But the governor seemed incapable of expressing how he truly felt. In trying to reverse the damage of the press release and other slights, he only confirmed the increasing criticisms of those who said he had no idea of what he was doing and was the epitome of the small-time congressman from a small-time town whose decency had become an effective mask for his utter lack of tact and instinct. In front of a chorus of reporters and television cameras, he held up a dollar in one hand and two lonely pennies in the other.
The dollar, said Ridge, signified the investment of the state. The two pennies signified the investment of Meyer Werft.
It was a stunning visual image that made its away across the Atlantic—a jingoistic American politician going out of his way to belittle and embarrass a respected businessman who months earlier had been personally hailed by German chancellor Helmut Kohl. Coming on the heels of the press release, it did nothing but reinforce every fear that Bernard Meyer already felt.
Rendell and Cohen tried to ignore the incalculable damage that the governor had wreaked, now for a second time in four days. They made sure that Schwarz, the Meyer Werft negotiator, was invited to a fund-raiser that was being held that night for the president in Philadelphia. Rendell talked Clinton into spending a few moments with Schwarz, and arrangements were made for the two of them to have their picture taken together.
“We’re shameless,” Cohen later admitted. “We’ll play every card.”
But the next day, when Schwarz appeared unannounced in Cohen’s office at 3:10 P.M. and made clear that the mayor might want to be there to listen to what he had to say, there were no smiles.
Rendell walked around the corner in his familiar waddle, his feet trudging purposely over the weathered linoleum. He had that bemused look on his face, as if there always had been something fanciful about being mayor anyway, a bizarre and wonderful way to spend a few years. But as he neared Cohen’s office, he knew what was on the line.
“The real long-term battle of the cities is this stuff. If this stuff doesn’t work, we’re dead.”
“It was a privilege for me to be there last night,” Schwarz began, referring to the opportunity to meet the president. “It was fascinating. And I wasn’t suffering. I’m suffering now. I spent the night on the phone with Bernard Meyer and part of the morning. I’m informing you—nobody knows—it’s fresh out of my fax. Bernard Meyer has decided to withdraw. Whether you served us well at this particular moment, it will not be enough in the next crisis. He feels he has been used by Ridge for a political game. I regret, gentlemen. What can I say? What can I do?”
With that, he delivered two copies of Bernard Meyer’s letter, one for the mayor and one for Cohen. Addressed to Rendell, the letter was heartfelt and emotional, an expression of the reluctance with which Bernard Meyer was giving up his dream. As a courtesy, the letter had been written to the mayor in English, and the imperfect language made it all the more poignant.
I was very shocked when Michael Schwarz told me first about the press release and then about the press conference of Governor Ridge, when he, instead of presenting the actual facts of our proposal, he put out a dollar note and 2 pennies to show what the Government is doing and what Meyer Werft is doing. This was the last sign for me to stop in order not to lose face and the name of a shipyard and a family who [has been] in business [for] 200 years. To start up with a brand-new shipbuilding facility in Philadelphia, to create innovative high-tech shipbuilding, to turn around the negative trend of shipbuilding in the U.S.… must not only be supported by some subsidies but much more by the will and the emotional support of all parties and political resources.
I realized this weekend that despite the fact that I was supported in a fantastic and brilliant way by so many friends including the President, Mr. Clinton, I will never get this support from all parties which are essential to realize such a difficult but futuristic project.
Therefore please understand my final decision to terminate our activities in your Philadelphia, a town I fell in love with; but emotions are one thing. Facts have to guide us now.
Rendell paused after reading the letter. He had five seconds to figure out what to do next. He rubbed his face with his hands and took a breath, as if steadying himself before the final assault on the mountain. And then he spoke as if the message so unequivocally communicated to him without a hint of hope, that the dream was over, had never been delivered. The tone in his voice didn’t betray ruefulness or regret, but something strange and spellbinding. Optimism.
He and Cohen shared with Schwarz the outlines of the new financing package, in which there would be no involvement by the state whatsoever. They promised they were not interested in a seat on the board of directors. They vowed a rate of return on the investment that would be profitable. “We will blow away any impediments that you have,” said the mayor with that rat-a-tat-tat of surety and familial warmth. “The state will not have anything to do with it. The structure will be yours.”
“We will ask Meyer Werft on behalf of the city of Philadelphia and the United States of America to come back,” added Cohen.
“You may get this deal as early as tomorrow,” said the mayor.
“All this is in play already,” said Cohen.
They were not bluffing.
“I will relay this message,” said Schwarz. “What kind of effort you are making.”
As for Bernard Meyer’s official letter of withdrawal, Rendell handed his copy to Cohen. “We’re gonna deep-freeze this letter,” he said.
The next day, September 20, Bernard Meyer met with his board of directors and issued a statement to the German press announcing his withdrawal from the project. “I think it’s vague enough so that it’s not too much of a disaster,” said Cohen to a colleague over the phone. But it only made the possibility of the deal even more remote. “We have a patient where the heart has stopped beating,” he acknowledged. “The brain waves are still going, but people are beginning to disconnect the life-support systems.”
