Episode 71 -- Roy Cohn with Matt Sitman (Part 1)

Roy, are you are you feeling unethical?

What are you trying to embarrass me in front of my family?

Well, it is unethical, actually.

Oh boy, you are really something.

What the fuck do you think this is?

Sunday school?

No, Roy, but this is this is gastric juices turning.

This is enzymes and acids.

This is intestinal, is what this is.

Bowel movement and blood red meat.

This stinks.

This is politics, Joe.

This is the the game of being alive.

And

you think you're above that?

I think because he did have this kind of oppositional personality, he did like to challenge the establishment, kind of like take people on.

There was almost this daring quality to the flimsiness of Cohn's closet.

Yeah.

I mean, we're talking in the 1950s.

This Roman holiday with David Schein, this, you know, beautiful, tall, blonde man, who kind of did seem to be Cohn's type.

I mean, my jaw just dropped, right?

Because it did seem like if you wanted to be discreet as you're persecuting communists and homosexuals,

like if you didn't want this to come back to you in a certain way, you just wouldn't have behaved that way.

And it is kind of just a bit shocking how much Cohn almost dared people to call him out, which they did when the fallout from this gallivanting with Shine

crashed down upon him.

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Air Donegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bid with the right.

So welcome, listeners.

This is a very special episode.

I've been really looking forward to it because like a lot of, you know, sensitive souls, maybe especially like a lot of people who grew up Catholic, I have long harbored this like secret fear that morally speaking, I am just like the biggest piece of shit in the world, right?

Like,

I am this like especially contemptuous person.

No, I think this is like actually a very formative like intellectual exercise.

However, when we are researching this episode, I was completely disabused of that notion because I learned that I cannot be the worst person in the world because that title belongs to Roy Cohn.

Yeah, that seems fair.

We probably should have done an episode on Roy Cohn a long time ago.

There are a few figures in the history of like gender conservatism or interestingly, gendered conservatism who I've been a little bit afraid to tackle on the podcast just because their influence is so vast.

You know, I'm thinking of like Freud, Phyllis Schlafly,

St.

Paul.

These are all like kind of mega people who I know we're going to have to talk about one day, but who I've been afraid to dig into.

But today we're going to finally harpoon one of these white whales because we're talking about a big one, the lawyer, the fixer, the famous anti-communist, the Trump mentor, crook, closeted gay man, and the model for a very interesting form of dominance, masculinity.

That's right.

So we have a wonderful guest for this today.

Yeah, we do.

Matt Sitman.

I've been waiting to break in here.

The host of the amazing podcast, Know Your Enemy, and the obvious person to ask about a Roy Cohn episode.

Why is that, Adrian?

After Moira's wind up and saying he's the worst person in the world, you say, and the person who first came to mind to talk about this horrible person is Matt Sittman.

Well, I feel like you and Sam have blazed a trail when it comes to treating awful people with compassion on your podcast.

And again, like, I think Moira is right that, like, compared to someone like Whitaker Chambers, who seems to have been overall sort of decent, Roy Cohen is really truly a piece of shit.

And so I think that we need your compassion and your empathy with this person.

But also, you know, you and I share with Cohn the fact that, you know, we are gay men, although of, as we were saying, of a very different generation.

And in confronting him and his hypocrisies, you know, which are sort of

legion and very easy to look up if you have HBO and can get your hands on angels in America just about anywhere.

You know, they're very different, but there are pangs of recognition of things that that we sort of observe around us now.

So yeah,

that's all I meant.

I'm not saying you're a bad person, but I'm saying you're a...

I'm giving you a heartbeat.

This would feel incomplete without you.

Well, thank you.

We should say we've all sort of done a lot of delving.

We've become coneheads, if I dare say so.

But we've all become coneheads in a different way.

There are a slew of amazing documentaries about Roy Cohn.

There are a bunch of interesting books.

There are are a bunch of good academic books that sort of combine him with a bunch of these gay mentor figures that Moira already alluded to.

So I think that we're all going to come at this guy in a slightly different way.

And you already mentioned, Matt, that

Citizen Cohn, the sort of most exhaustive book.

And exhausting to read.

