One damn thing after ano.., p.17
One Damn Thing After Another, page 17
The format of the proceeding itself was new to me. It took place in a large amphitheater, with the parties and advisers seated around a huge table, roughly fifty by fifteen feet. At one end of the table, the commission’s case-team panel, responsible for investigating the proposed merger, sat on a dais. Around the walls were commission staff, observers, and glass-enclosed translators’ booths. The lawyer for WorldCom was a British barrister, who spoke first and, while seated, read his entire presentation in a monotone from a large binder. He droned on and on, reading every word. I had not been aware this was the way the panel expected arguments to be given, but I was not going to change what I had in mind.
I got up and talked animatedly as I walked around the table, using a laser pointer to illustrate exhibits on a large screen. I had steeped myself in the material and economic arguments, so I spoke without notes, often with some pungency. At one point, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, and, looking up, I saw the French translator inside her booth getting into the spirit of my presentation and waving her arms around. After I spoke, there was a break, and numerous European staff and panel members came up to tell me that they “had never seen anything like it,” loved it, and would like to see more of this kind of advocacy.
We won. The commission agreed with our “network effects” argument and ordered, as a condition of approving the merger, that WorldCom and MCI not only divest some of their Internet facilities but also that MCI sell off contracts for thousands of its business and residential Internet customers.
Meanwhile, as it turned out, the GTE–Bell Atlantic merger agreement was one of the longest pending deals on record. It took almost two years—until June 2000—to get it approved by the FCC and the DOJ, as well as numerous state regulators. Once we consummated the merger, the resulting combined company was rebranded Verizon. I was asked to stay on as general counsel of the new combined company. GTE’s leader, Chuck Lee, served as chairman, and his counterpart at Bell Atlantic, Ivan Seidenberg, became CEO of the new company. I started splitting my time between our new headquarters in New York City and our governmental affairs and regulatory offices in Washington.
On September 11, 2001, I was home in Virginia, preparing to leave for downtown when the planes struck the World Trade Center towers. Watching the initial news coverage, I realized it was a terrorist attack. I left home for the DC office and was on the George Washington Memorial Parkway, which runs along the Virginia side of the Potomac, when the radio reported that other planes were at large and further attacks were possible. I had a view of the Pentagon and suddenly saw a huge plume of billowing smoke. Little did I know at the time that one of our friends was on the plane that hit the Pentagon: Barbara Olson, the wife of the Solicitor General, Ted Olson. Within days, I drove up to New York. We could clearly see from our office windows the smoke still rising over Lower Manhattan.
Over the next couple of days, I heard a number of officials refer to the World Trade Center as a “crime scene.” I became concerned that we would treat Al Qaeda’s attacks as a matter to be handled through the criminal justice system rather than as a national security matter. On September 13 I called the deputy counsel to President George W. Bush, Tim Flanagan, who had served as head of the Office of Legal Counsel during the last few months of my tenure as Attorney General. I made the case to Tim that these terrorist attacks were acts of armed foreign aggression in violation of the laws of war. As such, if there was to be any trial, those proceedings should be before military commissions, not our domestic civilian courts. I reminded him of some of the legal research we had done at OLC almost a decade earlier relating to the Pan Am 103 bombing. It turned out that Vice President Dick Cheney had the same view, and President Bush issued an executive order establishing military tribunals.
Over the next few years, I was asked to testify before various congressional committees in support of the Bush administration’s handling of the war on terror. I explained the difference under our Constitution between actions taken to enforce our domestic laws against errant individuals and actions taken to defend the country from foreign adversaries who attack the country. Unfortunately, a series of ill-considered Supreme Court cases have utterly confused these two distinct spheres and have thus succeeded in tying the country’s antiterrorism efforts in knots. That the five coconspirators charged with planning the 9/11 attacks have yet to face justice twenty years after the fact is a national disgrace.
In 2003 Chuck Lee took a well-earned bow and stepped down as chairman at Verizon. Ivan Seidenberg assumed both the role of chairman and CEO. Ivan—always referred to as just “Ivan” at all levels of the company—was a phenomenal leader. Growing up in the Bronx, he first worked for New York Bell as a cable splicer. After serving in combat in Vietnam, Ivan returned to the phone company and worked his way through college and business school at night, eventually becoming CEO of NYNEX. Seidenberg was a master strategist and, through a series of deft deals—mergers with Bell Atlantic and then GTE, and multiple wireless deals—he built up Verizon into one of the two main telecom companies in the United States. After Chuck left, Ivan grew the business more by acquiring MCI in 2005 and the wireless company Alltel in 2008. Although Verizon was a huge and complex corporation, Ivan had mastery over all aspects of the business and ran it with a sure hand. I learned a lot about management and leadership from him.
