Robert Christian Eckhardt (July 16, 1913 – November 13, 2001) was a Democratic United States Representative representing the 8th District of Texas from 1967 to 1981.
Early life and family
Eckhardt was born in
Austin, Texas
Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of Texas, as well as the seat and largest city of Travis County, with portions extending into Hays and Williamson counties. Incorporated on December 27, 1839, it is the 11th-most-populous city ...
King Ranch
King Ranch is the largest ranch in the United States. At some it is larger than the state of Rhode Island and country of Luxembourg. It is mainly a cattle ranch, but also produced the Triple Crown winning racehorse Assault.
The ranch is lo ...
in South Texas. Eckhardt graduated from the
University of Texas at Austin
The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,07 ...
in 1935 and received his law degree from the University of Texas Law School in 1939. He served in the United States Army from 1942 to 1944. Eckhardt was appointed Southwestern Director of the
Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs
The Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, later known as the Office for Inter-American Affairs, was a United States agency promoting inter-American cooperation (Pan-Americanism) during the 1940s, especially in commercial and econ ...
, 1944–1945.
Political career
He moved to Houston, Texas and was elected a member of the
Texas House of Representatives
The Texas House of Representatives is the lower house of the bicameral Texas Legislature. It consists of 150 members who are elected from single-member districts for two-year terms. As of the 2010 United States census, each member represents abo ...
, serving from 1958 to 1966, where he compiled a fairly liberal voting record. One of Eckhardt's most enduring accomplishments in the Texas House was writing the Texas Open Beaches Act, passed in 1959.
In 1966, he was elected as a Democrat in Congress representing
Texas's 8th congressional district
Texas's 8th congressional district of the United States House of Representatives includes parts of Montgomery County, Walker County, Harris County, Polk County, and all of San Jacinto County. It includes much of the northern outlying areas ...
, which included most of northern
Houston
Houston (; ) is the most populous city in Texas, the most populous city in the Southern United States, the fourth-most populous city in the United States, and the sixth-most populous city in North America, with a population of 2,304,580 i ...
. Eckhardt was the sponsor of the War Powers Act and the Toxic Substances Act. He was reelected six times without serious difficulty. In 1980, however, he was narrowly defeated by
Jack Fields
Jack Milton Fields Jr. (born February 3, 1952) is a Texas businessman and a former Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from a Houston-based district.
Early life
Fields was born in Humble, a northern suburb of Hous ...
, losing by only 4,900 votes. He was also a co-founder of the ''
* Eckhardt, Bob. ''The Tides of Power: Conversations on the American Constitution between Bob Eckhardt, Member of Congress from Texas, and Charles L. Black Jr., Sterling Professor of Law, Yale University'' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976)