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The evolution of William Cohen

He used to compose poetry, keep a diary, write long letters of friends. But the secretary of defense has left that life - and his Maine roots - far behind.

Bill Cohen is flying - again. This time, he's on his way to his hometown of Bangor. It looks like one of those rare easy days for the US secretary of defense (SecDef in Pentagonese). He's flying with only three aides. The secure fax line in the Gulfstream V jet hasn't spit out any classified documents for at least a half-hour. Soon he will meet with Bangor High School students, old friends, and family: a time, perhaps, to reconnect with his roots.

But his guard is up. "It's no difference to me whether I'm in Bangor or anywhere else," he says, shifting in his leather seat, his brow furrowing. "In this position, everything you say will be used by Iran, Iraq, the Chinese. You are always watched by someone. So you are never off your game."

So this, he lets it be known, is no nostalgia tour. Indeed, Bangor is a place he once called a "cultural wasteland," a place he left long ago. Ever since he was first elected to Congress nearly 30 years ago, he says, he has felt like "Willy Loman with your bags packed. It's a question of always being in the air, never on solid footing. There's a sense of rootlessness, even more so now."

The plane lands. Cohen stretches his trim 6-foot, 165-pound frame - the same weight he was as a senior at Bangor High. He checks his carefully coiffed hair, brushes invisible lint off the sleeves of his blue suitcoat, juts out his jaw just slightly, and bounds off the plane. Servicemen salute. He strides over to them, smiling broadly, his blue eyes flashing.

"Coins," he says crisply, extending his palm to an aide. The aide hands over a fistful. Cohen shakes hands with all of the enlistees, then gives each a commemorative coin, which has written on one side, "William S. Cohen, Secretary of Defense."

Over the next two hours, he talks to students at the annual William S. Cohen Aspirations Symposium. He greets the basketball team, then ROTC members. The aide fishes for more coins.

Finally, he moves offstage. A private lunch is set for about 20 people - his mother, brother, sister, a scattering of old friends, but not one of his two sons, Chris, who lives about two hours away. Cohen didn't think it was worth Chris's time to make the drive for a crowded lunch at Miller's Famous All You Can Eat Buffet, which is famous for the salads and for its plaster Jersey cow on the roof.

Cohen steps inside the restaurant. Standing by the door, next to the candy machine, is his red-cheeked mother, Clara, 80, her white hair piled high, as always, beehive style.

"Hi, Ma," he says.

"You're not calling enough," she answers. "I never see you anymore."

"Ma, I'm working day and night," he pleads.

It has little effect. She starts in again. He stops her.

"I don't have to take this from anybody," he snaps, leaving her side to greet others.

Just what the SecDef needs. Lip from his mother.

William Sebastian Cohen is one of the most powerful people in the world; he has been the civilian leader of America's 1.4 million men and women in uniform for close to four years. It comes on top of a sterling career on Capitol Hill, where he served for 24 years in the House and Senate as an in de pend ent-minded Republican representing Maine.

The record of his public life is voluminous. Several hundred boxes filled with documents from his career sit undisturbed at the University of Maine's library annex in Orono, charting everything from breaking ranks during Watergate with his vote to impeach President Nixon to his critique of the Reagan administration's handling of the Iran-Contra affair.

But the private Bill Cohen is harder to find. This is partly because the greater one's public role, the more important it is to secure an intensely held inner core. It's also because that inner core has grown smaller and smaller over the years as he has embraced work with greater and greater fervor.

His life, in fact, could stand as a metaphor of the times. He seems a public-servant version of a Horatio Alger hero. He was a boy raised in working-class Bangor who by dint of hard work, ambition, and a lucky break or two climbed close to the pinnacle of America's democracy.

That's half the metaphor. The other half is the price. What price did Bill Cohen, or does any other workaholic for that matter, pay for the ambition that brought glory? It is only from that perspective that a touch of Willy Loman emerges in Bill Cohen.

Some may say that almost any price would be worth the payoff of becoming secretary of defense. But they do not include some of the people who are closest to Cohen. Their pain, caused by his conscious choices, is mostly cloaked in privacy.

Finding the private Bill Cohen means looking in musty places, reading between the lines of tattered and scarce editions of his first book of poetry or in the crossed-out sentences of his early private correspondence, when he was much less of an editor of his thoughts than he is now. The poems reveal a central theme that seems particularly relevant today to him - and perhaps to others as well: It is his attention to the seasons, the cycles of nature, watching his father grow old, watching his sons grow up, wondering how he grows among, or without, them.

