Seldom has a politician left public office with more self-generated fanfare than Sen. William S. Cohen. “Last week, I announced that I would not seek reelection to the Senate,” Cohen announced for the second time in a January 1996 Washington Post op-ed. “I have been moved by the reaction of my constituents and colleagues. Many expressed sadness over my decision, and nearly all were perplexed. Why are so many leaving the Senate? How can the center hold? Won’t the system fall apart?”
His friends and admirers weren’t the only ones who feared that Cohen’s resignation might leave the Republic in shambles. Cohen feared the very same thing. In the middle of yet another farewell address — during which he described himself as, among other things, “Aesop’s fly on the wheel of history’s chariot” — Cohen related an anecdote that helps explain why he believes America might be unable to carry on without him: “I recall after supporting the crime bill two years ago, a call came into one of my district offices, and a man was very angry. He said, ‘I am angry with your boss,’ to one of my staffers. I said, ‘Why was he angry?’ He said, if you excuse the expression, ‘He’s too damn reasonable.'”
“Perhaps,” said Cohen grandly, “that will be the epitaph on my gravestone.”
Perhaps not. Cohen was nominated by President Clinton last month to be secretary of defense, a job that may ultimately earn him other burial inscriptions. The nomination seems at first blush a wise choice; the president added an experienced (and easily confirmed) foreign policy hand to his cabinet and can plausibly claim to have taken a stab at bipartisanship by choosing a Republican. Certainly Cohen approved; he described his own nomination as “a very bold and exciting move.”
To those familiar with Cohen’s behavior over 24 years in Washington, his promotion also makes sense in a baby-boomer-pol kind of way. The relentless narcissism, the goofy sensitive-guy routine, the self-conscious and phony moderation — all these are characteristics Cohen shares with the man who hired him. Bill Cohen and Bill Clinton should get along perfectly.
Except they probably won’t. It’s not that the two men will disagree on all that much: Though Cohen is often called a “moderate,” in truth his positions on issues like environmental protection and partial-birth abortion are not centrist, but solidly liberal. It’s just that Cohen loves nothing more than to point out other people’s flaws — especially when those people are nominally on his side.
Those who know Cohen have a hard time believing he will be able to keep the policy differences he does have with the administration private once he becomes defense secretary. “I can’t imagine him supporting Clinton once he loses an argument,” says a Senate staffer who has worked with him for years. ” Subordinating himself to people who he disagrees with is absolutely anathema to Bill Cohen.” A former high-level CIA official who dealt with Cohen during the latter’s days on the Senate intelligence committee puts it this way: “If you make a deal with Cohen, you can’t count on the fact it’s going to be honored, because he does play to the galleries. He is very concerned with his image in the media.”
When a reporter asked Clinton about Cohen’s habit of tangling with members of his own political camp, the president made it clear he hadn’t thought much beyond the confirmation process. “A man with a creative, independent, inquiring mind is just what we needed for this team,” Clinton replied. Did the president read the press release Cohen’s Senate office issued upon his retirement? It dubs Cohen a “true Renaissance man” and praises him for being ” as close to the ideal definition of a public servant as one can get” — a man of “integrity” and “fierce independence” who specializes in “bringing executive branch wrongdoing to light.” A man who allows such a document to go out from his own office — and who may very well have written the thing himself — is not going to make a good soldier, especially for Bill Clinton.
Cohen’s reputation as a political straight-shooter began when, as a freshman member of the House Judiciary Committee in 1974, he voted for President Nixon’s impeachment. In the Cohen myth, the vote to impeach has become something like a combination of the Exodus and Elvis’s appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show — a single act that forged a great identity. President Nixon has “allowed the rule of law and the Constitution to slip under the boots of indifference and arrogance and abuse,” Cohen proclaimed at the time. “The footprints of guilt must often be traced with the searchlight of probability.” As recently as last month, syndicated columnist Robert Novak recalled Cohen’s “courageous vote to impeach Richard Nixon.”
Courageous? Hardly. Novak said as much at the time. In a May 1974 column, Novak pointed out that Cohen’s stand against Nixon had brought the young congressman waves of support. “In truth, private polls show Cohen amazingly popular” in his Maine district, Novak wrote. Cohen’s approval rating topped 80 percent. He received standing ovations from crowds even in conservative Maine counties. And, according to Novak, “Cohen’s mail immediately following his rebuke to Mr. Nixon ran 10 to 1 in his favor.”
