He was the founding chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at University of California Irvine College of Medicine.
He gained national prominence by announcing in 1987 that Ronald Reagan had been suffering from diminished mental ability as early as 1980.
He came to this conclusion by using the Gottschalk-Gleser scales, an internationally used diagnostic tool he helped develop for charting impairments in brain function, to measure speech patterns in Reagan's 1980 and 1984 presidential debates.
[1] Gottschalk coinvented software that uncovered a link between childhood attention deficit disorder and adult addiction to alcohol and drugs.
In 2004, at age 87, he published his last book, World War II: Neuropsychiatric Casualties, Out of Sight, Out of Mind.