Richard M. Cohen, News Producer Who Wrote of a Health Challenge, Dies at 76

Richard M. Cohen, an outspoken and award-winning television news producer whose career was eventually derailed by the ravages of multiple sclerosis, which he wrote about in a best-selling memoir, died on Dec. 24 in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., a village in Westchester County. He was 76.

His wife, the former “Today” show host Meredith Vieira, said his death, in a hospital, was caused by acute respiratory failure.

Mr. Cohen spent more than 20 years in the news business, working with luminaries like Ted Koppel at ABC and Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather at CBS. But he tackled a different subject when he wrote a memoir — and articles for HuffPost, The New York Times and other outlets — about dealing with M.S., a degenerative disease of the central nervous system.

Mr. Cohen was diagnosed with M.S. in 1973, when he was 25 and helping to create a documentary for PBS about the politics of disability.

Despite diminishing eyesight, which turned into legal blindness, and worsening balance, which caused falls that made him appear inebriated to the uninformed, he worked into the mid-1990s as a producer for CBS News, CNN, PBS (again) and FX.

“Richard was a man of vibrant good humor and sparkling intelligence,” Mr. Koppel wrote in an email. “I am sure that his many illnesses caused him more than the occasional bout of despair, but he never shared that with me.”

One of Mr. Cohen’s strategies to cope with M.S. — and to live life as he chose — was denial. He told very few people, including the CBS News executive who hired him in 1979, for fear that he would be viewed as unfit. He learned years later from that executive that if he had been honest about his condition, he would not have been hired.

In 2004, about a decade after his producing career ended, he published what he called a “reluctant memoir,” “Blindsided: Lifting a Life Above Illness,” to recount how his once-vigorous life was circumscribed by M.S. and two bouts of colon cancer.

“Welcome to my world,” Mr. Cohen wrote in the book, which spent several weeks on The Times’s best-seller list, “where I carry around dreams, a few diseases, and the determination to live life my way. This book is my daily conversation with myself, a chronicle of the struggles in that exotic place just north of the neck.”

Ms. Vieira said in an interview that Mr. Cohen’s right side had become so immobilized by M.S. that he typed “Blindsided,” and subsequent books, only with his non-dominant left hand, and with his face close to the computer screen.

“He had a lot of determination and a lot to say,” she said.

His second book, “Strong at the Broken Places: Voices of Illness, a Chorus of Hope” (2008), offered him some distance from his own maladies. In that book, he profiled five people with chronic illnesses: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease; non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma; Crohn’s disease; muscular dystrophy; and bipolar disease.

Richard Merrill Cohen was born on Feb. 14, 1948, in Manhattan. His father, Benjamin, was a doctor; his mother, Theresa (Beitzer) Cohen, was a nurse. His father and paternal grandmother also had M.S.

Mr. Cohen was a “ne’er-do-well” in high school, he wrote in “Blindsided,” and was thrown off athletic teams, ejected from classes and suspended. In one spectacular prank, he and some friends stole the electric chair from an abandoned prison; his father made him return it the next day.

His focus sharpened at Simpson College, in Indianola, Iowa, near Des Moines, where he was an antiwar activist. He was inspired to become a broadcast journalist after talking with Peter Jennings, then an ABC News correspondent, when he visited the campus.

After graduating in 1970 with a bachelor’s degree in history and political science, Mr. Cohen was hired at ABC News as an assistant to the producer of the Sunday public affairs program “Issues and Answers.” In 1972 he was the floor producer for Mr. Koppel at the Democratic and Republican presidential conventions.

In 1973, he joined the PBS program “America ‘73,” where he helped produce the documentary about disabilities. Coincidentally, it was while at PBS that he began to experience symptoms that led to a neurologist’s diagnosis of M.S.

“I dropped a coffeepot for no reason,” he told Yahoo in 2019. “I fell off a curb for no reason. I noticed a little numbness in my leg.”

“It hit my eyesight fairly quickly,” he continued, “but other than that, I was very active physically and I thought I was really beating it. I was living in denial.”

He received a master’s degree from the Columbia University Journalism School in 1976, then continued to work at PBS after being turned down for work at “NBC Nightly News” because he admitted to having M.S.

In 1979, he joined CBS News as a producer. He worked for Mr. Cronkite and Mr. Rather and traveled for the “CBS Evening News” to hot spots in Poland, Lebanon and El Salvador, despite his deteriorating condition.

“He was an original,” Andrew Heyward, a former “Evening News” senior producer who later became president of CBS News, said in an interview. “There was a kind of mold at CBS where people acted within unspoken strictures, but he wasn’t bound by those conventions. He was outspoken, charming, and had an absent-minded-professor quality that people found endearing.”

Mr. Cohen’s rebelliousness surfaced publicly in opinion essays for The Times. In 1987 (under Mr. Rather’s byline but written together), after cutbacks at CBS News, the article warned that the division might fall into mediocrity under the network’s new owner and chief executive, Laurence A. Tisch. The piece angered Mr. Tisch and Howard Stringer, the president of CBS News.

Later that year, when Mr. Cohen was the “Evening News” producer in charge of foreign news, he wrote (this time under his own name) that Western news outlets should leave South Africa because of the strict limitations placed on reporting by the apartheid state. The government sought assurances from CBS that Mr. Cohen had spoken for himself, not the network.

More important, he criticized Mr. Rather for the way he handled a hostile, contentious live interview on the “Evening News” with Vice President George Bush on Jan. 25, 1988, early in the presidential campaign. Mr. Rather aggressively pressed the vice president on his role in the Iran-contra scandal; the Bush campaign accused CBS of misrepresenting the terms of the interview.

“Look, I think Dan made mistakes,” Mr. Cohen told The Des Moines Register. “I think his posture was probably too aggressive, but that’s not the issue.” He added: “We took a heavy hit. I think it was very damaging to us. To Dan. To our credibility.”

About six weeks later, CBS News ousted Mr. Cohen as the senior “Evening News” producer for political coverage. He refused another assignment and left the network.

While at CBS, Mr. Cohen won two Emmys for reports for the “Evening News.” He won a third in 1989 after returning to PBS, for a segment of “The Public Mind With Bill Moyers” in 1989 about the power of images on news, politics and elections. His segment was included in a four-part entry that won “The Public Mind” a Peabody Award.

After Mr. Cohen moved to CNN, he produced a documentary in 1992 about Bill Clinton, during his successful run for the presidency. He finished his producing career in the mid-1990s at FX.

In addition to Ms. Vieira, Mr. Cohen is survived by their daughter, Lily Cohen; their sons, Gabe and Ben; a grandson; his brother, Bernard; and his sister, Terrie Cohen.

Mr. Cohen did not want people either to pity him or to praise him for the way he dealt with multiple sclerosis.

“Those who battle serious sickness each day and refuse to become victims are incessantly told we inspire the chronically healthy,” he wrote in HuffPost in 2014. He added: “Allow me to set the record straight. There are no heroes, only survivors. There are no medals or merit badges dangling from our chests.”