Patricia A. Goldman

Patricia Ann Goldman (March 22, 1942 – July 26, 2023) was an American public official and women's rights advocate. She served on the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) from 1979 to 1988, most of that time as vice chair.

An alumna of Goucher College, Goldman began her career in 1964 as a legislative assistant on Capitol Hill. She worked for various political organizations, directing the Wednesday Group (a group of liberal Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives) and chairing the Republican Women's Task Force of the National Women's Political Caucus. She was appointed to the NTSB by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 and reappointed by Ronald Reagan in 1984.

In 1988, Goldman entered the private sector as a senior vice president for USAir. She was later president of the WISH List and the Ovarian Cancer National Alliance, which she co-founded and served on the board of the Chautauqua Foundation.

Early life and education Patricia Goldman was born in Newton, New Jersey, on March 22, 1942, to Jacob J. Goldman, a dentist, and Miriam L. ( Cassiday) Goldman, a former nurse and homemaker. She arrived in the capital as an independent but soon joined the Republican Party. From 1965 to 1966, she was a legislative assistant for an ad hoc U.S. House subcommittee focused on the War on Poverty (part of the Education and Labor Committee), hired by Representative Albert Quie as the Republican minority's lone staffer. She provided legislative counsel to the National League of Cities and the U.S. Conference of Mayors in 1971 and 1972. She labeled herself variously an independent, progressive, moderate, feminist, and "thinking person," adding, "I don't think a Republican feminist is an oxymoron." coordinating legislative efforts among its 31 members. She was also a board member of the Ripon Society, a liberal Republican think tank.

She held teaching positions as a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School; a lecturer at the Brookings Institution; and a visiting professor with the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, which sent her on visiting lectureships at universities across the country.

Transportation safety Goldman was a member of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), an independent federal agency, for almost nine years. On the recommendation of Representative Barbara Mikulski and others, to succeed Philip Hogue. Before her Senate confirmation, in a meeting with White House counsel Robert Lipshutz, she promised to recuse herself from potential issues involving interests of her husband, former Senator Charles Goodell, who consulted for the Concorde supersonic airliner and held stock in oil and rail. She had no prior technical knowledge but was trained on the job by staff experts. reappointed her to the board on March 21, 1984; and renamed her vice chair on June 5, 1986. the Air Line Pilots Association endorsed her renomination. As vice chair and chair, she and Burnett took alternate weeks serving as part of the NTSB's Go Team, which investigated major accidents. She was often quoted in the media as one of the "first investigators on the scene". Notable events investigated by Goldman included the 1980 collapse of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge in Tampa, the 1982 crashes of World Airways Flight 30 in Boston and Pan Am Flight 759 in New Orleans, and the 1984 derailment of Amtrak's Montrealer in Vermont.

A focus of the NTSB in the 1980s was the promotion of child safety seats, the nonuse of which the NTSB said contributed to 90 percent of infant fatalities in traffic collisions, which according to Goldman "could have been prevented by the proper use of child safety seats". Goldman and the NTSB petitioned for legislation in all fifty states to require the use of restraints for children under the age of four, something that was accomplished in 1985, and raised awareness to get the public to use them more frequently and correctly. She remembered of her service on the NTSB, "You could see the results of what you were doing. That was interesting and gratifying." The previous year, she had been floated as a possible successor to Transportation Secretary Elizabeth Dole. After leaving the board, Goldman joined the USAir Group as senior vice president of corporate communications on February 16, 1988. One of the highest-ranking women in the aviation industry at the time, she was in charge of internal and external communication at USAir until her retirement at age 51 on January 31, 1994.

Later career In July 1985, Goldman participated in the World Conference on Women in Nairobi. She received an honorary degree at Goucher's commencement in 2010.

Goldman served on the board of directors of Crown Central Petroleum from 1989 to 2000, and the Chautauqua Foundation from 1992 to 2003. In 1995, she became the president of the WISH List, a political action committee raising funds for female Republican candidates in favor of abortion rights. After surviving ovarian cancer, in 1997 she co-founded and was the president of the Ovarian Cancer National Alliance (OCNA), an advocacy and patient support organization, which merged into the Ovarian Cancer Research Alliance (OCRA) in 2016.

In April 2010, Toyota named Goldman to an independent six-person panel to investigate vehicle safety issues, which released a critical report in May 2011.

Personal life Goldman was the second wife of Charles Ellsworth Goodell, a Republican former senator from New York; they were married from July 1, 1978, until his death on January 21, 1987.

Goldman married Stephen Kurzman, a lawyer who served as Assistant Secretary for Legislation under Elliot Richardson in the Nixon administration's Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, on May 20, 1990; they met in the 1960s, when he worked in the U.S. Congress, as a staffer for U.S. Senator Jacob Javits. Beginning in the 1970s, she spent part of every summer at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York.