This Day in New York History (Roy Cohn, McCarthy and Trump Whisperer, Dies)

Aug. 2, 1986—While pressed by multiple misconduct charges leading to disbarment, Roy Cohn—a shadowy courtroom presence behind public figures ranging from Sen. Joseph McCarthy to future President Donald Trump—died of complications from AIDS, a disease he denied having.

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 20^th 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/)

Quote of the Day (Dwight Eisenhower, on the ‘Book Burners’)

“Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.”—President Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Remarks at the Dartmouth College Commencement Exercises, Hanover, New Hampshire,” June 14, 1953

A quarter century before Dwight Eisenhower warned Dartmouth graduates against book burners, the practice would have been regarded as a throwback to the witch-burnings of the Middle Ages. But on this date in 1933, German counterparts to Dartmouth—the finest their country had produced—gathered in university towns to incinerate approximately 25,000 books for propagating“un-German” ideas.

The authors whose works were burned that day form an indelible part of the modern era: Henri Barbusse, Franz Boas, John Dos Passos, Albert Einstein, Lion Feuchtwanger, Friedrich Forster, Sigmund Freud, John Galsworthy, Andre Gide, Ernst Glaeser, Maxim Gorki, Werner Hegemann, Ernest Hemingway, Erich Kästner, Helen Keller, Alfred Kerr, Jack London, Emil Ludwig, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, Hugo Preuss, Marcel Proust, Erich Maria Remarque, Walther Rathenau, Margaret Sanger, Arthur Schnitzler, Upton Sinclair, Kurt Tucholsky, Jakob Wassermann, H.G. Wells, Theodor Wolff, Emile Zola, Arnold Zweig, and Stefan Zweig.

High Nazi officials, along with professors, university rectors, and university student leader,s addressed the mass audiences at the awful ceremonies, in which the books were heaped onto bonfires attended by band playing and “fire oaths.”

It was only less than half a year since Adolf Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany, but he had already provided an extraordinarily vivid symbol of how fast he would move against enemies—not just those he could see, but those whose thoughts he wished to suppress.

Only two months before Eisenhower spoke, Senator Joseph McCarthy had demonstrated that the same 

thing could happen here—or, rather, in United States Information Service (USIS) posts in Western Europe, many of whose libraries felt pressured by the senator’s bumptious young aides Roy Cohn and David Schine to remove books by the likes of Dashiell Hammett, W.E.B. Du Bois, John Steinbeck, Herman Melville, and Henry Thoreau.

When American forces came upon Nazi concentration camps at the end of WWII, General Eisenhower had members of Congress and journalists visit the gruesome sites so that the horror of what occurred would be seen, understood and documented. He knew, as well as anyone, that it was but a short step from burning books to burning people. Privately, he had grown to loathe McCarthy for his bullying. But concern about looking undignified—his vow not to "get into a pissing contest with that skunk"—led him to issue only veiled warnings such as the one at Dartmouth. Onlyy when “Tailgunner Joe” went after the institution to which Ike gave his best years, the U.S. Army, did the President finally determine that this modern-day know-nothing needed to be destroyed--and even then, his hand remained, publicly, largely hidden from the controversy.

(The image accompanying this post, of the May 10, 1933 book burning in Berlin, comes from the U.S. National Archives.)