Robert S. Strauss, Presidential Confidant and Deal Maker

Photo

Robert S. Strauss with his boss, President Jimmy Carter, after a signing ceremony for the Trade Act of 1979, which Mr. Strauss pushed as the special representative for trade negotiations. Credit Dennis Cook/Associated Press 

 

Robert S. Strauss, who rose from the Texas Plains to become an influential Washington insider, leading the Democratic Party and hopscotching among White House posts when not making millions as a lobbyist and deal maker, died Wednesday. He was 95.

His law firm, Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, confirmed his death.

Mr. Strauss was known for a quick wit and a rough-hewn persuasiveness that recalled his small-town roots and enhanced his prowess among a vanishing breed of back-room power brokers. His knowledge, contacts and instincts — running across parties and administrations — ran so deep that he was almost invariably included in the tiny, powerful fraternity known as Washington’s “wise men.” He called himself a “centrist, a worker, a doer, a putter-together.”

It was Mr. Strauss whom Nancy Reagan asked to tell her husband, President Ronald Reagan, that the Iran-contra arms-for-hostages scandal was corroding his administration and that he had to make changes. It was Mr. Strauss whom President George Bush in 1991 appointed ambassador to the Soviet Union, even after he told the president that he had never voted for him for anything. Mr. Strauss became ambassador to the newly non-Communist Russian Federation.

Bob Woodward wrote in his book “Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate” (1999) that when some Republican leaders in the House of Representatives were having second thoughts about impeaching President Bill Clinton, they turned to Mr. Strauss to ask other Republican leaders to consider censure instead.

Through the law firm he co-founded — Akin, Gump — Mr. Strauss deftly navigated the territory where business and government intersect and deals are made. Over Thanksgiving dinner in 1990 at the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan, he brokered final details of Matsushita Electric’s takeover of MCA for $6.6 billion. His reported $8 million fee was split between both sides, because he had represented both.

If anything, that  typifies his ilk (for better and for worse).

In April 1979 Mr. Strauss became Mr. Carter’s personal representative to the Middle East peace talks, which then concerned Palestinian autonomy in the Israeli-occupied territories. Years later, speaking to The Los Angeles Times, an unidentified friend quoted Mr. Strauss’s response to getting the assignment.

“The first thing I’m going to do is go to Israel and court Premier Begin’s wife like she was an 18-year-old schoolgirl,” Mr. Strauss said, according to the friend, referring to Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

“Then I’ll go to Egypt and court Sadat’s wife the same way,” he continued, referring to President Anwar el-Sadat. Before long, Mr. Strauss predicted, “one of those ladies is going to turn around in bed to her husband and say: ‘You know, that little Bobby Strauss is not such a bad guy. Why don’t you do something nice for him?’ ”

Larger-than-life statesman

On the 15th of December, this story follows up:

With Mr. Holbrooke’s death on Monday, the administration has lost one of its most resonant voices, just as it completes its latest review of its Afghan war strategy. His death confronts the White House and State Department with some difficult questions, starting with how to replace a larger-than-life statesman in a post that was created for him and which he built from scratch.

His obituary:

A brilliant, sometimes abrasive infighter, he used a formidable arsenal of facts, bluffs, whispers, implied threats and, when necessary, pyrotechnic fits of anger to press his positions. Mr. Obama, who praised Mr. Holbrooke on Monday afternoon at the State Department as “simply one of the giants of American foreign policy,” was sometimes driven to distraction by his lectures.

Few diplomats could boast of his career accomplishments. Early on, Mr. Holbrooke devoted six years to the Vietnam War: first in the Mekong Delta with the United States Agency for International Development, seeking the allegiance of the civilian population; then at the embassy in Saigon as an aide to Ambassadors Maxwell Taylor and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.; and finally in the American delegation to the 1968-69 Paris peace talks led by W. Averell Harriman and Cyrus R. Vance. Mr. Holbrooke was the author of one volume of the Pentagon Papers, the secret Defense Department history of the Vietnam War that cataloged years of American duplicity in Southeast Asia. The papers were first brought to public attention by The New York Times in 1971.

That is quite a pedigree.

Mr. Holbrooke also made millions as an investment banker on Wall Street. In the early 1980s, he was a co-founder of a Washington consulting firm, Public Strategies, which was later sold to Lehman Brothers. At various times he was a managing director of Lehman Brothers, vice chairman of Credit Suisse First Boston and a director of the American International Group.

He intended to become a journalist, but after graduating in 1962 he was turned down by The Times and joined the State Department as a foreign service officer. 

The Times's loss was the nation's gain, one can say.


When President Clinton took office in 1993, Mr. Holbrooke was named ambassador to Germany. He helped found the American Academy in Berlin as a cultural exchange center.


But there was to be one more task. As Mr. Obama assumed office and attention shifted to Afghanistan, Mr. Holbrooke took on his last assignment. He began by trying to lower expectations, moving away from the grand, transformative goals of President George W. Bush toward something more readily achievable. But his boss and old friend, Mrs. Clinton, expressed absolute confidence in him. “Richard represents the kind of robust, persistent, determined diplomacy the president intends to pursue,” she said. “I admire deeply his ability to shoulder the most vexing and difficult challenges."