It should be really no shock to see how amoral the odious lawyer and manipulator extraordinaire Roy Cohn was, but after watching Matt Tyrnauer’s impressive piece of investigation, we realise that most of us never knew the half of it.
His time as the lackey and confidente of Senator Joseph McCarthy the self appointed Grand Inquisitor in 1950 determined to rid the US of Communist sympathies and homosexuals is well documented, although has ever really calculated the exact number of human lives they ruined.
When Cohn came to work for McCarthy he already had blood on his hand as the Prosecutor of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg charged with treason and conniving with the Judge to get them the death penalty, a decision that is still deemed controversial today.
Not content with using his ruthless tactics to denounce Communists in the Administration and high profile parts of society like Hollywood, McCarthy was persuaded to open Hearings into the Armed Services which he publicly declared were a hotbed of Communist sympathisers. Tyrnauer however points out that the real motivation was that the Army leadership had refused Cohn’s entreaties to get a Commission for his very close friend G. David Schine, so he had pushed McCarthy to get
some sort of revenge. Whether Schine was in a relationship with Cohn is never proved, but it is clear from the archival footage, that Cohn was very infatuated with this handsome rugged men.
Those Hearings marked the beginning of the end for McCarthy when some legistaliars had finally had enough of his obscene tactics and it was Senator Joseph Welch who silenced him in front of the TV cameras by demanding “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”
Soon after Cohn left McCarthy;s service insisting that it was a move he made on his own accord, and it became the beginning of the next part of his career when he befriended the rich and powerful. They loved Cohn’s attitude of winning at all costs, regardless of the law. Soon he represented the heads of all the Mafia families as they came to realise that Cohn was the only one who could wriggle them out of any problems, including murder charges.
All of this so far seems just like something that is way back in our almost forgotten history and like one of those gangster movies that Hollywood used to churn out. However, very scarily it suddenly gets frighteningly true.
Cohn met a young Donald Trump and very quickly the two became fast friends. Trump admired the way that Cohn cut all corners and always got exactly what he wanted no matter now seemingly impossible it may have been.
Cohn mentored the budding property developer and taught him how to conduct his business : how to lie through his teeth, never admit to anything, and always be able to detract attention away from any uncomfortable issue. It was Cohn that finally got the go ahead for Trump Tower and for the next few years the two men were inseparable. That is until Cohn had AIDS (which he denied to his dying day) and Trump was one of the first to desert him
In between that when the NY Bar finally caught up with some of Cohn’s nefarious actions and they successfully sort to dis-bar him. Trump one was of the many celebrities that rushed to his defence with ridiculously glowing references, Barbara Waters was another one.
Cohn’s endless stream of despicable actions and crimes can fill text books, but there are two significant parts of his live that surface in this documentary which made a particular lasting impression
First there his sexuality which he sated with a daily fix of a whole retinue of young men which was he kept as private as possible. It was however his strident effort to out gay men and women in The Lavender Scare in the 1950’s in a manner that would totally ruin their lives, that is totally unforgivable. Plus the fact that if he had be publicly open about his diagnosis of AIDS it would have a major impact towards distimagtisig the disease at this crucial time.
More importantly though is the fact that the movie reminds us that the endless criminal and immoral outrageous behaviour that is perpetrated by the uncontrollable despot at the White House is sadly not as we wanted to believe a new and very temporary dark period in our culture. Cohn and his ilk were responsible for so much of the creation of what was to come. The only difference being that Cohn was a skilled and clever operator, and the man he mentored lacks his brains and intellect and fails to see beyond his own vanity and thin skin.
Labels: 2019, documentary
