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/)

This Day in New York History (Bill O’Dwyer Withers Under Questioning at Kefauver Crime Hearings)

Mar. 19, 1951—The Kefauver Committee hearings on organized crime, in the middle of a 14-city media road show, had already reached a crescendo upon arriving at New York's Federal Courthouse within the prior week, particularly with testimony by reputed mobster Frank Costello.

But now, in the first of two successive days, the nation would be transfixed by more testimony unfolding through the emerging medium of television: William O’Dwyer, the current US Ambassador to Mexico and the former mayor of New York City, crumbling under hostile committee questioning, was experiencing the effective end of his public career.

Costello, nicknamed the “Prime Minister of the Underworld,” would be sentenced to 18 months in prison for contempt of Congress when he broke off his testimony. O’Dwyer, more cooperative, saw his reputation shrivel, a judgment formalized in the committee’s final report that took him to task for allowing organized crime to fester under his watch while he was Brooklyn District Attorney and New York’s Mayor.

But the hearings' importance lay beyond destroying O’Dwyer or the intrigue surrounding the appearance of Costello, who worked out an agreement with the five-man committee to allow only his hands to be seen by TV viewers.

Indeed, the Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, which held hearings in 14 cities, demonstrated the corrosive effects of organized crime at the city and state levels, marked a cultural watershed, positioned chairman Estes Kefauver for presidential and vice presidential bids, and set the stage for deeper investigations into mob influence.

What follows in this past is based on research for a biography of O’Dwyer’s faithful younger brother Paul that I wrote with Rob Polner, An Irish Passion for Justice.

Accusations had already appeared in the New York press related to what O’Dwyer’s interim replacement as DA, a Republican, called his “laxity” and “maladministration” of his district attorney’s office. The mushroom cloud of these questions led to his hurried 1950 resignation from City Hall and appointment by President Harry Truman as ambassador to Mexico.

Then Truman gave his blessings to Kefauver—a colorful Tennessee politician who had made a coonskin cap his trademark in his successful 1948 Senate race—to examine mob infiltration of city and state governments and summon their leaders, many of them fellow Democrats, by request or subpoena.

Understanding the environment surrounding the hearings can bewilder contemporary readers unless they keep in mind these factors:

*Television: An estimated 30 million Americans tuned in to watch the live proceedings in March 1951. By the time the committee, its staff, and attendant cameras rolled into New York, the hearings had become a sensation. Suddenly, “Kefauver block parties” became the rage, and Broadway attendance took a nosedive as viewers found the real-life drama on their small screens at home even more fascinating and entertaining than what they would normally see on the Great White Way.

*Cold War pressures: Just as communists sought to erode the international appeal of democracy following World War II, so the mob world’s money was subverting democracy from within, the new zeitgeist went.  For that reason, Bill would be regarded not simply as someone who may have pulled punches on behalf of shadowy figures believed to have underworld connections, but rather as a supporter of an “alien” conspiracy fomented by Italian American criminals who were destabilizing the American experiment from within.

*A focus on gambling: Though the committee’s understanding of “organized crime” encompassed “protection,” prostitution, murder, blackmail, and gambling, according to the committee’s mission statement, it was the last that consumed the lion’s share of its attention. Gambling was, Kefauver claimed, "the life blood of organized crime," so the committee went to the areas where the activity was most likely to flourish: cities, which were often controlled, as in New York, by Democratic political machines.

Paul O’Dwyer, an attorney normally with a heightened awareness of his clients’ rights and interests, long afterward regretted having strongly urged his brother to testify, even though Bill’s doctor had cautioned about the physical strain created by the hearings:

“I felt his [Bill’s] appearance was imperative because he should not let his detractors say they had frightened him from coming to a town over which he had presided with such distinction for five years. It was immature reasoning, and in retrospect, I believe I would not have given that advice to a client not related to me but otherwise under the same circumstance.”

Bill’s testimony, frequently non-specific, struck many as evasive. Moreover, the normally self-confident pol who had been twice elected Gotham’s mayor had been replaced by am energy-drained witness who, battling the flu and mopping his perspiring brow, reacted with annoyance to his inquisitors rather than his customary charm. He did little to hide, for instance, his scorn of Republican Charles Tobey of New Hampshire as a hypocrite:

Tobey: “Why did [O’Dwyer aide James] Moran go to the apartment [of Frank Costello, in 1942] with you, to carry a bag or what? Was he an errand boy, a companion, an advisor?”

O’Dwyer: “Senator, if the answer is intended to be anything other than sarcastic, I will answer it.”

Tobey: “When you were there, were you conscious that he was a gangster?”

O’Dwyer: “I was conscious that he had a reputation as a very big book-maker.”

Tobey: “It seems to me you should have said about Costello, ‘Unclean, unclean!’ And that you should have left him alone, as if he were a leper. But instead you trotted up to his place—”

O’Dwyer: “I had business with him. They say there is a lot of it in your home state of New Hampshire—30 million dollars a year… I wonder who the bookmakers in Breton Woods support for public office in New Hampshire?”

