``It's the same manner in which he approached business for 18 years'' on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Sen. John W. Warner (R., Va.).
In a strangely foreshadowing event, Cohen, as a U.S. senator from Maine, came to the support in 1989 of Sen. John Tower, whose chances of becoming defense secretary were collapsing over allegations of alcoholism and other misconduct.
Cohen, in an impassioned though ultimately unsuccessful defense of Tower, quoted from The Crucible, the play about the 17th-century Salem witch hunts, and decried the ``crescendo of hysteria.''
Flash-forward eight years: Cohen took the same tack when he came to the defense of Ralston, whose candidacy to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff crashed Monday over an affair he had 13 years ago while separated from his wife.
Again, Cohen called for caution in criticizing common human failings, and for the separation of private life from public duty.
``It's a very thoughtful and judicious tone that's been set,'' said Chris Potholm, an old Cohen friend from Maine. ``I thought it was also very, very solid. He stood up for the man.''
Initially, when the adultery case of female bomber pilot Flinn, who was forced from the service, made headlines, Cohen ducked for verbal cover.
He said he couldn't comment - something that had been alien to him in Congress. ``It's a big change in my life from being a senator, where I could say, and usually did say, everything,'' he said. ``And no one really cared.''
But in his new position, the bread baker's son - who has never served in the American military but who as a classics scholar studied the armies of Greece and Rome - has learned how much people do care.
