In the comforting cubbyholes of Ballard Spahr, where everything spoke of order and rational flow, cases in, cases out, cases won and cases lost, hours and minutes billed, it was easy to feel control over the world. From the forty-sixth floor, even the city below seemed somehow innocent and workable—the slow trickle of cars, the tiny buildings, the lines of trees running up the straight and narrow streets, the imprint of a city still very much the same as the one William Penn laid out in the late 1600s, with its visionary grid of streets and squares and the natural boundaries of its two rivers, the Delaware to the east and the Schuylkill to the west.
For all of Cohen’s success as a lawyer, there was something totally untested about him, particularly when it came to the glare of public service and his ability to deal head to head with elected officials who had spent a lifetime perfecting the art of bullying and manipulation and castration so quick and bloodless you didn’t even know you had lost your essentials until you walked out of the room and noticed you were a little bit lighter.
Cohen was the chief of everything at Ballard Spahr, but the source of his fame at the firm had little to do with boldness and leadership and the indefinable art of personal interaction. He was known for how, in a case involving twenty different partnerships, he had kept track of every single one of them. He was known for being the first one to work in the morning and the last one to leave at night. He was known for the way he learned the nuances of group insurance by reading some five thousand pages on it. He was known for the way he sat in the firm library and researched a statute not for one state or five states or ten states, but for all fifty. He was known for the way he personally inspected every piece of mail his secretaries typed up for him, even the envelopes. All those qualities had made him a legend, the man who got things done. But in the house of horrors of City Hall, where nothing ever got done, what good could David Cohen possibly do?
As he stood at the window, he rationalized his decision for leaving by noting that the corner office had never really been his anyway, since Ballard Spahr had moved into the building only earlier the previous year. It was the careful, clinical thing to say. But for a moment the most uncommon of expressions, a flickering of self-doubt, flashed across his face. He uncharacteristically lingered at that window for a few seconds more, as if trying to find some solace and meaning in the tiny twinkling lights of the city. “There I’ll be, right down there,” he said quietly, but there was something tentative in the way he said it, as if he were packing and moving not to the job and the challenge of a lifetime but to a cabin in a forbidden wilderness, without food, electricity, or running water.
It wasn’t a keen sense of public service that was driving Cohen to do what he was doing. Although he was intrigued by the challenge of somehow trying to right the capsizing ship of a major American city, that really wasn’t his primary goal. Instead, he was motivated almost solely by loyalty to the man who was about to become the 127th mayor of the city of Philadelphia. When Rendell asked him to take on a specially created job within the administration, everybody who knew David Cohen also knew that he would say yes. Cohen adored Rendell and seemed willing to do anything for him. But given their respective styles and their respective temperaments, the way they did things and didn’t do things, Cohen’s leap into public service seemed all the more like a free fall into a swimming pool that a city maintenance worker had forgotten to fill with water.
II
It isn’t unusual for grown adults to be awakened in the middle of the night by nightmares of being back in college. Usually the nightmares have to do with failing to study enough for an exam, maybe even missing it altogether because the alarm clock didn’t go off. Ed Rendell had a recurring dream about his days as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1960s, and like all dreams, it was tailored to the needs of his personality. In his version, the course at hand was astronomy. There were three days to go before the exam, and as Rendell himself explained it, the source of his anxiety was really twofold: “Not only haven’t I studied; I can’t even find the book.”
As an undergraduate at Swarthmore, David Cohen took time off to work in the office of Congressman James Scheuer and graduated in the top 10 percent of his class. As an undergraduate at Penn, Ed Rendell got enormously involved in school government, had poor grades the first semester of his sophomore year, while he was being rushed for a fraternity, and was remembered by at least one professor not for the zeal with which he approached Penn academics but for the zeal with which he approached Penn co-eds. The fraternity he belonged to at Penn, Pi Lambda Phi, was known on campus as the Jewish animal house, and when Rendell joined it, it was under suspension for branding the Pi sign on the virginal buttocks of its pledges.