My nearly fifteen years in the telecom business coincided with the most exciting era in the industry. The legal and regulatory issues I got to handle were, in Judge Robert Bork’s phrase, “an intellectual feast.” My daily fare involved novel regulatory issues, hard-fought legal battles in the antitrust and intellectual property arenas, and major transactions. One of the ironies is that, when I started in 1994, the conventional wisdom among most analysts was that the long-distance companies—AT&T and MCI/WorldCom—would own the future and that the stodgy local phone companies such as the Baby Bells and GTE would end up as roadkill. Exactly the opposite happened. The local companies assembled into two clusters: NYNEX, Bell Atlantic, and GTE, on the one hand, and SBC, PacTel, Ameritech, and Bell South, on the other. Then each entity acquired a long-distance company: the former entity, Verizon, bought MCI; and the latter entity, SBC, purchased AT&T (and decided to use the AT&T name).
As much as I enjoyed working with Ivan Seidenberg, I decided to retire from Verizon at the end of 2008. There were three reasons for my decision. First, by my standards, I had already made ample money—enough for Chris and me to have a decent retirement. Second, I felt I had been running full tilt for thirty-five years in a succession of stressful positions without respite, and, having spent almost fifteen years in essentially the same general counsel job, I was ready for a change of pace. The commute was becoming tiresome. Finally, I wanted to reduce my workload and have more control over my schedule. This last feeling became especially strong after my parents died within a few years of each other, and I spent a lot of time in 2005–06 alone in their home in northwestern Connecticut, going through their possessions and settling their affairs. What affected me the most as I sat in the empty house—eerily silent except for the echoes of the ticking clock—was coming across their many unfinished projects all in a state of suspended animation. It hit me hard, reminding me starkly of the shortness of life.
Throughout our marriage, an ongoing joke between Chris and me was my succession of pledges to her each time I took on a new, challenging job. I would promise that, if she would let me get through just this next one, we would finally slow down and take time for ourselves. This started while I was working and going to night law school. I promised her, “Just wait till I get law school under my belt.” But after that, it was, “Just wait for me to finish this clerkship.” And then, “Just wait for me to make partner at the law firm.” When President George H. W. Bush came to the Department of Justice in 1991 for my swearing-in as Attorney General, I gave remarks in which I went through the whole litany, and ended with, “So Chris, I promise: once I get this Attorney Generalship under my belt, we will take time to smell the flowers.” Everyone laughed. But I did not keep my word. Instead, I had accepted a demanding corporate job that had me commuting every week for nearly fifteen years to the New York area, while she bore the main burden of raising our three daughters. It was time for me to come through.
And so I retired from Verizon at the beginning of 2009. I could not have been happier how this turned out. Over the next ten years, I took on a limited number of legal matters either as “of counsel” (a senior adviser, but not a partner) to the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis or as a solo consultant. These matters for corporate clients were intellectually stimulating but not all-consuming. In addition to this legal work, I was invited to join a number of boards of directors, including the boards of two large public companies, Dominion Energy, headquartered in Richmond, and Time Warner in New York. I was fortunate to serve on these boards because it gave me the opportunity to work very closely with two superb chief executives: Tom Farrell at Dominion and Jeff Bewkes at Time Warner. Both were brilliant strategists who skillfully guided their companies through sectors undergoing rapid change: the energy and media content sectors.
As I had hoped, my retiring from Verizon gave Chris and me the chance to spend much more relaxing time together. Over the next three years, we traveled more than we ever had before—sometimes just the two of us, sometimes with the children, and other times with longtime family friends. While we especially enjoyed Italy and France, we still managed to spend time in our favorite places: Scotland, England, and Ireland. Our daughters Mary and Patricia were married by this time, and in 2010 grandchildren started arriving.
With more leisure time, I was also able to indulge my old event-planning habits from my days as social chairman at my fraternity. Starting in 2009, we held the first Barr Family Annual Ceilidh. The Gaelic word ceilidh in Scottish (or ceili in Irish), pronounced “kay-lee,” means a social get-together with traditional music and dancing. I started holding these events for more than 120 guests in hotel ballrooms. It was essentially like having a large wedding reception every year. In addition to food and drink, we’d have bagpiping, of course, and I’d also book a traditional Celtic dance band and a “caller” to guide people through traditional Irish and Scottish dances—which are analogous to American square dancing. In the Baltimore area, we have some of the best traditional musicians in the world, and I would always have them play for the dancing. The pipers from my old band would provide the piping music. I then started getting more ambitious, expanding the events to feature—in addition to the local musicians—major artists from Scotland or Ireland, who I would book while they were on tour in the United States.
I asked my daughters to invite half the guests. This large group of younger people helped keep the dancing energetic. The first big ceilidh we held was at the old Washington Club on Dupont Circle. Although the turnout was huge, I worried that no one would participate in the traditional dancing. But when the caller announced the first dance, everyone got up to dance. The events have been that way ever since. Quite a few prominent Washingtonians came to enjoy these parties, and I soon started getting many requests for invitations.
In January 2012 our world was turned upside down. Our daughter Meg, then twenty-seven, was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Meg had just completed a judicial clerkship and was two weeks into her new job as an assistant US attorney in the District of Columbia. I will always be grateful to the US attorney there, Ron Machin, and his management team for their kindness and willingness to accommodate Meg while she was ill. She was assigned to appellate work so that she could work on briefs while being treated.
