In 6 decades of law, politics and education, Robin Gibson boils it 'to what's essential'

In his more than six-decade career as a lawyer, Robin Gibson has worn many hats and assumed many roles – highly regarded trial attorney, general counsel to Florida Gov. Bob Graham, chair of both the Florida Board of Regents and the Federal Judicial Nominating Commission of Florida, organizer of an ambitious Polk County charter school system, recipient of awards acknowledging professional excellence, city commissioner and deputy mayor of Lake Wales.

Inaction never was and still isn’t an element of the 87-year-old Gibson’s makeup.

Q. What was your early life like and what led to your friendship and professional affiliation with Bob Graham?

A. I was born in Trinidad where my dad was flying seaplanes for Pan American. I lived there for all of five weeks. My brother was born in Oakland when dad flew the Pacific route on the China Clipper. My older sister was born in Rio when he was flying in South America and my other sister was born in Miami when we came back at the beginning of World War II, and from then on I grew up in Miami. Bob Graham and I were presidents of rival high school student bodies. We wound up being in the same fraternity at the University of Florida and became good friends. I’m one day older and I have tried to convince him that I’m one day wiser, but I could never sell it.

Q. How did you become his general counsel?

A. We went through a two-year campaign and I told him we’d go down in flames together, but he wound up being elected governor in 1978. He never said a word to me before the election but afterward he told me he wanted me to be his general counsel. I didn't even know what a general counsel was. It turns out it's the governor's lawyer. I said I'd give him six months – I thought that might be a deal killer. He said, “Okay but then you'll have to find your successor.” Jean and I and our kids went to Tallahassee and after six months we came home.

Q. What is the general counsel’s role?

A. General counsel is the head of a small law firm that works for the governor. Whatever comes up in the way of legal issues, the general counsel's office is there for him. I was worried about doing it because I had never done anything like that and it turned out to be easy – all you need is a copy of the Florida constitution and good judgment. The problems are not that difficult. I'd been involved in high quality litigation – that's difficult. Writing appellate briefs – that’s difficult. Being up against top quality lawyers – that's difficult. And all that is really the best possible training. Being general counsel was easy compared to that.

Q. So the challenges of the job were not necessarily legal ones. What stood out about the experience?

A. One of the things that intrigued me about being lawyer to the governor was I've always wondered what it was like to be “in the room where it happened,” and there I found myself in the room where it happened. Graham was comparatively young, he was new and so he was being tested. And that meant all of us were being tested. There were a number of critical situations – an execution, the suspension of a sheriff, to name a couple – and I’d look around and there're four or five people in the room, at most. It's kind of scary. You wonder, is this all there is? Because I know those people and they grew up just like I did, nothing special about any of us. I realized that in all the rooms where it happens it is ordinary people who’ve achieved something, maybe, and have these opportunities, but they don't necessarily have any special wisdom, they just do the best they can with what they've got. And that’s true on all levels of government and at all levels of business.

Q. You mentioned your wife, Jean. How did you meet?

A. At the University of Florida there was this good-looking girl from Saint Petersburg that I’d had my eye on for some time. We met at a social function, dated for three years and married on Aug. 12, 1961, after she graduated with honors majoring in math and I was entering my last year of law school. She ultimately became the bookkeeper for our law firm for 30 years.

Q. Alzheimer's can strike anyone – rich or poor, educated or unschooled, urban or rural. When your wife was diagnosed, how did you both handle it? What advice can you offer other families who may have a loved one similarly afflicted?

A. My emphatic advice is to get a diagnosis so you know what the heck you're dealing with. In our case, Jean was concerned about her memory – she couldn't remember names, and everybody including me said, “Don’t worry, everybody forgets names.” But she’s a worrier. Eventually we got a scan that came back as probable Alzheimer's. A neuropsychologist we went to see was a big help and told us what was going to happen. We stuck it out here at home as long as we could, but she was wandering and eventually we couldn't manage so she went into Waters Edge, which is a magnificent place. She’s been there 3½ years now. I see her every day and we have a good time together. Alzheimer’s has been termed “the long goodbye” but the way I look at it, it's part of life. It happens differently for different people – could have happened to me – and this is the way it happened for us.

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Q. How did you come to pick Polk County as a place to practice law and raise your family?

