is to take the experience i gleaned from covering a lot of amazing people like slade gorton and dan evans and to write biographies and there are so many stereotypical notions about slade gorton in particular. the notion that he is a right wing republican, unscrupulous, thinks spotted owls taste like chicken. all of the above. it really doesn't square with the person that i cover for all those years. joel connelly, my friend and colleague for all these years better than anyone took the time to portrait shades of gray. not enough for slade gorton but in my view in a really outstanding way. i will give you a thumbnail. pretty amazing to me. i lived and covered a lot of it but when i had the time to start doing research and working at the state library with some amazing resources of microfilm from every newspaper in the state and access to online news engines. longer than that, 56 years in all has been active in political history of his adopted state and collective legislature in 1958 as a 30-year-old with an amazing politician in his own right. the most fascinating thing to me early on was t