Adrian Lee is a solicitor-advocate in London, specialising in criminal defence, and was twice a Conservative parliamentary candidate.
At 6am on 2nd August 1986, a frail, wizened 59 year old white American male gasped his last in his bed in Bethesda, Maryland. At his bedside, holding his hand was the man’s secret male partner, a 28-year-old New Zealander called Peter Fraser. The dying man had announced to the media that he had liver cancer, but in reality, he had been diagnosed with A.I.D.S. two years before. Not only did he never admit his homosexuality, but he had donated to an organisation campaigning against gay rights.
The man in question was the most notorious and ruthless Attorney-at-Law in New York, Roy Marcus Cohn.
Roy Cohn was born on 20th February 1927 to Albert C. Cohn, Assistant District Attorney of Bronx County (and future Judge of the Appellate Division of New York State Supreme Court) and his wife Dora, whose family had made their fortune from the Lionel Corporation, America’s equivalent of Hornby model railways. The young Roy, who was raised in the Jewish faith, was expected to follow his father into law. In 1946, Cohn graduated in law from Columbia University and was subsequently called to the New York. So far, so conventional. All of that was about to change.
Cohn started practising law as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in 1948, about same time he became a board member of the American Jewish League Against Communism. Cohn soon found his niche, prosecuting those who were accused of working for the Soviets within the U.S. government. He worked for the Office of the Southern District of New York and was one of the lawyers responsible for successfully prosecuting eleven Communist Party members for advocating violent revolution against the U.S. government. However, Roy’s breakthrough case, at the age of 24, was undoubtedly the 1951 trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.
The Rosenbergs, a New York couple who had originally met in the Young Communist League, passed thousands of top-secret documents and scientific research materials to the U.S.S.R. Employed by the Soviet N.KV.D. from 1942, they had delivered blueprints for radar, sonar and aircraft jet engines. Undoubtedly their greatest espionage coup was helping the nuclear scientist Klaus Fuchs to smuggle to Moscow vital extracts from the Manhattan Project files. The Soviets obtained their start in the nuclear arms race from the theft of American secrets.
Roy Cohn was responsible for examining-in-chief David Greenglass, Ethel’s brother, who became a key Prosecution witness. The Rosenbergs were both found guilty and, unusually for peace time, sentenced to death. Fashionable liberal opinion, as in the earlier Alger Hiss case, regarded the couple as innocent victims framed by the American establishment. Outrage reached its height in June 1953, when they were finally executed in the electric chair. Julius died quickly but Ethel required three bursts of electricity, resulting in smoke emanating from her head. Not only was this grim spectacle described in graphic detail in the press, but also the fact that their two young children were now orphaned.
Cohn was rumoured to have lobbied the trial, Judge Irving Kaufman, to impose capital punishment on them. He denied this strongly, but his image was already taking form and solidified with his next job.
Few names are more synonymous with 1950’s American politics than that of the Senator for Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy.
Elected as a Republican Senator in 1946, McCarthy had until two years before been a registered Democrat. For his first few years, he remained unknown, but fate lent a hand when Joe was invited to give the Lincoln Day Speech to the Republican Women’s Wheeling Club, West Virginia on 9th February 1950. During the address, McCarthy fumbled in his pocket and produced a small piece of paper. Holding the paper aloft he is alleged to have declared:
“The State Department is infested with Communists. I have here in my hand a list of 205 – a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”
Coming after the detonation of the first Soviet atomic bomb and Mao’s victory in the Chinese civil war (for which Truman was blamed for his inertia by Republicans), McCarthy’s speech caught the mood of the moment and attracted nationwide publicity.
For the next two years, McCarthy garnered publicity over Communist infiltration of the American government. At the start of his second senatorial term, and with Eisenhower in the White House, McCarthy was appointed as Chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. On the Director of the F.B.I., J. Edgar Hoover’s recommendation, McCarthy appointed Roy Cohn as the Subcommittee’s Chief Counsel, with one Robert Francis Kennedy (R.F.K.) as Assistant Counsel. Kennedy later resigned citing disagreements with McCarthy in July 1953, but Cohn not only stuck with McCarthy until the end but became visibly identifiable as the Senator’s second-in-command. The team eventually became complete when David Schine, heir to a wealthy family of hoteliers, was appointed as the Subcommittee’s “Chief Consultant.”
Cohn had recommended Schine to McCarthy. Schine’s achievements were limited and his only work to date was the self-publication of a six-page pamphlet entitled “Definition of Communism”, which was placed, along with the obligatory Gideons Bible, in each bedroom of his family’s hotel chain. During the Summer of 1953, Cohn and Schine toured the Western European capitals examining the United States Information Agency libraries for books written by Marxists or Communist sympathisers. They attracted negative publicity in Europe as they were perceived to be at best ideological censors and at worst would-be book burners. Rumours also began about the closeness of the two men’s relationship.
At a time when homosexuality was illegal, this was highly dangerous.
In November 1953, Schine received his U.S. Army call up papers. Cohn was incandescent and campaigned for Schine’s exemption. Roy lobbied everyone from Schine’s company commander to the Army Secretary. When this failed, he attempted to get Schine an officer’s commission rather than just enter as a private. When this was rejected too, Cohn went into a rage and threatened to “wreck the Army”. The U.S. Army retaliated by exposing the pressure placed on them by McCarthy’s Chief Counsel. McCarthy was then dragged into the Cohn-Schine relationship and made allegations that Communists had infiltrated the Army. This was too much for ordinary Republicans. It was one thing to accuse the State Department of Leftist sympathies, but the U.S. Army was deemed sacred. A Senate investigative hearing was hastily established and broadcast on live television. Over the course of three months, McCarthy was discredited and ultimately destroyed.
In December 1954, the Senate passed a censorship motion against McCarthy. He drifted into alcoholism and died in 1957, aged only 48.
Despite arguably being the architect of McCarthy’s downfall, Cohn extricated himself from this and for he next thirty years enjoyed an infamous and richly rewarded career as New York’s most brutal Attorney.
He cruised the streets in his chauffeur driven Bentley with the personalised licence plate “Roy C”, but, in contrast, lived humbly with his mother until her death in 1967.
Cohn was notorious for making eye-contact with juries and using no notes in his closing speeches. Many found his pale blue eyes hypnotic.
He became consigliere to prominent Mafia bosses like Tony Salerno, Mario Gigante and John Gotti, and was renowned for coercing and blackmailing his legal opponents. His reputation was as fearsome as it was disreputable. Cohn was investigated for perjury, financial impropriety and witness tampering. Fellow lawyer Victor A. Kovner remarked: “You knew when you were in Cohn’s presence you were in the presence of pure evil”. This then was the man that a young Donald J. Trump turned to for assistance in 1973, when his father’s housing corporation was accused by the Justice Department of operating a colour bar on black tenants.
Cohn’s first recommendation was to countersue the government for $100 million for reputational damage. He taught Trump never to concede an argument and instead try to unnerve his opponents by reacting more severely than anticipated. Put simply, you fight fire with fire. Trump sued but the counterclaim failed.
This forced Trump to settle the charges out of court, but Cohn then provided Donald with his second lesson: even if you are defeated, never acknowledge that defeat. When asked about this case in the 2016 presidential debates, Trump replied, “We settled the suit…with no admission of guilty.” For the next decade, whenever Trump encountered legal problems, he reputedly uttered the phrase “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Trump reputedly called Cohn fifteen to twenty times daily and told the press that Cohn was a genius.
He once said in Cohn’s praise: “All I can tell you is he’s been vicious to others in his protection of me.”
High praise indeed.