Geoffrey Cowan is an American lawyer, professor, author, and non-profit executive. He is currently a University Professor at the University of Southern California, where he holds the Annenberg Family Chair in Communication Leadership and directs the Annenberg School's Center on Communication Leadership & Policy. In 2010, Cowan was named president of The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands, a position he held until July 2016. In this role, Cowan was commissioned with the task of turning the 200-acre estate of Ambassador Walter Annenberg and his wife Leonore into "a venue for important retreats for top government officials and leaders in the fields of law, education, philanthropy, the arts, culture, science and medicine."[1] Since Sunnylands reopened in 2012, Cowan has helped to arrange a series of meetings and retreats there. In 2013–14, President Barack Obama convened bilateral meetings at Sunnylands with President Xi Jinping of China and with King Abdullah II of Jordan. In 2016, President Obama hosted the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) at the site, where they released the Sunnylands Declaration.[2] Prior to his time at Sunnylands, Cowan was appointed by President Bill Clinton as Director of Voice of America.
Geoffrey Cowan was born to a Jewish family[3] on May 8, 1942, in Chicago, Illinois. He is the son of Louis G. Cowan, former president of the CBS television network and professor at the Columbia School of Journalism. His mother, Polly Spiegel Cowan, granddaughter of Joseph Spiegel, was a TV and radio producer, and a civil rights activist who started Wednesdays in Mississippi together with Dorothy Height.
Cowan is a graduate of both the Dalton School (class of 1956) and the Choate School (class of 1960). He went on to graduate from Harvard College (class of 1964), where he studied American History and Literature, and was an editor of The Harvard Crimson. He is a 1968 graduate of Yale Law School.
In the summer of 1964, Cowan went to rural Mississippi to register black voters and start a farmers co-op during Freedom Summer. His letters home were included in the book Letters from Mississippi and published by Esquire in Smiling Through the Apocalypse: Esquire's History of the Sixties.[4][5]
The following summer, Cowan returned south to Alabama to co-found the Southern Courier, the first civil rights newspaper in the region. The Southern Courier began publication in July, 1965, and "every week for three years - 177 issues - it reported the stories of the movement that changed America."[6]
While working for Senator Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign during his last year at Yale Law School in 1968, Cowan founded "The Commission on the Democratic Selection of Democratic Nominees" to increase public participation in the presidential selection process.[7] Chaired by Governor and later Senator Harold Hughes of Iowa, the Commission studied the ways in which delegates were chosen and issued a report of the committee's findings that was delivered at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The report concluded that nearly half of the delegates needed to nominate a presidential candidate were chosen by party bosses.[8] This led to dramatic reform in the selection of delegates for presidential primaries. Cowan later said of his work on the commission, "The campaigns of 1968 were part of a broader movement to change institutions in a substantial way, whether it be an incumbent President or a corporate hierarchy for the American Medical Association."[9] On the eve of the 1972 Democratic Convention, Howard K. Smith delivered a commentary as co-anchor of the ABC Evening News that ended with these words: "Over the hall tonight hang huge pictures of men who made the Democratic Party what it is. One is missing - young Geoffrey Cowan. He did more to change conventions than anybody since Andrew Jackson first started them."[10]