Hand in Hand

They were in the takeoff phase of a rocketing romance, Bill Cohen and Janet Langhart, dining in New York, clearly enjoying each other’s company. At the time, he was Maine’s senior senator, rebounding from divorce, and she was host of a syndicated television talk show, recovering from her husband’s suicide.

As they left their table, a diner who recognized Cohen approached in a familiar manner that presumed too much.

“It must be very difficult for you,” he began.

In what way?

“Well, privacy. You probably don’t have any moments to yourself.”

It’s not bad. It’s a pretty good life, and I have my moments of privacy.

“Well, it must be very difficult for you.”

Well, to do what?

“Well, you know.”

The fellow obviously was struggling, but Cohen was certain he understood the stranger’s shorthand: White U.S. senator being romantic in public with a black woman. Still taboo.

“He couldn’t bring himself to say it,” Cohen recalls, “but that was what he was getting to.”

Seven years later, Cohen is secretary of Defense and Langhart is first lady of the military. Together, they are perhaps America’s preeminent interracial couple. Which is to say: a magnet for curiosity, examination, hope.

It’s not easy being a symbol of any kind, let alone carrying the extra weight that race often packs. They host dinners for foreign defense ministers, travel the globe representing their country, tour U.S. bases to exhort the troops. In the process, they have become the best advertisement for the kind of dialogue and interpersonal racial progress President Clinton is now pushing, the kind of progress that can’t be legislated.

Washington has long been home to prominent interracial couples: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), Clinton’s budget director Franklin Raines and Children’s Defense Fund President Marian Wright Edelman are all in mixed marriages.

But it’s rare for an interracial couple with the stature of Cohen and Langhart to discuss candidly and publicly their views on race and the episodes that have shaped their thinking. To them, their union is testament that it’s possible to scale the cultural walls that divide many Americans.

“I take quite a measure of pride when I step off that plane that says ‘United States of America,’ and there is a woman that I am proud to have as a partner walking down that set of steps wherever we go,” Cohen says. It says that “this is not an issue for us,” he adds, “that this is something that transcends race, that two people can love each other.”

“When I look at Bill,” Langhart says, “I don’t see color, even though he’s got the most beautiful set of blue eyes I’ve ever seen. I don’t think color. I think Bill.”

*

Since 1970, the number of interracial married couples in the United States has quadrupled--evidence, it would seem, that attitudes about intermingling have softened following Jim Crow’s demise. The youngsters are leading the way: Fifty-seven percent of teenagers in a recent USA Today / Gallup poll said they had dated interracially.

Yet the mere sight of a white man and a black woman together--or vice versa--still can provoke steely stares, whispered disparagements or worse.

Langhart acknowledges having to overcome her own “attitudes about how white people have treated my people and some of them have treated me.” She once went to an audition for a modeling part in a Hotpoint appliance ad, only to be told the company was still debating whether it was ready to let a black woman advertise its stoves and refrigerators.

“I thought, ‘They have dogs in their ads . . . and I’m a black person and they’re going to have a big meeting about whether or not [to use me]?’ ”

She walked away from the audition.

In taking her as his bride, Langhart says, “Bill had to be courageous because there are greater consequences, perhaps, to him for marrying me than any consequence to me for marrying him.”

How so?

“He could be considered an outcast. Why would you marry a black woman?

“Because his world sets the tone, at least they think they do.” She is talking about the world of influential white men. “Who has the power to be racist? The person in charge.”

So black people can’t be racist?

“I think we can have racial hatred comparable to theirs, probably with greater provocation,” she says. “On the other hand, we don’t have the power to prevent them from progressing the way that they can stifle our opportunities, whether it’s where our children go to school or whether or not we get the job.”

By and large, Cohen and Langhart say, they have been embraced by official Washington, hugged by their own nation and welcomed in other countries “with virtually no hostility expressed,” he says. “That has been more surprising to me,” Cohen states, “and pleasing, I must say.”

Blunders That Wound

Historically, it has been more common to see black men wedding white women than the reverse. But according to research by American Enterprise Institute scholar Douglas Besharov, marriages between black women and white men are climbing faster. Of the black women who married last year, Besharov estimates, more than 5% married white men.

