Liz Robbins Dies at 76; Broke Glass Ceiling as a Washington Lobbyist

Her father, Manuel Robbins, was a lawyer who labored for quite a lot of metropolis companies, together with the Manhattan district legal professional’s workplace below Thomas E. Dewey, and her mom, Eleanor (Landau) Robbins, labored in communications for the American Pink Cross.

Liz grew up in Scarsdale, N.Y., studied philosophy at Wheaton School, outdoors of Boston, and graduated in 1967.

Alongside together with her husband, she is survived by her daughter, Robin Johnson Tokley, and a grandson.

Ms. Robbins labored in promoting in New York and spent a stint in Washington, working for a number of congressional committees. She returned to New York to hitch a brand new metropolis program centered on childhood growth.

She didn’t intend to return to Washington. However she quickly realized that the financially constrained metropolis may do much more by accessing federal funds; it simply needed to ask. And she or he knew the best approach to ask.

“They went broke and despatched me again to Washington to do some lobbying,” Ms. Robbins instructed the Washington newspaper Roll Name in 2005. “And so lots of broke locations began calling me up.”

By 1981 she was lobbying for San Francisco, Berkeley and the state of Michigan, in addition to New York Metropolis. Although she was a Democrat, she labored each events and developed relationships with high Republican senators. Throughout powerful negotiations over a toddler care invoice with Bob Packwood of Oregon, he challenged her to a sport of gin rummy. She gained $12, and his vote.

“She was like a snapping turtle; she wasn’t going to let go,” George Miller, a former Democratic consultant from California, mentioned in an interview. “One factor you discovered about Lizzie, she was not going away.”