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The Cohens: "Love in Black and White"

Mr. Wattenberg: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. There isn’t another Washington power couple quite like Janet and Bill Cohen. She is a former model, television journalist and CEO of her own communications firm. And he is a Republican former Congressman and Senator from Maine and Secretary of Defense under President Bill Clinton. Together they have authored “Love in Black and White: A Memoir on Race, Religion and Romance.” The topic before the House: The Cohens: Only in America. This week on Think Tank.

Mr. Wattenberg: Janet Langhart Cohen and Senator and Secretary of Defense William Cohen, welcome to Think Tank for the first of what I hope will be a number of visits.

Mrs. Cohen: Thank you, Ben.

Mr. Wattenberg: Your very fascinating book is called Love in Black and White and it is by William S. Cohen with Janet Cohen, so let me begin with Senator and Secretary of Defense as we normally do. Bill, tell me a little bit about your – where you were born and how you grew up, it’s a very interesting story. Not too long but just, ..because we’ve got two people in here, it’s going to take awhile.

Mr. Cohen: I’ll shorten it up. I was born in Bangor, Maine. My dad was Jewish, my mother Irish Protestant. I was raised in Bangor, went to Hebrew school for six years, was not allowed to be bar-mitzvah’d because my mother remained an Irish Protestant, did not convert.

Mr. Cohen: And so I grew up in sort of another world, in terms of not being accepted by either the Gentile community or the Jewish community. So, I think it was a learning experience in character building, it allowed me to be on the outside by force of necessity, but to identify with those who perhaps had obstacles in their path.

Mr. Wattenberg: Janet, how about your thumbnail biography?

Mrs. Cohen: Well, like Bill, we were both born during the World War II and I was born in Indianapolis, Indiana in a very segregated society. America at that time was an apartheid country, particularly in the South. There were signs up, as we all know, in the South that said white only, colored only and in the North, up South, in Indianapolis where I was born, there were also signs that said “Restricted”. It meant that blacks, nor Jews, perhaps even in Boston, no Irish, could enter or apply.

Mr. Wattenberg: And the Klan was anti-black, anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic. You put those three groups together you get forty percent of the population.

Mrs. Cohen: And they were headquartered in my hometown.

Mr. Wattenberg: Now, Indiana was a terrible state for Klan party, I’m think there was an Indiana Governor who was a Klan member.

Mrs. Cohen: Mm-hmm.

Mr. Wattenberg: So you grew up in this segregated society?

Mrs. Cohen: Yes, I grew up primarily in a government project where, of course, there were only black and it was an experiment, I believe, designed by the Roosevelt Administration to see if they could, indeed, construct, design and construct an environment for all blacks and it was nicely called a Ghetto, a Black Ghetto, but it was a very nice place to live and I went to an all black high school, the name of the high school was Crispus Attucks, Crispus Attucks was the first man, who just happened to be black, to die in the Revolutionary War. So that was the man that our school, our high school, was named for.

Mr. Wattenberg: And as I read the book – tell me if this is wrong – you both grew up angry.

Mr. Cohen: I think that’s fair to say for me and Janet, yeah.

Mrs. Cohen: My rage developed later. Even though as early as five years old I was at a Klan meeting. My mother worked in the homes of white people as a domestic and in that home there were two little white girls who were a little, oh I guess about three to five years, older than I, and took me for a little walk in the neighborhood because they were following a line of cars that were going by. It was an Indian summer night, probably in October, and we were on this slope looking down at a clearing and I noticed that just about everybody was wearing a white robe, even the children. The women were sitting on the running boards of those 1940’s cars and as it got darker, in the clearing, there was this big, huge cross that burst into flames and like most children I was fascinated by the fire and the flames, but I remember those two little girls, those two sisters, saying to me as they had me between them, ‘You have to be quiet Janet because we’ll get into trouble for having you here’, and I simply thought they meant because they had taken me too far from the house.

And when we got back to the house they washed up, I washed up and my mother fed me and I never told my mother about that meeting, for some reason, I guess because I thought we were too far from home and it might have been a problem. Until I saw a Klan meeting on television, and I told my mother, I said, ‘I was at one of those meetings’, and she said, ‘You have a vivid imagination; you would never have survived one of those meetings’. And I told her where we were working, or where she had worked at that time, and just about the time that it had happened and she said, ‘You know, they did have a lot of Klan meetings around there’. And what it did, having the cross, a flame and learning what that signified, affected my faith. My mother was a devout Christian, very God-fearing and it was hard for me to embrace the whole aspects of religion, having my first recollection of the cross being one that was burning.

