"Mr. Social Security: The Life
of Wilbur J Cohen,"
by Edward D. Berkowitz.
University of Kansas Press. 1995.
Book Review by Larry DeWitt (SSA Historian)
(This review appeared in the Spring
1996 issue of the Social Security Bulletin, Vol. 59, No. 1, pgs.
91-92)
President John F. Kennedy referred to Wilbur
J. Cohen as "Mr. Social Security."
This was Kennedy's way of indicating his respect for Cohen's vast
expertise and authoritative voice on all matters related to Social
Security. And that respect was well-deserved. Wilbur Cohen was
present at the birth of Social Security and watched over it with
parental concern for more than 50 years, until his death at age
73 in 1987. This splendid biography by Professor Edward D. Berkowitz,
Chairman of the History Department at George Washington University,
does an outstanding job of telling the story of one of Social
Security's most engaging figures. The book's foreword is by Joseph
A. Califano, former Department of Health, Education, and Welfare
(HEW) Secretary.
Wilbur Cohen was a staffer of the Committee
on Economic Security (CES) that drafted President Roosevelt's
social security proposal. Immediately after the passage of the
Social Security Act in 1935, Cohen
became the first employee of the Social Security Board, where
he worked with energetic enthusiasm on behalf of the new program.
Quickly making himself indispensable, Cohen became the Agency's
chief liaison to Capitol Hill, where he worked with tenacity and
effectiveness for 20 years. He would go on to become Secretary
of HEW during the Johnson Administration and would become a key
player in the development of the disability program and, especially,
in the creation of Medicare. Berkowitz's assessment of this latter
accomplishment is that "...with the possible exceptions of
President Lyndon Johnson and Congressman Wilbur Mills (D-AR),
Cohen played the leading role in the passage of Medicare in 1965."
Mr. Cohen was a former student of Edwin
Witte at the University of Wisconsin and when Witte was appointed
Executive Director of the CES he asked Cohen to become his assistant.
Cohen's intelligence and hard work were valued by Witte, who would
later write a memorandum to Arthur J. Altmeyer describing Cohen
as "our best research worker." Edwin Witte also supported
a job recommendation for Cohen as Altmeyer's executive assistant,
a recommendation which contained this glowing assessment: "To
say that we have been highly pleased with his work is to put it
very mildly. He has a keen mind and turns out an enormous quantity
of work." These traits, intelligence and prodigious hard
work, would characterize Wilbur Cohen's entire career.
Cohen, like Altmeyer and Witte, was a product
of the Wisconsin progressive tradition in public policy. Berkowitz
describes him as a "post-Progressive Era reformer" whose
approach to social reform was shaped by his studies at Wisconsin.
The portrait of Cohen that emerges in Berkowitz's book is of the
consummate Washington insider. Patient but determined, brilliant
but not self-promoting, Wilbur Cohen was content to work behind
the scenes and was willing to settle for incremental progress,
so long as progress was being made. His knowledge of Social Security
would lead Senator Paul Douglas (D-IL) to quip: "...an expert
on Social Security is a person who knows Wilbur Cohen's telephone
number."
Witte and then Altmeyer would become the
young Wilbur Cohen's mentors, and others would eventually join
with Cohen in a kind of informal network that Berkowitz calls
"the apparatus." This
group, which included Arthur Altmeyer, Bob Ball, Elizabeth
Wickenden, and Nelson Cruikshank, among others, would work together
in an ad hoc way to influence every piece of Social Security legislation
from the 1940's to the 1980's.
Wilbur Cohen provided important staff support
in the passage of the 1939 amendments that dramatically changed
the character of the Social Security program by adding survivors
benefits. He provided input to President Truman's famous message
in 1945 calling for the creation of a national health insurance
program. As an aid to Altmeyer, Cohen played an important role
in the passage of the 1950 amendments that increased Social Security
benefits for the first time and which Altmeyer judged to be "crucial"
for the program's survival. In the early years of the Eisenhower
Administration, Cohen was instrumental in enrolling the Administration
in the emerging bipartisan consensus in support of Social Security.