Exactly.

It's also exhausting to read.

If anything, we have too much information on this guy,

which probably means that we'll sort of have to take sort of stabs at him and try to sort of figure out how to

make him fit into broader narratives because there's just like it's an over-documented life and it's a really complicated life.

Yes.

Believe it or not,

listening to Moira's description of Cohn being someone that you've hesitated to take on on the podcast because he's just, there's too much, kind of as you were just alluding to, right?

He's a towering figure for those of us who labor in these vineyards of trying to understand these freaks on the right and that was the same for me like I think I knew Cohn would fascinate me too much and so he was a figure I hadn't fully explored up to this point and I must say since you mentioned the empathy Sam and I try to bring on know your enemy to some of our the people we talk about uh the topics we raise One thing I did do, and you mentioned the various documentaries about Cohn, which are very good, a number of them.

Like there's more than one very good documentary about Roy Cohn.

So there's lots of footage of him in those documentaries, but also preparing for this, I would just kind of look up interviews with Cohn on YouTube because I do feel like seeing someone kind of live like that

is important to getting a read on them.

And I found him evil, yes, wicked, but also

It's kind of like the allure of evil.

He was kind of fascinating to watch.

He had a lot of charisma.

Okay, I'm glad I'm not alone in that judgment because the specific clip, maybe your listeners will want to look it up, that really impressed me in precisely that way was he was in the late 70s on this show with Gore Vidal because this television movie called Tale Gunner Joe about Joe McCarthy had just come out and they were sparring over it.

Now, there's other things that are said in that interview we can talk about later, but I just was watching and I thought, my God, this guy's holding his own with Gore Vidal, who's so handsome and suave and good on television, articulate.

You know, Gore was like the best at that.

And Cohen kind of held his own debating Joe McCarthy with him.

I have the same intensity of feeling about the destruction of a person and a period in American history, which destruction I think has been very unfairly attempted, entailed on a joke.

Okay, in summary of your being here today, first, Gore, your PR people did know about the appearance today with Roy Cohen.

They just knew he was going going to be on a program a couple days ago.

And they even switched to the...

It's very different from reading that there's going to be a debate on the program.

You know, page six in the post, they make everything into a fight, and that's what happens.

But I do appreciate you.

You're both coming on.

I'm glad it went so smooth.

What are your reactions to each other in summary of your few minutes spent?

Well, if you overlook Mr.

Vidal's McCarthyism, he's a very charming person.

Roy Cohen has managed to stay out of jail all these years, and I admire him for that, and I'd like to have him for my lawyer.

I will conclude on that point.

And I thought, this guy had real chops.

I kind of see how he could persuade people or work on people or get them to do his bidding in a certain way.

He was really charismatic.

Yeah, you know, I think like right now we're in a moment in our current conservative climate where we see a lot of evil that is impulsive, a lot of evil that is borish, a lot of like id-driven evil, right?

Stupid evil.

And Roy Cohn reminds me of this like 20th century vision of evil evil that is calculating and intelligent and has

this ability

to manipulate that almost requires a degree of understanding of others, right?

He is an evil that turns his

very real capacities and virtues towards a like politically malignant and like amoral project, right?

As opposed to the evil we have now, which feels a lot more like a temper tantrum by a toddler.

Aaron Ross Powell, at the same time, there is a kind of continuity too, right?

Like,

especially around the Rosenberg trial, there's every indication that he exaggerated what he did, right?

He does present as a heel, right?

He does have this kind of heel evil that his, at this point, most famous associate, Donald Trump, would kind of perfect in some way, I would say, right?

Like, he is the guy you're supposed to boo and jeer when he walks onto the stage, and he kind of inhabits that with a kind kind of relish like there is a kind of vince mcmahon quality i mean very very different but like he he he's magnetically bad and commands a stage in a way that that feels very much of our moment this guy is a great troll he would have made an amazing troll yes definitely

and i'm sure most people listening to this know that Cohn was a kind of mentor and lawyer for Donald Trump in the kind of 70s and 80s, almost a mentor to Trump.

That basic fact now is, you know, well reported and well known.