Ordinarily, Hodgkin’s is an eminently curable form of cancer, and, based on her initial response to chemotherapy, which was administered by a DC oncologist, it was thought her chances of being cured were close to 95 percent. Unfortunately, the disease proved to be refractory and surged back in July 2012 during her chemotherapy treatments. This dropped Meg’s odds appreciably. We had already visited a wonderful oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and established a relationship with her just in case Meg’s case became complicated. As Meg, Chris, and I sat crushed and distraught after getting the bad news, I e-mailed the Dana-Farber oncologist. She got back to us immediately even though she was on vacation, and, within days, we were heading up to Boston. I withdrew from a legal project I was working on, and Chris and I got an apartment in Boston so we could stay with Meg during her treatment. We were there for six months.
Once in Boston, Meg started a second line of chemo to prepare her for a stem cell transplant. But in another distressing setback, her disease resisted this particular drug. By this time, Meg, like me, had become a voracious consumer of medical studies and literature. We both saw charts showing that her chances for successful treatment at this stage had dropped to 17 percent. Even though Meg’s oncologist told us to ignore these numbers, it was hard not to get down. The oncologist remained upbeat, however, and moved immediately to plan B: using radiation to drive down the disease, followed by high-dose chemo and the stem cell transplant. Meg’s transplant was completed in late November, but the hospital wanted us to stay in the area for an additional ninety days, if possible, which we did. A PET scan to see if the disease was still detectable would not be done for six months.
We were fortunate to have a lot of support while in Boston. One of Meg’s college friends from the University of Notre Dame was living there, and she visited Meg regularly, and many other high school and college friends were constantly rotating through as well. My old friend Bob Kimmitt had introduced me to a priest friend of his, Monsignor John McLaughlin, then living in Boston, who had been the head of vocations for the Catholic military chaplains. He became very close to us, and we relied heavily on his spiritual support. To my surprise, we adored the social worker assigned to us at Dana-Farber. When first offered her services, I said we did not really need a social worker, but she quickly became indispensable and made life much easier for us. While I found Dana-Farber extremely patient-friendly, the social worker helped things go more smoothly and reduced the stress.
After Meg’s transplant, we were all emotionally drained and still had more anxious times ahead. With Christmas approaching, I decided to try to rent a place outside the noisy city, possibly by the shore. I called a real estate agent at random. It turned out she had worked in the Reagan White House and knew who I was. Once she learned the circumstances, she said she had an idea and would get back to me. She soon called back with the news that a former telecom executive had a large home on the shore in Scituate, Massachusetts, near Boston, which was empty for several months, and he would be delighted to let us use his house, paying just the utilities. This proved a blessing. Chris, Meg, and I spent three months cocooned in this beautiful home, taking walks together on the beach and enjoying the lovely setting. As my daughter said, it was the worst of times and the best of times.
At the time we left the Boston area at the end of February 2013, a new monoclonal antibody was showing promise as a post-transplant “consolidation” treatment, designed to knock out any lingering cancer cells. The FDA had not approved it for this use yet, although it had been approved for other uses. Meg wanted to try it. One of the great things about the American health care system is that doctors have the freedom to make off-label use of drugs if they believe it would benefit their patient. I talked to a physician at the US Food and Drug Administration who said that, if he were in my shoes, he would get the monoclonal antibody treatment for his child. Dana-Farber could not administer it, but a proponent of the treatment at Columbia University Medical Center was willing to treat Meg with it. She completed this course of immunotherapy at the end of 2013. Shortly afterward, the antibody was approved by the FDA for post-transplant consolidation in cases of Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
During the three years following the transplant, we would travel up to Dana-Farber every six months for Meg to undergo a PET scan. As everyone touched by cancer knows, the anxiety around these regular imaging procedures is profound. After three years, the scans were reduced to once a year. Our daughter’s last scan was at the end of 2017 and continued to show no evidence of disease.
We took nothing for granted, but as time passed, we all started to breathe a little easier. Meg continued in the US attorney’s office, now able to work on trials. Meanwhile, in 2016 I learned I had prostate cancer, and my surgery for that was successful. Once that was out of the way, I took on a major matter for a corporate client and returned to Kirkland & Ellis as “of counsel” to get the support I needed to handle the matter.
Part IV
Trump Years
Introduction
I had long planned on supporting Jeb Bush for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.
We had become friends during his father’s administration many years earlier, and I campaigned for him when he ran for governor in Florida. He was down-to-earth, thoughtful, and soundly conservative, with an effective record as governor. I knew he stood for a strong national defense and was tough on crime. He understood how America’s newly discovered energy abundance could allow us to become once again the world’s mecca for clean and efficient manufacturing. He was also passionate about the issue I considered paramount if we are going to put our country back on the road to sanity—school choice—giving parents more control over their children’s education and providing more diverse and rich educational options. I made substantial contributions to his campaign and was pulling hard for him.
