booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

chopper pilot as “a super soldier.” Barlow’s promotions had come so fast that Congress
hadn’t had time to approve them. He’d been a lieutenant colonel just eight months earlier.
Many members of the Guard had backed Gardner for governor because he promised
to shake up the Military Department. Now a number of officers groused about political
patronage – on condition of anonymity, of course. Barlow had been 31 st on the seniority
roster. If they hadn’t seen him coming, that spoke volumes about their political combat
readiness. They conceded he was a true “blood-and-guts warrior.” What they didn’t realize
was that he was also a crack military administrator. Unfazed by it all, Barlow said Booth had
actually offered him the No. 1 job in January. “I could have been an immediate two-star
general,” he told reporters, “but I didn’t want the troops to think it was a political thing.”
Some members of the Gardner team were relieved to see Barlow back in uniform,
but he never lost Booth’s ear. He got his second star and was named adjutant general by
Gardner in 1989. One of the craftiest operatives the capital has ever seen, Barlow was paid
$85,000 a year to head the state’s National Guard and $85,000 a year as executive director
of the Medina Foundation. He also collected as much as $20,000 more for weekend drills
with the Guard. Norton Clapp said Barlow was so good at his job that neither he nor the
foundation’s board were the least bit worried about his telecommuting. No other state
agency director held a second full-time job. By all accounts, however, the general was a
dazzling juggler. Adele maintains that one of Gardner’s biggest mistakes as governor was
not naming Barlow his chief of staff. “Greg ran Pierce County for Booth and Booth got all
the credit,” she says, adding that she wishes she had known that when she was touting
Gardner in her column and doubtless helped get him elected. “I wrote one time that Booth
had a guy working on his campaign who was blowing his money. …I was walking through
the Legislative Building one day when here comes this really handsome silver-haired guy
in uniform. It’s Greg Barlow. He said, ‘You’re Adele Ferguson?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘I
just want to thank you for the column you wrote. … I went down yesterday and picked up
his checkbook!’ Barlow didn’t mess around. Booth should have taken Barlow to Olympia
with him.” Dean Foster says that would have been a bad idea. “Barlow intimidated me,” the
former chief of staff says. “He intimidated most everybody, and he had a negative view of
government that in my mind would have hurt Booth very rapidly. He did make decisions
and he did chop off heads. They’re a little more used to that kind of stuff in Pierce County.
Down here we play a little softer.” Ron Dotzauer, not known for playing softer, admired
Barlow’s toughness and loyalty to Booth, but he believes “it would have been a disaster –
an unmitigated disaster” to have Barlow as chief of staff. “We all worried about that.”
* * *
To the Republicans’ delight, the majority Democrats “degenerated into an interhouse,
inter-generational, self-destructive feud” over relatively minor spending differences.
On April 28, after 105 days, the lawmakers went home without passing a budget for the
1985-87 biennium. Grimm and McDermott and their Ways & Means staffs exchanged
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