171
Oral History of Philip Lacovara, Esq.
This interview is being conducted on behalf of the Oral History Project of The Historical
Society of the District of Columbia Circuit. The interviewer is Carrie Johnson, and the
interviewee is Philip Lacovara. The interview took place via Zoom on Wednesday, September 4,
2024. This is the sixth interview.
MS. JOHNSON: Thanks so much for making time for me today.
MR. LACOVARA: Glad to be with you again.
MS. JOHNSON: When we last left off, you had, after a period of deliberation and some
wining and dining, maybe without the wine, other firms, you had decided
to return to the firm Hughes, Hubbard & Reed. You were talking a little
bit about the generous offer they made, including a partnership. I wonder
what it felt like to be back in private practice after the really high-pressure
public service you had done immediately prior.
MR. LACOVARA: It was a bit of a relief getting back into something that was more of an
orthodox legal pathway. It did, however, carry with it some tensions of its
own because part of the assignment was that I was to build the
Washington office of the firm as a free-standing aspect of the Hughes,
Hubbard legal regime. They had formed an association with two
established Washington lawyers, two people of some note to anybody who
has been around the Washington legal and political circles. One man,
Harry McPherson. Harry worked for Lyndon Johnson. He was one of his
key advisors and one of the most erudite cultured men I ever knew. The
other was a man named Berl Bernhard, who was also a political operative.
A pretty good lawyer who, among other things, wound up during the
course of my association with him owning the short-lived Washington172
Federals football team, which was a spring football team. I think it was
then the USFL, United States Football League, and Berl acquired the
franchise for that team, which played at RFK Stadium in the spring.
In any event, they were both partners at Hughes Hubbard and also
partners in their own firm in Washington, the Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard &
McPherson firm which had a basic Washington regulatory practice. It was
kind of the old-line approach to Washington law practice specializing in a
couple government agencies. One of the focal points of that firm’s practice
was the aviation industry, and that, in fact, turned out to be an entrée into
one of the major types of legal work that I wound up doing.
The overall goal in my appointment as a partner was to establish an
independent Hughes Hubbard Washington presence with partners solely at
Hughes Hubbard. I went about trying to build the office by recruiting
some of my colleagues from the Watergate special prosecutor’s office,
including Peter Kreindler, who had been the special assistant both to Cox
and Jaworski, Jerry Goldman, who had been one of the lawyers on the
Watergate prosecution team, and several other people. I then also looked
to recruit some of the people who might have had credentials similar to the
ones that I had, specifically clerkships with Judge Harold Leventhal. So
two of my early hires were former Leventhal clerks who had gone on to
clerk on the Supreme Court, so I hired Jay Kelley Wright, not to be
confused with J. Skelly Wright, the Court of Appeals judge, and David
Becker. They had both clerked on the Supreme Court. We had a nucleus173
of a few people very quickly after I joined the firm in 1974, and we began
building. We acquired our own offices and went through a couple of
migrations from a little office on L Street to what was then a brand new
outpost on Pennsylvania Avenue when Pennsylvania Avenue was just
being redeveloped. We went into the first purpose-built law office
building of the modern era on Pennsylvania Avenue, at 1201
Pennsylvania, and we were the other major tenant in the building besides
Covington & Burling, which had about five-sixth of the building, and we
had two little floors, second and third floors. It was one of my favorite
offices. I had a corner office there.
The practice evolved very quickly. We started doing work, as I
mentioned, for some airline clients that the Verner Liipfert people had
introduced me to, especially Northwest Airlines. That went on for virtually
all of my practice with Hughes Hubbard in Washington, which lasted until
1988. I did a lot of work for Northwest and had a couple of matters that
went to the Supreme Court.
We also developed another outgrowth of the Hughes Hubbard
practice with the accounting profession. Hughes Hubbard had done a lot of
work for what was then Coopers & Lybrand, now
PricewaterhouseCoopers. As a result of some of that securities fraud-type
litigation, I began doing a fair amount of work not only in SEC
investigations and litigation but also doing lobbying work. The lobbying
was for the accounting profession in general about legislation affecting174
fraud statutes and so forth. I developed an active practice as a substantive
lobbyist. That is, my role was to lay out position papers, meet with
senators and congressmen and staffs, along with the representatives, the
so-called Washington representatives of different companies. They would
be the people who had the political connections, and I would be the person
who tried to make arguments about why whatever was in that company’s
or that industry’s interests really coincided with the national interests.
