This Power Marriage That Would Have Been Unthinkable 30 Years Ago . .. -- Secretary Of Defense William Cohen And His Wife, Janet Langhart, Regard Their Union As Testament That Cultural Walls Are Coming Down

WASHINGTON - They were in the takeoff phase of a rocketing romance, Bill Cohen and Janet Langhart, dining in New York, clearly enjoying each other's company. At the time he was Maine's senior senator, rebounding from divorce, and she was host of a syndicated television talk show, recovering from her husband's suicide.

As they left their table and headed toward the door, a diner who recognized Cohen approached in a familiar manner that presumed too much. "It must be very difficult for you," he began.

In what way?

"Well, privacy. You probably don't have any moments to yourself."

It's not bad. It's a pretty good life, and I have my moments of privacy.

"Well, it must be very difficult for you."

Well, to do what?

"Well, you know."

The fellow obviously was struggling, but Cohen was certain he understood the stranger's shorthand: White U.S. senator being romantic in public with a black woman. Still taboo.

"He couldn't bring himself to say it," Cohen recalls, "but that was what he was getting to."

Seven years later, Cohen, now secretary of defense, and Langhart are perhaps America's pre-eminent interracial couple. Which is to say a magnet for curiosity, examination, hope.

A weighted symbolism

It's not easy being a symbol of any kind, let alone carrying the extra weight that race often packs. They host dinners for foreign defense ministers, travel the globe representing their country, tour U.S. bases to exhort the troops. In the process they have become the best advertisement for the kind of dialogue and interpersonal racial progress President Clinton is now pushing, the kind of progress that can't be legislated.

Washington has long been home to prominent interracial couples: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, Clinton's budget director Franklin Raines and Children's Defense Fund President Marian Wright Edelman are all in mixed marriages.

But it's rare for an interracial couple with the stature of Cohen and Langhart to discuss candidly and publicly their views on race and the episodes that have shaped their thinking. To them, their union is testament that it's possible to scale the cultural walls that divide many Americans.

"I take quite a measure of pride when I step off that plane that says `United States of America,' and there is a woman that I am proud to have as a partner walking down that set of steps wherever we go," says Cohen. It says that "this is not an issue for us," he adds, "that this is something that transcends race, that two people can love each other."

"When I look at Bill," Langhart says, "I don't see color, even though he's got the most beautiful set of blue eyes I've ever seen. I don't think color. I think Bill."

Since 1970, the number of interracial married couples in the United States has quadrupled - evidence, it would seem, that attitudes about intermingling have softened. The youngsters are leading the way: Fifty-seven percent of teen-agers in a recent USA Today/Gallup poll said they had dated interracially.

Stares and disparagements

Yet the mere sight of a white man and a black woman together - or vice versa - still can provoke steely stares, whispered disparagements or worse.

Audrey Chapman, a prominent Washington couples therapist who has worked with interracial pairs, recounts an episode in which a black female friend and her white suitor were chased by a group of epithet-shouting white bullies as they strolled late at night in Manhattan's theater district. Frightened and out of breath, they finally gained refuge in a trendy apartment building with a sympathetic doorman.

"The larger picture is there's still a lot of racial tension and disharmony in America," says Chapman.

Cohen and Langhart have not been confronted with the kind of scary situation Chapman described. But neither of them is naive.

Langhart acknowledges having to overcome her own "attitudes about how white people have treated my people and some of them have treated me." She once went to an audition for a modeling part in a Hotpoint appliance ad, only to be told the company was still debating whether it was ready to let a black woman advertise its stoves and refrigerators.

"I thought, they have dogs in their ads . . . and I'm a black person and they're going to have a big meeting about whether or not (to use me)?"

She walked away from the audition.

In taking her as his bride, Langhart says, "Bill had to be courageous because there are greater consequences, perhaps, to him for marrying me than any consequence to me for marrying him."

How so?

"He could be considered an outcast. Why would you marry a black woman?

"Because his world sets the tone, at least they think they do." She is talking about the world of influential white men. "Who has the power to be racist? The person in charge."

So black people can't be racist?

"I think we can have racial hatred comparable to theirs, probably with greater provocation," she says. "On the other hand, we don't have the power to prevent them from progressing the way that they can stifle our opportunities, whether it's where our children go to school (or) whether or not we get the job."