Now he is thinking of a next career, anticipating a change of season. Autumn is here. He turned 60 in August. His political lease on one of the largest offices in the nation's capital is up in January.

He wants to make money. He wants to start a business, probably as a consultant on international trade or defense matters. He wants to keep one foot in public service, maybe putting in some time on a blue-ribbon panel. He wants more time with his second wife, Janet Lang hart, a former Boston television personality. And, he says, he wants to spend more time with his two sons and two grandsons. He could stay in Washington. He could live in New York City. He could go back to Maine - but he won't.

"It's hard to think where that community will be, frankly," he says in his government jet. "The community will be my wife, our dog, Lucky, my sons, their children. I'm going to be starting a business. When you think about retirement, about a retirement community, I'm not there yet. I'm too young, even though I'm at the age when most people think about retirement. I'm just beginning. I've got another 15 years of real active life. Fifteen years from now, assuming I'm still living, I will think about some community."

But where does he start? How does someone who has spent nearly three decades filtering every word in public find his real voice? Or has the public man become the man himself?

Many before him, such as good friends Warren Rudman of New Hampshire and Gary Hart of Colorado, former US senators both, have recently made the adjustment. Cohen has asked them about it.

"It's hard to walk away from that kind of a job," Rudman says. "You've got your own private air force to carry you around. It's one hell of a shock the day after, when you start your own car and bring your own dry cleaning in."

Samuel R. Berger, President Clinton's national security adviser, believes Cohen won't have a problem.

"He has his own kind of internal sense of direction, internal sense of right and wrong," Berger says in a telephone call from Air Force One. "I don't think Bill is somebody whose head is turned by public life, or who will wake up in the morning waiting for the call from CNN . I think he defines his life by what's important, not by the accouterments of power."

Over a lifetime, of course, priorities shift. What's important today becomes less so tomorrow. Throughout his life, Cohen has taken stock. By all accounts, he reexamined his life in great depth a few years ago.

The catalyst can be traced to a specific moment, a phone call from his mother at 5 a.m. on October 10, 1995.

"Your father has died," she said.

Ruby Cohen, 86, who had spent 69 years working up to 18 hours a day in his tiny Bangor Rye Bread bakery, had collapsed while mixing dough.

The father was a giant to his son. The son wrote his father's eulogy, 13 typed pages that concluded with a poem he had written years earlier called "Larger Now," which envisioned his father's passing.

Father, I would join
you now in eternity
but my sons still
look to outreach me;
I cannot fall,
until they are tall
and I am small
and the cycle
complete.

The death marked a change of seasons. By year's end, Cohen had quit the Senate and proposed marriage to Lang hart, a poised African-American woman whose years in television in Boston still make her a recognizable figure there today. And in December of 1996, after getting married and printing business cards for a new consulting venture called The Cohen Group, he was asked by President Clinton to be defense secretary. Cohen became the lone Republican in the Cabinet.

Since then, the workaholic Cohen has pushed himself even harder, matching if not exceeding his father's pace. He is up most mornings at 4:30 to lift weights or run on a treadmill at a gym next to his Washington apartment. He's at work before 7, stays there often until 9 p.m., climbs into bed around midnight, and sometimes takes calls in the wee hours of the morning.

Then there's travel. He estimates logging nearly 750,000 miles in the air, including nine trips to the Middle East and 10 trips to Asia since January of 1997. But travel is also time together with Lang hart. They especially enjoy visiting troops.

"I find that when we go abroad," Lang hart says, sitting with her husband in his huge Pentagon office, "you're jet lagged, and you're sick, and there they are standing in formation waiting for you. It's soul-renewing, and it reminds me why I do love people, why I do love this country, why I'm proud to be an American."

It is their social life in Washington that drains her but not him. They have become one of Washington's most sought-after couples, averaging several black-tie events a month. And while Lang hart is a glamorous presence at state dinners or charity balls, Cohen says he's the one who feels more at ease. After all, he's been doing it since he was 32 in Bangor.

"She is basically a recluse who, if she had her choice, would not even come out," Cohen says.

"Yes, honey, I am a recluse," she says to him from across the table, "but I do love people, and having been in television for a very long time - in Chicago, Indianapolis, Boston - I've had to interact on a business level. You're at a grocery store, for instance, picking at produce, and they know you, but you don't know them."

Lang hart recently helped move her ailing mother into a Washington nursing home in order to be closer to her. But while Lang hart juggles the personal with work (she runs a media consulting business), Cohen's focus almost entirely is tied to his work.