Tobey: “I hate a four-flusher!”…

When Bill was back at his hotel room after concluding his testimony, family and friends quickly sensed that he had lost his old elan, as described later in an oral history interview by Brooklyn Eagle reporter Clifford Evans:

“Suddenly he looked old. Suddenly this very proud man . . . who had gone from bartender here in N.Y. all the way up to being the No. 1 citizen as Mayor, and then during the war, had become a General and had been given the rank in our State Department of minister—a man who, single handedly, on assignment from Roosevelt, had negotiated with dollars and in secrecy for the saving of thousands of Jews from Hitler’s Germany—a man who had done so much to make us feel good, and suddenly, everything just crashed. The grayness about him and the open window there— it was kind of a difficult moment.”

Now in his early 60s, Bill finished out his term as ambassador a year and a half later. Any possibility of a further diplomatic, or even political, career, let alone influence at any local or national level, was over. Though he was never charged as a result of the multiple investigations into his time as prosecutor and mayor, he also was never able to dispel the miasma of doubt about his conduct until his death in 1964.

City Hall reporters recalled that, only a generation before, a prior New York Democrat, the dapper “Beau James” Walker, had also departed Gracie Mansion in haste as a corruption scandal erupted. More than seven decades would pass before another mayor would see his time in office end prematurely.

The rise and fall of Eric Adams eerily echoed O’Dwyer’s. As ex-cops from Brooklyn, they ascended the political ladder largely based on their crime-fighting reputations. The Irish emigrant and African-American tapped into the fierce pride of marginalized groups that, by the time the politicians reached middle age, had become crucial cogs of the city’s Democratic coalition.

In the end, they could not maintain their political base. Party leaders prevailed upon Truman to appoint O’Dwyer as ambassador. Adams, despite the Trump Administration’s decision to drop federal charges of bribery, fraud, and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations, was forced to withdraw his independent bid for reelection as mayor in the fall of 2025.

The Kefauver hearings demonstrated the power of televised congressional hearings to lift or lower individual politicians’ reputations. Ironically today, bipartisan investigations of important national issues—a hallmark of Congress at least since the Teapot Dome scandal— are in abeyance. They’ve all but disappeared from contemporary politics since the election of Donald Trump to a second term.

That is a striking if rarely commented-on development, especially considering that Capitol Hill panels have shed light on government waste and misconduct through the eras of Jim Crow, Joe McCarthy, the Vietnam war, Watergate, rampant FBI and CIA abuses, 9/11, and Wall Street recklessness. The nationally televised hearings focused on the January 6 US Capitol attack were the last of any magnitude.

New rounds of televised hearings are painfully overdue—inquiries unrelated to the dangers once posed by organized crime, but to organized money and its similarly pernicious effect on the functioning of democratic government.

As the line between private and public interests has gone from blurred to all-but erased, the survival of a balanced two-party system hinges, at least in part, on the willingness of Congress to examine enormous conflicts of interest and alleged corruption in Washington. 

This Day in New York History (Birth of Hamilton Fish III, Political Scion and Arch-Isolationist)

Dec. 7, 1888— A shared upstate patrician background might have sufficed to put Franklin Roosevelt and Hamilton Fish III on a pleasant personal, if not political, basis.

Instead, the Republican Fish—born on this date in Garrison, NY—became an increasingly vociferous Congressional opponent not only of the Democratic President’s New Deal domestic policies, but also, problematically, of his attempts to “quarantine” Fascist dictators through aid to Western democracies at the outbreak of World War II.

Relations between the two Hudson Valley politicians (Fish was the congressman for the President’s own district) became so tense that FDR lumped the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, together with fellow GOP isolationists Joseph Martin and Bruce Barton, in the scornful, rhythmically charged phrase “Martin, Barton and Fish.”

For most of the postwar period, Fish has been regarded just as a cranky reactionary foil to Roosevelt, with, at worst, hidebound isolationist views. 

Since the airing of Rachel Maddow’s podcast Ultra last year, however, long-forgotten aspects of his approach to dealing with Nazi Germany have raised serious questions about his office’s involvement in disseminating Nazi propaganda and supporting violent far-right hate groups.

Those questions have been troubling enough that the Desmond-Fish Public Library in Garrison, after pointed and persistent inquiries from residents, is reviewing whether it should rename itself and/or engage in a “restorative justice” effort.

In the fall of 1941, during a federal investigation of Nazi activities in the U.S., George Hill, a top staffer for Fish, was seen carrying large bags to a Capitol Hill storage room and to the D.C. headquarters of the America First Committee that promoted non-intervention in World War II. 

The links to Fish were eye-opening and multiple: the congressman not only employed Hill but also controlled the storage room and had spoken at an America First rally. When files were destroyed at the America First office, a scandal arose as to whether Fish might have been the effort to tamper with evidence.

As investigators dug further, they found that Nazi agents had used Hill to send out order forms for recipients who wanted copies of the notorious antisemitic forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” It was all done with the “franking privilege” that allows members of Congress the right to mail material to their constituents for free.  

It is too bad that Maddow became so fascinated by the unmistakable contemporary echoes of the Nazi plot to undermine democracy that she did not explain why the isolationist movement that Hill hoped to exploit enjoyed broad-based support, across multiple ethnic groups and ideologies. 

