Mr Mansour Goes to Washington

In conversation with Mark Mansour.

Mark Mansour spent twenty-five years in rooms where the rules were being written, bent and sometimes broken — advising Fortune 500 companies on regulatory strategy, moving between FDA, EPA, Kraft, Kellogg and the corridors of corporate America. He was the lawyer who knew where the lines were and was paid to keep clients from crossing them. When they crossed them anyway, he was  the one who read from the autopsy report.

Eventually, he walked away. This conversation is about what he saw in those rooms, what it cost him to stay as long as he did, and what he's doing now that he's out. Along the way: growing up Lebanese-American in Pittsburgh, living in Beirut before the war, and a career that took stranger turns than most.

Mark doesn't hedge. He is, as he'd be the first to tell you, not that kind of lawyer.

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Want more between essays and episodes? Check out Below the Fold — shorter dispatches on the stories worth paying attention to, from the people in my own backyard to the forces reshaping the wider world.

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Credits:

Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson

Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs

Music: Ilya Kuznetsov

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

He said, Why would I go to jail? I said, because you were supposed to have done a recall, you didn't do it, and then somebody died. That's strict liability. You are liable for what happened no matter what the approval status of your product was.

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Welcome to all that I've met. I'm Meredith, and today I'm delighted to be joined by Mark Mansoor, a longtime Democratic activist and attorney who for more than two decades sat in rooms where the rules were being written, bent, and sometimes broken. Mark spent his career advising Fortune 500 companies on regulatory strategy, working for some of the most prestigious law firms in Washington and his in-house counsel at Kraft and Kellogg. And then, a few years ago, walked away from it all to launch a Substack and podcast on American politics. I'm keen to find out why.

SPEAKER_01 0:49

Mark, welcome. Meredith, it's great to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

SPEAKER_00 0:53

I want to set the stage a bit, Mark. You grew up in Pittsburgh in a bilingual household speaking English and Arabic, with a father determined to stay connected to his Lebanese heritage, which I suspect wasn't an uncomplicated thing in 1960s America, and probably wouldn't be an uncomplicated thing in 2026 America, to be honest. But I'm guessing there are complexities around growing up with a dual identity that might make you more aware of how you're perceived. There's a story you told me about something that happened when you were about 11 years old, the week after Robert Kennedy was shot. Could you talk about that?

SPEAKER_01 1:30

It was early June and it was the beginning of baseball season. And I played Little League. I was the second baseman. And I went to pick up my uniform at the sporting goods store that was responsible for handing out the uniforms to the Little Leaguers. And I walked in and I said, Mr. Jackson, I'm here to pick up my uniform. He didn't say a word. He went and got the uniform and fired it right at me. And I was shocked. And I said, Why did you do that? He said, Here you go, Sir Han. Enjoy your uniform. And I broke down crying. So I went back to the house and told my mother what happened, reluctantly, because she wanted to know why I was crying. And she was livid. She marched out of the house and went to Mr. Jackson's shop. And she said, How dare you throw that uniform in that child's face and call him Sir Han. He never did a thing to you. He never did a thing to Robert Kennedy. We weren't responsible for what happened. And it's grossly unfair and grossly immoral for you to do what you did. And from then on, Mr. Jackson could not have been nicer to us. I think she gave him a piece of her mind, or several pieces, to be honest. And I learned a lesson that there was really nothing that I could do about my Arab heritage. I was Lebanese, Sarhan was Palestinian. That didn't matter to people. I was an Arab. And I got chased by a bunch of kids that day as well. And I outran them. But they would have beaten the hell out of me, I think, if they'd caught me.

SPEAKER_00 2:58

That's a really intense experience for a young boy. And I'm curious, you know, as a child to have experienced power exercised against you in the ugliest way. Did it make you angry or did it make you careful?

SPEAKER_01 3:14

It made me angry. Not so much careful. I was proud of my heritage. My father taught me how to be proud of my heritage. And I wasn't going to succumb to that sort of treatment. So I fought back with words. And I think I turned a lot of people on to the idea that, you know, that there were issues in the Middle East that were very sensitive and they were very difficult. And that being Lebanese did not necessarily mean that I was a terrorist. In fact, it meant didn't mean that I was a terrorist at all. It hurt, but I was able to kind of overcome the pain by just thinking rationally and realizing that they didn't know any better. And it was my job to educate them.

