WASHINGTON — Thomas Hale Boggs Jr., who was the son of two prominent members of Congress and yet, as a pioneer of the capital’s lobbying and fund-raising industry, was the one who came to be called “King of the Hill,” died on Monday at his home in Chevy Chase, Md. He would have been 74 on Thursday.
His sister, the broadcast journalist Cokie Roberts, said he had apparently had a heart attack.
After one unsuccessful campaign for Congress in 1970, for a seat from Maryland rather than Louisiana, his family’s stronghold, Mr. Boggs chose to follow what the Boggses called the family business, politics, in a more lucrative way. Losing the race, he later told an interviewer, was “the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Starting a small company with a partner, Jim Patton, Mr. Boggs used his familiarity with both the levers of power and the intricacies of policy to build the firm Patton Boggs into a giant that became synonymous with Washington lobbying and represented some of the nation’s largest corporations and trade associations.
Mr. Boggs had a notable success as a behind-the-scenes architect of the federal government’s 1979 bailout of Chrysler, his client. He was well known for battling on behalf of trial lawyers to block changes to tort law that threatened to make it harder for people to sue for damages, and for lobbying for free trade, a priority of his father’s, in Congress. Like some of its competitors in the lobbying industry, Patton Boggs went through tough times in recent years. It merged this year with the international law firm Squire Sanders to become Squire Patton Boggs.
Despite the often-criticized nature of his work, Mr. Boggs — known as Tommy to presidents, friends and reporters, although he preferred Tom — received generally friendly treatment in the news media. In 1999, “60 Minutes” broadcast a segment, titled “The Lobbyist,” that called him “the fattest of the fat cats” — a sobriquet Ms. Roberts had threatened to preserve in needlepoint. The year before, Carl Bernstein profiled him in Vanity Fair magazine under the title “King of the Hill.”
Mr. Boggs, reflecting his political heritage, was an active Democrat and raised large sums for party candidates. But he operated mainly before partisanship in Congress turned toxic, in a time when Democrats and Republicans were amiable adversaries, working and socializing together.
A few Republican friends, like Haley Barbour, a fellow lobbyist and former Mississippi governor, received Mr. Boggs’s contributions as well. And Ms. Roberts said her brother would never aid anyone who tried to unseat a longtime Republican senator, Charles M. “Mac” Mathias Jr., because Mr. Mathias had been so kind to the Boggs family after their father died.
In 1972, as the younger Mr. Boggs was establishing his firm, his father was the House majority leader and expected to rise to speaker. But weeks before the November elections, the elder Mr. Boggs was campaigning in Alaska for a local congressman, Nick Begich, when their plane disappeared. (Mr. Begich’s son Mark is now a senator from Alaska.)
“Tommy often talked about how hard that was, because he had sort of just gotten to know him as a friend,” Ms. Roberts said.
Months after his father’s plane was lost, his mother, Lindy Boggs, was elected to finish her husband’s term and was then re-elected repeatedly, rising to the senior ranks of the House. She retired in 1991, served from 1997 to 2001 as President Bill Clinton’s ambassador to the Vatican and died last year at 97.
Mr. Boggs was born in New Orleans on Sept. 18, 1940, the second of four children and the only surviving son of Thomas Hale Boggs Sr. and the former Marie Corinne Morrison Claiborne (Lindy was a nickname). Mr. Boggs Jr., who was born the year that the senior Mr. Boggs was first elected to Congress, bore a rough resemblance to his craggily handsome father.
Although the family was closely identified with New Orleans, Mr. Boggs was raised in the Washington area, in a house where his parents hosted Democrats with names like Kennedy, Humphrey and Rayburn.
Mr. Boggs attended local Roman Catholic schools, from a parish elementary school in Bethesda, Md., through Georgetown Prep, Georgetown University and finally Georgetown Law School. In high school, he once had a job operating a Capitol elevator for lawmakers.
His older sister, Barbara Boggs Sigmund, who was mayor of Princeton, N.J., died in 1990. Mr. Boggs is survived by his wife of more than 50 years, Barbara Boggs; three children, T. Hale Boggs III, Elizabeth Boggs Davidsen and Douglas Boggs; and eight grandchildren.
“He was an incredibly generous person,” Ms. Roberts said. “People come up to me all the time and say, ‘Your brother got me through a really hard patch.’ ” But, she added, “The reason he was so successful was because he worked incredibly hard. He knew every detail of every piece of legislation that he worked on and every player, and not just the out-front players.”
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