A Prayer for the City (6 page)

Certainly the senior partners at Ballard Spahr were hoping that, for it wasn’t simply by a stroke of hyperbole that Cohen was known at the firm by the acronym COE—chief of everything. Nor was there anything accidental about the nature of his success. Even in law school at Penn, his aura had been considerable. Fellow students recognized it—his nickname then was Chief Justice Cohen. Some students couldn’t stand him, were repelled by his alacrity, but others marveled at the way he read not only all the cases that were assigned but all the footnotes, carefully underlining everything in a rainbow array of color-coded markers. They even liked him outside class, amazed, even puzzled, by the lack of pretense in this kid from Highland Park in northern New Jersey whose father had spent much of his life as a salesman for Bulova.

If fellow students found him special, so did his teachers. One in particular was Arthur Makadon, who was also the hiring partner for Ballard Spahr. Makadon taught Cohen appellate advocacy, and almost instantly he recognized something uncanny about this second-year law student, something that went far beyond his work in class. It wasn’t simply his base of knowledge—plenty of students at Penn had that from their endless hours
of studying and their impressive genetic strands of neurosis and paranoia. Plenty of students functioned with no sleep. What Makadon saw in Cohen wasn’t the earnestness of an extremely hardworking law student but an ability to size up events in a way that was remarkably suited to the realities of the world. Although he was still in his early twenties, Cohen somehow understood, even in the artificial atmosphere of law school, precisely what it took to get things done, how to get from point A to point B without getting diverted by anything in between. To Makadon, it was remarkable to see someone who had mastered that elusive side of life at such a young age, who already seemed so unfettered by idealism, impulse, or dreams but instead was completely practical, not a brilliant legal scholar but, in a world measured by production and results, something far better—a brilliant pragmatist. “Who was I to ask law students for practical advice?” remembered Makadon. “He was the one exception.”

A city power broker in his own right, Makadon would ultimately bring Cohen and Rendell together. In the beginning at least, particularly given that Cohen had no experience in politics save a stint in the office of a New York congressman between college and law school, it seemed like a mismatch. But Makadon knew both men intimately. If it was he who had discovered the gift of David Cohen as corporate litigator, it was also he who had discovered the gift of Ed Rendell roughly a decade earlier, when they had worked together in the Philadelphia district attorney’s office. Perhaps on the theory that opposites really do attract, instinct told him that this was a political marriage that would endure and maybe even thrive.

Cohen’s wife, Rhonda, who was a year ahead of her husband at Penn Law, remembered the same quality that Makadon witnessed, an almost mystical ability to know precisely what is important. Already married, they had breakfast together on the day of a major examination in a course they both were taking. David started firing potential questions at her. He cited material from the footnotes, and Rhonda told him he had gotten it all wrong, his studying had been completely off the mark.
Footnotes—who on earth would base his studying on the footnotes?
Later that day she got the exam and saw the questions.
The footnotes—the damn footnotes
. It was as if he had written it.

As a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1981 and executive editor of the
Law Review
, he could have gone anywhere in the country. Law firms beckoned and hoped to impress him. At least one had him picked up in a limousine outside the federal courthouse in Philadelphia—a senior partner at the firm had thought Cohen
would be flattered by the attention. Instead he was mortified and after the lunch insisted that he be dropped off a block from the courthouse so no one would see him. Makadon desired Cohen as well, for Ballard Spahr. But since he knew David Cohen and understood better than most the basic paradox of his personality, he also knew how laughable it was for anyone to think that Cohen might be dazzled by a limousine. In law school, Cohen was the master of his domain. Outside that sphere, he was so rounded and average that it was hard not to wonder whether some piece of him—the piece that seeks flamboyance and extravagance for the sheer frivolity and fun of it—had somehow been removed at birth. In a certain way, it made David Cohen seem very, very bizarre.

Makadon, knowing that one of Cohen’s outside interests was sports, sought his attention by sending him
The Breaks of the Game
by David Halberstam. It worked, and Cohen agreed to the job at Ballard by hiring a woman to go to the offices with a bouquet of balloons and sing his words of acceptance.

