Roy Cohn: An Anti-Communist Scoundrel Who Mentored Trump

‘American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump’By Kai Bird and Susan GoldmarkScribner, 528 pagesHistorians hostile to biography complain it places far too much importance on the individual. Biographers, however, are intrigued by far more than historical significance as they attempt to portray what is distinctive about their subjects, and what it is that makes them intrinsically significant. Even if, historically, a subject may be given too much weight, a biographer may well take into account, as in Roy Cohn’s case, his alarming presence to his contemporaries.New Republic editor, Martin Peretz, interviewed for my biography of Lillian Hellman, told me about calling her and mentioning he had talked with Roy Cohn. Just the name was enough to inflame her and cause the usually unflappable Peretz to come undone. She was outraged that he would even talk to Cohn. I wasn’t sure who was the more ferocious party: Cohn or Hellman.Cohn has ascended in importance now that Donald Trump has been quoted asking “Where is My Roy Cohn?” Counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy, persecutor of the Rosenbergs and other Communists accused of spying, Cohn, as Mr. Bird and Ms. Goldmark portray him, is just as relentless and prevaricating as his detractors have said he was. But then how to make a life worth writing about if it is just one evil act after another? Sin, as H. L. Mencken suggests in one of the book’s epigraphs, is what prevents the world from becoming dull.In Cohn’s case, he remains perpetually of interest because of his proximity to power — not only to Richard Nixon and Donald Trump but to mafia figures and, really, anyone of prominence who might have needed a fixer. You can bring the thuggish Roy Cohn on stage at several pivotal moments in American history, as Tony Kushner does in his play, “Angels in America.”Although we know much more about Cohn’s childhood than about George Washington’s, the result seems to be the same in terms of character formation: They are sui generis. The modern wish to explain individuals in terms of their childhoods simply doesn’t work, as Cohn himself said: He had no childhood, and he liked it that way. What mattered to Washington, always, as to Cohn, was to be around powerful people.The law interested Cohn at an early age but law school bored him. He was canny, putting his photographic memory to good use and shrewdly keeping FBI informants such as the former Communist Elizabeth Bentley in line during the campaign to expose Soviet espionage.The authors largely lets Cohn tell his story through succinct anecdotes that the biographer then enfolds in a narrative as persistent as his subject who learned from prosecutors like Irving Saypol putting the case against the Rosenbergs. Cohn excelled in cross examination, which would become of maximum value to Senator McCarthy during congressional hearings.It troubles Mr. Bird and Ms. Goldmark that Cohn seemed to understand that some of the Communists or Communist sympathizers were essentially harmless, if unwilling to confess that they had been duped by the Communist Party. Why prosecute such people, the biographers ask? I do not expect an answer from them — or from Cohn, were he still alive. Cohn never seems to have explained himself in this regard.But in this instance, Cohn’s ferocity may have had a point beyond advancing his own ambitions. If those prosecuted are not willing to tell the truth, and in some cases expose others who were likewise duped, where does that leave society at large? Cohn had no noble cause in mind by prosecuting those involved in Communist activities, but a man of his unforgiving temperament might well have scorned those who hid behind their misguided, if noble intentions.Mr. Bird and Ms. Goldmark acknowledge that the “evidence against the Rosenbergs was credible” in so far as they were engaging in a conspiracy to spy against the United States. In the end, Cohn had nothing to do with their fate. Judge Irving Kaufman did not consult the prosecutors when he decided to sentence the couple to the electric chair for aiding the Soviet Union in obtaining the secret of the atomic bomb.Kaufman’s verdict “certainly reflected the ideological tenor of the times,” the authors observe: “But none of what he said was true.” The Rosenbergs had not conveyed significant information to the Soviet Union. Not that it mattered to Roy Cohn, who in Mr. Bird and Ms. Goldmark’s book keeps his credentials as a scoundrel intact.Mr. Rollyson is the author of ‘American Biography.‘

Roy Cohn: An Anti-Communist Scoundrel Who Mentored Trump

Roy Cohn: An Anti-Communist Scoundrel Who Mentored Trump

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