R. Mosbacher, GOP fund-raiser, commerce chief

HOUSTON - Robert Mosbacher Sr., 82, a Houston oil multimillionaire who was U.S. commerce secretary under his close friend President George H.W. Bush, died yesterday in Houston after a yearlong battle with pancreatic cancer, family spokesman Jim McGrath said.

The Texan was a powerful Republican fund-raiser who served in the top echelons of Bush's presidential campaigns and most recently was a general campaign chairman for 2008 GOP presidential nominee John McCain. As commerce secretary, Mr. Mosbacher helped lay the foundation for the North American Free Trade Agreement.

"Together we shared a journey that led to the presidency, the mountaintop of American politics, and there we worked together to help America more fully embrace the world around us and compete in the newly emerging global markets that the waning Cold War made accessible," Bush said in a statement. "No doubt, he will be remembered as one of the most effective commerce secretaries in our nation's history."

Mr. Mosbacher was born in Mount Vernon, N.Y., and earned his bachelor's degree in business administration from Washington and Lee University in 1947. He moved to Houston and built a successful oil and gas company that would have interests in U.S. and international markets.

Bush described Mr. Mosbacher as "an honorable and a first-rate businessman, and perhaps the shrewdest deal-maker I ever knew."

Mr. Mosbacher got into politics in the early 1960s, working as a fund-raiser for Republican candidates in southeast Texas and also managing former Vice President Richard M. Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign in Harris County, which includes Houston.

He was chief fund-raiser of Bush's 1988 presidential campaign, and after Bush's victory was appointed commerce secretary. He was the main official promoting NAFTA, which was signed into law during the Clinton administration.

In 1995, he supported efforts to eliminate the Commerce Department, saying it was no longer necessary and a "prime example of how the federal bureaucracy has gotten too big and too expensive."

In his political career, Mosbacher managed the national fund-raising operations of five GOP presidential campaigns, from Gerald Ford's in 1976 to McCain's. He was also involved in charitable projects, helping start the Odyssey Academy Charter School in Galveston, Texas, and supporting the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

Mr. Mosbacher and his first wife, Jane, had three daughters and son Robert Jr., who succeeded his father as head of Mosbacher Energy. Jane Mosbacher died in 1970. Mr. Mosbacher is also survived by his fourth wife, Michele McCutchen, a Houston writer, whom he married in 2000.