Remembering Jack D. Gordon
Biography
MIAMI, FLORIDA, DECEMBER 19, 2005
As members of the hospice community, we understand the universality of the experience of grief and loss. While our credentials say we are experts, the pain of the loss of our leader, colleague and friend is not muted. What is different for us is our personal perspective on Jack’s remarkable life and the great impact he has had on our society, particularly in the areas of healthcare and end-of-life care. The facts of his life are well known. What is less well known, except to those who knew Jack, is his deep humanity which was so completely absorbed into his being. In an effort to celebrate Jack while grieving his loss, we hope to share some insight into that life and the unique perspective that made him such a powerful force in the hospice community and such a formidable advocate for social change.
At his death, Gordon was Chairman and CEO of Hospice Foundation of America. He assumed leadership of the organization in 1990 and during his tenure the Foundation grew from a local, South Florida fund raising organization to a recognized national leader in end-of-life care. Gordon brought his unique understanding of people and the dynamics of organizations – forged during a lifetime of community service, political passion, and a life-long quest for knowledge – to improve care of the dying by being an uncompromising advocate for the hospice concept of care. Only through this reflection on his extraordinary life can we begin to understand how and why he was able to have such success in transforming our organization and affecting the hospice movement – and to help people understand his lasting legacy.
EARLY INFLUENCE
Jack Gordon was born in Marquette, Michigan and grew up in Detroit. After attaining a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Michigan in 1942, he joined the army, where he received a Combat Infantry Badge with the 96th Infantry Division for service in the invasions of Leyte and Okinawa in the Pacific theatre during World War II.
Jack’s wartime combat experiences along with heavy doses of Talmudic study as a youth infused in him a life-long reflection upon death and its meaning, spiritually as well as existentially. While it is clear that such reflection would inform his hospice work to help people with terminal illness, it also formed the basis of his intellectual legacy of twenty years in the Florida Senate.
On Jack’s very first day in the Senate he took the floor to argue against the death penalty. This was Florida in 1972. The final vote was 39 for the death penalty, with the sole dissent being Jack’s vote. Seven years later he rose again to address the issue: “I was opposed to the death penalty then, I am just as opposed to it today.” Again he was the lone voice, resisting the attempt to “sanitize” the deed by lethal injection instead of the electric chair. Influenced by his combat experiences, Gordon decried the insensitivity to human life that would allow people to say, Well, here is a better way to kill. “There isn’t a better way, or a more humane way to kill,” he reasoned, from the depth of his religious conviction. Then he quoted John Donne: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And, therefore, never ask for whom the bell tolls, because it tolls for thee.” The Senate heard Gordon out in stony silence, then voted once again 39-1.
PROFESSIONAL SUCCESS
Upon release from the Army, Gordon settled in Miami Beach, where he was an organizer and the managing officer of Washington Federal Savings and Loan Association of Miami Beach from 1952 to 1981. He was active in the community, serving as a Member of the Miami Beach Housing Authority, and Chairman of the Tourist Development Authority of Miami Beach and the Dade County Human Relations Commission. As President of Washington Federal, he served as a Housing Finance consultant to USAID (United States Agency for International Development) in Central America and Africa as well as an expert with the United Nations Technical Assistance Program in Somalia. From 1965- 1970 he was a member of the U.S. Commission on State Departments of Education, and he also held a position on the Secondary and Post-Secondary Education Commission and the U.S. Panel of Teacher Training.
Gordon’s father was very influential in his life. Jack never forgot his father’s strong emphasis on the Jewish tenets of social responsibility. “I’m a real product of a Jewish social conscience,” Gordon once said. And it was that social conscience which spurred Jack to go against conventional political advice and, with several friends, found the first ACLU chapter south of the Mason-Dixon line. “We got our beleaguered forces under what we considered a respectable banner—obviously a minority opinion,” Gordon once recalled with a laugh. As the influential president of a savings and loan, Gordon played behind-the-scenes roles in urging the Chamber of Commerce to pressure lunch counter owners to serve anyone who sat down – not a popular opinion in the Miami of the 1950s.
