When I was
an undergraduate nearly 50 years ago, I was talking with fellow staffers on my
college newspaper about the McCarthy Era, venting my loathing for the senator’s
chief counsel. Suddenly, a freshman reporter yelled, “Don’t talk about my Uncle
Roy that way!”
To say
that I was stunned by this unexpected response would be an understatement. But
I was equally amused by the retort of another reporter in the room: “I wouldn’t
go boasting about it, Richard.”
Cohn had
graduated from the same school where we were matriculating, Columbia
University. For all his brilliance (he graduated from the law school at age
20), he remained, a quarter-century after his meteoric rise to fame and
notoriety during the Red Scare, a deeply loathed figure on campus.
He was reviled
in New York at large and Washington, too, for what many judged his abrasive,
ethically edgy representation of clients. But his Rolodex still bulged with
prominent people from all walks of life and even both political parties.
(Despite closeness to far-right Republicans, he retained the ties to local
Democrats developed by his father, a judge and member of the party.)
Clients
hoped to benefit not just from his undoubted knowledge of the law, but
influence. Ironically, in his last couple of years, even as he falsely claimed he was
afflicted with liver cancer, Cohn was calling in chits in the
ideologically sympatico Reagan Administration to secure the experimental AIDS
medication AZT, then only in the clinical trial stage.
Nearly a decade after his death, Cohn was depicted, in all his splenetic hypocrisy, in Tony Kushner’s epic drama of life during the AIDS years, Angels in America.
And more than three decades after his passing, he was recalled as the evil
mentor of young real estate tycoon-on-the-make Trump, in the documentaries Where’s My Roy Cohn? and Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story Of Roy Cohn, as
well as the feature film The Apprentice.
Ivy Meeropol, the
director of Bully. Coward. Victim, has special reason to abominate Cohn. As an assistant prosecutor, he was not only instrumental in winning
espionage convictions against her grandparents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, but
also in communicating in secret with Judge Irving Kaufman about the need to
sentence both to death.
(Today,
after the release of declassified Soviet archives and USA government
intercepts, the historical consensus is that though Julius was guilty of
running a spy ring, the evidence against Ethel was far thinner—contradicting
Cohn’s ludicrous contention years later to journalist Sidney Zion that she was
“the mastermind of this conspiracy.")
Though
Cohn facilitated the Rosenbergs’ destruction, it is equally true that he helped
engineer the self-immolation of his boss after that trial, McCarthy, during the
lawyer’s 18 months as chief counsel for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations.
His insane
threat to “wreck the Army" if it did not give friend and fellow aide G.
David Schine favored treatment in boot camp—and his demand that McCarthy back
him up—resulted in the televised hearings that exposed the senator unmistakably
as a bullying, reckless threat to the Constitution.
Resigning
from his post after the Army-McCarthy hearings, Cohn retreated to New York,
where he spent more than two decades building up a profitable practice at his
law firm, Saxe, Bacon & Bolan.
By the
time that journalist Ken Auletta caught up with him for a December 1978 Esquire
article, he was riding high—scoffing at four trials from which he had
escaped unscathed, even crowing that his notoriety, rather than being a stigma,
furnished him with more publicity and clients.
He had
some reason to feel that he’d survived the worst blows thrown at him. By this
time, his clients had numbered Francis Cardinal Spellman (who had employed his
services in a school prayer case), Barbara Walters (whom he briefly dated), Studio
54 co-owners Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, Aristotle Onassis, Rupert Murdoch, Bianca
Jagger, and rumored Mafia chieftains Carmine Galante and “Fat Tony” Salerno.
Nevertheless, Cohn’s ambition and ruthlessness were so relentless as to spark speculation that they were rooted in fear, including of antisemitism.
Robert Sherrill’s August 2009 review in The Nation of two books pointed to Cohn’s concerns that the public would associate Jews with Marxism, and the lawyer did stun friends with enough slurs directed at co-religionists that it was commonly believed that he was a self-hating Jew.
That behavior was certainly bewildering. But I think Sherrill does not give adequate attention to what was surely Cohn’s more gnawing unease: exposure as a gay man.
As early as the Army-McCarthy hearings, when he and Schien were closely, even inextricably, linked in the public eye, he squirmed as the lawyer representing the military, Joseph Welch, when asked by the senator what a “pixie” meant, responded, “A pixie is a close relation to a fairy. Have I enlightened you?”
As Cohn
reveled in his celebrity, whispers about his sexual orientation turned into
open conjecture. Auletta, for instance, bluntly asked during an interview if he was gay, and it was
difficult to miss the insinuations—starting with the quiet adjectives and
adverbs before exploding in the final sentence—in this passage:
“He looks
like a killer. Except for the body and the deportment. He's only five feet
eight inches tall, 144 pounds. The suit he is wearing this day is dark blue,
slightly tucked at the waist, with a faint stripe. A modest paisley tie fades
into a nondescript striped shirt. His mannerisms—the licking of the lips, the
waving wrists—are effete.”
Six weeks before his death, surely too sick from AIDS to fight with his long accustomed vigor and ruthlessness, he was finally disbarred on several charges, including:
*tricking a dying, elderly multimillionaire client into signing a will naming Cohn as co-executor;
*failing to repay a client $100,000 he’d borrowed for two decades, until the disbarment proceedings started; and
*submitting a false statement on an application to the DC bar.
No summary
of the influence of Cohn on life in the second half of the 20th
century—or the first quarter of this one—would be complete without a discussion
of his relationship with President Trump, which began in the mid-1970s.
Dennis Rohatyn’s October 2019 post on the Culture Catch Web site criticized Where’s My Roy Cohn?
for offering an overly simplified explanation of Cohn’s impact on Trump, leaving the President's overbearing father Fred out of the picture. Fair enough.
But with
that said, it’s all too easy to see how Trump absorbed the lessons of his
consigliere:
*Never
admit wrongdoing, or even a mistake.
*Attack,
attack, attack the prosecution.
*The more
preposterous a countercharge, the better. (He called the Jewish lawyers from
the Nixon Justice Department suing the Trump Organization for refusing to rent
to blacks “Gestapo agents,” just as Trump later would weaponize the Justice
Department to pursue counter-investigations against officials involved in
previous cases against him.)
It’s fair to say that Cohn helped Trump gain his coveted foothold in the Manhattan real estate market with advice on converting the Commodore Hotel into the Hyatt Hotel.
Then he protected him from the consequences of his playboy lifestyle not
only by writing his prenup agreement with Ivana, but also by directing the
young Czech emigrant to a lawyer of his own choosing who would review the pact.
For all
his tirades about desiring loyalty from aides, Trump displayed little of it as Cohn
fought in vain against disbarment and AIDS. The disappearing act did not go
unnoticed by the lawyer, who is said to have remarked (in the bowdlerized
version) that Trump had ice in his veins.
It is rare
that one individual can be seen as a malevolent force in three different eras.
But the life of Cohn resoundingly confirms the truth of Shakespeare’s line from
Julius Caesar: “The evil that men do lives after them.”
(The image
accompanying this post, of Cohn conferring with Sen. McCarthy over questioning
of witness William Taylor, was taken on Aug. 23, 1953. It appeared in the
Los Angeles Times and is now part of the collection at https://digital.library.ucla.edu/catalog/ark:/21198/zz0002shqk/)
No comments:
Post a Comment