Even for the most high-powered of interracial couples, those who travel by chauffeur and are insulated from the kind of hate directed at the Manhattan couple, there’s always something. An ignorance to correct, a faux pas that wounds.

In the circles in which Cohen and Langhart move, it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish racism from misperception, discrimination from stupidity. Call this the battlefield of subtlety.

People who say, “ ‘Now wait a minute, I’m not racist, I’m not bigoted, I’m not,’ ” Cohen asserts, “don’t really understand they could be saying something which, in fact, reveals it.”

They’ll be at dinner parties of Washington’s elite and the guests will turn to the only African American at the table--Langhart--and initiate a discussion about Colin Powell.

“I can’t measure what they’re thinking,” she says, “but I would imagine by their behavior they were trying to seem tolerant and liberal. And while he’s well-deserving, Colin is . . . he’s the flavor of the month. It gives them a place to assuage whatever guilt they have for the trespasses of others of their kind. Or an effort to make me, an enlightened one, say that they’re equally enlightened.”

A former runway model, Langhart is striking, radiant. When she walks across a room, you can spot the eyes following. She has a piercing gaze and the seductive charm of an interviewer who knows how to get to the heart of the matter. But something about her beauty--smooth cafe au lait skin? flowing hair? green eyes?--causes some to verbally impale themselves. There was the time a U.S. senator asked Cohen which of Langhart’s parents was white, and the time two Duke University scientists posed a similar question to her late husband, who was white.

“I mean what kind of nonsense is that?” she asks.

Her husband’s reaction to such insensitivities is often stronger than hers. “I think it hurts him more than it hurts me,” she says.

*

Growing up in Bangor, Maine, the son of a Jewish father and an Irish mother, Cohen also was treated as an outsider, a misfit. Though he was a whiz in Hebrew school, the local rabbi told him he could not be bar mitzvahed unless his Protestant mother converted. Either that or undergo a conversion ceremony that required the rabbi to draw a drop of blood from his penis. Cohen, then 12, was infuriated--and afraid. With his parents’ blessing, he broke with the Jewish faith and chucked the mezuza he wore on a neck chain into the river.

And yet, because his last name was Cohen, the youngster still faced anti-Semitism: An adult once hurled beer cans at him while he pitched a baseball game, screaming, “Send the Jew boy home!”

“So it made me more sensitive, perhaps, than I otherwise might have been,” he says.

Cohen raised his own sons to think independently. One of them is married to a black woman, too.

After his 25-year marriage ended and he and Langhart became an item, a prominent Connecticut couple--financial backers of his Senate campaigns--wrote him that he was destroying his career by taking up with a black woman. Cohen responded with a forceful letter of his own.

“I expressed it very clearly that I did not want their support under any circumstances.”

Coming Together

Together they radiate simpatico. Individually, they are as different as Jell-O and creme bru^lee.

Cohen, 57, is the product of a two-parent home in a rural, overwhelmingly white New England community. His father, a baker, worked 18-hour days to provide for the family. Langhart, 55, was raised by a single mother, a hospital ward secretary, in an Indianapolis housing project. Her world was virtually all black.

Bookish and introspective, he writes poetry and mystery novels and is fascinated by Civil War history. A world-class schmoozer, she loves big events--such as the Kennedy Center Honors gala she and Cohen attended.

He’s a lifelong Republican. She’s a lifelong Democrat who worked in Michael Dukakis’ 1988 presidential campaign.

At home, he relaxes by devouring a James Carroll memoir. She relaxes by devouring the competition on “Jeopardy!”

*

He’s immersed in his work. She shares in it: During a trip to Bulgaria earlier this year, Langhart toured local hospitals and discovered how badly they needed basic medical equipment. At her instigation, the U.S. military airlifted excess medical supplies to the country, and a private firm donated pharmaceuticals. Being first lady of the military has its privileges.

Cohen and Langhart first met in 1974 when he, as a freshman congressman, was interviewed on the Boston-based “Good Day” show, which she co-hosted. They stayed in contact over the years. But it was a distant friendship.