SPEAKER_00 3:53

A few years after that, your family moved to Beirut, and you described those years as two of the best years of my life. What was it about Beirut that got under your skin and affected you so deeply?

SPEAKER_01 4:05

It was the Paris of the Middle East. It was a beautiful city, a beautiful country, really. And there was so much going on. We had spies from every country in the world. Arafat would hang out at a coffee shop down the street and we'd see him in his entourage regularly. That's not to say that I was approving of him, but he was there. And it was sort of a lesson in world politics, having those spies in Arafat and various Palestinian groups and the Lebanese. And it was really a precursor to the Lebanese war, which ultimately chased us out. But I loved it because it was a different culture, but it was my own culture at the same time. And I could go around the country and pass for a Lebanese because I was by origin. And I learned to speak Arabic. And I think that enriched my experience tremendously because I was able to interact with the Lebanese on a level that I think made me proud and made me happy to be part of the culture. People treated me like a local. And I enjoyed that. I enjoyed having fun with my friends at the American Community School. I met people from all over the world. We had Americans there, mainly Americans, but we had people from other countries as well. And that taught me how to be a citizen of the world, because that's really what we were in Beirut, all of us, citizens of the world. We also had fun at the beach. We had fun skiing. We had fun traveling around the country. It was just a unique environment, very different than the United States, but at the same time cosmopolitan, cultured, and very reminiscent of Europe.

SPEAKER_00 5:35

Absolutely. So when you came back to America after a few years, after being in that culturally rich environment and vibrancy, as you said, the Paris of the Middle East, what hit you first?

SPEAKER_01 5:47

We went over in 70 and came back in 73. So, you know, at that point, a month before we got back in September, the war broke out in the Middle East, the Yom Kippur War. It taught me again that nothing was easy in this respect, that I had to live with my heritage and it was what it was. But it made me wonder whether or not I was truly fit to be in either culture, that I was kind of in between, that I was in some nether world that really wasn't completely American or completely Lebanese. And it took a while to get over that.

SPEAKER_00 6:20

I'm sure, but almost immediately you were making a really big decision, choosing where to go to university and what to study. And you chose Georgetown School of Foreign Service. I'm guessing your experience abroad was a factor, as well as your father.

SPEAKER_01 6:36

Well, the decision to go to the foreign service was his. So I did. And I'd loved every minute of it. It was just such an enriching experience because we had a curriculum that was the first two years was mandatory courses in politics and economics and diplomatic history and international business and various other things. So I just got an education that was unique.

SPEAKER_00 6:57

Yeah, it is a unique curriculum. And like many others who've gone to SFS, it kept you in Washington. You went to work on Capitol Hill for David Bonnier. You were 23 years old, knocking around the halls of Congress.

SPEAKER_01 7:10

Well, it was a thrill to walk into that building every day. I mean, the idea of being in Washington, I still hadn't still hadn't gotten over it, even after four years of college. I mean, I was actually advising a congressman and telling him what I thought. And he took it under consideration and actually listened to me. And that was a very heady thing for a 23-year-old. Very heady.

SPEAKER_00 7:28

Did you get exposed to agency work and regulatory issues?

SPEAKER_01 7:33

I did. FDA and EPA were part of my beat. So I was involved in FDA work for quite some time while I was up there. For a little while, I did foreign policy as well because of my background. I was a Kennedy kid and I grew up wanting to get into public service. So it was really exciting being involved in that. And I did two years of it. This is still an area that I love, politics. It's one that I would love getting into, but I've had two years and it's enough. And so I applied to Harvard to graduate school and I got in.

SPEAKER_00 8:04

So off you go to Harvard, to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. What was your plan?

