Richard M. Cohen, an outspoken and award-winning television news producer whose career was ultimately derailed by the ravages of multiple sclerosis, which he wrote about in a best-selling memoir, died Dec. 24 in Sleepy Hollow, New York, a village in Westchester County. It was 76.
His wife, former “Today” anchor Meredith Vieira, said he died at a hospital of acute respiratory failure.
Mr. Cohen spent more than 20 years in the news industry, working with such luminaries as Ted Koppel at ABC and Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather at CBS. But he tackled a different subject when he wrote a memoir — and op-eds for HuffPost, The New York Times and other publications — about dealing with MS, a degenerative disease of the central nervous system.
Mr. Cohen was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1973 when he was 25 and helped create a documentary for PBS about disability politics.
Despite impaired vision, which turned into legal blindness, and impaired balance, which caused falls that made him appear drunk to the uninformed, he worked in the mid-1990s as a producer for CBS News, CNN, PBS (again ) and FX.
“Richard was a man of lively humor and bright intelligence,” wrote Mr. Kopel in an email. “I’m sure his many illnesses caused him more than the occasional bout of despair, but he never shared that with me.”
One of the strategies of Mr. Cohen’s way of dealing with multiple sclerosis — and living life as he chose — was denial. He told very few people, including the CBS News executive who hired him in 1979, for fear of being seen as incompetent. He learned years later from that executive that if he had been honest about his condition, he would not have been hired.
In 2004, about a decade after his career as a producer ended, he published what he called a “reluctant memoir,” Blindsided: Lifting a Life Above Illness, to recount how his once vibrant life was curtailed by multiple sclerosis and two colonic crises. Cancer.
“Welcome to my world,” wrote Mr. Cohen in the book, which spent several weeks on the Times best-seller list, “where I carry dreams, some illnesses and the determination to live life my way. This book is my daily conversation with myself, a chronicle of the struggles in that exotic place just north of the neck.”
Ms. Vieira said in an interview that the right side of Mr. Cohen was so immobilized by multiple sclerosis that he typed Blindsided and subsequent books with only his non-dominant left hand and his face close to the computer screen.
“He had a lot of determination and a lot to say,” she said.
His second book, Strong at the Broken Places: Voices of Illness, a Chorus of Hope (2008), offered him some distance from his own illnesses. In that book, he described five people with chronic diseases: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or Lou Gehrig’s disease; non-Hodgkin lymphoma; Crohn’s disease? muscular dystrophy; and bipolar disease.
Richard Merrill Cohen was born on February 14, 1948 in Manhattan. His father, Benjamin, was a doctor. His mother, Theresa (Beitzer) Cohen, was a nurse. His father and grandmother also had multiple sclerosis
Mr. Cohen was an “unknown” in high school, wrote in “Blindsided” and was kicked from sports teams, expelled from classes and fired. In an impressive prank, he and some friends stole the electric chair from an abandoned prison. his father made him return it the next day.
His focus was sharpened at Simpson College, in Indianola, Iowa, near Des Moines, where he was an anti-war activist. He was inspired to become a journalist after speaking with Peter Jennings, then a correspondent for ABC News, when he visited campus.
After graduating in 1970 with a degree in history and political science, Mr. Cohen was hired at ABC News as an assistant producer of the Sunday public affairs program “Issues and Answers.” In 1972 he was a producer for Mr. Koppel at the Democratic and Republican presidential conventions.
In 1973, he joined the PBS program ‘America ’73’, where he helped produce the documentary on disabilities. Coincidentally, it was while at PBS that he began to develop symptoms that led to a neurologist’s diagnosis of multiple sclerosis
“I dropped a coffee pot for no reason,” he told Yahoo in 2019. “I fell off a curb for no reason. I noticed a little numbness in my leg.”
“It affected my vision pretty quickly,” he continued, “but other than that, I was very active physically and I thought I was really beating it. I was living in denial.”
He received a master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of Journalism in 1976 and then went on to work at PBS after being turned down for a job at “NBC Nightly News” because he admitted he had multiple sclerosis.
In 1979, he joined CBS News as a producer. He worked for Mr. Cronkite and Mr.
“He was an original,” Andrew Heyward, a former senior producer of the “Evening News” who later became president of CBS News, said in an interview. “There was a kind of mold at CBS where people acted within unspoken constraints, but he wasn’t bound by those conventions. He was honest, charming and had a reluctant professorial quality that people found endearing.’
The rebelliousness of Mr. Cohen appeared publicly in opinion essays for The Times. In 1987 (under Mr. Rather’s byline but written together), after cutbacks at CBS News, the article warned that the division might descend into mediocrity under the network’s new owner and CEO, Laurence A. Tisch. The piece angered Mr. Tisch and Howard Stringer, the president of CBS News.
Later that year, when Mr. Cohen was the Evening News producer responsible for foreign news, wrote (this time under his own name) that Western news agencies should leave South Africa because of the severe restrictions placed on reporting by apartheid. situation. The government sought assurances from CBS that Mr. Cohen had spoken about himself, not the network.
Most importantly, he criticized Mr. Mallon for his handling of a hostile, controversial live “Evening News” interview with Vice President George W. Bush on Jan. 25, 1988, early in the presidential campaign. Mr. Mallon aggressively pressed the vice president for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal. the Bush campaign accused CBS of misrepresenting the terms of the interview.
“Look, I think Dan made mistakes,” said Mr. Cohen in The Des Moines Register. “I think his attitude was probably too aggressive, but that’s not the point.” He added: “We received a heavy blow. I think it was very detrimental to us. To Dan. To our credibility”.
About six weeks later, CBS News fired Mr. Cohen as “Evening News” senior producer for political coverage. He declined another assignment and left the network.
While at CBS, Mr. Cohen won two Emmy Awards for reporting for the “Evening News.” He won a third in 1989 after returning to PBS, for a segment on “The Public Mind With Bill Moyers” in 1989 about the power of images in news, politics and elections. His segment was included in a four-part entry that won “The Public Mind” a Peabody Award.
Since Mr. Cohen moved to CNN, producing a documentary in 1992 about Bill Clinton during his successful run for the presidency. He ended his career as a producer in the mid-1990s at FX.
Besides Ms. Vieira, Mr. Cohen is survived by their daughter, Lily Cohen; their sons, Gabe and Ben; a grandson; his brother, Bernard; and his sister, Terrie Cohen.
Mr. Cohen wanted neither to be pitied nor praised for the way he dealt with MS.
“Those who battle serious illness every day and refuse to be victimized are constantly told that we inspire them to stay healthy,” he wrote to HuffPost in 2014. He added, “Let me set the record straight. There are no heroes, only survivors. There are no medals or badges of merit hanging from our chests.’
