B6 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 , 2019
obituaries
BY HARRISON SMITHDavid A. Jones Sr., a Kentucky
lawyer who turned a $1,000 in-
vestment into America’s largest
nursing-home chain, then trans-
formed his business into a hospi-
tal giant and finally into the
$37 billion health insurance cor-
poration Humana, died Sept. 18 in
Louisville. He was 88.
Mr. Jones was the chief execu-
tive of Louisville-based Humana
until 1997 and served as chairman
for 44 years, retiring in 2005 only
after reaching the company’s 73-
year-old age limit for board mem-
bers. Humana announced his
death in a statement, and spokes-
man Jim Turner cited complica-
tions from multiple myeloma as a
cause.
Raised in poverty on the west
side of Louisville, Mr. Jones was a
Golden Gloves boxer turned pugi-
listic executive whose take-no-
prisoners business style helped
make Humana one of the coun-
try’s biggest for-profit hospital
chains and eventually a health
insurance colossus.
But he was also known as a
generous philanthropist in his
hometown. He co-owned the for-
mer Kentucky Colonels basket-
ball team, worked to bolster pub-
lic education, helped raise
$120 million to build a 3,700-acre
park system and influenced state
and local politics from his office in
Humana’s 27-story headquarters,
a granite skyscraper dubbed “the
pink cash register.”
In a statement, Senate Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)
described Mr. Jones as “the single
most influential friend and men-
tor I’ve had in my entire career,”
adding: “I’ve never forgotten
something he told me when I was
starting out in Jefferson County:
‘The most important word in the
English language is focus.’ ”
For decades, Mr. Jones was one
half of a corporate odd couple,
locked in what he described as a
professional marriage with his
friend Wendell Cherry, who
served as a president and chief
operating officer of Humana be-
fore his death in 1991. Mr. Jones
was considered the visionary,
Cherry the pragmatist.
The duo met while working at
the Louisville law firm Wyatt,Grafton & Sloss, where Mr. Jones
was one day surprised by a con-
versation with a once-impover-
ished client, now preparing to buy
a mansion. “It turned out he
owned a nursing home,” Mr. J ones
later told Forbes, “so we decided
to build one ourselves.”
Securing $1,000 in financing,
Mr. Jones joined Cherry and four
friends in constructing a 78-bed
nursing home in 1961. Somewhat
ominously, their chief nurse fell
sick shortly before it opened, forc-
ing the two lead business partners
and their wives to empty bedpans
in the business’s early days, ac-
cording to the Louisville Courier-
Journal.With the passage of Medicare
and Medicaid, nursing homes be-
came increasingly popular, and
Mr. Jones and Cherry built or
acquired about 40 other facilities
over the next decade. Deeming
the market oversaturated, Mr.
Jones and his partner tried devel-
oping trailer parks.
Mobile homes proved a bust.
But with hospitals, their company
— then known as Extendicare —
began to take off. They built or
acquired about 40 hospitals in
seven years. then abandoned the
nursing-home sector altogether.
Renaming themselves Humana
in 1974, they took on debt to
compete with burgeoning for-
profit health-care operators such
as Hospital Corp. of America,
while a ttaching their name to hos-
pitals such as Humana Hospital-
Audubon in Louisville.
It was there, in 1984, that Wil-
liam C. DeVries performed the
world’s s econd artificial-heart im-
plant, in a public relations coup
for Humana. The company vault-
ed to international prominence,
amid a wave of positive news
media coverage that diminished
only slightly after the patient suf-
fered strokes and complications,
dying after 620 days.
Mr. Jones went on to draw
praise for his company’s central-
ized operations and medical tech-
nology, and he boasted that Hu-
mana was the lowest-cost health-
care company in the country. But
he drew increasing criticism from
rivals and peers for his hard-
charging style, and for the compa-
ny’s i nescapable influence in Ken-
tucky. Humana took over the Uni-
versity of Louisville’s teaching
hospital — and reportedly turned
a profit for the first time in years,
without turning away indigent
patients.
