booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

Norton Clapp, by now president and CEO of the Weyerhaeuser Co., “was as
surprised as I was when I got accepted at Harvard,” Booth says, smiling at the memory.
Clapp’s expectation was that Booth would grow into a role in the family business, but a
Harvard MBA was a first-rate education with cachet. In his own reserved way, Clapp began
telling people his stepson was a bona fide comer. He happily paid the tuition.
Was a Harvard Business School education all that it’s cracked up to be? “It was,”
says Booth, quipping, “but George Bush went there, so I don’t know – except that he had
help getting in.” Harvard used the Socratic Method “where you had to be on your toes
every day. There were a lot of really bright students there. For the first time in my life I
knew that I couldn’t get by without studying. I worked harder than I’d ever worked before.
Every Friday before we left class they handed us a paper to write – 1,500 words due at 6
Saturday night. If you lived off campus you were given until midnight. But if you waited
until midnight to turn it in you lost your one night out of the week. So I made it a point to
turn it in earlier. I got to know three other Harvard guys who lived in the same apartment
complex. We’d get together and talk over our business scenarios, develop themes and
make sure we had the facts right. Then you’d write your own paper: What points do you
see with the business model? What’s wrong with it? How would you change it? Why
does this happen after you change it? That kind of critical thinking on real-world business
challenges. Harvard was where I really acquired self-discipline. The courses I did well in
were finance, not marketing, not production. I learned how to manage money. And to this
day I’m better at managing other people’s money than my own.”
* * *
When he turned 25 in 1961 he inherited a trust fund most informed sources believe
was in the neighborhood of $1.7 million, or approximately $12 million in today’s dollars,
based on the Consumer Price Index. With advice from the Laird Norton financial wizards,
he watched the fund grow handsomely. It included holdings in Weyerhaeuser, Safeco
and Puget Sound National Bank, as well as prime real estate. When he was running for
governor, his money was in a blind trust that had been established in 1972 when he was a
state senator. It was managed by a Seattle investment broker. By the mid-1980s, his fortune
was likely at least $38 million, according to a proxy report on his Weyerhaeuser stock. Some
said a lot more, although he scoffed at one estimate of $50 million. While he was a skilled
executive with a good nose for numbers, Booth was not a shrewd investor like Norton
Clapp. He emulated his stepfather’s conservatism, however, so his questionable ventures,
including partnerships in two soccer teams and a pie company, were never big losers.
“Booth didn’t want to be known as a trust baby,” says Jim Griffin, his friend since
childhood. “After he got his MBA and started working for a clothing firm in Tacoma, he made
it clear to me and his other friends that he would live on his salary with no help from his
trust income. After he and Jean started having kids, Jean would complain to my wife, Wendy,
that Booth wouldn’t trade in their VW ‘Beetle’ for a bigger family car or buy a dryer for their
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