"I've never seen him more alive than when he's been in this building," Lang hart says. "He gets up earlier. He works out. He comes home later. He's like a college kid. He's reading his briefs. He's talking on the phone. He's worried about the people who serve us. We had the people come home from the East Africa bombings, and there was mist in his eyes, how speechless he was. Even after seeing the movie Saving Private Ryan, how nostalgic he was."

For Cohen, finding pleasure in work derives from having watched his father: "If you knew Ruby Cohen ... he never took a day off. Even on religious holidays, rather than take a day off, he would drive down to Boston to see what other bakers were doing. He was never satisfied. He wanted to know what flour they were using, what kind of yeast, all to make the perfect roll. That was always an inspiration to me."

He was born in his mother's bed on the third floor of a tenement on Hancock Street a few blocks from downtown Bangor. On the floor above him, homeless old men sometimes slept on cots. Next door was Morris Slep's meat market. Down the street was Dolly Jack's, the local whorehouse.

From the age of 3, Cohen remembers riding along in his father's truck as he delivered rolls around the city. It was a hard life. And there were a handful of lessons that stayed with him. In his personal papers at the University of Maine, he wrote in long-hand about it.

One lesson dealt with intolerance: At age 12, after studying at a Hebrew school for more than five years for his bar mitzvah, he was told by a rabbi that he could not go through with the rite of passage unless his mother, an Irish Protestant, converted to Judaism. The rabbi also told Cohen that he would need to extract a drop of blood from him, as a symbol of removing the Irish impurity from his veins.

"No one had made that clear to me before," Cohen recalls. "I said, `You picked a fine time to tell me.' "

In an undated document in his personal papers, he wrote emotionally: "I went to my father with tears in my eyes. `Dad, I'm not going to do it.' He responded quietly: `Billy, you don't have to.' I knew that my mother had talked to him. She had never given in to all of the pressures that insisted upon conformity and religious conversion. She preferred exclusion."

Cohen said he was "struck in horror" by the condition of taking a drop of blood. "Take your yarmulkes and shove them," he wrote.

He walked to the Penobscot River, tore off the gold-plated mezuza that hung from his neck, and "threw it into the polluted water. A symbollic gesture. No more chains. No more pretense, no more apologies. I no longer had to struggle to be on the inside of any social or religious circle. ... But it also meant a lack of security that any group gives its membership. It was a bitter form of emancipation."

A second lesson from childhood was learned through basketball.

"The Y became my first home," he wrote. "I slept at my parents' home. When the Y was closed on Sundays, I would practice outside, even in the winter with snow on the ground. I went inside only when my hands and ears ached from the cold so that I couldn't hold the ball any longer."

He became a star with a 30-foot set shot. The cheers of the crowd thrilled him, he wrote: "I achieved my childhood dreams of playing before five or six thousand people on Friday evenings." He was named to the all-state basketball team.

His father attended every game and every practice, giving a running commentary from the stands on the shortcomings of his son's teammates. He spoke the truth as he saw it. The son finally asked him to leave.

"He never made a big deal of it," Bill Cohen recalls in his Pentagon office. "I was dribbling down the court one day, and it was dark, and I could sense his presence. I looked outside, through a window, and there he was, watching me, snow piling up on his hat."

The father wanted him to become an orthodontist and attend school seven miles up Route 2 at the University of Maine at Orono.

"He said, `Look, there's no heavy lifting. You don't have to work that hard, and you do very well financially,' " Cohen recalls, laughing at the memory. "I said, `Look, Dad, I don't want to be an orthodontist.' "

Cohen went to Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where he majored in Latin and graduated cum laude in 1962. Three years later, he earned his law degree, also cum laude, at Boston University. One of his first jobs was as assistant editor of a magazine produced by the American Trial Lawyers Association in Watertown. At age 25, he decided to move back to Bangor and start his own law practice.

The decision was tortuous. He was leaving a mentor, Thomas J. Lambert, his boss at the association. In a letter to Lambert and his wife, Cohen described driving to Maine with his first wife, Diana, after spending a weekend with them:

"We drove more than five miles out of Boston before we dared to utter a word to each other for fear that tears would blur our eye and disrupt our damn composure. We love (and like) you both more than we dare say."

In another letter to Lambert, Cohen drew upon his knowledge of the classics to explain that he needed to push on, challenge himself. He recalled Homer:

"I say that I felt like Odysseus lolling in the lush land of the Lotus Eaters. And yet there was always the gnawing thought that after five or 10 years of effort, I would inherit the wind or perhaps a handful of dust."

