[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 4]
[House]
[Pages 5133-5136]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1300
                     HONORING WILLIAM BOOTH GARDNER

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2013, the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Heck) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. HECK of Washington. Mr. Speaker, on Friday, March 15, last month, 
William Booth Gardner passed away in his home in Tacoma, Washington, 
after courageously battling the ravages of Parkinson's disease for 
about 20 years. Born in 1936, he was 76 years old.
  Booth Gardner will be remembered for many things. He will be 
remembered as Washington State's 19th Governor, having served from 1985 
to 1993. He voluntarily retired after two terms, with sky-high job 
approval ratings, and was subsequently appointed as ambassador to GATT, 
now known as the World Trade Organization, by his good friend, 
President Bill Clinton.
  He will be remembered as a person of means--some would say 
considerable means--who began his lifelong pattern of ``pay it 
forward'' by volunteering to work with children in the inner city

[[Page 5134]]

while he was still in college. He even coached Jimi Hendrix in 
football.
  He will be remembered for turning around a scandal-ridden Pierce 
County government as its first elected county executive and bringing it 
into the 20th century.
  He will be remembered for his impish sense of humor. At the end of 
the long campaign for the aforementioned county executive position, so 
familiar was he with his opponent's speech that he delivered it, 
verbatim, at the last campaign appearance. It was the only time his 
opponent was left both figuratively and literally speechless.
  Booth Gardner will be remembered for leading Washington State through 
a stunning era of progress. He was a national leader in civil rights. 
He appointed our State's first African American to the United States 
Supreme Court. He signed an executive order banning discrimination 
against gays and lesbians in the State workforce way back in 1995, way 
before it was the popular thing to do. And at the time he said, The 
only thing I care about is if they are competent to do the job.
  He pushed forward a trainload of environmental protections. For 
example, he signed an order protecting wetlands, knowing their 
importance to ensuring clean water, while most of the rest of us were 
still thinking about wetlands as kind of like large mud puddles.
  He was a national education leader. He chaired the Education 
Commission of the States and fought for standards before that was 
popular. He expanded choice for students and restored a then-
deteriorating higher education funding system.
  He leveraged his very considerable private sector experience to be a 
great manager of State government, implementing--again, before it was 
popular--commonsense ideas like a rainy-day fund and life-cycle capital 
budgeting.
  But Governor Gardner really shined in health care. When he chaired 
the National Governors Association, he triggered the national debate on 
health care and for improving access for low-income families and 
containing costs for all of us.
  Booth Gardner will also be remembered for the Academy Award-nominated 
documentary that bore his name, Booth Gardner's Last Campaign. It 
eloquently told the story of his successful advocacy in our State of 
the Death with Dignity initiative, which was overwhelmingly approved by 
the voters.
  I'm often asked about how and when I first met Booth. It was 40 years 
ago this year. I was a 20-year-old very lowly clerk in the Washington 
State House of Representatives. I took paperwork over to the chair of 
the Senate Education Committee. And to my great surprise, then-State 
Senator Booth Gardner invited me into his office, never having met me, 
and simply said, Sit down and tell me about yourself, Denny. Little did 
I know that day that, many years later, I would have the unbelievable 
honor to serve as his chief of staff.
  Booth Gardner will be remembered for many things; but mostly I think 
he will be remembered for governing when government actually worked, 
and it was due in no small part to his steadfast commitment to 
civility, respectfulness, and collaboration.
  For my own part, I will remember him as boss, mentor, and the truest 
and dearest of friends.
  I now yield to my very good friend, the gentleman from the Seventh 
Congressional District of Washington State, Dr. McDermott.
  Mr. McDERMOTT. Thank you very much, Denny.
  Although it makes me sad for the reason we are speaking here today, I 
am honored to say a few words about my friend, Governor Booth Gardner.
  A lot of people will remember us as adversaries, and that's true for 
a brief time. We ran against each other for Governor in 1984, and I 
lost. Now, it might come as a surprise to you, but I didn't 
particularly like losing. And so after the election, I went off to a 
place I had up in the San Juan Islands to lick my wounds on Lopez 
Island. It's exactly there where Booth found me a few days later. He 
called and said, I'm going to be up in the area. I have a place over on 
Shaw Island, and I'll come over and see you. And so he drove his boat 
over and we met.
  I had a 40-acre farm, and we walked around the property four times, 
talking about our visions, about the State, about the election, about 
the campaign, and where we wanted the State to go, because Booth and I 
both loved the State of Washington. By the time we landed on my front 
doorstep, we'd solved all of Washington's problems.
  Booth had a unique characteristic which I think Denny alluded to, and 
that is we had a Senator in the State by the name of Warren Magnuson 
who used to say you can get a lot of things done if you don't care who 
gets the credit for them. Booth really did believe that.
  I'd been working on a basic health plan for the working poor in the 
State for a number of years before he got to be Governor, and I hadn't 
been able to get it through the Republican Governor and the Republicans 
in the legislature. It was my passion project: giving the poor who fell 
outside of Medicaid but were working an opportunity to buy into the 
health care system in some way. It was one of those gaps between what 
the Federal Government did and what the private insurers and the 
employers were doing, and there were lots of people who were working 
full time but couldn't get health care.
  So we put together this program. He told me that day when we were 
talking around that he would do everything he could to get it passed, 
and he kept his word--also unusual in politicians. He put everything he 
had into it. And when it was finished, he signed it in the middle of my 
district in a little clinic called Country Doctor in the middle of the 
city on Capitol Hill.
  That bill has helped the working poor of Washington all over the 
State get medical care and is one of the first public options. It's so 
good for the State of Washington that Senator Cantwell took it and put 
it into the Affordable Care Act. It's now in the blueprint for the 
safety net that we are developing in this session of Congress.
  So Booth lived on beyond his days. His ideas, his willingness to make 
something happen, carried into the future, and he never walked around 
telling anybody about it, just did it. That walk with me, a couple of 
rivals, was really the beginning of it all.
  It wasn't only health care. I was the Ways and Means chairman in the 
Senate, so I had a lot to do with how the budget got put together. But 
it doesn't matter if you're the Ways and Means chairman or not, if the 
Governor won't sign it, you can't get it passed. He and I had lots of 
talks.
  He was willing to sign a bill that created the largest settlement for 
women workers in this country under equal pay for equal work. He signed 
it after a lawsuit that the State had lost, and I convinced him that we 
ought to settle the case and let women move ahead in the workplace, and 
Booth said, Good idea.

