Richard Hibey Interview 6

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Oral History of Richard Hibey, 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 James Rocap, and the interviewee
is Richard Hibey. The interview took place in Dick Hibey’s home on Cathedral Avenue on
Monday, August 7, 2023. This is the sixth interview.
MR. ROCAP: Good afternoon.
MR. HIBEY: Good afternoon.
MR. ROCAP: Dick, it’s been almost a month or maybe even more than a month since we last
chatted, and in between, you had a few additional recollections of things that had
happened in the periods of time that we’ve already gone over, and we both agreed
that we ought to go back and make sure that we capture everything. So that’s
what we’re going to do at the beginning of today’s session before we move on to
the formation of Anderson Hibey.
One of the things that we wanted to talk about was your recollection of
another wonderful story from your college days. Also, there was a proceeding that
involved you with Judge Harold Greene during your Prettyman fellowship. There
is a part of the Billie Austin Bryant case that we already talked about that sounded
like it probably gave some insight into what Judge Gesell was like and how he
handled cases at the time, which we think we should add to the record. And then
there are a couple of stories from your time at Surrey Karasik that we’ll want to
go over before we head into the formation and your time at Anderson Hibey. So
with that as background, why don’t we start with your recollection of learning
Russian when you were at Lemoyne College.
MR. HIBEY: There came a time when the college, I assume recognizing what was going on in
the world, offered a course in the Russian language. Six or seven of us signed up.
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MR. ROCAP: This again was back in the late 1950s early 1960s?
MR. HIBEY: Exactly. We signed up for the course and had a really good first year of studying
the language. Toward the end of the year of study our professor asked if we would
be interested in taking a second year of Russian.
MR. ROCAP: How many students were in the class?
MR. HIBEY: I think about a half dozen. He said nobody should answer that question right
away. You’re all invited to my home for wine and cakes. This guy was a real
high-class nobleman.
MR. ROCAP: And a good marketing agent it sounds like.
MR. HIBEY: I guess so. We had no deterioration. The group remained intact. So we went to his
home one night to talk about what the course would be about, what it would
cover, thereby giving the students the ability to make an informed judgment about
whether they wanted to do a deeper dive into the Russian language. So on the
appointed evening, we went to Doctor deRopp’s home, and we were warmly
received and taken into the living room area. It was like stepping into the 19th
Century. Everything was an antique. Everything was simply first class and
beautiful, and we understood that all this stuff was rescued from his family homes
in Europe before the Communist Revolution of 1917. We were quietly, without
real exchange of conversation, admiring the beauty of the place, during which
time, he stepped away to help his wife prepare the wine and the cakes that they
would serve to their young guests. During that period of absence, we were taking
everything in, and one of my classmates pointed to a clock that was very ornate,
situated on a Louis the 14th kind of desk, just dripping with decoration. It was
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quite beautiful. One of my classmates looked over and pointed to the clock and
said, “It’s baroque isn’t it.” And another classmate, without missing a beat, said,
“Well maybe he just doesn’t wind it all the time.” We just howled and tried to
regain our composure before he came back in. But it’s a story that stuck with me
all these years.
MR. ROCAP: So those two didn’t go down to the comedy station?
MR. ROCAP: Not to the comedy station, but to their credit, they were there for Russian II. There
were no dropouts from that course.
MR. ROCAP: Can you speak any Russian?
MR. HIBEY: I guess only in my dreams. In asking me that question, you remind me of another
experience. I went home for the summer, and my father and I had a terrific sweet
tooth. It developed that in the summer evenings when our house went quiet, Dad
and I would jump in his car and go to a bakery nearby. All of the bakers who
worked there were refugees and survivors of the death camps during World
War II. They were all Jewish. They were all tattooed, but they survived, and they
were brilliant bakers. We’d go down there and get something hot out of the oven
in the late evening. It was a wonderful experience for me on two fronts. First of
all, Dad and I were doing something together and enjoying every minute of it. The
other is that all these bakers spoke Russian, and they spoke Russian with me. So
for a brief period of my life, I was actually pretty good at it.