Jack’s father was also a great encourager of unrestricted, unlimited, uncensored reading. This legacy led to his lifelong commitment to education. Jack was elected to the Dade County (Miami) School Board in 1960 and served two terms on what was then the 6th largest school system in the country. As a candidate he called for desegregation; the race drew national attention. When asked by a local reporter how he put up with the campaign bashing, Jack replied with a quote from Ibsen:
You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth. (An Enemy of the People, Act. V)
A POLITICAL POWERHOUSE
In 1972, Gordon was elected to the Florida State Senate and was re-elected five times, serving until 1992. During his 20-year tenure in the Florida Senate, he chaired every major committee, was elected President Pro Tem in 1983-84, and chosen by his fellow senators to serve as majority leader in 1989. His legacy of legislation will continue to impact Floridians for generations.
Jack was selected several times as one of the most effective members or most effective in debate. He successfully sponsored legislation to decentralize the State’s Human Services agency and place a student as a voting member of the Board of Regents, the oversight and regulating body in charge of the state university system. He passed legislation mandating required writing in all classes. This law was later named for him as the Gordon Rule, and became the bane of students across Florida, as satirized in a political cartoon. In the area of health care he was 20 years ahead of his time, sponsoring and shepherding legislation to create a hospital cost containment commission, require generic drugs to be used when not specifically prohibited, decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana, and make physician records available to the public.
The first hospice licensing legislation in the nation was presented in the Senate by Gordon in 1979 - four years before the Medicare Hospice Benefit became law. Jack often noted that the Florida law offered hospice care for one year, rather than the six months we associate with the Medicare benefit, and the law in Florida still reads that way. The six month Medicare limit was a back room trade-off in Congress over some concerns that hospice would be costly. We now know that hospice is less costly, but through HFA Jack continually assailed the false notion that there is any medical reason to limit hospice benefits to six months.
A leader in the area of civil rights, Jack sponsored legislation to eliminate age discrimination in employment and prevent private country clubs from discriminating on the basis of race or gender. He twice sponsored and led the effort to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. On the last try for ERA Gordon quieted Senate opponents for a few minutes by asking them, “Can someone tell me how I would explain to my daughter that I voted to deny her the same opportunities in this society as her brothers? If you can find a way for that to make sense, I’ll reconsider ERA.”
One of his greatest legislative achievements was the passage of the privacy amendment to the Florida constitution. Adopted in 1980 the amendment declares that every natural person has the right to be let alone and free from governmental intrusion into his private life. The amendment was ratified by Florida voters and legal scholars believe it may provide a stronger right to privacy than the federal constitution.
In 1985 Gordon created and was the first director of the Institute for Public Policy and Citizenship Studies at Florida International University, which was subsequently named the Jack D. Gordon Institute for Public Policy and Citizenship Studies. He also served on the Board of Directors of the Mildred and Claude Pepper Foundation and the Center for Policy Alternatives, and was a member of the Carter Center Mental Health Task Force.
Every person who knew Jack came away with their own strong impressions of him. Some of his political foes may have wished he represented another state. Some wondered if too many 39-1 votes evoked Don Quixote. But those Senators in the know regarded Gordon as one of Florida’s most influential and principled public officials. His ability to reason, to outsmart opponents in back-room maneuvering, to make trade-offs to gain a goal, and his sense of strong fiscal conservatism forced even those who didn’t agree with him to listen carefully. One Tallahassee reporter wrote that he “mixes philosophy and conviction with innate political cunning like no one else in the Florida legislature.”
When it came time to leave the legislature in 1992, Jack did not opt for the road taken by many ex-lawmakers. He continued his commitment of service to humanity by becoming the Chief Executive Officer of Hospice Foundation of America. Instead of becoming a lobbyist, he leveraged his fame to hold a testimonial in his honor that would raise money for an inner city health care center. In 1992 Jack turned over almost one-quarter million dollars to the Overtown Community Health Center to provide primary care to anyone at no cost.
Gordon leaves behind a legacy of towering political and practical achievement enveloped by integrity. When faced with difficult decisions, Jack believed the answer could always be found by just stepping back and eliminating everything extraneous; what is left would be the right thing to do.
As HFA employees have come to understand his lifelong struggle against injustice he sometimes quoted a code of responsibility which shaped his outlook on duty and dedication to causes. It has inspired all of us to pursue our mission with vigor. It guides us in our daily work in the service to the dying. It has served as our mantra in our efforts to bring more compassionate care to the terminally ill, their families, and their friends. We offer it here as our tribute to Jack Gordon and our commitment to him, his passion, and his compassion, that we will continue his legacy.
It is not up to you to finish the task – but neither are you free to desist from it.
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