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July 2, 1999 | It takes no small amount of chutzpah to march into the "Evil Empire," with the Golden Arches emblazoned on your business card and preach the gospel of one of capitalism's greatest success stories to hard-line Soviet leaders. But it's clear from the moment you meet him that he's the embodiment of chutzpah. He's always smiling, always talking, always oozing enthusiasm. He sucks up the attention of anyone near him. It's not necessarily a bad quality. In the world of corporate dealmaking that's more about schmooze than number-crunching, a smile you can't say no to and a personality you can't ignore are winning assets. Our meeting place was the McDonald's in New York City's Rockefeller Center. When I walked up and introduced myself, he was standing near the service counter showing off his Technicolor McDonald's logo tie to a man and a woman in suits. Smiling broadly, he thrust out his hand and said, "Great to meet you! Let's have lunch!" Every McDonald's is a variation on a theme. The golden arches, the neatly wrapped Big Mac and fries glistening in red cardboard packages, the pimply faced employees: These are generally the same wherever you go. This is the genius of McDonald's: A Big Mac always tastes like a Big Mac, even though in Russia they may also serve borscht. The McDonald's closest to my home in Oakland, Calif., is a dingy, ominous-looking shack. The McDonald's in Rockefeller Center is hyper-clean, neon-lit and cavernous enough to seat more than 100. Joined by his two companions (Irwin Kruger, owner of several McDonald's in Manhattan, including this one, and Maurren Kitts, director of communications for McDonald's Canada), Cohon and I settle into a corner of the restaurant to talk about his new book on bringing the McDonald's franchise to what was then the crumbling Soviet Union, "To Russia With Fries." But before I can get started, Cohon wants to give me a present. It's a travel alarm clock that wakes you with the sound of your own voice. He demonstrates how to record a message. "That's neat, isn't it? It's yours." Nobody's given me a clock before. I don't know how to respond. I blush a little, thank him and set it aside. "Have you read my book?" he asks. Flummoxed again! I pull it from my bag and open it to Page 241. "I've gotten this far," I say apologetically. "That's good. Thanks for taking the time. It's tough to read books like this. Most interviewers don't have the time. They have assistants read it and they pose questions," he says, excitedly. Cohon might have taken writing lessons from Virginia Wolfe. His book flits back and forth in time from his childhood in Chicago, to meeting Gorbachev, to his Army days, to his first encounter with McDonald's founder Ray Kroc, who in 1966 invited Cohon to quit his job as a lawyer and purchase the McDonald's franchise license for all of Eastern Canada. Cohon borrowed $60,000, moved from Chicago to Toronto and started opening restaurants. By 1971, he had 34 of them. Kroc offered him $1 million to sell the franchise back, but Cohon refused. Instead, he exchanged it for company shares. Cohon was the second-largest company-employed shareholder (Kroc was the first) when he set his sights on the Soviet Union. During the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, Cohon had taken a delegation of Soviets who were organizing the 1980 Olympics in Moscow to eat at McDonald's. The Soviets were impressed, and Cohon quickly saw potential for big profits behind the Iron Curtain. His negotiations to make McDonald's the official food provider for the Moscow Games were a spectacular failure -- costing millions of dollars and killed at the highest levels of the communist government for ideological reasons, Cohon explains. (In retrospect, it was a blessing in disguise: The United States boycotted the Olympics and it wouldn't have looked good for McDonald's to have taken part.) Cohon persisted, and on Feb. 1, 1990, the first McDonald's opened in Moscow. Capitalist labor had a hero in the Soviet Union. We order lunch from the store's manager and I ask Cohon if Russians still perceive McDonald's as a symbol for all things American. "When it opened in Russia, it was a way for people to visit the West without ever going to the West," he recalls. "At that first restaurant nearly 10 years ago, people used to take the packaging. They'd walk out with the empty bags and the wrappers and the straws -- anything that had McDonald's on it. "In Russia today, they view it as a Russian company. We've got 6,000 Russian employees. We took out a newspaper ad one day. We got 27,000 written responses. All we said was, 'We're McDonald's. We pay based on productivity. Would you like to come work for us?' They used to have this line in Russia, back in the '70s: We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. It was the communist sort of thing."
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