Richard Cohen, a veteran journalist and the husband of former Today anchor Meredith Vieira, has died. Cohen passed away on Christmas Eve at the age of 76 following a two-month battle with pneumonia, per Deadline. He had lived with multiple sclerosis for over 50 years prior to his death and also survived two cancer diagnoses.
Today host Hoda Kotb announced Cohen’s death during the Jan. 7 broadcast, telling viewers that he was “surrounded by his family and love,” including his wife of 38 years, and their three children – daughter Lily, 32, and sons Gabriel 34, and Benjamin, 36.
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“She’s in really good spirits,” Kotb’s co-host Savannah Guthrie added of Vieira. “She was such a beautiful and devoted wife to Richard, and he adored Meredith. And hanging out with them, they were like the most fun and entertaining, irreverent, cool couple you could hang out with.”
The View‘s Joy Behar also shared news of his passing during the Tuesday broadcast of the long-running ABC program. She said the date of his passing, Christmas Eve, was “fitting, because he came into this world on Valentine’s Day,” and his Dec. 24 death “felt like perfect symmetry.”
Born February 14, 1948, on Long Island, New York, Cohen was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) in 1973 when he was 25. Per the Mayo Clinic, MS is “a disease that causes breakdown of the protective covering of nerves,” and “can cause numbness, weakness, trouble walking, vision changes and other symptoms.”
Cohen told Vieira of his diagnosis when they were on their second date, recalling to Yahoo Life in 2019, “I told her about the illness, because I sort of learned the hard way to get it on the table. And she really didn’t blink.”
Vieira said that when Cohen told her of his diagnosis, it didn’t faze her, noting, “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.”
Vieira and Cohen married in 1986 and went on to welcome three children together. Throughout their 38-year marriage, Vieira publicly supported her husband, telling PEOPLE in 2019 about living with her husband’s MS diagnosis, “We definitely allow each other to vent. That’s part of the deal. Certainly he’s allowed to vent, because he’s got chronic illness. But I am too. Because there are days I can’t stand it and the limitations it puts on the entire family. It’s good to say it. But we don’t dwell.”
In addition to his open battle with MS, Cohen also battled cancer twice. He was first diagnosed colon cancer in 1999 and then again in 2000.
Cohen was a journalist who won three Emmy Awards for his work as at CBS News and also spent time at CNN, PBS, and ABC. Outside of journalism, Cohen wrote for the “Health and Fitness” section for The New York Times and authored several books, including his memoir Blindsided and Strong at the Broken Places, which documented his own health battles, as well as the lives of others living with chronic illnesses. He is survived by his wife and their three children.