Sometimes it took more of an effort to keep a straight face while making
these arguments. When I would rehearse them with my wife, she would
shake her head and say you really don’t think you’re going to get away
with that one, do you? And I would say I’m going to give it my best.
Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t.
I will say that the lobbying aspect was quite enjoyable. It was at a
time when Congress was going through a transition, some of which was
benign and some of which I think turned out to be destructive. The benign
part was money was becoming less and less an obvious inducement to
taking votes or staking out positions. I think probably when I started,
Congress was evolving from a rather tawdry environment to one where
it’s a little bit more cautious and at least more sanitary, although money
still talks, and everybody is aware of the corrosive impact of money in the
political system.
The not so benign evolution in the post-Watergate period: I think
political scientists have marked the 1974 congressional election as really175
the turning point in the 20th Century in terms of congressional
functionality. With the advent of the Young Turks in that class of 1974,
the old seniority system crumbled. That, as a practical matter, has made
the situation that we have now. We’re now talking fifty years later. It’s
much more difficult to get anything accomplished. And as the ouster of at
least one recent Speaker of the House illustrates, every young buck views
himself or herself as entitled to make as much mischief as possible without
any real consequences.
By contrast, under the old system, the committee chairman, as it
was invariably then, decided what was going to move forward, what
legislation should look like, and everybody else on the committee
essentially saluted and said yes, sir. That made it easier to be a lobbyist
because you could have a practical way forward to getting legislation
moving forward. Also, from the standpoint of optimal political science
principles, it made it possible to get things done, mostly good things,
sometimes not so good things. The paralysis that we’ve seen in the last
two decades or so is largely a result of what I saw emerging when I first
began becoming involved in legislative lobbying.
I will tell you one little story about the course of evolution as I was
describing it. I remember going in to see one senior senator from a
southern state. At that point, I was doing some lobbying for what’s now
called Big Pharma, and we were talking about pushing for legislation to
provide some antitrust protection in the pharmaceutical industry and other176
aligned industries. After I did my presentation on why this proposed
legislation was really good economics and good social policy, we were
just about to leave and the senator said to my client, whose name was Bill,
last name not to be mentioned, Bill, I appreciate you coming by to see me.
I wonder if you could do me a favor. I’ve got this fundraiser, and I’ve got
some tickets for this fundraiser, and I wonder if you could maybe place
these somewhere, Bill. Maybe your company would want to take a table
for the fundraiser. He handed him a stack. They may have been $1,000 a
plate tickets. Bill looked at me and said, senator, this fundraiser was last
week. The senator said, well, Bill, that’s not going to make it any easier
for you, but I really appreciate your help.
So that’s the way it was, and it may still be that way now. I don’t
know, but that’s the way it was in the 1970s and thereabouts.
MS. JOHNSON: Okay, so let me interject here. You are a fellow whose favorite job was
perhaps having a badge and driving around in your car with NYPD.
You’re confronted with a situation that seems problematic at best and
illegal at worst, so what did you do with that?
MR. LACOVARA: It was awkward, and I had to content myself with the principle that I
wasn’t doing anything illegal, and Bill wasn’t doing anything illegal
either. It was in accordance with campaign finance regulations, and I was
registered a lobbyist. He was registered as a lobbyist. These things were
not going to the senator directly. He had a campaign committee. And
that’s still the same way it is today. It’s how millions and millions of177
dollars goes into campaigns. None of the money is supposed to go directly
to the members, and occasionally if they dip into their campaign funds,
they get found out.
It was not so much a question of, am I skirting on the edge of the
law here. I thought I had been doing great things in the public interest, and
now I’m representing private commercial interests. Indeed, big business
interests. What I contented myself with was a pair of justifications. One
was, well, it’s a living, and I have to support my family, and it’s not
illegal. Another justification, and this was quite explicit, I was part of the
advocacy process, and I know that this was literally the case, either right
in front of me as we were making these visits or right behind me were
people from Public Interest Research Group or the ACLU. So I could say
to myself, I’m an advocate. I’m presenting my best arguments. There are
people who actually employed to present a contrary argument, and it’s up
to the people who get elected to make the decisions about which
arguments are more persuasive. Sometimes we lost, despite all the factors
that I mentioned, and sometimes we prevailed. I was able to reconcile
what I was doing with those explanations.