After college, David Cohen went to one of the nation’s finest law schools—the University of Pennsylvania. After college, Rendell applied to Penn Law School, but despite being a Penn alumnus, he did not gain acceptance—the classic case of a very smart person with unique powers of memory and reasoning who saw college as a gilded fraternity house: he said he scored a 710 on his law boards, placing him the second highest of the Penn graduates applying for admission. But his grade point average, a 2.5, placed him 201st. Rendell went to Villanova Law School instead.
At Penn Law School, David Cohen became a legend because of his hard work and mature judgment. At Villanova University School of Law, Ed Rendell became a legend because of the apartment he lived in on Lombard Street. A frequent guest dubbed it the Ape House, an appellation Rendell did not even begin to dispute. “Oooh, what a pigpen,” he recalled fondly. As for his future after law school, many agreed that it would be great, or at least interesting, as long as it had as little to do with the actual practice of law as possible.
David Cohen started going out with his future wife, Rhonda, at Swarthmore after they began to work on the school newspaper together. So worried was Rhonda about dating a coworker that she made him promise he would not quit the paper if they broke up. Ed Rendell’s dating patterns in college were guided in part by the urgings of his mother, who seemed largely interested in his marrying someone rich. As a result, he went out with a stream of women who were pampered and obnoxious, albeit very rich—until he met Midge Osterlund. At the time, one of his closest friends, Dave Montgomery, who went on to become president of the Philadelphia Phillies, was on a date with Midge, and Rendell was with someone else. Rendell asked Montgomery how things were going with Midge, and when the response was lukewarm, Rendell proposed a trade: he would give Montgomery the dating rights to the woman he was seeing in return for rights to Midge. As an added incentive, Rendell agreed to throw in a couple of Peter Paul Mounds bars.
Midge had first met Rendell at the Ape House on Lombard Street, where, she remembered, his idea of doing dishes was to fill the bathtub with them and proceed from there. She was a junior at Penn from a Catholic family in Wilmington, Delaware, where her father, like just about everyone else in that city, worked for Du Pont. Rendell, in law school at that point, was a Jew from Riverside Drive on the Upper West Side of New York. She was blond and athletic with just the right touch of sass; he was dark and handsome and jutting-jawed with enough gestures and spontaneous outbursts to make a drum major jealous.
There was nothing casual about their on-again, off-again romance, nor was there anything remotely casual about him. She remembered sitting in awe and disbelief on one of their first dates, at a Penn basketball game, as he screamed and yelled. She remembered the way he ate, voraciously, with his fingers. She was intoxicated by his intensity and yet in another way was so overwhelmed by it that she broke up with him in the fall of her senior year at Penn. “Certain things about him were too intense,” she remembered. But he continued to pursue her. And bit by bit she relented. In 1970, he proposed to her, and she said yes—because he was Ed Rendell, because it was hard to think of anyone else in the world quite like him. She later quipped that of all the Jewish men in the world, she “married the one who didn’t care about money.”
It was true. Ed Rendell didn’t care about money. But he did care about other things, with as much zeal as anyone who has made millions on Wall Street cares about money, and the intensity that Midge Rendell saw others had seen as well—galvanizing when it was focused, scary when it dissolved into temper tantrums and fits appropriate to children. “He was different,” said Midge Rendell in recalling her first impression of him during those courtship days at Penn. “Everything about him was different.”
There had always been something devilish and dramatic about him, the way he memorized the names of all the U.S. senators when he was a little boy, the way he loved to play football in the rain in high school because it felt so heroic, the way he once tried to get the guests to leave his Christmas party in the wee hours of the morning by serving them a special hors d’oeuvre of dog food mixed with mayonnaise, the way his eyes moistened when he talked about the death of his father. He couldn’t sit still for more than a minute or two, and there was a perpetual frenzy to him. But he also possessed his own vision—not making money or excelling within the closed world of a corporate law firm as David Cohen had done, but something far riskier. He was one of those people who seemed destined for one of two things in life—early success or an early heart attack.