Cohen paced the office. As if it were an act of Providence, this was the first time in nearly four years that a phone wasn’t ringing or the infernal beeper wasn’t screeching during the heat of the day. He was proud of what he had done—taken an audacious idea for financing and navigated it through a hive of politics and gotten it to the point of being inches from completion. Somehow, in some way, Bernard Meyer had to be brought back to the table for the sake of the city and for Cohen’s own vain sense of himself as the miracle maker. All he needed was an opening, a sliver of space, a way to show Bernard Meyer just how good he was, the ultimate urban gunfighter in a blue suit who always fixed what others messed up. And then, as usual, the wheels began to click and whir …
Five hours later, at 5:00 P.M., the siren of an unmarked black sedan cleared away the crawl of rush-hour traffic so David Cohen could get to his house in Chestnut Hill. The car, driven with usual aplomb by Sergeant Buchanico, squeezed in between lanes of the expressway, narrowly avoiding one chrome fender after another. But Cohen, on the portable phone in the front passenger seat, was oblivious to what was happening outside anyway. He got home in record time. His two boys were there, and he explained to them what was happening, and although they were certainly young enough to need baby-sitters, they were certainly old enough to know their father had really gone over the rational edge this time.
“I don’t want you to go to Germany,” said Benjamin. “You don’t even know how to speak German.”
“Who do you know in Germany?” asked Josh.
“Maybe no one,” their father admitted, particularly when he was going to Germany unannounced, without even an invitation, to see a man who might decide not to see him at all.
He went upstairs to his bedroom and packed quickly and carefully, layering shirts, socks, several ties, and a copy of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil into a black bag with the lettering TEAM PHILADELPHIA. He went back outside, where Sergeant Buchanico was waiting. He was driven helter-skelter back to his office, wh
ere, like a spy, he received his final batch of secret documents—a letter from Ridge to Bernard Meyer pledging his support, a printout outlining the financing. He was driven to the airport just in time to make a 7:20 P.M. flight on British Airways. He settled into seat A10 and hurtled through the night to a place he had never been to before, to convince a man from another land with another culture who didn’t even know he was coming to do a deal that seemed dead.
Cohen arrived at Heathrow in London the following day, September 21, at 7:25 A.M., and had enough of a layover that he could go to a Thomas Cook lounge and shave, shower, and put on a clean shirt and tie. At 10:55 A.M., he flew Lufthansa flight 4035 to Bremen, about an hour’s drive from Papenburg. When he got to the airport at Bremen a little after 1:00 P.M., he was paged. It was the mayor calling. The good news was that Bernard Meyer had been contacted and now knew he was coming (the plan had always been not to contact Meyer until Cohen was in the air, on the assumption that he would not refuse a meeting if he knew Cohen had already traveled several thousand miles in the middle of the night). The bad news was that Bernard Meyer was out of town.
Cohen walked over to the Hertz office at the Bremen airport, where the clerk did not speak any English, and he, true to the words of his son Benjamin, did not know a stitch of German. He was given a makeshift map and set off on his way to the Maritim Hotel in Bremen, known for its wonderful view of the city’s Burgerpark. It was now rush hour, and Cohen discovered that the map was basically useless. None of the streets was straight. Some of them changed names without notice. Others had no names at all, and those that did were of course in German. The drive took an hour and a half instead of a half hour. And once he got to his hotel room, he was faced with a situation that he hadn’t faced in at least twenty years. He had nothing to do. And he had to do it in Bremen.
Back in the mayor’s office in Philadelphia, Ed Rendell worked feverishly to keep the deal intact. In the city, there was a remarkable surge of momentum, particularly once word leaked out that Cohen was in Germany. His reputation as someone who always got what he pursued only reinforced the belief that Meyer Werft would return to negotiations and added to the fervor. But in Germany, the signals continued to be clouded. In Philadelphia, the mayor sat at his desk, his face tilted downward and his eyes downcast.
“Maybe none of this stuff can work,” he said quietly.
“The problem is Bernard has gone just too far,” said Cohen when he spoke with the mayor by phone later that afternoon. “He’s informed his labor employees of the withdrawal]. He’s informed his banks. He’s informed the German equivalent of the SEC. He’s informed the press.”
Rendell told Cohen of his idea to lead a huge delegation of congressmen and other elected officials to Papenburg and explain to various German interests involved that what happened to Bernard Meyer wasn’t a show of disrespect but the nature of American politics, in which rudeness and gratuitous potshots were common features of the sport. The great pomp of such a delegation flooding the pristine atmosphere of Papenburg, Rendell hoped, would give Meyer the cover he needed to come back into the deal. “Tell [Meyer] I can suck up as good as anyone on earth,” said Rendell over the phone. “That may be the best thing we’ve learned in my years on the job.”
