the secretary of self-love

...All this posturing seemed to play well in Maine...

...In 1995, he was the only Republican in the Senate to vote against the party leadership's budget reconciliation bill...

...It is also dramatically at odds with that of the Clinton administration, which has declared the present ABM treaty "the cornerstone of strategic policy...

...Cohen also continued in his role as his party's self-appointed moral voice...

...Cohen played the maverick integrity card all the way to the Senate, beating incumbent William Hathaway in 1978 and winning two more terms decisively after that...

...One stanza reads: Before they unleash hurricane winds, Before they breathe through nostrils red beyond all Fahrenheit, Turn them to endless ash, yes, save us from their savagery...

...He is very concerned with his image in the media...

...I can't imagine him supporting Clinton once he loses an argument," says a Senate staffer who has worked with him for years...

...So much for courageously bucking the tide of public opinion...

...The relentless narcissism, the goofy sensitive-guy routine, the self-conscious and phony moderation—all these are characteristics Cohen shares with the man who hired him...

...Christian Potholm, Cohen's campaign manager at the time, says Watergate resulted in "a tremendous gain in [Cohen's] popularity with Democrats and independents...

...Those who know Cohen have a hard time believing he will be able to keep the policy differences he does have with the administration private once he becomes defense secretary...

...He said, 'I am angry with your boss,' to one of my staffers...

...Courageous...

...They liked him because he had so little party loyalty...

...Why are so many leaving the Senate...

...Cohen's reputation as a political straight-shooter began when, as a freshman member of the House Judiciary Committee in 1974, he voted for President Nixon's impeachment...

...It dubs Cohen a "true Renaissance man" and praises him for being "as close to the ideal definition of a public servant as one can get"—a man of "integrity" and "fierce independence" who specializes in "bringing executive branch wrongdoing to light...

...As a second-term congressman, Cohen must have been fully aware of dozens of examples of similar behavior...

...In a May 1974 column, Novak pointed out that Cohen's stand against Nixon had brought the young congressman waves of support...

...If we are going to establish and maintain confidence in our political system, then we have to reverse the widespread perception that it is just politics as usual in Washington...

...Subordinating himself to people who he disagrees with is absolutely anathema to Bill Cohen...

...Cohen has never managed anything larger than a Senate staff, and he has never served in the military...

...In the middle of yet another farewell address— during which he described himself as, among other things, "Aesop's fly on the wheel of history's chari-ot"—Cohen related an anecdote that helps explain why he believes America might be unable to carry on without him: "I recall after supporting the crime bill two years ago, a call came into one of my district offices, and a man was very angry...

...Cohen's verse addresses vital questions of the day: the Arab-Israeli conflict, the plight of Vietnam veterans, and the political situation in China...

...Shocked and appalled by the offer, Cohen publicly demanded that "disciplinary action" be brought against the lobbyist...

...More than simply wrong or illegal, Men of Zeal declares, the Reagan administration's stonewalling during Iran-contra was actually "another kind of warfare that threatens us...

...Hardly...

...Spend any time reading Cohen's work and you quickly discover the Bill Cohen Paradox: Despite his job title and his widely recognized intelligence, Cohen is actually hard to take seriously...

...In 1985, he met, poet to poet, with Soviet writer Andrei Voznesensky and convinced President Reagan to do the same...

...The two touches of white—crescents on her firm breasts, a narrow band across her buttocks and groin—seemed like adornments on her dark, rippling skin...

...a strong national majority supported impeachment...

...Judiciary Committee Members Splendidly Rising to History," declared one Washington Post headline...

...A White House lobbyist, Cohen reported, had approached him and another Maine congressman with a deal: If they would vote with the administration on a tax bill, the president might be persuaded to re-appoint a prominent Maine Republican to the National Transportation Safety Board...

...Cohen's calls to amend it, he says, "just drove them crazy...

...In December 1975, Cohen contacted a New York Times reporter to recount a startling breach of ethics in the Ford administration...

...Men of Zeal may be the future defense secretary's most famous published work, but it is only a small part of an ever-expanding oeuvre...

...In prose so impassioned that it earned a blurb from none other than Dan Rather, the senators breathlessly conclude: "If we continue to lie to each other, or withhold information, or leak information, alter or shred documents, or put them in burn bags,...the damage that we will inflict upon ourselves would be as suicidal and destructive as any that has taken place in the Middle East...

...When Republicans defeated the Clinton healthcare plan, Cohen rallied a group of its supporters to construct a similar alternative...

...Did the president read the press release Cohen's Senate office issued upon his retirement...

