The vanished Washington of Strauss

“Last of his kind” is an overused phrase, but in the case of Robert S. Strauss, who died Wednesday at 95, it is apt. For his like will not pass Washington’s way again, if only because the world that made him — and men like him — is also gone for good.

Strauss was a small but perfectly formed Texan, a gleeful partisan chairman of the Democratic National Committee who helped elect Jimmy Carter, and then became a trusted counselor to Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, and later Russia.


Like Edward Bennett Williams and other Washington super-lawyers of the late 20th century, Strauss played more angles than Isosceles, and sometimes represented both sides in a delicate deal. In an age of bland-speak, he was blunt and colorful, calling his fellow Texan Jack Valenti, the longtime head of the Motion Picture Association of America, a “little sumbitch,” (as in “The Hay-Adams is the only place that little sumbitch’ll eat lunch!”)

( Also on POLITICO: Robert Strauss dies at 95)

“I don’t do much press anymore,” he told a reporter more than a decade ago, before going on to hold forth at length in his trademark twang. Ebullient, gregarious, Strauss was the life of every party, and together with the late Harry F. Byrd Jr., he held the modern record for attendance at the annual spring dinner of the Gridiron Club (every year from 1973 to 2008 or 2009), whose revels he addressed at least four times as a speaker — a special distinction for one who never held elective office.

Not everyone was a fan. Writing in The New Republic in 1988, Michael Kinsley memorably dismissed Strauss as “99 percent hot air,” and questioned whether he adhered to any ideology or principle at all. Strauss himself despised descriptions of him as a “fixer.”

“I detest that word,” he once told Time magazine. “It sounds cheap. It’s not me. I don’t know how to fix anything. Hell, I’ve never even fixed a traffic ticket. …What I do is help make the government work.”

That he did, in ways hard to imagine in the face of Washington’s current dysfunction. It was Strauss to whom Nancy Reagan turned to convince her husband that the Iran-Contra scandal was hurting him and had to be addressed. And it was Strauss to whom some Republicans in the House of Representatives turned when they were having second thoughts about impeaching Bill Clinton, to see if he could persuade the party’s hottest heads to consider censure instead.

( PHOTOS: Robert Strauss, 1918-2014)

The son of a dry goods merchant, Strauss was a born salesman — whether as Carter’s inflation czar, Mideast peace negotiator or as the nation’s first envoy to the new Russian federation after the fall of the Soviet Union (where he’d served as the last ambassador).

His political ties were deep and wide, dating to his days as a volunteer on the first congressional campaign of one Lyndon B. Johnson in 1937. After his graduation from the University of Texas Law School in 1941, he joined the FBI in lieu of military service in World War II, and in 1945, co-founded the Dallas law firm — Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld — that would become his powerhouse power base, especially after it opened its Washington office in 1971.

Strauss grew rich but never lost sight of his humble roots, as a rare Jew in small town Texas. And because he came of age in a generation marked by the Great Depression and the war, he shared a sense of national purpose and common cause with friends in both political parties that is rare, if not unheard of, today. As former House Speaker Jim Wright once said of him at a private dinner, “It’s an honor to have with us a close friend of the next president of the United States — whoever the hell he may be.”

He was pushing 60 when he took his first appointed job in government — as Carter’s special trade representative. But he made up for lost time. And if, in his later years, it bothered him that his brand of centrist politics was out of sync with the Democrats’ more liberal elements, he didn’t let it show. Even in a wheelchair, or for only a part of an evening he would have once savored to the end, he kept showing up.

So it does not seem a cliché to say, as President Barack Obama did on news of his passing, “Bob was truly one of a kind.”