“The company’s philosophytoward their competitors is, ‘We’ ll
run over them, or through them,
or around them.’ It’s almost a
Vince Lombardi thing,” Richard
M. Abell, administrator of St. An-
thony Hospital in Louisville, told
The Washington Post i n 1985. “It’s
almost like they want to own the
city. I liken it to the old coal-min-
ing company towns.”
Mr. Jones found mixed success
stepping into the health insur-
ance market in 1984, with a strat-
egy to offer insurance plans to
patients Humana later served in
hospitals. But after spinning off
its hospitals as a separate compa-ny, Galen Health Care, in 1993, its
insurance business soared. Rev-
enue grew from $3.7 billion in
1994 to $13.1 billion when Mr.
Jones retired as chairman.
His tenure was not without
controversy, notably at a 1991 con-
gressional hearing in which Hu-
mana came under fire for billing
patients $103.65 for a pair of
crutches that cost $8.35, among
other high markups. Investiga-
tors described the exorbitant pric-
es as typical of health-care provid-
ers across the country, and Mr.
Jones defended his company’s
overall pricing policies, while not-ing Humana had posted a record
profit the previous year.
In interviews and business
roundtables, he was often called
upon to defend for-profit health
care. Mr. Jones preferred the term
“taxpaying” when describing his
business. “The notion that being
nonprofit adds some kind of
weight to what you do is baloney,”
he said, according to the Courier-
Journal. “Whoever is not paying
taxes on profits has the moral
issue, not those of us who are
paying taxes.”
David Allen Jones was born in
Louisville on Aug. 7, 1931. His
father was a contractor, his moth-
er a schoolteacher.
Mr. Jones attended the Univer-
sity of Louisville on a Navy ROTC
scholarship, studying accounting.
He graduated in 1954, served in
the Navy and then taught eco-
nomics at Quinnipiac College in
Hamden, Conn. He received his
law degree from Yale University in
1960 and soon returned to Louis-
ville.
After stepping down from his
day-to-day duties at Humana, Mr.
Jones returned in 1999 to work as
interim chief executive for six
months, amid a stock skid of
40 percent that year. His son Da-
vid A. Jones Jr. chaired the com-
pany for five years after Mr.
Jones’s retirement, and in 2015
Humana agreed to be acquired by
Aetna for $37 billion. A federal
judge later blocked the deal, say-
ing that it would hurt competition
and raise prices for consumers.
Mr. Jones married Betty Ash-
bury in 1954, and she died last
month. In addition to his son
David, survivors include four oth-
er children, Sue, Dan, Matt and
Carol Jones; a brother; a sister;
and 11 grandchildren.
Even as his company’s stock
price soared in the 1980s, Mr.
Jones maintained a relatively
modest lifestyle, riding a Honda
Civic to work. “I never set out to be
a corporate mogul,” he told The
Post i n 1985. “I guess what I want-
ed was independence. I achieved
financial independence, but
when you take on responsibility,
independence is hard to pre-
serve.”
[email protected]DAVID A. JONES SR., 88
Built Humana into a giant
of health-insurance industry
1998 PHOTO BY BRIAN BOHANNON/ASSOCIATED PRESS
David A. Jones’s $37 billion company, Humana, began as a chain of
nursing homes. Humana drew praise for its medical technology
and criticism for its all-encompassing influence in Kentucky.CORRECTIONl The Sept. 17 o bituary of Mexican
artist Francisco To ledo incorrect-
ly reported that the word “grillo”
is Zapotec for cricket, relying on a
2004 interview with Mr. To ledo in
the journal Geographical. Grillo
is Spanish, not Zapotec.“I’ve never forgotten
something he told
me... ‘The most
important word in the
English language is
focus.’ ”
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.),
in a statement describing his friend
and mentor David A. Jones Sr.BY BART BARNESJames Robertson, a federal
judge who drew national atten-
tion for his ruling on the rights of
a foreign detainee in U.S. custody
at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and
his resignation from a judicial
surveillance panel to protest war-
rantless federal wiretapping, died
Sept. 7 at a hospital in Washing-
ton. He was 81.