...An accomplished, brilliant, incredibly well-read lawyer from a working-class family, Sen...

...The poor lobbyist must have been confused by the controversy, since swapping votes for favors is politics as usual in Washington, and in every other place in the world where democratically elected legislatures gather...

...As recently as last month, syndicated columnist Robert Novak recalled Cohen's "courageous vote to impeach Richard Nixon...

...His friends and admirers weren't the only ones who feared that Cohen's resignation might leave the Republic in shambles...

...Not even Gerald Ford, Nixon's own vice president, publicly criticized Cohen for his position...

...As his colleague Joseph Biden once explained, Cohen is "a poet, seriously a poet, a published poet...

...Somehow, in the end, Chandler rises above these loutish Neanderthals and succeeds in exercising his own brand of, yes, thoughtful moderation...

...That November, Cohen won reelection by a large margin, beating a well-known Vietnam war hero and former POW...

...Ostensibly about a KGB-inspired terrorist plot, The Double Man is actually an extended meditation on the goodness of its protagonist, a moderate New England senator named Thomas Chandler...

...The senator thus finds himself "preoccupied," not with his own success, but "with more important issues—the threat of nuclear war, the reformation of the tax code, protection of the environment against toxic wastes...

...She wore no bra," Cohen writes of a nude female assassin in one passage from a 1991 mystery novel called One-Eyed Kings...

...he described his own nomination as "a very bold and exciting move...

...On the other hand, for a man famous for being bland—between 1987 and 1990, he gave a mind-numbing total of 41 speeches at the Brookings Institution—Cohen isn't uniformly dull...

...In recent years, Cohen has been particularly outspoken about the need for strong missile defense...

...Cohen then teamed up with his Maine colleague, Democratic senator George Mitchell, and a year later produced a book on the affair entitled Men of Zeal...

...Dan Rather blurbed this book, too...

...Nixon was already facing profound image problems long before Cohen voted against him...

...And those were news stories...

...People in Maine are ornery," explains Dick Morgan, a government professor at Bowdoin College, Cohen's alma mater...

...Certainly Cohen approved...

...A longtime opponent of the nuclear freeze, Cohen backed most of the White House's positions during the Cold War...

...One Monday morning in the fall as the group's drill exercises were beginning, Morgan remembers, "this Psi U freshman wandered in with an ill-fitting uniform...

...The footprints of guilt must often be traced with the searchlight of probability...

...In truth, private polls show Cohen amazingly popular" in his Maine district, Novak wrote...

...It's not that the two men will disagree on all that much: Though Cohen is often called a "moderate," in truth his positions on issues like environmental protection and partial-birth abortion are not centrist, but solidly liberal...

...Cohen was nominated by President Clinton last month to be secretary of defense, a job that may ultimately earn him other burial inscriptions...

...Cohen's approval rating topped 80 percent...

...Which makes it a lot like Cohen's own stand on many Republican-favored foreign policy issues...

...And, according to Novak, "Cohen's mail immediately following his rebuke to Mr...

...Chandler is a public servant of regal "distinction," whose "bearing, the way he walked, identified him as a man in charge...

...Cohen's first love is poetry, and he commits it frequently...

...Along the way, he took a seat on the Armed Services Committee, became knowledgeable about foreign policy issues, and helped write laws with unassailable monikers, like the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 and the Anti-Kick-Back Act of 1986...

...There was a lot of party disloyalty to like...

...How can the center hold...

...At the height of the controversy over the Strategic Defense Initiative, Cohen composed a poem entitled "High Frontier," later published in his 1986 volume, A Baker's Nickel...

...But at least you're building some lines of communications so you don't automatically paint everybody as a monster over there...

...the president added an experienced (and easily confirmed) foreign policy hand to his cabinet and can plausibly claim to have taken a stab at bipartisanship by choosing a Republican...

...In the Cohen myth, the vote to impeach has become something like a combination of the Exodus and Elvis's appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show—a single act that forged a great identity...

...Quickly emerging as one of the Reagan administration's most aggressive critics, Cohen concluded the hearings by signing a majority-written report that described Reagan's aides as a "cabal of zealots...

...When a reporter asked Clinton about Cohen's habit of tangling with members of his own political camp, the president made it clear he hadn't thought much beyond the confirmation process...

...My vote is not for sale, never has been and never will be...

...Cohen has written eight books since being elected to Congress in 1972— three novels, three non-fiction works, and a couple volumes of poetry...