                              {time}  1310

  Finding a partner like Booth, one who's willing to get past politics 
and jump in the deep end with you on some issues that weren't exactly 
sort of centrist--sometimes he took some real risks--is not a very 
common thing in politics. But with Booth it was common. The best 
interests of the State always came first.
  Although, occasionally I would go over to his office to find him and 
they would say, well, he's gone. Well, where is he? Well, he's gone up 
to coach his girls soccer team in Tacoma.
  He had all kinds of interests and all kinds of concerns about kids, 
and he was willing to put everything he had into it, both in the office 
and out of the office.
  Now, some of his most important work, in my view, and what shows his 
real character and why I feel bad today, is that when he left the 
Governor's mansion, he was in apparently good shape, as far as we knew; 
went off to Geneva to work for the GATT trade organization, and while 
he was over there, the diagnosis was made of Parkinsonism.
  Parkinsonism is a very, very difficult disease to cope with. Your 
mind is active, everything is active; your body

[[Page 5135]]

just won't cooperate. And Booth had this disease and struggled with it 
for 20 years, as you've heard.
  Now, death is a frightening thing for all of us to think about. None 
of us want to think about death. It's not something that's usual table 
conversation or much of a conversation out here on the floor. But Booth 
was willing to look at it straight on, and he was willing to talk about 
it in a way that few other people were.
  He wanted to talk about what people's options were; and he saw the 
suffering, he was going through it himself, and felt that everyone 
should have the right to choose how they want to end their life. In a 
final directive, when you go into the hospital, you tell them whether 
you want them to resuscitate you or not. All of that, he looked at all 
of that.
  And the one thing that was obvious to him was that there comes a time 
when there is no hope, and there is no question when it's going to 
happen; and people ought to have the right to make their own decision 
at that point. It's called death with dignity.
  Now, he took that issue on. Here's a man who's struggling with a 
debilitating disease of his own, no political advantage whatsoever in 
doing it, none. But he came and spent his time. He was sick; it was 
hard for him to get up and talk. Sometimes he could only talk a few 
sentences and then someone else would have to take the podium because 
he was unable to continue.
  There weren't any donors watching. There was no election to be 
prepared for. It wasn't even an issue that affected him directly, 
because the requirement of the law was that you had to have two doctors 
say that you had only 6 months to live, and with Parkinsonism, it's not 
possible for any physician to say that. So it wasn't something he was 
doing for himself. It was because he thought it was right for the 
people of the State of Washington.
  You rarely find someone with that ability to get out of their own 
self-interest. He just believed in it. He believed that it was best for 
the people of Washington, and he wasn't going to let his sickness or 
anything else stop him from getting it done, and it passed by about a 
54 percent majority.
  Booth was a great man. They say people are--they pass twice, once 
when they die, and once when people stop telling stories about him. The 
stories will never stop about Booth. I could stand up here and tell 
them for a long time.
  But he was a great man. He was a good Governor, he was a good father, 
he was a good husband, and he was my partner and my friend, and I'll 
miss him very much.
  Rest in peace, Booth.
  I yield now to Doc Hastings, from Pasco, Washington.
  Mr. HASTINGS of Washington. I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I 
want to thank my other colleague from Washington (Mr. Heck) for having 
this Special Order.
  I didn't know Governor Gardner that well. We come from different 
political parties. That's one reason why you don't probably build a 
close association. But also my last 2 years in the legislature was his 
first 2 years as Governor, so I don't have the special relationship 
