Conservative Babylon

Claims to fame: Lawyer, prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; Chief Counsel for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Communist witch hunts; member, John Birch Society; queer-baiter; closet homosexual; liar; tax cheat; evil incarnate

Moral apex: The most ruthless member of the McCarthy cabal, Cohn — who swore he wasn’t gay, but just liked sex with men — destroyed the lives of many other men who were (or might have been) gay.

Cohn was most famous for his role in the 1951 espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Cohn’s direct examination of Ethel’s brother David Greenglass produced the testimony (in which the brother later claimed he perjured himself) that was mostly responsible for the Rosenbergs’ conviction and execution.

Cohn took great pride in the Rosenberg verdict, 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 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover, who recommended him to McCarthy. McCarthy hired Cohn as his chief counsel, choosing him over Robert Kennedy, reportedly in part to avoid accusations of an anti-Semitic motivation for the investigations. Cohn assisted McCarthy’s work for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, becoming known for his aggressive questioning of suspected Communists. Cohn tended to be disinclined to hold the hearings in open forums. This mixed well with McCarthy’s preference for holding “executive sessions” and “off-the-record” sessions away from the Capitol in order to minimize public scrutiny and to question witnesses with relative impunity. Cohn was given free rein in pursuit of many investigations, with McCarthy joining in only for the more publicized sessions.

— Wikipedia

Of course, suspected Communists were not the only target of the McCarthy hearings.

A brief investigation of homosexuals as security risks also grew out of previous inquiries. In 1950, Senator McCarthy denounced “those Communists and queers who have sold 400 million Asiatic people into atheistic slavery and have American people in a hypnotic trance, headed blindly toward the same precipice.” He often laced his speeches with references to “powder puff diplomacy,” and accused his opponents of “softness” toward communism. … The subcommittee had earlier responded to Senator McCarthy’s complaint that the State Department had reinstated homosexuals suspended for moral turpitude with an investigation in 1950 that produced a report on the Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government. The report had concluded that homosexuals’ vulnerability to blackmail made them security risks and therefore “not suitable for Government positions.”

— Introduction (2003) to Executive Sessions Of The Senate Permanent Subcommittee On Investigations Of The Committee On Government Operations, Volume 1 (1953)
United States Senate

Homosexuals were expecially easy targets for McCarthy — and for his zealous young counsel. … Cohn maintained public scorn for homosexuals to the end of his life, going out of his way to lobby against legislation on their behalf, and, according to Zion, once turning away a delegation that hoped he would agree to defend a public school teacher fired because of his sexual orientation. “I believe,” Cohn said, “that homosexual teachers are a grave threat to our children.”

— Geoffrey C. Ward
American Heritage

If it is unclear whether or not McCarthy was gay, there is no doubt about Roy Marcus Cohn (1927-86), who became the chief counsel to McCarthy’s subcommittee in 1953 at the age of twenty-six. …

In 1953, Cohn prevailed over Robert F. Kennedy to become the McCarthy investigatory committee’s chief counsel. Cohn brought along his friend and night-clubbing companion, G. David Schine, as “Chief Consultant” to the committee. Within a few months, the two young men were running the show. …

In April 1953, Cohn and Schine set off for Europe, ostensibly to investigate U.S.-run libraries to make sure that no left-wing literature was hiding out on their shelves. The trip was a fiasco that turned up nothing, infuriated virtually every American embassy in Western Europe, and turned the two investigators into laughing-stocks. …

Nicholas von Hoffman, one of Cohn’s biographers, reports that people who saw Cohen and Schine close up doubted that they were lovers or that Schine was gay. …

Cohn, in private conversation with friends, denied any intimate involvement with Schine. In any event, Cohn was deep in the closet. He was dating women and spending more time at the Stork Club than in Washington’s gay bars. For years, he would deny that he was gay, telling journalist Ken Auletta in an interview in the 1970s, “Anyone who knows me and knows anything about the way I function … would have an awfully hard time reconciling, ah, ah, reconciling, that with ah, ah, any kind of homosexuality. Every facet of my personality, of my, ah, aggressiveness, of my toughness, of everything along those lines, is just totally, I suppose, incompatible, with anything like that.” As Hoffman notes, Cohn’s “embarrassed, thick-tongued denial of his sexuality” took place at a time when even high-school students had come to realize that most gay men were anything but “limp-wristed, lavender lads.” Cohn’s view of what constituted a gay man remained mired in stereotypical notions of the fifties. …

During Cohn’s eighteen-month period of service to Senator McCarthy, the young counsel apparently had no compunction about using allegations of other people’s homosexuality to destroy them. Whether this was an effort to hide his own homosexuality through cruelty to others, or an expression of gay self-hatred, or his own defiant pride in his own toughness and aggressiveness, or some combination of all three, is anyone’s guess. …

Then there was the case of Senator Lester Hunt, a Wyoming Democrat. An opponent of McCarthy, Hunt was up for reelection the following November to a Senate that was split down the middle between Democrats and Republicans. Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, a friend and political ally of Cohn, had a talk with Hunt. Unless Hunt withdrew from the race for reelection in November, Bridges reportedly told him, everyone in Wyoming would find out that Hunt’s son had been arrested the previous October for soliciting a D.C. plainclothes policeman for “lewd and immoral purposes.” Hunt withdrew from the race. Eleven days later, he shot himself to death in his Senate office. …

But Cohn and McCarthy soon received their comeuppance. …

— Neil Miller
Out of the Past:
Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present