Among the various gifts that Cohen received during his tenure at Ballard Spahr was that little wooden box with the calculator inside. On the front an inscription read,
BILLING KING
. The general rule of thumb at Ballard was a secretary for every two lawyers to handle the paperwork and filing and all the rest. But David Cohen didn’t have just one secretary to handle the volume of work he produced. He had two. He billed close to four thousand hours, the legal equivalent of winning a batting title by a hundred points while hitting .450. But it wasn’t just his prodigious capacity for work that made him so good at what he did. It was his patience as a negotiator, the way in which he determined the result that he wanted and then, as Makadon put it, exhibited a “willingness to stay with something forever”—until he got there. In the meantime, he never got frustrated. He never personalized or railed or sought vendettas. Once again the normal human impulse, to get angry and become agitated, never even surfaced. He went in for the kill by listening, by making eminently clear that he really didn’t mind, he could sit in some shitty conference room like a prisoner of war for a year, maybe two, without a single speck of emotion other than affability until he got the result he wanted. Other lawyers would have gone mad. They would have relished the delicious moment when they reached across the table and strangled the pinstriped bastard on the other side who had made their lives so miserable for so many months. But not David Cohen. “I saw him sit with lawyers I couldn’t even bear to be in
the same room with for days and work out a resolution,” said Makadon. “It was amazing to me.”

Rhonda Cohen also worked at Ballard Spahr. In 1985, both she and her husband suffered personal trauma when their first son, Benjamin, was born, in a true medical rarity, after an ectopic pregnancy. Benjamin would go on to become a happy and enchanting child, but the initial period of his life was a nightmare. He spent more than a year at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where he was on a respirator for much of that time and enduring operation after operation. Cohen’s routine, according to Makadon, almost never varied: he arrived at the hospital at 5:30
A.M.
to be with Benjamin, got to work around 8:00
A.M.
, and worked nonstop for the next twelve hours, then returned to the hospital for several more hours. Makadon was Cohen’s closest friend in the firm, but never once did Cohen discuss his feelings. The quality of his work never faltered. He never sought a sympathetic ear. His outward demeanor never changed.

Makadon couldn’t think of a worse ordeal than those daily hospital visits. He also knew he could never have handled it the way Cohen did, by somehow managing to compartmentalize every single speck of it, as if, in the sphere of work and cases and thousands of billable hours, the emotion of what he was feeling had no place and was somehow separate and distinct.

By the time David Cohen was in his mid-thirties, he was one of the top business getters in a firm filled with notable rainmakers. He was making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and yet he showed little inclination to parlay it into something, to do something with it. He drove an old-model Saab. He lived with his wife and two children in a house on Lombard Street in the downtown section of the city that was shockingly modest for a family that was producing close to half a million dollars of income a year. He had a style of dress distinguished by the holes in the soles of his black shoes and the fraying collars of his button-down shirts. As the man he was about to go work for, Ed Rendell, would later say of him with true awe, “If you took David to a motel room, and there was a beautiful naked woman on one bed and a legal brief on the other, there would be no question. He’d head straight for the legal brief.”

In the sublime silence of this Sunday night that would be the last silent night for the next four years, the moment of reckoning had come for David Cohen. As he quietly continued to pack what little was left, the grand tower
of City Hall, some 548 feet high and until the mid-1980s the single highest point in the entire city, loomed from the window. It was a strange and remarkable building—Walt Whitman once described it as both “weird” and “beautiful”—positioned in such a way, smack in the middle of Philadelphia, that much of the downtown vehicular traffic had to circle around it in forced homage.

Started in 1871, at a very different period in the city’s life, it took thirty years to build and at completion was the largest office space in the United States. Presumably it was built to symbolize the magnificence of government. The council chambers on the fourth floor were larger than the House of Lords in London. The walls on the first floor were twenty-two feet thick, and the twenty-seven-ton cast-iron statue of city founder William Penn, designed by Alexander Milne Calder, was, and still is, the largest single piece of sculpture atop any building in the world. But over time, as both the city and its government began to unravel, City Hall began to symbolize something else entirely, not a citadel for the majesty and machinery of government, but a symbol of the very mockery of it—a favored place for suicides (either from the 360-foot-high observation deck or from the six-story stairwell on the inside), knee-deep bird droppings, basement rats so big that only psychotic cats dared to stalk them, and false fire alarms so routine that no one bothered to budge.

