No. 1
My father did a lot of instructing, but we did not always take away the lesson he intended. He taught us in both ways: by example and by counterexample. The most helpful instruction might come via a side remark or gesture, the slouch of his shoulders or a smile that started in his eyes and spread across his face. If a certain song, Frank Sinatra’s “There Used to Be a Ballpark,” say, struck him as profound, he’d say, “Listen to the words! It’s not about a ballpark! It’s about life!” If a movie made him cry, Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, for example, he’d say, “It’s not about a hayseed from Mandrake Falls. It’s about everyone.”
Or maybe he did know; maybe he meant for us to learn less from the words than from the music. Maybe it was all misdirection. He could be tricky that way. It’s what he meant by the difference between the what and the how.
“What you say is often less important than how you say it,” he’d explain. “It’s like the difference between the head and the heart, between the knowing and the believing.”
Consider the way he taught my sister, my brother, and me how to drive. After drilling us on every road sign, traffic custom, and law, and coaching us through every sort of K-turn, lane change, and merge, he’d announce the lesson over, pick a seemingly random destination—Michael’s, in Highland Park, for hot dogs, say, or Walker Bros. The Original Pancake House in Wilmette—and tell us to “take it easy and drive me there.” Then, as you made the turn in to traffic, he’d slug you hard in the ribs, steady the wheel if you swerved, and say, “You just failed the test: what to do if stung by a bee.”
At the end of our last lesson, he told me to drive him to Wrigley Field, where the Chicago Cubs were playing the New York Mets at 3:05 p.m. There was a long line for the left-turn lane that led to the expressway. When we got near the front, my father, who’d been smoking a cigar and tuning the radio, said, “The car in front of you is going to jump the green light and take the left before the oncoming traffic. I want you to get close on his bumper and follow him through.”
Explaining himself, he added, “We don’t want to miss the first inning.”
I started well, and kept close to the lead car, but then made the mistake of looking into the faces of the oncoming drivers. Their eyes were full of hate, their mouths twisted in fury. I froze in the middle of the intersection, snarling traffic and setting off a cacophony of honks and insults. When the cars were finally sorted, we drove on in silence. It was my father who spoke first, saying, “It was my fault. I overestimated you.”
When I turned twenty-one, Herbie—of course, to me he’s Dad—took me to buy a car. It was to be my first negotiation, an experience akin in his mind to losing one’s virginity. He made a long list in preparation for this transaction, a catalog of features my first car had to have. Each characteristic of each candidate was given a number value between one and twenty-two. According to this list, the perfect vehicle for me was a used Honda Civic with less than seventy thousand miles.
We looked and looked; then, amazingly, he balked when we actually found it.
“I don’t get you,” I said hotly. “It checks every one of your boxes.”
“You haven’t learned a thing,” he said sadly. “This car has all the what, but it’s seriously deficient in the how.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Did you see all that writing?”
The car was covered with names. Red letters on the driver’s door said “Bobby.” Blue letters on the passenger’s door said “Bari.” Yellow letters on the hood said “Billy,” this presumably being the name of the car itself.
“So what?” I said. “We can have it repainted.”
“You’re missing the point,” he told me. “A schmuck owned this car.”
No. 2
My father is named Herbert Cohen, but most people call him Herbie. To Grandma Esther he was Herbela. To childhood friends, he is, at his own insistence, Handsomo, Mr. Stunning, or the Elder Statesman. In professional circles, he is Herb Cohen, an expert in the art of the deal and the author of You Can Negotiate Anything, a publishing phenomenon that came out of nowhere in 1980 to sell more than a million copies. He’s a speaker, a guru of the corporate retreat, a consultant to governments and companies, the gun hired to work out the terms and close the deal, the wise man helicoptered in to settle the strike. He helped resolve the Major League Baseball umpires’ strike in 1979, as well as the New Orleans Police strike the same year. He advised Jimmy Carter during the Iran hostage crisis in 1980 and 1981. He advised Ronald Reagan during the summits with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 and 1986. He was part of the American team at Geneva during the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks in the 1980s, where he went “eyeball to eyeball with the Russkies” and learned what he calls “the Soviet style.” He helped settle the NFL players’ strike in 1987.
He trained G-men and spooks. He was a pioneer in the field of game theory and helped set up the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit. The famous term he might well have coined—“win-win”—comes from game theory, which, according to Herbie, focused on potential outcomes, including “win-lose,” “lose-win,” “lose-lose,” and “win-win,” which he merely repurposed from academic study to human relations. And yet, though he’s lectured at Harvard and Yale and worked for many Fortune 500 companies, including IBM, Apple, Google, General Motors, Sony, and Samsung, he says he learned everything he needed to know about negotiation in Brooklyn as a kid, citing a specific incident. “A tenth grader snatched a dog off the street and took it into a basement. He said he’d kill the dog if its owner, a girl who went to Erasmus—she was my friend Inky’s cousin—did not go to a dance with him. A classic kidnapping. I was the only one on the scene who could figure out how to talk to the kid, understand and reason with him. As for learning the trade, it had everything: a victim, a hysterical family, an unreasonable demand, a crowd of onlookers, and a ticking clock. We all had to be home in time for dinner.”
By 5:30 p.m., Herbie having persuaded the kidnapper to settle for a free lunch at a diner of his choice instead of a date, the dog was safely back home and the street returned to its former placidity.
Over time, Herbie turned the tricks he learned in coastal Brooklyn—he’s from Bensonhurst, looks like it, and talks like it—into a philosophy, a kind of Jewish Buddhism. He preaches engaged detachment, characterized as “caring, but not that much.” More than a business strategy, he considers this a way of life. “Don’t get fixated on a particular outcome,” he says. “Always be willing to walk away—from the car, from the house, from the property. Once you see your life as a game, and the things you strive for as no more than pieces in that game, you’ll become a much more effective player.”
Most of his parental advice is about maintaining perspective, which he does by dismissing whatever is currently bothering you as “a walnut in the batter of life, a blip on the radar screen of eternity.” The man is besotted with aphorisms. If you look and look at something, but still can’t see what he wants you to see, he’ll say, “We’re all captives of the pictures in our heads.” Or: “We see things not as they are but as we are.” Or: “Believing is seeing.” If you present him with a clever plan to right a previous wrong, he’ll say, “The meek shall inherit the earth, but not its mineral rights.” If you are mesmerized by a charismatic leader, he’ll say, “The key to walking on water is knowing where the stones are.” Or: “Don’t put your trust in princes.”
“Time heals all wounds,” he’d once told me, “right up to the moment it kills you.”
No. 3
Herbie grew up in the redbrick apartment house at 2109 Eighty-Fifth Street in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, near the intersection with Twenty-First Avenue. If you go today, you’ll find Ichi Sushi, Amazing Aquarium, BeBe Day Spa, Lily Bloom Bakery, Gap, and Effie’s Boutique.
Copyright © 2022 by Rich Cohen
