86 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
Evans won a second term with nearly 55 percent of the vote. Kramer
breezed to re-election. Fletcher—invariably listed in the media as the
“Negro city councilman from Pasco”—came up 48,000 votes short against
John Cherberg, the veteran lieutenant governor. A right-wing Yakima
weekly that backed George Wallace for president produced a racist smear
of Fletcher that was circulated in working-class white neighborhoods in
the closing days of the campaign. “It was appalling,” Gorton says.13*
Washington State went for Humphrey by a hair. But Nixon won the
presidency, pledging that “bring us together” would be the motto of his
“open” administration.^14
“AeosL d g Rton wiLL Light soMe fiRes ARound heRe,” was The Daily
Olympian’s six-column headline over a major profile of the new attorney
general on Jan. 1, 1969. He didn’t fit the stereotype of a politician, the
capital city paper observed. “He isn’t a glad-handing, backslapping deni-
zen of smoke-filled rooms. Often described as arrogant—‘he just doesn’t
know how to be tactful,’ says one long-time acquaintance—he neverthe-
less skillfully manages to get his way politically without compromising his
obvious idealism. His abruptness, however, other friends say, is more an
impatience with nonessentials and time wasting than a lack of feeling.”^15
Gorton made it immediately clear that he would be an activist attorney
general and that he was more interested in legal talent than patronage,
although if you were a brainy young Republican, so much the better.
Chris Bayley, a 31–year-old Harvard graduate, was Gorton’s pick to head
the Consumer Protection and Antitrust Division. Bayley, who grew up in
Seattle, and Sam Reed, an activist from Eastern Washington, had founded
Action for Washington, a group that included Steve Excell, Jim Waldo,
Stuart Elway, Jack Durney and many other young “Dan Evans Republi-
cans.” The “Action Team” was their brainchild.^16
Right after the election, Gorton began evaluating O’Connell’s assistants.
He concluded many were first rate, including Robert Doran, Ed Mackie,
Phil Austin, Charlie Roe, Robert Hauth and the Montecucco brothers, Joe
and Rich. Five had been law clerks for State Supreme Court justices. In all,
there were some 100 assistant attorneys general. “I resolved that I was go-
ing to interview every one of them and decide whether or not to keep them,”
- Fletcher went on to serve in the Nixon and Ford administrations and is widely regarded
as the father of the affirmative action movement. As executive director of the United
Negro College Fund, he coined the slogan “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” He died
in 2005.