But I think this foray into Cohn's life and times really impressed upon me that he wasn't just like Trump's lawyer.

He wasn't just like a guy who did some favors for Trump.

I really see him as

kind of initiating Trump into or being the kind of midwife into kind of who Trump became politically and ideologically.

Trump was relatively, I mean, he had his instincts, he was Trump, but relatively unformed when they first met and when Cohn took on, you know, this case of the Trump, their apartment buildings, right, discriminating against African Americans from renting the apartments.

And it wasn't just like Cohn helped them get out of that or, you know, Cohn was Trump's conciglieri in that particular case.

It was really, yeah, like this guy was a mentor to Trump and I think bears a lot of blame for who Trump became.

So with that all in mind, this man's talent, his charisma, his sort of self-styled legend and his impact on, you know, the conservative of our own age, let's dig into it.

Let's go through the life of Mr.

Roy Cohn.

Let's do it.

Okay.

So a lot of, I think, people of our generation, the sort of like millennials, first came to know Cohn after he died through Angels in America, the Tony Kushner epic about the AIDS crisis in New York, in which Cohn is a central figure.

He is called in that work the pole star of human evil.

And he is sort of a symbol there of the rapacious indifference of AIDS, right?

Like how it comes after gay men, even when they are, you know, not members or do not understand themselves as part of this like righteous oppressed minority, right?

But more recently, he's come in for this secondary reappraisal as a mentor of Donald Trump.

But I think it makes a little bit of sense to just start at the beginning with Cohn's childhood, which was, on the one hand, very privileged and also like very, very unhappy.

So he was born.

in the Bronx in February of 1927, and he was the only son of a marriage that is basically universally described as loveless

between the mother, who was the daughter of a very powerful, very wealthy New York banking family, the Marcuses, and the man who they sort of corralled into marrying their quite ugly daughter in exchange for making him a judge, right?

So he is completely doted upon by his mother, but in some like weird ways, like both him and his mother had the same like big nose

and his mother tried to get what seems like an early nose job for Roy when he was still a child that got botched.

Oh, wow, really?

Which is like why he had that scar on his nose, which is like very visible and prominent.

I assumed he was a boxer, but okay.

No, it was like this mother was trying to spare him from what she had suffered, the ill effects of her looks, right?

That was the way that his mom expressed love.

He would live with his mother pretty much continuously until her death, which happened when he was 40.

They were very, very close.

Yes.

And she was kind of a piece of work.

Did you guys ever hear the Passover story in your travels through Roy Cohn?

No.

So a childhood Passover at Roy Cohn's house.

The whole family, the big Marcus, powerful cousins are all assembled.

And as is typical of Passovers, you know, the youngest child, one of Roy's baby cousins, gets up and asks the four questions, which begin with,

Why is this night different from all other nights?

And Roy Cohn's mother, who in recounting of the story that I've heard sounds like she was a little bit drunk, sort of bursts out laughing and she goes, This night is different from all other nights because the maid is dead in the kitchen.

And indeed, the maid had dropped dead in the kitchen.

She had some sort of like heart attack or stroke or something.

And Roy Cohn's mother,

to preserve the Passover and not disturb the dinner that she was hosting, had the maid's body shoved under the table in the kitchen and was just going to like wait till dinner was over to deal with it.

Wow.

So that was mom.

Yes.

Can I hop in here with a detail about Roy's mother?

Yeah.

I mean, you're right.

Moira, to point out that they lived together until she died when Roy was 40.

At which point, I think one of his aunts, her sister, moved in, actually.

So he still had the maternal, you know, kind of presence there.

Was her name Agatha?

Because that's like perfectly out of like the worst Oscar Wilde play ever.

But Moira, as you pointed out, she was supposedly quite homely and

kind of this, the sister that they had trouble marrying off, despite all the money the family had.

Adrian, the book you mentioned by Nicholas von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn, The Life and Times of Roy Cohn, that's the main biography I read.

So I'm going to draw from it here, but going forward, I wanted to mention that.

But this was what a Cohn family member said about the mother.

And this is a quote.

Dora, that was her name, Dora.

Dora was never institutionalized, but in my opinion, she should have been.

She was demented.

