Word: feinberg
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...grabbing the satellite link from Afghanistan to visit the hospital website. "I'm sorry I couldn't be there," he told the image on the screen softly, over and over. It's one thing to calculate what we've lost; but then there's Victim Compensation Fund arbiter Ken Feinberg, advising a widower who wants to know whether he should fill out one claim form or two, since his wife was eight months pregnant. Most kids had their shock and confusion, but unlike Hilary Strauch, they didn't have a teacher pull them aside in the hall...
...Feinberg has a big personality, and he is hit or miss on first impression. He missed with Steve Campbell, a New York City police officer whose wife was killed in the World Trade Center collapse. "Your offer spits on my wife, spits on my son and spits on my father-in-law," Campbell told him during one of Feinberg's first Manhattan meetings with the families of Sept. 11 victims. The Campbell meeting was not rock bottom. "Staten Island," says Feinberg. "Staten Island was the worst. Very, very heated. Just awful. It's on CNN; I've got the tape...
...special master of the Federal Government's September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, Feinberg has to put a price on lost life. It may be a heartrending calculus, but it is, in the end, just calculus. Lawyers and actuaries worked out payment structures for catastrophic death decades ago, and--with a few modifications for cost of living, income and dependents--anyone can discover his or her approximate postmortem value with a 10- second glance at a statistical chart. Feinberg's challenge is to convince the 9/11 families that even though the country has valorized their husbands, sisters, sons and mothers because...
...some respects this case is one of the easiest I've ever done," says Feinberg, 56. "There's a relatively finite number of claimants: 3,000, maybe 3,200. There's no causation problem here, not really. These people were injured or killed by traumatic injury--instantaneous. It's the emotion. The emotional proximity between this program and the event makes this an unprecedented, difficult assignment because people, understandably, see no reason to be reasonable. Why should they be? What happened to them was not reasonable...
...Feinberg is not the first person you would pick to comfort the aggrieved. He has a jagged intellect that does not easily abide dissent; he is a leading candidate for the title of World's Most Competitive Human; he is completely unfamiliar with hushed, conciliatory tones (even in intimate moments, his thick Boston accent and habit of applying verbal italics to every third word make Feinberg sound as if he is in the midst of a perpetual rant). He is, not surprisingly, a very successful lawyer...