Where’s My Roy Cohn?
Donald Trump famously said he wanted someone like Roy Cohn as his attorney general. “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” shows the world what he meant: a crook.
The documentary tells the story of Cohn, his life and career, and it’s a grim saga. He was not moral, or nice, or principled. He had no limits, no depths he wouldn’t sink to. And more than 30 years after his death, he seems to have come back into style, in that some of the political techniques that he honed over a long career have become standard practice for his former protege, who is now the president of the United States.
But calling Cohn a mere “crook” isn’t enough. He earned the title, to be sure, but he was more special than that, a crook of genius and audacity, and of genuine legal talent. His story is fascinating, and the movie — I hasten to add this, lest people avoid it on this basis —is not about Trump, except to the extent that their lives overlapped socially and legally.
Cohn was born in the Bronx in 1927 and was so smart that he’d completed college and Columbia Law School by the time he was 20. At 24, he became one of the prosecutors in the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and, when they were found guilty, pushed for their execution. This led to his being chosen as legal counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who was engaged in a series of anticommunist witch hunts in the early 1950s.
It’s an open question whether Cohn genuinely believed there was a communist threat or merely used the threat as an avenue to power. In any case, he certainly did the latter, and the movie contains footage of Cohn working hard to amplify a newsreel audience’s fear.
The curious thing about Cohn is that, despite McCarthy being censured and going down in historical ignominy, Cohn walked away from the McCarthy period with, if not a good reputation, one that was functionally operative. In the 1970s and ’80s, he was easily the most famous lawyer in New York City and, as a consequence, he became something of a public character. If you lived in New York at the time, you would often see him in the newspaper or hear him on talk shows. He was a flashy, aggressive guy, the kind of character that New Yorkers tend to like.
What’s surprising to realize now is that, even as he was acting the pugnacious sage on radio and TV shows, he was a mob lawyer. He defended Mafia bosses. Basically, he represented whoever was obviously guilty and willing to pay him. He was attracted to power. He identified with the lawless. And his method of defense was to go on offense, immediately, and make wild accusations against the prosecutors.
His relationship with Trump began when he defended Trump and his father for violation of the Fair Housing Act. The government demonstrated widespread, systematic discrimination against African Americans in the Trump organization’s renting of units. The Trumps were about to throw in the towel and take their punishment, when they hired Cohn, who went on the attack, filing an immediate countersuit. Ultimately, the Trumps settled out of court without having to make an admission of guilt.
Recognizing a kindred spirit in Trump, Cohn taught the young real estate mogul to never admit guilt, and how when caught in a lie, to replace it with another lie. Cohn also showed that it was possible to keep changing your story as long as you never admit that you changed your story.
The documentary shows that the one story Cohn never changed concerned his sexuality. He pretended to be straight until his death from AIDS complications in 1986.
Cohn was a strange mix of selfaggrandizing and selfloathing, or maybe that’s a familiar mix. In any case, he emerges from the film partly sympathetic, if only because he seemed so miserable all his life, but mainly as the prime example of what Shakespeare meant when he said, “The evil that men do lives after them.”