She was an extremely neurotic woman.

Whether she was psychotic or not, I'm not sure, although I suspect she probably was.

Dora was not well educated.

She did not go to college.

She was not a very intelligent woman, but she was a domineering woman, extremely neurotic, the type that had to dominate everything she had any contact with.

And that part of the Von Hoffman biography, Citizen Cohn, part two, it's called Mama's Boy.

So if we want to get into any of the Freudian

analyses here,

the overbearing mother was a striking aspect of Cohn's biography.

That's amazing.

Isn't that an incredible quote?

I know.

I had the thought, I was driving down here this morning and I was like, you know, I'm so glad we have Matt for this, but I think there's going to be moments when I wish we had Sam because

I think the Freud is going to jump out.

Yes.

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Something that you're going to notice going forward, if you haven't perused many of these wonderful documentaries and books about Cohn, dear listener, you'll notice something that Matt sort of just casually dropped, which is that, you know, normally when you interview someone for a documentary about a person, that person will sort of try to maybe cushion what they're going to say a little bit.

That does not on the whole appear to be the case with Roy Cohn in that HBO documentary, Bully, Coward, Victim.

Like, there are at least three people who are like, oh, yeah, he was the worst person in the world.

The idea that this family was just,

you know, the worst is something that everyone seems to have been able to agree with.

And he was an only child, we should say.

And it's funny when Moira mentioned the Seder, I wasn't sure exactly where you're going because one thing that is another kind of, you know, everyone says about Cohn's childhood is that because his mother kind of favored him like this, and because he was kind of doted upon and treated as like a, you know, precocious young man,

and because also, you know, his father, Al Cohn, ended up becoming a judge.

He was kind of part of the democratic machine, right?

And that's why he married Nora for the money, basically, because you had to sort of pay tribute, you know, to the local machine to become a judge.

It meant lots of like interesting political figures from the city, you know, would come to their dinner table.

And Cohn was, he never liked to like sit at the kids' table or not be included.

He would love to sit at the adults' table, listen, and sometimes hold court himself.

But just in terms of how he was raised, that like, you know, your only son, you put at the dinner table with these luminaries from the Democratic Party and let him hold forth.

It's just, I think, a glimpse of, you know,

how he was raised.

Did anybody come across the story from his childhood when he was 10 and he met FDR?

Yes, yes, that's in Citizen Cone.

But go ahead, Moira.

Well, he meets at one of these parties that Matt is talking about where his parents are hosting these Democratic Party luminaries.

FDR comes and has dinner at the Cohn family household and a 10-year-old Roy Cohn tells FDR that he approves of his plan to pack the court.

He goes, that's smart.

You should really do that.

To which I wonder what FDR said.

So thank you, little boy.

Yes.

But yeah, that's the, like, he was never exactly a child, right?

This is a guy who was in a rush to power almost from the time he was born.

Yeah, and it's basically a teenager when he bursts onto the public stage.

The other thing to point out is, of course, that, that, so Cohn comes from great privilege.

And

we're going to talk about him as a conservative, but essentially comes out of a democratic establishment, I think.

And it's interesting to think about his path then, like Horace Mann, Columbia BA, Columbia law degree with someone like another know your enemy, Fave, someone like Irving Kristol, right?

Brooklyn Boys.

City College of New York, right?

Like Cohn is taking a different route.

He's taking the route that kind of was only opening up to Jewish Americans at the time when they were extremely privileged, it seems to me.

And you know, part of the privilege, the money we've mentioned his mother's side having was like the Lionel Train Company, right?

Toy Train Company was part of the money.

The founder of Q-Tips,

the inventor of that, was part of the family money, but also the Bank of the United States,

which

in 1930, right, there was a run on the bank.

And long story short, Cohn's uncle, the only banker, I think, jailed

for their bank going under, even though he was seemingly an upright man who kind of the reason the bank got started was the family was so trusted.

When they were in like the garment industry, you know, decades earlier, people would ask him to keep their money.

But he kind of got caught holding the bag.

There was a run on the bank, and he went to jail at Sing Sing, right?

Yeah.

And Cohn would visit him, right, in jail.

