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Blindsided: Lifting a Life Above Illness: A Reluctant Memoir by Richard M. Cohen Rating: ••• (Recommended)
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Coping All of us find ways to cope with the challenges life throws us. Sometimes by reading a memoir, we can discover how others cope with the challenges they’ve faced. The finest memoir I’ve read in a long time is Richard M. Cohen’s Blindsided, an account of his three decades of coping with multiple sclerosis, followed by two recurrences of colon cancer. Along the way, Cohen works, marries, parents and hopes. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of chapter 5, “Racing Against MS,” pp. 61-64: Hard news was where the action was, the place most every young television journalist wanted to be. The evening news was the arena I had yet to enter. Troubled health and limited eyesight kept my expectations low, thrusting the romantic world of the evening news into the distance. The Cronkite crowd I grew up watching would probably remain as distant figures on the tube. My sphere had centered on documentaries and live television. With no formula known to me for making the right connections and breaking into daily news, I was fast becoming a creature of PBS. In the spring of 1979, I sat in my office at WNET New York public television, reading a news item in Variety. The short article announced that CBS News had appointed a Director of Recruitment, a job title I associated more with a football team than with the television news business at that time. Impetuously, I stuck a piece of stationery into the typewriter and wrote this stranger a note. I announced to him, all too glibly, “I do not know what you are recruiting for, but if it is not the army, sign me up.” The overture was foolish. I heard nothing back and felt mildly embarrassed. Summer had arrived, and I gave CBS News little thought. When this mysterious man did contact me, I was shocked to hear from him. He was gruff and promised nothing. He growled and told me he had checked me out, then dispatched me to meet various broadcast producers and, finally, the guys in the white shirts of the front office. “Don’t embarrass me,” my new patron snarled. “You are my first candidate.” I made the rounds at CBS; no one asked a single personal question, and I offered no personal information. By summer’s end, I was offered a producing job on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. When the call came, I was thrilled for an opportunity I once considered out of reach. There was a contract to negotiate, some routine paperwork to sign, and, oh yes, the company physical to take at CBS corporate headquarters in New York, a black-stone-sheathed building informally known as Blackrock. A physical? This was a bolt out of the blue. Instantly I realized that once again I would face difficult choices about truth and health and the self-protection of silence. My predicament played into the siege mentality that comes too easily with illness. The world was not against me. It just felt that way. I was torn between a winning strategy and a losing brush with conscience. I called my friend Robert MacNeil. “Robin, I do not know what to do,” I lamented, if not whined. “Do you think I should tell them everything?” A pause followed. “No, I do not. Say nothing,” MacNeil advised. “Your silence,” he said, “is an honorable dishonesty.” At last, a person I respected mightily had given me permission to lie. The words health and honor begin with the letter h. The h is silent in honor. (Years later, Sanford Socolow, Cronkite’s executive producer, told me that I had done the right thing. “I am not proud to say this,” he said quietly, “but I don’t think I would have hired you if I had known.”) I felt dirty, but not too dirty. So much of what I had learned about journalism had to do with basic honesty and full disclosure. Yet there I was, about to perform a dishonest act to inaugurate my relationship with an institution built around honesty. This was a fine kettle of fish. All that stood between the Cronkite newsroom and me now was the company physical. Such exams are not known for their attention to detail, and I figured I probably could bluff my way through the ordeal. It was the eye examination that worried me most, but I had a plan. My right eye was considerably more damaged than the left—some vision had eventually returned in my left eye—so I would test the left eye twice. How, I did not know. I took the exam, patch over my right eye first. “Now cover your left eye,” the nurse instructed. “I just did,” I answered sweetly. “My mistake,” she responded, with a smile. “Then cover your right eye.” I was happy to oblige. I passed the physical. Blindsided presents a vision of life from someone whose own vision has rendered him legally blind. The power of hope to a life of struggle resounds on each page. You may cry when you read this memoir, but you’re likely to come away from reading Blindsided with added courage to cope with whatever you face in the challenges of your life. Steve Hopkins, May 25, 2004
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