booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

thanks to his tennis coach at Pacific Lutheran University. “Dad has done all these things.
Success in business. Owning sports teams. State senator. County executive. Governor. How?
He cut corners. He lost his wife. He didn’t spend enough time with his kids. Kids equate love
with time, with being there. Not with ‘Dad bought me a great tennis racket.’ My dad missed
it. Where was he when I needed help?” Then the governor’s son lowered his voice and
winced, Bergner wrote. It “seemed part of a strenuous attempt to restrain a lancing anger.”
Finally, he said, “We don’t need Booth and Dr. Kevorkian pushing death on us. Dad’s lost.
He’s playing God, trying to usurp God’s authority. … I fear the day when he meets his maker.”
In 2004, however, after he was elected as an alternate delegate to the Republican
National Convention, Doug told a reporter that Booth had been “a great dad and a great
granddad.” He said their political differences took a back seat to their family life. Booth had
never suggested he’d been anything approaching a great dad. In fact, to being an absentee
father he had frequently pleaded guilty as charged. He thought those public mea culpas
helped. What he didn’t grasp until Bergner’s article was the extent of his son’s bitterness
about his failings as a father and perceived shortcomings as a Christian.
Booth maintains he never told Bergner his campaign was driven by a desire to kill
himself. He says the writer jumped to that conclusion from his musings about how anyone
could benefit from him “hanging around.” Moreover, he says that by emphasizing his alleged
ulterior motive to wear down resistance to Netherlands-style mercy killing Bergner skewed
the story toward the slippery slope. He also believes the writer was biased by the fact
that his own father suffered from Parkinson’s. Bergner readily admitted in the story that
Gardner’s plight had “a particular resonance” for him. Just before he left for Seattle, Bergner
wrote, he told his father about his assignment, emphasizing, “This isn’t a message.” Bergner
“had been scared that the mere fact of the subject being broached between us would lower
barriers – within him, within me; against suicide, against a quiet kind of patricide …”
On balance, the story Bergner found tangled in the driftwood was poignantly
compelling: A rich and famous fading father at odds with his deeply religious son over a
life-or-death issue of interest to everyone in America. A great storyteller, he wrote it with
arresting pace and a keen eye for detail. Some of the wounds Booth suffered from it were
clearly self-inflicted. What the piece most lacked was a second articulate voice favoring
assisted suicide – someone like Dr. Preston. When Bergner introduced his mixed emotions
about his own father’s struggle with Parkinson’s, it gave the story a thought-provoking
personal perspective. It also lowered a barrier and called into question his objectivity.
Jean Gardner says a number of her friends viewed it as a cautionary tale. “I was
disappointed that he dwelt so much on the relationship of Doug and Booth and how Doug
was taking all of this. I felt that the focus of the article should have been the issue of death
by choice. But, on the other hand, I had many, many calls from friends saying that they
loved the article and that they were giving it to their husbands to read, and to their sons to
read so that the husbands and the sons could know the importance of a relationship, of a
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