Leaving Government in 1956, Cohen became
a professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where
he expanded his life-long interest in education to encompass educational
policy as well. He would continue to influence Social Security
legislation while out of Government, returning in 1961 with the
Kennedy Administration. Cohen became the Assistant Secretary for
Legislation at HEW and, eventually, Undersecretary, and
finally, Secretary of HEW. After his death, the HEW North
Building was renamed the "Cohen Building" in his honor.
Probably Cohen's greatest accomplishment,
and certainly the one about which he was most proud, was his role
in the passage of the Medicare program in 1965. Working closely
with the members of his "apparatus" and with contacts
in Congress that he had carefully cultivated for more than 30
years, Cohen was the Administration's point man on Medicare. He
shepherded the bill through a seemingly endless series of legislative
hurdles, and it was his combination of negotiating skills and
technical expertise that time and time again kept the legislation
from going off track. At the end of his Presidency, Lyndon Johnson
was reflecting with Cohen on the accomplishments of his own Administration.
When Cohen told the President that he had first come to work in
Washington in 1934, Johnson challenged him to name the five most
beneficial pieces of legislation since that time. Although there
was some uncertainty about the last two, they were unanimous about
the first three: The Social Security Act of 1935; Medicare; and
the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Wilbur Cohen
had worked on the passage of all three.
Mr. Cohen was also a pivotal figure marking
the transition from the New Deal era to the New Frontier and Great
Society eras. A perfect illustration of this change was his amicable
disagreement with Altmeyer over the approach to welfare. For the
New Deal generation, welfare meant cash assistance with little
Government involvement in the lives of recipients. Altmeyer distrusted
interventionist public welfare strategies because he thought they
tended to undermine society's basic commitment to support those
needing help. For people in the emerging social work tradition
of the New Frontier era, cash assistance was only part of the
attack on poverty. Cohen thought that there were "lots of
other elements we must emphasize other than assistance, such as
training, research, casework services, medical care, and rehabilitation."
The fact that Cohen began as a New Dealer and became a Great Society
interventionist illustrates in microcosm some of the changes that
swept through American society from the 1930's to the 1960's.
At the end of the Johnson Administration,
Wilbur Cohen left Government for the second time, and returned
to academia, where he once again worked on the outside to produce
his customary incremental changes to Social Security. But with
the coming to power of Richard Nixon, Cohen's influence began
to lessen. For the first time in his career he found himself excluded
from the action. He would eventually move to interest-group politics,
founding the Save Our Security coalition. Whether working on the
outside or inside of Government, Wilbur Cohen worked nonstop,
literally until the day he died while on a speaking engagement
in South Korea.
Professor Berkowitz's book is a major contribution
to the scholarship on the history of Social Security--it is more
than just a biography of Wilbur Cohen, it is also a major contribution
on the history of Social Security. The social and political trends
associated with the program over the past 50 years, and the part
played by Wilbur Cohen in these events are some of the exciting
details found in this scholarly piece.
In his foreword to this book, Joseph Califano
sums up Wilbur Cohen's career by stating: "Wilbur Cohen was
one of the most effective public servants of the 20th century."
This excellent biography shows us that he was also one of its
most interesting and engaging public figures, and reminds us that
if Wilbur Cohen had not passed this way, the Social Security program
as we know it would not exist, and what does exist of Social Security
would be much diminished in scope and in influence. And in a tribute
both to Cohen and to Professor Berkowitz's efforts, Califano tells
us: "Wilbur Cohen's life is what Government at its best is
all about-helping- the most vulnerable among us. This book comes
at a time when we all need to be reminded of that. It should be
given to every young civil servant on the day he or she arrives,
fresh out of college, to begin a Government career. In a few hours
of reading this book, they'll learn more about public service
than at any college or school of public administration. More important,
they'll learn that each of them can make a difference. For, when
all is said and done that's what makes Wilbur Cohen such a success:
He made a difference." |