Thomas R. Donahue - Personal Life

Personal Life

Donahue has been married to Rachelle Horowitz since 1979. He has two children, Nancy Donahue and Thomas R. Donahue III, from an earlier marriage.

Horowitz has been involved in the civil rights movement, the trade union movement, and Democratic politics since the 1950s.

At the age of 24, she was the transportation director for the 1963 March on Washington, which brought together some 250,000 people for the largest demonstration in America until then. Horowitz spent three months in Jackson, Mississippi, planning for Freedom Summer in 1964 and was arrested in a civil rights protest in New York City.

In the trade union movement, Horowitz served as the assistant to the civil rights leader Bayard Rustin from 1964 to 1973 when he was president of the A. Philip Randolph Institute. She later became the political director of the American Federation of Teachers and assistant to its president, Albert Shanker, who had enormous influence in the union movement and politics. William Galston of the Brookings Institution once described Horowitz’s role. Referring to the 1973 Woody Allen movie “Sleeper”-- in which “a thawing Woody is informed that most of civilization was destroyed when a man named Albert Shanker got the Bomb” – Galston joked, “Well, if Al Shanker had gotten the bomb, Rachelle would have been in charge of target selection.”

She represented the trade union movement on the Democratic National Committee from 1980 until 2000. In that period, she co-chaired the party’s Rules Committee and served on the Executive Committee and the committees that drafted the party’s 1988 and 1992 platforms. Horowitz was a leading figure in the presidential campaigns of Ted Kennedy (1980), Walter Mondale (1984), Michael Dukakis (1988), and Bill Clinton (1992).

Horowitz now serves on the Board of Directors of the National Democratic Institute, which she helped found in 1983.

Together, Horowitz and Donahue currently lead an active retirement in Washington, D.C.