Still, in correspondence to another friend, he hinted that Bangor could not keep him forever, calling the city a "social and cultural wasteland. And yet we have found that the very dearth of intellectual endeavors has intensified our appetites so that we never miss an opportunity to attend a worthwhile function."

Bangor, in fact, had become a place to realize his dreams. He volunteered to serve on several civic boards and then won election, in quick succession, to the city council, school board, and mayor's office. In 1972, Robert A. G. Monks, then running for a US Senate seat in Maine, and Monks's campaign manager, William Webster, met with Cohen in his living room in Bangor. They asked him to run for the US House seat serving all of northern Maine. Later, a trio of local Republican power brokers also encouraged Cohen.

"It was a natural choice," says Lewis Vafiades, now 86, a retired Bangor lawyer and one of the trio. "He was bright. He was down to earth. And the idea strongly appealed to him."

Days later, he was running. At age 32, a little more than six years after returning home, he won the election. Only two years after that, he was a national figure, leading seven moderate members of the House Judiciary Committee to support a resolution of impeachment against Richard Nixon.

In many respects, the day he left for Washington was the day he left Bangor behind. He was taking life lessons with him, the principles of self-reliance, hard work, and truth to oneself.

"I have set out only a few small goals for myself during my brief trespass upon this earth," he wrote in a letter to a friend on July 7, 1966, a month before his 26th birthday. "To be a man of integrity and honesty . . . and ultimately," he concluded, in a reference to Icarus, "to have a `love affair with the sun,' with knowledge."

T his past Father's Day, Chris Irish, his wife, Kerry, and their 2-year-old son, Jacob, drove 10 hours from Auburn, Maine, to Washington, D.C., in order that son could be with father - and that grandson could be with grandfather.

Chris Irish is the former Chris Cohen. Seven years ago, he and his wife decided to change their last names when they got married. It signaled their commitment to each other. And, says Chris, it didn't hurt that he would be known as just himself, not the son of the secretary of defense.

His father understands. "It's a great name for him," he says. "He's three-quarters Irish." The elder Cohen, too, revealed that he once thought about changing his name - to Cohan, which might be interpreted as an Irish name. "My father always wanted me to change my name. He felt I probably would never be accepted by the Jewish community."

The June visit in Washington "was wonderful," Chris says, although the get-together had limits. Cohen had to cut short an overseas trip by a day in order to see his family.

They met not in the Cohen apartment near Washington's Chinatown neighborhood but at a Chinese restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia. They sat together for two hours.

The visit was the longest that Bill Cohen has ever had with Jacob, who calls his grandfather "Bumpa." Prior to Father's Day, he had seen his grandson five times, each time by his accounting for an hour or less. He has seen his other grandson, 10 1/2-month-old Connor, once; Kevin Cohen, Connor's father and Cohen's eldest son, had been living in Hong Kong. He and his family recently moved to Atlanta.

"It's kind of a relief that he is getting out," Kevin Cohen says. "The public has had him for the better part of three decades."

But finding time for sons, let alone grandsons, has never been easy for Cohen.

"I don't think I ever had a chance to spend that time with my sons in their early ages as my father did with me - as much as I would have liked to," he says.

Chris Irish understands. "My dad has been on the go, straight, for a long time," he says, sitting cross-legged on his living room couch. "But now it's way too much." He quickly adds, "In my opinion, anyway. It's hard for him to find the time. You don't know how much he loves us and how he does try to stay in touch. He just chooses these jobs that take him to faraway places."

Diana Dale Dunn was divorced from Cohen in 1987 after 25 years of marriage, after both sons had grown. She moved back to Maine because "I became out of touch with who I really was. I needed to return to my roots, to reconnect to what was real."

She doesn't have to say that that hasn't been part of Bill Cohen's life plan. But she notes that his job is so all-encompassing that he doesn't write for himself anymore, "and writing has always been Bill's way of handling his emotions, has always been his outlet. I would suggest that he has other muses now, with Jacob and Connor, and I think if he could spend time with them, perhaps he could find inspiration to write, as he did with his sons.

"He makes an effort to stay in touch with his sons," she says, "but the demands on his time are just incredibly intense. His schedule has always been inhumane. I hope Bill will be able to find time to be part of his children's lives, and his grandchildren's lives. He is missing a great deal. It would bring him so much joy."

The seasons are passing.

"On the day that Jacob was born," Dunn says, "Bill was in Boston, to throw out the first ball of the Red Sox season" - an assignment that he took so seriously that he practiced throwing a baseball the 60 feet, 6 inches from pitcher's mound to home plate in order not to bounce a throw to the catcher, as George Bush did one year.

