[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 16]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page 21598]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                HE DID NOT SET STANDARDS, HE LIVED THEM

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                        HON. JOHN J. DUNCAN, JR.

                              of tennessee

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, September 9, 2003

  Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, I assume that not a large number of people 
read the articles we place in the Record, but I am sure that at least a 
few across the country do. I wish everyone, especially young men, would 
read the column Richard Cohen wrote about his father in today's 
Washington Post.
  Many years ago, I got a degree in journalism and worked briefly both 
as a newspaper reporter in Knoxville and as a teacher at T.C. Williams 
High School in Alexandria. I would guess that Richard Cohen and I are 
about as different in backgrounds and beliefs as any two men could be, 
but I greatly admire his writing. I read almost all his columns, but I 
believe this column about his father is possibly his best ever.
  Perhaps this touched me because I was very close to my own father. 
But, I am going to send this column to my two sons, ages 17 and 23, 
with a note from me. I will tell them that I believe they have the 
intelligence and skills and personalities to do great things with their 
lives, but as Richard Cohen has written, you do not have to be rich or 
famous or ``important'' to lead a good life, and that it is far more 
important to be good than it is to be great.
  I would like to call this column to the attention of my colleagues 
and other readers of the Record.

               [From the Washington Post, Sept. 9, 2003.]

                           (By Richard Cohen)

                He Did Not Set Standards, He Lived Them

       Newton, Mass.--Harry L. Cohen died early Sunday morning 
     here after a long illness. He is survived by his wife of 66 
     years, Pearl ``Pat'' Rosenberg Cohen, two children, two 
     grandchildren and the sweet memories of anyone who knew him. 
     He was 94 years old and my father.
       Newspaper obituaries are generally reserved for the 
     notable, the exceptional--people of some achievement or 
     notoriety. My father does not fill that bill. He was a mere 
     high school graduate who worked almost all of his life for 
     one firm. He invented nothing, discovered nothing, wrote 
     nothing and was elected to no office, high or otherwise. He 
     was the most ordinary of men--but, God, I have known few like 
     him and neither have you.
       Over the years I have written several columns about my 
     parents. I did that by way of sending them a gift and also 
     because they were great material. My mother, 91, was born in 
     Poland just before World War I. She came to this country as a 
     child and she was--always in Poland and for a time in 
     America--desperately poor. If there is a single person who 
     embodies the glory and the promise of this country, it is my 
     mother. It is that simple.
       My father, too, has a story. His starts in some Ken Burns 
     documentary, black-and- white photo of the Lower East Side of 
     New York, where he was born in a tenement. It was in a 
     tenement, too, where his mother died when he was still a 
     child. My grandfather, poor and unskilled, put my father and 
     my uncle in an orphanage, where--with some Dickensian spells 
     with foster families--he was raised.
       He was a Depression kid, my father. In some ways, though, 
     the worst of times were the best of times for him. He had a 
     job. He had a car. Soon, he had a wife and she, of course, 
     worked, too. The two of them virtually never stopped working. 
     Even in retirement, my father took jobs. He went door to door 
     for a polling firm. He parked cars in West Palm Beach, where 
     he had ``retired'' with my mother. He worked as a doorman in 
     a fancy Palm Beach high-rise. In some sense, he did this 
     because the Depression was, for him, always lurking nearby, 
     but also because he found dignity in work.
       Some of this is colorful, I know, but it is not why my 
     father was exceptional. It's because he was a good man. Not 
     once--not ever--did I know him to cheat: not in business, not 
     on his wife, not on his friends and never on his children. I 
     know of no one he hurt, no one he slighted, no one he 
     abandoned. The great men I have spent a lifetime around--the 
     politicians, the statesmen, the rich, the powerful, the 
     creative--can make no such claim. They always say they had to 
     break some eggs to make their omelet. My father made no 
     omelet. But he broke no eggs, either.
       I have written this before, but it is worth saying again: 
     My father's sort of goodness is rare. As he lay dying, as we 
     talked about his life, he expressed no regrets. Not from him 
     came reservations about how he neglected his children in 
     favor of work, how he spent too much money, how he cared too 
     much about the appearance of things and little about their 
     substance. He did not understand men who were not charitable, 
     who exchanged wives as they do cars, who would slight a child 
     to score another business deal. He had his dreams, but the 
     overriding one was to lead an honorable life.
       To be perfectly truthful, we did not always agree--not on 
     certain issues (Israel, for instance) and not on how one 
     should live one's life. I could not--I have not--been him. He 
     did not set standards, he lived them--and deep into my career 
     I kept thinking that some of the things I wrote and some of 
     the things I did were like a bad report card I was bringing 
     home from school. His disapproval, sometimes not even stated, 
     was concussive. I reeled.
       He died in his sleep. He died at home, still tended by my 
     mother and my sister, Judith, and the remarkable women whose 
     chosen work it is to care for the dying. He was never in pain 
     and he was alert almost to the end, still getting the joke, 
     still not wanting to go. He was, I tell you, the most 
     extraordinary of ordinary men, what in Yiddish is called a 
     mensch--not a great man but, much rarer still, a good one. 
     There is nothing greater.

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