Several hours later, he spoke to Cohen again, this time to convey the news that Meyer had agreed to a meeting the next day in Papenburg. “At least he’s not irritated by your visit. Keep your fingers crossed.”
An hour afterward, the Delaware River Port Authority officially approved the bond package that would supply $110 million of public financing to Meyer Werft. Six days after the governor’s disastrous press release and three days after his even more disastrous press conference, everything was in place—the public money, the structure, the rate of return, the support of every politician imaginable. Even President Clinton was playing an active role, agreeing to call Bernard Meyer if the deal seemed on the cusp of closure and needed one final push.
Now all eyes focused on Cohen, still stuck in a hotel room in Bremen with its view of the Burgerpark.
“It’s not so easy to make phone calls from here,” he ruminated to the mayor at one point, although he was certainly trying.
“David in a hotel room in Bremen?” Rendell mused after he hung up. “He must be going through call withdrawal.”
VII
At noon the next day, Rendell, looking for any hope across the Atlantic, took it as a positive signal that he had not yet heard from Cohen. The meeting between the chief of staff and Bernard Meyer had begun at 8:00 A.M. Philadelphia time, and if Meyer had dispatched Cohen quickly, sent him off in a rowboat on the North Sea, the mayor assumed he would have heard something. Ever maneuvering, he seized upon yet another line of attack: using his leverage with the White House and Commerce Secretary Ron Brown to try to get Disney to move its order for two cruise ships from an Italian shipbuilder to the new Meyer Werft shipyard in Philadelphia.
At 2:15 P.M. the phone rang in the mayor’s office.
It was Cohen calling from Papenburg, where it was 8:15 P.M.
“I don’t know where we are. We started at a definite no. I don’t know if we’re still there or not.”
Cohen said that Bernard Meyer had been “blown away” by the particulars of the new financing package and liked the idea of a huge delegation coming to Papenburg to provide him with cover to come back to the table. “You could tell that this had appeal to him, but he’s sort of stuck on—he’s told everyone [he’s not coming], and wishy-washiness is really criticized over here.”
Rendell told Cohen of his idea to get Secretary Brown to intervene with Disney. He said he also thought he could get the State Department to ease the German government’s fears of losing shipbuilding technology to the United States.
“I don’t know if business concerns [matter] to him at this point,” said Cohen. “I think you should say you still haven’t heard from me. Since we have no idea where this is heading, I think you shouldn’t say anything.”
Of all the requests made to the mayor, that was always the hardest. But he seemed eager to do his best to comply.
“Whatever you say. I will say you guys are now dining.”
Three and a half hours later, when Rendell had not heard from Cohen again, he felt almost giddy. It must mean they were having dinner, a long and glorious dinner at which all the issues were somehow being resolved. It must mean that Cohen had worn Bernard Meyer down and convinced him that this was too good a deal to pass up. “This has to be a good sign,” he said as he paced about the office. “You have to believe that they’re doing some good. I mean it’s a four-hour dinner.” Too excited to work, he opened the most recent batch of gifts he had received. Turning some of the items on their sides to make sure he understood them from every possible perspective, he came to a swift conclusion.
“I get the most useless junk,” he said.
A little bit after 6:00 P.M. the phone rang in the mayor’s office.
It was Cohen.
David Cohen had never worked harder in his entire life to make something happen, and the qualities that had made him such a sensation in his own country had transported themselves across the Atlantic. Cohen’s greatest gift may have been knowing just how to serve powerful men in a way that made them think his ideas had really been theirs all along—an appealing combination of obsequiousness and quiet strength, ego sublimation and steady faith in his convictions.
He could tell that Bernard Meyer’s original plan was to be polite but dismissive, get him in and out as quickly as possible and give the dream of a new shipyard that would be the envy of the industrial world a final burial. But a rapport was established, and there was a plain simplicity to Cohen that made him hard to say no to—still in the same suit he had worn on the plane, with that boyish face untouched by the slightest whiff of a hard edge, appearing uninvited on the doorstep of Meyer Werft like a wayward puppy, remarkably buoyant despite jet lag and lack of sleep.
Bit by bit as the aftern
oon progressed, Cohen had sensed that he was making headway, whittling away with dogged patience. As he went over the idyllic terms of the financing and put forth letters of support from Governor Ridge and President Clinton, he could feel the war that Bernard Meyer was waging within himself, torn between his heart and his own professional code of not going back on his word. Cohen himself had been almost overcome by the magnificence of the massive Papenburg shipyard, easily capable of working on two cruise ships at once yet so precise in its modern technology as to be somehow delicate. It made the idea that such an opportunity might fall through the fingers of the city not just frustrating or regretful but almost cruel.
He met with Meyer for several hours that afternoon. The two men, along with several others, had a dinner that lasted nearly three hours. And then they met again for another forty-five minutes. Cohen returned to his hotel room around 1:00 A.M. German time, the emotional residue of a day unlike any other in his life still very much with him. And then he called the mayor.
“I don’t think it’s good,” he said.
A Prayer for the City Page 47