The cause was a heart ailment,
said a son, Stephen Robertson.
Judge Robertson was a U.S.
District Court judge in Washing-
ton from 1994 to 2010. His resig-
nation from the Foreign Intelli-
gence Surveillance Court in 2005,
three years into his appointment,
followed media revelations that
the Bush administration had by-
passed the court by failing to
obtain warrants in its gathering
of information from U.S. electron-
ic communications carriers in its
war on terrorism.
The administration’s actions
came at a time of heightened
anxiety over national security
that followed the 9/11 terrorist
attacks in New York and Washing-
ton. To the Bush administration,
the warrantless wiretapping
practice was “the terrorist sur-
veillance program.”
Before serving on the federal
bench, he was a corporate lawyer
from 1965 to 1994 with the Wash-
ington firm now known as
WilmerHale. Among his early as-
signments was representing the
Automobile Manufacturer’s A sso-
ciation in the wake of car safety
violations uncovered by consum-
er activist Ralph Nader.
In 1969, he took a leave from
the firm to run the Jackson, Miss.,
office of the Lawyers’ Committee
for Civil Rights Under Law, a
Washington-based nonprofit
group that brings private lawyers
in campaigns for civil and human
rights.
Judge Robertson described
himself in an oral history for
Columbia University as a “del-
egate from the establishment. I
came from a recognized firm. I
wasn’t a radical. I wasn’t a long-
haired hippie. I understood au-
thority and how it worked.”
Some of his most important
cases, he said, were low-profile
and set no universal legal prec-
edent but related directly to
workaday life and injustice in the
rural South.
“In one case,” he said, “a black
minister was charged with con-
tributing to the delinquency of a
minor because he appeared at t he
door of the jail with his Sunday
school choir to ask about a black
man that he had heard was being
beaten in the jail.
“The jailer then arrested him
and his whole choir,” Judge Rob-
ertson continued, “put them in
the jailhouse upstairs, maced
them through the bars of the jail
— they opened the windows and
started singing ‘We Shall Over-
come,’ crowds gathered in the
courthouse, the highway patrol
were called in to keep order, and
the denouement of all this was a
charge of contributing to the de-
linquency of a minor, a 12-year-
old girl — to wit, by ‘causing her to
be in a bad place,’ namely, the jail.
“That case, believe it or not,
went to trial,” he added. “A nd, of
course, the minister was convict-
ed, but we got it reversed on
appeal.”
Another case, he said, involved
the time-honored stratagem of
getting the right jury and a twist
on a line from the English poet
Alexander Pope, “Wretches hang
that jurymen may dine.”
The matter involved a black
defendant charged with assault to
kill a sheriff’s deputy and a jury —
of two blacks and 10 whites — that
began considering the case
around Thanksgiving.
“ ‘If we have to be here until
Easter, we’re going to be here
until Easter, We’re voting to ac-
quit,’ ” Judge Robertson quoted
the black jurors as having said.
“They out-waited the white folks.... The white folks all said, ‘Oh, to
hell with it. We’ll vote to acquit.’ ”
Such cases, Judge Robertson
said, could become “a catalyst for
community organization. All civil
rights movements are local....
They were town by town, county
by county.”
After three years in Mississip-
pi, Judge Robertson returned to
his firm in Washington and be-
came partner in 1973. He would
remember those years in the
South as defining elements in his
legal career. As president of the
D.C. Bar Association in 1991 and
1992, he helped establish a proc-
ess for the hiring of young minori-
ty lawyers by the white-shoe law
firms.
President Bill Clinton appoint-
ed him to the federal bench in
1994. A decade into his tenure, he
ruled in a major case regarding a
Yemeni prisoner, Salim Ahmed
Hamdan, who was being held at
the U.S. military detention center
at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.
Hamdan, a chauffeur for al-Qae-
da terrorist leader Osama bin
Laden, had been seized during
the American invasion of Afghan-
istan and imprisoned by the U.S.
military.A military tribunal designated
Hamdan an enemy combatant,
even as Hamdan challenged his
detention with a writ of habeas
petition before Judge Robertson’s
court. The judge ruled in Ham-
dan’s favor, saying the govern-
ment had neglected to determine
if Hamdan was a prisoner of war,
as required by the Geneva Con-ventions, before trying him by the
commission.