But her revelations about isolationist Senators Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota and Burton Wheeler of Montana will surely lead many to look further into the careers of these once-boldface names in politics.

For me, though, the story of Fish—part of a political dynasty that included a grandfather who became governor of New York and Ulysses Grant’s secretary of state, as well as a father who also served in Congress—is particularly fascinating. It’s not just because his office was at the heart of the hullabaloo.

It’s also because a politician like Fish—who, like FDR, was inspired to join the Progressive movement by the President’s distant cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, and who led an African-American regiment in WWI—became associated with some of the most arch-conservative elements in American politicians.

Consider, for instance, that in 1921, shortly after he began his term as a U.S. representative, Fish sponsored legislation creating the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, or that a year later, he secured passage of the resolution calling for a homeland in Palestine for the Jews; or that, in 1924, he secured passage of “adjusted service” certificates redeemable in 1945 for war veterans—legislation that President Coolidge feared constituted an undue burden on taxpayers.

But in 1930, he led a committee investigating Soviet Communist influence in the United States that, while uncovering no subversives, gave early exposure to the extremist views of Fr. Charles Coughlin.

Though he started out by wishing FDR well after the governor of New York won the Presidency, Fish quickly came to believe that the New Deal—and, consequently, the Democratic Party that supported it—was riddled with socialism.

From then on, Fish’s beliefs and actions drifted towards the fringe, as he:

*denounced FDR for establishing diplomatic relations with the USSR in 1933;

*called for Roosevelt’s impeachment following his 1937 “quarantine” speech;

*spoke at a German Day rally in 1938 at Madison Square Garden, where the stage was filled with swastikas;

*took the personal airplane of Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to an August 1939 conference in Oslo, then stated that German claims to territory were “just”;

*led GOP opposition to the Lend Lease Act, a “fascist” piece of legislation that would make FDR a “dictator.”

It might fairly be said after that last characterization that Fish couldn’t recognize a real dictator if he stumbled over one. Although he denied being antisemitism, pointing to his early advocacy for a Jewish homeland, it can fairly be stated that, like British appeasers, he saw Nazi Germany as a bulwark against the rise of international Communism.

The attack on Pearl Harbor was anything but a happy 53rd birthday gift to the congressman. It left Fish scrambling for cover, as he was among the first to call for a declaration of war against Japan (although years later, he characteristically reversed himself, charging that FDR had conspired to get the U.S. into the conflict).

These days, it has become fashionable for some observers to say that the fate of Donald Trump should lie not with jurors but with voters. The termination of Fish’s political career does not exactly conform to this model.

True, Fish escaped legal accountability for any part he might have played in the Nazi subversion scheme when the investigation into that stumbled. 

Even with the growing pro-war feeling of the public during the war, he might have continued to represent his district except that he’d made a powerful enemy in his own party: Thomas Dewey.

Annoyed by Fish's support for fellow isolationist Robert Taft for the GOP Presidential nomination in 1944, the New York Governor helped redraw the boundaries of his congressional district, leading to Fish's loss of his seat. 

Maybe the true lesson of Fish's political termination--as well as those involved in the January 6 insurrection--could be that while voters might possess the ultimate power over a politician, they can be provided a great assist by fellow party officeholders who punish them primarily for their own reasons.

This Day in New York History (1st Female St. Pat’s Grand Marshal)

March 17, 1989-- Dorothy Hayden Cudahy, the “First Lady of Irish Radio,” established another “first” when she led the March down Fifth Avenue as the first female Grand Marshal in the New York St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Her precedent-breaking walk came four years after her initial bid for the post had opened parade organizers to charges of sexism.

In my youth, my parents began each Sunday with Mass and a trip to the bakery, and closed it out by listening to Ms. Cudahy’s “Irish Memories,” a weekly program consisting of musical selections, news, advertisements, interviews, and other segments. She took over the program at age 21 in 1943 upon the death of her father, James Hayden, who had been running it for the past 15 years. Even her assumption of this post foreshadowed her later pioneering effort in the way it upset traditional notions of male dominance, as many listeners assumed the job would go to her brother, James Hayden Jr.

An entire generation has passed since gay-rights activists and the St. Patrick’s Day Parade organizers had their first clash. Many of those caught up in observing the controversy year after year may be unmindful of the parade’s political donnybrooks in a history dating back to 1762.

The 1980s, when Cudahy and her supporters waged their campaign, was particularly rife with disputes that dominated the headlines. In 1983, for instance, the selection of Michael Flannery, an 81-year-old founder of the Irish Northern Aid Committee (NORAID)—just recently acquitted of gunrunning to the Irish Republican Army—led to the boycott of the parade (similar to New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s this year)  by then-Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and former Gov. Hugh L. Carey.

When Cudahy threw her hat into the ring, she seemed like a natural for the honor—someone with a strong commitment to Irish culture (epitomized not just by her program but by co-founding, with Paul O’Dwyer, the Irish Institute of New York), and, as Calvin Trillin noted in a 1988 New Yorker piece on the parade, someone willing to campaign for the post.

