Harvey Milton Applebaum

Harvey Milton Applebaum passed away on January 21 in Bethesda, Maryland, following a long illness. Born on March 1, 1937, in Bessemer, Alabama, Harvey was the son of Oscar Arthur and Evelyn Stein Applebaum, the owners of a shoe store in Bessemer. Harvey graduated with honors from Bessemer High School in 1955, and matriculated that same year at Yale University, where he joined the class of 1959.

Harvey’s years in New Haven were transformative. After absorbing the initial culture shock, he majored in history, played the drums in the Yale football and concert bands, ran the Hillel society, played intramural basketball and tennis, served on the class council, was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and made a group of lifelong friends. Yale helped him spend a summer abroad in Paris in 1957, where he acquired enough French to use it later in his legal practice. He also toured Europe with the Yale concert band, a trip that included stops in Moscow and Kyiv, then part of the Soviet Union, a visit he then had to explain to a suspicious Alabama draft board. Harvey moved on to Harvard Law School, where he was again one of the top students in his class and a member of the law review.

After graduation in 1962, Harvey married Elizabeth (Betsy) Bloom of Houston, Texas, a graduate of Wellesley College. Because Harvey had won a Sheldon Fellowship from Harvard, they were able to spend their year-long honeymoon traveling around the world, visiting, among other places, India, Iran, Japan and Egypt as well as London and Paris. Harvey acquired a love of travel and a special fondness for French food and British theater, which lasted throughout his life.

Harvey passed the bar in 1962 and joined the Washington, DC firm of Covington & Burling. He would spend his entire 60-year legal career at Covington, becoming a partner in 1971, and serving as senior counsel from 2006 until his retirement in 2022. Harvey was a mainstay of the firm’s antitrust and international trade practices. He led the firm’s successful defense of many major clients in antidumping proceedings before the International Trade Commission. His antitrust expertise ran the gamut from DOJ and FTC investigations to counseling matters. He was widely recognized as the leading expert on, and indeed had an encyclopedic knowledge of, the Robinson-Patman Act.

Harvey served as Chair of the ABA’s Antitrust Section (1980-81) and served on several task forces for the Section. He also taught antitrust law at Georgetown and the University of Virginia, logging more than fifty years teaching a spring antitrust seminar for UVA law students in Charlottesville, often bringing his children and adding on visits to Monticello, a place he loved. Harvey wrote and spoke extensively on antitrust issues and served as the first chair of the editorial board of the widely consulted ABA Antitrust Law Developments treatise. He published numerous articles in legal journals.

Beyond his law practice, Harvey was a dedicated board member and chair of the Washington Tennis and Education Foundation and a member of the board of the Levine School of Music. He gave many hours of his time to Yale, serving as a member and then chair of board of the Association of Yale Alumni (AYA), as a member and then president of the board of the Yale Club of Washington, D.C., and as the chairman of the board of the Yale Alumni Magazine. For these efforts, Harvey was awarded the Yale Medal, and his name is carved into the walls of the Rose Alumni House and Commons, the central dining hall.

Harvey was an avid tennis player and sports fan who remained loyal to the Alabama football team all of his life, only once rooting against Alabama, when a friend of his played football for Auburn. He served as captain of the Covington and Burling basketball team for eighteen years, leading that team to five lawyers league championships during the 1970s. He loved all kinds of music, played drums as part of a band that performed at lawfirm retreats, also performing at all three of his daughters’ weddings. He and Betsy spent many summers in Santa Fe, where they attended the chamber music and opera festivals. In Washington they regularly attended Kennedy Center concerts, traveling often to New York and London to see plays. Harvey was an avid reader of newspapers, kept close track of local and national politics, and always voted in local and national elections.

Harvey was devoted to his family, both immediate and distant, keeping in touch with relatives in Alabama and Georgia, attending the matches and school plays of his children. He is survived by his wife, Elizabeth Bloom Applebaum, of Chevy Chase, Maryland, his sister, Lynne Waggoner, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and his three daughters: Kathy Lowy of Bethesda, Maryland, Julie Flynn of San Francisco, California, and Anne Applebaum of Washington, DC and Warsaw, Poland, as well as his seven grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held later this spring at the Cosmos Club in Washington, DC. The family welcome contributions in his name to the Washington Tennis and Education Foundation, www.wtef.org, and Woodley House www.woodleyhouse.org. Inquiries and condolences can be sent via his daughter, Kathy Lowy, at [email protected]

May his memory be a blessing, and may it bring comfort to all who cherished him.