And I would say of all the facts about Cohn's childhood, in addition to the overbearing mother, this uncle who had been jailed, like Cohn viewed his uncle being put in that position as like, what happens when you're on the wrong side of power?

Yeah.

It taught him, he made a vow to himself to never be

kind of find himself in the position his uncle was in and kind of use power to,

well, frankly, you you know, it's telling.

It's an incredible kind of, you know, the cunning of history.

Sing Sing, where he visited his uncle in jail, was where the Rosenbergs would be executed.

That's right.

However many decades later, the same prison.

So that experience of visiting his uncle in jail at Sing Sing was formative for him.

And that's something kind of most of the documentaries and biographies really, I think, rightly point to as something that really shaped young Roy Cohn.

Yeah.

In the Bully Coward Victim documentary, one of his nephews, actually, one of Cohn's nephews proposes basically that he was so traumatized by this uncle going to jail.

I think it's a cousin, not a nephew.

Sorry, Adrian.

Being a little pedantic.

I think it's David Marcus, who later became a journalist, a maternal cousin.

Marcus is.

That's right.

Yeah, sorry.

But yeah, so I think they propose basically that this is about a kind of an identification with the aggressor here, right?

That like the only way to fight this is to join the car serial system.

As Matt is saying, the very institution that jailed my uncle, I will work towards killing my enemies, basically, right?

Like it's a full-on identification with the aggressor.

They don't say it.

I think the cousins don't say it.

But there is an element of like, he must have been aware that like one way to end up in jail is being a gay man at that time, right?

So like it's not that he's thinking, oh, I guess the lesson here is don't do financial scams, which spoiler alert, he would definitely do some financial scams.

Yeah, he definitely did not take that lesson from his uncle's incarceration.

He definitely.

But I think the lesson he took away from the way I am exposes me to this kind of thing.

So the only way to make sure it doesn't happen to me is to wield the power of that institution.

Something that the family really understood as well.

You know, what would have been impressed on Roy Cohn was not only the risks of homosexuality, but the risks of being Jewish.

Something that the family really understood was that the Bank of the United States was not unique in terms of its financial malfeasance around the time of the stock market crash.

It was unique in that it was controlled by a Jewish family, right?

Right.

And, you know, Matt mentions that Cohn's uncle was the only banker to go to jail for that crisis.

And the family really interpreted their uncle's misfortune as a product of anti-Semitism as much as a product of his own misbehavior.

Yes.

I think at one point in the Citizen Cohn biography, someone's quoted from the family as, yes, the Episcopalian

Morgan or, you know, more establishment types, they could have fixed this.

They could have covered the run on the bank, but they didn't because they were anti-Semites.

Yeah.

And I think that might be a good way to transition to the Rosenberg trial.

Yeah.

Because Adrian, as you mentioned, Cohn sort of like

rams his way through his education, you know, Horace Mann, Columbia University, Columbia Law.

He graduates from Columbia Law at 20, right?

Before he could even be admitted to the bar.

Right.

He gets admitted to the bar on his 21st birthday, which is the first moment that he's legally possible, right?

And he pretty quickly gets recruited as a prosecutor for the trial of Julius and Essel Rosenberg, in part because the prosecution was worried that the trial was going to look anti-Semitic, right?

So they wanted a Jewish prosecutor.

And that's part of how Cohn got the job.

On the mere technicality that it probably was.

Yeah.

They're like, oh, no, how could our anti-Semitic show trial, you know, be read as somehow anti-Semitic?

Do you guys want to give us a gloss on the Rosenbergs really quickly for our listeners who might not be totally familiar?

Julius and Ethel.

So Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,

the only two people executed during the Red Scare of the early 50s,

and Cohn would take ample credit for that, were basically accused of, in what, 1950, I believe, of having given the Soviets the secrets to the bomb they were convicted in 1951 of espionage and were executed in 1953

they would have both been in their mid-30s at the time and as Matt said at Sing Sing prison in Osening New York so they were a married couple i believe they were both american born but they were descendants of this group of jewish like russian and eastern european émigrés who formed a like strong jewish community on new York City's Lower East side, right?

