Roy Cohn

Cohn, four months before he died from complications brought on by AIDS.

Roy Marcus Cohn (February 20, 1927 – August 2, 1986) was an American lawyer who came to prominence during the investigations by Senator Joseph McCarthy into Communism in the government and especially during the Army-McCarthy Hearings. While widely unpopular during his lifetime, he nonetheless wielded tremendous political power at times. Cohn was a member of the Democratic Party but was widely considered a "Democrat In Name Only" (DINO), as he supported most of the Republican presidents of his time and Republicans in major seats across New York.

Early life

He was born in Manhattan, the only child of Albert Cohn, a New York judge who was influential in Democratic Party politics, and Dora Marcus Cohn. He lived with his parents until his mother's death in 1969, after which he lived in New York, the District of Columbia, and Greenwich, Connecticut.

Cohn graduated from Columbia Law School at the age of 20, and began working for the office of United States Attorney Irving Saypol in Manhattan, a position many have attributed to his politically connected father.

Anti-Communist investigations

As Saypol's assistant at the U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan, Cohn helped to win a number of high-profile anti-Communist cases. He was known for his zealous prosecution of William Remington (a former Commerce Department employee convicted of perjury relating to his membership in the Communist Party), for the prosecution of eleven Communist Party leaders for sedition under the Smith Act, and for his work in the Alger Hiss case. But Cohn was most famous for his prominent role in the 1951 espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Cohn's cross examination of Ethel's brother produced the testimony (later found to be perjured) that was mostly responsible for the Rosenbergs' conviction and execution.

Cohn took great pride in the Rosenberg case, and claimed to have played an even greater part than his public role: he said in his autobiography that his own influence had led to both Saypol and Judge Irving Kaufman (a family friend) being appointed to the case, and that Kaufman had imposed the death penalty on Cohn's personal advice.

The Rosenberg trial brought the 24-year-old Cohn to the attention of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who recommended him to McCarthy. He soon became McCarthy's chief counsel — chosen over Robert Kennedy — and gained power nearly equal to McCarthy's in the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, becoming known for his aggressive questioning of suspected Communists. After his appointment, Cohn continued to perform as if he were a prosecutor rather than grand jury. Cohn tended to be uninclined to hold the hearing in open forums. This mixed well with McCarthy's preference for holding "executive sessions" and "off-the-record" sessions far away from the Capitol in order to minimize public scrutiny and to question witnesses with relative impunity. Cohn, although sometimes thought to have been chosen in part to avoid accusations of an anti-semitic motivation for the investigations, was given free rein in pursuit of investigations. McCarthy would come to admit in regard to Cohn, however, that "putting a young man in charge of other men doesn't work out too well."

McCarthy arranged for Cohn's friend, G. David Schine, to be given leave from the Army to serve on the subcommittee; this fueled clashes with the Army, which later contributed to McCarthy's public discrediting. After McCarthy was censured in 1954, Cohn resigned and went into private practice.

When the NBC television network produced a movie in the early 1980s about McCarthy's career, Tailgunner Joe, Cohn responded by writing a paperback book criticizing the movie for factual errors and defending McCarthy's anti-Communist crusade.

Later career

After leaving McCarthy, Cohn built a 30-year career as a high-powered attorney in New York City. His clients included Donald Trump, Mafia figures Tony Salerno and John Gotti, Studio 54 owners Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, and the Archdiocese of New York. He was known for his active social life, charitable giving, and combative personality. He maintained close ties with conservative politics, serving as an informal advisor to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

Cohn was the grandnephew of Joshua Lionel Cowen, founder of the Lionel model train company. By 1959, Cowen and his son Lawrence had become involved in a family dispute over control of the company. Cohn and a group of investors stepped in and bought the majority of both of the Cowens' shares of stock, thus gaining control of the company. Under Cohn's leadership, Lionel was plagued by declining sales, quality control problems and huge financial losses. In 1963, he was forced to resign from the company.

Federal investigations in the 1970s and 1980s charged Cohn three times with professional misconduct, including perjury and witness tampering, and he was accused in New York of financial improprieties related to city contracts and private investments. He was never convicted. Eventually, the New York Bar association brought disbarment proceedings against Cohn on grounds of unethical and unprofessional conduct, including misappropriation of clients' funds, pressuring a client to amend his will, and lying on a bar application. He lost his license in 1986 during the last month of his life.

Private life and death

Rumors of Cohn's homosexuality began to spread throughout Washington shortly after he was appointed chief counsel to the Government Committee on Operations. When he brought on the wealthy and handsome Schine as chief consultant, it made for good gossip fodder. It became widely believed that Schine and Cohn had a sexual relationship, especially after their 1953 junket to Europe. Reporters watched as they alternated between burning suspect books in U.S. embassies, and publicly engaging in horseplay. Moreover, Cohn's conduct over Schine's drafting -- at one point vowing to "wreck" the U.S. Army for failing to give Schine a commission -- indicates a possible relationship.

Cohn's homosexuality was an open secret during most of his career. His public response to all questions on this subject was sometimes evasive and sometimes a flat denial; he encouraged rumors of a relationship with his longtime friend Barbara Walters, who publicly stated that she thought he was heterosexual. Though his closeted sexuality was far from unusual at the time, it was arguably in tension with his public life in right-wing politics. Cohn and McCarthy targeted many government officials and cultural figures not only for suspected Communist sympathies but for homosexual tendencies, sometimes using sexual secrets as a blackmail tool to gain informants. McCarthy may not have known Cohn was gay, but it may have been alluded to during the Army-McCarthy hearings by Army attorney Joseph Welch when Cohn produced a photo as evidence and Welch asked McCarthy if the photo came from "a pixie ... a close relative of a fairy."

In the 1970s, no longer a national figure, Cohn frequented gay bars semi-openly, but still denied that he was gay, and lent his support to anti-gay political campaigns. During debates over New York City's first gay rights law, he said homosexuals should not be allowed to be schoolteachers.

In 1984, he was diagnosed with AIDS, and attempted to keep his condition secret while receiving aggressive drug treatment. He insisted to his dying day that his disease was liver cancer. Cohn never spoke publicly about AIDS but, according to his friends, he claimed to have used his political influence to increase the government's investment in AIDS research.

He died on August 2, 1986, of complications from AIDS at the age of 59.

While most conservative political figures have preferred to distance themselves from the legacy of McCarthyism, some have defended McCarthy and Cohn's anti-Communist crusade, most notably conservative pundit Ann Coulter in her book Treason.

Fictional portrayals

A dramatic, controversial man in life, Cohn inspired many dramatic fictional portrayals after his death. Probably the most famous is his role in Tony Kushner's Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, in which the (fictionalized) Cohn is portrayed as an amoral, power-hungry hypocrite who vigorously denies his sexuality, while being haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg as he lay dying. In the 2003 HBO version of Kushner's play, Cohn is played by Al Pacino. Kusher would again write about Cohn in a one-act play, G. David Schine in Hell

Cohn has also been portrayed by James Woods in the 1992 biopic Citizen Cohn, and by Joe Pantoliano in Robert Kennedy and His Times.

Cohn is portrayed in an episode of The X-Files, in which an elderly former FBI agent (Darren McGavin), speaks to Agent Mulder about the early years of the McCarthy era and the beginning of the X-Files.

External links

• Find-A-Grave profile for Roy Cohn