BOOTH WHO? - Washington State Digital Archives

term limits proposal on the November ballot, which he denounced as a terrible idea, had
anything to do with his decision. (The initiative was soundly defeated 12 days later.) Booth
said he wouldn’t rule out running for the Senate if fellow Democrat Brock Adams bowed
out. He might challenge Republican Senator Slade Gorton in 1994 – even run for governor
again if his successor “comes in behind me and trashes the office.”
* * *
Booth was indifferent about another controversial issue on the 1991 ballot – “Death
with Dignity,” which would have allowed a terminally ill person to request and receive a
lethal dose of drugs from a physician. “My instincts tell me people ought to have the choice
as it relates to themselves,” he said in an interview. “Then I made the mistake of starting
to think about it. The more I think about it, the more I think it needs to have a good open
debate and discussion, and I need to get involved in some of that. It takes two doctors to
declare a terminal illness. Then you get into what’s ‘terminal,’ because we’re always talking
probabilities.” Another thing that gave him pause was the possibility that weary caregivers
could pressure terminally ill people “to make a decision that it would be best for them to
terminate their lives, when in reality maybe they don’t want to do so at all. But having said
all that, my instinct is that it ought to be a personal choice.”
The issue was rejected by the voters, with nearly 54 percent opposed. The Roman
Catholic Church spent nearly $500,000 and waged a full-pulpit-press against physicianassisted
suicide and an initiative to reaffirm abortion rights, narrowly losing on the latter
issue. Seventeen years later, a revised Death with Dignity issue would be Booth Gardner’s
“last campaign.”
* * *
The governor invited an unsuspecting Denny Heck to a private lunch at the mansion
about a week before his announcement. His chief of staff had barely unfolded his napkin
when the governor leaned forward and said there would be no third term. “You could
have knocked me over,” Heck says. “It was a real gut-shot. It was so far ahead of time. He
didn’t have to make a decision for months.” Earlier that year, Heck says, Booth seriously
considered running for the Senate. Adams had been wounded by allegations he had
drugged and sexually molested a former congressional aide. Booth would have been the
instant frontrunner even if Adams had run. He caught hell from the Adams people and
other Democrats when he worried out loud about the party’s prospects for keeping the
seat if Adams or Mike Lowry won the nomination. Dick Larsen charged that Gardner’s
candor was fresh evidence that he was “imperious, tactless and politically dumb.” He
posited that it was the handiwork of Heck, “the Ayatollah of the governor’s strategy shop,
to give Gardner some new spark by floating the notion of him as a U.S. Senator.” For Heck,
this was a veritable badge of honor and better by far, in any case, than a “Blame Governor
Heck” button.
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