Administering BP Fund, a Master Mediator

Kenneth R. Feinberg was special master for the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund.

From The New York Times:

Kenneth R. Feinberg bristled when reporters dubbed him the compensation czar for his Treasury Department job monitoring executive pay at companies that received government bailouts. The term, he lamented to ABC News last year, “makes it sound like I’m going to issue some imperial decree.”

Mr. Feinberg, named Wednesday by President Obama as the independent administrator of a $20 billion fund set up by BP to compensate victims of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, may not have the powers of a king. But he does seem to specialize in Solomon-like decisions.

Over the course of his long career as a mediator, he has helped settle a variety of thorny disputes, including a class-action suit by Vietnam veterans protesting the use of the chemical defoliant Agent Orange, and a determination of the fair market value of the Zapruder film of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

At the Treasury Department, he has repeatedly slashed the pay of Wall Street and auto company executives, confronting outraged citizens and bankers alike.

“He has an enormously thick skin,” said his law partner, Michael Rozen.

Mr. Feinberg, 64, is perhaps best known as special master of the federal September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, which distributed nearly $7 billion to more than 5,000 survivors and families of victims. He presided personally over hundreds of hearings, a role that required him to grapple with the deepest sort of human pain and make agonizing decisions about the value of each life lost, a task he recounted in a 2005 memoir, “What Is a Life Worth?”