In its mass of contradictions, City Hall was ornate enough to rival Versailles, with its red Egyptian-marble columns and alabaster walls; depressing enough to rival a local jail with the soupy gloom of its dimly lit hallways and cigarette-stained floors; bizarre enough to rival a psychiatric ward with the disparate elements housed within it. The mayor and his immediate staff had offices there, of course, as did the seventeen members of the city council and their staffs. The majority of the city’s criminal courtrooms were in City Hall as well. As a result, it wasn’t unusual for the solemn flow of a meeting in the mayor’s Cabinet Room on the second floor to be interrupted by the wail of a convicted felon. Among the hundreds of sculptures decorating the exterior of the building were four figures, Folly, Repentance, Pain, and Prayer. They were placed over the western archway in the hopes that prisoners being led into the building would see them and perhaps feel some inspiration to lead a proper life. In this regard, they also seemed apt figures for David Cohen.

In the comforting cubbyholes of Ballard Spahr, where everything spoke of order and rational flow, cases in, cases out, cases won and cases lost, hours and minutes billed, it was easy to feel control over the world. From
the forty-sixth floor, even the city below seemed somehow innocent and workable—the slow trickle of cars, the tiny buildings, the lines of trees running up the straight and narrow streets, the imprint of a city still very much the same as the one William Penn laid out in the late 1600s, with its visionary grid of streets and squares and the natural boundaries of its two rivers, the Delaware to the east and the Schuylkill to the west.

For all of Cohen’s success as a lawyer, there was something totally untested about him, particularly when it came to the glare of public service and his ability to deal head to head with elected officials who had spent a lifetime perfecting the art of bullying and manipulation and castration so quick and bloodless you didn’t even know you had lost your essentials until you walked out of the room and noticed you were a little bit lighter.

Cohen was the chief of everything at Ballard Spahr, but the source of his fame at the firm had little to do with boldness and leadership and the indefinable art of personal interaction. He was known for how, in a case involving twenty different partnerships, he had kept track of every single one of them. He was known for being the first one to work in the morning and the last one to leave at night. He was known for the way he learned the nuances of group insurance by reading some five thousand pages on it. He was known for the way he sat in the firm library and researched a statute not for one state or five states or ten states, but for all fifty. He was known for the way he personally inspected every piece of mail his secretaries typed up for him, even the envelopes. All those qualities had made him a legend, the man who got things done. But in the house of horrors of City Hall, where nothing ever got done, what good could David Cohen possibly do?

As he stood at the window, he rationalized his decision for leaving by noting that the corner office had never really been his anyway, since Ballard Spahr had moved into the building only earlier the previous year. It was the careful, clinical thing to say. But for a moment the most uncommon of expressions, a flickering of self-doubt, flashed across his face. He uncharacteristically lingered at that window for a few seconds more, as if trying to find some solace and meaning in the tiny twinkling lights of the city. “There I’ll be, right down there,” he said quietly, but there was something tentative in the way he said it, as if he were packing and moving not to the job and the challenge of a lifetime but to a cabin in a forbidden wilderness, without food, electricity, or running water.

It wasn’t a keen sense of public service that was driving Cohen to do what he was doing. Although he was intrigued by the challenge of somehow
trying to right the capsizing ship of a major American city, that really wasn’t his primary goal. Instead, he was motivated almost solely by loyalty to the man who was about to become the 127th mayor of the city of Philadelphia. When Rendell asked him to take on a specially created job within the administration, everybody who knew David Cohen also knew that he would say yes. Cohen adored Rendell and seemed willing to do anything for him. But given their respective styles and their respective temperaments, the way they did things and didn’t do things, Cohen’s leap into public service seemed all the more like a free fall into a swimming pool that a city maintenance worker had forgotten to fill with water.