Title: Where’s My Roy Cohn?
Rating: 4 Stars
Whatever else you might want to say or think about Roy Cohn, one thing is certainly true, he led an interesting life. He was a (possibly, the) dark malignant force in the US for some thirty-five years.
This was marked from his very first entry onto the main stage. He graduated from law school at the age of twenty but had to wait until he was twenty-one to take the bar.
At the age of twenty-four, he took his first big case, prosecuting the Rosenberg trial. For those of you not up on your communist nuclear paranoia, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were accused of being atomic spies by passing on Manhattan Project documents to the Soviet Union. It became quite the cause celebre with conservatives demanding their execution and liberals fighting against what they saw as state paranoia.
I believe that the current consensus is that Julius was a spy but that Ethel was not. Regardless, in a sign of things to come, Cohn used every illicit trick in the book to secure their convictions and, ultimately, their executions.
Such lack of ethics in the ruthlessly brutal pursuit of his own aims drew the attention of Joseph McCarthy. Cohn became McCarthy’s chief counsel during his communist witch hunt. Interestingly enough, one of his investigations was the so-called Lavender Scare, in which the investigation was focused on Soviet agents making gay government employees spy for the Soviet Union to keep their sexuality from being publicly revealed. This led Dwight Eisenhower to sign an order excluding gay people from government service. This was interesting because it was a barely kept secret that Cohn was gay and it’s a fact that he died of AIDS.
It could be argued that Cohn’s sexuality ultimately brought down McCarthy. At the time, Cohn had an intimate relationship with a man named David Schine. Schine was drafted into the army. Cohn tried to coerce the army into giving Schine light duty. Cohn threatened to “wreck the army”. This led to the Army-McCarthy hearings, which dramatically included the army’s chief counsel calling out McCarthy with the phrase “have you no decency, sir”. This hearing broke our country’s fever of paranoia and McCarthy never recovered.
However, Cohn just kept on going on. He entered the world of New York law. Most famously, he became the go to lawyer for the mafia, representing, among others, Tony Salerno and John Gotti.
In case representing gangsters wasn’t enough, Donald Trump enters the picture. He was a large owner of rental apartment properties. Many of those properties illegally discriminated against minorities by doing such things as quoting different prices for the same apartment and falsely claiming no vacancy when a minority tried to apply. The government accused him of violating the Fair Housing Act.
Trump hired Cohn and Cohn counterattacked with his usual lack of fear and ethics. He filed a massive counter suit against the government that was dismissed. Trump ultimately accepted a settlement that he found acceptable.
This started a decade long relationship where Cohn served as Trump’s mentor if not father figure. All of the things that we now know and love about Trump, from his repeating known bald face lies to never backing away from a fight to having no sense of shame are lessons directly from Cohn’s life.
Also, Cohn introduced Trump to Rupert Murdoch, so we have him to thank for that as well.
In the political arena, he was credited with encouraging John Anderson’s third party candidate run in 1980 to benefit Ronald Reagan. There were rumors that he worked with the media to publish Thomas Eagleton’s medical history (complete with depression and shock treatments) to torpedo McGovern’s 1972 campaign. Considering his own relationship with the mafia, he might have appreciated the irony of digging up the dirt accusing the 1984 Democratic Vice Presidential candidate, Geraldine Ferraro, of having mafia ties through her husband.
To his dying day, he claimed that he had liver cancer. Everyone knew that he was dying of AIDS, but he was so deeply closeted that he would take that secret to his grave. Once it became known that he was dying of AIDS, Donald Trump stopped receiving his phone calls.
Do you think that this fact hurt Roy Cohn, or do you think Trump’s abandonment of him in his dying moments served as proof to Cohn that he taught his protege well?
dorkenstein 