By and large, Cohen and Langhart say, they have been embraced by official Washington, hugged by their own nation and welcomed in other countries "with virtually no hostility expressed," he says. "That has been more surprising to me," Cohen states, "and pleasing, I must say."

Historically, it has been more common to see black men wedding white women than the reverse. But according to research by American Enterprise Institute scholar Douglas Besharov, marriages between black women and white men are climbing faster. Of the black women who married last year, Besharov estimates, more than 5 percent married white men.

Even for the most high-powered of interracial couples, those who travel by chauffeur and are insulated from the kind of hate directed at the Manhattan couple, there's always something. An ignorance to correct, a faux pas that wounds.

A battlefield of subtlety

In the circles in which Cohen and Langhart move it's sometimes difficult to distinguish racism from misperception, discrimination from stupidity. Call this the battlefield of subtlety. Here, prejudice is often locked away in minds and hearts where it can flourish in the darkness.

People who say, "Now wait a minute, I'm not racist, I'm not bigoted, I'm not," Cohen asserts, "don't really understand they could be saying something which, in fact, reveals it."

A former runway model, Langhart is striking, radiant. But something about her beauty - smooth cafe au lait skin? Flowing hair? Green eyes? - causes some to verbally impale themselves. There was the time a U.S. senator asked Cohen which of Langhart's parents was white, and the time two Duke University scientists posed a similar question to her late husband, who was white.

"I mean, what kind of nonsense is that?" she asks, wearing the frown of incredulity.

Her husband's reaction to such insensitivities is often stronger than hers. "I think it hurts him more than it hurts me," she says.

Together they radiate simpatico. Individually they are as different as Jell-O and creme brulee.

Cohen, 57, is the product of a two-parent home in a rural, overwhelmingly white New England community. His father, a baker, worked 18-hour days to provide for the family. Langhart, 55, was raised by a single mother, a hospital ward secretary, in an Indianapolis housing project. Her world was virtually all black.

Bookish and introspective, he writes poetry and mystery novels and is fascinated by Civil War history. A world-class schmoozer, she loves big events -like the Kennedy Center Honors gala she and Cohen attended.

He's a lifelong Republican. She's a lifelong Democrat who worked in Michael Dukakis' 1988 presidential campaign.

Cohen believes Langhart, who broke into television nearly three decades ago as a weather forecaster in Chicago, should have made it all the way to the top -like Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters. Her career was progressing nicely until she was fired in 1987 from Boston's Channel 5 for refusing to pick lottery numbers, saying she did not want to become "Vanna Black."

She bounced around television for the next nine years, including stints as an "Entertainment Tonight" correspondent and as a Black Entertainment Television talk-show host. But she never cracked the big time.

"I think race obviously had something to do with it. That's my judgment," says Cohen.

You learn quickly that Langhart is unabashedly blunt - about almost everything. Like her observation that "success in this country sometimes is equated with whiteness" and her feeling that she has more in common with a black man "on the themes that impact me as an individual than I do with a white woman."

Growing up in public housing in Indianapolis made her more race-conscious than gender-conscious, she says. Which leads to a question she knows some African Americans ask themselves when they see her out with Cohen: Why is she with this white guy?

Answer: "I like how his mind works. He's wired up in a special way. Deep, deep analytical way. Sensitive way . . . He's very spiritual. Soulful."

But sometimes she jokes with Cohen that when they walk into a roomful of black folks, "they love him and wonder about me."

Her last husband also was white. "In each case, I fell in love and they just happened to be white." But in each case, she acknowledges, she asked herself: "Am I selling out?"

Marrying white, she decided, didn't undermine her cultural kinship with black people. Nor did it erase her "awareness" that there are still whites who can be racially intolerant.

There was a time when the mere idea of a Cohen-Langhart power couple in America was unimaginable. It was only 30 years ago that the Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws in 16 states. Occasionally, some horrific incident offers a reminder that the past is still with us: On Dec. 1, 1995, four skinheads pleaded guilty to firebombing the mobile home of an interracial couple in Richland, Miss.

For Cohen and Langhart, such news will always be grim. But it is not the stuff of their reality. Their life is still a dreamy romance, unfolding in the protected limelight of government jets and government security and state dinners. Unlike the Richland couple, theirs is a world of relatively modest annoyances. A defense secretary and his star wife, symbols of racial progress.

"Notwithstanding all the problems that we do have in our society," says Cohen, "the fact that we can be married and be a visible couple with very little, if any, animosity expressed toward us . . . is a pretty positive statement."