Four Friends
Page 39
* * *
AT JOHN’S MEMORIAL SERVICE, on Park Avenue, John’s eulogy fell to his uncle Teddy. He started by thanking President Clinton, Hillary, and Chelsea for coming to the service and for their “extraordinary kindness” through the course of the week, which included Clinton’s secretary of defense, William Cohen, signing off on the use of the navy ships and the burial at sea. “Once,” Senator Kennedy began, “when they asked John what he would do if he went into politics and was elected president, he said: ‘I guess the first thing is call up Uncle Teddy and gloat.’ I loved that. It was so like his father. From the first day of his life, John seemed to belong not only to our family, but [also] to the American family. The whole world knew his name before he did.… But John was so much more than those long ago images emblazoned in our minds. He was a boy who grew into a man with a zest for life and a love of adventure. He was a pied piper who brought us all along. He was blessed with a father and mother who never thought anything mattered more than their children.”
He spoke about John’s love for his mother, his sister, and his new bride. He described John’s support for the Institute of Politics at Harvard, which was named after his father, and about his founding of Reaching Up, a program to train caregivers for the mentally disabled. And he spoke about John’s quiet but significant support for the Robin Hood Foundation, in New York City. “He was still becoming the person he would be, and doing it by the beat of his own drummer,” he said. “He had only just begun. There was in him a great promise of things to come.” He said that like his father before him, John had innumerable gifts but not the gift of a long life.
Then he paraphrased “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” a 1919 poem by William Butler Yeats lamenting the loss of a friend’s young son: “What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?”
Acknowledgments
This was a particularly challenging book to report and to write. My four friends were not around to be interviewed and, except for John, they had each led lives of relative anonymity. They also lived (and died) in an era before having an online presence was even a possibility. So, again except for John, typical Google searches, and other typical journalistic research techniques, yielded little, if anything, of substance.
But to my enduring appreciation, that is where their friends, girlfriends, brothers, sisters, and children played such an important role in the writing of this book. I will be forever immensely grateful to them for agreeing to speak with me and for sharing both their memories and memorabilia of their loved ones. They could have easily said no and that would have been that. But they did not.
To that end, I would like to thank specifically Bruce MacWilliams, Doug Buck, Beau Poor, Jamie Lustberg, Alison Spear, Michael Neuman, Bill Van Deventer, Hugh Jones, Iain Day, Justus O’Brien, John T. Davis, Joshua Rothman, Bobby Cohan, Norman Berman, Alan Cantor, Carol Kingsley, Zach Berman, Steve Bache, John Barber, Jim Horowitz, Ilyse Levine-Kenji, Brooks Klimley, Allen Bennett, Ray Rickman, Steve Sposato, Richard Stratton, Clif Daniel, Thomas Daniel, Phil Balshi, Benji Swett, Mark Bodden, Mike Boschelli, Cha Cha Hartwell, Ezra Susser, Sarah Conover, Miriam Cytryn, Daisy Douglas Savage, Steven J. Donovan, Richard Riker, Terry Gruber, Will Iselin, Marc Wallis, Melissa Bank, Michaeline Bresnahan, Mimi Gaber, Mark Opler, Peter Begley, Will Zogbaum, Giles McNamee, Karna Bull, Mary Ellen Bull, Pam (Bull) Garvin, Rick Bull, George Bull, Tim Kyros, Ken Cera, Kathy Roach, Marty Koffman, George Lombardi, Sasha Chermayeff, Brian Steel, Peter Blauner, Christopher Randolph, Meredith and Nancy Price, Jeff Strong, Ed Hill, Gary Ginsberg, Mark Three Stars, Michael Gross, Nancy Haberman, Chris Oberbeck, John Pucillo, William Bradford Reynolds, Jim Spader, Santana Goodman, and Richard Weise. I couldn’t have written this without you.
I’d also like to thank especially Paige Roberts, the Andover archivist who was extremely helpful to me throughout, and to Diane Silvia, at the Brown Daily Herald, who was incredibly generous with her time in rooting out obscure reviews of John’s acting roles while at Brown. Thanks also are due the archivists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for allowing me to pore over the records of David Buck’s father, Dudley, during the years he worked at MIT before his untimely death. I would also like to thank Gordon Goldstein, my friend and fellow Andover graduate (Class of 1982), who provided ongoing wisdom and counsel throughout this project. There were many others who were also extremely helpful to me as sources in the writing of Four Friends but who would prefer to remain anonymous. You know who you are and I thank you immensely.
I owe a massive debt of gratitude to Noah Eaker, my editor at Flatiron Books. He did a masterful job editing and shaping this book into what I hope is a first-rate narrative. He was a beacon through some rough seas, and always found a way to bring me safely into port, as needed. He did a fantastic job. I would also like to thank Bob Miller, Flatiron’s president and publisher; Colin Dickerman, now at FSG; Amy Einhorn, Flatiron’s executive vice president; Marlena Bittner, Flatiron’s director of publicity; and especially Lauren Bittrich, at Flatiron, who worked tirelessly to bring this book to fruition.
As usual, Joy Harris, my literary agent, was crucial in making this book happen. She has been by my side throughout and I am tremendously fortunate and thankful to have her there. Her wisdom and wise counsel are peerless. I would also like to thank Adam Reed who works with Joy and who makes sure everything that needs to be happening, does happen.
My parents, Paul and Suzanne Cohan, as well as my brothers, Peter and Jamie, and their families, have always been steadfast in their love and encouragement. There would be no Four Friends without them, if for no other reason than it was my parents, in their infinite wisdom, who decided the three Cohan brothers should go to Andover in the first place. Big thanks are also due my in-laws, especially Ellen Futter, Jeff and Susan Futter, and their families. And, as always, to Gemma Nyack.
Sometimes I marvel at how lucky I am to have my extraordinary wife, Deb Futter, and my two incomparable sons, Teddy and Quentin, in my life. Their love and friendship has been invaluable to me for what seems like forever. I can’t imagine life without them. At the end of writing a book about the unexpected loss of four of my high school friends, their essential roles take on even more importance.
ALSO BY WILLIAM D. COHAN
The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co.
House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street
Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World
The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite, and the Corruption of Our Great Universities
Why Wall Street Matters
About the Author
WILLIAM D. COHAN is the bestselling author of Money and Power, House of Cards, The Last Tycoons, The Price of Silence, and Why Wall Street Matters. He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and also writes for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Financial Times, and The Washington Post. He lives in New York City. You can sign up for email updates here.
Thank you for buying this
Flatiron Books ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
Not for Oneself
The End Depends upon the Beginning
Jack
Will
Harry
John
Acknowledgments
Also by William D. Cohan
About the Author
Copyright
FOUR FRIENDS. Copyright © 2019 by William D. Cohan. All rights reserved. For information, address Flatiron Books, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271.
www.flatironbooks.com
Illustrations by Randy Glass
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-07052-4 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-07053-1 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250070531
Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.
First Edition: July 2019