THE WHITE HOUSE, January 2018.
Barely a year into his presidency, Donald Trump is caught in a political storm. The investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election is gathering momentum, threatening to bring down his administration. Then comes another blow: his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has recused himself from the inquiry, depriving Trump of a means to steer the proceedings as he wishes. The president is livid. He wants to reverse the attorney general’s decision, but an aide informs him that Sessions will not budge. And then, as The New York Times later reported, Trump erupts in front of his staff. “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” he cries out.
Even those well versed in the theatre of American politics might scratch their heads and ask: Roy who?
For a sharp, succinct answer, watch the documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn?, released a year after Trump’s infamous outburst. Directed by Matt Tyrnauer, the film offers a workmanlike portrait of Cohn. Drawing on archival footage, photographs and conversations with former associates, it traces the rise and fall of the ruthless New York lawyer who became a feared political operator and an early mentor to Trump. Cohn died in 1986, aged 59, from AIDS-related complications.
Cohn first gained notoriety as a prosecutor in the case against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a married couple who were accused of passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. In June 1953, the Rosenbergs became the first American civilians to be executed for espionage during peacetime—that, too, based on evidence that is today regarded as inconclusive. Cohn subsequently served as chief counsel to Republican senator Joseph McCarthy during the anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s. He went on to build a powerful private law practice, representing politicians, celebrities, businessmen and even members of the mafia. One of his protégés was Trump.
Like most contemporary documentaries, Where’s My Roy Cohn? dispenses this lurid history in neat, potent capsules. If you would prefer a more artistically nuanced exploration of Cohn, you might find a more compelling portrait in Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s celebrated two-part play that was adapted into an HBO miniseries. In the series, Cohn, played by Al Pacino, is a deeply immoral yet tragic figure. He has spent his career attacking people suspected to be gay, even as he is himself a closeted gay man dying of AIDS.
“I came here to forgive,” the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg tells Cohn before his lonely and painful death, “but all I can do is take pleasure in your misery.... You are dying in shit, Roy. Defeated.”
Cohn’s notorious venality has inspired such contempt that even The Simpsons, the longest-running American sitcom that debuted three years after his death, occasionally sets aside the convention against mocking the dead to take a dig at him. One character casually mentions acquiring a high-end tuxedo cheaply because “Roy Cohn died in it”.
A more recent, perhaps the most visceral, depiction of Cohn comes in The Apprentice, Ali Abbasi’s film about how Trump became his protégé. In one tense scene, Cohn, played by Jeremy Strong, lays out his three rules for success to Trump, played by Sebastian Stan. The most important is this: “No matter what happens, no matter what they say about you, no matter how beaten you are, you claim victory and never admit defeat. Never admit defeat, Donald! That’s how you win.”
Both actors, who uncannily captured the physicality and mannerisms of their real-life counterparts, received Oscar nominations last year for their work.
Yet, even though each of these adaptations are successful in their own right, they fall short of capturing the full sweep of Cohn’s colourful and consequential career. An earlier biography, Citizen Cohn, by journalist Nicholas von Hoffman, published two years after Cohn’s death, came close to portraying him as a master of the dark arts of power. But reviewers felt that the sheer density of information in it obscured the larger questions: who was Cohn, really, and why does he occupy such an important place in American political culture?
A new book, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, by journalist Kai Bird and his wife, Susan Goldmark, attempts to not only weave a grand narrative around Cohn’s life but also make a larger argument: Cohn’s spirit continues to haunt America.
The book builds on the familiar foundations of the Cohn mythology, adding fresh layers to the portrait of a man who cultivated journalists (television news icon Barbara Walters had a romantic relationship with him) and intimidated his opponents. Once, seeking preferential treatment for a friend in the US army, Cohn went so far as to bully Robert T. Stevens, secretary of the army under president Dwight D. Eisenhower, threatening to wreck the army’s public image and “show the country how shabbily it was run”.
He also weaponised controversies. When a young Trump, then making his way in real estate, was accused of discriminating against Black prospective tenants, Cohn came to his defence as a lawyer, filing a $100 million defamation suit against the government as a PR manoeuvre to divert public attention.
American Scoundrel presents these tactics not as isolated instances of manipulation, extortion and deception, but as elements of a full-fledged political doctrine that has travelled from the McCarthy era to Trump’s White House. Rather than merely arranging the where, when, why and how of Cohn’s life, the book also attempts to answer a fundamental question: what, really, is Roy Cohn?
In the manner of the 2019 documentary Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn—directed by Ivy Meeropol, granddaughter of the Rosenbergs—the new biography delves deep into Cohn’s psyche. The authors trace an important early influence to his mother, Dora, the daughter of a self-made wealthy banker who chose Albert, a New York judge, as her husband. Described as “mean, vicious, ugly and foulmouthed”, Dora was so obsessed with appearances that she permanently damaged her son’s nose by insisting on surgery to correct a minor imperfection. The operation went terribly wrong.
Dora dominated Albert and the household to such an extent that even during the traditional Passover seder, when judges and lawyers would gather at her husband’s table, it was Dora who presided.
Guests noticed that something was amiss at one such dinner. The household staff appeared nervous, and a waiter’s hand shook as she poured the Passover wine. After the prayers, one guest asked the obvious question: why was this night feeling different?
“Dora,” write the authors, “interrupted to answer the question herself with the stunning revelation, ‘Because the Schvarze [a Yiddish slur for a Black person] is dead in the kitchen!’”
A maid had apparently died of heart failure, and Dora had ordered the servants to lay her beneath the kitchen table until the medical examiner arrived. Meanwhile, she had decided that the seder must proceed. “Tradition,” the authors write, “could not be interrupted.”
Forceful and layered, the book’s narrative benefits considerably from the authors’ position as both insiders and outsiders to the American establishment. Goldmark, who conducted much of the research and edited her husband’s draft, was a World Bank economist in Latin America and Asia. Bird, an alumnus of Kodaikanal International School in Tamil Nadu, is the son of a former US diplomat who served in Beirut, Cairo and Mumbai. As a journalist, he has long chronicled the American establishment, with his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 book, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, marking a career high.
It was while researching American Prometheus—which details how the McCarthy era’s anti-communist hysteria nearly destroyed Oppenheimer’s reputation as a scientist—that Bird first began to realise Cohn’s significance in America’s political evolution.
“Before Roy Cohn,” write the authors, “America had a bipartisan establishment that adjudicated the rough edges of the country’s raucous democracy. Cohn used his entire career to subvert the establishment, breaking all the rules and creating a divisive, highly partisan political culture.”
One widely circulated photograph of Cohn shows him, as a young man, leaning towards McCarthy in a Rasputin-like whisper during a trial.American Scoundrel seems to suggest that, even if both men may now belong to history, Cohn’s ghost may still be whispering. That day in the White House, when Trump pined for Cohn’s presence, he might well have heard that whisper.
AMERICAN SCOUNDREL: ROY COHN’S DARK JOURNEY FROM JOE MCCARTHY TO DONALD TRUMP
Authors: Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pages: 528; price: Rs702 (Kindle)
