Roy Cohn (July/August 1988 | Volume: 39, Issue: 5)

Roy Cohn

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Authors: Geoffrey C. Ward

Historic Era: Era 9: Postwar United States (1945 to early 1970s)

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July/August 1988 | Volume 39, Issue 5

Joseph McCarthy’s fall from favor after the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings was precipitous enough to satisfy all but his most unforgiving victims. Censured by his colleagues in the Senate, snubbed by the White House, ignored even by the newsmen who had once fought to be first to carry his press releases, he grew convinced that he was being hounded by triumphant Communists who had taken over the telephone company, and, when the tumblers of brandy and vodka he drank in relentless, suicidal succession began to produce delirium tremens, he screamed in fear of the writhing serpents he was sure surrounded him. “No matter where I go,” he sobbed to a friend toward the end, “they look on me with contempt. I can’t take it anymore…They’re murdering me.”

When McCarthy finally, mercifully, died in May of 1957, not yet 50, Roy Cohn, the young investigator whose reckless arrogance had done more than anything else to start McCarthy on his downward slide, was among the pallbearers. Cohn had been revealed before the television camera as surly, irresponsible, and untrustworthy, and he had finally been forced to resign his post. Unlike McCarthy, he had seemed to thrive on all the exposure, and was already using his notoriety to build what turned out to be a thirty-year career as one of New York’s pre-eminent political fixers. Part of his “mystique,” he once said proudly, “depended on people thinking that I was getting away with every kind of shady deal.”

Because effective fixers do their work behind closed doors, on untapped telephones, and are careful always to cover their tracks and commit as little as possible to paper, efforts to chronicle their careers rarely satisfy. Two new books on Cohn further prove that rule. The core of The Autobiography of Roy Cohn is Cohn’s own sketchy, self-serving version of his life, left unfinished at his death, then edited by Sidney Zion. Since it was in Cohn’s interest always to seem more powerful than he really was, it is impossible to know which of his gaudy tales to believe about judges bought and sold, politicians made or ruined, and the base intentions that he claimed motivated all those who dared cross him, from Robert Kennedy to George Bush. A self-styled “flaming civil libertarian,” Zion has padded out this book with a number of stories intended, I think, to demonstrate his own generosity of spirit in having had Cohn for a buddy in the face of outraged friends.

 

Nicholas von Hoffman’s Citizen Cohn is better, an attempt at a full life, but undercut by the inclusion of too many undigested passages from old newspaper and magazine articles, by the fact that a substantial number of the “several score” interviewees upon whom the author depends for his fresh material apparently preferred not to be identified, and by the author’s own unfortunate fascination with the clinical details of the life Cohn led as a clandestine, but desperately promiscuous homosexual amid