SPEAKER_01 8:09

I thought it would be an opportunity to become a professor first and foremost. And I got disillusioned somewhere in the middle of my experience when I was a TA. And a kid wrote a really bad essay. He didn't answer the question at all. And I remember there was one passage where he said, and when we get to our analysis, and I finally snapped. And I drew a line from the text to the margin, and I said, whenever that might happen. And it was kind of cynical, and I probably shouldn't have done it, but I did it. And I got to the end, and I gave him a C minus. And I said, I gave you a C minus because although you write well, you didn't even come close to answering the question. And it was clear you didn't know the material. So he complained to the professor. And the professor told me, Mark, you cannot give C minuses to kids at Harvard. And I said, Why the hell not? He said, Because we just don't do that here. Once they get in, they're expected to perform, but we're also expected to treat them as if they were, you know, what they are, very intelligent students. I said, but how does giving somebody a C minus for not performing detract from that? He said, it's just what we do. And I said to myself, well, that's not what I do. He ended up giving him a B plus. And that caused me to decide that I just did not want to be a professor.

SPEAKER_00 9:23

That's quite a story. Some would say maybe explains a lot in the current political context. So what did you do?

SPEAKER_01 9:31

What a lot of my classmates did at Georgetown, go to law school. So I went to law school in Georgetown. I wanted to come back to Washington. I missed it. I still love this city. I've lived here most of my adult life and I still enjoy it. But the bottom line really was that I decided that I could maybe make a difference being a lawyer. And so I got interviewed by several firms. And it was an interesting decision I made. I made the decision to go into corporate law because I wanted to go back to Detroit and run for office. And I thought that was the easiest path to get there. And my parents were there and I wanted to spend some time with them.

SPEAKER_00 10:07

So you go to Detroit. What was your experience there?

SPEAKER_01 10:11

Well, I became a litigator, and within a couple of years, I woke up one morning and I started shaving, and I was thinking, you know, I hope both sides lose its case because they were both despicable as far as I was concerned. I didn't enjoy the work very much. I found it to be sort of stolifying and at times depressing. I decided I'd activate my dreams and run for office in 1990. And I was recruited by a few Democrats in Michigan to run for a seat that was being held by a Republican in a Republican district. I was very hesitant to run in that district, but the problem was all of the Democrats in the districts surrounding Detroit and outside of Detroit were all lifers. They were in office forever. None of them ever left. So I had no opportunity to get an empty seat that was being left by a Democrat because they weren't leaving. So I was left with this unappetizing opportunity to run in a Republican district that no Democrat had ever won. So I took some money that I had and commissioned some polling with the help of the Democratic Party in Michigan. And I polled very poorly among men. The way the polling was done was it would say candidate X believes X, Y, and Z. You know, what's your view on that? And the men really didn't like my positions at all. I was very liberal, very progressive. A lot of women did, though. I did better among women.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 11:29

But the numbers were not enough to surmount the odds. And I decided I wasn't going to go begging for money, which was the worst part of it. And the guy that ultimately did run was convinced he'd win. I told him, you're not going to get more than 39% of the vote. That's what my polling tells me. He got 39% of the vote.

SPEAKER_00 11:44

Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 11:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:46

Back in the day when polling was accurate, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 11:48

It was much more accurate, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:50

So had you left the law firm by then? What came next?

SPEAKER_01 11:54

I continued practicing law, enjoying it less and less every day. And I decided that I would like to work for a company. So I started putting out feelers with headhunters to see if I could get in with a company that I could be a regulatory lawyer and go back and draw on my FDA experience. Well, ho and behold, a headhunter that I was working with knew an international headhunter. And she came to her and said, Do you know anybody who's multilingual, that has a background in FDA law, that would be interested in going overseas and working for Kraft? She said, I do. So she talked to me and I said, Hell yes, let's do it. So the headhunter had me flown over to Switzerland to meet with Kraft and they made me an offer. And I was audacious at the point. I didn't think it was enough money to warrant uprooting my life. So I asked for double and they gave it to me without even blinking, which made me wonder whether I should ask for three times as much. But I wasn't going to get greedy. I accepted it and did quite well. I traveled from country to country in Europe. And then because of my Arabic, I was assigned to Dubai to cover the Middle East. And the work I did was basically advising companies on regulate regulatory strategy, on how to get legislation changed, on how to deal with regulations and how to conform with regulations in other countries in a way that was consistent with the law, but at the same time allowed them flexibility to work. And I enjoyed it. The regulatory people in these companies really genuinely wanted to do the right thing. What year was this? This was back in 92 and 93. There was a push toward reducing pollutants. So, you know, later on there were other programs that supported the arts and that supported sciences and supported public television and things like that. They would contribute to good causes. I enjoyed that part of it. In general, I just got the sense that people were doing the right thing by the public, by their customers, and by the regulators.

