Word: kenly
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...Ken 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...
...Victim Compensation Fund did not have that luxury. "These people lost family members just weeks before in the most horrific circumstances," says Jeanne Marks, a psychologist and friend of Feinberg's who has met with several of the families. "They lost total control of their lives, and then Ken comes in and presents them with a plan that [Congress] has already drawn up. That just increased how powerless they felt, and they really vented...
...room--40 clerks and Judge Fuld--in hysterical tears," says U.S. District Judge Jack Weinstein. "That marked him in my mind. Years later, when the Agent Orange case was in front of me and I needed somebody to try and settle it, I reached back in my mind to Ken because he was not only brilliant, but he had a particular sense of humor that would make people want to work with...
...other judges and lawyers were asking him to step between warring parties, and in cases ranging from the faulty birth-control device Dalkon Shield to asbestos exposure, Feinberg got the job done, more or less inventing the field of mass tort mediation as he went along. "The secret to Ken's success," says a judge who has worked with Feinberg on a number of occasions, "is that he knows when to listen and when not to. He'll hear proposals from both sides, then ignore everybody and find a middle ground he thinks is fair. Then he devotes himself...
...spoke seemed like he was treating this as just another case. I wanted to scream, 'This is not just another case! This is Sept. 11!'" Months later Feinberg says, "I would have done some things differently," though he doesn't elaborate on exactly what. Dede Feinberg, Ken's wife of 27 years, believes her husband's demeanor was misunderstood. "He tries to give off this attitude of strength because he wants to be somebody you can believe in to pull this whole thing together," she says. "Unfortunately, people don't know him, and this gets perceived as cynical or flippant...