MR. ROCAP: You could order a sweet in Russian?
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MR. HIBEY: Yes. I could. And more than that, to be honest with you, because they understood
where I was at the very beginning of the study of this language, they turned out to
be live textbooks that would help me through that experience.
MR. ROCAP: Wonderful story. One other incident that you had recalled from your time in the
Prettyman Fellowship involved Chief Judge Harold Greene, in what would
become the Superior Court.
MR. HIBEY: Right. It was called the Court of General Sessions, as I remember. He was the
Chief Judge. He came from the Justice Department where, if I’m not mistaken, he
was a principal author of the Voting Rights Act of 1964. I think that’s the one that
Lyndon Johnson signed. Soon after that, he was appointed to be a judge in the
Court of General Sessions. After a short tenure as an associate judge, he was
named Chief Judge. His tenure there coincided with my year in the Prettyman
Fellowship. One day, my chief, Bill Greenhalgh, called me into his office and
asked me if I had any appearances to make. I said, “Not today or for the rest of
the week.” He said, “Good, Harold Greene needs the services of one of you guys,
and since you’re free, I’d like to have you go over there and see what he wants.” I
said fine. So I dutifully went over to his court, to his chambers, and he said to me
that he wanted to hold a hearing that day on what the District of Columbia was
doing or not doing in the wake of the case entitled DeWitt Easter v. District of
Columbia. In that case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia
Circuit ruled that chronic alcoholism was an absolute defense to public
drunkenness. He wanted to know what the District was doing to respond to the
situation where alcoholics picked up for public drunkenness would no longer be
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prosecuted criminally, but instead would be eligible for alcohol rehabilitation
treatment. He sent me to the drunk tank, otherwise known as a cellblock, in the
courthouse, where I would find close to a hundred people who had been picked up
for public intoxication over the weekend past. He wanted me to identify people
who would fall into categories. He needed to know, shall we say, people who
existed in that population. I don’t remember well what the categories were other
than he wanted me to identify people who were admittedly alcoholic, who had
been arrested more than X number of times, and how many of them ended up in
Occoquan, which in those years was where they housed people convicted of this
purported offense, and to identify how many of them, if any, received any
treatment from the District of Columbia authorities, and break those categories
out, and then put on the stand in this hearing somebody from the various
categories.
MR. ROCAP: So for example, somebody who had been convicted more than five times, more
than ten times, more than fifteen times, something like that?
MR. HIBEY: Yes. And with a little background on their lives as alcoholics. So I went
downstairs and mingled in the cellblock, found the people who fit my categories,
and let the judge know that we were ready. The hearing convened in the late
afternoon when the criminal calendar was long cleared for the day, and we
brought upstairs from the cellblock everybody who was charged with public
drunkenness that weekend. One side of the assignment court was fully populated
by these guys. Judge Greene conducted the hearing. I examined the witnesses and
got the pertinent information out of them. The corporation counsel was
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represented by one of its Assistants. I kept thinking that the poor guy just ran into
a train because he didn’t see this thing coming. At that point, the Judge spoke
from the bench and said that in light of the fact that the teachings of DeWitt
Easter had not been applied in the case of these people, and they were all
alcoholics in need of help, he, the Judge, dismissed all of the charges. My clients,
more than a hundred of them, were free to go. And believe me, they cleared out of
there.
MR. ROCAP: A good day’s work for a defense lawyer.
MR. HIBEY: Well you know I thought if I could chalk up a hundred and some odd wins, that
would be a real boast.
ROCAP: Just so we have in the record, the DeWitt Easter case is 360 F.2d 50, and it was
decided March 31, 1966, so this would have been right about halfway through
your Prettyman fellowship.
MR. HIBEY: Yes.
MR. ROCAP: The other thought that occurred to me was this is an extraordinary event in the life
of a young lawyer. You’d been doing this work now for maybe eight or nine
months or so.
MR. HIBEY: No. We had to pass the bar, so we were sworn in December 15, 1965, I think.