SPEAKER_00 13:50

Eventually, you came back and after some time in Michigan, returned to Washington.

SPEAKER_01 13:55

So I came back to Washington. And they decided to stay. So it was an opportunity to do regulatory law. The lawyers that worked in the regulatory area were very much products of FDA. They were people that were in FDA, and they were not inclined to advise clients to find a way around the regulations. And I found that to be really refreshing, working with people who had been in FDA, who believed in the culture at FDA, and who were more inclined to steer clients toward the right path. And the clients were similar to Kraft, really inclined toward that. They want to do the right thing. A lot of them are very much in the regulatory departments consistent with FDA's philosophy about regulating. The marketing people, not so much. The marketing people want to push it as far as they can. Marketing was the bane of my existence from company to company. They never thought the laws applied to them. And when the laws did apply to them, they thought they were silly. And it was a chore trying to get them to understand that those laws, if violated, would jeopardize the company. On numerous occasions in numerous companies, I had to tell the marketing people no. And they would repeatedly say, You're obstructing our ability to do business. And I would tell them you're obstructing the company's ability to do business by violating the law and bringing down the wrath on our heads. And I finally got to the point where I was becoming more and more aware of what was going on around me, that I was becoming more politically active. I was involving myself as a democratic activist more and more. And I knew politics and I enjoyed it. I think by then I started to understand a little bit more how politics worked and how things were done. So I started becoming more active. And that pretty much extended through the last 10 years of my career as a corporate lawyer.

SPEAKER_00 15:46

Early on, before you went to law school, you mentioned you worked on Capitol Hill for David Bonnier. Did he remain a touchdown for you?

SPEAKER_01 15:53

He was still around. He is a man of tremendous ethics and tremendous, a tremendous sense of right and wrong. He was always about doing the right thing and about defending the downtrop.

SPEAKER_00 16:05

Tell us a little bit about him for an audience that might not be American or might not be familiar with him. Who is he?

SPEAKER_01 16:13

David Bonneau grew up in Detroit. He was the son of an auto worker. And his mother died at an early age. And he too was attracted by politics. And so he showed up at my door back in 1975, 76, or, you know, around the time he was running for Congress first. And I knew that he was my state legislator, but I didn't know that much about him. So he knocked on the door and he gave me a sapling. And the reason he did that was because we had a terrible ice storm the winter before, and it killed a lot of trees. And so part of his pitch was we're going to help, you know, the environment by planting these trees. I'm going to give a tree, a small tree, to every constituent whose door I knocked on. Where he got all these trees, I have no idea. But he gave out these trees and he won in a very crowded Democratic primary race. I think there may have been 10 people there. And it was a Democratic district. This is Macomb County, which is, of course, famous for being a swing district and ultimately the Reagan Democrat district back in 1980. Back then, it was very much a Democratic district. And so he won pretty handily in 76. And I went to work for him not long after that. And enjoyed it tremendously because of who he was. He was just a good guy, period.

SPEAKER_00 17:32

Sounds it, but he can't be the only one. I'm guessing that in your 25 years working as a lawyer, you encountered others like Banyer, that there were at least a few people who believed in doing the right thing.

SPEAKER_01 17:43

Yeah, I think that's true. There were times that there was joy. But in the main, it was satisfaction for doing a good job. I think that was a big part of it. You know, I was good at what I did, and I enjoyed doing what I did because the companies I worked with were decent people. And I always viewed my clients, the individuals that I worked with, as people that I can help. And I didn't just think about helping the company. I thought about helping the people that I was representing, the regulatory people who came to me for help, who stayed up nights worrying about problems. I took great satisfaction in helping those individuals.

SPEAKER_00 18:13

It sounds like for the most part, at least, the people around you wanted to do the right thing. But were there exceptions?

