148 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
Magnuson’s enormous clout proved crucial.
It was February of 1976. Munro and his wife Karen were out for a Sun-
day sail on Budd Inlet at Olympia when they encountered a SeaWorld
capture crew. In a scene that seemed like Apocalypse Now meets Free
Willy, aircraft buzzed overhead and depth charges exploded as speedboats
herded six terrified orcas toward nets. After frantic calls to several news-
rooms went unanswered, Munro reached Layton at home. Soon he was
watching from the shore, outraged. Nearby was John Dodge, an Ever-
green State College student who went on to become an award-winning
reporter. “I’m haunted to this day by their plaintive, eerie cries,” he says.
So too the Munros, who became whale conservationists overnight. “It
changed our lives,” Ralph says. “It was horrifying and heartbreaking.”
Munro, then working as an aide to Governor Evans, arrived at work
outraged Monday morning, brandishing the front page of the P-I. Evans,
unfortunately, was skiing in Utah. “Our chief of staff thought I was over
reacting, so I called Slade. His secretary caught up with him in Walla
Walla and he soon called me back. He was so mad over the capture that
he said he almost wanted to go out and cut the nets himself. He told me
to go to his office at noon and there would be a group of attorneys as-
sembled to help.” Gorton’s deputies were initially skeptical. “They all
started teasing me: ‘You want us to do what? Save the whales! Give us a
break!’ But they had orders from Slade and we all went to work.”
With a U.S. marshal and the biggest, meanest-looking fisheries officer
they could find, they served papers on a SeaWorld official late one night
next to the capture raft. Layton and KING-TV’s Don McGaffin spotlighted
the story as the drama moved to a series of courtrooms. Testimony re-
vealed that about a dozen whales died during the capture of 45 Southern
Resident orcas at Penn Cove off Whidbey Island in the 1970s as trappers
herded them out of Admiralty Inlet with cherry bombs and separated
calves from their mothers. “One of SeaWorld’s guys threw down his pa-
pers and moved across the courtroom to our side,” Munro recalls. “He
muttered, ‘I’m tired of lying’ loud enough for the judge to hear.” SeaWorld
soon wanted to settle. Munro looked on as Gorton stood in the hall out-
side federal district court in Seattle and told SeaWorld’s attorneys there
would be no deal until they agreed to never again seek permits to cap-
ture whales in Washington waters. “No way,” they said. “OK,” Gorton said
with a shrug. “Let’s go back to the courtroom.” They folded. SeaWorld
complied with the court’s order to relinquish its permit. The orcas it had
captured were set free. It was the last orca capture in U.S. waters.^16
Magnuson, the architect of the Marine Mammal Protection Act of