The other part of it was I was also quite deliberate in pursuing
pro bono causes. So this was the way that I was reconciling in my own
soul what I was doing in order to make a living and develop my law firm’s
office and help keep employed what turned out to be thirty or forty people
ultimately. I had to generate fees to do that. It had its own enjoyable178
aspects because I liked the intellectual part of it. I liked the advocacy part
of it. I then became active in a variety of pro bono efforts. One of them
was a class action on behalf of migrant apple pickers. We did a class
action in the US district court and got a huge settlement for these migrants
against the big agricultural interests. I did that sort of thing.
I became involved with the American Bar Association in two
capacities. I was at the time a conservative Republican, and I knew people
from the Washington Bar who were active in the American Bar
Association Section of Individual Rights which was the Civil Liberties
section. One of these women who was a friend of mine said, you really
ought to be involved in this because it would be useful to our policy taking
and policy formulating positions in the section of Individual Rights to
make sure that we understand the other side of issues. I was nominated for
the so-called council of the Section of Individual Rights sometime in the I
think late 1970s or early 1980s. I found out that, far from contesting a lot
of these policies, I’m not sure I served the sounding board function that
they had in mind originally. I began to emerge or, as I call it, to green
myself. I refer to this as the greening of Philip Lacovara. I became much
more liberal and perhaps open-minded. So eventually, I became the
chairperson of this section, and it was in that capacity that I helped to
create the Thurgood Marshall Award with Justice Marshall as its first
recipient.179
Among the things that I became involved in through that section
was the ABA International Human Rights Trial Observer Project, which
was initially under the sponsorship of the Section of Individual Rights,
although it later became a major ABA project. In that conjunction, I did
two trial observer missions, which my firm was willing to let me take the
time and spend the money to pursue. One was in Yugoslavia before the
breakup of Yugoslavia. It was a trial of the Belgrade Six. I have some
interesting stories about that if there’s time or interest. The other was to
monitor the trial before a military security court in Istanbul. These are
human rights challenges that persist ‘til this day. These trials were both in
the 1980s.
The Yugoslav trial involved the conjoined prosecution of six
people who ranged all the way from Euro-Socialists to Trotskyite
communists, but all of them had different views about what should happen
to Yugoslavia, and that included Serbians, Kosovars, Muslims, and so
forth. There was nothing that these people had in common other than they
were trying to make trouble for the central government of Yugoslavia. I
remember meeting with the prosecutor during one of the breaks. This was
in Belgrade. I said I’m familiar with the Yugoslav constitution that talks
about right of political assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of
conscience. Why are you prosecuting these people? They want the same
thing that all people around the world want which is an opportunity for
freedom, which your constitution guarantees, and everybody wants the180
same thing, a peaceful lifestyle where their families can grow up with
opportunity. I remember him sitting behind his desk shaking his head, and
he said, you Americans, you think that every country in the world is a
melting pot like yours. He said this is not a melting pot country. This is a
country that was patched together after World War I with different
warring ethnic groups that have been at each other’s throats for centuries.
Tito was able to keep a lid on things. Marshal Tito, who had died two or
three years earlier, was able to keep a lid on this because he was a hero in
fighting the Nazis during World War II, but he’s gone, and all we’re trying
to do is keep the country from exploding. I looked back at him with my
know-it-all American condescension saying you don’t give people enough
credit trying to repress these efforts at political activism. Partly because of
the attention that was being paid to the trial by the ABA and a couple of
other European groups that had sent trial observers, the men were
convicted, but they were given suspended sentences so there was no real
consequence, largely because the international community was watching.
And then, of course, within a very short period of time, two or three years,
Yugoslavia exploded, and you had NATO involvement, you had tens of
thousands of people killed, and the country fractured into six different
countries now. It’s unclear exactly where Kosovo is as a country. That’s a
Muslim enclave, but the Kosovars and the Serbs are still at each other’s
throats, and the Orthodox and the Latin Christians, the Catholics versus
the Orthodox, they’ve been slaughtering each other with almost as much181
abandon as the Muslims and the Christians have been slaughtering each
other. So he was right, and I was wrong, at least in the sense that he
understood a problem that I did not appreciate.
