Peter Dyckman Campbell (born February 28, 1934) is a fictional character on AMC's television series Mad Men.

Kartheiser has won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series twice along with the cast of Mad Men.

His mother, Dorothy "Dot" Campbell (née Dyckman) (Channing Chase), descended from an old Dutch family that had arrived in New Amsterdam and at one point "owned pretty much everything north of 125th Street".

In Season 2, after his father dies on American Airlines Flight 1 over Jamaica Bay, Pete is unable to cry.

Displaying a mutual resentment of their mother, Bud and Pete reminisce over Alfred Hitchcock's film Rope, loosely based on the story of Leopold and Loeb.

In Season 6, when Pete's mother is forced to live with him in his apartment, he takes pleasure in exploiting her developing Alzheimer's disease to control her.

Pete is said to have attended The Buckley School, Deerfield Academy, and Dartmouth College, and it is implied that he was in the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity at the latter.

One of these occurrences nearly gets him fired, but Bert Cooper forestalls that because, regardless of Pete's skills or lack thereof, his family connections are important for bringing in new business for the firm.

A lower middle class Catholic from Brooklyn, Peggy tells Pete that she has just graduated from Miss Deaver's Secretarial School.

[13] Early in Season 2, Peter meets Susie (Sarah Wright) after a casting call for Playtex, and they talk in the elevator.

[14] During the Season 2 finale, set during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Pete – taking stock of his life now that he fears nuclear war may well be imminent – tells Peggy he thinks she is "perfect", and then confesses that he is in love with her and wishes he had married her.

It is the same rifle he bought on store credit in Season 1, when he returned a ceramic chip-and-dip he and Trudy received as a wedding gift.

[10] At the start of Season 3, which takes place about six months later, Pete and Trudy seem much closer: he immediately calls her when he gets a promotion, and there is no mention of their child.

They seem like a very happy couple dancing the Charleston at Roger Sterling's (John Slattery) garden party, and Harry Crane's (Rich Sommer) wife is jealous of them.

When Trudy goes out of town weeks later, though, Pete feels lonely and coerces his neighbor's young German au pair Gudrun (Nina Rausch) into sleeping with him; actor Vincent Kartheiser said that the script said that the "au pair" was supposed to kiss his character back, but the actress portraying her didn't do it, which led some critics to believe Pete raped her.

However, in Seasons 4 and 5, Pete seemed to lose his dominance in the relationship, such as when Trudy "forbids" him to give their money to Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.

By the start of Season 5, Pete and Trudy have moved with their baby daughter to a new home in Cos Cob, a village in the affluent commuter city of Greenwich, Connecticut, which sits on the New Haven Line.

By July 1966, he has enrolled in a driver education course in order to gain a license, where he flirts with a high school student in his class.

Living in Greenwich has a negative effect on the Manhattan-raised Pete, who begins to feel restless in his marriage, home life, and career.

He begins an affair with Beth Dawes (Alexis Bledel), the unhappy wife of a fellow commuter, which ends after she has a round of electroshock therapy to cure her undiagnosed depression and, as a result, forgets who he is.

Pete reacts by pushing the bottle of beer he was drinking into a cake Trudy had baked and walks out the house without further comment.