Don’t hold me to that, but I was ready to go the first of the year, so I was three
months into the practice.
MR. ROCAP: The other extraordinary point, and I don’t know whether you have reflections on
this, but of course Harold Greene went on to become one of the finest judges that
the District Court ever had. He oversaw the AT&T cases and the breakup, among
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many, many other things. You had this early experience with him. How did you
view him as a judge over the years?
MR. HIBEY: Brilliant. Not as personable as so many of the other judges, but it wasn’t offputting.
He was all about business, always with kind of a smile on his face but, at
least toward me and the people I know, he wasn’t particularly warm. I mean we
had judges who invited us to their chamber Christmas parties because we had
appeared before them during the previous year. We didn’t get anything like that
from Judge Greene. We just got good, solid judging. I never heard anybody
complain about him.
MR. ROCAP: Let’s move back to the case of Billie Austin Bryant, which we talked about in the
last session or the session before, a major representation for you when you were
an assistant US attorney. There was one procedural step in the process that you
recalled and thought it was useful adding to the history.
MR. HIBEY: What I had recalled, and I’m sorry I hadn’t recalled it earlier, was during the pretrial
motions practice, which was otherwise unremarkable, the lawyers for Bryant
filed a motion for change of venue and wanted the case removed, I think to
Pennsylvania. I understood that the law would permit a change of venue in a case
but only to move it to an adjacent district, which in this case would have been
Virginia, as it had the closest district court within the federal system. Gerhard
Gesell was the presiding judge and very much in charge of his own courtroom. He
controlled things firmly, not uncomfortably, he just was very much on top of his
game every time he took the bench. So when the motion came up for argument
among the list of motions that these guys filed on behalf of Bryant, Judge Gesell
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turned to me, assuming he knew the answer, and he said, “What is your position
on this.” I said that the government had no objection and that case should be
removed to the Eastern District of Virginia.
In those days, capital cases in the Eastern District of Virginia meant that
somebody was going to die because the death penalty was very much imposed in
that jurisdiction. The Judge was not happy because that case would be removed
from his calendar, and it’s not clear to me whether he could travel with the case.
But that’s beside the point. It was going into Virginia. I’d say within a few
minutes, the lawyers for Bryant stood up and withdrew their motion for change of
venue, and that issue was taken off the table.
MR. ROCAP: So a good indication of be careful what you ask for.
MR. HIBEY: Exactly.
MR. ROCAP: The importance of thinking through your strategy. Alright, let’s move on to the
years at Surrey Karasik, and as I mentioned earlier, there were a couple of other
events that we thought it might be helpful to add to the oral history. At some point
during those roughly ten years, the firm undertook the representation of the
government of Sudan in connection with its willingness or not to arbitrate a case.
Maybe you could talk a little bit about that and your involvement in it and what
happened as a result of it.
MR. HIBEY: The Surrey Karasik firm had a very strong international practice. There was a
time, and I think this is included in it or within a brief period thereafter, that they
had offices and Paris, Beirut, Jeddah and Tehran.
MR. ROCAP: This was in the 1970s?
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MR. HIBEY: Yes, I believe that’s right.
MR. ROCAP: You were there from 1971 I think to 1981.
MR. HIBEY: Yes. They had those places established with American lawyers leading those
offices. So much of the work originated with one of the partners, Norman
Vander Clute. The government of Sudan got in trouble by defaulting in the middle
of an arbitration between I think a construction firm and the government
regarding the Wadi Halfa project. I can’t remember much more than that with
respect to the issue other than that Sudan walked away from the arbitration when
it learned that there were Jews on the board of directors of the claimant company,
and that immediately would plunge them into default.
I was new to the law firm and to the practice but was asked to accompany
Van to go to London and then Khartoum and meet with the attorney general of
Sudan, the Minister of Justice, I guess, and to go over the materials that we had
and give him advice on what they should do with this self-induced predicament.