Much of Rendell’s persona came from his father. An ardent New Dealer, Jesse Rendell took his son to Zabar’s, the delicatessan over on Broadway, where they cupped their ears to a radio and listened to the 1952 Democratic National Convention. Emotional and full of life, Jesse Rendell wept when Adlai Stevenson was beaten by Dwight Eisenhower in the general election later that year. He lived and died each fall with the New York Giants in football and each spring with the New York Giants in baseball, and during the short period of time father and son were together, Jesse taught Ed to seize the intensity of the moment as if there might never be another one. When he died of a heart attack while hailing a cab, there was a sense of absolute shock in the family. Just two days earlier Jesse Rendell had played football in the park with his two boys. Nothing seemed wrong with him. But looking back on it later, Ed Rendell realized that his father, in his voraciousness for life, had also done everything wrong from a physical standpoint, smoking four packs of cigarettes and drinking a fifth of liquor virtually every day. By most accounts, Rendell’s mother, Emma, had the opposite temperament of her husband’s. When Ed and Midge started dating, they would go to New York to visit her. The apartment was dark, Midge recalled, and Emma was invariably in bed watching television. When she did rise, it was to walk over to the closet and see where Midge bought her clothing, since Emma’s family had been in the fashion business. Other than that, Midge could not recall seeing Emma actually out of bed until she and Ed decided to get married. “I’d kind of have to peek into the bedroom to say hello to this woman,” said Midge. “It was the weirdest thing.”
What money the Rendell family had growing up in New York did apparently come from Ed’s mother’s side of the family. She was a Sloat, of the fashion-designer Sloats, makers of a popular line of women’s skirts. Ed’s father worked as a middleman in the garment district, buying raw material from textile mills and selling it to manufacturers. He never made much money, but as Rendell later recalled in a lengthy profile in The Philadelphia Inquirer, he “strove mightily to keep our standard of living up to that of my mother’s family.” The family’s apartment at Eighty-first Street and Riverside Drive had thick walls and a wonderful view of the Hudson River and was eventually sold to actors Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson. From the fourth grade on, Rendell and his brother, Robert, went to private schools. For high school, Rendell attended the prestigious Riverdale Country School. He was asked not to return at the end of his sophomore year for what he described in the Inquirer profile as “just little stuff. You know, disrupting classes, things like that. The worst thing I did, I dumped tuna fish on a teacher at lunch, somewhat accidentally, somewhat deliberately.” He was readmitted to Riverdale for his senior year, in time for the editors of the 1961 yearbook to prophesy, “Eddie has a good chance for success in politics, his chosen profession.” Then he went on to Penn and law school at Villanova.
After graduation from law school, in 1968, Rendell went to work for the district attorney’s office in Philadelphia. If the legend grew around David Cohen for his ability to negotiate hour after hour, day after day, without ever personalizing and letting his emotions go, the legend grew around Ed Rendell for exactly the opposite reasons. He once impulsively picked up the phone and screamed at the governor himself for releasing a convict in a prison-furlough program, according to the Inquirer profile. To make a point during a trial, he once dug his heel into a defense attorney’s instep. When he got angry, he put his foot through the door of his office and tossed furniture and punched holes in walls.
He quickly worked his way up the hierarchy, becoming chief of the homicide unit. But then he left the office, and in December 1976 he decided to oppose the Democratic incumbent, District Attorney F. Emmett Fitzpatrick, in a primary race. It seemed a laughable campaign, filled with chutzpah and hubris, and no one gave Rendell much of a chance. “Ed who?” chortled Fitzpatrick when asked about his opponent. But Rendell refused to give in, sweeping the city away with his ability to talk to anyone for five minutes and make the person think a friendship had existed for years. Momentum built, and he coasted to easy victory in both the Democratic primary and the general election.
