Richard Cohen Retires
A bittersweet farewell to a newspaperman past his sell-by date.
After 51 years at the Washington Post, 43 as a columnist, he’s stepping away. His farewell letter strikes all the right notes:
There were no better bosses than the Grahams — and, more recently, Jeff Bezos. I roamed the world on their dime. Flying into Cairo for the first time, I looked out the window. A sandstorm obscured the pyramids, but I envisioned them anyway and could not get over the fact that I was being paid to see them. What fools the Grahams were. I would have done it for nothing.
Back in 2017, I helped produce a documentary for HBO on the life of Ben Bradlee. HBO called it “The Newspaperman,” and I thought, how wonderful, how apt. That was Bradlee and, with the same permission he gave me to write a column, I take that appellation for myself as well. It is, I think, the highest of callings, and I never wanted to be anything else. You go to work and someone pins an imaginary badge on you and deputizes you to go forth and discover life, ask questions, turn over rocks and, in the case of a column, think so hard it’s physically draining.
Many of the responses to his departure are less than kind. Andrew Beaujon of The Washingtonian reminds us of Cohen’s many controversies:
Cohen joined the Post in 1968 and became an opinion writer in 1984. He helped get the redesigned Post magazine off to an extremely rocky start only two years later with a piece that sympathized with jewelry store owners who didn’t want to let young black men into their shops; Ben Bradlee, then the paper’s executive editor, apologized after protesters returned thousands of copies of the magazine to the newspaper.
In the years since he displayed a remarkable ability to survive at the paper despite being accused of sexual harassment (he somehow got a better office out of the deal) and frequently stepping in it with regard to race, like the time he wrote that “People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children” or the time that he wrote sympathetically about the man who killed Trayvon Martin. Cohen’s work could appear just as clueless when he tackled other sensitive subjects, as when he wrote, “The first thing you should know about the so-called Steubenville Rape is that this was not a rape involving intercourse.”
None of those columns made the Washington Post‘s own roundup of Cohen’s greatest hits.
Matt Yglesias wrote about Cohen last April, castigating him for his resentfulness about affirmative action amidst a life of privilege. He lists many of the same transgressions Beaujon pointed to and observes,
There’s a phrase I learned a few years back that goes, “When you are accustomed to privilege, equality can feel like oppression.”
Cohen’s career, I think, exemplifies the wisdom contained in that aphorism. He’s a guy who’s enjoyed a well-compensated, high-status, easy-to-do job for decades who nonetheless quite sincerely feels put upon by the fact that he lost a job to a woman sometime in the 1970s and sometimes get called a racist because he thinks young black men should be subject to discriminatory treatment.
He feels, on these grounds, a profound affinity for Trump voters. And because the demographic of put-upon older white men does, in fact, exert disproportionate influence over American social and economic institutions, there continues to be a well-compensated and not very taxing job for him into his late 70s.
With regard to the nature of the job, I’m closer to Cohen’s “so hard it’s physically draining” than Yglesias’ “not very taxing.” Writing 800 words a couple times a week isn’t all that hard. Doing so with tens of millions of people judging every word is. Doing so week after week, year after year? Unimaginable.
Cohen is an example of a common phenomenon in his business: a columnist that should have been put out to pasture long ago. It’s not so much that, at 78, he’s lost his fastball. But, after 40-plus years, he’d long since run out of new ideas.
It says something positive about Cohen that he continued to write what he believed despite coming under constant fire in his professional and social circles for it. And even moreso for Post management for not wilting under those pressures, especially in the social media era. But it’s decidedly less positive that, despite the lavish travel budget of the Grahams, and later Besos, he didn’t grow all that much from all that thinking he strained so hard to do. He’s still very much a child of the 1940s and 1950s. A worldview that made him a liberal in his 20s and 30s made him a conservative in his 40s and 50s. And a crank in his 60s and 70s.
You know, my paternal grandparents remained unrepentant Nazis until their late 80s. For some reason I have never considered their continued adherence to horrendous beliefs in spite of all opposition a positive feature.
This whole “good for him that he stands up for his convictions” can die in a fire as far as I’m concerned. It’s part and parcel of the continued malfunction of public debate and journalistic responsibility – the elevation of form over content.
James, a lot of people want his job. It’s very desirable.
I am biased, but the bulk of the criticism has been for horrendous writing, as mentioned by Matthew.
@Ebenezer_Arvigenius: “This whole “good for him that he stands up for his convictions” can die in a fire as far as I’m concerned. ”
Notice that Cohen was richly rewarded for his convictions. He is not a martyr.
My granddad went to his grave thinking Richard Nixon was completely innocent and the liberal Communists in the media framed him.
@Ebenezer_Arvigenius:
The thing is, he was an opinion writer. He believed some retrograde things but, so long as he had the gig, it was his job to defend them. I think a lot of people in his position write with an eye to being popular with their social circles or simply keeping the gravy train running.
@Barry: I think he was a pretty good writer with some bad ideas. But I think most people should have a column for, say, ten years max. Beyond that, it’s rare to continue to have good ideas.
For me it says: I’m part of the Old Boy’s Club.
I was never familiar with Richard Cohen, but I’m happy to see him gone.
I used to write a weekly 800 word restaurant review column first for the Portland Sunday Telegram paper then for the Richmond News Leader. At the time I was a fugitive, living under one alias, writing under a different alias, while improperly working at a restaurant myself. It was a very popular column, and I quite enjoyed the death threats.
It was easy.
Writers love them some pity, love it when the civilians stroke their egos, and love to go on about the terrible burden of writing what amounts to three manuscript pages. @Mataconis writes more every day before lunch. If you think 800 words a week is a strain, find a different job, ya big baby.
@James Joyner:
No. He believed some hateful, evil things. We’re not talking about objecting to artificial turf or the designated hitter rule here; we’re not even talking about thinking men should have shorter hair than women. We’re talking straight toxic racism and sexism.
One of the recurring criticisms of Conservatism as a way of thought is that it routinely fails to distinguish a preference for continuity from defense of the indefensible. You are reinforcing that characterization here.
@Teve: To quote the description of the Nixon library in John Moe’s Conservatize Me:
@DrDaveT: I think he believes pretty much what everyone in his social circle believed in his youth and just hasn’t grown particularly much. He’s not burning crosses in people’s lawns. He’s harboring weird prejudices and proclaiming it for all to see.
@James Joyner:
James, please. Stop digging.
These are not excuses. They are not even mitigating circumstances. I thought conservatives believed in personal responsibility.
You could say these things truthfully about Donald Trump, and it would not make him a whit less culpable for being the hateful monster he is. After all, he is not “burning crosses on people’s lawns” either.
odd fellow , richard. u never knew what he was going to say.