I met with the Minister of Justice, who in the middle of the meeting
politely asked my indulgence as he went and got his prayer rug and said his
prayers with me there. He then rolled up his rug and came back to the
conversation. We did business on that subject, gave him advice. We were there
for five days, during which time the Sudanese were kind enough to show me
around. It included going out to the desert to see the whirling dervishes. While in
the desert seeing this very disoriented image of people who are much taller than I
could imagine given the distance between them and me. And when we drove up
closer, I encountered 25 or 30 Dinkas who average easily 6 feet 8 inches in size.
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Not all was pleasant, notwithstanding dinners at various clubs during the week
where we met what I came to understand was the ruling class of Sudan, because I
was also there when the Munich athletes were murdered.
Toward the end of my stay, Van said to me, “You know you’re not very
far away from Lebanon and your family is from Lebanon, is that not true?” I said,
“Yes, that’s right.” He said, “You ought to go up there and see them.” Now I am
not well-traveled at this point, and this is my first time out of the United States
except for Canada.
MR. ROCAP: You’re probably 30 years old at this point or around there?
MR. HIBEY: Yes. I had a baby. I was just not well-traveled. He said why don’t you do it, and I
did. I took a three- or four-hour flight to Beirut and stayed in the city that first
night, walked up to the Corniche, had a fabulous dinner overlooking the
Mediterranean, feeling very cosmopolitan, went back to my hotel, which was in
the French tradition, Lebanon having been a mandate of France after World War I
and the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. As I was having a nightcap, which for
me was non-alcoholic, I said to the maître d’ as I looked at these flickering lights
in the distance, I said, “What villages are up there?” He said to me, “What village
do you want?” I thought that was a weird thing to say. And then he said to me in
Arabic, “You’re the son of an Arab, aren’t you?” I said yes. He said, “Well, your
family’s up there. They’re waiting for you. Why don’t you go?” I said to him,
“They don’t know me, I don’t know them. This is not going to happen. I’m just
traveling.” This guy was the maitre-d’. I can’t remember his name. The waiter he
called over was a guy named Camille, last name Chamoun. There was a time
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when Camille Chamoun was president of Lebanon, and I suppose this guy was
related or he was named in honor of him, but I always thought that was an
interesting name. He said to Camille, “This young man is looking for his family.
Do you know where Kfertai is?” He said, “Oh yes, it’s just up the road about an
hour out of town.” He said, “Can you take him there tomorrow morning?” He
said, “Of course, it’s my day off. I’m happy to.”
The next morning at 7:00 I’m in this guy’s car, and he’s driving up
through the villages in the mountainous district of Lebanon and took me to my
father’s home. That journey, if I never did anything else, that journey would have
been the capstone of my family life, so to speak. We went up the road. We asked
somebody, “Can you tell us where the House of Hibey is.” “Who wants to
know?” says the person. He said, “This is a relative and he wants to find his
family.” Well come on in and let’s have lunch and we’ll talk about it.” “No, we
have to keep going.” “Alright, well you just go up the road and whatever the
instructions were.” I’d run out of my Arabic by then.
Next stop, we see an old man. They seem to specialize in old men over
there. We said, “Could you help us.” He said, “Who wants to know?” “This
man’s writing a history on the House of Hibey.” “Oh okay, well come on in and
have a cup of coffee and we can talk about it.” I don’t drink coffee, but anyway,
“No thank you, uncle, we have to keep going.” Then somebody in an orchard is
picking his apples, which are about the size of grapefruits. “Who wants to know?”
when we asked him about the House of Hibey. We explained I was looking for
my family. He throws down a couple of apples and says, “They’re further up the
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road. Enjoy your fruit.” One more time. It’s crazy to myself. An old man on the
road walking with a cane. “We’re looking for the House of Hibey. Can you tell us
where we can find it?” He leaned in and he said, “What was that name again?” I
said my name in Arabic, translated very loosely. “I am Richard son of Gabriel
Hibey.” He says, “Gabriel was my brother.” The driver says, “Well this is . . .” ,
whatever I was, great-nephew or whatever. This guy starts to cry and says, “Get
him out of the car. I want to kiss him.” So I get out of the car, I’m now on the side
of the road embracing this old man who then directed me to a house where we
parked. And as we were getting out a gentleman walked out from under the arbor
and said to us basically, in Arabic, “Welcome, come into the home, meet my
family, have something to eat, then tell us who you are and what brings you here.”
