Richard M. Cohen, an outspoken, 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. He was 76 years old.
His wife, former “Today” host Meredith Vieira, said his death, at a hospital, was caused by acute respiratory failure.
Cohen spent more than 20 years in the news business, working with luminaries such as Ted Koppel at ABC and Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather at CBS. But he took on a different topic when he wrote a memoir — and articles for HuffPost, The New York Times and other media — about managing MS, a degenerative disease of the central nervous system.
Mr. Cohen was diagnosed with MS in 1973, when he was 25 and helping to create a documentary for PBS about disability politics.
Despite declining vision, which turned into legal blindness, and worsening balance, which caused falls that made him appear drunk to the uninformed, he worked until the mid-1990s as a producer for CBS News, CNN, PBS (again) and FX.
“Richard was a man of vibrant good humor and brilliant intelligence,” Mr. Koppel wrote in an email. “I’m sure his numerous illnesses caused him more than the occasional bout of despair, but he never told me about it.”
One of Mr Cohen’s strategies for coping with MS – 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 that he would be considered unsuitable. Years later he learned from that manager that if he had been honest about his condition, he would not have been hired.
In 2004, about a decade after his producing career ended, he published what he called a “reluctant memoir,” “Blindsided: Lifting a Life Above Illness,” to chronicle how his once vigorous life had become circumscribed. from MS and two colon attacks. cancer.
“Welcome to my world,” Cohen wrote in the book, which spent several weeks on the Times best-seller list, “where I carry with me dreams, a few 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 Mr. Cohen’s right side had become so immobilized by MS that he typed “Blindsided” and subsequent books, only with his nondominant left hand and with his face close to the computer screen.
“He had a lot of determination and a lot to say,” he 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 profiled five people suffering from 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 paternal grandmother also had MS
Mr. Cohen was “evil” in high school, he wrote in “Blindsided,” and was kicked off track teams, kicked out of classes and suspended. In a spectacular prank, he and some friends stole the electric chair from an abandoned prison; his father had it returned to him the next day.
His attention was focused on Simpson College, in Indianola, Iowa, near Des Moines, where he was an anti-war activist. He was inspired to become a television journalist after speaking with Peter Jennings, then an ABC News correspondent, when he visited campus.
After graduating with degrees in history and political science in 1970, Cohen was hired at ABC News as an assistant producer of the Sunday public affairs program “Issues and Answers.” In 1972 he was the floor 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 disability. Coincidentally, it was while he was at PBS that he began experiencing symptoms that led to a neurologist’s diagnosis of MS.
“I dropped a coffee pot for no reason,” he told Yahoo in 2019. “I fell off the sidewalk for no reason. I noticed some numbness in my leg.”
“It affected my vision pretty quickly,” he continued, “but other than that, I was very physically active and thought I was really strong. I lived in denial.
He earned a master’s degree from Columbia University Journalism School in 1976, then went on to work at PBS after being turned down to work at “NBC Nightly News” because he admitted to having MS.
In 1979 he joined CBS News as a producer. He worked for Cronkite and Rather and traveled for the “CBS Evening News” to hot spots in Poland, Lebanon and El Salvador, despite his worsening condition.
“He was an original,” Andrew Heyward, a former senior “Evening News” producer who later became president of CBS News, said in an interview. “There was a kind of mold at CBS where people operated within unspoken boundaries, but he wasn’t bound by those conventions. He was outspoken, charming and had the quality of an absent-minded professor that people found endearing.”
Cohen’s rebellion surfaced publicly in opinion essays for the Times. In 1987 (under Mr. Rather’s byline but co-written), after cuts at CBS News, the article warned that the division might fall 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.
That same year, when Cohen was the “Evening News” producer in charge of foreign news, he wrote (this time under his own name) that Western news outlets would have to leave South Africa because of the strict limitations placed on reporting by apartheid. state. The government sought assurances from CBS that Mr. Cohen spoke for himself, not the network.
More importantly, he criticized Rather for the way he handled a hostile and controversial live interview on the “Evening News” with Vice President George Bush on January 25, 1988, at the start of the presidential campaign. Mr. Rather aggressively pressed the vice president about his role in the Iran-contra scandal; the Bush campaign accused CBS of misrepresenting the terms of the interview.
“Look, I think Dan made some mistakes,” Mr. Cohen told the Des Moines Register. “I think his posture was probably too aggressive, but that’s not the issue.” He added: “We have suffered a huge blow. I think it was very harmful to us. To Dan. To our credibility.”
About six weeks later, CBS News ousted Cohen as senior producer of “Evening News” for political coverage. He turned down another assignment and left the network.
While at CBS, Cohen won two Emmys 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 on the power of images in news, politics and elections. His segment was included in a four-part video that won “The Public Mind” a Peabody Award.
After Cohen moved to CNN, he produced a documentary about Bill Clinton in 1992 during his successful run for president. He ended his producing career in the mid-1990s at FX.
In addition to Ms. Vieira, Mr. Cohen is survived by his daughter, Lily Cohen; their sons, Gabe and Ben; one grandson; his brother Bernardo; and his sister, Terrie Cohen.
Mr. Cohen didn’t want people to pity him or praise him for the way he coped with multiple sclerosis.
“Those who battle serious illnesses every day and refuse to become victims are continually told that we inspire the chronically healthy,” he wrote in HuffPost in 2014. He added: “Let me set the record straight. There are no heroes, only survivors. There are no medals or merit badges hanging from our chests.”