[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 53 (Wednesday, May 3, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3322-S3324]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             DAVID MAHONEY

  Mr. STEVENS. Mr. President, our Nation has lost one of the great and 
modest men of our time, David Mahoney. A man who will receive 
posthumously one of the highest awards the medical community can bestow 
on a layman--the first Mary Woodard Lasker leadership in Philanthropy 
Award for ``visionary leadership'' from the Albert and Mary Lasker 
Foundation on May 9.
  David, through his generosity, with both his time and his money, 
greatly expanded knowledge about the human brain, neuroscience, and the 
connection between body and brain which is helping people lead longer, 
healthier lives.
  He led us through the ``Decade of the Brain'' and used his 
extraordinary marketing and public relations skills to foster awareness 
in Congress and our people of the importance of medical research and 
brain research in particular.
  From his humble beginnings in the Bronx, my friend served as an 
infantry captain in World War II and then attended the Wharton School 
at the University of Pennsylvania while working full time in the mail 
room of an advertising agency.
  David's talents did not stay hidden for long; by the time he was 25, 
he had become the youngest vice president of an advertising agency on 
Madison Avenue.
  He went on from there to form his own agency in New York and then

[[Page S3323]]

began his climb through the corporate world, first running the good 
Human Ice Cream Co., and rising to chief operating officer of Norton 
Simon's various corporate holdings.
  It was during his stewardship of Norton Simon, Inc., that I first met 
David. My friend Norton Simon retired as president and CEO of Norton 
Simon, Inc., in 1969 and selected David Mahoney to be the new leader of 
his company.
  He chose David because ``David was inspirational, tough, visionary, 
and dangerous.'' David expanded the company and helped Norton Simon 
build the world famous Norton Simon art collection, the greatest 
personal art collection west of the Mississippi.
  David wrote a book about his own life in business called Confessions 
of a Street Smart Manager. David was a wonderful combination of street 
smarts garnered from growing up in the Bronx, an education from the 
Wharton School, and the Irish charm that could convince people to share 
a dream and work to realize its value.
  Just 2 years ago David authored another book, along with Dr. Richard 
Restak, ``The Longevity Strategy--How To Live To 100 Using the Brain-
Body Connection.''
  David once said that ``God gave you intelligence so you could build 
your intuition about what lies ahead.''
  David Mahoney's second career and perhaps most lasting legacy was 
with the Charles A. Dana Foundation where he served as its chairman 
since 1977.
  After leaving Norton Simon, he focused the attention of the Dana 
Foundation on neuroscience research and helped the world's top 
neuroscientists and researchers explain the importance of their 
research to the general public and to funding agencies in the executive 
branch and the Congress.
  In 1992, he and Nobel Laureate Dr. James Watson launched the ``Decade 
of the Brain'' with 10 specific objectives they believed might be 
achievable by the end of the decade. That effort focused attention 
better than ever before on understanding the basis for diseases of the 
brain like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and generated an unprecedented 
level of support for neuroscience research.
  David has become widely and justifiably credited as our foremost lay 
advocate for neuroscience. While David had recently expressed some 
frustration to me that those 10 ambitious goals had not yet been fully 
achieved, through his efforts remarkable progress has been made in 
understanding the human brain and the diseases that afflict it. I know 
those goals will ultimately be met, and David Mahoney will be forever 
remembered as the driving force behind this effort.
  My friend David Mahoney and his wife Hillie have been close friends 
of ours for many years. David and I celebrated our 75th birthdays, 
which fell in the same year, and shared many memorable times. Catherine 
and I will miss his wit and his wisdom and his leadership, but I will 
continue to enjoy personal memories of our friendship and to be 
grateful for his legacy of exploration into the workings of the human 
brain.
  Mr. President, the May 2, 2000, New York Times contained an excellent 
obituary of David Mahoney, and I ask unanimous consent that it be 
printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                 [From the New York Times, May 2, 2000]

David Mahoney, a Business Executive and Neuroscience Advocate, Dies at 
                                   76

                          (By Eric Nagourney)

