booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

ordered a batch of T-shirts that said “No more Hill Street Blues for the WSP.”
Still, the campaign was worried about the tenor of the press coverage. In July,
it distributed a three-page letter from Emory Bundy, Booth’s college classmate who
had recently stepped down as director of public affairs for King Broadcasting Company.
Addressing his “former colleagues of the Fourth Estate,” Bundy said he admired a feisty
press dedicated to probing conflicts of interest and afflicting the comfortable. “But Booth
Gardner has had words and phrases like ‘multimillionaire’ and ‘Weyerhaeuser heir’
routinely used as adjectives preceding his name … irrespective of the substance of the story
… The effect is obvious. The repetitious, gratuitous use of such words and phrases implies
something sinister.” Bundy added that it was quite true that Booth Gardner was wealthy,
and “the media not only is entitled but is obligated to probe whether he handles his
personal affairs in a manner consistent with the responsibilities of public office.” However,
if reporters did due diligence, “I believe you will find a person who has handled his affairs in
an exemplary and public-spirited manner…” Bundy noted he himself was wary of Gardner
when they served as student body officers at the University of Washington in 1957. Then
he discovered that Gardner “was spending countless hours organizing and coaching
teams in Seattle’s Central Area” in an era when “there was not a department store in the
downtown area that would hire a black person as a sales clerk.” Realtors and bankers,
meantime, systematically segregated neighborhoods, and athletic clubs barred Jews and
other ethnic minorities. “So to learn that this young white guy had gone to the ghetto and
put together first a team and then entire sports leagues for the kids of the area – and did
it in such a quiet way – was a remarkable thing. … So here is a candidate with fine human
values, abundantly demonstrated, combined with outstanding administrative skill.”
But there’s no crying in the big leagues. The media was unchastened. Booth
Gardner was rich, and that was his cross to bear.
* * *
Peter Callaghan, who went on to become an influential political columnist for the
Tacoma News Tribune, was on the campaign trail in 1984 for the Everett Herald. “If Booth
could make a personal connection with people, he was great,” he remembers. “But if it
became kind of a wholesale address he was nervous.”
McDermott was seldom at a loss for words. Down the stretch to the Primary
Election, Callaghan was covering the senator in Eastern Washington. “First of all, he’s
broke, so it’s a very, very low-budget kind of operation. We were told later that Jim really
funded the entire flight by collecting money from the newsies. It was the scariest airplane
I’ve ever been on” – a veritable puddle-jumper compared to Spud One.
They landed in the Tri-Cities and headed for a Pasco grade school, where
McDermott proceeded to offer an interactive civics catechism: “I’m running for governor.
Does anybody here know who the governor of the state is right now?”
The kids were kind of shy. Finally a boy in the back raised his hand.
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