BOOTH WHO? - Washington State Digital Archives

second deep-brain surgery. I’m sitting in the taxi, staring at the door to the hospital, hoping
I can get my life back.” From there, he’d take the reader on a flashback to his childhood
“and all those curve balls.”
Less than 24 hours after the second surgery, he was heading home. He felt
incredibly better. “All the outward symptoms of Parkinson’s had disappeared – magically,
medically or miraculously. What did it matter? For the first time in 10 long years, I felt like a
whole person again.”
“It was a raging success,” Gardner told Dave Ammons. “The doc said, ‘I hit a home
run with you.’ ” Having watched his decline with sadness, the longtime AP reporter was
amazed by the results of the second surgery. “I’m on one-fifth the amount of medicine I
was on before,” Booth bragged. “You might see a couple of clues about the disease, but
most of the time you wouldn’t know I had Parkinson’s. I am calm. My temperament is even.
I’m not hammered with drugs.” He said he’d been told he probably had “a good 10 years
left” and he wanted to make the most them. Gardner turned 70 on August 21, 2006. It was
a far happier birthday than the year before.
* * *
The morning after Booth announced his “last campaign” on TVW, he called Laird
Harris, his former policy adviser. Harris had founded a public affairs consulting firm in
Seattle after leaving the governor’s office in 1987. “I’d been working with him on education
issues, so we talked often, but I had no idea he was thinking about ‘a Death With Dignity’
campaign until that call,” Harris says. “It was typical Booth in many ways.” He’d get an idea
and run with it, recruiting old friends and making new ones. Soon, some of the Northwest’s
most successful Democratic campaign operatives joined the cause. Harris, an accomplished
cat-herder, kept them on track.
The two national organizations lobbying for “physician-assisted dying” expressed
immediate interest in joining the effort. Their cause had met with little success other than
in Oregon, where voters had narrowly approved a “Death With Dignity” ballot issue in 1994.
Three years later, they soundly rejected a move to repeal it, and in 2006 the U.S. Supreme
Court, on a 6-3 vote, ruled that Attorney General John Ashcroft had overstepped his
authority in seeking to punish Oregon physicians who prescribed drugs to help terminally ill
patients end their lives. At the time of Gardner’s announcement, a major effort was being
made to get an Oregon-style aid-in-dying law through the California legislature. Having a
popular ex-governor lead a campaign in Washington was a potential breakthrough.
One of the first questions Booth had to weigh was whether he wanted to run his
own campaign or get involved with the already organized groups and their state affiliates.
Booth, Cynthia and Laird attended a getting-to-know-you meeting with representatives of
the groups in Seattle in late February. Robb Miller, the executive director of Compassion &
Choices of Washington, was there, together with Dr. Tom Preston, a member of his board.
Barbara Coombs Lee and Kathryn Tucker represented the group’s national office, which
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