The following year, he also served as press secretary to Rep. Walter H. Judd of Minnesota, then the ranking Republican on the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
He remained in this position with Quaker Oats until 1969 when he was recruited by the Nixon administration as an assistant to the United States Secretary of Commerce to begin a new federal program involving aid to minority business enterprises.
As a foreign service officer, he managed the agency's worldwide communications and advertising program until The Quaker Oats Company requested he return — which he did in 1971 — after which he became its vice president of government relations.
[citation needed] He became the first corporate lobbyist to be an appointed Fellow of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, serving in its Institute of Politics, where he taught in addition to continuing his role — on leave — at Quaker.
[citation needed] Long active in Chicago civic, religious and political life, Roeser was a founder of Project LEAP (Legal Elections in All Precincts), the city's anti-vote-fraud organization, was president of the City Club of Chicago for seventeen years and its chairman; was chairman, founder of the Republican Assembly of Illinois, an organization of grassroots conservative Republicans, and a co-founder of Catholic Citizens of Illinois.
Roeser authored the book Father Mac: The Life and Times of Ignatius D. McDermott, co-founder of Chicago's famed Haymarket Center.
[6][7] Fellow talk-show host Dan Proft told the Arlington Heights Daily Herald that Roeser had died of congestive heart failure.
[8] Thomas F. Roeser was posthumously inducted into the William Howard Taft High School Alumni Association Hall of Fame in Chicago, Illinois in March 2013.