SPEAKER_01 18:21

So when I was a litigator earlier in my career, before I became a regulatory lawyer, I conducted and defended a lot of depositions. On one occasion, we had a CEO, and this guy was a piece of work. I found myself facing a deposition with him. So I prepared him and told him that the most important thing to remember was to avoid volunteering anything beyond the confines of the question. Consistent with his personality, he responded very haughtily, that he spoke to investors, boards, political figures, yada yada yada, and that he could conduct himself just fine before an ambulance chaser without my advice. So I went and warned the partner with whom I was working what had happened, and he told me that was how he was, and to do my best to refuse to allow him to answer any potentially harmful questions. That was much easier said than done. Within five minutes the guy began to self-destruct, and I mean self-destruct. I got flopsweats and watched him with horror. Aside from insulting opposing counsel, he talked over me and began spilling confidential information, and the judge would see the transcript. So finally I decided to take drastic measures, and I kicked him under the table in an effort to stop him. I literally hauled back my leg and kicked him. Now I should have realized what would happen next. He began shouting at me, demanding I stop kicking him. Right out loud in front of everybody. He then abruptly walked out of the deposition, damage was done, company was ultimately found guilty and paid multi-million dollar settlement.

SPEAKER_00 19:59

Wow. What about a CEO who pushed back, who maybe wanted permission rather than advice? Did that ever happen behind closed doors? Was there any particular CEO who kept you up at night?

SPEAKER_01 20:13

I think one of the most consequential cases I worked on was a medical device company that had a product that malfunctioned. And that malfunction should have resulted in a recall almost immediately. The CEO of the company didn't want to do a recall. And the general counsel, who's a friend of mine now, and I pushed him very hard. And so did the regulatory people at the company because they wanted to do the right thing. The CEO wanted to make money, and he did not want to run a he didn't want to run a foul of the FDA, at least he said he didn't, but he did. Along the way, one of the products malfunctioned again and somebody died. And I'll put you in the room. After the death, I brought the autopsy report. And I remember sitting with my coat on, ready to go to the airport. It was cold that day, and I was ready to get out because he was not responding to anything I was saying. And the general counsel pleaded with me to talk to him again. And I started reading from the autopsy report. And I told him, This is what happened. FDA is going to come down on you like a ton of bricks. And in fact, it may be too late already. You had better get on the phone with FDA, put me on the phone, put the general counsel on the phone, put the uh the regulatory people on the phone, and try our best to explain how and why this happened. Even though we really couldn't. And he still fought me. And I told him, look, you and he, pointing at the general counsel, and him, the head of regulatory, could all go to jail over this. He blanched at that point. He said, Why would I go to jail? I said, Because you were supposed to have done a recall, you didn't do it, and then somebody died. That's strict liability. You are liable for what happened, no matter what the approval status of your product was. And so the bottom line was he looked at me and said, Do I really have to do this? I said, I shouldn't have to tell you, but yes, you have to do it. And I will initiate the process if you give me the go-ahead. But if you don't, I'm quitting. Because I cannot represent you in good conscience if you don't do a recall. Well, we did the recall and FDA was all over our backs. I mean, they wanted to shut the company down. And it took incredible persuasion to show them that most of the company, in fact, all of the company except for him wanted to do the right thing. And they basically told us, well, the company's got to get rid of this guy to show good faith. So I was invited to speak to the board along with the general counsel and I told them what happened. And they fired him on the spot. Fired him right away. And got a new CEO in who helped clean the mess up. And I helped them clean the mess up. And it took two years to develop good faith with the comp the customers who were angry, justifiably so. N FDA, which was so against the company at that point that I don't know, you know, I don't know what we could have done to fix it. But it just took a lot of hard work. We had to do a lot of persuasion. We had to bring in new people. We had to show them that we were prepared to do the right thing. There were no recalls, there were no warning letters for a couple of years, and they finally got off our backs.

SPEAKER_00 23:19

That's an extraordinary story.

SPEAKER_01 23:21

Yes. This was one man. One man. Nobody else in the company was against the recall. They wanted to do it. I brought in a consultant to tell them to do a recall. Didn't listen to her either.

