Norman Cousins[1] (June 24, 1915 – November 30, 1990) was an American political journalist, author, professor, and world peace advocate.

Cousins attended Theodore Roosevelt High School in the Bronx, New York City, graduating on February 3, 1933.

[1] Cousins joined the University of California, Los Angeles faculty in 1978[6] and became an adjunct professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences.

[3] Politically, Cousins was a tireless advocate of liberal causes, such as nuclear disarmament and world peace, which he promoted through his writings in Saturday Review.

In a 1984 forum at the University of California, Berkeley, titled "Quest for Peace", Cousins recalled the long editorial he wrote on August 6, 1945, the day the United States dropped the atomic bomb in Hiroshima.

[citation needed] Following the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, President John F. Kennedy saw that only he could find the terms that would be accepted by Nikita Khrushchev to avert nuclear war.

"[8] In the 1950s, Cousins played a prominent role in bringing the Hiroshima Maidens, a group of twenty-five Hibakusha, to the United States for medical treatment.

Cousins became an unofficial ambassador in the 1960s, and his facilitating communication between the Holy See, the Kremlin, and the White House helped lead to the Soviet-American test ban treaty, for which he was thanked by President John F. Kennedy and Pope John XXIII; the Pope also awarded him his personal medallion.

"I made the joyous discovery that ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep," he reported.

"When the pain-killing effect of the laughter wore off, we would switch on the motion picture projector again and not infrequently, it would lead to another pain-free interval.

He and other members of the Cousins family were also taken aback by the casting of Asner, since the two men bore scant physical resemblance to each other.