Mr. Wattenberg: And your anger – you threw your Jewish star into the river, is that right?

Mr. Cohen: Well I was wearing a Mezuzah. I spent six years in Hebrew school, usually ended up being the number one student in the class but was never given the number one prize. And then at the very end as I was preparing for bar mitzvah, I was then told that I could not be bar mitzvah’d and I thought, well, you picked a fine time to tell me, Louise; why not when I began this, because I would go to public school and Hebrew school, so I was doing double duty at that time. And plus I was taking some of the assaults.

When I was pitching in Little League for example, I had one experience in a small town where someone, one of the fans, threw some beer cans at me and said, ‘Send the Jew boy home’, and so I was prepared to take the assaults coming with the name of Cohen, but I wasn’t accepted by the Jewish community. So there was some anger...

Mr. Wattenberg: You were advised, I think even by your father, perhaps to change your name?

Mr. Cohen: Oh, my dad did. Several times he asked me, he suggested, whether it was in total seriousness or not, he said, ‘You know, you really will get through life better if you change your name because there’s a lot of hostility you’re going to encounter’. I would have none of it. I said, ‘It’s going to stay the way it is’.

Mr. Wattenberg: So you served – you’re a lawyer and you get into politics and you just go (makes sound). You’re a Congressman and a Senator and a military expert and then as you are getting ready to leave, after you two get married, you get a phone call from President Clinton.

Mr. Cohen: Right.

Mr. Wattenberg: And why don’t you tell us about that?

Mr. Cohen: Well I had spent 24 years on Capitol Hill and I decided it was time for me to do something else in my life, so I announced my retirement, Janet and I got married, and then we were preparing to enter the private world when I got a call from the White House saying, ‘Would you come down and meet with the President?’. I did. At that point I had already signed a letter of intent to lease a space down here in Washington, had my business cards all printed up, so I was in to the private world mentally.

We had a lunch and we talked philosophy, nothing specific, and then I had a second and then third meeting, finally, at which time he offered me the position.

Mr. Wattenberg: Janet, when you went to the Pentagon, perhaps with a little foreboding as I read it here, you really fell in love with the place.

Mrs. Cohen: Well there was no foreboding going to the Pentagon. When I heard that the President had offered Bill the job of Secretary of Defense, and while he was pondering whether or not he would accept it, I said, ‘You have to say yes, this is the most important job in the world, to lead our military. These are the finest men and women, the best and the brightest’, and he said, ‘Yeah, well I want to do that’, and then later I learned...

Mr. Cohen: As you go back – I had promised her once I left the Senate, life was going to be normal. I’d be home by five, we would have a different life and then along came this proposal. I knew it was going to involve eighteen hours a day. So, yeah, I hesitated and she reassured me.

Mrs. Cohen: I had no problem with that. What we didn’t talk about was when Bill first asked me to marry him he was in the Senate and I said no, not because I didn’t love him and didn’t want to be married; it was because I didn’t want to hurt his career. I thought his being married to a black woman, and should he want to get reelected or have greater aspirations beyond the Senate, being married to me would hurt him, and I kept saying ‘no, no, no’. And it seems I underestimated Maine, and to some extent America.

Mr. Wattenberg: That’s of course is the running theme in this quite remarkable book, is how people reacted to your marriage and maybe you could each give me a sense of that.

Mr. Cohen: Well they reacted quite positively. I mean, it’s some irony of history that Strom Thurmond was at our wedding.

Mrs. Cohen: Trent Lott.

Mr. Cohen: And if you give – if you look back at the history of Strom Thurmond being – leading the Dixiecrat Party and against integration...

Mr. Wattenberg: It’s a funny thing, what happens to politicians when blacks vote, and then all of a sudden (makes sound). It happened to George Wallace; all of a sudden he just did a 179.

Mrs. Cohen: Strom Thurmond lived to be 100 years old. 100 years is a long time in a country that’s just over 200 plus years old. And I think, like the country has grown, I believe Senator Strom Thurmond had grown and when he was at our wedding I had asked him, because of protocol, for him to sit up front with our family, and he said, no, no I won’t do that, but I thought he would anyway. And when I walked through the door to walk down the aisle to meet up with Bill, Senator Strom Thurmond’s face was the first one I saw, and he was looking at me, Ben, in a way that was – it was very playful, but this time he looked very serious and I hadn’t forgotten that. And later, after the wedding, I said to Bill he looked at me in a very paternalistic way. That was nice. And, of course, we all later learned that he had a black daughter, a bi-racial daughter. So I wonder, was he thinking of her when looking at me.

