Steve Forrester

Neil Goldschmidt, who died at his Portland home Wednesday, was a force of nature, a transformational figure as mayor of that city. He was also a man who squandered his talent and trashed his moment in history.

I became aware of Goldschmidt when I was 16 and a high school junior in Pendleton. My father served on a panel that annually selected an intern for the office of U.S. Sen. Maurine Neuberger. He returned from that year’s candidate interviews to rave about the brilliance of the young man whom they had selected, a University of Oregon senior named Neil Goldschmidt.

Months later, after unexpectedly becoming Sen. Neuberger’s page, I met Goldschmidt on Capitol Hill. He was driven by a number of causes, especially the civil rights turmoil unfolding in the South. He urged Sen. Neuberger to speak out on civil rights. She did not. In response, he gave up his internship and traveled to the South to join the fight for progress.

Some years later, I saw Goldschmidt and his new wife in their Berkeley apartment while he was a University of California law school student. While I observed the affection between them, I wondered if she was a sufficiently strong personality in that relationship.

As a post-baccalaureate student at Portland State University, two of us obtained funding for an urban affairs monthly publication we called Metropolis. We launched it at the dawn of the reform movement in Portland City Hall. In Metropolis, I wrote my first column about the new, young Portland city commissioner. “Neil Goldschmidt is young and he is not patient,” was the lead.

When a group of us started the Portland alternative weekly Willamette Week in 1974, I covered the mayoral race, which Goldschmidt won. It was an interesting time in Portland, as the new mayor innovated constantly — including the downtown transit mall, killing the Mt. Hood Freeway and creation of Tom McCall Waterfront Park on the banks of the Willamette River. The ’70s were a heady time in the city. Portland loved itself — so unlike what the town has become as it fitfully recovers from years of rioting and senseless vandalism.

During those mayoral years, Goldschmidt sowed the seeds of his own destruction. He committed statutory rape, having sex repeatedly with a 14-year-old girl. In the decades ahead, he covered up that crime with evasion and payoffs for her silence. He also destroyed the life of that woman, who died young.

In my early years as a Washington, D.C., correspondent, Goldschmidt arrived as President Jimmy Carter’s secretary of transportation. I covered his U.S. Senate confirmation hearing and wrote a day-in-the-life piece on him for my Eugene newspaper client. My wife and I joined the Goldschmidt staff for a picnic, where we noticed their hubris. None of them knew his career would be doomed. In hindsight, it was surprising that the FBI, in its investigation of a Cabinet nominee, failed to unearth Goldschmidt’s sexual predation of a minor.

After Carter’s defeat, Goldschmidt became Oregon’s governor. He launched a major prison-building program. In his 1988 State of the State Speech, the governor said: “We will build more prison cells because they are needed. But if this is all we do, they will always be full.”

He followed his single term by creating a lobbying firm. Watching him work for questionable causes was a disappointment to the men and women who had followed the reformer into City Hall. He was like the movie actor who plays a prizefighter and in decline becomes a professional wrestler. After Willamette Week blew the cover on the statutory rape story, one of its reporters speculated that Goldschmidt’s lobbying venture was about making as much money as possible — knowing that once he had been exposed, his earning days would be over.

I suppose one could call Goldschmidt a tragic character. I prefer the distinction made by the playwright Arthur Miller — saying that Goldschmidt was the stuff of pathos, not tragedy.