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COPYRIGHT 2004 Aspen Publishers, Inc.
Michael S. Gordon, credited as the chief architect of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), died February 1, 2004. He was 70 years old. His colleagues in the employee benefits community will miss his passion, humor, articulate voice, and humanity. The following tribute to his life and his work was prepared by his friends and colleagues who are contributors to and readers of Benefits Law Journal.
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On graduating from the University of Chicago School of Law in 1955, Michael Gordon began work as a young lawyer at the US Department of Labor (DOL). People who knew him then described him as brilliant, hardworking, and idealistic. In the early 1960s, the DOL made what turned out to be a momentous decision for millions of Americans: it assigned Michael to the staff of the Committee on Corporate Pension Funds--the cabinet-level task force established by President John E Kennedy to study the nation's private-sector pension system. It was here that Mike first encountered and began thinking about how to solve the many problems facing the private pension system.
Michael left the DOL in 1970 and was hired by Senator Jacob K. Javits, R-NY., as minority counsel on pensions for the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare Subcommittee on Labor, where he served until 1975. During Mike's tenure on the subcommittee, pension reform moved from idea to reality with the enactment of ERISA, one of the most significant pieces of social legislation of the twentieth century.
People writing of this important legislative period have referred to Michael Gordon's role in the creation of ERISA as draftsman, engineer, and architect. While no single person can truly claim any of those titles (and Michael, always modest, never did), it can be said without hesitation that ERISA would have been a far different and weaker bill had Senator Javits not had the wisdom to hire this young, brilliant, hardworking, and idealistic lawyer.
Michael spent the last three decades of his life combining private legal practice with public service. He often was cared on to testify before Congress on what it got right in 1974 and what remained to be done to complete ERISA's promise. He spoke always with eloquence, grace, force, and vision.
In his practice, Michael represented multiemployer plans, corporations, and non-profits. He also represented individual employees when he thought they had been wronged, often in cases other attorneys had turned down as too quixotic. He was chair of the board of directors of the Pension Rights Center for roughly two decades. He worked with grassroots activists on pension and health care issues, serving as a technical advisor to the Coalition for Retirement Security and as general counsel of the National Retiree Legislative Network. He wrote important articles reflecting on ERISA and its legislative history and opened his files and gave his time to academics studying employee benefits. He was on the board of the Pension Research Council at the University of Pennsylvania and chair of the advisory board of the BNA Pension and Benefits Reporter.
Michael Gordon was revered and loved by almost all those whose lives he touched. Abbott Leban, a pension and business attorney knew Michael for only four years. In an online guestbook of remembrances of Michael, he spoke for many when he said, "We fast became friends, so much so I felt as if I had known him all my life; that's how comfortable we felt with each other. I am certain that feeling about Mike is held and treasured by every single person whom he favored with his grace, his humor, the force of his intellect, and his knowing all that territory between the realities of life as it is and, with fair-mindedness always, its delicious ironies and the absurd."
Eulogy
Steven J. Sacher
Mike Gordon was, by turns, my boss at the Department of Labor, and then my mentor, and then a friend and most respected colleague in the Washington employee benefits bar for more than 36 years. It may sound odd to refer to the passing of a friend as an uplifting event, but nothing focuses the mind like an absence of choices, and for the last 48 hours Mike has been constantly and compellingly in my mind. In this city of cynics, of jaded lawyers, crass politics, swollen egos, grandiose schemes, and incessant, mindless talking heads, Mike shone like a highly polished diamond....
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