And they were indeed members of the Communist Party, as a lot of Jews on the Lower East side in the 1930s and 40s were.

Julius Rosenberg had served in the U.S.

Army, and he spoke about his

commitment both to the United States and to communism as sort of this like fusion that was much more typical, like during and immediately after World War II of like a popular front fusionism, right?

He's like, I am a communist and I am an American because these are the forces that defeated Nazism.

That's right.

And that was like something that you would hear from a lot of American communist Jews at the time.

And they were like kind of like workaday people, right?

They weren't very elite.

Julius had an engineering job and some old army connections by which he does indeed seem to have been funneling some technical aspects of America's military development to the Soviets.

So like in terms of like, were they actual spies?

It seems pretty firmly established in the historical record that Julius Rosenberg like was, yes, a spy for the Soviet Union.

Ethel's involvement is a lot murkier.

And the choice to prosecute her as well as her husband, and specifically the choice to seek the death penalty for either of them, but particularly for Ethel, was something that was really Roy Cohn's pet project.

Yes, when the Venona papers, right, were kind of released and decoded after the Cold War ended, like it was pretty much confirmed, as you say, that Julius was in some sense a spy passing along information, even if, you know, kind of how important he was to the overall operation might not be certain.

But Ethel, she didn't have a code name, right?

So she's not in these papers.

And the fact that she was executed, too,

was because of Cohn's obsession with it.

And it really seems like maybe this was Cohn's chance to kill his mother, so to speak,

to offer that analysis, because it was, he was like, really obsessed with her.

And like, really, it was him who really, really, really seemed to want her to be executed as well.

And he did this, according to his own autobiography, which, Adrian, you said is like not the most reliable narration, but he did this at age 23 through a series of really illegal and wildly immoral gestures.

So one of the first things he did was he persuaded Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, to lie under oath about the extent of Ethel's involvement in the espionage scheme.

And he also had ex parte conversations, sort of like outside secret conversations, which are illegal, with the judge, Irving Kaufman.

in which he persuaded the judge to pursue the death penalty, even though the Department of Justice and the FBI were both trying to avoid the death penalty, which they thought would have like bad PR effects.

It was Cohn, at least in Cohn's telling, who both fabricated this evidence and convinced the judge to pursue the maximum punishment.

So Cohn is at least presenting himself really as the Rosenberg's murderer.

He's like, I am the one who got these people killed.

Yes.

Can I read something from the Citizen Cohn biography about his posture towards Ethel Rosenberg?

Yeah.

Again, this is from Citizen Cohn, Nicholas von Hoffman's biography.

Between the husband and the wife in the Rosenberg family, Roy blamed Ethel the most.

He was almost ferocious when her name came up, although the FBI memo relating the ex parte contact with the judge has Roy saying that sparing her life would be the best way to get her to peach on her comrades.

Elsewhere, it almost seemed he would have commuted the father's sentence while showing no mercy for the mother.

Roy spoke of her, quote, den mother supervision of the family's part in the communist movement.

And I mean, we should say that by contrast, I think J.

Edgar Hoover initially pushed for a arrest of Ethel in order to use it as a lever, I believe, to make Julius talk.

So it's not like Roy sort of is reflecting on a change in the perception of the case among law enforcement.

She's really kind of a lone voice in like, we have to kill this woman.

And I mean, this is why, right, she's in Angels of America as sort of his chief tormentor and not he.

Yeah, she's a ghost played by Meryl Streep,

who does a very unconvincing,

like Yiddish New York accent in the famous Ethel Rosenberg coat and hat, tormenting Al Pacino as Roy Cohn, as a ghost figure while he's dying of AIDS in the hospital.

The Rosenbergs are executed by Electric Chair in 1953 at Sing Sing.

The Electric Chair is always a bad way to die, but Ethel Rosenberg's execution in particular seems to have been botched.

So they had to shock her over and over and over again in order to get her to die.

She had two children, two sons under 10 at the time.

And this is, you know, for all the differences they may have had in their approach to the case, Cohn's conduct in the prosecution in the Rosenbergs is really impressive to J.

Edgar Hoover.

who hires Cohn to come work for him in Washington as sort of a like media fixer.