Cohen’s reception in Washington was, if possible, even warmer. “Judiciary Committee Members Splendidly Rising to History,” declared one Washington Post headline. Another Post account described Cohen as one of “the young Republicans who will inherit their party’s future.” And those were news stories. The opinion pages were even more slavishly supportive. Not even Gerald Ford, Nixon’s own vice president, publicly criticized Cohen for his position. Nixon was already facing profound image problems long before Cohen voted against him. His approval rating was mired at 24 percent; a strong national majority supported impeachment. So much for courageously bucking the tide of public opinion.
Far from hurting him back home with Republican voters, the publicity Cohen received during Watergate made him politically impregnable. Christian Potholm, Cohen’s campaign manager at the time, says Watergate resulted in “a tremendous gain in [Cohen’s] popularity with Democrats and independents.” That November, Cohen won reelection by a large margin, beating a well-known Vietnam war hero and former POW.
For Cohen, the lesson was obvious, and before long he was once again in a fit of moral outrage, once again directed at a member of his own party. In December 1975, Cohen contacted a New York Times reporter to recount a startling breach of ethics in the Ford administration. A White House lobbyist, Cohen reported, had approached him and another Maine congressman with a deal: If they would vote with the administration on a tax bill, the president might be persuaded to reappoint a prominent Maine Republican to the National Transportation Safety Board. Shocked and appalled by the offer, Cohen publicly demanded that “disciplinary action” be brought against the lobbyist. “The one thing that will never be compromised is my integrity,” Cohen announced in a statement dutifully reprinted in the Times. “My vote is not for sale, never has been and never will be. If we are going to establish and maintain confidence in our political system, then we have to reverse the widespread perception that it is just politics as usual in Washington.”
The poor lobbyist must have been confused by the controversy, since swapping votes for favors is politics as usual in Washington, and in every other place in the world where democratically elected legislatures gather. As a second-term congressman, Cohen must have been fully aware of dozens of examples of similar behavior. Never before had he felt the need to call the press. On the other hand, calling the press had never before been so profitable.
Cohen played the maverick integrity card all the way to the Senate, beating incumbent William Hathaway in 1978 and winning two more terms decisively after that. Along the way, he took a seat on the Armed Services Committee, became knowledgeable about foreign policy issues, and helped write laws with unassailable monikers, like the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 and the Anti-Kick-Back Act of 1986. He kept up with pork-related obligations back home, working to steer business to his state’s sizable defense industry, even fighting to make the government buy more Maine blueberries for school lunches and C-rations.
Cohen also continued in his role as his party’s self-appointed moral voice. “Those who plant their feet in the concrete of ideological absolutism are heralded as heroic defenders of truth, justice and the American way,” Cohen once thundered, complaining that thoughtful Republicans such as himself are derided as “mushy.”
All this posturing seemed to play well in Maine. “People in Maine are ornery,” explains Dick Morgan, a government professor at Bowdoin College, Cohen’s alma mater. “They liked him because he had so little party loyalty.” There was a lot of party disloyalty to like. When Republicans defeated the Clinton healthcare plan, Cohen rallied a group of its supporters to construct a similar alternative. In 1995, he was the only Republican in the Senate to vote against the party leadership’s budget reconciliation bill. By the end of ’95, Cohen was voting with the Clinton administration more frequently than any other GOP senator.
The closest Cohen came to replicating his performance in Watergate was in 1986, when he helped run congressional investigations into the Iran-contra scandal. Quickly emerging as one of the Reagan administration’s most aggressive critics, Cohen concluded the hearings by signing a majority- written report that described Reagan’s aides as a “cabal of zealots.” Cohen then teamed up with his Maine colleague, Democratic senator George Mitchell, and a year later produced a book on the affair entitled Men of Zeal.
The book is a tedious read, but it does end with a passage characteristic of Cohen’s public pronouncements. More than simply wrong or illegal, Men of Zeal declares, the Reagan administration’s stonewalling during Iran-contra was actually “another kind of warfare that threatens us.” In prose so impassioned that it earned a blurb from none other than Dan Rather, the senators breathlessly conclude: “If we continue to lie to each other, or withhold information, or leak information, alter or shred documents, or put them in burn bags, . . . the damage that we will inflict upon ourselves would be as suicidal and destructive as any that has taken place in the Middle East. ”
Men of Zeal may be the future defense secretary’s most famous published work, but it is only a small part of an ever-expanding oeuvre. Cohen has written eight books since being elected to Congress in 1972 — three novels, three non-fiction works, and a couple volumes of poetry. Another volume, “an examination of how elderly people are victimized by fraud,” is on the way. Spend any time reading Cohen’s work and you quickly discover the Bill Cohen Paradox: Despite his job title and his widely recognized intelligence, Cohen is actually hard to take seriously.
