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anything accidental about the nature of his success. Even in law school at Penn, his aura had been considerable. Fellow students recognized it—his nickname then was Chief Justice Cohen. Some students couldn’t stand him, were repelled by his alacrity, but others marveled at the way he read not only all the cases that were assigned but all the footnotes, carefully underlining everything in a rainbow array of color-coded markers. They even liked him outside class, amazed, even puzzled, by the lack of pretense in this kid from Highland Park in northern New Jersey whose father had spent much of his life as a salesman for Bulova.
    If fellow students found him special, so did his teachers. One in particular was Arthur Makadon, who was also the hiring partner for Ballard Spahr. Makadon taught Cohen appellate advocacy, and almost instantly he recognized something uncanny about this second-year law student, something that went far beyond his work in class. It wasn’t simply his base of knowledge—plenty of students at Penn had that from their endless hoursof studying and their impressive genetic strands of neurosis and paranoia. Plenty of students functioned with no sleep. What Makadon saw in Cohen wasn’t the earnestness of an extremely hardworking law student but an ability to size up events in a way that was remarkably suited to the realities of the world. Although he was still in his early twenties, Cohen somehow understood, even in the artificial atmosphere of law school, precisely what it took to get things done, how to get from point A to point B without getting diverted by anything in between. To Makadon, it was remarkable to see someone who had mastered that elusive side of life at such a young age, who already seemed so unfettered by idealism, impulse, or dreams but instead was completely practical, not a brilliant legal scholar but, in a world measured by production and results, something far better—a brilliant pragmatist. “Who was I to ask law students for practical advice?” remembered Makadon. “He was the one exception.”
    A city power broker in his own right, Makadon would ultimately bring Cohen and Rendell together. In the beginning at least, particularly given that Cohen had no experience in politics save a stint in the office of a New York congressman between college and law school, it seemed like a mismatch. But Makadon knew both men intimately. If it was he who had discovered the gift of David Cohen as corporate litigator, it was also he who had discovered the gift of Ed Rendell roughly a decade earlier, when they had worked together in the Philadelphia district attorney’s office. Perhaps on the theory that opposites really do attract, instinct told him that this was a political marriage that would endure and maybe even thrive.
    Cohen’s wife, Rhonda, who was a year ahead of her husband at Penn Law, remembered the same quality that Makadon witnessed, an almost mystical ability to know precisely what is important. Already married, they had breakfast together on the day of a major examination in a course they both were taking. David started firing potential questions at her. He cited material from the footnotes, and Rhonda told him he had gotten it all wrong, his studying had been completely off the mark.
Footnotes—who on earth would base his studying on the footnotes?
Later that day she got the exam and saw the questions.
The footnotes—the damn footnotes
. It was as if he had written it.
    As a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1981 and executive editor of the
Law Review
, he could have gone anywhere in the country. Law firms beckoned and hoped to impress him. At least one had him picked up in a limousine outside the federal courthouse in Philadelphia—a senior partner at the firm had thought Cohenwould be flattered by the attention. Instead he was mortified and after the lunch insisted that he be dropped off a block from the courthouse so no one would see