Cohen, Wilbur J.

Wilbur J. Cohen (1913–1987) was the Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (DHEW) under President Lyndon Johnson, but today Cohen is often credited with a larger role in public service. He is seen as the key architect of the American social welfare system. A participant in drafting the Social Security Act of 1935, Cohen was also closely associated with the passage into law of Medicare legislation in 1965. Between those two watershed events in American welfare history, Cohen proved himself a tireless advocate of federal assistance for America's most vulnerable members.

The conditions of Cohen's early life likely contributed to his later advocacy for social welfare. The son of immigrants, Cohen grew up in Milwaukee in modest circumstances. His father was a grocer. And from an early age, Cohen was keenly aware of economic disparities. Cohen was also intelligent and a good student in school. At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he majored in economics, influenced in his choice by the great depression that had settled on the nation in the early 1930s. There he distinguished himself as an energetic and hardworking student and, more important, made contacts that were to prove immensely helpful in launching him into a career in government.

After graduating in 1934, Cohen considered graduate school and a career in academe but instead accepted a job as a research assistant with a former professor in Washington, D.C. Edwin Witte was one of a number of academics who were drawn to Washington to assist in writing the New Deal legislation of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Witte was then executive director of the Committee on Economic Security, working under Arthur Altmeyer (another Wisconsin alumnus), the Assistant Secretary of Labor.

Cohen arrived in Washington in 1934 and found it much to his liking, a heady place for a bright young college graduate with liberal leanings and boundless energy. Working under Witte on the Committee on Economic Security, Cohen helped write language that eventually became the basis of the nation's first social insurance legislation. In 1935, President Roosevelt signed into law the Social Security Act, the most well-known provision of which was insurance for the elderly. Cohen, at the age of 22 years, had played a part in drafting it.

A provision of the act created the Social Security Board—later known as the Social Security Administration—and Altmeyer, a board member, offered Cohen a job. For the next 20 years, Cohen served as a staff member of the board, and in that time he worked to expand the provisions of the original Social Security Act well beyond its original coverage. In 1939, for example, he was much gratified when amendments to the act added survivor benefits to the original legislation.

As director of the Bureau of Research and Statistics within the Social Security Administration, Cohen developed a keen knowledge of the technical aspects of the Social Security programs, which he used to good effect as a congressional liaison, providing crucial assistance in drafting public policy language, statements, and scripts. Cohen was a technocrat—a technical expert—but he was by no means a minor bureaucrat only handy with statistics. Instead, he played an important part in drafting national welfare policy and persuading legislators to embrace it and make it their own cause.

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