that Mr. Heck and Mr. McDermott had with him.
  But the one characteristic that I did realize with him has been 
talked about a great deal by my colleagues, and that is that he was a 
very friendly guy. When Mr. Heck was on the floor just a moment ago 
saying, as a clerk, you know, he'd call him into his office and treated 
him like an equal. And I found that characteristic the same in my 2 
years when I was in the legislature with Mr. Heck, or with Governor 
Gardner, even when we were the minority party at that time.
  But probably the story that I remember best on a personal note dealt 
with my daughter. In the Washington Legislature, and I assume other 
legislatures are the same way, when sine die comes, it is done at 
precisely the same time. And the doors of the House Chamber are open, 
the doors of the Senate Chamber are open, and the joint rules require 
that the gavel drop at the same time. So, you know, it has to be 
organized and so forth.
  And my oldest daughter happened to be a page on that sine die. It was 
going to be my last sine die, as a matter of fact. So I told her, why 
don't you go behind the House podium, and you can see how that works. 
And so she kind of snuck behind there and managed to get that view.
  And then after sine die, typically, in the Washington Legislature 
there are a number of get-togethers. The Governor's Office happens to 
be on the floor right below the Senate Chamber, and parties are going 
on and so forth.
  So my daughter changed because we were going to drive home, and she 
put on a sweatshirt. And the sweatshirt was a remembrance of her going 
to the State volleyball finals. And so she had a bunch of names, all of 
her classmates wrote their names on there.
  So we walked down to the Governor's Office, and he looked at her and 
grabbed her and, you know, wanted to know what all the names were, what 
happened, did they win the championship, I mean, all this sort of 
stuff, just, I guess, so typical of the type of individual that 
Governor Gardner was.
  So I can't talk about the policies that my previous colleagues spoke 
about, but I can tell about that one particular issue. And it just 
turns out that my daughter is here in town this weekend with her three 
daughters, and we were talking about that last night. And she says, 
yeah, you know, I do remember that, where he kind of put his arm around 
me and made me feel very welcome.
  So he was a Governor that was forward-looking. I know he's thought 
about very, very well. My part of the State is a whole lot different 
than the other part of the State politically; but there's no question 
that, at least in his second term, he did very, very well in my part of 
the State. I didn't necessarily like that, but that's part of politics.
  So he will be missed; and the editorials around the State that spoke 
of him, I think, were very true. But just from a standpoint of 
personality, that's my association with him. And he certainly will be 
missed.
  With that, I'd like to yield to one of the newest colleagues from the 
State of Washington, the gentleman from the Sixth District, Mr. Kilmer.
  Mr. KILMER. Thank you. And thank you to all of my colleagues from 
Washington State who spoke before me. I'm batting clean-up and have the 
unique position of having neither served with Booth Gardner nor having 
run against him.
  But I actually met him when I was a kid. There's no doubt that Booth 
Gardner's legacy of accomplishments is impressive, and I could stand 
here and list them off, both from his role as Governor and for his 
involvement on trade issues at the Federal level.
  But I think it says more about the kind of man Booth Gardner was when 
we don't just talk about what he accomplished, but we talk about what 
kind of man he was. As someone who met him as a kid, I was just very 
much struck by the fact that he was exceedingly civil and very, very 
kind and seemed to have interest in every person he represented.
  Regardless of one's race or religion or orientation or gender or 
economic status, he seemed to care about every person he represented, 
including a little kid in Port Angeles, Washington, where I was born 
and raised.
  I met Booth for the first time when I was a kid and he was a 
candidate and my mom was involved on his campaign.

