the fReshMAn 37
theession s wAs winding down when Gorton encountered an incom-
prehensible bill on trade regulation. “For the life of me, I couldn’t figure
out what it was designed to do. All I knew was that I wasn’t wild about the
sponsors—two D’s and one R.” He found the R and asked what it was all
about. “Oh,” said the Republican, “it’s to end gasoline price wars.” Gorton
wrinkled his brow. “How can this be good?” He was a young lawyer, liv-
ing on a young lawyer’s salary, with a wife and young son. He liked gas
wars. The upshot was that the bill would not allow gas stations to post
their prices anywhere but on the pump.
In one of his first speeches, Gorton argued forcefully for free enter-
prise and the American consumer. “But the bill passes 82 to 17 or some-
thing like that and shoots over to the Senate.” Jealously guarding its
prerogatives, the Senate ignored the House bill and passed a virtually
idenical one of its own, which arrived on the House floor on the last t
day Senate bills could be considered. Now it required a two-thirds vote
to go from the second reading to the third on the same day. “I really
went to work,” Slade remembers, leaning forward as he relishes the
memory. “I got all my Evans-type ‘R’ friends and went over to the liberal
Democrats, including John Goldmark and Wes Uhlman, and we re-
cruited them to oppose the bill. Lo and behold we got 36 votes against it
and the bill died.”
Since his law firm’s stable of clients included Texaco, Gorton had pur-
posely avoided consulting any of his bosses. He was back at his desk in
the House chamber the next morning when a lobbyist strolled up.
“Great job on that bill, Slade! Where do I send your case (of booze)?”
“Who the hell are you?”
“I’m the lobbyist for Standard Oil and all the other oil companies. We
think it’s great that you killed this bill!”
In an instant, Gorton grasped that it was the guys who owned the gas
stations who were backing the bill—not the oil companies.
“Get out of my sight before I deck you!” he sputtered.
“I was just so furious. Here was a guy who presumably had a lot of in-
formation on the issue and yet did nothing to inform the person who was
fighting it. Doubtless, he then sent a huge bill to his clients.”
After the session adjourned, Gorton wrote a letter to Texaco. They’d
wasted their money if they paid that lobbyist so much as a red cent, he
said. “I reached a conclusion back then that 90 percent of all the money
ever spent on lobbyists was wasted. But the problem with the community
that hired lobbyists was that you never knew which 10 percent did work.
As for the 10 percent side, I think we have probably benefited from the