Booth Gardner, 1936–2013

last updated 8 January 2015

Former Washington state Gov. Booth Gardner had had Parkinson’s disease for over a decade when he joined a meeting of experts pushing for a new state law allowing physician-assisted suicide. Despite his tremor and difficulty speaking, Gardner set a confident tone. “He jabbed his thumb back over his shoulder with absolute authority and said, ‘We’re going to have a campaign, and I want you all to get in line behind me,’” remembered one attendee. “‘My goal is to lessen the pain of dying.’’’ Three years later, in 2008, Washington voters approved the Death With Dignity Act, which allows terminally ill patients to choose lethal medication.

Gardner was born in Tacoma to a socialite mother and an alcoholic father “who was cruel to his son,” said the Los Angeles Times. His parents divorced when he was 4, and his mother married Norton Clapp, who later headed the paper company Weyerhaeuser. When Gardner was a teenager, his mother and his sister were killed in a plane crash, “an event he later said ‘had a greater effect on me than anything else in my life.’”

Gardner’s large inheritance enabled his political career, but the Democrat was “a political oddity,” said The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “He spoke with a squeaky voice likened to Elmer Fudd on helium.” Yet after stints as a state senator and county executive, he was elected governor in 1984 “in the face of Ronald Reagan’s landslide,” and in eight years pushed through an innovative land-use law, a health plan for poor workers, and more funding for state universities. He died of complications of Parkinson’s, which does not qualify as a terminal illness under the law.