Who Let Roy Cohn Off the Hook?

Roy Cohn was born in 1927, the only child of Albert Cohn, a Democratic district attorney (and later judge) aligned with FDR’s political machine, and Dora Marcus, a wealthy socialite whose family had made their money in banking. By all accounts, Cohn’s parents hated each other and often enlisted Roy in their various battles. But they both seemed to believe that their son was destined for great things. He sped his way through New York City’s most elite educational institutions (Horace Mann, Columbia College, Columbia Law School) and used his father’s connections to be named an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York in 1948. Bird deftly traces the key cases that made Cohn’s name as an anticommunist crusader, including the successful prosecutions of William Remington and the Rosenbergs. These successes attracted the attention of the greatest red-hunter of them all, Joseph McCarthy, and in January, 1953, Cohn began an eventful 19-month stint as the lead investigator for the Wisconsin senator’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

Cohn soon became McCarthy’s right-hand man, running investigations, leading the questioning of witnesses, serving as the senator’s liaison to other government branches, and—perhaps most importantly—directing the public relations operation that kept McCarthy and his subcommittee at the forefront of the national consciousness. It was a role that threw him into the spotlight, with journalists blurring the line between news and gossip as they tracked his every move. Much has been written on the irony of Cohn fueling the Lavender Scare, the Cold War-era persecution of homosexuals, at the same time he was having sex with men. The infamous Army-McCarthy Hearings, broadcast to a national TV audience in the spring of 1954, exposed McCarthy and Cohn as bullies and severely damaged their political reputations. Cohn resigned from McCarthy’s staff and returned to Manhattan, where he crafted a second act as a pugnacious, well-connected, and unscrupulous attorney. Those successes would ultimately lead him back to the world of politics, and he held significant sway as a conservative fixer in the 1970s and 80s.

Throughout Bird’s narrative we see the constant failure of institutional leaders to punish Cohn for his illegal and immoral activities. President Dwight Eisenhower allowed McCarthy and Cohn’s investigations of supposed communists to continue apace, fearful that the then-powerful McCarthy would fracture the Republican Party. When the Army-McCarthy Hearings revealed that Cohn had fabricated evidence against enemies in the Department of Defense, the Eisenhower Administration declined to pursue charges of perjury against him, again for fear of alienating the right wing of their coalition. When, in 1973, a suspicious fire on Cohn’s yacht scuttled the vessel and killed one crew member, no charges were filed, in spite of the local sheriff’s “strong suspicion that foul play was involved.” The IRS moved glacially in investigating Cohn’s lifelong tax evasion. The City of New York took no legal action against Cohn and his business partner Paul Dano for their corrupt management of parking lots and subway newsstands from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, quietly canceling the contracts instead of pursuing charges. The New York State Bar Association could have—and should have—sought to disbar Cohn far sooner than the early 1980s (Cohn ultimately lost his law license two months before his death from AIDS-related complications in August, 1986).