But the recently installed Parade Chairman, Frank Beirne, barred her from the nomination because she was not a member of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), even though she was a member of its Ladies’ Auxiliary. Even after the rules were changed, it took several more years for her candidacy to advance. The Trillin article cited several reasons for this initial failure, including the perception that Cudahy’s son Sean had campaigned too strenuously on her behalf (though this did not seem to hamper the election of prior male winners); resentment of Cudahy for bringing on the AOH unwelcome media attention; and, simply, sexism.

The year that Cudahy won, her only opponent was Mary Holt Moore, a Bronx elementary school teacher. (“I presume they didn’t have a viable candidate in the males,” Cudahy chuckled.)

Cudahy (who died at 88 in 2010) was not obstinate, she told a journalist, but “an optimist.” That faith led her to break down a silly barrier. Later female grand marshals—Moore, along with actress Maureen O’Hara and author Mary Higgins Clark—would follow in her wake.

This Day in NY History (Former VP Burr Dies Dies in Disgrace)

September 14, 1836—On the same day his second wife was granted a divorce from him, 80-year-old Aaron Burr died at a hotel in Staten Island. The former Revolutionary War colonel, lawyer, U.S. Senator, and Vice President, who had moved with a rapidity through politics that startled and even angered his contemporaries, had, in the end, been stilled by a stroke suffered two years before.

It was characteristic of Burr that the last public episode involving him would be controversial. It was uncharacteristic that it would bear all the hallmarks of a Restoration comedy.

Burr had married Eliza Jumel while he was in his late 70s. He had lost his first wife nearly a half century before, charming a succession of women since then. Perhaps he hoped that Madame Jumel, believed to be the wealthiest woman in New York, would provide him an element of safe harbor.

As so often happened with this too-clever-by-half man, he was badly mistaken. He had grabbed onto a tigress, a woman described in this way: “born a bastard, in youth a prostitute, in middle age a social climber, died an eccentric.“ The marriage foundered within a year, as the couple quarreled over how rapidly Burr was running through her money.

Madame Jumel gave him a strong legal kick on the way out the door. A simple divorce wasn’t enough for her: she charged him with taking a 26-year-old woman as his mistress. She did so because the woman in question, Jane McManus, was at that point in New Orleans and, therefore, unable to appear in court to contest the charge.

At first, Burr had pleaded that he was too old to be guilty of adultery. It could be called a tribute to his virility that so many refused to accept that as an excuse.

At last, exhausted by the legal struggle, Burr did not contest the adultery charge, but he refused to admit it and declined to provide alimony.

Burr had as much intelligence and charm as any leader in the early American republic. But now, in the declining days of his life, he had set tongues wagging again.

This time, people asked how a smart lawyer such as himself could get into this kind of mess. Thirty years before, they had asked how he had fallen from power so precipitously. If his enemies were hardly the paragons of virtue posterity long believed, it remains the case that his own character, not their excesses, is why his legacy is so radically different from theirs.

None of this is to say, though, that he left no mark on the future republic. It just so happens that his DNA runs through methods rather than words or institutions.

''He is as far from a fool as I ever saw,'' Andrew Jackson said, ''and yet is as easily fooled as any man I ever knew.''

By the same token, it can be said, no man was in a better position to understand Burr than Andrew Jackson. Old Hickory had also killed a man in a duel. Moreover, Burr laid the groundwork for Jackson’s destruction of the deferential style of politics in which Americans had continually turned to aristocrats to lead them, from George Washington to John Quincy Adams.

But Jackson had survived his involvement in dueling. For all political intents and purposes, Burr had not. I think much of it had to do with the fact that most people judged, correctly, that Burr was too clever by half.

In a syndicated column from the 1970s, Garry Wills disputed President Richard Nixon’s comparison of himself with British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, instead likening him to Burr. The parallels that Wills underscored were strong, including that:

· Both men served in the U.S. Senate before ascending to the Vice-Presidency;
· Both men attracted enemies early on because of their no-holds-barred tactics;
· Both men, when out of public office, were highly skilled attorneys;
· Both men served as Vice-Presidents under older men regarded as national heroes;
· Both men, after losing their chance to go directly from Vice-President to the Presidency, entered close, bitterly fought, unsuccessful statewide races;
· Both men fell from power and spent the rest of their lives in disgrace.

In the years since the column appeared, other historians have also pursued this historical analogy, though perhaps in not the way Wills intended.

Most notably, both men have become the poster boys of historical revisionism, with their causes advanced, oddly enough, by the liberals who once despised them. The likes of Gore Vidal, Tom Wicker, and Howard Dean have praised Nixon for his foreign-policy prowess (especially in his overtures to Communist China) and even for a more benign attitude toward big government than his GOP successors would display. Burr is now praised not only for believing in the equality of women (he provided his beloved daughter with an education equal to any learned man's), but for opposing the hegemony of the “Virginia Dynasty” of the Democratic-Republicans Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe.

But there was a reason why the odor of disreputability clung so strongly, despite his best efforts, to this antic, elfin (he was hardly taller than our smallest President, Madison) figure: the meanings and intentions behind words were fungible to Burr. He did not like to openly commit to strategems lese his freedom of action be inhibited. Thus, he gave one set of people one thing to believe, another group something else.

