Harvey Kushner remembered
Harvey Kushner. Photo courtesy of the Kushner family
Pioneer think tank CEO and Peninsula resident Harvey Kushner passed away recently from injuries suffered during a fall.
Kushner was born in Brooklyn in 1930 and raised in Baltimore, where he attended public schools and earned an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He planned to enter the then new field of bioengineering, but that was before his wife Rose, a medical lab technician, gave birth to their first son. To support his family, Kushner went to work at Operation Research (ORI), one of the nation’s first for-profit think tanks.
While rising rapidly through the management ranks, Kushner resumed studies in physics and business.
ORI’s projects included Naval systems; NASA’s Nimbus, the first weather satellite; the Hubble telescope; and a computerized war game to help the Army Medical Corps, which proved invaluable during the Vietnam War. One of Kushner’s projects was to study how new sentencing requirements affected California Superior Courts.
He became ORI’s CEO after leading a then-innovative takeover of the company through an employee stock ownership plan.
About this time Rose developed breast cancer. She would write several books on the subject and become a forceful advocate for mammography and minimally invasive surgical procedures. She was a member of the National Cancer Advisory Board. After succumbing to cancer in 1990, her husband took it upon himself to edit updates of her pamphlet, “If you’ve thought about breast cancer.”
After leaving ORI, Kushner established Kushner Management Planning Corp., a private government consulting company. He moved to Palos Verdes in the early 1990s and married Dr. Patricia Sacks, Director of the Vasek & Anna Maria Polak Breast Diagnostic Center at Torrance Memorial Medical Center. They shared passions for medicine, travel and the arts. Kushner was an accomplished artist, violin player and sailor.
In a 2009 profile in Peninsula People, Kushner spoke about his deep admiration for the two women in his life: “What Rose did in 16 years and what Pat is doing every day is very hands on. You can come home at night and say I helped somebody, I did something valuable, something important. I’ve done everything I can to support them. I guess I get as much out of what they accomplish helping other people as they do.”
In 2010, Kushner became one of the first heart patients to receive an LVAD (Left Ventricular Assist Device) heart pump as a long-term “destination” device. (Heart pumps are usually meant to be temporary, until a donor organ becomes available.) He often credited his extraordinarily long seven years with an LVAD to his wife Pat’s medical background.
“The key to longevity with an LVAD is sleeping with your doctor,” he liked to joke.
Kushner is survived by his wife Patricia, sons Gantt and Todd, daughter Lesley, three grandsons, a granddaughter, and his dog Reo.