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| Lobbyist, lawyer Thomas H. Boggs Jr. dead at 73 | Lobbyist, lawyer Thomas H. Boggs Jr. dead at 73 |
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| Thomas H. Boggs Jr., who for years was at the epicenter of Washington legal, business and political circles as the city’s marquee name in lobbying and political fund-raising, died Sept. 15 at his home in Chevy Chase. He was 73. | |
| The cause was an apparent heart attack, said his sister, the broadcast journalist Cokie Roberts. | The cause was an apparent heart attack, said his sister, the broadcast journalist Cokie Roberts. |
| With a gregarious charisma that even his nemeses among good-government groups found hard to resist, Mr. Boggs spent four decades as a heavyweight in Washington influence peddling. He had a shrewd understanding of how the city operated outside the public view — how to get to people in a position of power and how to win their support. | |
| “The best lobbyist in Washington is a member of Congress who agrees with you and is willing to lobby for you,” he once told an interviewer. “He may not want to play a front role if he has a constituency that is against what you are trying to get him to do, but your best bet is still to try to convince a member to be your lobbyist.” | |
| By pedigree, Mr. Boggs had grown up in a home where politics was the family business. His father, a Louisiana congressman, rose to U.S. House majority leader and died in a plane crash over Alaska in 1972. His mother, known as Lindy, won the special election for her husband’s seat and served nine terms in Congress before President Clinton named her U.S. ambassador to the Holy See at the Vatican. | |
| “Tommy” Boggs, as he was widely known, entered the law and lobbying trade soon after graduating from Georgetown University law school in 1965. A few years later, he made a brief but unsuccessful run for Congress representing suburban Maryland. | |
| He rose to the apogee of influence in the wake of Watergate-era reforms that saw an “explosion and diffusion” of committee oversight and power, said Charles Lewis, an author of books on money in politics and founder of the nonprofit watchdog group the Center for Public Integrity. | |
| The firm Mr. Boggs was most identified with, Patton Boggs, continued to enjoy a formidable presence and routinely topped the list of most profitable — raking in a whopping $40 million last year in lobbying fees. | |
| Over the years, the company joined the lobbying effort to save the carmaker Chrysler from bankruptcy and worked to persuade Congress in 1980 to approve federal loan guarantees of up to $1.5 billion. Working for the American Bankers Association, Mr. Boggs helped argue for the repeal of Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law that prohibited commercial banks from combining with brokerage houses. The repeal, part of a larger appetite for deregulation in the late 1990s, is often said to have played a significant role in worsening the financial collapse of the late 2000s. | |
| But Patton Boggs was subsumed earlier this summer by the larger Squire Sanders law firm because of declining revenue and high-profile departures of partners, prompted in part by setbacks for the firm in a battle with Chevron. | |
| Patton Boggs had sided with plaintiffs seeking payment from the oil giant over toxic oil waste left behind in Ecuador decades ago. But Chevron had alleged wrongdoing on the part of the plaintiffs and Patton Boggs regarding a $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron in an Ecuador court in 2011. The firm recently settled its dispute with Chevron, paying the oil company $15 million. |