He became enormously popular. He wasn’t afraid to take on judges for perceived ineptitude and handing out light sentences. Reporters adored him, not simply because of his warmth but because he was immensely helpful when they sought his assistance on stories exposing the ineptitude and the corruptness of the city’s judicial system.
He had the swagger and the hard-jawed look of a hard-assed prosecutor, but behind the bluster was also a certain hesitation and weakness, particularly when it came to his own political career. He ran for reelection in 1981 and won in a landslide. The following year he had a clear opportunity to win the Democratic nomination for governor. But he backed off, only to watch a little-known Democratic challenger nearly topple the Republican incumbent. The decision gnawed at him. He was still the district attorney, but those who worked for him said it became increasingly clear that he had little interest in the job anymore. The esprit de corps with which he ran the office, his ability to hire the best talent away from the public defender’s office, the personality that engendered such loyalty that you didn’t really mind when he made you a promise you knew he couldn’t possibly keep—all of it began to ebb. Those who worked for him could tell he was preoccupied with what he was going to do next to further his career. He finished his term as district attorney and ran for governor in 1986 in the Democratic primary, and he got trounced. The qualities that had made him so appealing in Philadelphia—the frat-house twinkle in the eye, the five o’clock shadow that appeared like a thundercloud, the viper’s tongue that could make mincemeat out of judges—became an impediment in Altoona and Aliquippa and Allentown.
A year later, in 1987, he announced that he would run for mayor against the incumbent, W. Wilson Goode, in the Democratic primary. It was a terrible decision, and the campaign was even more of a disaster than the governor’s race. He appeared flat, almost dazed, going through the motions without the passion that had once been his trademark, reading from press releases and position papers with all the spirit of a telemarketing salesman. Roughly a month before the election all his closest advisers knew he was going to lose, in part because of the monolithic nature of Goode’s black voting base but also because it had become clear that Rendell had no real interest in the job of mayor beyond that it meant he would be getting back into politics.
But in the debacle and ashes of the 1987 mayoral race, something momentous occurred. It happened early in the campaign, before there even was a campaign, during a strategy meeting at Rendell’s house. The subject of staff came up, and when it came time to recommend a press secretary, Makadon, in his ever expanding role as p
ower broker, fund-raiser, and political adviser, piped in and said he had someone in mind whom he knew quite well, a guy named David Cohen.
At first, there was some confusion among the group that had gathered. There was a David Cohen who was highly active in city politics. He was a city councilman who was considered vituperative and unpredictable, so why on earth was Makadon suggesting him? No, not that David Cohen, said Makadon. Another David Cohen, a guy who was a thirty-one-year-old law partner in his office. But at least the other David Cohen knew something about politics, was actually in politics. What the hell did this David Cohen know about anything except being a corporate lawyer, which meant not knowing anything at all?
“Who the fuck is he?” said political strategist Neil Oxman to Makadon. “Do you know what the campaign is about? Do you think this is for amateurs?”
A week later someone with lengthy experience in politics wrote a draft of Rendell’s announcement of his candidacy. It needed considerable rewriting, so Rendell decided to talk to David Cohen, and he hired him as his press secretary. Makadon knew that Oxman was basically right. It was a risky move. Rendell really should have taken someone with prior campaign experience. From a political vantage point, who the fuck was David Cohen?
To the reporters covering the campaign, Cohen was initially something of an oddity, too young, too boyish looking, too insulated and buttoned-down ever to enter the dark and treacherous tunnels of city politics. He adapted quickly, though, earning high marks for credibility and prompt responses to questions, but given the whole tenor of the campaign something about what he was doing still seemed out of sync, just as something about what the candidate himself was doing was out of sync. “I became convinced that Ed didn’t want to be mayor any more than I wanted to be mayor,” Cohen admitted after the election was over. “He had simply wandered from one losing campaign to another because he didn’t know what else to do.”
A Prayer for the City Page 5