40 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
looked more like a rancher than a lawyer because that’s what he was.
Goldmark, his vivacious wife Sally and their two young sons had aban-
doned the East for a ranch with no electricity in the wilds of Okanogan
County after John saw combat in the South Pacific as a U.S. Navy officer
during World War II.^4
Goldmark had served three terms in the Washington Legislature and
was chairman of the powerful House Ways & Means Committee. “John
Goldmark philosophically was everything I
wasn’t,” Gorton says. “He was not only a
Democrat, he was quite a liberal Democrat.
I loved to debate him in the House because
he was an eloquent speaker. He was the best
spokesman the Democrats had.”
Gorton and Goldmark were of similar
temperament, Dwyer said. “Impatient of
the foolish and venal, Goldmark lacked the
statehouse politician’s air of genial medioc-
rity.” Emmett Watson, Seattle’s favorite col-
umnist, always recalled that when he first
met Goldmark “he seemed prickly and im-
patient; too questing, too demanding; no
time for small talk.” When Watson intro-
duced Goldmark to his college-age daugh-
ter, he asked her all sorts of probing ques-
tions about her goals, hopes and dreams.
“Well, what did you think of him?” Watson
asked that night. “I think he’s the kindest man I’ve ever met.” “How so?”
“Because he was taking a genuine interest in me.”^5 If she had met Gorton,
she might have said the same thing. Smart young people bring out the
best in him.
In the 1962 Democratic primary, Goldmark was challenged from the
right in his own party. Donations from the private-power lobby, the John
Birch Society and other arch-conservatives boosted his opponent. Front-
page stories and editorials in the local weekly branded him a pinko. Al-
bert F. Canwell, the celebrated 1940s communist hunter from Spokane,
appeared at a forum sponsored by the American Legion to warn the locals
that the godless Marxist-Leninist menace was burrowing into their midst.
Canwell revealed a skeleton in Sally Goldmark’s closet. Years before
meeting John, when she was an idealistic young New Deal worker during
the Depression, she had joined the Communist Party. One night when
State Rep. John Goldmark,
a Democrat from Okanogan,
in 1961. Washington State
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