       David Mahoney, a business leader who left behind the world 
     of Good Humor, Canada Dry and Avis and threw himself behind a 
     decidedly less conventional marketing campaign, promoting 
     research into the brain, died yesterday at his home in Palm 
     Beach, Fla. He was 76.
       The cause was heart disease, friends said.
       Mr. Mahoney, who believed that the study of the brain and 
     its diseases had been shortchanged for far too long, was 
     sometimes described as the foremost lay advocate of 
     neuroscience. As chief executive of the Charles A. Dana 
     Foundation, a medical philanthropic organization based in 
     Manhattan, he prodded brain researchers to join forces, shed 
     their traditional caution and reclusivity and engage the 
     public imagination.
       To achieve his goals, he brought to bear the power of 
     philanthropy, personal persuasion and the connections he had 
     made at the top of the corporate world.
       Using his skills as a marketing executive, he worked 
     closely with some of the world's top neuroscientists to teach 
     them how to sell government officials holding the purse 
     strings, as well as the average voter, on the value of their 
     research. He pressed them to make specific public commitments 
     to find treatments for diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's 
     and depression, rather than conduct just ``pure'' research.
       ``People don't buy science solely,'' Mr. Mahoney said this 
     year. ``They buy the results of, and the hope of, science.''
       In 1992, aided by Dr. James D. Watson, who won the Nobel 
     Prize as a co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, Mr. Mahoney 
     founded the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives, a foundation 
     organization of about 190 neuroscientists, including Dr. 
     Watson and six other Nobel laureates, that works to educate 
     the public about their field.
       The same year, after taking over the 50-year-old Dana 
     Foundation as chief executive, Mr. Mahoney began shifting it 
     away from its traditional mission of supporting broader 
     health and educational programs, and focused its grants 
     almost exclusively on neuroscience. Since then, the 
     foundation has given some $34 million to scientists working 
     on brain research at more than 45 institutions.
       Mr. Mahoney also dipped into his own fortune, giving 
     millions of dollars to endow programs in neuroscience at 
     Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. Later this month, 
     the Albert and Mary Lassker Foundation, which traditionally 
     honors the most accomplished researchers, was to give him a 
     newly created award for philanthropy.
       ``He put his money where his mouth was,'' said Dr. Kay 
     Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins 
     University.
       Mr. Mahoney's journey from businessman to devotee of one of 
     the most esoteric fields of health was as unusual as it was 
     unexpected.
       David Joseph Mahoney Jr. was born in the Bronx on May 17, 
     1923, the son of David J. Mahoney, a construction worker, and 
     the former Loretta Cahill.
       After serving as an infantry captain in the Pacific during 
     World War II, he enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania's 
     Wharton School. He studied at night, and during the day he 
     worked 90 miles away in the mail room of a Manhattan 
     advertising agency, Ruthrauff & Ryan. By the time he was 25, 
     he had become a vice president of the agency--by some 
     accounts, the youngest vice president on Madison Avenue at 
     the time.
       Then in 1951, in a move in keeping with the restlessness 
     that characterized his business career, he left Ruthrauff & 
     Ryan to form his own agency. Four years later, when his 
     business was worth $2 million, he moved on again, selling it 
     to run Good Humor, the ice-cream company that his small 
     agency had managed to snare as a client.
       Five years later, when Good Humor was sold, Mr. Mahoney 
     became executive vice president of Colgate-Palmolive, then 
     president of Canada Dry, and then, in 1969, president and 
     chief operating officer of Norton Simon, formed from Canada 
     Dry, Hunt Food and McCall's. Under Mr. Mahoney, Norton Simon 
     grew into a $3 billion conglomerate that included Avis Rent A 
     Car, Halston, Max Factor and the United Can Company.
       Despite his charm, associates said, he had a short temper 
     and an impatient manner that often sent subordinates packing. 
     ``I burn people out,'' he once said in an interview, ``I'm 
     intense, and I think that intensity is sometimes taken for 
     anger.''
       The public knew him as one of the first chief executives to 
     go in front of the camera to promote his product, in this 
     case, in the early 1980's for Avis rental cars, which Norton 
     Simon had acquired under his tenure.
       By all accounts, including his own, Mr. Mahoney was living 
     on top of the world. He was one of the nation's top paid 
     executives, receiving $1.85 million in compensation in 1982--
     a fact that did not always endear him to some Norton Simon 
     shareholders, who filed lawsuits charging excessive 
     compensation, given that his company's performance did not 
     always keep pace with his raises.
       Tall and trim, he moved among society's elite and was 
     friends with Henry A. Kissinger, Vernon E. Jordon, Jr. and 
     Barbara Walters. He was reported to have advised Presidents 
     Richard M. Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, and to have 
     met with Mr. Carter at Camp David.
       But his fortunes changed late in 1983. True to form, the 
     restless Mr. Mahoney was seeking change, putting into motion 
     a plan to take Norton Simon private. But this time, he 
     stumbled; a rival suitor, the Esmark Corporation, bettered 
     his offer and walked away with his company.
       Mr. Mahoney was left a lot richer--as much as $40 million 
     or so, by some accounts--but, for the first time in his life, 
     he was out of a job and at loose ends. He described the 
     period as a low point.
       ``You stop being on the `A' list,'' he said some years 
     later, ``Your calls don't get returned. It's not just less 
     fawning; people could care less about you in some cases. The 
     king is dead. Long live the king.''
       It look some years for Mr. Mahoney to regain his focus. 
     Gradually, he turned his attention to public health, in which 
     he had already shown some interest. In the 1970's, he had 
     been chairman of the board of Phoenix House, the residential 
     drug-treatment program. By 1977, while still at Norton, he 
     became chairman of the Dana Foundation, a largely advisory 
     position.
       Mr. Mahoney increasingly devoted his time to the 
     foundation. In 1982, he also because its chief executive, and 
     soon began shifting the

