Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 390

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "A Prayer for the City," by Buzz Bissinger.

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.

In the early 1950s, a sociologist named Peter Rossi had visited Kensington to do research for a book he was writing on why people move, and he found, much to his amazement, that residents of Kensington did not want to move despite its dearth of amenities. He found the loyalty to it astounding and the rituals of the place—buying soft pretzels under the El, going to soccer games over at the Lighthouse Field—had a hold that was almost spiritual. But over time, that sense changed—a neighborhood in the city that was no longer a place to live in but a place to escape from if you were somehow lucky enough to have the means of escape. “Kensington today is a passed-over, deteriorated, forgotten section of industrial Philadelphia,” wrote Jean Seder in a book called Voices of Kensington. “Almost all the mills have gone. They’ve moved South, or gone out of business. Periodically the children set fire to the empty shells of factories, and the city levels the ruins into another empty lot.”

“I shot him. So what?” he said. And if the police got wind of it and started asking questions about it, Dwayne said he would tell them what happened without a lawyer, which is exactly what he did. He voluntarily gave himself up to the police a week later. He made no attempt to mitigate the crime or even lie about it, as if he really didn’t care what happened to him. A life on the streets with no job and no future, or a life in prison—what exactly was the better choice? In his statement to the homicide detectives, he expressed what for him, at least, might have been the equivalent of a guilty conscience: “I only shot him once.”

Like the wife that all men dream of but so very few have, Cohen perceived his whole role as making life easier for the mayor, even when he was admonishing him to keep his mouth shut, as he frequently did (“You should now assume that a reporter will be present for everything you do unless you’re talking to Midge in the bedroom”). He posed no threat, and his loyalty, like that of a palace guard, was absolute. Like a well-meaning but sometimes careless husband, Rendell promised not to repeat the mistakes of the past (“You tell me what to say, and I’ll be good”) and paid Cohen the ultimate compliment: “As you get to know him, he becomes better. For most people, it’s just the opposite. You like them a lot, and [then] it’s all downhill.”