Schine, McCarthy, and Cohn

When Schine was drafted into the army in 1953, Cohn made repeated and extensive efforts to procure special treatment for Schine. He contacted military officials from the Secretary of the Army down to Schine’s company commander, and demanded that Schine be given light duties, extra leave and not be assigned overseas. At one point, Cohn is reported to have threatened to “wreck the Army” if his demands were not met. This conflict led to the Army-McCarthy Hearings of 1954, in which the Army charged Cohn and McCarthy with using improper pressure on Schine’s behalf, while McCarthy and Cohn counter-charged that the Army was holding Schine “hostage” in an attempt to squelch McCarthy’s investigations into Communists in the Army. During the hearings, a photograph of Schine was introduced, and Joseph N. Welch accused Cohn of doctoring the image to show Schine alone with Army Secretary Robert Stevens. Although the findings of the hearings blamed Cohn rather than McCarthy, they are widely considered an important element of McCarthy’s disgrace. After the Army-McCarthy Hearings, Cohn resigned from McCarthy’s staff and went into private practice.

— Wikipedia

Was it Cohn’s loyalty to Schine that caused him to overreach? Or was it love? Infatuation? Or just blind rage and determination to assert his power over the U.S. Army? Roy Cohn was a complicated man. …

[Sen. John McClellan's] attempt to pin down [Cohn's sexual orientation] proved unsuccessful, but the subject of Cohn’s sexual proclivities soon emerged in another way that was far more damaging. …

In the end, the Republican and Democratic committee members offered differing reports on the hearings. But McCarthy and Cohn had seemed embattled throughout and thoroughly outclassed… For the first time, senators had openly denounced McCarthy. McCarthy still retained intact at least some of his ability to inspire fear in his enemies, but Cohn had clearly outlived his usefulness. Part of his undoing had been his bullying tactics toward the army, but more than that, he had been an easy target for the kind of gay-baiting he himself practiced. He resigned his subcommittee post and returned to New York to practice law.

— Neil Miller
Out of the Past:
Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present

After leaving McCarthy, Cohn had a 30-year career as an attorney in New York City. His clients included Donald Trump, Mafia figures Tony Salerno, Carmine Galante and John Gotti, Studio 54 owners Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, and the New York Yankees baseball club. He was known for his active social life, charitable giving, and combative personality. In the early 1960s he became a member of the John Birch Society and a principal figure in the Western Goals Foundation. He maintained close ties in conservative political circles, serving as an informal advisor to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

— Wikipedia

Defending [Cohn] against charges that included having demanded a loan of one hundred thousand dollars from a client in a divorce case, then refusing to pay her back, his partner was reduced to pleading that Cohn was “a man who loves people, loves animals. He once jumped into a river to save a dog in trouble.” It didn’t work. In the spring of 1986, with only weeks to live, he was disbarred.

— Geoffrey C. Ward
American Heritage

Divine justice: He died in 1986 at age 59, of the disease he’d kept secret for two years: AIDS. He maintained to his dying day that he had only liver cancer, and even a spokesperson for the NIH tried to sidestep the issue, saying “the immediate cause of death was ‘cardio-pulmonary arrest.’ She said the death certificate also listed two secondary causes of death: ‘dementia’ and ‘underlying HTLV-3 infections.” Most scientists believe the HTLV-3 virus is the cause of AIDS.” — “Roy Cohn, Aide to McCarthy and Fiery Lawyer, Dies at 59,” New York Times, August 3, 1986

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 Cohn is portrayed as a self-hating, power-hungry hypocrite who is haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg as he lies dying of AIDS. In the 2003 HBO version of Kushner’s play, Cohn was played by Al Pacino.

Cohn is also a character in Kushner’s one-act play, G. David Schine in Hell. This title may have been inspired by the National Lampoon comic strip Roy Cohn in Hell, published in that magazine right after Cohn’s death.

— Wikipedia

Memorable quote:

“Truth is hardly ever an absolute — there are so many elements.”

— Roy Cohn

Memorable observations:

“Roy was not gay,” [Roger Stone] told me. “He was a man who liked having sex with men. Gays were weak, effeminate. He always seemed to have these young blond boys around. It just wasn’t discussed. He was interested in power and access. He told me his absolute goal was to die completely broke and owing millions to the I.R.S. He succeeded in that.”

— Jeffrey Toobin
The Dirty Trickster
The New Yorker, June 2, 2008

[H]e never lost his power to bring out the worst in everyone. About the time of Cohn’s last hospitalization, I happened to attend a gathering of New York writers, several of whom were publicly identified with the cause of more enlightened treatment for AIDS victims. Party chatter among writers being no more elevated than it is among, say, construction workers, the causes of Cohn’s condition were eagerly discussed.

“I never thought I’d be saying this about anyone,” said one best-selling novelist, well known for her generous support of humanitarian causes, “but I’m glad he’s got AIDS. He deserves it.”

“Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy,” agreed her no less celebrated, no less normally warm-hearted friend.

Everybody laughed.

That kind of merciless venom would not have surprised its target. Roy Cohn seems to have relished the special loathing his enemies reserved for him, and as these two disappointing books imply, it seems more than likely that on some level he shared fully in it.

— Geoffrey C. Ward
American Heritage

Suggested Torah reading for Mr. Cohn:

The LORD shall smite thee with madness, and blindness, and astonishment of heart:

And thou shalt grope at noonday, as the blind gropeth in darkness, and thou shalt not prosper in thy ways: and thou shalt be only oppressed and spoiled evermore, and no man shall save thee.

— Deuteronomy 28:28-29

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