Obituary
William Gorham, founder of Urban Institute think tank, 91
An economist and apprentice of Robert S. McNamara, the defense secretary under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, Gorham held high-level positions at the Department of Defense and the old Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) - now the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In 1962, Gorham was employed by McNamara’s Department, improving troop effectiveness, compensation, and the military draft. From 1965 to 1968, he was a high assistant to HEW Secretary John Gardner.
In the late 1960s, Johnson and his top domestic adviser, Joseph A. Califano Jr., began the Urban Institute - as an independent, nonpartisan organization with Gorham its president - to evaluate the ongoing success of the administration’s newly-hatched Great Society programs. The Institute received its early funding from foundations and from HUD. It was not the first public policy think tank in Washington - the Brookings Institution began in 1916 - but the analysis of social programs, poverty, and urban problems was still an emerging field in 1968. The Institute has helped shape debate on countless issues, from poverty and housing to health care, racial inequity, taxation, the environment, employment, aging, and infrastructure. Gorham as president retired in 2000.
Early in Barack Obama's Presidency, the Institute’s analysis of a Massachusetts health-care law championed by then-Gov. Mitt Romney (now a Utah Republican senator), helped provide the basis for projections of how Obama’s Affordable Care Act would take shape. More recently, the Urban Institute has studied social ramifications of the coronavirus pandemic, racial disparities in corporate America, the changing workforce, and many other topics.