When Cohen’s marriage to his childhood sweetheart dissolved in 1987, Langhart called to check on him. Cohen returned the concern when Langhart’s estranged husband, Robert Kistner, a prominent gynecologist and co-developer of the oral contraceptive, committed suicide in early 1990.

They began conversing by phone, then rendezvoused in New York that same year.

“We talked about life, about politics, about philosophy, poetry, his stuff,” she remembers. “Neither of us was the dating kind. . . . So, it was like, ‘Oh, we’re friends. We can share.’ ”

Though there was a strong mutual attraction, their relationship developed slowly.

“I was divorced in ’87 and lived alone for quite a few years,” Cohen recalls, “and kind of got adjusted to living alone, cooking too many microwave dinners.”

In October 1995, Cohen’s father collapsed suddenly at his bakery and died. The death prompted Cohen to think harder about the rest of his life. Three months later, he announced he was retiring from the Senate. “And then I said, ‘Well, that’s one very big decision. Now, how about another one? And why don’t we get married?’ And Janet said yes.”

Three weeks later, on Valentine’s Day, they were wed in the Mansfield Room of the Capitol. The marriage--his second, her third--made sweet an otherwise traumatic period. Then, just as Cohen was preparing for private life, President Clinton asked if he wanted to be Defense secretary. He couldn’t resist.

The Military’s CEO

Cohen’s Pentagon office is huge. It has a shower and a whirlpool and polished mahogany furniture. He is, after all, secretary of Defense. But on this day, at this moment, Cohen is not much interested in the perks of office, or the latest developments in Bosnia. In fact, he would prefer that the Defense Department technicians who routinely record his words for history skip this interview session. He would just as soon not have his spokesman there, either. This is personal--it’s about his wife and race, two subjects he’s passionate about, but careful and skittish about, too.

“I’ve always said, ‘Well, why hasn’t she really achieved the kind of recognition that someone of this talent really should achieve?’ And all of the excuses I’ve heard over the years, it’s just been . . . I mean, it’s pathetic, in my words.”

Cohen believes Langhart, who broke into television nearly three decades ago as a weather forecaster in Chicago, should have made it all the way to the top, like Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters. Her career was progressing nicely until she was fired in 1987 from Boston’s Channel 5 for refusing to pick lottery numbers, saying she did not want to become “Vanna Black.”

She bounced around television for the next nine years, including stints as an “Entertainment Tonight” correspondent and as a Black Entertainment Television talk-show host. But she never cracked the big time.

“I think race obviously had something to do with it. That’s my judgment,” says Cohen.

At points in her career, according to Cohen, white television execs told her, “Well, you really are too attractive” or “you speak too well.” (Code: She’s not ethnic enough.)

“I’ve never heard that used against any person who is white,” he says. “She is also very forthright and very strong,” he adds, “and I think over the years that has presented problems to people who would expect her to be compliant or needy, subservient.”

She’s not complaining. She’s happy being the leading lady of Defense and running Langhart Communications, which teaches corporate captains how to become more media savvy. She’s planning to do some writing on the side, and some television on the side.

But he still feels for her, even if she doesn’t moan much herself. Clearly, he’s angered by what has happened to his wife’s career, but he’s also pained.

*

At work, Cohen is CEO of a $250-billion a year military structure. The irony is that Cohen presides over a military that has been struggling with its own real-life sex and race drama. Since November 1996, 22 drill sergeants have been accused of sexual misconduct at the Army’s three principal training bases. Of the 20 who have been found guilty so far, 16 are black. Most of the complainants have been white women.

Cohen said last summer that he intended to look at why “there seems to be a disproportionate number of African Americans who were charged and not white males.” That review is underway through the Pentagon’s Office of Personnel and Readiness.

When he was a senator, he was part of a small group on Capitol Hill that met informally to discuss race relations. He once co-chaired hearings on the impact of “gangsta” rap music on society and is one of a dwindling number of prominent Republicans who still believe in affirmative action.

