Slade Gorton, Who Was Voted Out of Senate and Then Back In, Dies at 92 - The New York Times

Slade Gorton, a Washington Republican who in three nonconsecutive terms in the Senate championed his state’s logging, aviation and technology industries and feuded with Native American tribes over fishing rights and sovereignty in the casino age, died on Wednesday at his daughter Sarah’s home in the Seattle area. He was 92.

J. Vander Stoep, who served as Mr. Gorton’s chief of staff in the Senate, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.

In his interrupted Senate service, from 1981 to 1987 and again from 1989 to 2001, Mr. Gorton achieved a little-noticed distinction: He was one of only 16 senators in history to win the office back after having been turned out by the electorate. (Senators have been directly elected by voters only since 1914, when a constitutional amendment removed that power from the various state legislatures.)

First elected on the coattails of Ronald Reagan’s presidential landslide in 1980, Mr. Gorton became known as a “giant killer” for upsetting Senator Warren G. Magnuson, a 75-year-old Democratic institution who began his congressional career during the Depression and ended it as the Senate’s senior member.

Although Mr. Gorton was 52 and had been a state official for two decades, he looked youthful — a bit like the actor Henry Fonda — and he was a marathon runner. To demonstrate his vigor to the voters, he ran 62 miles from his home in Seattle to Olympia, the state capital, to pay the filing fee for his Senate campaign.

He also said it was “time for a change,” a cliché that would come back to haunt him 20 years later when a younger opponent used it to end his Senate career. But in 1980 Mr. Gorton trounced Senator Magnuson with 54 percent of the ballots and joined a Senate that was controlled by Republicans for the first time since 1954.

Mr. Gorton in Washington in 1992. He lost his bid for re-election in 1986 but ran for the Senate again two years later and won.Credit...Maureen Keating/CQ Roll Call, via Associated Press

Calling himself a “passionate moderate,” Mr. Gorton soon established himself as a contrarian. He won a seat on the Budget Committee and backed President Reagan’s programs to cut taxes and social-welfare spending and to support a military buildup. But he broke with the president by endorsing the Equal Rights Amendment and favoring the use of federal funds to pay for abortions for poor women.

His vote against a rise in Social Security benefits rankled voters, and critics said he failed to dispel the impression that he had not been forceful enough in challenging the federal government when it was considering using the Hanford nuclear power plant in southeastern Washington State as a dumping ground for nuclear waste. In 1986, he lost his re-election bid to Brock Adams, President Jimmy Carter’s secretary of transportation.

Saying he was retiring from politics, Mr. Gorton resumed his law practice in Seattle. But he ran again in 1988 when Washington’s other senator, Daniel J. Evans, a former governor, decided to retire.

Mr. Gorton took a rare step for a politician: He admitted that he had made mistakes. He said he should never have opposed Social Security cost-of-living increases or supported aid to Nicaragua’s right-wing contras in their guerrilla war against the leftist revolutionary Sandinista government.

“I needed to listen more,” he told voters. On Election Day, he edged out Representative Mike Lowry, a liberal Democrat and a future governor of the state. He returned to the Senate in 1989, joining that rarefied club of 16 who had made a comeback to the chamber after a re-election loss.

(The historical significance was hardly noted at the time. Americans unfamiliar with constitutional amendments are often surprised to learn that senators were elected by state legislatures, not by voters, for 125 years after the founding of the federal government. The framers believed that having state legislatures elect senators would free senators from popular pressures. But fights in the legislatures over slavery, the Civil War, bribes and political chicanery led to a reconsideration, and the 17th Amendment, ratified in 1913, rewrote the rules for the 1914 elections.)

Mr. Gorton in 1998 with, from left, Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft; Patty Murray, Washington State’s other U.S. senator; and Scott McNealy, the chief executive of Sun Microsystems. Mr. Gorton became known as “Senator Microsoft.” Credit...Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Back in the Senate, Mr. Gorton became known as “Senator Microsoft” for his support of that Seattle-based technology giant. He also became a leading advocate of timber interests in the West, and of Boeing, Alaska Airlines, Airborne Express and other Washington aviation interests.

When the Senate voted on articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton, Mr. Gorton voted yes on the obstruction-of-justice charge and no on perjury.

Mr. Gorton feuded with Native American tribes for many years over treaty rights that allowed Indians to take up to half the annual runs of salmon and steelhead trout in Puget Sound and the Columbia River. He sought cuts in the Bureau of Indian Affairs budget and fought tribal immunity from some civil suits. His public hearings in Seattle attracted people waving American flags and shouting anti-Indian slogans.

In 2000, tribes flush with casino revenues fought back, contributing $1.3 million to Maria Cantwell, a former Democratic representative 30 years younger than Mr. Gorton. She echoed lines he had used in 1980, saying it was “time for a change.” Mr. Gorton stressed his seniority and influence — points Mr. Magnuson had made 20 years earlier — and the result was the same: The incumbent lost.

Mr. Gorton in his office in Washington 2000. Later that year he lost his re-election bid to Maria Cantwell, a former Democratic representative 30 years his junior.Credit...Paul Hosefros/The New York Times

Thomas Slade Gorton III, who almost never used his first name, was born in Chicago on Jan. 8, 1928, the oldest of four children of Thomas Slade Gorton Jr., the founder of a successful fish business, and Ruth (Israel) Gorton. Slade and his siblings, Mary Jane, Mike and Nat, grew up in Evanston, Ill.

He graduated from Evanston High School in 1945, served a year in the Army and earned a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College in 1950 and a law degree from Columbia University in 1953. He joined the Air Force as a lieutenant and rose to colonel. Resuming civilian life in 1956, he practiced law in Seattle but joined the Young Republicans with a political career in mind.

In 1958, he married Sally Jean Clark. She died in 2013. His survivors include their three children, Thomas Gorton, Sarah Nortz and Rebecca Gorton; his brothers, U.S. District Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton and Mike Gorton Sr.; his sister, Mary Jane Gorton; and seven grandchildren.

Mr. Gorton served five terms in the Washington House of Representatives from 1959 to 1969. As the state’s attorney general over the next 12 years, he pressed for health warnings on cigarette packages, unit pricing on groceries and campaign finance disclosures.

After leaving the Senate, he joined the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks in 2002 and helped write its final report, which concluded that successive administrations had failed to read warning signs leading to the Sept. 11 attacks.

An authorized biography by John C. Hughes, “Slade Gorton: A Half Century in Politics,” appeared in 2011.

Julia Carmel contributed reporting.

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