SPEAKER_00 23:31

Interesting. You said when one of our conversations we were talking about the ebbs and flows of regulatory environments, and you said the Obama years were when your practice actually thrived. That stricter enforcement meant more work and something else started to shift.

SPEAKER_01 23:48

Yeah, Democratic administrations generally regulate a lot more rigorously than Republican administrations do. And so I was quite busy because they were spending time doing inspections, doing recalls, forcing recalls on companies. And it produced more work because when companies are in trouble, they need a lawyer. And so they needed me more and they called on me more, and my practice thrived. And that changed when Trump took over.

SPEAKER_00 24:12

Now the regulators are being defanged. Really defanged. What are companies actually doing?

SPEAKER_01 24:19

The big companies are self-policing. That's really the bottom line. They've decided that they're going to avoid strict liability lawsuits by self-policing and self-regulating. If FDA won't do it, we'll do it because we don't want to be sued. They want to do the right thing, but they also don't want to be litigated against. That's a real worry because failure to warn, strict liability is basically a product of the failure to warn. And there have been a lot of cases, for example, Purdue Pharma over OxyContin, Takeda, a couple of other drug companies paid very, very big settlements to customers over the failure to warn and the fact that the product was defective or it had side effects that were bad. So companies don't want that. No company wants that.

SPEAKER_00 25:06

Sounds to me like regulation and the law operate in two different silos.

SPEAKER_01 25:12

To some degree they do, yeah. I think that's an accurate assessment.

SPEAKER_00 25:15

So I'm going to shift gears a bit. I'm going to ask you something a little different. You've been candid about various CEOs who wouldn't listen, clients who wanted permission instead of advice. I want to turn that around. You've told me you stayed in corporate law well beyond your expiry date. If your firm had written you a termination letter, what would it have said?

SPEAKER_01 25:36

I should have been fired in 2020. My interest in my practice had been waning for several years, really since 2017. My firm should have sent me a letter, a termination letter that read, Dear Mr. Mansoor, we have noticed a diminution in your productivity and interest in both acquiring new clients and serving existing clients. We have discussed this on several occasions, and there has been little discernible change. Consequently, we believe that the best course is for you to transition your client matters to one of our partners and seek different opportunities. To be frank, our advice is that you explore career options outside the law. You are a gifted individual and have noticed that you have other interests that we believe you would benefit from pursuing. Please let us know when you have time to meet to discuss the transition process. Yours sincerely, the Management Committee. That's the letter they should have written me, and it probably would have sent me off on a different path sooner than it did. But they didn't do it. I ultimately fired myself, and here we are.

SPEAKER_00 26:40

Okay, so we're gonna do a quick lightning round. First instinct, one or two words if you can.

SPEAKER_01 26:49

Beirut.

SPEAKER_00 26:51

Kennedy or Obama.

SPEAKER_01 26:54

Which Kennedy?

SPEAKER_00 26:56

JFK.

SPEAKER_01 26:56

JFK.

SPEAKER_00 26:57

The advice your father gave you that you ignored and wished you hadn't.

SPEAKER_01 27:02

To try to be a diplomat.

SPEAKER_00 27:03

The one regulation you wish still had teeth.

SPEAKER_01 27:07

Any EPA regulation.

SPEAKER_00 27:09

The last thing that genuinely surprised you about how power works.

SPEAKER_01 27:16

That people can be so hard-hearted.

SPEAKER_00 27:18

Are you happier or busier?

SPEAKER_01 27:20

I'm happier.

SPEAKER_00 27:22

Mark, your story is really about what it costs to take a long way round to oneself. Thank you so much for talking about the route you took to get there, and I'm sure many listeners will relate.

SPEAKER_01 27:33

Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_00 27:35

Okay, I think we're done. Thanks to Dax and the team at Speech Dalks for the sound editing, and Ilya Kuznetsov for the music. This podcast and everything else you read on my Substack is how I make my living. If you found value in this conversation or in any of my writing, a paid subscription is the best way to support my work. Just go to all that I have met.substack.com or click the link in the show notes. Finally, please share this episode or leave a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It makes a real difference to how the show gets discovered. See you next month.