After all these years, it is still impossible to say exactly what Burr was up to in the chain of events that landed him before the U.S. Supreme Court in a trial for treason. Burr escaped with his life at that point because Chief Justice John Marshall insisted on more legally rigorous evidence for treason than that favored by the Jefferson Administration.

Before he had alarmed Jefferson with his ambiguous adventures in the Western states and the Louisiana Territory, or disgusted the Virginian with his opportunistic, equivocal positions on whether he’d let the Federalists vote for him over Jefferson in the House of Representatives in the disputed election of 1800, Burr had proven that he could be very useful indeed to the Democratic-Republicans in New York, where he had used newly formed Tammany Hall to move the state out of the grasp of Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists.

It was Burr's genius to see the potential for a benevolent association to be refashioned into a political machine--one that, under later leaders, would be epitomize the boss system in the United States.

Burr represented “a new power in the government,” according to Henry Adams’ epic History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson: “for being in public and in private life an adventurer of the same school as scores who were then seeking fortune in the antechambers of Bonaparte and Pitt, he became a loadstone for every other adventurer who frequented New York or whom the chances of politics might throw into office. The Vice-president wielded power, for he was the certain centre of corruption.”

As discussed in Gustavus Myers' history of Tammany Hall, Burr's top lieutenants, who continued to worship their old chief, remained in power well into the late 1830s. Martin Van Buren, an early admirer of the Vice President, would use and expand on Burr's methods in forming his own version of the machine, the Albany Regency. Finally, once Irish emigrants took power in Tammany, they took the machine to its ultimate level.

Joseph J. Ellis' American Creation includes less than a page on Burr, but in the methods he used to build Tammany Hall, the little colonel helped create the democratic process we know so well in America today--one in which participation in voting and even public office is open to a wider range of people than simply the elites contemplated at the time of the Constitution. That same process, of course, has also left the system for more open to corruption and demagoguery.

This Day in New York History (Lenny Bernstein Throws “Radical Chic” Soiree)

January 14, 1970—Maestro Leonard Bernstein’s far-ranging interests—composing, conducting, performing, educating, writing—took a turn into P.R. disaster on this night, as he hosted a gathering at his Park Avenue apartment that gave rise to a savagely resonant Tom Wolfe catchphrase, “radical chic.” What probably annoyed Bernstein the most about the resulting public derision was that the event wasn’t his idea—it was his wife Felicia’s.

To hear Felicia Bernstein talk about the whole affair later, it wasn’t really a “party,” but a serious meeting in which 90 of her progressive (or, in the preferred term of the time, “liberal”) friends—including Otto Preminger, Barbara Walters, society bandleader Peter Duchin, and the wives of Harry Belafonte, Richard Avedon, and Arthur Penn--listened to spokesmen from the Black Panther Party discuss their program, police violations of their civil rights, and fundraising ideas to help pay for legal expenses.

But it was difficult to see matters in that light given the stark juxtaposition between the Bernsteins’ swanky, 15-room penthouse and the self-professed “Maoist” rhetoric of the Panthers present that night (or, as one of the guests exclaimed to a friend about one of the spokesmen: “He’s a magnificent man, but suppose some simple-minded schmucks take all that business about burning down buildings seriously?”)

Leonard Bernstein’s insatiable craving for attention rendered him vulnerable to the criticism that soon hailed down on him. He could have taken it if the carping had come strictly from the likes of, say, conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. But it was the liberal New York Times—first through Charlotte Curtis’ report the next day, then through a positively blistering editorial a few days later—that took the lead in bringing to light his romantic, naïve brand of political activism. (Wolfe’s original New York Magazine cover story—later paired with another from the same period to form the book Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers—did not appear for another five months after the event.)

Two generations later, passions still flare over the incident. Conservative blogger Ed Driscoll, writing five years ago, believed that an argument could be made that Wolfe’s piece was “the most influential, or at least most significant, magazine article of the past forty years” in the way it pinpointed a Democratic Party in thrall to far-left ideologies hellbent on destroying even liberal institutions. New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, on the other hand, takes Wolfe to task for “advancing the new art of wedge-issue politics.”

Driscoll’s piece overstates the importance of Wolfe’s admittedly hilarious piece, but the normally sensible Ross has been so overcome by his own hero-worship of Bernstein that he ascribes more negative consequences to the piece than it in fact produced. In addition, while attacking Wolfe for thinly veiled malevolence, Ross ignores the very real anti-Semitic overtones of the Panthers--something that Bernstein overlooked or did not know (undoubtedly the latter--not only was he busy to the point of insanity, but his strong feelings about the Holocaust and the state of Israel would have made him look askance at any group that expressed anti-Semitism).

Moreover, Ross cites Bernstein’s daughter Jamie on how all the criticism affected her mother: “There was this sense that our mother never recovered from the heartbreak and shame of this incident. No one was all the way to happy again.”

Wrecking a family—that’s a pretty weighty indictment. Unfortunately, it’s also more than this cause celebre can bear. You can make—and many people have—a far stronger case that Leonard Bernstein’s long-unresolved sexual orientation did more to end his marriage than any mockery inflicted on him by Wolfe or The New York Times.