                              {time}  1320

  I was struck by the fact that he seemed to be spending an inordinate 
amount of time talking to me, even though I wasn't old enough to vote. 
I met him again in his last year in office. As a high school senior, I 
received a scholarship to go off to college; and Booth, as Governor of 
our State at the time, was hosting a luncheon to honor all the 
scholarship recipients. And I remember he came over to talk to my mom 
and me and say hello. In that very brief interaction, I was just struck 
by the extent to which he seemed to care about my mom and about how 
much he cared about me. As an 18-year-old, I just thought it was really 
cool that a Governor expressed that level of interest.

[[Page 5136]]

  Over the years, I'd run into him at political events or often at 
education-oriented events or events in Pierce County, where he was our 
first county executive. And our interactions always started in the 
exact same way. He'd start by saying, How's your mom? Many years later, 
just this last year when I decided to run for Congress, I was very 
touched that he came to my kickoff in Tacoma. Parkinson's, by that 
point, meant that he could not walk, and he struggled very deeply to 
express himself. I went over to thank him for coming. I kneeled down 
and thanked him, and I could tell he was struggling to say something. 
It struck me I knew he was going to ask, How's your mom? I thanked him 
for that, and I told him she was doing just fine.
  The other thing I'll say about Booth and his legacy is the legacy he 
lives behind of his family. His grandson, Jack, actually interned with 
our campaign. He's an extraordinary young man who spoke very eloquently 
at the memorial service that was held in honor of Governor Gardner.
  So you can look at his legacy of accomplishments when it comes to 
education or protecting our environment or extending health care 
services to folks who need it or his work to improve our economy or 
improve civil rights, or you can look at his extraordinary business 
legacy as someone who is a leader in our business community. But for 
me, his legacy is as a guy who truly cared about others. That's how I 
will remember Booth Gardner.
  Today, I will tell all who are listening that my mom is doing well, 
but she misses Booth Gardner; I miss Booth Gardner; and the people of 
Washington State miss Booth Gardner.

                          ____________________