Neil Goldschmidt obit

Neil Goldschmidt, Oregon former governor who sexually abused young girl, dies at 83

 

He was not on the list.

Neil Goldschmidt, the Oregon governor and Portland mayor credited with turning a frumpish city into a thriving metropolis only to see his record forever stained by revelations that he had sexually abused a young teen girl, died at home in Portland on Wednesday, according to his family.

His family was by his side, they said. The reported cause was heart failure. He was 83.

Goldschmidt’s high-energy leadership style thrust him into the upper circles of power, including a heady stint inside President Jimmy Carter’s administration. His crash into political purgatory, after he was exposed and confessed to statutory rape of a 14-year-old girl, left him largely shunned and unforgiven in the state he loved.

He spent his last years alternating between homes in Southwest Portland and the bucolic Provence region of France. Friends said he desperately wanted to reengage in public policy, but had resigned himself to a much more anonymous retirement.

The public shock over the revelation he was a child sexual abuser is best understood against the backdrop of his once-unparalleled influence in Oregon.

For a time, it seemed Goldschmidt commanded the center of Oregon’s political and business echelons. As a one-term Democratic governor, he oversaw Oregon’s comeback from a recession that ravaged the state’s timber industry but sowed the seeds of a high-tech makeover of the economy.

As President Jimmy Carter’s transportation secretary, he turned the nation’s attention to alternative transportation even as he steered a controversial bailout of Chrysler. As a Nike executive, he led the giant athletic company’s international operations. As a top-dollar lobbyist and consultant, he worked deals that reached from Portland’s Park Blocks to Weyerhaeuser’s boardroom.

It was during his six years as mayor, however, that a young, brash and ambitious Goldschmidt left his most lasting marks. He pushed for and won initiatives to turn what some called “Stumptown” into an ambitious, pedestrian friendly, transit-oriented model of smart growth and new urbanism.

In short, he laid the groundwork for the modern image of Portland as one of the nation’s most livable cities. But it was also during that time that he began sexually abusing an underage neighborhood girl — a secret he kept buried for nearly 30 years. Goldschmidt’s victim died in 2011.

Fred Leonhardt was Goldschmidt’s former speechwriter, a member of his inner circle and the author of the then-governor’s career-shaping state of the state address in which he called for “a guarantee to every child in every region of our state a greater chance for a decent life.”

But after Leonhardt learned the full details of Goldschmidt’s history of sexual abuse and statutory rape from former Multnomah County Sheriff Bernie Giusto, their bond was irreparably broken. Leonhardt said he took the story to The Oregonian in December 2003. The newspaper’s editors were slow to act on his tip, however, and it was Willamette Week’s Nigel Jaquiss that eventually broke the Pulitzer Prize-winning story.

Leonhardt said it was as though Goldschmidt had “deliberately” set out to destroy his young victim’s life.

Margie Boulé, then a columnist for The Oregonian, interviewed Goldschmidt’s victim over many months after the abuse became public. She said the abuse occurred for years, beginning when she was 13.

She struggled after the abuse, and Goldschmidt reached a financial settlement with her in secret.

Boulé wrote about her reaction to the 2004 stories about Goldschmidt’s fall from power: “The stories made her sound like a throwaway person, she said, a teen who’d been asking for trouble, an ex-con who might have had a hard life even if she hadn’t been abused as a child by the most powerful, charismatic man in Oregon.”

Longtime Goldschmidt confidant Gerry Frank, who died in 2022, said: “In no way can we gloss over what he did. It was wrong. He knows it, everybody does. But Neil Goldschmidt is probably the smartest, most charismatic, most visionary guy that Oregon has produced in a long, long time.”

Yet, U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden said the best response to Goldschmidt’s death would be for people to contribute to organizations dedicated to preventing sexual abuse such as the Oregon Association for the Treatment and Prevention of Sexual Abuse.

“Neil Goldschmidt’s abuse of a young girl destroyed her life, a horrific act that should make any other discussion of his political career moot,” Wyden said in a statement.

So it goes with Goldschmidt. He will be remembered as someone once credibly thought of as presidential material, but whose official portrait was summarily removed from its place of honor in the state Capitol and exiled to a storage warehouse in Gresham.

“The point is, all around this state and certainly around this city, Neil Goldschmidt transformed things and made lives better,” said Mitzi Scott, a one-time campaign aide who later became close friends with the Goldschmidt family. “Does that cease to exist because he made a mistake? No, it doesn’t.”

His family members said in a statement that they hoped “those mourning his passing can remember the significant positive contributions he made to our community.”

“Neil was a force of personality and the patriarch of our large, blended family. Although he battled many health issues for years, he was actively engaged with family and friends in discussions about school, business, politics and wine until the day of his passing,” they said in the statement. “We will deeply miss his presence in our lives.”

Neil Edward Goldschmidt was born June 16, 1940, in Eugene, to parents Lester and Annette Goldschmidt. He cut his political teeth at the University of Oregon, where he was elected student body president and later recruited students to join the civil rights movement.

His was a close-knit family and would remain so throughout Goldschmidt’s political and personal ups and downs. Goldschmidt graduated from the UO with a political science degree in 1963, the height of the civil rights era in the United States. He spent a brief time in Washington D.C., as an intern for former U.S. Sen. Maurine Neuberger.

Things happened quickly for the young political up-and-comer. Two years after he got his degree, he married Margaret “Margie” Wood in Eugene. Two years later, the Goldschmidts headed for Berkeley, California, where he attended law school at the University of California. Then it was back to Oregon and up to Portland, where he took a job as a Legal Aid lawyer.