A. I was originally recruited to Miami with a wonderful law firm doing first-rate trial work, but Miami had changed from when I had grown up. My parents were both born in Palatka, and I wanted to raise our family in a small town. I figured if I came to a small town that I’d have to sit in front of the drugstore with the boys and spit and chew and give up a first-rate law practice in order to get the quality of life for my family. But I did some research and got hired with the Woolfolk Myers firm – now Peterson & Myers – a first-rate law firm that was interested in somebody like me. I was there for eight years before starting my own firm with Ken Connor.

Q. What qualities make a first-rate lawyer?

A. One of the myths is that lawyers are antagonistic to each other. They're adversarial – they're in an adversarial situation – but the reality is that good lawyers get along very well because good lawyers respect each other. Good lawyers know what they can give up and then this wide case with all kinds of issues gets narrowed down to what counts. I’ve been told that a talent I have is to boil something down to what's essential, get to the core of it, and that's what good lawyers do. You try what matters and the decision comes out based on merit.

Q. When you're in front of a jury, what is the most important thing that you want them to know?

A. There's a perception that a lawyer contorts the facts, but you really can't fool the jury. You take the facts and work with them and advocate the case based on them so that what they're hearing from you they know to be true. Jack Edmond told me that the main thing in a trial is credibility. You don’t exaggerate – the facts coming from you are exactly what they are. And maybe it's a surprise to the jury – hey, this guy's telling me the truth. It's like building a bank account. You put money in – that's the credibility – and then when it comes to the judgment call, which is discretionary, that's when you cash the check.

Q. The Lake Wales charter school system is essentially your creation. You were the first chairman and then – and now – general counsel. It is among the largest charter school districts in Florida and will accept any child within its geographical boundary. Its schools have received national recognition. What was your impetus to get involved and what did you hope to accomplish?

A. I had had experience with education. At the university level, I was chair of the Board of Regents. And of course our kids were in school, so education was important and their preparation here was not what I thought it should be. In fact, for three of our kids their last two years were in boarding schools because of concerns about the quality of local education. I kept being concerned that it was going downhill. School board members were elected from Lakeland and Winter Haven and in Lake Wales we had no real pull or impact. We were getting the dregs.

I researched and came to find that while most charter schools are set up with individual boards, there's a way that the individual schools can report to one board and therefore you can have a school system. To convert takes a majority vote of parents and teachers and out of seven schools we got five, and that was the beginning of our system. Since then two startup schools have become part of this system. We have a local board, and that basically substitutes itself for the school board in Bartow. There’s been demonstrable, measurable improvement. The main thing that people were concerned about to begin with was discipline and academics, in that order, and now it's probably the reverse – it's academics and discipline because our academics are much better and when your academics are better your discipline is better. COVID knocked the props out from under us – we've got a lot of poverty here – and we're really recovering from that right now.

Q. Outsiders sometimes judge a place by how good the downtown looks. Lake Wales still has that dilapidated hotel dominating its landscape. What if anything is happening?

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A. A previous city commission was sold a bill of goods by a developer who was delusional so now we're in litigation. We have a pending motion for summary judgment in our favor and what will happen after that, if it's successful, is we will recover the title to the hotel and then it will go on the market and responsible people will rejuvenate it. I'm confident that will happen. In addition, we just executed an $18.5 million bond issue that will help transform Lake Wales.

Q. You doubtless have noticed the diminished role that precedent is playing in Supreme Court decision-making both at the state and federal level. Are we as a nation in danger of losing the rule of law?

A. I would say we're in danger of losing an independent judiciary. The constitutional scheme is absolutely brilliant but the separation of powers is critical. The invasion of politics into the judicial branch is the big risk. The judiciary needs to be independent to serve as a check, as it's designed to do. The idea that somebody would be put on the Supreme Court of the United States of America to rule a certain way is just obnoxious, but that’s what has happened.

Q. To what do you attribute the apparent national anger and mistrust of government?

A. There's always been a mistrust of government, so let's not overstate that. Throughout my long life, I’ve heard that everything's going to hell. Within my lifetime it’s been worse – the riots, the Chicago political convention and all that stuff – worse than what we have now. Except for the attack on the Capitol – that was worst of all. The main problem is partisanship – our elected representatives give up their judgment to a political party, and they're both guilty. I am a believer in democracy. I think the people who are whining about the loss of democracy are whining about democracy as they view it. Liz Cheney is my hero, and she lost her race. If this country elects Trump, that's democracy – so deal with it. I guess you get what you deserve.

Thomas R. Oldt can be reached at tom@troldt.com.

This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Robin Gibson looks back on 6 decades in law, politics and education