Several years after the Panther event, Bernstein left Felicia to begin a relationship with a man. Her wrath was something out of Greek tragedy. Upon their separation, she told her husband that she was laying a curse on him: "You're going to die a bitter and lonely old man." Her death from lung cancer in 1978 understandably left Leonard wracked with guilt.

All this said, the decline in Bernstein’s reputation in the 1970s had little if anything to do with his politics or personal failings. As I explained in a prior post, what stung him were music critics such as Leon Botstein who criticized him for scattering his creative energy.

In any case, his political views should not color how one feels about Bernstein’s creative achievements, anymore than John Wayne’s (on the right) or Susan Sarandon’s (on the left) should. It’s a particular irony in Bernstein’s case because, for a way, he became a convenient scapegoat for the entire “radical chic” impulse of that time.

Consider these events, which, as Wolfe notes, occurred at roughly the same period as the Bernsteins’ now-infamous gathering, and just think about this—nobody remembers any of these people for their incongruous blending of left-wing "happenings" in homes made possible by capitalist largesse:

* Sidney and Gail Horne Lumet also hosted a party for the Panthers;

* Jean vanden Heuvel threw a party for the Chicago Eight;

* Elinor Guggenheim gave a soiree for the Puerto Rican counterpart to the Panthers, the Young Lords.

This Day in New York History (Hamilton Attacks Burr in Governor Race)

Feb. 10, 1804—In Albany to argue a case that presaged a bright new future as an influential constitutional lawyer, former Secretary of the Treasury and Federalist chieftain Alexander Hamilton couldn’t resist the opportunity to involve himself in the most bitter controversy of the day, as he’d been doing for the last 30 years. 

This time, though, his decision began a long, complicated train of circumstances that resulted in his fatal duel at Weehawken, N.J., with Aaron Burr only five months later.

Faithful reader, if you thought the Spitzer and Paterson follies of the past year contained enough twists to cause permanent whiplash, you need to go back more than 200 years, when the skullduggery involving the gubernatorial race was really something to behold. The consequences of the election were completely out of proportion to the pettiness displayed.

Historians, novelists, and even playwright (Sidney Kingsley, in The Patriots) have long weighed in on the Hamilton-Burr feud. But I’m afraid that it would take a psychiatrist to make sense of the two New Yorkers. The truly amazing thing about the whole affair, after all, lies not in the two men’s differences but their similarities:

* Both men were born within a year of each other;

* Both suffered devastating personal losses in childhood—Hamilton had to live down being, in John Adams’ immortal if nasty phrase, “the bastard son of a Scotch pedlar,” while Burr, before the age of three, had lost both parents, a grandmother, a grandfather (Jonathan Edwards), and a great-grandfather;

* Both enjoyed classical education at Ivy League schools: Burr at Princeton, Hamilton at King’s College (later Columbia University);

* Both rose to become colonels in the American Revolution, serving with great distinction and displaying conspicuous bravery;

* Both became lawyers at the same time, and were considered among the ablest men of the bar;

* Both lived for a time in the 1780s on Wall Street, and even visited each other’s houses from time to time;

* Both were strongly anti-slavery;

* Both were short dandies with a roving eye, with Hamilton becoming ensnared in the American republic’s first sex scandal, the Maria Reynolds affair, while Burr’s second wife, Madame Jumel, successfully sued her septuagenarian husband for divorce on grounds of adultery.

But ever since the early 1790s, when Burr had defeated Hamilton’s father-in-law, Philip Schuyler, in a race for the U.S. Senate, the friendly rivalry between Hamilton and Burr had, bit by bit, become less cordial.

During the election of 1800, Hamilton had become so disturbed by what he regarded as Burr’s demagogic tendencies that he even persuaded Federalists in the House of Representatives to back his onetime enemy in Washington’s Cabinet, Thomas Jefferson, when the House was called on to break the Electoral College tie between Jefferson and Burr.

If you want a shorthand description of Burr, you can’t do better than the phrase “too clever by half.” That tendency led him to play footsie with possible Federalist voters in the House, neither requesting nor disdaining their vote. The Virginia leaders of the Democratic-Republican Party—Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe—did not soon forget his political opportunism.

By the end of Burr’s first year as Vice-Presidency, Jefferson had made sure he had lost out on patronage in New York State to a faction led by Governor George Clinton. As 1804 dawned, it became increasingly clear that Burr had no future in the White House as an heir apparent to Jefferson.

Now something extraordinary happened. Clinton notified Jefferson that he was going to step down as governor because of age (64) and ill health (chronic rheumatism). Amazingly, however, instead of seeing in Clinton an ex-governor, Jefferson saw him as a future Vice-President serving under himself. Having Clinton as his running mate for his second term, Jefferson decided, would accomplish three aims:

* it would shove Burr out of the way;

* it would put in the Vice Presidency someone who posed no threat to the person that Jefferson really wanted to succeed him, Madison; and

* it would preserve the Southern-New York alliance that had helped the Democratic-Republicans gain the Presidency in the first place.

Just as amazingly, Burr saw an opportunity in the suddenly open gubernatorial seat, too: the chance to become a political player again.

So Burr tossed his hat into the ring. In the free-floating New York state politics of the time, the Federalists had become so emasculated that they could not run a candidate of their own for governor—all they could do was help decide which of the Democratic-Republicans would win.