In 1969, fewer than three years after moving to Portland and the same year his son, Joshua, was born he ran for the Portland City Council. He won, becoming one of Portland’s youngest city commissioners.

His rise two years later to become the nation’s youngest big-city mayor sealed his reputation as a political virtuoso. Few in Oregon’s history rose so far so fast. Then he set about changing the city to fit the far more modern, hip and idealistic image he had for it.

The “downtown plan,” adopted the year before he became mayor, installed a transit mall that became the forerunner to the MAX lines that now crisscross the city. The Mount Hood Freeway, planned as a straight shot between wealthy West Hills neighborhoods and the ski slopes, was stopped, despite immense old-school political momentum. Harbor Drive, an expressway along the Willamette River’s west bank, was ripped up and replaced with the now iconic Tom McCall Waterfront Park.

A parking lot outside what was then the Meier and Frank department store transformed into Pioneer Courthouse Square. Nordstrom, lobbied heavily by the mayor, built one of its flagship stores across the street. The Portland Center for the Performing Arts opened in the historic Paramount Theater, another building saved from plans for a parking garage.

Goldschmidt’s rising political star perhaps flashed brightest when, in 1979, he resigned as mayor to take a position as President Carter’s transportation secretary. Staff members strew daisies in his path as he left City Hall on his last day.

When Carter suffered a landslide defeat in his bid for a second term, Goldschmidt seemed only too happy to move back to Oregon. His time in the national spotlight brought calls for him to run for Senate, and even some talk about a future presidential ticket. He wasn’t interested, said Tom Imeson, one of Goldschmidt’s closest associates.

“He didn’t like Washington,” Imeson said. “There was something about Oregon that was very genuine. Plus, he liked being in charge.” Back in his home state, Goldschmidt immediately went to work for Oregon’s most prestigious business, Nike, where he was vice president in charge of international sales from 1981 to 1985, then president of Nike Canada from 1985 to 1987.

All the while, Goldschmidt was being pressed to run for governor. Not that he needed it. His whole career seemed like a heat-seeking missile aimed at the Capitol in Salem.

As governor, Goldschmidt launched what he called the “Oregon Comeback” a series of initiatives aimed at bringing the state out of a prolonged recession. He focused on high-tech companies, enticing them with promises of tax breaks, an affordable work force and the state’s vaunted livability.

He headed off an inmate-overcrowding crisis by overseeing a construction boom of new prisons. He also introduced his Children’s Agenda, aimed at attacking drug abuse and child abuse while increasing educational opportunities for preschoolers through teenagers.

As his first term wound down, Goldschmidt began assembling a campaign staff for what many inside and out of the political community figured would be a cakewalk reelection. They were shocked on Feb. 7, 1990, when Goldschmidt announced he would not run for reelection.

“He called me from his car and said, ‘This campaign is headed into the ditch. I’m not running.’ And that was that,” Imeson says. Most attributed the decision to his deteriorating relationship with his wife, Margie, whom he divorced a few months later. Few knew the other, deeper cause that Goldschmidt hoped would stay hidden.

A private citizen once again, Goldschmidt launched a lucrative lobbying and international trade business. In 1994, he married Diana Snowden, a PacifiCorp executive, and the two bought into a Yamhill County winery that produced high-end pinot noir. As for politics, Goldschmidt preferred the inside game, which included behind-the-scenes advice to former Gov. Ted Kulongoski both during his first campaign and while he was in office.

Goldschmidt began attracting public and news media attention in 2001 when he landed a high-paying lobbying job for Saif, the state-run worker compensation program. The spotlight intensified three years later when Goldschmidt simultaneously worked a deal that could have landed him as chairman of Portland General Electric and agreed, at Kulongoski’s request, to take the helm of the state Board of Higher Education.

The latter would prove to be his downfall. Upset at the idea that someone who had abused an underage girl would take a top post overseeing universities, then-Sen. Vicki Walker, D-Eugene, tipped Willamette Week to a court document that laid out what had happened back in the 1970s when Goldschmidt was Portland mayor.

As the Portland weekly prepared to run a story that would later win it the Pulitzer Prize, Goldschmidt offered a partial confession to The Oregonian in May 2004. The ensuing onslaught of news stories and outraged public response effectively ended Goldschmidt’s private and public careers.

Overnight, he went from one of the state’s most powerful figures to its most vilified. He would never come close to recovering his former footing and lived the rest of his life in a kind of political and social purgatory.

The public’s fury with the former governor perhaps was best symbolized in March 2011, when custodians at the Capitol removed Goldschmidt’s official portrait which had once hung outside the state Senate from an out-of-the-way office and hauled it to a warehouse in Gresham for indefinite storage.

Some have wondered if there’s room to consider Goldschmidt’s accomplishments alongside the record of his abuse.

State Sen. Tim Knopp, R-Bend, who along with Walker requested the painting’s removal, said there is no room for forgiveness or redemption given what happened. Had his abuse been reported at the time, “there would be no public legacy for Neil Goldschmidt. He wouldn’t have been secretary of transportation, he wouldn’t have been governor of Oregon. His career would have ended rather abruptly.”

Goldschmidt’s survivors include his wife Diana, children Rebecca McMillan and Josh Goldschmidt; stepchildren Kirsten and Neilan Snowden; grandchildren Cambell and Delaney McMillan, Jaden Goldschmidt and Max; stepgrandchildren Jack Schroeder and Lucy, Lee and William Snowden; and brother Steve Goldschmidt.