(6 of 10)
As AEC chairman, Ray showed she was just as tough as Schlesinger suspected. Says one former AEC member: "She has a streak of Golda Meir in her." She created a separate division to set up stiffer safety standards for reactors, although the move affronted some top AEC officials who claimed it was unnecessary. She also made the AEC pay more heed to environmental-impact studies on reactors.
All the while, she lived in a custom 8-ft. by 28-ft., self-propelled motor home with her constant companions—a miniature gray poodle named Jacques and a huge, dignified Scottish deerhound named Ghillie. She moored the $18,000 bus on a dairy farm in Maryland. A Government limousine would pull up every morning, and Ray and her two dogs would be whisked to the AEC offices. At her suggestion, the AEC was reorganized in 1975 into two agencies and Ray then moved on to become Assistant Secretary of State for scientific affairs. When Secretary of State Henry Kissinger dodged her frequent requests for meetings, she quit after six frustrating months, declaring that trying to get a decision at State was "like slamming into a wall of marshmallows."
Once back home, Ray plunged into politics: "I decided I'd been telling other people what to do for a long time. I'd better put my money where my mouth was, and that's why I became a candidate. Why did I choose to run for Governor? I didn't have time to start any lower."
But was she a Republican or Democrat? Ray never had decided before, since Washington does not have party registration. She chose the Democrats because, she says, "although I tend to be fiscally conservative, I believe in the philosophy of the Democratic Party."
Her campaign, she admits, was "amateurish, naive and trial by error." Starting far back, she bustled around the state in a Volvo station wagon, stressing the need for economic development and nuclear power, and backing the construction of a Trident submarine base—opposed by the environmentalists—on Puget Sound. She had plenty of energy, an air of bluff honesty that appealed to independents, and a new face. Startling the experts, she defeated Seattle's popular but overconfident Mayor Wes Uhlman, 42, in the primary and then beat Republican John Spellman, 50, the top official in Seattle's King County.
On Inauguration Day last January, 42 Ray relatives showed up, and the Governor's Georgian mansion was as lively and cozy as the two-bedroom house where she and her four sisters had been brought up. There was a football game on the front lawn and jars of plums and applesauce from Fox Island in the kitchen. Ray plopped down into the high-backed chair in her office, twirling a plastic glass filled with champagne. "Well, we made it," she announced. "How sweet it is."