Remembering Michael Pertschuk
How do you say goodbye and thank you to someone who gave you so much? Michael Pertschuk, a lifelong crusader for just causes, died this past week at age 89. In his Washington Post obituary and beyond, much has been said of Mike’s formal roles as the chairman of the US Federal Trade Commission and one of the most powerful staff members ever to serve in the U.S. Senate, and his leading role in fighting big tobacco for decades.
But I remember something else that he was in abundance — a generous and dedicated mentor.
I first met Mike Pertschuk on the street in Manhattan on the evening of Consumers Union’s giant 50th anniversary gala in the fall of 1987. It was a spirited event in which Walter Cronkite had opened up the festivities by looking at the crowd of more than a thousand and declared, “What a well-dressed group of communists!”
My boss at Consumers Union at the time, Harry Snyder, spotted his old friend Mike on the street afterwards and introduced us. We had never met before but I knew who he was. Mike’s lost crusade while at the FTC, to regulate advertising aimed at children, was the subject of a case study we had used in graduate school at Harvard a few years before. I told him, “We studied you at the Kennedy School.”
“That case, that case! It follows me around everywhere — how Mike Pertschuk screwed up on children’s advertising!” He said it in good humor. We found a common bond, he and I, in a deep mutual interest in citizen advocacy and the strategy that made it powerful, a bond that would go on for decades.
In 1992 when my wife and I were taking a newlywed sabbatical from political work to volunteer for a year in a Bolivian orphanage, Mike and his Advocacy Institute partner, David Cohen (another wonderful mentor) asked us to go to South Africa on the Institute’s behalf to help set up an advocacy support project there. Off we went, laying the seeds as well for something much longer lasting.
Lynn and I were also in the final stages of adopting a five year old girl from that same orphanage and our first U.S. stop as a family was with Mike and his wonderful wife, Anna Sofaer, in the small Connecticut enclave of Yelping Hill. There under the trees Mike formally invited me to set up an Advocacy Institute west coast office, which would eventually become the Democracy Center. In the evenings we played cards together with our new daughter, Elly. Her favorite was Go Fish. Mike always happily let her cheat by walking behind him to look at his cards.
Few things used to give Mike more joy, it seemed, than connecting people of like interests, and of mentoring and supporting young people. The list of those he helped and cheered on is a long one. Few people, however, benefited more from Mike’s generosity than I did. He helped me build the organization that would become my life’s work, supporting citizen activists on five continents. He was always genuinely interested in whatever I was doing. He was always a keen and skillful strategic ear. He was always a friend. He was a mensch in so many ways at once.
Mike’s books are all sublime, real insight packed into well-crafted words. They endure now in his absence. His legacy in policy and politics is a tower. But it is his humility and good cheer that I will remember more. Like the night he accepted a challenge from my six-year-old daughter to race down a playground slide in San Francisco.
The last time Mike and I saw one another face-to-face was the summer of 2017 when my family returned a second time to the U.S. from Bolivia, this time as new grandparents. Twenty five years after our first visit there, I was back once more at Yelping Hill. Even as his memory sometimes kept words he was looking for just off the horizon, his wit, his intelligence and his deep decency was still shining bright.
A giant tree has fallen. A beautiful man has written his last lines. And so many people are so much better off for all he gave. Thank you.
