Roger Cohen

Cohen's mother, also from South Africa (b. 1929), attempted suicide in London in 1978.

His father, Sydney Cohen, a doctor, emigrated from South Africa to England in the 1950s.

Roger Cohen (born 2 August 1955) is a journalist and author.

He was a reporter, editor and columnist for The New York Times, and the International Herald Tribune (later re-branded as the International New York Times).

He has worked as a foreign correspondent in fifteen countries.

Cohen was born in London to a Jewish family.

In the late 1960s, Roger studied at Westminster School, one of Britain's top private schools.

He won a scholarship and would have entered College, the scholars' House, but was told that a Jew could not attend College or hold his particular scholarship.

(The scholarship initially offered to him was intended for persons who professed the Christian faith, as he later learned while researching the affair.) Instead, he was awarded a different scholarship.

(In the article cited, Cohen identifies Pigpen as the drummer for the Filmore East 1971 performances.) He studied History and French at Balliol College, Oxford, and graduated in 1977.

He left that year for Paris to teach English and to write for Paris Metro.

He started working for Reuters and the agency transferred him to Brussels.

In 1973, Cohen travelled with friends throughout the Middle East, including Iran and Afghanistan.

He drove a Volkswagen Kombi named 'Pigpen' after the late keyboard-playing frontman of the Grateful Dead.

In 1983, Cohen joined The Wall Street Journal in Rome to cover the Italian economy.

The Journal later transferred him to Beirut.

He joined The New York Times in January 1990.

In the summer of 1991, he co-authored with Claudio Gatti In the Eye of the Storm: The Life of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf.

The authors wrote the book based on information from Norman Schwarzkopf's sister Sally, without Schwarzkopf's help.

Cohen worked for The New York Times as its European economic correspondent, based in Paris, from January 1992 to April 1994.

He then became the paper's Balkan bureau chief, based in Zagreb, from April 1994 to June 1995.

He covered the Bosnian War and the related Bosnian Genocide.

His exposé of a Serb-run Bosnian concentration camp won the Burger Human Rights Award from the Overseas Press Club of America.

He returned to the paper's Paris bureau from June 1995 to August 1998.

He wrote a retrospective book about his Balkan experiences called Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo in 1998.

He served as bureau chief of the Berlin bureau after September 1998.

He took over as foreign editor of the paper's American office in the direct aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

She died there in 1999 and was buried in Johannesburg.

Living through a war in Europe was a harrowing experience in many ways, but I think that for everyone there of my pampered generation, it was also an education.

In war, you see people pushed to their limits.

To try to evoke that, to convey those experiences and so to impact government policy when governments are doing their best to ignore terrible things—that can be rewarding in more lasting ways than most journalism.

It won a Citation for Excellence from the Overseas Press Club in 1999.

Cohen wrote in Hearts Grown Brutal that his coverage of the war changed him as a person, and that he considers himself lucky to still be alive.

He later called this period the proudest achievement in his entire journalistic career.

His unofficial role was made formal on 14 March 2002.

In his tenure, he planned and then oversaw the paper's coverage of the War in Afghanistan.

During his first visit to India as an editor, he entered the country without obtaining a visa, having assumed that he would not need one.

He was then stuck in diplomatic limbo for several hours.

He has called this the most embarrassing moment in his career.

In 2004, he began writing a column called 'Globalist', which is published twice a week in The International Herald Tribune.