Mark Hatfield - Later Years and Legacy

Later Years and Legacy

After retiring from political office, he returned to Oregon and teaching, joining the faculty of George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon. As of 2006, he was the Herbert Hoover Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Politics at the school. Additionally, he taught at the Hatfield School of Government at Portland State University, which is named in his honor, and lectured at Willamette University and Lewis & Clark College while living in Portland.

In July 1999, Hatfield and his wife were passengers on a tour bus when a car collided with the bus. He and his wife received minor injuries, but began advocating for buses to be required to have seat belts.

The Mark O. Hatfield Library at Willamette is dedicated to him, along with Oregon State University's Hatfield Marine Science Center. Other namesakes include the Mark O. Hatfield Clinical Research Center at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland; Hatfield Research Center at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU); the Mark O. Hatfield Wilderness, Mark O. Hatfield Institute for International Understanding at Southwestern Oregon Community College; Hatfield Government Center station at the western terminus of the MAX Blue Line light rail; Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse in Portland; the Mark Hatfield trailhead at the western end of the Historic Columbia River Highway State Trail in the Columbia River Gorge; and the Mark Hatfield Award for clinical research in Alzheimer's disease. Work is underway to start a Mark O. Hatfield Memorial Trail in the Columbia River Gorge, a 60-mile trail through much of the Mark O. Hatfield Wilderness area.

From February 2000 to May 2008 Hatfield served on the board of directors for Oregon Health & Science University. His papers and book collection are stored in the Willamette University Archives and Special Collections, inside the Mark O. Hatfield Library. Senator Hatfield merited his own chapter in Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation.

In 2010, a group of filmmakers began production on a documentary film about Hatfield's public service.

Hatfield was admitted to the Mark O. Hatfield Clinical Research hospital at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland in November 2010 for observation after his health began to decline. Mark Hatfield died at a care facility in Portland on August 7, 2011, after several years of illness. A specific cause of death was not immediately given.