...Those who plant their feet in the concrete of ideological absolutism are heralded as heroic defenders of truth, justice and the American way," Cohen once thundered, complaining that thoughtful Republicans such as himself are derided as "mushy...

...A man who allows such a document to go out from his own office—and who may very well have written the thing himself—is not going to make a good soldier, especially for Bill Clinton...

...When he took exception, however (as with his opposition to the B-2 bomber), his exceptions tended to be loud...

...It's not going to change the way their government looks at us, or vice versa," Cohen conceded...

...To those familiar with Cohen's behavior over 24 years in Washington, his promotion also makes sense in a baby-boomer-pol kind of way...

...His cap was askew, nothing looking right...

...President Nixon has "allowed the rule of law and the Constitution to slip under the boots of indifference and arrogance and abuse," Cohen proclaimed at the time...

...Far from hurting him back home with Republican voters, the publicity Cohen received during Watergate made him politically impregnable...

...Novak said as much at the time...

...Though he came to Washington to reform the corrupt political system, Chandler in time becomes an expert on foreign policy, with a special interest in NATO...

...Bill Cohen and Bill Clinton should get along perfectly...

...Pretty amusing, but for truly delirious inadvertent comedy, check out The Double Man, a 1985 spy novel he wrote with Gary Hart...

...Won't the system fall apart...

...The nomination seems at first blush a wise choice...

...And the thought went through my mind, 'Oh, no, we'll never make a soldier out of him.' That was Bill Cohen...

...Another Post account described Cohen as one of "the young Republicans who will inherit their party's future...

...A master of the tired platitude, the hackneyed quote, the incomprehensible metaphor, Cohen the prose stylist hovers somewhere between John Grisham and Judy Blume...

...He lasted one day...

...Last week, I announced that I would not seek reelection to the Senate," Cohen announced for the second time in a January 1996 Washington Post op-ed...

...Standing in the way of such achievements is the usual group of conservative Republican ideologues making ugly noises about "the evils of abortion, sex, and liberalism...

...I said, 'Why was he angry?' He said, if you excuse the expression, 'He's too damn reasonable.'" "Perhaps," said Cohen grandly, "that will be the epitaph on my gravestone...

...Many expressed sadness over my decision, and nearly all were perplexed...

...Another volume, "an examination of how elderly people are victimized by fraud," is on the way...

...In 1959, Dick Morgan was a cadet in charge of Bowdoin College's ROTC unit...

...By the end of '95, Cohen was voting with the Clinton administration more frequently than any other GOP senator...

...The one thing that will never be compromised is my integrity," Cohen announced in a statement dutifully reprinted in the Times...

...But his past may offer clues to the kind of defense secretary he will make, and just how long he will last...

...The book is a tedious read, but it does end with a passage characteristic of Cohen's public pronouncements...

...Except they probably won't...

...In August 1995, he took to the floor of the Senate to contend that the ABM treaty should be open to re-negotiation, arguing that the United States and key allies like Israel require protection from international threats not present when the original treaty was signed in 1972...

...Perhaps not...

...The poem's exact position on SDI is hard to read— "It's about man and his relationship to technology and science," Cohen told the New York Times—but it does appear generally supportive...

...He kept up with pork-related obligations back home, working to steer business to his state's sizable defense industry, even fighting to make the government buy more Maine blueberries for school lunches and C-rations...

...His approval rating was mired at 24 percent...

...For Cohen, the lesson was obvious, and before long he was once again in a fit of moral outrage, once again directed at a member of his own party...

...The closest Cohen came to replicating his performance in Watergate was in 1986, when he helped run congressional investigations into the Iran-contra scandal...

...Cohen's reception in Washington was, if possible, even warmer...

...One defense analyst on the Hill says that the administration thinks the treaty "is something that was brought down off Mount Sinai...

...Nixon ran 10 to 1 in his favor...

...Cohen feared the very same thing...

...A former high-level CIA official who dealt with Cohen during the latter's days on the Senate intelligence committee puts it this way: "If you make a deal with Cohen, you can't count on the fact it's going to be honored, because he does play to the galleries...

...Her glistening body was supple and deeply tanned...

...Never before had he felt the need to call the press...

...It's just that Cohen loves nothing more than to point out other people's flaws—especially when those people are nominally on his side...

...The opinion pages were even more slavishly supportive...

...Cohen's position on ABM is sensible...

...He received standing ovations from crowds even in conservative Maine counties...

...I have been moved by the reaction of my constituents and colleagues...

...On the other hand, calling the press had never before been so profitable...

...A man with a creative, independent, inquiring mind is just what we needed for this team," Clinton replied...