There was a similar episode in Turkey. I remember going into the
chambers of the military judge who was presiding to talk about the trial of
those people, and they were the people who were affiliated with the PPK,
which is still the Kurdish minority that is still pressing for a homeland or
independence, and they’re still being slaughtered, and occasionally there’s
a terrorist attack fifty years later. That problem too is still festering. I
remember talking to him about the whole concept of justice in a court. He
was a judge but a member of the military. One of the things that was more
startling and that has remained with me is that he had a kind of a pen
holder on his desk. One end was a hand grenade, and the other end was an
upraised bayonet. I thought okay. In the US, we have the scales of justice.
We have a wooden gavel. We have other indicia of justice, and in this
tribunal where I’m trying to observe the administration of justice, you’ve
got the bomb and the bayonet.
It was things like that that allowed me to feel comfortable in my
skin that what I was doing for those fourteen years was a satisfactory way
for an honorable person to lead his life.
MS. JOHNSON: Fourteen years is a good long time for somebody who had as many jobs as
you did.182
MR. LACOVARA: By far, that was the longest place I’d ever been and the longest segment of
my career. As I was mentioning, it had variations because I did regular
litigation, I did Supreme Court work. My specialty even then was in
Supreme Court litigation, and I argued a number of cases for different
clients. One of my proudest ones in the sense of having felt that I as an
advocate made a difference involved another pharmaceutical company.
Sometime in the 1970s, what was then the GAO, the General Accounting
Office, now it’s I believe the General Accountability Office, was trying to
investigate pricing of pharmaceuticals. Another issue that is as current as
today’s headlines, price gouging by pharmaceutical companies, Big
Pharma, the research companies. The GAO was demanding that
companies provide cost information, and the companies viewed this as
highly sensitive trade secrets kind of information. One of the controller
generals, I forgot which side sued the other. This all happened before I got
involved. There was a litigation in several different districts and thus in
several different circuits brought by five different pharmaceutical
companies versus the GAO opposing access to these cost records.
The Supreme Court took one of the cases, and it had gone against
the pharmaceutical company. The Supreme Court affirmed the decision by
a 4-4 vote, so “affirmed by an equally divided court.”
Simultaneously with that announcement of the 4-4 decision, the
Court granted cert in another identical case. I was then retained by another
drug company, Merck, to represent them in the Supreme Court. We183
briefed the case, and I argued it. A year after the Court had split 4-4 on an
identical set of legal issues and facts, the Court decided in my favor by a
7-2 vote. Not only did I pick up the new Justice, I don’t remember who it
was, but two of the Justices changed their minds. I thought that was about
the best indication that lawyering can make a difference. In many
situations, it doesn’t. The result is fore-ordained, and you could have
Daffy Duck do the oral argument, and the case would come out however it
was going to come out even with Clarence Darrow or Daniel Webster.
That was one where I think it did make a difference.
I argued a couple of other cases. At least one for Northwest
Airlines. I argued a case that the court ultimately dismissed as
improvidently granted, which was fine since we were the respondent. I
was doing that Supreme Court work, and doing lobbying, and doing
garden variety litigation and supervising and recruiting. I spent a lot of
time on the road recruiting for entry-level positions at the firm and then
trying to take in lateral partners.
One of the lateral partners I took in was another former Leventhal
clerk, Cal Collier, who had been chairman of the Federal Trade
Commission during the Reagan years. He was just a year or two behind
me so I’d known both him and his wife for many years.
I brought in somebody from the Justice Department who was an
aviation accident lawyer in the torts branch of the Civil Division, one of
the most flamboyant people I’ve ever known. Even though he was a184
Justice Department lawyer, somehow or other, because of the books he
wrote, he drove a red Ferrari or Corvette or some high-level sports car
with his own vanity license plates 4TRIALS. He had a big house out in
McLean. He was maybe a GS-15 in the Justice Department. He knew
everybody in the aviation accident industry. I went with him to London to
visit the Lloyd’s Syndicates, which would be a source of aviation accident
litigation for him at the trial level.
One of the cases I argued in the Supreme Court, again somewhat
controversial, involved the so-called government contractor defense. The
issue is, when a company is manufacturing something for the military and
it turns out that there’s a problem with it and it causes an injury, is the
manufacturer of this military product liable for tort damages.
The specific case that I had and for which my wife to this day has
never forgiven me involved a military helicopter made by Sikorsky
Helicopters. It was a CH-53 helicopter. Lieutenant Boyle of the United
States Marine Corps was flying this helicopter off an aircraft carrier in the
Pacific, and it crashed and sea. Lieutenant Boyle drowned because the
hatch for escaping from the helicopter was designed to open outward.