A master of the tired platitude, the hackneyed quote, the incomprehensible metaphor, Cohen the prose stylist hovers somewhere between John Grisham and Judy Blume. On the other hand, for a man famous for being bland — between 1987 and 1990, he gave a mind-numbing total of 41 speeches at the Brookings Institution — Cohen isn’t uniformly dull. “She wore no bra,” Cohen writes of a nude female assassin in one passage from a 1991 mystery novel called One- Eyed Kings. “Her glistening body was supple and deeply tanned. The two touches of white — crescents on her firm breasts, a narrow band across her buttocks and groin — seemed like adornments on her dark, rippling skin.”
Pretty amusing, but for truly delirious inadvertent comedy, check out The Double Man, a 1985 spy novel he wrote with Gary Hart. Ostensibly about a KGB-inspired terrorist plot, The Double Man is actually an extended meditation on the goodness of its protagonist, a moderate New England senator named Thomas Chandler. An accomplished, brilliant, incredibly well read lawyer from a working-class family, Sen. Chandler is a public servant of regal “distinction,” whose “bearing, the way he walked, identified him as a man in charge.” Though he came to Washington to reform the corrupt political system, Chandler in time becomes an expert on foreign policy, with a special interest in NATO. The senator thus finds himself “preoccupied,” not with his own success, but “with more important issues — the threat of nuclear war, the reformation of the tax code, protection of the environment against toxic wastes. . . .”
Standing in the way of such achievements is the usual group of conservative Republican ideologues making ugly noises about “the evils of abortion, sex, and liberalism.” Somehow, in the end, Chandler rises above these loutish Neanderthals and succeeds in exercising his own brand of, yes, thoughtful moderation. Dan Rather blurbed this book, too.
Cohen’s first love is poetry, and he commits it frequently. As his colleague Joseph Biden once explained, Cohen is “a poet, seriously a poet, a published poet.” Cohen’s verse addresses vital questions of the day: the Arab- Israeli conflict, the plight of Vietnam veterans, and the political situation in China. In 1985, he met, poet to poet, with Soviet writer Andrei Voznesensky and convinced President Reagan to do the same. “It’s not going to change the way their government looks at us, or vice versa,” Cohen conceded. ” But at least you’re building some lines of communications so you don’t automatically paint everybody as a monster over there.”
At the height of the controversy over the Strategic Defense Initiative, Cohen composed a poem entitled “High Frontier,” later published in his 1986 volume, A Baker’s Nickel. One stanza reads:
Before they unleash
hurricane winds,
Before they breathe
through nostrils red
beyond all Fahrenheit,
Turn them to endless
ash, yes, save us from
their savagery.
The poem’s exact position on SDI is hard to read — “It’s about man and his relationship to technology and science,” Cohen told the New York Times — but it does appear generally supportive. Which makes it a lot like Cohen’s own stand on many Republican-favored foreign policy issues. A longtime opponent of the nuclear freeze, Cohen backed most of the White House’s positions during the Cold War. When he took exception, however (as with his opposition to the B-2 bomber), his exceptions tended to be loud.
In recent years, Cohen has been particularly outspoken about the need for strong missile defense. In August 1995, he took to the floor of the Senate to contend that the ABM treaty should be open to re-negotiation, arguing that the United States and key allies like Israel require protection from international threats not present when the original treaty was signed in 1972. Cohen’s position on ABM is sensible. It is also dramatically at odds with that of the Clinton administration, which has declared the present ABM treaty “the cornerstone of strategic policy.” One defense analyst on the Hill says that the administration thinks the treaty “is something that was brought down off Mount Sinai.” Cohen’s calls to amend it, he says, “just drove them crazy.”
Cohen has never managed anything larger than a Senate staff, and he has never served in the military. But his past may offer clues to the kind of defense secretary he will make, and just how long he will last. In 1959, Dick Morgan was a cadet in charge of Bowdoin College’s ROTC unit. One Monday morning in the fall as the group’s drill exercises were beginning, Morgan remembers, “this Psi U freshman wandered in with an ill-fitting uniform. His cap was askew, nothing looking right. And the thought went through my mind, ‘Oh, no, we’ll never make a soldier out of him.’ That was Bill Cohen. He lasted one day.”
By Tucker Carlson
