The Wicked Wine of Democracy: A Memoir of a Political Junkie, 1948-1995

A Word about Sources

A WORD ABOUT SOURCES i fell in love with the pacific northwest long before i arrived there, in 1936 at age fourteen, singing “Lilacs in the Rain.” My dad, Herbert R. Miller—born in Iowa but raised in Portland, Seattle, and Tacoma—had reversed Horace Greeley’s maxim, “Go West, Young Man, Go West!” In 1913, after passing the bar in Washington State but without a law degree, he moved to New York City. Overnight, he became a dedicated Gothamite. Yet, his passion for the land of his upbringing only intensified , which he passed on to me. Long before I reached the Pacific Northwest, I was steeped in its lore and dreamed its dreams. I studied maps, newspapers, books—all the Pacific Northwestiana I could find in New York City. I devoured Bernard DeVoto’s account of the Journals of Lewis and Clark, the saga of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, the diaries and journals of the pioneers who trekked the Oregon Trail from 1840 to 1859, when Oregon achieved statehood, and stories of Abigail Scott Duniway and women’s suffrage and the Weyerhaeusers and other lumber barons. I found my spirit in “Battling Sixteen,” a short story in a Street and Smith pulp magazine about a punk city kid who went to Oregon to work in the harvests and became a powerful Ivy League football star. As a teenager, I spent two summers in the region’s wheat fields and orchards and wore number sixteen at Parkrose High School in Portland and later for a short while at the University of Oregon. 251 When I eventually found my niche in newspaper city rooms, I was blessed to be broken in by an extraordinary series of editors: Bill Tugman of the Eugene Register-Guard; A. L. “Bud” Alford of the Lewiston Morning Tribune; Thomas Lamphier Jr., of the Boise Idaho Statesman; Don Sterling of the Portland Oregon Journal; John A. Armstrong of the Portland Oregonian; Dick Johnston, founding editor of Sports Illustrated; and, above all, Ed Stone of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. What a post-graduate education in journalism—and life! By my late twenties I had a deepening knowledge of the territory and its people, particularly the politicians and the media. I continued to read extensively the many authors who chronicled the Pacific Northwest. I offer the following sampling of rich and varied works: Ken Kesey, whose magnum opus, Sometimes a Great Notion, was the saga of an iconoclastic lumberman fighting the system in Oregon; the writings of Stewart H. Holbrook, concentrating on the forest products and railroad industries; my friend Richard L. Neuberger (The Promised Land); Nancy Wilson Ross, the first of the feminist writers , who also wrote great travel books about the region (e.g., Farthest Reach); Robert Ormond Case, chronicler of the Columbia’s earlier days; Jack Olsen, master of macabre but true tales of eccentric locals; and the irrepressible Betty McDonald (The Egg and I) and other hilarious tales of country living in the Puget Sound area. Let me also mention three whose writings embody the best of all who have preceded them: Timothy Egan of Seattle, long-time regional correspondent for the New York Times (The Good Rain); Jonathan Raban, an Englishman transplanted to Seattle whose writing conveys the idea that the bountiful resources are not always all they are cracked up to be (The Bad Land); and Ivan Doig, now based in Seattle. His trilogy of a Scottish family ’s migration to Montana Territory in the 1880s (Dancing at the Rascal Fair especially) is a national classic. I’ve been an avid reader all my life and an eager student of human nature. In the 1960s, I developed the habit of maintaining a daily journal. It began as a means to discipline myself to ensure that I was using my considerable freedom in a productive way. I noted everything important to me, including the number of cigarettes I bummed that day. I kept these records for over forty years. For many years, I considered writing my memoirs. When I finally started the process, I wrote what became the chapters of this book as stand-alone 252 a word about sources accounts of the events they describe. I remember most of these events in my book—the people, the places—as if they happened yesterday. I have been known my entire life for having a talent for remembering names, dates, places...