Enter Hamilton, in Albany to appear in one of the landmark cases in state history. The Federalist, bruised from his Cabinet fights with Jefferson as well as from the bitter clash with President John Adams that split the Federalists in 1800, was now concentrating his efforts on the law. 

His advocacy would allow him to piece together his family life together again while also enabling him to begin making a dent in the mountain of debts he’d accumulated.

At this time, Hamilton was probably unrivaled as a constitutional lawyer. He had already demonstrated his piercing insights into the Constitution through the pamphlets he’d contributed to The Federalist Papers during the struggle over ratification. 

Service in the Cabinet had given him practical acumen in government, and two decades of arguing cases had honed his ability to sway juries through the relentless force of his arguments and passionate oratory. 

With James Wilson dead and Daniel Webster just starting out in public life, there probably was no other lawyer in the land at that time with so much potential to influence constitutional theory before the Supreme Court.

In fact, he was now in Albany for just such a case. Jefferson had announced in his first inaugural address, “We are all Federalists; we are all Republicans,” but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t above driving into the political wilderness the party that had made his service as Washington’s Secretary of State a form of hell. To that end, he was now pursuing prosecutions of Federalist editors.

One of these editors, Henry Croswell, enlisted as his attorney Hamilton. Croswell’s first trial had ended with the jury finding him guilty.

Now, in Albany, Hamilton was readying a six-hour address to the courtroom pleading for a new trial. In it, he called for freedom of the press and listed criteria for libel that have become commonplace in American press law ever since: i.e., that to be libelous, writing must be false, defamatory and malicious.

That speech, Hamilton’s friend James Kent remarked, was “the greatest forensic effort that he ever made,” and even political foes were inclined to agree.

But Hamilton couldn’t stick to the bar, a practice he venerated. Ever since he’d been a student at King’s College, he couldn’t miss an opportunity to make his mark on the burning political issues of the day. This time, the issue was Burr.

The deep suspicions Hamilton already harbored toward Burr’s advocacy of “democracy” became all the more pronounced because of rumors going around about a Federalist scheme in New England to secede from the Union. Leading Federalists in Massachusetts had become so disenchanted with slaveholding Virginia leaders of the Democratic-Republican Party that they were talking about breaking up the Union. Several of these secessionists saw in the disaffected Burr a potential ally.

Like much else with Burr, it’s hard to determine the extent, if any, of his involvement with this conspiracy. His invariable advice to anyone who received correspondence from him was that they burn his letter. That makes it difficult to reconstruct what he promised or didn’t promise people.

But Hamilton, convinced of Burr’s involvement, now brought it to the attention of the Federalists. He couldn’t oppose Burr’s bid for governor on purely personal grounds, so he had to find something. The New England confederacy became part of his political brief against Burr.

So opposed was Hamilton to Burr’s bid that, in a speech to Federalists gathered in Lewis’ Tavern in Albany, he even backed a longtime foe, John Lansing, a fellow New York delegate that he had opposed at the Constitutional Convention. Lansing's character, Hamilton argued now, was not as bad as Burr’s, and his lack of strength as a leader might actually revive Federalism in the state.

In the end, Lansing decided not to run, and the anti-Burr forces among the Democratic-Republicans turned to State Chief Justice Morgan Lewis. Hamilton now threw his support to him. When the votes were counted in late April, Lewis had, against all odds, beaten Burr handily.

At this point, Burr reminds me of nobody so much as Richard Nixon. After his 1960 loss of the Presidential race to John F. Kennedy, the Vice-President had decided, like Burr, to revive his political fortunes by running for governor of his state, California. 

Nixon’s loss in this second race then led him to lash out at the press with the famously bitter comment, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”

As he licked his wounds that spring, Burr’s characteristic sangfroid evaporated. Normally the most charming of men, his feelings turned as rancid as Nixon's would more than a century and a half later. He needed someone other than himself to blame. 

His feelings crystallized when he received in the mail an account that noting “a still more despicable opinion which General Hamilton has expressed of Mr. Burr.”

Burr’s attempt to find out directly from Hamilton what that “opinion” was led to the correspondence that produced Hamilton’s death and Burr’s permanent ostracism from American politics.

This Day in New York History (Metropolitan Opera Opens)

October 22, 1883—New York's Metropolitan Opera opened with a performance of Gounod’s Faust, starting as a meeting place for Gotham’s new-money class but swiftly becoming an established symbol of culture in its own right.

The nouveau riche of the Gilded Age were like today’s starlets with implants—they’d paid a lot for what they had and, by George, they were going to display every bit of it. One of my earlier posts discussed one occasion for this—the ultra-extravagant Vanderbilt fancy-dress ball, also in 1883.

Another such event was the founding of the Met. It all came about because New York’s millionaires (back when the term meant something) found themselves frozen out of New York’s Academy of Music, located near Union Square. The Academy’s old-line Knickerbocker elite were in no mood to accommodate the rich new upstarts, who regarded their offer of 26 additional boxes to be too little, too late. So the nouveau riche built their own property.

