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about how leadership—or the lack of it—is affecting the most pressing
issues of the day. A diverse group of contributors offer answers. Gorton’s
200-word pieces appear two or three times a month on the Post’s Web
page, often generating hot debate in the comments string.
Given his personality and the breadth of his reading since childhood—
all 12 volumes of Toynbee twice, Shakespeare and a smorgasbord of fic-
tion from Mark Twain to Tom Clancy—he writes like he talks. “Better to
be silent and thought insensitive than to speak out and prove it,” Gorton
concluded one column, borrowing from the Bible, Confucius, Lincoln
and Ben Franklin.^13
He saw no reason to be silent on a subject of insensitivity when Harry
Reid, the already embattled Senate majority leader, faced more trouble in
- Game Change, the newly published best-seller about the 2008 race
for the presidency, featured Reid’s observation that Obama had a good
chance to become the first black president because he was “light-skinned”
and had “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” Reid issued an
abject apology, which Obama accepted. The GOP national chairman, an
African American, was unmollified. He called for Reid’s resignation.^14
Recalling Lott’s gaffe in saying that if Thurmond had been elected
president on the segregationist Dixiecrat ticket in 1948, “we wouldn’t
have had all these problems over all these years.. .,” Gorton wrote:
The nation cannot be deprived of the opportunity for a frank and open
discussion of issues relating to race, no matter how controversial. That’s
a policy that obviously must apply to members of Congress as well as to
the press and public.
Neither the comment of Senator Lott, which cost him his post as Senate
Majority Leader, nor that of Senator Reid, which threatens his, however,
dealt with contemporary political issues.
Senator Lott’s was a throwaway to a 100-year-old retiring senator that,
ill-advised as it was, was not true, nor did it represent Senator Lott’s actual
views. It should not have cost him his position.
Senator Reid’s comment, as inelegant and inadvisable as it was, was
probably a correct description of election reality at the time. It is now al-
most two years in the past, and it should not affect Senator Reid’s post.^15In 1989, Gorton and Norm Dicks had followed through on an idea hatched
by Scoop Jackson. They helped Rich Ellings and Kenneth Pyle found The
National Bureau of Asian Research in Seattle. Pyle was the director of the
Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington.
Ellings, a former Gorton aide, in 2010 established an integrated offshoot: