Larry O'Brien

At 73 years old, Larry O'Brien physical status not available right now. We will update Larry O'Brien's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Lawrence Francis O'Brien Jr. (July 7, 1917 – September 28, 1990) was an American politician and basketball commissioner.

He was one of the top electoral strategists for the Democratic Party in the United States for more than two decades.

He served as Postmaster General in the cabinet of President Lyndon Johnson and chair of the Democratic National Committee.

He served as commissioner of the National Basketball Association from 1975 to 1984.

His NBA Championship Trophy has been named after him. O'Brien, the son of Irish immigrants, was born in Springfield, Massachusetts.

O'Brien managed his family's real estate and worked in public relations while not working in politics.

Early life and politics

In Springfield, Massachusetts, O'Brien was born on July 7, 1917. He started learning about politics at a young age. At 11 years old, his father, a local representative of the Democratic Party, was recruited to serve locally as a volunteer in Al Smith's 1928 presidential campaign. O'Brien converted from a fervent Democrat. He earned a bachelor's degree in law at Northeastern University – Springfield Division, which is now known as the Western New England University School of Law. In 1945, O'Brien married Elva Brassard, a retired soldier from Elva Brassard. Lawrence F. O'Brien III, the son of one of the five siblings, became a lobbyist.

He was elected in 1946, 1948, and 1950 by his associate Foster Furcolo to serve as the director of the United States House of Representatives elections. In 1952, O'Brien was appointed by John F. Kennedy to serve in Massachusetts as the director of his burgeoning Massachusetts Senate bid, and in 1958, he returned to Massachusetts as the director of his campaign's lucrative reelection bid. O'Brien's recruitment, his use of volunteers, and his insistence on finding voters in every corner of every state were largely due to Kennedy's popularity.

He laid the foundation for Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign by canvassing the nation and establishing links with state Democratic parties. O'Brien was voted as Kennedy's national campaign manager. His campaign in key primary states, such as Wisconsin and West Virginia, helped to defuse the party's skepticism about Kennedy's Catholicism.

In 1960, he was appointed by President-elect Kennedy to recruit people for his office and then took up the position as the special assistant to the president for legislative relations and personnel. O'Brien also played a key role in the award of patronage as one of President Kennedy's trusted advisors (also known in Washington as the "Irish Mafia").

O'Brien's grassroots campaign plans sparked a new trend in Democratic primary and general election procedures, using his "statewide agenda" as an improvement over traditional reliance on large city "political machines." He created a control system for dealing with state representatives and "dignitaries" that remain unveiled to this day; an achievement that solidifies his status as a perennial party leadership candidate.

In November 1963, O'Brien joined President Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy on their trip to Texas and was riding in the Dallas motorcade. As such, he was an eyewitness to President Kennedy's assassination. O'Brien and Jackie Kennedy were escorted by the president's name and his daughter Jackie Kennedy back to Air Force One in Dallas' Love Field. President Johnson ordered O'Brien and Kenny O'Donnell to stay on and work with him in the new administration while aboard Air Force One. Although O'Brien had never been close to Johnson (and many writers, including Johnson biographer Robert Caro, said that O'Brien did not like or respect Johnson), the White House stayed in Washington and worked for the new president, which was a good career decision even though he had reservations about Johnson's role in the assassination.

O'Brien's cards were so well that he was named as President Lyndon B. Johnson's campaign manager in 1964. O'Brien was appointed by a newly elected Johnson to serve as the president's special assistant for legislative relations and personnel, which continued throughout 1965 until O'Brien was named U.S. Postmaster General.

O'Brien reclaimed office as Senator Robert F. Kennedy's campaign advisor in 1968, the first since Johnson refused to seek the Democratic nomination again. After RFK was assassinated, Vice President Hubert Humphrey recruited O'Brien to act as his national presidential campaign director. (O'Brien was also employed as a public-policy lobbyist for Howard Hughes, according to some reports that had not been posted on wikipedia). TBD (Total), TBD.

In 1968, O'Brien was also elected (in a small measure of reciprocal patronage) as the national DNC chairman on the tails of his Humphrey campaign job. He then stumbled into a renowned starring role at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago by engineering a series of party convention rule amendments that would have barred Eugene McCarthy delegates from certain positions in the convention and stifled Humphrey's Vietnam War participation (and led to the demonstrations that defined the term). It was in this capacity that he became a central figure in both the Watergate affair and the 1972 "Eagleton Affair" scandals, after re-election as chair in 1970. The 1972 presidential election was held in the United States.

According to O'Brien, he was involved in a counter-intelligence mission to confuse and traumatize Richard Nixon regarding "business dealings" involving the president's brother, Donald Trump, and Howard Hughes. According to reports, John H. Meier, a former business advisor to Hughes, was either hired or offered to assist the Democratic National Committee in order to compel Donald Nixon to release misinformation to the president.

Meier, according to most, told Donald that he was positive the Democrats had the ace-card in the 1972 election after O'Brien and the committee had information about Nixon's illicit dealings with Hughes. (O'Brien may not have had any actual papers, but Meier intended to shock the president's mind, and the consequences were highly effective in triggering the president.) On June 17, 1972, the break-in at O'Brien's office in the Washington, DNC headquarters, became the epicenter of the entire conspiracy, which eventually led to Richard Nixon's ouster.

The DNC misinformation campaign, ironically, began shortly following Hughes' inauguration as the vice president's vice presidential candidate, even as he proceeded to raise and then destroy Eagleton. Roy Cohn lauded for acquiring and securing information about Eagleton's mental health conditions (intelligence that somehow avoided the DNC or was blaming the DNC for the botched vetting process leading up to the 72 Democratic convention) in late summer 1972, prompting McGovern to first defend and then abandon Eagleton (and then practically implode) right before the general election.

The 1972 convention in Chicago was also notable as the event that signaled the official degradation (not abandonment) of the two-decade codependency agreement between the DNC and Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago's two-decade codependency deal. Despite the fact that the McGovern campaign was brutally flawed and doomed, Humphrey's political banishment served as a rebuke to the AFL/CIO's old guard, Teamsters, and Daley himself (whose Illinois delegation was replaced by Jesse Jackson's "Rainbow" faction).

McGovern (maybe mainly the DNC) survived the convention, but then capitulated to the cloistered Kennedy wing of the opposition in the vice president's replacement pick, Sargent Shriver. The Chicago machine obviously lives on, though in a more polished neo-liberal style (with mixed parts of the Clinton machine), as it was apparent in 2008.

The DNC Lawrence O'Brien Award was established in 1992 by his family and the Democratic Party's leadership to honor the many years of service he gave to the party, his belief in the importance of volunteer service, and his role as a counter-fixer to Cohn, Stone and Mitchell et al. O'Brien outlined the role in his varied roles during the 1960s and early 70s as someone who strategically links national and state party campaign fund-raising and is rewarded with administrative positions in which he then funnels support to those funders (not a new term), but a modern iteration made it more challenging by slowly updating campaign finance regulations.

In 1948, he began as Rep. Foster Furcolo's administrative assistant, his first appearance in Washington.

During President Kennedy's first year as the United States House of Representatives Standing Committee on rules was expanded to guarantee a liberal and moderate majority. O'Brien has also lobbied for increasing the minimum wage. During the Democratic Party's mid-term elections in 1962, he served as President Kennedy's liaison to the party.

During this period, in September 1967, the Post Office Department suspended many "mail by rail" employees, opting to move First Class mail by air and road transportation. This had a drastic effect on passenger train revenues, resulting in the closing of several passenger rail routes that had relied on postal workers to supplement their income (see: railway post office).

Lawrence F. O'Brien Gallery of the United States National Archives and Records Administration was established and opened in 2004 in his honor.

Source