The order of that was never lost on me. I’m pretty sure I got it right even though I
had run out of Arabic about four people ago.
I walk into this beautifully appointed home that’s looking out over a
valley, and my host is trailing because he’s telling Camille where to park. I said to
Camille, “Listen I’m not going to be able to do much more than this with my
language ability.” He said, “Don’t worry. These people will carry you on that.” I
walked in. I introduced myself in Arabic, and it was pretty rough. This elegant
woman says, “Don’t worry about it.” Her children were there, grown. Her
grandchildren were there. We spoke French, Arabic, and mercifully English.
My father told me, when he heard that I was going to that part of the
world, he said, “If you ever get to Lebanon, you should look up one of my
childhood friends who as I understand it is a lawyer and lives in Beirut. His name
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is Nematullah Sfeir.” I said to the family, “I’m sorry I don’t know anybody. The
only person my father mentioned was Nematullah Sfeir, who was his childhood
friend.” This guy says, “I’m Nematullah Sfeir.” That still blows me away.
They pulled me out of the hotel. We had five days touring Lebanon. They
couldn’t have done enough. They introduced everybody in the village, an aunt of
mine who had visited America and been in my home, and they couldn’t have been
more gracious. That inspired a phone call after five days when I called the office
in DC to let them know that I was on my way to the Paris office. Mike
Nussbaum, the guy who hired me to begin with, picked up the phone and said, “I
represent your wife and she’d like to know where the hell you are.” So that ended
my trip to Lebanon, and then on to the Paris office and ultimately home.
MR. ROCAP: That is a wonderful family story. At this point were your parents alive?
MR. HIBEY: Very much so. My father and mother lived to a ripe old age. My mother died at
93. My father died at 102. When my father was 90, I took him back, Mary Ellen
and my son Justin also, back to Lebanon. Dad had not been there in 77 years. That
trip topped everything for me in terms of traveling to that part of the world.
MR. ROCAP: What year was this?
MR. HIBEY: He was 90. He died at 102 ten years ago. My son David didn’t go because he had
to take the bar exam.
MR. ROCAP: So this would have been around 2000. Do I have that right?
MR. HIBEY: He was born in 1908 plus 90. So somewhere around 1998. Sorry for that
diversion.
MR. ROCAP: When you went back, was Mr. Sfeir still there?
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MR. HIBEY: No.
MR. ROCAP: Had the village changed in those thirty years?
MR. HIBEY: No. The village, in terms of its geography and what passed for architecture, did
not. The church was still standing, the homes were still there. It was country.
MR. ROCAP: The country of Lebanon, of course, had been through –
MR. HIBEY: A lot of trouble, yes. Nothing like it is now. Then it was paradise. Now it’s a
failed state with no real prospects of regaining itself.
MR. ROCAP: Wonderful stories. So there’s one less-family-oriented, I think, story from your
time at Surrey Karasik. When you told it to me, it also underscored the amazing
amount of responsibility that you had early in your career for purposes of
presenting arguments, and I’m referring to an arbitration in which Surrey Karasik
represented Northrop sometime in the mid- to late-1970s in which you were
suddenly called upon to make a closing argument when perhaps you weren’t
expecting to do so.
MR. HIBEY: Well I wasn’t expecting to do so, but all of my tentacles were fired up because
there was something I could do.
MR. ROCAP: And had done for many years before that. So why don’t we start at the beginning.
Was this a AAA arbitration?
MR. HIBEY: AAA arbitration involving a claim by Adnan Khashoggi, a well-known arms
dealer of the day who was seeking a commission for assisting Northrop in landing
a major military assistance project for the Saudis. He claimed that he was entitled
to over $300 million in compensation. We conceded that he was owed something
like $37 million. That number was absolutely unacceptable to him, and that gave
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rise to an American Arbitration Association arbitration between Northrop and
Khashoggi.
