Journalist Richard M. Cohen, who won three Emmy Awards as a senior producer for CBS News and wrote four books on his 50-year battle with multiple sclerosis, died on Dec. 24, 2024 in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. after a two-month bout of pneumonia. A longtime summer resident of Wellfleet, he was 76.
The son of Benjamin Cohen, a doctor who also suffered from MS, and Teresa (Beitzer) Cohen, a nurse, Richard Merrill Cohen was born on Feb. 14, 1948 in New York City. He grew up in West Hartford, Conn., where, the Hudson Independent noted in its obituary, “he stole the electric chair from an abandoned Connecticut state prison.” His father made him return it the next day.
That symbolic act of defiance against injustice and unnecessary suffering characterized much of Richard’s career. After graduating from Simpson College in Des Moines, Iowa in 1970, where he protested the Vietnam War and campaigned for Eugene McCarthy, he landed a job with Peter Jennings as an assistant producer for ABC’s Issues and Answers.
In 1972, he worked as the floor producer during the Democratic and Republican conventions, managing, according to the Hudson Independent, to have the honor of being put on Richard Nixon’s enemies list. A year later, while working on a PBS documentary on the politics of disability, he was diagnosed, at 25, with MS.
Richard explained in interviews years later that at the time there was no treatment available: “It was just diagnosis and adios,” he said.
“For much of my life, the Outer Cape has molded a substantial piece of my inner being,” Richard wrote in an essay titled “A Sense of Place” in this newspaper in February 2020. “I fled [to Wellfleet] alone after I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Wellfleet always had cleared my head. I took care of internal business and felt more at home and secure in Wellfleet than in Washington, where I actually lived.”
Despite the realities of the disease — he became legally blind, had to rely on a walker, and was able to maintain the use of only one arm, his left — he was undaunted. He earned his master’s in journalism at Columbia in 1976 and became a senior producer at CBS for Walter Cronkite and later Dan Rather.
At CBS, Richard covered the Solidarity trade union movement in Poland and wars in the Middle East and Central America in addition to his main interest: politics. In 1985, he took a leave to spend a year as a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy Institute of Politics. Upon his return to CBS the following year, he married Meredith Vieira, who also worked for CBS News and whom he had met a few years earlier.
“It was contempt at first sight, as we both like to say,” he wrote in Blindsided, the first of his four memoirs. “We tentatively circled each other, two-legged animals stalking their prey. I once found Meredith lying on a couch in her office, watching Looney Tunes. I immediately trashed her. Sarcasm is a wonderful mechanism for flirting.”
Meredith’s response: “I thought to myself, What a jerk. I’m going to marry this guy.”
Richard and Meredith were married for 38 years and had three children, Benjamin, Gabriel, and Lily.
“I think that Richard was dealt a lousy hand,” Meredith told Good Housekeeping in 2013. “I get angry at that: Why should he have to go through all this? But I’ve seen what [adversity] does in terms of making you the person you are. I look at the kind of person Richard is and who the kids are. That’s the result of what he’s been through.”
“My own family house now sits next to my parents’ old place on Blackfish Creek,” Richard wrote. “I hiked the Audubon and White Cedar Swamp trails and poked around Provincetown in my younger years. Wellfleet was Tranquility Base for me.” It became a refuge for his children, too. “A tattoo now rests just above [my daughter’s] heel,” he wrote. “It displays the coordinates for Wellfleet.”
In 1988, Richard was fired from CBS after writing an article criticizing Dan Rather for an interview with George Bush that he considered “very damaging to us, to Dan, to our credibility.” The following year, he won a George Foster Peabody Award for the show “Illusions of News” with Bill Moyers on PBS.
Richard had a second act as an author of books, beginning with Blindsided: Lifting a Life Above Illness: A Reluctant Memoir (2004). “Welcome to my world,” he wrote, “where I carry around dreams, a few diseases, and the determination to live life my way. This book is a chronicle of the struggles in that exotic place just north of the neck.”
Strong at the Broken Places: Voices of Illness, a Chorus of Hope (2008) tells the stories of five ordinary people’s struggles with chronic illness, and I Want to Kill the Dog (2012) deals with his efforts to come to terms with the chaos Meredith’s pets brought into their household.
His last book, Chasing Hope: A Patient’s Deep Dive Into Stem Cells, Faith, and the Future (2018), written after he attended a 2012 conference at the Vatican on stem cell research, explores emergent therapies for diseases including MS. Through the conference, Richard took part in a stem cell protocol and began to sense a glimmer of something that looked like hope.
During his years writing books, Richard also wrote articles on health and fitness for the New York Times, the Huffington Post, and the AARP; he served on the advisory council of the Neuro Discovery Center at Harvard Medical School; and he was awarded a doctorate of humane letters at Simpson College and the Mt. Sinai Hospital School of Medicine in New York.
In 2020, Richard wrote three essays for the Provincetown Independent, one on a sense of place, another on the problem of where to find shelter during the pandemic (he advised staying home), and a third on fake news after the suspension of the fairness doctrine in 1987 and the shift from Walter Cronkite’s question “What do viewers need to know” to Dan Rather’s “What do viewers want to hear.”
Richard is survived by his wife, Meredith Vieira; a brother, Bern Cohen; a sister, Terrie Cohen; sons Benjamin Cohen and Gabriel Cohen and wife Alli; and daughter Lily Cohen and husband Charlie.