Mr. Wattenberg: And he liked looking at beautiful women.

Mrs. Cohen: Well he did, but this was a different look. I’ve seen that look too, but on my wedding day I saw something paternal and sweet. So I thought my mother and father and grandparents would have turned over in their graves to have known that Strom Thurmond, the Dixiecrat would be at our interracial wedding in the Capitol of the United States of America.

Mr. Wattenberg: It’s a very interesting phenomenon, the Southern political thing. George Wallace ran the first time for governor as fairly liberal, sort of a labor liberal, and got creamed, and then he turned into a Seg. and he won.

Mrs. Cohen: Well, you know, you never can get into anybody’s mind and you can only measure their behavior. I interviewed him after his accident, after he was shot, when I had the show up in Boston –

Mr. Wattenberg: Yeah, you had a whole great separate career as an extremely successful talk show maestro.

Mr. Cohen: She was the first black woman to have a syndicated television, national program.

Mr. Wattenberg: And a runway model, and an equestrian who played polo. I mean, you’ve got a very interesting career.

Mrs. Cohen: And I used all of those strengths and attributes to interview George Wallace, and I was all prepared, like I was when I interviewed David Duke to have an adversary. And George Wallace had changed, as you mentioned, and was more conciliatory. I think it was after he had met with your former boss, Johnson, did he change his mind.

Mr. Wattenberg: Did David Duke change?

Mrs. Cohen: I don’t think David Duke has changed, again, measuring behavior. His behavior has continued to be hostile.

Mr. Wattenberg: David Duke, I don’t know if there was a good side to Duke, but I certainly didn’t notice it. You talk a great deal about race. Now you have many people in the black community, Bill Cosby, who, for one, is a great man as far as talking very tough to the black community about crime, about illegitimacy, about a lot of other things. There’s nothing in your book that I saw that has any indication of that part of the problem; that the black/white problem in America is due to some black behavior. I mean, you have a five times disproportionate violent crime rate which has come close to destroying the community, and is that purposeful that you stayed away from that sort of rhetoric?

Mrs. Cohen: No, probably because I’m not a sociologist, and that isn’t what I do. I was sharing my personal experiences and what, in America, has shaped me and the people that have shaped me.

Mr. Cohen: Janet has addressed this issue, she wrote articles in support of what Bill Cosby was talking about in terms of culture. Some of that was in her book called, From Rage to Reason: My Life in Two America’s. When I wrote this book, I had to structure it in a way to take the best of what I could find in her book and to balance it out with my mini-stories. So, she has spoken about this in terms of the rap culture, the gangster rap...

Mrs. Cohen: Misogyny.

Mr. Cohen: ...misogyny. So she has spoken on that in terms of the need for black America to recognize it also has a serious problem it has to deal with. So, she has been very vocal on that.

Mrs. Cohen: And the responsibility is on black people to do the very best they can with the new laws that have been passed, yet some to be enforced, it is our responsibility, but it is also the responsibility of the larger society who benefits the most from their misfortune to do something about it and live up to those very proud and virtuous words of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Payne and Madison.

Mrs. Cohen: Just yesterday we celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling outlawing mescegenation in the Loving versus Virginia case, and Mrs. Loving, Mildred Jeter Loving, is still living in Virginia. But that was a case that was decided in 1967, I believe, because they were arrested, they had gotten married, a black and white couple, he was white, she was black, and they had moved to Virginia and were arrested, and – you want to tell it from there?

Mr. Cohen: Well they left – actually, they left Virginia, got married in D.C. and then went back to Virginia, were arrested, put in jail, sentenced for a year and they were then released with the condition being that they not come back to Virginia for 25 years. They ended up coming Washington, or elsewhere, bringing a lawsuit which resulted in a court overruling all anti-miscegenation laws across the country, but the point is that seven years prior to the time that I met Janet, it would have been illegal for us to marry in a number of states.

Mrs. Cohen: We would have been outlaws. Can you imagine that? Our live, our union would have been outlawed, against the law, a felony.

Mr. Wattenberg: In many states.

Mrs. Cohen: Seventeen. And my home state, Indiana was one of them.

