Robert Mosbacher

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Robert Adam Mosbacher

Robert Adam Mosbacher (born March 11, 1927) is a U.S. businessman. He was the Secretary of Commerce from 1989 to 1992.

Born in Mount Vernon, New York, his father was a wealthy stock trader who cashed in most of his holdings before Wall Street crashed, so the family did not suffer during the Depression. Mosbacher graduated from Washington & Lee University in Virginia in 1947 with a degree in business administration. He then went to Texas, where his father had some oil investments, and got into the oil business himself. In 1954 he found a million-dollar field of natural gas in south Texas. Since then, Mosbacher Energy Company has been very successful. His accumulated wealth and political connections have kept the Mosbacher family as one of Houston's wealthiest and well-known in [River Oaks].

Political Career

Mosbacher's primary claim to fame was his competition for presidential campaign contracts with the first President Bush.

In 1992, "Sources close to the former president George H.W. Bush say Karl Rove was fired from the 1992 Bush presidential campaign after he planted a negative story with columnist Robert Novak about dissatisfaction with campaign fundraising chief and Bush loyalist Robert Mosbacher Jr. It was smoked out, and he was summarily ousted" (Esquire Magazine, January 2003). As Novak provided some evidence of Rove's motive in his column describing former senator Phil Gramm's later firing of Mosbacher: "Also attending the session was political consultant Karl Rove, who had been shoved aside by Mosbacher". Mosbacher maintains that "Rove is the only one with a motive to leak this. We let him go. I still believe he did it."

Robert Adam Mosbacher shaking hands with Boris Yeltsin

Before this he was national finance campaign chairman for President Ford in 1976. He was also a Member of President Reagan´s Task Force on Private Sector Intiatives 1981-1983, and Vice Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He then became Secretary of Commerce in 1989 after he directed the George H. W Bush 1988 Presidential Election Campaign.

His son, Robert Mosbacher Jr., was an unsuccessful candidate in the 1997 Houston mayoral election.

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United States Secretaries of Commerce

United States Secretary of Commerce and Labor>Secretaries of Commerce & Labor (1903–1913): Cortelyou | Metcalf | Straus | Nagel

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