Bulletin | Fall 2013 33
Classnotes | Profile
CEo: Geoff Cowan ’60 Sunnylands When President Obama and Xi Jinping, China’s new president, met for two days in June 2013, the venue was an island of tranquility called Sunnylands, a 200-acre estate east of Los Angeles. The meeting was billed by the White House as a “get-to-know-you” retreat for the two leaders.
A native of Chicago, Geoff moved to Los Angeles in 1972 and eventually Sunnylands was once the western residence of the late publisher, philanbecame the director of UCLA's Communications Law program. In 1975, he thropist and diplomat Walter Annenberg and his wife Leonore, who had was a legal consultant to Norman Lear and the Writers Guild of America in used the estate as their winter retreat since 1966 when the main house – a their challenge to CBS' Family Viewing Hour, which affected Lear's program 25,000-square-foot Modernist mansion – was completed. “All in the Family.” In the center of Sunnylands’ atrium there is an original casting of Eve by In 1992, he won an Emmy as executive producer of the television movie Auguste Rodin. There is a private golf course that includes a pink pagoda. “Mark Twain & Me”. His books include the best-selling The People v. Clarence There are eleven lakes, some stocked for fishing. Darrow: The Bribery Trial of America's Greatest Lawyer (1993), which in 2009 Over the years, Sunnylands was the vacation site of numerous celebrities The Wall Street Journal called the best book ever written about a trial lawyer. and public officials, including presidents from Eisenhower to Reagan. But the With Leroy Aarons, Cowan also co-wrote the award-winning play Top Annenbergs dreamed that Sunnylands would find a new purpose after their Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers, which explored the delicate balance deaths: a venue for important retreats for top government officials and leaders between the press, the public's right to know and the government's need to in the fields of law, education, philanthropy, the arts, culture, science and protect certain vital national secrets. medicine. It could even be a west coast Camp David, as it was this year. In 1994, President Bill Clinton appointed Geoff to be the 19th director of Overseeing the infinite details and arrangements necessary to lay the groundthe Voice of America. (Geoff’s father, Louis Cowan, was the second director of work for a meeting between the American and Chinese leaders was Geoffrey VOA, from 1943 to 1945.) Cowan ’60, president of the Annenberg Foundation Trust. From 1996 to 2007, Geoff was dean of the University of Southern California’s “The White House called us in mid-April to ask if we could make Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. When he stepped down Sunnylands available for a meeting with a foreign leader, but we did not as dean in 2007, he was named a University Professor, the inaugural holder of know that it would be President Xi until mid-May,” Geoff recalled recently. the Annenberg Family Chair in Communication Leadership and director of “Both men were charming. I met President Xi at the airport, and he seemed USC Annenberg’s Center on Communication Leadership & Policy. Then in delighted when I gave him a book signed by President Nixon, where he recalls 2010, he was appointed to his current position at Sunnylands, while maintaining his first visit to China. We greeted President Obama when he arrived at his professorship and directorship at U.S.C. Sunnylands – and, in effect, turned over the keys to the estate for the duration “The Sunnylands Summit (between presidents Obama and Xi) would have of his stay.” delighted the Annenbergs, who wanted the estate to be used by a president For Geoff Cowan, the path from Choate to Sunnylands was a long and to meet with world leaders in an effort to achieve international agreements,” varied one. Geoff said. “By all accounts, including our sources in the U.S. government After Choate, he graduated from Harvard College, then went to rural and in China, it was a huge success, particularly because the men developed a Mississippi to register black voters and start a farmers’ co-op. His letters home personal relationship. As National Security advisor Tom Donilon told reporters were included in the book Letters from Mississippi. after the meeting, it was truly historic – “and the setting played a key role in He graduated from Yale Law School in 1968, worked in the presidential its success.” campaign of Sen. Eugene McCarthy, then practiced law in Washington, D.C., where he co-founded the Center for Law and Social Policy and wrote a weekly legal column for The Village Voice. Noel Hynd ’66 is a contributer to the Bulletin.