With sea water pressing against the hatch, there was no way for Lieutenant
Boyle to escape. His family brought a lawsuit claiming negligence in the
design of this helicopter to have a hatch opening outward rather than
inward. The specifications for the helicopter provided by the United States
Navy called for a hatch with a certain configuration which was in this case185
to be able to be opened inward, which would be a lot safer if you’re crash-
landing on land apparently. The issue was, can the manufacturer be
blamed for following the specifications ordained by the military. This has
enormous consequences. It applies to Agent Orange. It applies to almost
anything the military makes, airplanes, tanks, weapons of all sorts,
uniforms. It’s applied to people who are breathing in asbestos and so forth.
So the issue was, is there such a defense as a so-called military contractor
defense. Naturally on behalf of Sikorsky and United Technologies, its
parent company, we argued that there is such a defense.
I had to reargue that case because Justice Scalia wanted to have the
case reargued and re-briefed on the issue of the capacity of the federal
courts to recognize such a defense. The issue as he saw it was that this
sounds like a law-making function. Is it proper for the courts to decide
whether there should be such a defense or is this simply a matter of
statutory policy-making that Congress ought to make. So I had to argue
that one twice.
Sadly for Lieutenant Boyle’s family, and sadly for my relationship
with my wife, we won the case, and the government contractor defense is
an essential element of federal tort law to this day. It has the practical
effect, of course, of denying some injured people, some benefits, although
on that one I had to content myself with the position that I was taking,
there are other benefits that are provided for people who are injured in the186
armed forces, who suffer injury that’s related to the performance of their
functions.
So those were the kinds of things that I was doing for fourteen
years as the head of the Washington office at Hughes Hubbard.
MS. JOHNSON: Let me follow up on that enormously consequential case just to ask, you
may have said it and I didn’t catch it, the name of the flashy sports-car
driving gentleman you recruited out of the Civil Division of the Justice
Department into your law firm?
MR. LACOVARA: Mark Dombroff.
MS. JOHNSON: He wrote books about his cases or fiction books?
MR. LACOVARA: He wrote books about methodology. They were basically practice manuals
and he had a major legal publisher publishing these things. I guess he must
have gotten large enough advances or royalties to have managed to have a
pretty nice lifestyle. His travels while still in the government led him to
meet a very attractive stewardess on one of his flights, and she was his
wife when we knew him.
MS. JOHNSON: When did you start to get the itch about leaving this place that had been
very good to you financially and otherwise for a long, long time?
MR. LACOVARA: I would say a couple of things were happening at this point that are
necessary in order to answer the question. I didn’t really get an itch myself
until shortly before I left, which was 1988. This was the Reagan years in
the 1980s. We have not gone into any of the things that relate to the
Reagan years or my involvement with the Reagan administration or how I187
am responsible single-handedly for making Rudy Giuliani. I can go into
those if you’re interested. There was a bit of disquiet on my wife’s part
more than mine with Washington, with how it had evolved. She was at the
time a family therapist, and if you have read about this, this is long before
your time, one of the great themes of the Reagan Republican
administration was that it was family friendly, and this was the family
values era. It was before abortion became the kind of issue it is today in
the aftermath of the latest Supreme Court decision, but abortion was still
an issue but not as high-level as it is now because the Supreme Court ten
years earlier seemed to settle it. But there was a lot of emphasis on family
values, and I suppose it was designed to serve as a counterpoint to the
licentiousness of the left as people on the right saw it.
So in the midst of this climate of supposed concern for good,
healthy, wholesome family values, my wife was seeing patients, typically
teenage daughters, but some wives, of senior people in the government,
and without betraying professional confidences, she would regularly talk
about the hypocrisy that she was being forced to confront with the wives
and children of the wholesome family values politicians. So for her, the
disconnect, the cognitive dissonance between what was supposedly the
climate of the Washington establishment and what she was seeing in the
real-world behavior of these people, was becoming a bit of a strain for her,
and she was getting frustrated.188
At about that time, or at a point in 1988, a person I’d known
slightly in Washington, a man named Ben Heineman contacted me. Ben
had been a partner at Sidley Austin, a very smart guy who had been a
Supreme Court law clerk, I think he may have been editor in chief of the
Yale Law Journal, Ben had been recruited to go to work as general
counsel at General Electric Company working for Jack Welch who then
was viewed as the corporate manager of the century, or at least of the half
century. History has not judged him quite as well as commentators viewed
him at the time that Ben went there and that I went there. Ben sent a note
around to a number of people in Washington saying he was looking for
somebody to join him to be responsible for worldwide litigation. He also
was going to hire somebody to head tax planning, and it was going to be
like a small law firm. The three of us were going to be like partners
together in this venture. He asked whether there was anybody I could
suggest for the job. I must say I’m sure he wrote to a lot of people with the
exact same inquiry. I wrote back or called him up and said, this sounds
like an interesting job, GE is a great company, do you think it would be
something suitable for me. He said it sounds like a great idea. Come up
and meet with Jack. I met with Welch, and the rest is history. I said yes,
this is great. We’re going to pick up stakes and move from Washington to
Connecticut.
