Richard Cohen, an Emmy-award winning journalist and husband of former Today anchor Meredith Viera for 38 years, has died. He was 76 years.
“Richard Cohen died on Christmas Eve, surrounded by his family and love,” Today co-host Hoda Kotb, said of his Dec. 24 death on the NBC morning magazine show on Tuesday. Cohen had lived with multiple sclerosis for over 50 years and died after a bout with pneumonia, according to The Hudson Independent, which was the first to report on his passing.
He also survived two earlier battles with colon cancer. Born on Feb. 14, 1948 in New York City, Cohen was first diagnosed with MS when he was 25-years-old, just as he began working with ABC News as an associate producer.
“I don’t deny that I have the illness. I did for a while, and I think everybody does. But you come face to face with the symptoms soon enough. You’d be really out of touch with reality if you tried to play that game,” Cohen said in a 2007 interview with the Brain and Life publication.
“Still, what I denied then and what I deny now is the inevitability, the certainty of possible outcomes. I know I deteriorate because it’s a progressive disease, but I’m not going to make assumptions about wheelchairs and not being able to go up steps and not being able to work—things like that,” Cohen added.
As an Emmy award-winning journalist, Cohen became a senior producer at CBS News and later CNN. He also wrote books about living with MS and advocated for people faced with chronic illness. And he contributed to the “Health and Fitness” column at The New York Times.
Vieira in an interview with Today with Cohen at her side recalled being told on their second date about his MS diagnosis. “I’ve always been of the school of thought that you could get hit by a bus the next day, any one of us could. It certainly wasn’t enough to scare me off,” she said.
When leaving the Today program in 2011, Vieira cited a wish to spend more time with her family, including their two sons, Benjamin and Gabriel, and daughter Lily.
“Time is one of those weird things. You can never get enough of it, and it just keeps ticking away. And I know that I want to spend more of mine with my husband, Richard, and my kids,” she said from the couch on the Today set.
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