Robert "Skipp" Orr (1953 – August 12, 2021) was the

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from 2002 to 2007, and the one-time

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's European Affairs Division. At Motorola he also served as Vice President and Director of Government Relations, and also Government Relations Director for Nippon Motorola in

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. In November 2006, Boeing announced that Orr was retiring as President effective March 2007. Orr graduated from

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in 1976 with a

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. He subsequently earned a

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in government from

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, and his

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political science Political science is the scientific study of politics. It is a social science dealing with systems of governance and Power (social and political), power, and the analysis of political activities, political philosophy, political thought, polit ...

from

Tokyo University The University of Tokyo (, abbreviated as in Japanese and UTokyo in English) is a public research university in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Founded in 1877 as the nation's first modern university by the merger of several pre-westernisation era ins ...

. In addition to the corporate world, he spent many years in academia and the United States Government. From 1985 to 1993, he was a professor of Political Science at Temple University Japan. He also ran the Kyoto Center for Japanese Studies and the Stanford Center for Technology and Innovation at the Stanford Japan Center in Kyoto for two years. His book, The Emergence of Japan’s Foreign Aid Power (Columbia University Press) won the 1991 Ohira Prize for best book on the Asia Pacific. Orr’s career began in 1976 when he served for two years as Legislative Assistant to Congressman Paul G. Rogers (D-FL), a 12 term member of the

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. Between 1978 and 1981 he served on the House Foreign Affairs Asia Subcommittee staff seconded from the Select Committee on Narcotics. In 1981, he was appointed Special Assistant to the Assistant Administrator of Asia in the

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in the Department of State. He lived in Japan for over 16 years. He was fluent in

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and German and had intermediate command of French. Orr was chairman of the Panasonic Foundation in the U.S. and was a major fundraiser for the Obama 2008 presidential campaign. In 2010, he was appointed by President Obama to serve as executive director of the Manila-based

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, with the rank of ambassador. Orr died due to heart failure on August 12, 2021, at the age of 68 in Kamakura, Japan.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Orr, Robert 1953 births 2021 deaths Date of birth missing Boeing people Florida Atlantic University alumni Georgetown University alumni United States special envoys 20th-century American businesspeople 21st-century American businesspeople