I have known the author of this memoir, Professor Jerome Cohen, on and off for some decades through his son, Ethan Cohen, a top gallerist in New York who introduced the likes of Ai Weiwei to America. As part of the respect you show the parents of a friend, you don’t probe in detail about their history or achievements or stature in the world—appropriate interest is fine, but not too much direct questioning. They will tell you stuff if they want to. Well, as it turns out, there was a lot I wasn’t told.
I did know that Jerome Cohen had clerked for two separate chief justices, and that he’d headed the highly influential East Asian Law Department at Harvard and was a widely respected expert on the region. More vaguely I knew he’d somehow enabled the Kissinger overture to China, had taught various students who went on to become influential there, and, leaning on his contacts, had often fought for human rights in those climes. But I didn’t know that, behind the scenes, he’d led a life of extraordinary influence on global affairs, indeed on the course of history. He is now 94 and is suddenly faced with the unscrambling of the extensive ties he painstakingly helped build between America and the Far East, not least China.
And so, reading this book was not unlike realizing you’ve been intermittently dining with Clark Kent all these years. For the average reader of Eastward, Westward, a similar surprise awaits because few people suspect that lawyers who wrestle with the intricate penetralia of legal codes in foreign cultures, helping to align them with Western standards, are disproportionately consequential. Politicians and diplomats get all the limelight, but the hands-on experience and powerful leverage accrue to those implementing détentes on the ground. That’s the central pivot the author often occupied in Far Eastern affairs to great effect but little public notoriety.
The story begins with a high-achieving middle-class Jewish family in postwar Linden, N.J. Cohen’s father is a prominent activist in the local Republican Party and fights the Bund movement locally. The older brother gets top grades at the excellent public high school—the country was full of them back then. Jerome makes it to Yale and then Yale Law School, where he becomes editor of the Law Journal. It’s the 1950s, and one can feel the fleet-footed, well-behaved, perhaps over-optimistic confidence of middle-class America. The author marries a university girl of distinguished midwestern Jewish stock after a season of modest dating (they remain married to this day with six great-grandchildren). At one point, he is approached by CIA recruiters—Yale was the hub of foreign intelligence recruitment in those days—which he spurns when he’s told “we might want to train you and drop you into Red China to stir up trouble.” Tragically, a top athlete classmate signs on and ends up serving 18 years in a Chinese Gulag, from which Prof. Cohen eventually helps him get released.
Cohen is asked to clerk for Chief Justice Warren in the 1955 court term, and the narrative thickens as fascinating nuggets of gossip roll out about the justices, their personal habits, and juridical calculations. Washington was still a distinctly small place back then so the author gets to peer close-up into a highly secluded world—at a historic time. Just the previous year, the Court had established the groundbreaking precedent of Brown v. Board of Education; the country and the judges were still feeling the aftershocks. But here, amid the weighty issues, we realize from the narrator’s light touch and twinkling humor why he was included in so many social occasions and grown-up dinners at justices’ homes. He has a quietly mischievous eye that never offends or falters throughout the book. We learn that Justice Minton loved to chew tobacco during oral argument; when microphones were introduced, “it took him a few days to turn off his microphone before noisily expectorating into the receptacle at his feet.”
Astonishingly, as his year of clerking for Warren ends, young Cohen starts making history, albeit in a minor key. He is asked by a different justice to come back for a second year—an unprecedented event—when a clerk for Frankfurter can’t join. This and many other felicitous incidents down the years, the author modestly ascribes to luck. But by now, the reader knows better, being wholly in the grip of a precisely personable narrator. Clearly he gained trust and deployed charm in just the right measure to keep opening doors. More toothsome anecdotes flow by, and soon Cohen takes on his next challenge with a Rockefeller Grant to research mainland Chinese law in Hong Kong. An odd choice, considering he spurns weighty offers in academe and law practice at a time when China seemed an opaque mystery. Indeed, he is told that Africa is the future.
Where many others might fail, the author’s can-do optimism, of a kind then considered particularly American, overcomes apparently insuperable obstacles. How to research the legal system of a hermetically sealed country? He asks the Hong Kong police to bring him escapees from the mainland, even those floating alive in the harbor, to interview in person. He becomes arguably the world’s leading expert on Chinese criminal law by his mid-30s. He arrives at Harvard Law School as a professor in 1964 and within a few years is grappling with Vietnam war campus protests. About the student violence he says it “was a major infringement of university rules and academic freedom,” strong words for a lifelong Democrat. Among the book’s many blessings, bestowed by a life astutely steered, are vivid snapshots of time and place around the globe just as history erupts—and the light they throw on the present.
In 1968, Cohen chairs a committee of top academics to draft a confidential memo for President Nixon advising that he send a close aide for secret talks in Beijing. “That was the origin of Henry Kissinger’s famous 1971 visit,” writes Cohen. Meanwhile, he broadens the East Asian graduate admissions to include many more students from the region. This during a period when authoritarian regimes were common there. Quite a few of his protégés become leaders in Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, and elsewhere. Cohen’s patient indoctrination of their top young minds in the rule of law and democratic values surely helped create changes over time. As did his interventions on behalf of persecuted opposition figures such as Benigno Aquino of the Philippines, Kim Dae Jong of South Korea, Annette Lu of Taiwan, all who guided their countries to liberal governance. He also helped Ai Wei Wei get released by the PRC and later the famous “Barefoot” Blind Lawyer Chen Guangchen.
During the 1990s Cohen organizes the education of Chinese officials in Western commercial law and essentially spearheads the ensuing flood of investment. Was it a mistake to facilitate that process, considering the threat from China now? He devotes a chapter to the question. His answer: It’s legit to defend Taiwan and contain Beijing’s autocratic throw-weight but, handled with patience, China’s educated class, especially the lawyers, will bring about change. After all, it has happened elsewhere throughout the region. But one senses that the author knows he won’t be around long enough to see it.
Eastward, Westward: A Life in Law
by Jerome A. Cohen
Columbia University Press, 384 pp., $38
Melik Kaylan writes about culture and the arts for the Wall Street Journal.
