385Acknowledgements
wpoo hAtA ReR pLAce the world would be without librarians and archi-
vists. How would historians determine whether it snowed on a winter’s
day along Cape Cod in 1637? Or locate a 30-year-old political commercial
and find a Betamax player to view it? One floor below me at the Washing-
ton State Library, which Secretary of State Sam Reed saved from closure,
is a repository of priceless books, manuscripts and microfilm—and the
people who ensure it’s all accessible. The State Archives is another trove
for historians, history buffs and genealogists, as well as lawmakers and
their staffs. You can pore over documents and touch artifacts or access
100 million documents on line for free. Washington State’s archives are
in the forefront of the digital revolution. I am also indebted to the staffs of
the Washington State Law Library, the Tacoma Public Library and the his-
toric Hoquiam Timberland Library, my second home for the past 45 years.
Invaluable to telling Slade Gorton’s life story were six books you ought
to read: Art Thiel’s Out of Left Field, How the Mariners Made Baseball Fly
in Seattle; Philip Shenon’s The Commission, What We Didn’t Know About
9/11; William L. Dwyer’s The Goldmark Case, An American Libel Trial; Sena-
tor Trent Lott’s memoir, Herding Cats, and Mary Ellen McCaffree’s auto-
biographical Politics of the Possible, written with Anne McNamee Corbett.
In On the Harbor, From Black Friday to Nirvana, Doug Barker, my former
longtime colleague in journalism, offers the best account of what it was
like to be at ground zero in timber country during the spotted owl war.
In my biography of Booth Gardner, I mentioned the famous observa-
tion by Phil Graham, the late publisher of The Washington Post, that
journalism is a “first rough draft of history.” While Gorton, like Gard-
ner, often groused about the media’s “negativism,” his career was in-
sightfully chronicled by some of the most talented newspaper people
the state has ever seen, notably David Ammons, Ross Anderson, Joni
Balter, Knute Berger, Les Blumenthal, Rebecca Boren, David Brewster,
Peter Callaghan, Joel Connelly, O. Casey Corr, William Dietrich, John
Dodge, Adele Ferguson, John Hendren, Henry Gay, David Horsey, Dean