The arbitration was to take place in Los Angeles. The arbitrators included
Mike DiSalle, a former governor of Ohio, I think, James Finch, I think I have that
name right, retired chief judge of the High Court of Missouri, and the third
arbitrator was Telford Taylor, professor of international law at I think then
Columbia, but importantly to me historically, one of the original prosecutors at
Nuremberg.
MR. ROCAP: That is a remarkable panel and might be intimidating to some people.
MR. HIBEY: Arbitrations have a different rhythm to them. I easily parked any anxiety outside
the arena. It became kind of an intimate setting because we’re just talking to each
other in the way we, you and I, are now conversion.
My adversary was the Dean of the California bar, a man by the name of
Joe Ball. Joe Ball, as I remember, at some point in time was the lawyer for the
Warren Commission that investigated the Kennedy assassination. I hope I have
that right anyway. We spent a month out there. Our team included in the hearing
room two senior partners who had easily ten years on me in age, both really
brilliant lawyers, outstanding in their field, which was international law, who
were largely responsible for the international expertise of the Surrey firm. They
had handled mediations in the past, arbitrations I assume as well, but those were
settled. That’s what happened. This one wouldn’t settle, so they added me to the
team, and I was one of the three of us who were in the hearing room every day.
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There came a time when the parties had to deliver final arguments. I had
wrangled with Joe Ball. I was allowed to handle the courtroom hearing room
objections. There was this back and forth that established my involvement in the
case. When final argument rolled around, the senior on the team announced that
he’d be ready to make the final argument. That was not my call, but then again,
for somebody like myself, any opportunity to deliver a final argument is a choice
moment. So we started final arguments, and the case was passed to us for our
final argument. The senior got up and began and had great difficulty pulling it all
together. It was something he’d never done, and this is the thing that was
important for me on a number of different levels. When we got in the car to go
back to the hotel, there was silence, broken by the senior, who basically said, “I
didn’t do the job. I have a problem. This has never happened.” I immediately told
him, it was because he was probably exhausted from trying to pull everything
together because it’s a real challenge. By the time the ride to the hotel was over,
he passed the baton to me. The general counsel of Northrop was in the car, and he
said that he thought that was a good solution and that tomorrow Dick ought to
take over the argument. That was what happened. Not before I spent the entire
night awake reviewing the evidence to get myself ready for the final argument.
MR. ROCAP: When you presented final argument the next day, how long did the argument go
on?
MR. HIBEY: It went on several hours, during which I got a coughing jag and I could not stop it.
So they took a recess. The transcript as I remember says in the middle of my final
argument “(health break).” That was the entirety of the recordation of my
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coughing jag. The host arbitrating facility brought me a cup of hot water and it
broke the jag, and I was able to continue, and we did.
MR. ROCAP: What was the outcome?
MR. HIBEY: The $37 million that we posited. We agreed to that, not a penny more. That’s
what was awarded.
MR. ROCAP: That must have been satisfying, being able to do that. What were your feelings
after you finished the argument and then ultimately won the case?
MR. HIBEY: Probably not in sync with humility. It didn’t trouble me that I should be thrown
into the thing. After all, I was very much a part of the case throughout and my
newly developed genes were always toward closing the deal, so to speak, in final
argument. I was not out of my element, so I thought. I didn’t think about it too
much.
MR. ROCAP: That’s a theme that we’ve talked about from the beginning how things like this
had really not intimidated you even from the time you were giving your speeches
in high school and then in college and so on, and here you are in your mid-to late-
30s, a multi-hundred-million-dollar case, it was real money back in the 1970s,
being thrown into an argument and then performing well, and then winning.
MR. HIBEY: Well yes, but I guess it goes with not being caught up in the frenzy of the
moment. Too many people were depending upon me as a lawyer. I couldn’t let
them down. It’s pretty, what’s the right word, instinctual? Primordial? I never
really submitted it to a more complicated view.
MR. ROCAP: It’s simply in your DNA.
MR. HIBEY: Maybe.
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