Kenneth Feinberg is a busy man. You wouldn’t know it, though, as he sits on a porch that cranes far above Lambert’s Cove, providing a glimpse to the Vineyard Sound. It’s a calming view for a man plagued by the problems of nations and people alike.

“It certainly is very important that I manage to escape occasionally to Martha’s Vineyard to recharge my batteries,” he says with a laugh.

Since 1986, when he was asked by a federal judge to design and administer a compensation fund for Viet Nam War veterans who had been exposed to Agent Orange, Mr. Feinberg has been the go-to guy for resolving the difficulties that arise in the wake of national tragedies.

And it hasn’t been easy, especially when the task is to assign a monetary value to a human life, as was his job with the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund and with the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund, which was created in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shooting.

Mr. Feinberg tries to meet the victims’ families with a great deal of compassion, despite the often bureaucratic nature of his assignment. When he was administering the 9/11 victim compensation fund, Mr. Feinberg became the target of much of their grief and anger.

“You’re dealing with people’s initial, emotional reactions to tragedy,” he said. “It’s really psychological, because people are convinced that they are innocent victims of life’s unfairness.

“It’s human nature that people get emotional in good faith when they are victims’ of life’s curveballs: Why did my wife have to die? She was an angel. Why was my son killed in the tower?

“And with me, they have a live body that you can focus that criticism on,” he said. “You have to have a stiff spine to be able to take that on.”

Nevertheless Mr. Feinberg retains confidence in what he is doing, and how he does it. “If you think you’re doing it the right way, and you have the support of the people who know what you’re doing and have all the evidence, then you can just wade through it,” he says.

He does not see these funds as a panacea to the nation’s tragedies, but he does feel that compensation has been appropriate to the circumstances where it has been applied.

“I think the funds were the right thing to do, as long as people don’t see them as a precedent, or as the wave of the future,” Mr. Feinberg says. “You have to limit it to unique tragedies when the public wants to see something done, quickly.”

The debate over whether these programs are fair comes up often; the counter argument is that bad things happen to good people every day, and they don’t have a $20 billion fund at their disposal, as did residents along the Gulf of Mexico following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. It formed much of Mr. Feinberg’s discussion at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center on Thursday.

Mr. Feinberg explains that it is for that reason that Congress and the executive branch of the federal government — or, in the case of Agent Orange, the judges — take extra care in determining the necessity for such funds. They seek to limit compensation to cases of national tragedy, which often have a clear perpetrator, rather than purely environmental crises, though those are rarely entirely without blame.

“It’s very difficult,” he said, “and we pride ourselves, as Americans, on equal protection under the law. The American people don’t look with favor on elitism and special treatment,” Mr. Feinberg says.

This national trait of resentment came into play most powerfully when Mr. Feinberg served as the “pay czar” following the bailout of the banking sector after the global financial crisis. Mr. Feinberg was appointed by Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner to determine the salaries for corporate executives whose companies were the beneficiaries of the TARP fund, which used taxpayer money to save several financial institutions.

That particular task Mr. Feinberg describes as a “tough assignment,” due in large part to widespread public anger over corporate greed and the government’s indulgence of it.

“No matter what you do, you’re always accused of being too generous to the people who caused the meltdown,” he says.

“I don’t think I was too generous. The law spelled out that I had to take into account compensation that would keep the company competitive. So if I’m dealing with one person and I say, ‘I’m not going to give them anything because they caused this mess,’ that violates the statute, and that runs the risk that the company will suffer, and that the money will then never be repaid to the taxpayer.”

Despite the difficulty of dealing with the personal tragedies of many, Mr. Feinberg wouldn’t consider any other line of work. “I grew up in Brockton, Mass., which was a very close-knit Jewish community at the time. I was a teenager when President Kennedy was elected, and his call to public service really resonated with me, and I wanted to try to give something back,” he says.

Originally, Mr. Feinberg didn’t see public service in his future.

“I wanted to be an actor. I was a thespian at Brockton High School and at UMass, and I was going to go to drama school after college, when my father said, ‘You know, that’s a pretty tough life. Why don’t you take your acting skills and become a lawyer?’ And that’s what I did.”

And so it was that Mr. Feinberg has become central in providing closure to the victims of several national disasters, and so he has given back. However, he has found that the faith in government, and in him, to resolve our collective misfortunes has waned over the years.

“I’d like to think that the inherent optimism of the American people remains, along with a strong sense of self-reliance, which has been an important trait in American history — that we will pull ourselves up and move on,” he says.

“But overall the optimism now is undercut by a prevailing sense of uncertainty about public service, and government’s ability to solve problems,” Mr. Feinberg says, adding:

“It’s a question of whether the American people are as confident that public service can help alleviate pain and uncertainty.”