After the game - and his successful toss - Cohen flew to Washington. He phoned his congratulations to Chris.

"Bangor is not that far from Boston," Dunn says.

He is in Kosovo. It is Cohen's and Lang hart's third trip in a year to the province since the end of NATO's war against Serbia. Each time, their main purpose is to rally the troops.

"We want to provide you with the best possible quality of life," Cohen tells nearly 1,000 US troops sitting in plush movie seats at an auditorium at Camp Bonsteele. "We have worked on getting you pay raises, increased benefits, and now we are working on correcting housing inequities."

He finishes his talk and introduces his wife, saying she stays up late some nights talking on the telephone about the stresses of military life for women.

"Thank you for your courage!" she says, hoarse with laryngitis. "Thank you for everything you do to keep our nation strong. We are grateful for everything you do."

When she finishes, Cohen is beaming. "That's the best immitation of Lauren Bacall I've heard in a long time," he says.

The decision to return to Kosovo is a calculated one for Cohen. Kosovo rep re sents his most serious test in office - especially as a diplomat. During the conflict, he privately seethed at the reluctance of some NATO allies to increase the air attack on Serbian targets.

"There were times when there was a great deal of frustration on his part in trying to get decisions through NATO," says Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has worked with Cohen for more than two years.

Otherwise, Shelton says, the SecDef almost never shows a temper. "Secretary Cohen is a very levelheaded individual. He's what we would call in the infantry calm under fire."

Kosovo hasn't been the only difficult issue, of course. Policies concerning sexual harassment and sexual orientation have given him some of his biggest troubles. And the job has required dexterity. In the Middle East alone, he has had to play the diplomat (reaching out to the Arab world as much as to traditional ally Israel); the arms salesman (helping ink a $7.7 billion F-16 fighter jet package to the United Arab Emirates); and the behind-the-scenes power broker in the Clinton administration (blasting Israel for proposing a military technology transfer to China).

And 11 years removed from the Cold War, he helped persuade Congress and a reluctant president to accept a $17 billion spending increase for the defense budget last year. It included the largest pay increase for the military since 1981.

In his job, Cohen has mostly seemed the good-natured peacemaker, whether going back to visit friends in the Senate, attending the Principals' Meetings at the White House, or traveling the world. "I think his primary mandate from Clinton was to keep the Defense Department out of the papers," says John Pike, director of programs at the Federation of American Scientists.

Cohen shows his toughest side, perhaps, in his office during what he and his staff call "murder boards." Says one aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity, "The purpose of the meetings is to prepare him for congressional hearings, but he often grills us."

At the senior levels of the Clinton administration, Cohen is viewed - and this term is used over and over - as a grown-up, someone who doesn't throw tantrums over policy decisions. The Republican has become more loyal than most Democrats.

"I would say there has been nobody more a team player in this administration than Bill Cohen," says Berger, the national security adviser.

Perhaps the single strongest memory of his tenure will be the sight of him holding up a 5-pound bag of sugar on ABC's This Week as an illustration of how little anthrax it would take to annihilate a city. Playing on fears that Iraq would use biological weapons, Cohen used the bag of sugar as ammunition in his argument to bomb Iraq in late 1998.

At the Pentagon, he has surrounded himself with loyalists - a "Maine mafia," one joked - totaling at least 13 people who worked for him in the Senate or on one of his campaigns. The closest aide is chief of staff Robert S. Tyrer, 43, who started in Cohen's Bangor office at the age of 18.

Tyrer, says Cohen, "used to be like a son. Now he's too old to be like a son. He's my alter ego. He's like a brother."

In his eulogy to his father, Cohen opened with this:
"Work is love made visible."

The work at the Pentagon, he says, as Lang hart listens across the table, has been "the most exciting, demanding, exhilarating experience either one of us has ever had. We would do it forever, ideally."

They envision taking private trips together. "We had just gotten married when Bill got this job, so we're on our honeymoon," Lang hart says, her husky voice almost purring. "He promises to take me on a slow boat to China." Cohen replies:

"I took you on a slow plane to China once." They laugh. Their eyes lock. There's a long pause.

In Auburn, Maine, his son Chris says, "I would hope and expect for him to have more time" for family. But in the next sentence, he notes the pragmatic difficulties of living so far apart.

"It would be nice for Jacob's sake to see him more often," Chris says. "For me, it doesn't matter. It might for Jacob. The truth is we all love each other a lot."

Cohen says he, too, wants more family time. But the future is more uncertain than before.

"It will be interesting to see how I do," he says. "This is going to be a challenge for me. I don't know if I can slow the pace down."