[[Page S3324]]

     organization's focus to the brain. In part, the reason came 
     from his own experience. In an acceptance speech that he has 
     prepared for the Lasker Award, he wrote of having seen first-
     hand the effects of stress and the mental health needs of 
     people in the business world.
       But associates recalled, and Mr. Mahoney seemed to say as 
     much in his speech, that he appeared to have arrived at the 
     brain much the way a marketing executive would think up a new 
     product. ``Some of the great minds in the world told me that 
     this generation's greater action would be in brain science--
     if only the public would invest the needed resources,'' he 
     wrote.
       In 1992, Mr. Mahoney and Dr. Watson gathered a group of 
     neuroscientsts at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long 
     Island. There, encouraged by Mr. Mahoney, the scientists 
     agreed on 10 research objectives that might be reached by the 
     end of the decade, among them finding the genetic basis for 
     manic-depression and identifying chemicals that can block the 
     action of cocaine and other addictive substances.
       ``We've gotten somewhere on about four of them--but what's 
     life,'' Dr. Watson said recently.
       In recent years, Mr. Mahoney became convinced that a true 
     understanding of the brain-body connection might also lead to 
     cures for diseases in other parts of the body, like cancer 
     and heart disease.
       He believed that it would soon be commonplace for people to 
     live to 100. For the quality of life to be high at that age, 
     he believed, people would have to learn to take better care 
     of their brains.
       In 1998, along with Dr. Richard Restak, a 
     neuropsychiatrist, Mr. Mahoney wrote ``The Longevity 
     Strategy: How to Live to 100: Using the Brain-Body 
     Connection'' (John Wiley & Sons).
       Mr. Mahoney's first wife, Barbara Ann Moore, died in 1975. 
     He is survived by his wife, the former Hildegarde Merrill, 
     with whom he also had a home in Lausanne, Switzerland; a son, 
     David, of Royal Palm Beach, Fla.; two stepsons, Arthur 
     Merrill of Muttontown, N.Y., and Robert Merrill of Locust 
     Valley, N.Y., and a brother, Robert, of Bridgehampton, N.Y.
       Associates said Mr. Mahoney's temperament in his second 
     career was not all that different from what it had been in 
     his first. It was not uncommon, said Edward Rover, vice 
     chairman of the Dana Foundation's board of trustees, for his 
     phone to ring late at night, and for Mr. Mahoney to sail into 
     a pointed critique of their latest endeavors.
       One researcher spoke of his ``kind of charge-up-San-Juan-
     Hill style.'' Dr. Jamison, of Johns Hopkins, called him 
     ``impatient in the best possible sense of the word.''
       As in his first career, Mr. Mahoney never lost the good 
     salesman's unwavering belief in this product, ``If you can't 
     sell the brain,'' he told friends, ``then you've got a real 
     problem.''

  Mr. DODD. If my colleague will yield, I thank our colleague from 
Alaska for his comments about David Mahoney. I didn't know him as well 
as my good friend from Alaska but had the opportunity to be with him on 
numerous occasions. All the things the Senator from Alaska said about 
David Mahoney are true, and even more so. It is a great loss to the 
country.
  In fact, I point out our good friend from Alaska has lost a couple of 
good friends in the last few months.
  A man of significant contributions, a man who appreciated the arts, 
had a great love of this country and history--David Mahoney was all of 
those.
  Suffice it to say, I want to be associated with the comments of the 
distinguished Senator from Alaska on his comments about David Mahoney.

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