Norman Cousins
From Philosopedia
Cousins, Norman (24 June 1915 - 30 November 1990)
Cousins was born in Union City, New Jersey, the son of Samuel and Sara Miller Cousins. At age 11, he was misdiagnosed as having tuberculosis and was placed in a sanatorium. In school, however, he engaged in athletics and claimed when young that he had “set out to discover exuberance.”
In New York City’s Bronx, he attended Theodore Roosevelt High School, graduating on 3 February 1933. He edited the school’s paper, The Square Deal. He earned his B.A. from Teachers College, Columbia University.
He and his wife Ellen Kopf Cousins, whom he married in 1939, raised four daughters: Andrea, Amy Loveman, Candis Hitzig, and Sarah Kit.
A consummate opinion maker who received over fifty honorary university and college degrees, Cousins was an essayist who was best known as the editor of the Saturday Review of Literature and, later, of Saturday Review. The latter journal drew a connection between current events and the various types of literature, showing the influence of one upon the other.
His Good Inheritance: The Democratic Chance (1942) spoke of the potential for greatness that exists in America. Modern Man is Obsolete (1945) included his ideas about humanity in the atomic age. Anatomy of an Illness (1979) was based upon his experience with a life-threatening illness, telling about the healing ability of the human mind and the medical value of laughter.
In the 1950s he arranged to bring a group of “Hiroshima Maidens,” girls whose bodies were disfigured by the atom bomb’s explosion in their city, to receive surgical and medical attention in United States hospitals. One, Shigeko Niimoto, lived at his New Canaan, Connecticut, home and became a part of his family. Members of the Society of Friends volunteered to house the other girls.
Cousins’s editorials, lectures, and books on Albert Schweitzer and other subjects show him to be one of his time’s major independent thinkers. He was well-known internationally and had visited Schweitzer at his African hospital. The two discussed their mutual interest in music, for both played piano and organ.
Cousins occasionally attended Unitarian and Ethical Culture meetings. For the Unitarians in Westport, Connecticut, he donated the pulpit in memory of Schweitzer. Active on behalf of the World Federalists, Cousins once was sent by President Kennedy to negotiate the release of two Catholic priests with Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev, after which he visited the Pope to inform him of the project.
A memorial service for Cousins, held at the Manhattan Ethical Culture Society, included eulogies by Ved Mehta; Unitarian minister Homer Jack; Walter Hoffman of the World Federalists; McGeorge Bundy; Horace Sutton; and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who said that the world contains clever pessimists who through ruse argue for military destruction and war. “But Norman Cousins was a clever optimist,” Yevtushenko observed, lamenting that no one of his stature appeared able in the 1990s to speak for man and mankind quite the persuasive way Cousins was able to do.
At that memorial service, Norman's brother Robert read a letter written for the occasion by Norman himself, in which the thoughtful humanist stated that he hoped people “would come away from this joyous event better than when they came in.”
(See entries for Albert Einstein, for Albert Schweitzer, and for the Society of Friends.)
{FUS; WAS, extensive conversations}
