The Long Shadow
The shadow of Roy Cohn.
Cohn has cast a shadow over America since the 1950s, and we’re living under it still. He was a lawyer who played a key role in Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy’s infamous crusade against people he claimed were Communists or Communist sympathizers—“fellow travelers” in the lingo of the time—in government, the entertainment industry, education, and other influential positions.
McCarthy (left in picture with Cohn) rose to prominence because of a 1950 speech in which he claimed to have a paper with the names of 205 Communist Party members working in the State Department. Curiously, he gave a speech in another state the next day claiming his list had 57 names. Soon, it was four. Whatever the number, he revealed no names and no evidence, but his claims fell on fertile ground in the press and among those Americans afraid of recent Communist successes: the Soviet Berlin blockade in 1948 and the Communist conquest of mainland China and first Soviet atomic bomb in 1949.
Some saw these as part of an international Communist conspiracy along with American labor unions, FDR’s New Deal programs like Social Security, and the United Nations. Far-right extremists even imagined that fluoridated water and vaccines were plots to brainwash Americans. Sound familiar? By the late ‘40s, federal, state, and local governments had begun requiring employees to take loyalty oaths, a practice followed by some private employers. Behind the hysteria was a Republican Party goal: to get even for being out of power during Roosevelt’s long presidency followed by Harry Truman’s. Accusing leftists, Democrats, and even progressive Republicans of disloyalty seemed a sure way to regain their lost power.
Enter Roy Cohn, a young assistant U.S. attorney making a name for himself with his aggressive, often unethical, prosecutions of Soviet moles, senior members of the American Communist Party, and Soviet nuclear spies. His success led McCarthy to hire him as his chief counsel in 1951.
McCarthy, famously alcoholic, and Cohn, a bully famously loose with facts, spent much of the next three years with a Senate subcommittee investigating—in private sessions with no accountability— State Department programs like the Voice of America for Commie influence. State Department libraries removed 40 suspect books including The Selected Works of Thomas Jefferson. Not to be outdone, the House Un-American Activities Committee pursued artists, scientists, entertainers, and other suspected leftists. Hundreds of famous people lost their jobs or had careers altered including Lucille Ball, Albert Einstein, Leonard Bernstein, Charlie Chaplin, Langston Hughes, and Robert Oppenheimer.
Then McCarthy went too far, accusing Army Five-Star General George C. Marshall of treason. The 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings on TV exposed the Senator as a fraud, long on suspicions but short on evidence. The Senate formally censured him; worse, the press ignored him. He faded away, leaving his name attached to one of the ugliest periods in American history: “McCarthyism.”
Roy Cohn moved to New York City where he built a reputation as a “fixer” getting people like Aristotle Onassis, various Mafia leaders, and Donald Trump out of legal trouble. He taught young Trump how to navigate business and legal issues: never show weakness; never apologize; never explain; attack, never defend; intimidate to demand loyalty. Sound familiar? In the 1980s, Pulitzer Prize winner Murray Kempton, considered New York’s greatest columnist, wrote of Trump, “the man demeans anything he touches.”
Cohn was indicted several times for blackmail, bribery, and other crimes. Finally, a panel of the New York State Supreme Court disbarred him for misappropriation of clients’ funds, lying on a bar application, and falsifying a will. He died in 1986 of AIDS. He owed millions in unpaid taxes, so the IRS seized nearly all his assets, but Cohn’s shadow survives in the malignant lessons he taught a future president.