Back in the early ‘70s, he was invited by then-D.C. Delegate Walter Fauntroy to play with the Congressional Black Caucus in a benefit basketball game at Howard University. When he walked into the auditorium, he was booed and jeered, called “honky” and “white bread” by the black crowd. The hoots stopped once they saw that Cohen could shoot.

The experience gave him “just a little glimpse of what it must be like to be in a minority under those circumstances,” he says. “I had to demonstrate something beyond my color,” he adds, “in order to qualify for acceptance.”

In early 1995, he hand-delivered a letter to Clinton at a Rose Garden ceremony. The letter made the case for giving the subject of race concentrated focus, perhaps convening a national summit. It was one of many suggestions that helped convince Clinton he needed to pull the country into a more thoughtful discussion of race. Six months ago, the president launched a year-long initiative, complete with an advisory board and national town-hall meetings like the one he conducted recently in Akron, Ohio.

That letter was written not by Cohen, but by his future wife, Janet Langhart.

Just a Regular Person

Talking to Janet Langhart is like having a good seat at the theater. She’s a one-woman play, answering questions with dramatic flourish, drawing you into her world.

Every now and then, she signals her disapproval of some inquiry--gently, though--by assuming the role of interviewer. Why is the interracial aspect of her marriage so interesting? She’s wary, but proceeds nonetheless.

The conversation occurs in their Market Square apartment on Pennsylvania Avenue overlooking the National Archives. The place is bathed in ivory tones and has a Greco-Roman flavor.

In the middle of the living room is a fluted, weathered column--Langhart’s decorating touch. From the couple’s expansive L-shaped terrace, you can see the Capitol.

You learn quickly that Langhart is unabashedly blunt--about almost everything. Like her observation that “success in this country sometimes is equated with whiteness” and her feeling that she has more in common with a black man “on the themes that impact me as an individual than I do with a white woman.”

Growing up in public housing in Indianapolis made her more race conscious than gender conscious, she says. Which leads to a question she knows some African Americans ask themselves when they see her out with Cohen: Why is she with this white guy?

Answer: “I like how his mind works. He’s wired up in a special way. Deep, deep analytical way. Sensitive way. . . . He’s very spiritual. Soulful.”

But sometimes she jokes with Cohen that when they walk into a roomful of black folks, “they love him and wonder about me.”

Her last husband, Kistner, also was white. “In each case, I fell in love and they just happened to be white.” But in each case, she acknowledges, she asked herself: “Am I selling out?”

Marrying white, she decided, didn’t undermine her cultural kinship with black people. Nor did it erase her “awareness” that there are still whites who can be racially intolerant.

Kistner was a wealthy gynecologist who taught at Harvard Medical School and was 25 years her senior. They met when he performed surgery on her. But after 12 years, they had grown apart, were living in separate states and were in the process of getting a divorce when he committed suicide.

Her first husband, Tony Langhart, was black. Both had been young idealistic followers of Martin Luther King Jr. She was a television rookie in Chicago and modeling on the side. A month after King’s assassination in 1968, they got married. “It was a kind of sentimental reaction to that loss,” Langhart explains. The marriage lasted just six months.

“Yeah, I mean black men have been wonderful to me,” she says, “perhaps with the exception of my own father,” who was absent during her upbringing.

*

Accompanying Cohen on an overseas trip this past summer, she seemed to gravitate toward the black soldiers and seamen, many of whom were surprised--and pleased--to discover that she was black. At the Army base in Tazsar, Hungary, she approached Spc. Carlton Walker of South Carolina, an African American soldier with rippling biceps.

“Boy, you look big,” she said, turning on her charm. “Are you pumping it up? Let me check out that shoulder.” She punched him softly.

A month later, back at her Market Square apartment, she explains her approach:

When black soldiers see the boss’ wife is black, they don’t know what to expect. “Is she going to be uppity? Is she going to be ditsy? Where’s she coming from? I know what they’re thinking.”

So she wades into the crowd like Oprah to set them at ease. She asks where they’re from, if they work out. “And I say, pump it up! And then they’ll see that you’re regular, and that spreads.”