BOOTH WHO? - Washington State Digital Archives

that inequalities in health care left minorities and poor people particularly vulnerable to
proponents of euthanasia. Booth said he knew it would be a rough ride to Election Day.
Abortion and euthanasia are two of the most emotionally divisive issues in American
politics. One man’s “Death With Dignity” – like one woman’s “choice” – is another’s
blasphemy. Who was Booth Gardner to play God? He said he’d heard it all. He was
unprepared, however, for what happened next. It got very personal, and he felt as if he’d
been “blindsided by a blitzing linebacker, or actually two,” because he learned not only the
breadth of opposition to the initiative but the depth of a schism in his own family.
* * *
Daniel Bergner, a former Seattleite who contributed stories to the New York Times
Magazine, called in the summer of 2007, asking for an interview. The magazine had some
four-million Sunday readers. Booth took Bergner to Vashon Island and spoke with unusual
candor during two lengthy interviews. They walked and talked along the lane between
the beach and the Gardner family compound, watching his grandchildren navigate the
driftwood. “His walk was a vigorous lurch. One foot twisted inward, one knee buckled,”
Bergner wrote. “His torso keeled slightly with each step. He has Parkinson’s. … He is 71,
and his last campaign is driven by his desire to kill himself. ‘I can’t see where anybody
benefits by my hanging around,’ he told me, while his blond grandchildren, sticks prodding,
explored the water’s edge.”
“His leprechaun eyes lost their glint; his fleshy cheeks seemed to harden, his lips
to thin, his face to reshape itself almost into a square,” Bergner observed, as Gardner
explained why he was taking on what he called “the biggest fight” of his career: “I
want to be involved in public life. I was looking for an issue, and this one fell in my lap.
One advantage I have in this thing is that people like me. The other is that my logic is
impeccable. My life, my death, my control.” But the plan Gardner was backing wouldn’t
give him that control, Bergner added, because Parkinson’s isn’t a terminal disease. What
the former governor really wanted was “a law that would permit lethal prescriptions for
people whose suffering is unbearable, … a standard that elevates subjective experience
over objective appraisal and that could engage the government and the medical profession
in the administration of widespread suicide. … Would physicians be writing suicide
prescriptions for the depressed? Gardner’s campaign is a compromise; he sees it as a first
step. If he can sway Washington to embrace a restrictive law, then other states will follow.
And gradually, he says, the nation’s resistance will subside, the culture will shift and laws
with more latitude will be passed….”
Published on December 2, 2007, the piece was headlined “Death in the Family.”
The family part was what hurt. Booth Gardner was portrayed as not only a self-absorbed,
suicidal shadow of his former leprechaun self, his son testified that he had been a terrible
father. “He provided for us, but he wasn’t there for us,” Doug Gardner, who was 45, told
Bergner. A born-again Christian, Doug said he was lost before he found his Lord and Savior,
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