As news tips go, it was minor.
A candidate for lieutenant governor of Minnesota in 1982 had a 12-year-old petty theft charge in her background. Dan Cohen passed it along to a handful of reporters a week before Election Day in 1982 to help a friend running for governor. One catch: Cohen, a former Minneapolis City Council president and a Republican insider, couldn’t be named.
Cohen’s anonymous tip, and the fallout that exposed his identity, led to a decade-long legal battle with this newspaper. Cohen prevailed at the U.S. Supreme Court in 1991, setting a precedent that subtly reshaped the relationship between journalists and their sources. It was a fitting victory for an outspoken man who reveled in his fights with the Star Tribune.
“Every pratfall and misfortune that befalls the newspaper delights me,” he wrote in 1978, in his first column as a regular contributor to the Minneapolis Star.
The court case was just one notable chapter in Cohen’s extended career in public life, which spanned the 1960s to the 2020s. A Minneapolis booster and Bryn Mawr resident who vied in two disparate eras to be the city’s mayor, Cohen died on April 4 at age 87.
His father was investment banker Merrill Cohen, who rose from office boy to celebrated corporate titan of the Twin Cities. Dan Cohen grew up in Minneapolis and went on to graduate from Stanford University — where he met his wife, Gail, who survives him — and Harvard Law School.
Voters first elected the younger Cohen to office when he was just 28, in 1965. He joined a narrow Republican majority (then known as the Independent Caucus) on the Minneapolis City Council, representing a western ward that included portions of the Chain of Lakes. Cohen became City Council president two years later, establishing a reputation as an ambitious politico who knew how to get his way.
“I’ve gotten word around here that you don’t cross me,” Cohen told the Minneapolis Tribune in 1969. “When things are done, my wishes are to be consulted.”