Martin Cohen, a Washington Post Co. executive who helped guide the business in the 1970s and beyond, looking after the newspaper’s finances while serving as a top lieutenant to publisher Katharine Graham, died Aug. 5 in West Palm Beach, Florida. He was 94.
He had pneumonia, said his son George Young.
Mr. Cohen spent more than three decades at The Post Co., serving as a board member, controller, treasurer and vice president of finance before retiring in 1997. Although he could be taciturn and reserved — he had the crisp discipline of a veteran Marine — he was known as a generous mentor to younger executives such as Alan G. Spoon, who joined the company when he was just turning 30 and went on to serve as president.
“He was the institutional memory,” said Spoon, praising Mr. Cohen’s dedication. “His underlying fiscal conservatism and financial conservatism never gave way. No luxuries for Marty, no luxuries necessarily for The Washington Post Company.”
Mr. Cohen had a wide-ranging portfolio, working for the company at a time when its holdings included newspapers, television stations, Newsweek magazine and the Kaplan educational business. Over the decades, he navigated early investments into cellular phone technology, oversaw the Post’s employee pension fund and guided the company’s relationship with newsprint producers.
He also helped Graham take the family-owned company public in 1971, during a tense period in which The Post followed the New York Times in publishing excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, a secret government history of the Vietnam War. Four years later, Mr. Cohen served as a bulwark to Graham and Mark Meagher, the newspaper’s general manager, during the pressmen’s strike, a contentious labor battle that threatened to shut down the paper.
“Marty Cohen was invaluable to the Washington Post Company through all the years he was there,” said Donald E. Graham, who succeeded his mother, Katharine, as publisher of The Post and chief executive of the company.
“Kay Graham depended on his knowledge and judgment and often said how lucky she was to work with him,” he added. “So were the rest of us.”
The second of three children, Martin Cohen was born in Brooklyn on Jan. 8, 1932. Marty, as he was known, grew up in suburban Connecticut, where he was educated at a one-room schoolhouse before graduating from the private Bulkeley School in New London. His mother was a secretary and homemaker, and his father was an egg distributor, arranging deliveries between local farms and grocery stores.
Mr. Cohen received a bachelor’s degree from Brown University, served as a Marine lieutenant in Japan and earned an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
After launching his financial career at Price Waterhouse, he worked on tax legislation as a consultant with the Treasury Department. He joined The Post Co. in 1966, serving as a special projects manager at Newsweek and The Post, and became a vice president at the company in 1974. In 1987, he was elected to the board.
By then, he had joined Post managing editor Howard Simons in buying a weekly Alaska newspaper, the Homer News. Simons had learned the paper was for sale after visiting Homer in the late 1970s on a birding trip, traveling to the ends of the U.S. highway system in hopes of spotting the red-faced cormorant.
Mr. Cohen’s interests tended more toward golf and theater than birds. He served as president and board chairman of the Maltz Jupiter Theatre in Florida; was a trustee of the Philip L. Graham Fund, which supports Washington nonprofits; and was a board member of what is now Children’s National Hospital.
His wife, Nancy Young Cohen, died in 2023. Survivors include his partner, Carla Darlington; three sons, Ed, Jon and George; a sister; and several grandchildren.
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