24 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
One of its stars in the 1870s was Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., whose career
on the U.S. Supreme Court is the stuff of legends. Gorton was assigned
to work for Elliot Richardson, who reportedly had posted the fourth-high-
est grades in the history of Harvard Law School. It was a humbling expe-
rience to work for someone so brilliant and charismatic. Twenty years
later, when he was Washington’s attorney general and Richardson headed
the Department of Justice, Gorton followed the Watergate scandal with
extra fascination as Richardson resigned in the “Saturday Night Massa-
cre” after President Nixon fired Watergate special prosecutor Archibald
Cox. Several Northwest journalists observed that Gorton seemed a clone
of the slender, cerebral Richardson.
A Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar, Gorton was offered a full-time job at
Ropes & Gray when he graduated. He turned it down, with no regrets. “It
was a wonderful experience, but I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life
keeping my nose above water in this magnificent law firm.” There was
another reason: Gorton was glued to the TV at a friend’s house during the
1952 Republican National Convention—televised nationally for the first
time. One of the stars of the five-day drama was Don Eastvold, a 32–year-
old lawyer from Tacoma. Tall and handsome, Eastvold had been a moot
court champion at the University of Washington Law School. He won a
seat in the State Senate from Pierce County’s 29th District in 1950. Now
he was running for attorney general.
An Eisenhower delegate, Eastvold’s deft management of a floor fight at
the Washington State GOP Convention carried the day for the party’s
young liberals, who solidly backed Ike for president over Robert Taft, the
rock-ribbed conservative from Ohio. The stakes were much higher when
the party convened in Chicago in July. Eisenhower and Taft were virtually
deadlocked for the nomination. A decisive battle erupted over the creden-
tials of the pro-Taft Georgia delegation. With Eastvold in the trenches,
Ike’s troops finally prevailed. Eastvold’s performance was hailed by Time
magazine as “bold and brilliant.” Life described him as the general’s
“youthful captain.”^1
“Beware a young man with a book,” Eastvold declared in prime time,
reprising an old adage among lawyers as he brandished a copy of a law
book featuring a Supreme Court decision he said buttressed Ike’s posi-
tion. Gorton and some 70 million other Americans watched Eastvold give
a dynamic nominating speech for the next president of the United States.
Eastvold became the youthful face of Republican politics in Washington
State. “My gosh,” Slade said to himself, “that looks like a wonderful place.”
Moreover, “one didn’t have to have an awful lot of smarts to know what