Albert
Thomas was born in Nacogdoches, Texas, on 12th April, 1898. During
the First World War he served as a second lieutenant
in the United States Army.
Thomas
graduated from the Rice Institute, Houston, Texas, in 1920. He then
went on to study law at the University of Texas in Austin and in 1927
became district attorney for the southern district of Texas (1927-1930).
A
member
of the Democratic Party, Thomas was
elected to the House of Representatives in 1936 and eventually became
chairman of the House
Defense Appropriations Committee.
Thomas
became a member of what became known as the Suite
8F Group. The name comes from the room in the Lamar Hotel in Houston
where they held their meetings. Members of the group included Lyndon
B. Johnson,
George Brown and Herman
Brown (Brown & Root), Jesse H. Jones
(multimillionaire investor in a large number of organizations and
chairman of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation), Gus
Wortham (American General Insurance Company), Robert
Kerr (Kerr-McGee Oil Industries), James
Slither Abercrombie (Cameron Iron Works), William
Hobby (Governor of Texas), Richard Russell
(chairman of the Committee of Manufactures, Committee on Armed Forces
and Committee of Appropriations) and John
Connally (Governor of Texas). Alvin Wirtz
and Edward Clark, were also members of
the Suite 8F Group.
Albert Thomas (far left) with Lyndon Johnson on the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Thomas also served on the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy and was instrumental
in securing the location of the United States National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) and the Lyndon B. Johnson Space
Center in Houston in 1961. This involved obtaining 1,000 acres of
land that had originally been owned by the Humble Oil Company to Rice
University. Thomas persuaded George Brown,
a trustee of Rice University, to donate the land to NASA.
Albert
Thomas died in Washington on 3rd January,
1966 and was buried in the Veterans' Administration Cemetery, Houston,
Texas.
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