Mr. Cohen: So how far have we come? A long way that in 1996, Janet and I could be married at the United States Capitol and that for us was very symbolic, because that Capitol was built on the backs of slaves who were forced to help build that great building of ours and had wonderful words etched in the marble about liberty and quality and justice for all, and it wasn’t true then.

Mrs. Cohen: And what’s curious, and ironic, is that we have used the system of this great nation to right the wrongs. Those very words that I talked about earlier by the great Founders, we have used the Constitution, we’ve amended it appropriately, we’ve gone to Supreme Court rulings and we’ve used this due process to change things, to have America live up to her words.

Mr. Wattenberg: And you now have a – you have Washington, Lincoln sharing a holiday, Martin Luther King with his own holiday, so that’s pretty symbolic.

Mr. Cohen: And you have a candidate, who is black, who is running for President and it tells you –

Mr. Wattenberg: Barack Obama.

Mr. Cohen: Barack Obama. ..so there’s a lot of changes taking place.

Mr. Wattenberg: And Colin Powell was in first place in the polls.

Mrs. Cohen: So was Tom Bradley in L.A. and look what happened.

Mr. Wattenberg: That’s right.

Mrs. Cohen: Polls and actual voting are two very different things.

Mr. Cohen: I think, and Colin was ahead in the Republican primary polling, and had he stayed in I think he could have been nominated.

Mrs. Cohen: You think he could have been elected? He certainly was qualified.

Mr. Wattenberg: Well if he was nominated he would have been a powerful candidate because he would have drawn black votes from the Democratic Party.

Mr. Cohen: Plus he had four stars on his shoulder which made a big difference.

Mr. Wattenberg: Which is a lot of stars.

Mrs. Cohen: Okay, let’s talk about the black candidates, the most current one, Barack Obama. If America has, indeed, come very far in that he’s considered a viable candidate, from both camps, black and whites, why does he have Secret Service protection?

Mr. Wattenberg: Why does he have what?

Mrs. Cohen: Secret Service Protection.

Mr. Wattenberg: I think every candidate who is above a certain threshold in the polls gets Secret Service.

Mrs. Cohen: I thought you had to be nominated?

Mr. Wattenberg: No, I don’t think so.

Mrs. Cohen: Then why don’t the others have it?

Mr. Wattenberg: Bill, you correct me, I think once you hit a certain threshold in the polls, above ten or fifteen percent...

Mrs. Cohen: Mitt Romney has it; he doesn’t have Secret Service.

Mr. Wattenberg: Does not have Secret Service?

Mrs. Cohen: He’s leading in the polls.

Mr. Wattenberg: Does he have Secret Service protection?

Mr. Cohen: I don’t know the answer to that question.

Mrs. Cohen: I know the answer to that question, he’s had death threats.

Mr. Wattenberg: Look, if he’s getting death threats, I damn well want him to have Secret Service, and he’s courageous to run.

Mr. Cohen: And the question is, why is he getting death threats? Are the others getting death threats? And the answer is, probably not. And the reason he’s getting is because he’s black, and you still have deep seeded racist in this country.

Mr. Wattenberg: Well, Mrs. Clinton has Secret Service protection...

Mrs. Cohen: She’s the former First Lady; that’s customary.

Mr. Wattenberg: I understand, but she’s also gets a lot of hate...

Mrs. Cohen: You think she gets threats?

Mr. Wattenberg: Okay, yeah; I mean, I know that. She gets a lot of hate mail and...

Mr. Cohen: Anyway, to come back to...

Mrs. Cohen: I digress.

Mr. Cohen: We’ve come a long way. White society has come a very long way, there’s no question about it. You go back historically, what has happened, what we did as a people, to people that we brought over here and how we treated them and set them back and say, ‘you can’t read, you can’t learn the language, you can’t communicate’ and look at how far we have come. Because they’ve always been telling me, I used to point out, and I do in the book, you can take – had a lot of myths about blacks weren’t intelligent, they could be big outfielders, slugging outfielders, couldn’t be pitchers, you could be a running back, but you couldn’t be a quarterback, you could be a coach, but you couldn’t be the head coach. So every single myth about inferiority has been shattered.

Mr. Wattenberg: Right. You have these great black quarterbacks now and the whole idea, you know, that there’s a breed of people, white and black, all dumb jocks, is you got a guy who’s a quarterback and he’s got to know where 21 other people are and make split second audibles, this is not a dumb anything.

