The Hon. Horace Kornegay: When Things Don’t Work Out

Horace Kornegay’s last job was with my first law firm in Greensboro, NC. He had been the district’s representative to the U.S. Congress for eight years in the 1960s. After that, he had been president and counsel for, wait for it, The Tobacco Institute, Inc., a lobbying group for guess-who, from 1969-86.

Then he joined my firm as Of Counsel, a title given to old guys who aren’t expected to work an awful lot but are expected to produce a lot of business. Though in truth I was Of Counsel to a boutique software firm in Belltown, and all I did was work. Produce business? For me, the term just indicated that I was too old to be an associate and too inconsequential to be a partner.

The day the Greensboro firm announced Horace’s hiring to the rest of us, the joy amongst the partnership was undiluted. A former U.S. Congressman! A president of the Tobacco Institute! He knew everyone! Everyone loved him! He was going to produce so much business we’d have to staff up. Yay! Partners literally bounced around the halls on their toes, grinning and waving coffee cups at each other.

A young corporate partner, the firm’s first female partner, Betsy White, claimed that she was fired up over the hire, that it would energize the firm. Betsy wasn’t much older than I was, and she was profane, irreverent, and a Greek Yankee. She couldn’t have been so excited about an old dinosaur whose last gig had been, very publicly, with a tobacco lobbying firm. I’m sure she was just spouting the firm’s party line. We make compromises, don’t we? I could hear the lie in Betsy’s ardent tone, truly.

Betsy liked to work, especially at 2 a.m. on a Saturday night when she held me captive working on real estate limited partnership offerings. She often had two cigarettes going at once. Poor Betsy, all that work, and then she died of the same brain aneurysm that felled her brother a few years earlier. God bless you, Betsy.

I wasn’t as enthusiastic about the Hon. Mr. Kornegay. Horace was an old southerner whose time had passed. He had departed the U.S. Congress 18 years before. His presidency of the Tobacco Institute couldn’t bode well—it was 1987, and the country’s views were changing, even in North Carolina. Farmers had begun planting asparagus in the sandy soil instead. I was uneasy about the prospects.

Anyway, Horace dutifully showed up every day and stalked the halls. He’d puff on a cigarette as he headed who knows where. I know that I usually encountered him going in the general direction of the men’s room, so maybe that was it.

He was engaging: He’d walk down the hall, slightly hunched over, his bright brown eyes on you like a politician, puff his cigarette, smile and greet you, “Hey, Buddy Roo.” Then he’d walk on. (“I didn’t know we had so many lawyers named Buddy-Roo,” one young tax partner said.) There didn’t appear to be a particle of meanness in him. I was a little afraid of him; how much power did he have to have to have landed this gig? So I just smiled back and kept on.

I dimly recall him being in meetings, and certainly partners went to his office, sat down, and consulted him. He was on the phone some, always puffing on a cigarette.

In the late 80’s in North Carolina, this was accepted practice. One of the partners had a sign, “Thank You For Smoking”, posted unironically in his office. He did labor work—countering union activity, I imagine, though I wasn’t much a party to that—for the American Tobacco Company, and he smoked a pipe constantly. He died of a heart attack at 70. Not preaching, just telling the facts.

I still recall a colleague, Michael Gioffre, still allowed to smoke an occasional cigarette in his office at AIG when I began there in the very early 90’s. In fact, he choked on a cigarette one day. Henry Kunkemueller, an actuary, a graduate of Yale, and one of Wilmington, DE’s elite, caught Michael and me talking, and so he stopped in and went on endlessly about people and events that meant nothing to Michael and me. Something about how he and Nat Brosius went and did this or that.

At that point, I barely knew Henry, but I still wanted to say, Henry, don’t you have some work to do? Apparently not. When he finally left, I said, “Christ, I thought we were going to have to feign a homosexual act to get him out of here.” Thus Michael choking on his cancer stick.

Later, but too early on in my time at AIG for me to have been involved in something so weighty, I got assigned to deal with some pretty scandalous activity involving Henry. We were going to sue someone over a piece of business he was involved in. (It was a young department, and as I was the only lawyer who’d ever been in a courtroom, it was mine to deal with.)

But I could never get a consistent set of facts out of him to write a coherent complaint. I’d confirm, So then this and that happened? And once again he’d pause, say, “Well, not really,” and create a whole different set of facts. I finally got mad enough at him that my boss Robert had to intercede with what he usually said in my defense: “Henry, George is just doing his job.”

The problem was that it appeared that Henry had constructed a fake insurance policy. Something like how the premiums next year would equal the claims this year, perhaps, just a sham. The crisis played itself out when I was in an office in Manhattan with about seven higher ups and we had Henry on the phone in Wilmington, and a really nasty lawyer named Pat Foley was questioning Henry closely. Finally Foley squeaked in his New York Irish accent, “Was this a circle jerk, Henry? Did we get dribbled on?” All of the males except me snickered.

I couldn’t believe that in the world I’d landed in a senior lawyer would say such a thing. In any event, it brought Henry to his knees, so to speak, and the crisis went away when the head of AIG, Mr. Greenberg (see post dated November 12, 2019), met with our potential defendant and intimidated him into some sort of settlement.

I don’t recall what happened to Henry. Probably I never knew; that was true of people at AIG. One financial guy with a murky portfolio, a very nice guy but a Republican who celebrated the 1994 mid-terms too vociferously for my taste, was suddenly gone one day. So was Henry. He’s probably wrapping pale blue scarves around himself these days.

Anyway, back to Horace, who as I say joined the firm in 1987. I left in 1988. I assume he was still there when I left, but I have no memory of him. I don’t know when he retired; I wasn’t invited to that party. (I’m joking.) He died in 2009 at 84—amazing, after all that smoking.

Sometime later, I think it was a young partner with whom I remained friends who said, “I’m not aware that Horace ever brought in any business at all.”

So that didn’t work out; I was actually right about that one.

What’s the connection between Henry Kunkemueller and Horace Kornegay? The moral of this story: old white men who grow useless in their dotage do go away, sometimes suddenly. But despite their lack of usefulness, or their positive ability to cause trouble, they’re just finally, after great delays, gone, and the waves crash over them pretty quickly. Some of us have the sense to get out before we’re disappeared, but we suffer the same fate: no one remembers us.

The Hon. Horace Kornegay (D-Tobacco)