# Rawleigh Warner Jr. (1921–2013) Chairman and chief executive of [[Mobil Oil]] from September 1969 to February 1986, president for four years before that, and the executive who decided that an oil company should argue with the public rather than placate it. Born in Chicago to a Pure Oil executive, Princeton 1944, a Marine officer in the Pacific, he came to Socony Mobil in 1953 from Continental Oil and rose through the international side. What made him different from the other Standard Oil heirs' chief executives was temperament: he read, he argued, and he hired [[Herbert Schmertz]] — a Kennedy-campaign lawyer with no oil background — to run public affairs and gave him license. ## The program Warner's 1973 speech to Mobil employees named the environmental movement, and the press that carried its case, as the reason the company would now speak for itself. The instruments were the *New York Times* op-ed-page advertisements that ran from 1970 for thirty years — the origin of [[Advocacy Advertising]] — the Masterpiece Theatre sponsorship on PBS (1971–2004) that bought the company cultural standing while its ads fought the regulators, and a legal-political campaign to establish that a corporation has a First Amendment right to speak on public questions. Warner carried the argument himself, to the Economic Clubs of Chicago and Detroit and to the 1974 [[Edison Electric Institute]] convention: "We are in no sense eager to stifle those who oppose us. On the contrary. We just want to be heard, too." Four years later the Supreme Court agreed in *First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti* (1978), the case that made [[Corporate Free Speech]] doctrine and the ancestor of [[Citizens United]]. The vault's [[Corporate Free Speech]] page argues the sequence ran from Mobil's strategy documents to the constitutional holding, not the other way round. ## The company Under Warner Mobil diversified — the 1974 purchase of Marcor (Montgomery Ward and Container Corporation) was a $1.6 billion bet on retail that never paid — and expanded overseas while the OPEC decade made the majors both rich and hated. He retired in 1986 and served on the boards of AT&T, Chemical Bank and Time Inc. What survives him is the posture: the corporation as a political actor with a voice, a lawyer and a grievance, which every industry campaign since has copied. ## See Also - [[Mobil Oil]] · [[Herbert Schmertz]] · [[Advocacy Advertising]] · [[Corporate Free Speech]] · [[Citizens United]] - [[Edison Electric Institute]] · [[ExxonMobil]] · [[Standard Oil]]