The U.S. Supreme Court up-
held Judge Robertson’s ruling in
2006 in a decision largely focused
on whether the president or Con-
gress had explicit authorization
or inherent power to establish a
military commission with the
right to try those charged with
war crimes in the post-9/11 war on
terrorism.
Although Hamdan was later
tried and convicted under new
rules, he was released to Yemen in
2008.
In 2002, Chief Justice William
H. Rehnquist named Judge Rob-
ertson to the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court, a secretive in-
telligence court of 11 judges that
authorizes surveillance on U.S.
soil if a target is shown to be an
agent of a foreign power.
The court was created in 1978
in the wake of revelations of abus-
es involving domestic spying by
U.S. intelligence and law enforce-
ment agencies, as a way to bal-
ance privacy and civil liberties
against national security impera-
tives.
The 2001 al-Qaeda-sponsored
attacks on the United States,
which killed nearly 3,000 people,sparked a renewed urgency to
fight international terrorism by
any means possible, including the
hunt for communications records
that might help federal agents
connect dots and prevent another
catastrophe.
After his resignation, Judge
Robertson spoke critically of how
the court’s mission had strayed
from its straightforward duty to
approve or turn down a warrant
application, particularly after
Congress passed amendments in
2008 to the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act, which had set
up the court. The new legislation
allowed the government to con-
duct domestic surveillance with-
out warrants in some cases and
granted the court interpretive
powers.
“That change, in my view,
turned the FISA court into some-
thing like an administrative agen-
cy that makes rules for others to
follow,” Judge Robertson said at
an oversight hearing in 2013.
“That’s not the bailiwick of judg-
es. Judges don’t make policy.”
At the hearing, some critics of
the surveillance court said the
judges were largely Republican
appointees who acted as a rubber
stamp for the national securitycommunity. Hearings consisted
of government lawyers and the
judges, and Judge Robertson was
among those suggesting that the
process had become too one-
sided.
“A nyone who has been a judge
will tell you a judge needs to hear
both sides of a case before decid-
ing,” J udge Robertson said. “This
process needs an adversary.”
In 2015, Congress passed the
USA Freedom Act, which empow-
ered the court to appoint “amicus
curiae,” o r individuals with exper-
tise in privacy and civil liberties,
telecommunications or any area
that may assist the judge in cases
involving a “novel or significant
interpretation” of the law.
James Robertson was born in
Cleveland on May 18, 1938, and
grew up in Oberlin, Ohio, and
Dayton, Ohio. His father was a
banker, and his mother a social
worker. He graduated from
Princeton University in 1959,
served in the Navy and received a
law degree from George Washing-
ton University in 1965.
In 1959 he married Berit Pers-
son. In addition to his wife, of
Washington, survivors include
three children, Stephen Robert-
son of Los Altos, Calif., Catherine
Robertson of Washington and Pe-
ter Robertson of Cleveland; a twin
sister; and six grandchildren.
Away from the courtroom,
Judge Robertson was an amateur
photographer, a singer and guitar
player, a sailor, and a do-it-your-
self handyman who made book-
cases and other household items.
Thirty-three young lawyers
clerked for him during his years
as a judge and they remained
lifelong friends. He presided at
the weddings of eight of his for-
mer law clerks, including one
nuptial where both bride and
groom had been his clerks.
“I think of this as an arranged
marriage. I arranged it,” he said at
the time.
[email protected]JAMES ROBERTSON, 81
Fe deral judge resigned in stand against warrantless wiretapping
CLIFF OWEN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Former Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge James Robertson testifies July 9 , 2013, in
Washington before the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. In 2 005, Judge Robertson had
resigned from the court in protest following media revelations over warrantless surveillance.“That change, in my
view, turned the FISA
court into something
like an administrative
agency that makes rules
for others to follow.”
Judge James RobertsonUPLOADED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws