Toward the end of his biography of Roy Cohn, written with his wife, Susan Goldmark, Kai Bird quotes the editor and publisher Jason Epstein: “In a way, he’s not real, he has no substance.” On the other hand, a note to the list of characters for Tony Kushner’s landmark drama Angels in America (1991), written in the immediate aftermath of Cohn’s death, reads: “The character Roy M. Cohn is based on the late Roy M. Cohn (1927–1986), who was all too real.” At once not quite real and all too real, Cohn has the uncanny presence of a ghoul or a fiend. He is a creature from the depths of the American political imagination, too pure in his utter malignity to be entirely credible, too potent in his continuing consequence to be safely interred in the past.
Just after the opening credits of the 1992 film Citizen Cohn, based on Nicholas von Hoffman’s biography of the same name, a figure whose face we do not see is gasping for breath on a hospital bed. The nurse asks, “Who is this guy? The White House called again last night.” A young doctor chips in, “The president wanted to know what they can do for him.” The cynical senior doctor responds, “Wanted to make sure he was dead.” James Woods’s cadaverous Cohn springs up, whips off his oxygen mask, and announces, “Fuck you!”
In both Citizen Cohn and Angels in America, while he is slowly dying from AIDS-related conditions, he is haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, the alleged Soviet spy he sent to the electric chair in 1953. Yet Cohn himself is the revenant who cannot be exorcised. Kushner has him tell her, “I’m immortal, Ethel. I have forced my way into history. I ain’t never gonna die.” Which, so far, has turned out to be true on both counts—from beyond the grave, Cohn has forced himself into American history. Kushner gives us Cohn as a kind of anti-Christ, his drawn-out, agonizing death a physical and mental crucifixion. Cohn rose from the dead, resurrected not only in Angels in America, Citizen Cohn, The Simpsons (where he recurred frequently as the Blue-Haired Lawyer), and Jeremy Strong’s rivetingly reptilian embodiment in the 2024 movie The Apprentice,* but as the evil spirit that possesses Donald Trump.
In 2017 Trump famously asked, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” The answer stares at him from the mirror: he is his own Roy Cohn. Though the influence of his lawyer and fixer on the young Trump is common knowledge, not the least of the virtues of Bird’s punchy, racy, and appropriately nauseating new biography is the renewed force it gives to this cliché. There is something eerie about the thoroughness of Trump’s mimicry of Cohn’s way of dealing with the world: lie relentlessly, refuse to pay small bills, respond to all criticism with smears and threats, claim all defeats as triumphs, sue everybody all the time, weaponize the law and, when you can, the entire justice system, learn from the Mafia, use the phone to avoid leaving a paper trail, always present your highly privileged self as a victim of the elites, divide the world into allies to be used and enemies to be abused, into the winners who must be flattered and the losers who are there to be exploited in every imaginable way.
Trump’s language is Cohn’s language (always preface a big lie with “if you wanna know the truth”) and so is his whole style of public speaking—Cohn taught him to ad lib everything. Above all, Trump learned one very big thing from Cohn: that the veneer of morality in the American upper class is very thin. Cohn proved conclusively that there is no limit to its tolerance for corruption. Trump got that message—and so did Jeffrey Epstein.
One of the reasons Cohn is so fascinating for writers is that he can be envisaged as both a historical figure and a postmodern figment. Kushner makes him an unknowing disciple of Michel Foucault, embracing the distinction between a set of actions (men having sex with men) and a way of life (being a gay man). Kushner’s Cohn explains:
Like all labels they tell you one thing and one thing only: where does an individual so identified fit in the food chain, in the pecking order? Not ideology, or sexual taste, but something much simpler: clout. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will pick up the phone when I call, who owes me favors…. Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout. Does this sound like me, Henry?… I have sex with men. But unlike nearly every other man of whom this is true, I bring the guy I’m screwing to the White House and President Reagan smiles at us and shakes his hand. Because what I am is defined entirely by who I am. Roy Cohn is not a homosexual. Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man, Henry, who fucks around with guys.
Gabriel Sherman, who wrote the screenplay for The Apprentice, makes Cohn a full-on deconstructionist who tells the young Trump that “there is no right and wrong. There is no morality. There is no Truth with a capital T. It’s a construct. It’s a fiction. It’s manmade…. You create your own reality.” And, one might add, your own unreality. More than anything else, Cohn was a swindler, and like all good con men he knew how to disappear from the domain of hard facts. Bird writes that “he left behind no private papers, not even an archive of his legal career. He had destroyed just about everything.”
From the beginning of his public career, the malleability of truth was Cohn’s weapon of choice. Words, memories, statements had no meaning in themselves. They were traps in which to catch his prey. As a prosecutor at the Justice Department during the McCarthy era, when he made his name, he often relied on a favorite device: charging suspects with perjury if he could prove nothing else.
One of his early victims in the anti-Communist witch hunt was William Remington, an economist with the Office of Price Administration and the War Production Board. When Cohn’s charge that Remington had committed perjury by denying membership in the Communist Party was thrown out on appeal, Cohn then charged him with lying when he denied knowing of the existence of a branch of the Young Communist League at Dartmouth College—an absurd basis for a criminal indictment. Yet this time Remington was convicted, and sentenced to three years in prison.
Cohn’s whole reputation as a hot-shot prosecutor of traitors—which, in 1953, won him the position of chief counsel to Joe McCarthy’s Senate Investigating Committee—was based on a demand for absolute truthfulness in the legal process, a concept for which he had an equally absolute contempt. In 1952, while Cohn was prosecuting the China expert Owen Lattimore, again for perjury, the FBI agent assigned to the investigation complained of Cohn himself that “he just could not be trusted. In addition, he is a pathological liar.”
For Cohn, textual records were useful fictions. His career as a counterfeiter reached its climax in 1975, when he visited his old friend and client, the bootlegger turned bourbon mogul Lew Rosenstiel, in Mount Sinai hospital in Miami Beach. He brought with him a draft codicil to Rosenstiel’s will, giving control of his $75 million estate to himself and two of his current clients, Rosenstiel’s granddaughter and her husband. Rosenstiel was, as Bird describes him, “in a vegetative state and dying.” But Cohn returned the following morning,
grabbed his hand with the pen, and said to him, “We will help you, Lew, to sign.” The resulting signature was illegible. A handwriting expert later testified that the so-called signature consisted of a number of squiggly lines which in no way resembled any letters of the alphabet.
Bird reproduces an image of it. If Cohn himself could be represented by a cipher, this would be it: a sign in which nothing is legible except the brazenness of his duplicity.
Just as Cohn defied the distinctions between reality and unreality and between life and death, he also broke down the divisions between fame and infamy. He grasped with remarkable clarity the truth that American celebrity has no moral content. When Trump claimed in the 2005 pussygate tapes that “when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything,” he was merely stating the facts as Cohn had shown them to be. Cohn made himself, first and foremost, a star. After that, none of his crimes ever really mattered, except in the sense that notoriety was even more valuable than adulation.
Cohn grew up with the assumption that America was a country of men, not of laws, in which it was vital to make oneself known to the right people. His mother’s very wealthy parents (their fortune was founded on the provision of banking services to Jewish immigrants) had a hard time making a marriage for her because she was, in the words of her nephew James Marcus, “mean, vicious, ugly, and foul-mouthed.” According to Marcus, “In desperation and through political connections, they offered a judgeship to any attorney who would take Dora off their hands.” Albert Cohn took the offer. He got, in return, a very unhappy marriage but also an ascent to the New York Supreme Court and subsequently to the appellate court.
Judgeships could be bought and so, it followed, could judges. Cohn was formed in a world where the Democratic Party machine effectively decided who sat on the bench, creating a network of obligation and intimidation—favors were returned, or else. In human relations, Cohn seems to have cared about only two things: loyalty and fear.
These are, not coincidentally, the virtues of the Mafia. One of Cohn’s classmates at Horace Mann prep school, Gene Pope, was the son of the construction and media mogul Generoso Pope, who in turn was closely connected to the mob boss Frank Costello (born Francesco Castiglia). Costello was described by The New York Times in 1949 as the “real boss of the Democratic machine in New York.” As a teenager Cohn ingratiated himself with Generoso Pope. Bird quotes Cohn as saying that “Gene’s father had more to do with my incipient political career than any other single person.”
In this nexus of judges, politicians, moguls, and mafiosi, reputation was an internal matter. Those who were connected had to be immediately recognized by one another. Cohn’s innovation was to keep this intense personal knowledge but add the external dimension of fame. To the pleasures of being in the know he joined those of becoming very well known. This was his superpower: he could hold on to the private modus operandi of the Mafia and Tammany Hall fixer while simultaneously projecting himself as a celebrity, a boy wonder, an American hero.
It is hard not to relate this extraordinary dexterity to his sexuality. According to his doctor, “Roy’s active homosexual life began in his freshman year at Columbia.” That he knew himself to be gay—and therefore to be engaged in covert criminal activity—from an early age seems certain. But in his public life, even in the 1980s, when it would not have mattered very much, he never presented himself as anything other than a straight man who appeared at social events with beautiful starlets or socialites on his arm. His friend the New York Times journalist Sidney Zion wrote that “Roy lived in a closet that was the oddest in history—a closet with neon lights—but he maintained it fiercely.”
Far from being a hindrance, however, this dual existence fitted him for another form of doubleness: the ability to gain power and money by both hiding and flaunting his influence. He could operate amphibiously in the realms of nod-and-wink and of lurid exposure. Sex and corruption were in one, politics and patriotism in the other.
Yet Cohn didn’t just live in a neon-lit closet—he created for those around him a strange combination of extreme visibility and willed ignorance. In both the Republican Party and celebrity society, he could be at once known and unknown: an obvious and outrageous villain whose crimes and cruelties were sources not of repulsion but of attraction.
It is possible to have some sympathy for Cohn as a member of an oppressed minority, but mastery of duality proved, in the case of Ethel Rosenberg, to be murderous. Cohn used throughout the trial the old methods of private influence, discussing the evidence behind the scenes with Irving Kaufman, the judge, and urging him to impose the death sentence on Ethel as well as on her husband, Julius. Just before their executions, he and Cohn spent a week’s vacation together in Florida and socialized together at the New York City Athletic Club.
Yet Cohn also used the case to make himself famous. At the end of the trial he was filmed for a television interview on board a liner about to sail for Italy, boasting about the deterrent effect of the death sentences and posing as the youthful embodiment of American justice. The glow from the electric chair lit up Cohn’s public persona—and continued to do so throughout his life. He exuded thereafter the killer’s glamour.
Cohn’s psychotic ability to compartmentalize allowed him to take a peculiar pleasure in persecuting gay men. Homophobia was inextricable from anticommunism. McCarthy targeted the effete “prancing mimics of the Moscow party line.” In 1950 he told the American Society of Newspaper Editors that “I refuse to break ranks at the pitiful squealing of those who hold sacrosanct those communists and queers who have the American people in a hypnotic trance, headed blindly toward the same precipice.” Speaking privately to two reporters afterward, he put it even more crudely. “If you want to be against McCarthy, boys,” he said, “you’ve got to be a communist or a cocksucker.”
As McCarthy’s right-hand man, Cohn was heavily involved in the Lavender Scare of the early 1950s, during which around eight hundred federal employees were fired for alleged sexual perversion. Cohn routinely referred to these men as “fags” and recorded witnesses giving evidence of meetings with “fairies and queers” in public parks. This kind of behavior is often referred to as self-loathing, but there is no evidence that Cohn hated himself. On the contrary, his lack of compunction about destroying the lives of men with whom he shared a condition of oppression was the ultimate in self-aggrandizement. It made him a tough guy.
In 1955 the sociologist Daniel Bell noted that
in these strange times, new polar terms have been introduced into political discourse, but surely none so strange as the division into “hard” and “soft.”… Presumably one is “soft” if one insists that the danger from domestic Communists is small, [while] the “hard” anti-Communists insist that no distinction can be made between international and domestic communism…. The only issue is whether one is “hard” or “soft.”
Gay men were soft because their homosexuality was associated with femininity. Cohn was not a gay man because he helped put Communists in the electric chair.
The persecution of both leftists and homosexuals depended on gossip and innuendo. Rumors, hints, suggestions—the half-world of unstable expressions and unstated meanings—substituted for evidence. Even silence was deadly: Cohn’s perjury prosecutions were often based on what his victims had failed to say. This is the other line that is always blurred by Cohn—the distinction between gossip and fact. From an astonishingly early age, he immersed himself in scandalmongering. At thirteen he was already contributing items to the gossip columns of a local tabloid, the Bronx Home News. While still a teenager, he acted as an unofficial apprentice to the New York Post gossip columnist Leonard Lyons. In his McCarthyite period, he formed a close alliance with the syndicated gossip columnists Walter Winchell and George Sokolsky. In 1952 he put up half the money for his friend Gene Pope’s purchase of The National Enquirer.
Gossip was a form of entertainment that was also deadly serious. As Christoper Elias puts it in his excellent Gossip Men: J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and the Politics of Insinuation (2021), “Information once derided as idle talk became a matter of national security.” The term “security risk” became itself a media and bureaucratic euphemism for homosexuality. Cohn politicized scandalmongering and placed it at the heart of power. He sat at the center of a web whose threads spun out into newspaper and magazine tittle-tattle but within which innocent men and women could be trapped and devoured.
The problem with innuendo, however, is that because it eludes precise meaning, it also escapes control. Double entendre is a game that two can play. The fall of McCarthy—and consequently the end of Cohn’s first phase of power—is generally dated from the question asked of him in the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954 by the army’s counsel, Joseph Welch: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
The potency of the moment—watched by millions on live television—makes it easy to forget that it was embedded in an extraordinary game of competitive gay-baiting. McCarthy and Cohn—both of whom were subjects of homophobic gossip—made the fatal error of suggesting that the army contained a nest of Communists and homosexuals. The security establishment finally hit back with its own best weapon: a dossier showing that Cohn had pestered military commanders to get favorable treatment for a young draftee named David Schine.
Cohn had become besotted with Schine, the rich, blond heir to a hotel chain. Cohn had taken him on a notorious tour of US embassies in Europe, where they rooted out alleged Communist sympathizers and purged hundreds of books from their libraries. There is and was no evidence of a sexual relationship between the two men, but their intimacy and Cohn’s relentless efforts to ease Schine’s life in the army gave the military and security establishment a weapon with which to fight back.
That weapon was Cohn’s own: innuendo. At no point during the Army-McCarthy hearings was Cohn explicitly accused of being in a sexual relationship with Schine. But the army’s lawyers acted like saucy vaudeville comedians. Ray Jenkins asked Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens, “Did it come to your attention that this private, David Schine, was hiring his fellow soldiers and paying them money to clean his rifle?” The question was greeted with loud schoolboy laughter from the august senators. (The anti-McCarthy columnist Drew Pearson added the double entendre of the name of the army base, referring to “the man who cleaned Schine’s rifle at Fort Dix.”)
The fatal moment at the hearings came when Welch was questioning McCarthy’s assistant, Jim Juliana, about a doctored photograph in which Schine featured. When Juliana repeatedly failed to say where the cropped image had come from, Welch asked, “Did it come from a pixie?” McCarthy took the bait and interrupted to ask Welch to define the word “pixie.” Welch replied: “A pixie is a close relative of a fairy. Shall I proceed, sir? Have I enlightened you?”
This was, in effect, a smear—but only in effect. Welch’s words gestured toward a distant meaning: that Cohn or McCarthy or both were queer and that they were going after others to hide their shame. This was not anti-conspiracy; it was counter-conspiracy. McCarthy stupidly responded by upping the ante, suggesting that a lawyer in Welch’s office was homosexual. It was this—and not a general outrage at the depredations of the witch hunters—that produced Welch’s “Have you no decency?”
This game of implications and inferences led to Cohn’s resignation and McCarthy’s fall. Yet it also, strangely, allowed Cohn to resurrect himself. It made him a full-time resident in the world of the unsaid. Cohn was all hinterland and no solid territory. He fell from grace for reasons that were entirely unarticulated, and the unspoken was henceforth the essence of his allure. He became the American right’s prince of darkness, the man who did things that could only be hinted at, who knew things that could not be acknowledged, who had unique access to the great mysteries of power.
For the rich and famous, Cohn thus combined the magnetic attractions of both obscenity and obscurity. Everyone knew at some level that he was a very nasty piece of work but everyone believed that, like some black magician, he was able to command the forces of darkness. It was always better to have Satan in your corner—even if the devil was as likely to defraud you as to help you.
And “everyone” means an astonishing range of the rich and famous: from the Catholic archdiocese of New York (Cohn was close to Cardinal Francis Spellman and his successor, Cardinal Terence Cooke) to Mafia hoodlums like “Fat Tony” Salerno and Carmine Galante; from his great friend Si Newhouse, the owner of Condé Nast, to Bianca Jagger (whose divorce from Mick he handled); from Rupert Murdoch to Estée Lauder, from the Yankees owner George Steinbrenner to the owners of Studio 54, the nightclub at which he himself was a fixture. Nancy Reagan called him often from the White House because he could supply a fix of her favorite drug: gossip. Cohn became the connective tissue of New York society: at his parties Andy Warhol could meet Trump (whom he called “really good-looking…. He’s a butch guy”) or Chuck Schumer.
In all of this, Cohn brings to mind not just Trump but another undead figure of contemporary American politics: Jeffrey Epstein. Cohn was long gone by the time Epstein built his own dazzlingly complex network of influence, connection, and mutual obligation. But the most revolting revelation in Bird’s biography is that Cohn, like Epstein, preyed on underage victims.
The gay community in Provincetown was disgusted by the sight of Cohn with underage boys on his yacht. Disturbingly, Bird, ignoring the dynamics of sex trafficking, refers to these children as “hustlers,” a term he would surely not apply to Epstein’s victims. But he does give a shocking account of the experiences of Richard Kerr, who from the age of eight was incarcerated in the notorious Kincora Boys’ Home in Belfast, which was run by pedophiles with alleged links to British intelligence. Kerr says that when he was sixteen he was trafficked to have sex with Cohn in Venice.
The account is entirely credible, but it will fall back into the category of rumor, gossip, innuendo. Even if it is true, how could the rich and famous and the righteous Republicans for whom Cohn is still a patriotic hero possibly have known such things? For them, it was enough to know that Cohn’s unscrupulous brutality was at their service. In everything he did, he confirmed for them the only truth they ever really wanted to know: that, in the end, there is only power. In his all-inclusive depravity, he liberated them from the nagging burdens of morality. A world in which Cohn could thrive was a world in which truth and justice were indeed mere constructs.
Bird’s horrifying biography makes the ultimate political triumph of this malevolence seem far less surprising. In Angels in America, Kushner has Cohn ascend, after his crucifixion, to heaven and then return “dressed in a fabulous floor-length black velvet robe de chambre.” He must surely now come down from wherever he is and enter the President’s Bedroom on the second floor of the White House, in the early hours when the Truth Social posts have stopped, to sit quietly by the bed and relish his vindication. He is the founding father of the rotten republic.