Corporate life, at least at GE at that time, was something that was
otherworldly. It was like being carried around in a sedan chair. I had a189
factotum assigned to me to make everything work, including selling our
house and getting everything arranged and getting possible places for us to
live. It was the kind of lifestyle which a humble country lawyer in
Washington was not accustomed to.
I had an interesting time at GE. Not surprisingly, it didn’t work and
really couldn’t work as Ben had originally designed it because he was the
general counsel. He was a senior vice president. I was vice president and
senior counsel for litigation and legal policy. The other lawyer that he
brought in, John Samuels, who was a partner at Dewey Ballantine, I think.
John went up as vice president for tax matters. In any corporate
environment, there’s a pyramidal structure. There’s the chairman and
CEO, and Ben reported to him. Although I had a so-called dotted line to
Welch on litigation, I was a direct report to Ben, so while I had a number
of direct contacts with Welch, I had to make sure that Ben who was
technically my boss was in the loop.
The issues that I was working on were fascinating, and GE at the
time was the largest company in the world and had what Ben accurately
called the biggest playpen in the world to play in. GE’s operations ranged
from nuclear energy on one end through aircraft engines, locomotives. GE
had acquired RCA, so it had the entire defense establishment business of
the old RCA. It owned NBC. It had insurance companies, and it had GE
Capital, which at that point was financing most of the world, and it had
lots of international corporations. Any conceivable kind of legal issue that190
a practicing lawyer might have the remotest opportunity to become
involved in was right there as part of the GE universe. As the vice
president in charge of worldwide litigation, I got to decide which things I
wanted most to pay attention to as long as I was accountable for the things
that I wasn’t paying as much attention to. It was a great playpen. It
ultimately came undone. That may not be exactly the right way to put it,
but if you want me to fast forward, I can go through that two years.
That was when I left Hughes Hubbard and worked at GE. Before
going to Hughes Hubbard back in 1974 another option was to join Nino
Scalia. I may have mentioned to you the reason I didn’t go to work with
Scalia when he asked me. Did we talk about this at all?
MS. JOHNSON: No.
MR. LACOVARA: When I was leaving the Watergate prosecutor’s office in 1974, Scalia,
who was head of the Office of Legal Counsel, asked me to come in as his
deputy, as deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal
Counsel. I said to him I’m not taking any deputy jobs anymore. I had a
level of responsibility as counsel to the Watergate special prosecutor. I’ve
just come off arguing the Nixon tapes case. So I was feeling kind of full of
myself at the time. That was the same attitude I had that led me to turn
down the job at the beginning of the Reagan administration. This is how I
made Rudy Giuliani. When Reagan came in in 1981, I was asked to go
over to meet with Ed Schmaltz at his White & Case office. He was to be
the new deputy attorney general in the Reagan Justice Department, and he191
asked whether I would be willing to accept the position of associate
attorney general, which was the number three position at Justice. I told
him I appreciated that offer, but I didn’t think that that was a job that
ought to exist. It was a newly created position. I said I think that it just
introduces another level of insulation between the attorney general and the
heads of the operating divisions, and it just seems too bureaucratic a
position, so thank you, but no thanks. This is where my perspicacity once
again could be called into question. I said nobody who takes that job will
ever be heard from again. The next thing I heard, they offered it to Rudy
Giuliani who was at that point a kind of obscure assistant US attorney in
New York. Rudy took the job and managed to parlay it into a high-
visibility job. Because of his high-visibility job, he got himself appointed
United States Attorney in New York where he became a high-visibility US
attorney with his own PR people.
Footnote here, my dear friend John Martin, who was a US attorney
in New York before Rudy, would for years afterwards introduce himself
as the United States Attorney in New York before television, which was
his way of distinguishing himself from Rudy.
