Gary Cohn

Gary Cohn was held back in elementary school because he could not read. The second year went no better than the first. He was severely dyslexic at a time when the condition was poorly understood, and the distance between his effort and his schoolwork kept growing. Assignments that took classmates minutes could keep him working for six, eight, or nine hours. Sometimes he sat in his room crying. The finished page still looked wrong.

Teachers saw laziness. Tests showed strong intelligence, which only made some adults more certain that he was refusing to work. To recover some standing with his classmates, Gary became the classroom joker. Discipline problems followed. In fourth grade, after an abusive encounter with a teacher, he struck back, walked out, and was expelled. He later called this stretch “the ugly years.”

His parents had no easy explanation. They did have another school to try, and then another. Their ambition narrowed to a high-school diploma. When Gary finally received one, he remembered his mother crying harder than he had ever seen.

After school, on weekends, and during summers, Gary worked in his grandparents' electrical-contracting warehouse. The place held thousands of parts. He remembered where they belonged, knew what could substitute for a missing item, and filled orders faster than employees who had worked there for decades. His grandfather treated this as evidence. When Gary's parents, worn down by the school years, considered military school, Gary remembered him saying, “No, you're not sending him anywhere. He'll be fine.” His grandparents kept him close to work where memory and practical reasoning counted.

Cohn graduated from American University, built a career in trading, became president and chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs, and later directed the National Economic Council. Changing schools did not deliver a neat turnaround, and his family did not make dyslexia disappear. They kept looking for a workable setting. His grandparents also refused to let one kind of record outweigh the capable boy working in front of them.