Roy Cohn: The devil at the heart of the American dream

If he’d lived, Roy Cohn would’ve been 100 years old next year, but he’s still very much alive in the American psyche.

Cohn is the thin red line that winds through America for much of the last century – from the execution of convicted spies the Rosenbergs to the dramas of McCarthyism, from the hedonism of the ‘70s, Studio 54 and Reaganism to the rise of one of his most eager students, Donald Trump.

Kai Bird, co-author of the superb Robert Oppenheimer biography “American Prometheus,” turns his gaze on Oppenheimer’s polar opposite with his fascinating new book, cowritten with Susan Goldmark, “American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy To Donald Trump.”

Cohn’s spectre has made a bit of a posthumous comeback in recent years, as his clear influence on Trump’s “never give in” style has become apparent, and their relationship was even given the big-budget Hollywood biopic treatment in the Oscar-nominated The Apprentice.

Roy Cohn was an awkward Jewish kid with an overbearing mother who worked his way into the top corridors of power with his sheer unrelenting drive to win at any cost. As a young attorney, he was just 23 years old when he played a pivotal role in the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted and executed in the electric chair in 1953 for passing secrets to the Soviet Union. Cohn pushed hard for the still-shocking execution of the couple – the guilt of Ethel, a 37-year-old mother of two, remains particularly disputed decades later.

“I would have fucking pulled the switch if they’d have let me,” Cohn said years later.

The Rosenberg trial set the pace for Cohn’s career, as he moved from more liberal leanings to a conservative, pugnacious worldview, teaming up with Senator Joseph McCarthy as his chief counsel and horse whisperer during anti-communist witchhunts in the ‘50s, still just in his 20s as he launched a vendetta against anyone who was suspected of being communist, subversive, or gay.

The capping irony is that Cohn himself was gay, but deeply denied it despite his increasingly wild sex life into the ‘60s and ‘70s, and his subsequent death from AIDS at just 59 in 1986.

“American Scoundrel” shows us the making of an American monster, all swagger and bravado and zero morality. Through the darkest days of the 20th century, Cohn is there, hustling in the ears of politicians and crooks, refusing to give an inch or show compassion to anything or anyone. After McCarthyism, which stained him for the rest of his life, Cohn turned into a powerful lawyer for the mob and a variety of dubious characters, raking in the bucks and basking in his reputation as a man not to be crossed.

Bird and Goldmark show us how Cohn evolved, raised by a smothering mother whose own cousin called her “the nastiest person she ever met,” wheeling and dealing in business deals while still a teenager. Cohn was an ugly man made uglier by a botched surgery as a child to remove a small bump on his nose – his mother insisted he should be perfect – that left a grotesque red scar running down it for the rest of his life.

As he aged, Cohn took on a reptilian sheen, scorching himself with constant suntanning, his eyes becoming more hooded and piercing, the scars on his nose and from clumsy facelifts turning his visage into something Mephistophelean. His soul seemed to be coming out of his pores.

When he met a young Trump in the 1980s, who was seeking advice over a lawsuit accusing his housing properties of discriminating against Black renters, Cohn told him, “Tell them to go to hell and fight the thing in court.” And that advice has echoed through America ever since.

One passage from “American Scoundrel” feels like it sums up the Cohn worldview – and the style of so many of his acolytes:

Roy looked out the window and angrily asked, “What time is it?”

Bob was frightened by Roy’s demeanor, but he replied, “Well, it’s nighttime, it’s dark.”

“No,” Roy said.

“I tell you it’s daytime, and I’ll prove to you it’s daytime. Now, go out and figure out how I did it.”

Roy Cohn has been dead for 40 years, but he’s still with us. As Bird and Goldmark point out in a new essay for The New York Times just this week, the sneering figure of Stephen Miller, Trump’s new chief of staff, bears a strong resemblance to Cohn in nearly every way.

“More closely than anyone else in Mr. Trump’s administration, he follows Mr. Cohn’s playbook of aggressive, unapologetic defiance,” they wrote.

Reading a biography about a damnable villain is always a strange experience. Bird does attempt to humanise Cohn a little bit – he was apparently very loyal to his friends, including a peculiar “beard” relationship with TV’s Barbara Walters – but ultimately, he was a man who fought the world day after day. I can’t say it’s a “fun” book, but it’s key to understanding the way America has evolved in the past 80 years, briskly told and much of it in Cohn’s own words – he was never shy of seeking publicity in interviews.

In the end, Cohn was disbarred for misconduct and only weeks later died a lonesome, painful death from AIDS, denying to the public he was gay or that he even had AIDS (he claimed it was liver cancer) until the end. Never apologise.

In Bird’s book, it’s reported that a journalist saw Trump at Cohn’s funeral, weeping.

I have some mild hope that last week’s midterms show a convulsive rejection in America of the Roy Cohns of the world, of the aversions to any kind of inner reflection, regret or apology.

But I’m also keenly aware that “American Scoundrel” shows us such tendencies have been part of the country for a very long time – long before Cohn’s rise and fall, of course. He simply magnified them for a new mass-media world.

Roy Cohn’s dark legacy haunts America to this day. And ghosts can be very, very hard to get rid of.