Victor Kamber

Victor Samuel Kamber (born May 7, 1943) is an American labor union activist and political consultant in the United States.

Kamber, an Assyrian-American, was born in 1943 in Chicago, Illinois, and attended public schools there.

Kamber subsequently attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

During his undergraduate schooling, Kamber joined the Phi Gamma Delta collegiate social fraternity.

In 1965, he along with Samuel E. Honneger and Joseph Mullins worked tirelessly to establish the Delta Colony of Phi Gamma Delta at the University of New Mexico which later became the Alpha Nu Chapter of Phi Gamma Delta in 1966.

He worked on the presidential campaign of United States Senator Barry Goldwater.

He earned his bachelor's degree in 1965.

In 1968, Kamber worked on the presidential campaigns of Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon.

Federal officials accused him of submitting a forged letter to his draft board in 1968.

The letter had ostensibly been signed by the president of PGCC and attested that Kamber was a faculty member there.

But PGCC president John Handley testified he had not seen the letter, had not authorized it and had not signed it.

Kamber was acquitted of charges that he did not teach at the community college, but convicted of forgery and sentenced to two years in prison.

After his conviction, Kamber worked as a lobbyist for the Building and Construction Trades Department (BCTD) of the AFL-CIO.

Under Robert Georgine, also a Republican, Kamber rose quickly to become the department's chief lobbyist.

Kamber's tenure at BCTD was marked by a significant drop in the political power of the AFL-CIO on Capitol Hill.

A Democrat, he worked for the AFL-CIO in the 1970s before forming The Kamber Group, a public relations firm, in 1980.

In 1970, Kamber was convicted of forgery while teaching at Prince George's Community College (PGCC).

At the time, Kamber was president of the national Young Republicans' leadership training school in Chicago.

Kamber later received a Master of Arts degree from the University of New Mexico, a J.D. from the Washington College of Law at the American University, and a master of laws from George Washington University (he received this last degree in 1972).

Kamber later was an administrative assistant to United States Representative Seymour Halpern (R-New York).

In 1977, Kamber and the BCTD persuaded the Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives to rush a common situs picketing bill onto the floor in the hopes of stampeding members of Congress to approve the legislation.

Instead, the tactic lead to a major defeat for labor.

After the defeat of the picketing bill, Kamber was tapped by AFL-CIO president George Meany to head a labor law reform task force.

Kamber's goal was to prioritize the AFL-CIO's labor law reform goals, strategize a plan for building support for the bill, and winning the legislation's enactment.

The effort never got off the ground, as political changes in Congress put the labor federation on the political defensive.

Kamber left the AFL-CIO in 1980 and founded his own public relations firm, The Kamber Group.

The Kamber Group quickly known as one of Washington's hottest public relations firms.

In time, it became one of the nation's largest independently owned consulting and public relations firms.

Almost immediately, Kamber took on some very high-profile clients.

He established a legal defense fund for Rep. Frank Thompson, Jr. (D-New Jersey), who was caught in the federal government's Abscam sting.

He also supported a movement to draft Sen. Ted Kennedy for the Democratic presidential nomination.

In 1982, Kamber founded the Progressive Political Action Committee (ProPAC).

ProPAC was a political action committee which sought to counteract political election spending by the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC) by supporting Democratic candidate for federal office.

Kamber served as ProPAC's treasurer.

He was counsel for the NFL Players Association during the 1982 National Football League strike.

ProPAC shut down its operations in 1983.

Kamber did not neglect his labor roots, however.

The Kamber Group worked for Democratic Party candidates and labor unions for 25 years, becoming one of the most well-known "boutique" P.R. firms in Washington, D.C. Kamber sold The Kamber Group in 2005 to Carmen Group Lobbying, where he remains president of its subsidiary, Carmen Group Communications.

Kamber is a frequent guest on national and local television and radio programs, newspapers and magazines, and is a published author.

He currently is an adjunct professor at The American University.