Mr. Cohen: All I’m pointing out is, we’ve had these myths to hold people down and then once you show the light these people have always been qualified. There hasn’t been a pigmentation of their skin that’s held them back, it’s been social and society and racism.

Mrs. Cohen: And sexism and anti-Semitism.

Mr. Cohen: So now you see that they’re able, once you lift the burdens, once you take the chains away, they’re able to soar like anybody else and that’s what is great about this country, that we have in a relatively short period of time, been able to allow people to reach their highest potential. So, that’s the promise of this country.

Mr. Wattenberg: Talk to me about black racism. Malcolm X called whites white devils, or something, you have within the black community light skinned blacks being dumped on by dark skinned blacks, so vice versa. Is this a phenomenon, this racist phenomenon that is in every society?

Mrs. Cohen: Oh, I think so. We’re seeing it in Asia where the Asian women and the Indian women, they feel that the lighter you are, the better you are. I think racism has to do with power, and black people have no power over white people, so I would say that Malcolm in his early days, a reactionary, an angry man much like I am, I was more a follower of Malcolm X then I was of my dear friend, Dr. Martin Luther King, and his approach to winning our freedom and equality. So, I think it’s he was a reactionary, I think all of us would be reactionaries if indeed, we were oppressed by racist society and denied our equality.

Mr. Cohen: It also goes back to life on the plantations, to the extent that you had white slave masters sleeping with black women and producing lighter children.

Mrs. Cohen: Mulatto children.

Mr. Cohen: All those children were given special privileges. And so, the goal was to get lighter and that you were given more privileges, and so there’s bound to be a resentment that still lingers, where you have the darker skinned blacks who feel that they have been mistreated by those who have, they have not had the same privileges granted to them. So, that’s still there.

Mrs. Cohen: I think it’s in every society, you look at almost any society that has been oppressed, they want to, if it’s not the Stockholm syndrome of wanting to assimilate with your captors, you want to survive and color of skin, color determined everything in this country.

Mr. Wattenberg: Still?

Mrs. Cohen: Oh, I think so. Even blonde hair determines everything, blonde hair.

Mrs. Cohen: I would say to my girlfriends, my black girlfriends, when I’d see a young white girl get a job on television, and I would call it ‘going blonde’ because over time they would get blonder and blonder and blonder. And I would joke that even white girls have to pass for white, they have to lighten their hair to reach that Aryan ideal. So, and if you look at (inaudible) media, we have war going on, we have an election going on, we have some concerns about our national security with nuclear threats out there and we’re covering Paris Hilton, Anna Nicole Smith? Now her baby. And every ten years we come up with ‘who murdered Jon Benet Ramsey’? And if you look at the missing people from the Alabama girl down in Aruba, you would never think anybody other than blonde women were missing, true?

Mr. Wattenberg: I don’t know. That’s an interesting point.

Mrs. Cohen: And that shows value. That shows the value that our society puts on you the more white you are. So, is it any wonder that in the black society there wouldn’t be this little crab in the barrel mentality, like who’s lighter, or who’s darker.

Mr. Wattenberg: Well, I’m sure I can come up with something to dispute that, but that is a very interesting point.

Let me ask you this question, since the 1960’s, 1970’s there have been a variety of legislative measures, some people call them affirmative action, some people call it quotas, whatever, that has attempted to bend over backwards to say, look, you were oppressed and now we’re going to help bring you in. Do you see a day, five, ten, twenty, twenty-five, thirty years from now, where we’re going to get rid of all that because there will be enough equality?

Mrs. Cohen: I do. Because we have intermarried, we watched a little dance program last night and we were sitting there trying to discern who was black, who was Asian, who was white, who was mixed, who was Latino because the younger generation, that’s young enough to be our grandchildren, they’ve gotten beyond it for the most part, they’re multiracial. When I signed my admission slips to get into college I had to write Negro, white or other, and if other explain. Well, all of these kids today are going to have to explain because they are other, like Tiger Wood. But, I think yes, nature being...

Mrs. Cohen: But regardless of race, we’ll find height or weight or age as we’re doing now in some cases, to discriminate against each other and until we arrive and evolve at a place spiritually where we can accept people based on their humanity, regardless of what they look like and where they come from or the language they speak. I think we still have a long way to go, not just America, humanity.

Mr. Wattenberg: Well, I don’t think we are going to get a better final statement than that one, so thank you very much, Janet Cohen, Bill Cohen and thank you. Please remember to send us your comments via email. We think it makes Think Tank a better program. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg.

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