booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

Chapter 19: Soul searching
It’s bad enough that Parkinson’s attacks your ability to walk and talk, even smile.
Adding insult to those injuries, Booth says it dulls your mind and “ravages your soul.” Doug
Gardner empathizes with
his father’s infirmities, but
worries most about his soul.
Coming to terms with his son
is one of Booth’s major pieces
of unfinished business. “It’s
growing better and better,”
Jean Gardner says, adding
that their son is “deep, very
sensitive and reads a lot. He’s
a good guy. Both he and Gail
are understanding Booth a
lot better, and they’re seeing
what some of us would say is the real Booth.”
Who is the real Booth? “Well, I’m not going to say that to you. But Doug in
particular, he’s seeing all that now. The good thing is he’s accepting it: ‘This is who my dad
is. I love him but I don’t necessarily admire him like I want to.’ ”
If you’re picturing Doug Gardner as a dour Bible-thumper, think again. He has an
irreverent sense of humor and an infectious laugh. When his father’s biographer pitched
him a tough question roughly 10 seconds into their interview, he quipped, “And of course
you’ll want to know all about my sex life, too.” Surprisingly, in light of what has been
written about him, he also sees some shades of gray in the debate over assisted suicide.
“My take is that they don’t really know with 90 percent plus surety that someone is going
to die until the final few weeks of life. That’s where I wish the debate would have been. But
they brought in this six-month window and that just bugged me to the end. People can live
10 or 15 years past that six-month diagnosis.”
Doug says he also regrets that “a father-and-son rift” played into “what sells” in
popular culture and amplified his disagreement with his dad. “You go on the Internet and
it’s all about who broke up today.” Still, he felt compelled to speak out against the initiative
because “there was a slippery slope that Dad hadn’t examined. Dad says, ‘We’ve put in all
these safeguards. Yada, yada, yada.’ Well, we’ll see. There are a lot of disabled people like
Duane French who are concerned that the value of life is going to be based on someone’s
perception of their value – that people are expendable and the disabled might be the first
to go. … Dad put hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money into that campaign.
Booth in 2009 with a photo of the moment in 1984 when he learned he had
been elected governor. John Hughes for The Legacy Project.
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