The first Metropolitan Opera House—one where it stood until it moved into its present quarters at Lincoln Center in 1966—was located at Broadway and 39th Street. Fashions could and did change over the years in terms of the repertoire (sometimes in Italian, sometimes in German, but a couple of things remained constant: 1) the constellation of talent that came to the house, and 2) the inadequacy of that venue as an institution for musical theater. (In the latter case, the acoustics were fine—it was limited rehearsal and storage space, not to mention cramped dressing rooms, that represented the problem.)

The latter problem was alleviated by the move to the organization's current home, in Lincoln Center, in 1966. But, whether on 39th Street or further uptown, the talent has remained constant, with the stage serving as home over the years to the likes of Enrico Caruso, Lawrence Tibbett, Maria Callas, Marian Anderson, Joan Sutherland, Renee Fleming, and "The Three Tenors"—Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and Jose Contreras. Plus, of course, my favorite—the late great baritone Robert Merrill, who for more than three decades thrilled Yankee fans such as myself with his thrilling renditions of “The Star-Spangled Banner” on opening day at the stadium.

This Day in New York History (The Vanderbilt Fancy-Dress Ball)

March 26, 1883—P. T. Barnum’s troupe was in New York on this Monday night, but that wasn’t the only circus in town. At approximately 11 pm, a mob gawked at the city’s wealthiest families sashaying out of their carriages into the new limestone palace of William K. Vanderbilt and his wife Alva, who were throwing the “fancy-dress” ball to end fancy-dress balls to celebrate the opening of their new home at 52nd Street and Fifth Avenue.

For nearly a decade, on my way to and from work, I passed by the spot that housed one of the legendary events of the Gilded Age, unaware, like nearly all New York’s midtown workers and tourists, of what had once happened here.

Vanderbilt’s mansion must have been something to see. When I visited the mansion owned by William’s more private brother Frederick up in Hyde Park, N.Y., the tour guide told our group that the wondrous home we were gaping at was nothing compared with William’s.

Now, however, William’s humble little Fifth Avenue abode has gone the real estate version of the way of all flesh, with stores and offices taking up what had once been a monument to gaudy excess. Too bad: the rich in those days were sort of like a contemporary Hollywood starlet after implants: they had paid a lot for what they had gotten, and by golly, they were going to show it!

The preparations for the event—which, at a then-astronomical $250,000, was the most expensive fancy-dress ball given to date in the U.S. —were discussed in hilarious detail in Matthew Josephson’s satirical muckraking history, The Robber Barons. From reading his account, it seems that enough costumers and milliners were employed in the task to fill Napoleon’s army at its zenith.

But the coming affair caused consternation to Caroline Schemerhorn Astor, the grande dame of New York high society, who had never deigned to call on any Vanderbilt—starting with Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt, the founder of the family fortune in shipping and railroads.

Egged by her friend, the social observer and incurable snob Ward McAllister, Mrs. Astor had become obsessed with “The Four Hundred,” a list of society’s biggest muckety-mucks. By sheer coincidence, they happened to be the people that passed muster with Mrs. A. Conspicuously missing from the list were the Vanderbilts.

Commodore Vanderbilt’s Dutch lineage was not that far removed in length from Mrs. Astor’s. But he gave all the appearance of the worst kind of parvenu with his swearing, his constant tobacco-chewing, and especially the way he kept blithely missing spittoons with the excess from his mouth. (Okay, I might have had a problem with that, too, if I had the kind of antique furniture possessed by Mrs. Astor.)

For years, this exclusion didn’t matter to the Commodore or his son, or their wives. But it did matter to the 30-year-old wife Alabama-born wife of the Commodore’s grandson William.

Alva Vanderbilt was intent on entering high society, and she was went about doing so with the same battering-ram force that those peasants exerted on the Bastille in David O. Selznick’s 1935 version of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Alva hit Mrs. Astor on her greatest point of pride, inviting everyone from The Four Hundred. Everyone, that is, but Mrs. Astor’s daughter Caroline.

That would not do at all. So Mrs. Astor pulled herself together and, at long last, called upon Mrs. Vanderbilt.

The young Astor girl got her invitation, and the Astors and Vanderbilts had created one of the great grand alliances of history. Unlike those involving the U.S., Britain and the U.S.S.R. in World War II or the Kennedy and Cuomo clans more recently, this one remained intact through the years.

But most important was the event at hand: all systems were go were go for the party of the century.

More than a century and a quarter later, it’s amusing to read about citizens in a supposedly egalitarian republic dressing up, without irony, as a Venetian princess, King Louis XVI, or an “Electric Light,” of all things, with white satin trimmed with diamonds, and with a diamond headdress.

Josephson caught the moment in all its unapologetic Gilded Age glory, as “the dancers formed in the gymnasium on the third floor, moved down the grand staircase of Caën stone (fifty feet high), and swept through the great hall (sixty-five by twenty feet) into a drawing-room (forty by twenty feet whose whole wainscoting of carved French walnut had been torn from a French chateau and hauled across the ocean).”

The Vanderbilt’s modest little house-warming party have been faintly echoed through the years in such events as Truman Capote’s costume ball of the 1960s and Malcolm Forbes’ 70th-birthday party in Morocco. But for setting the standard, nothing beat Alva Vanderbilt’s.