Further footnote about Rudy and how I feel myself responsible for
making him America’s mayor and whatever he became thereafter. Later in
the 1990s, by that point I was back in New York after leaving GE, I don’t
remember why it was, but I was asked to do the debate prep for the
woman running against Rudy for Mayor of New York. She was a City192
Councilwoman named Ruth Messinger. New York was basically a
democratic city. Rudy was going to be running as a Republican. Ruth
Messenger, as the City Council president, a senior position elected city-
wide in New York, was thought to have a good shot at it. I was asked
whether I would stand in in a mock debate or a series of mock debates
playing Rudy Giuliani so that she would be prepared to deal with Rudy
across the debate stage. I remember being as nasty and aggressive and
condescending and confrontational as I knew by this time Rudy to be. I
guess I didn’t prepare her well enough because Rudy got elected, or re-
elected, and that was 1997. As a result, Rudy was the Mayor of New York
on 9/11 which catapulted him into national and international fame. I think
he got an honorary knighthood from the Queen because of his role in
organizing New York in the aftermath of 9/11.
Those are interludes, but you asked about why I left Hughes
Hubbard and why I left GE. I left GE in part because I was chafing a little
bit at being the number two and having to report to Ben. Meanwhile, and
this an important part of my oral history, when we were in Washington,
we would go to parties, meet new people, and people would say to my
wife, you must be Phil Lacovara’s wife. We then moved to Connecticut,
and things shifted. My wife and I we were at a dinner party, a small party
with just six people organized by one of the other lawyers at GE. He was
much older than I but was not an officer. Because of his role in assigning
litigations over the years, he knew a lawyer in New York City by the name193
of Ira Millstein. Ira was the senior partner at Weil, Gotshal & Manges. The
six of us had dinner at the home of my friend, and Ira was there. We were
having a conversation, and I don’t remember what it was about, but the
next day I got a call, and it was Ira Millstein on the phone. I had met him
maybe once or twice before that. He said I don’t want to talk to you. I
want to talk to your wife. Ira said he was chairing a commission that had
just been appointed on the use and security of Central Park. This was in
the aftermath of the infamous rape of the jogger for which five young
black men were arrested and Donald Trump demanded that they be
executed. He still has not acknowledged that they were wrongfully
arrested. The political powers or the economic powers in New York
decided that something needed to be done about Central Park, and they
organized a commission. I think it may have had city blessing, and it
included on it some of the rich and powerful, including Donald Trump. Ira
said he needed somebody to be the executive director of this, to run it and
supervise whatever was going to come out of this whole enterprise, and he
said he decided there’s only one person in the world who could do this,
and he said that’s you, Madeline. He had met her just that one night. I
think I may have mentioned to you on another occasion, I once told Jack
Welch the only person I knew who could run GE besides him was my wife
Madeline, and apparently Ira concluded the same thing. To compress this
long story, this was the commission that really is responsible for the
regeneration of Central Park, which is now used from north to south by194
tens of thousands of people, almost completely safe space for black people
and white people and Hispanic people largely because of the efforts of this
commission that Madeline helped organize and administer and helped
develop the policy recommendations for. As a result of it, she met a lot of
the key players in New York, the key people in the investment banking
community, the real estate community, the Old Line 400 and so forth. So
for all the rest of our time in that part of the world when we would go to a
party, somebody would say to me oh, you must be Madeline Lacovara’s
husband. Our roles had completely inverted, and she was the prominent
well-connected figure in New York, and I was sort of the plus-one, the
opposite of the way that it had been in Washington where I was a minor
celebrity in the Washington community.
MS. JOHNSON: Amazing. I have just learned in the last several months the term trailing
spouse, which is used in the academy. It resonates in light of that
anecdote. I am going to propose that we end, and next time we’ll pick up
with a little more about Jack Welch and your marvelous spouse and then
get to Wall Street and Morgan Stanley if that works for you. And we can
track back with anything else about the Reagan administration that you
wanted to touch.
MR. LACOVARA: Sure. I’m trying to drag in some of these things simply because, to the
extent that anybody ever reads this transcript, they’re not going to be
interested in me, they’re going to be interested in what I know about195
people who are famous or people about whom other people might be
doing research.
MS. JOHNSON: I think you’re certainly interesting enough in your own right, but your
point is well taken with respect to the truly incredible number of situations
and personages you have encountered in your long career.