And he's working for J.

Edgar Hoover at the FBI for a couple years, essentially working as like a media liaison, right?

When Jay Edgar Hoover wants to embarrass someone who is not cooperating with him, it is Roy Cohn who he has call up the papers and place this damaging information about them.

And this is part of the beginning of Cohn's lifelong vocation, really, like as a blackmail artist, as somebody who can extort favors from people he's targeting by threatening to or actually embarrassing them in the public sphere.

And it seems to be J.

Edgar Hoover who introduces Roy Cohn to the next major figure in his life, Joe McCarthy.

Either of you guys want to tell us about his relationship with Joe McCarthy.

Yeah.

I was going to say, I don't know who should go first.

You go first.

So McCarthy, right, senator from the great state of Wisconsin, the last Republican to serve in that job, for some reason, started basically in 1950, more or less,

to warn about the presence of communists and homosexuals in, I think, initially the State Department, but really it expanded very, very quickly and broadly.

And by the time Cohn joins him, he's already a few years into this campaign.

Is that right, Matt?

I believe so.

I mean, Cohn was 24 when he came to the attention via the Rosenberg trial of J.

Edgar Hoover.

And yes, by the time he's working for McCarthy, I do think McCarthy had already started getting going on the anti-communist hearings.

And something that's pretty important that a book that Matt recommended to us and that I loved reading, Christopher Elias's Gossip Men, J.

Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohen, The Politics of Insinuation from University of Chicago Press, something that is made sense of to me is like, unlike the Rosenbergs, the question of gossip is sort of central to the McCarthy hearings, right?

Like for listeners who don't know that period so well, McCarthy bursts into the national spotlight in February of 1950 with this famous speech where he claims to have a list of members of the Communist Party employed by the State Department, right?

So from the very beginning, this is a politics of gossip.

This is really about like what did who say to whom?

Can I add one little detail here?

Yeah.

The Wheeling West Virginia speech that Joe McCarthy gave where he had the supposed list of 200 and some communists.

One of the reasons these hearings kind of got started was, you know, like people didn't take that speech seriously.

Yeah.

And the part about kind of whispers and rumors, I've mentioned this maybe once or twice before, but some of your listeners might know I'm an ex-conservative.

When I was 22 years old, I was an intern at the Heritage Foundation for a guy named Lee Edwards, who a few months ago just died.

But now that he's passed, I feel more liberated to say one day we were, as his intern, his research assistant, we were out at the Hoover Institution, not far from all of you at Stanford, and doing archival research.

And one day, driving along the Pacific Ocean, he told me that it was his father, the Edwards father, Willard Edwards, the D.C.

bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune, you know, a conservative paper, who gave McCarthy the list.

Oh, wow.

Wow.

And by the way, since I mentioned this to Rachel Maddow

about a year or so ago, because she's doing a bunch of research into McCarthyism and Red Scare for her, I think, next big podcast project.

And she looked into it, and it was, it's true.

Like all of Willard Edwards' columns for the Chicago Tribune were floating these kind of communists infiltrating the federal government around the time of the speech.

And, but that's just to say, in terms of rumors and whispers, yes, it was a list given by a journalist to Joe McCarthy, right, that he used in this speech.

And who knows how it had been passed around, you know, until it got to the, to, to Willard Edwards, who gave it to McCarthy.

Wow.

Yeah.

But that's the origin of the list.

A right-wing journalist gave it to Joe McCarthy.

Yeah, it's not like anything we're currently witnessing in this country.

So that's great.

Yeah.

And so Cohn joins this via, as you say, via J.

Ecker Hoover.

And part of it is that he's just a different person, right?

There is an idea that he's still a Democrat, I guess, technically.

And at this point, one should say that like the famous kind of like, are you now or have you ever been kind of stuff, I think, is receding into the background.

Really, the lavender scare is sort of taking over.

So here's a gay man very much in charge of unmasking gay men mostly within the administrative apparatus of the U.S.

government, who people think are basically blackmailable and therefore must be removed.

And that's before we even get to Cohn, right?

Because the other elephant in the room is that, you know, like J.

Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy is widely rumored to also be a gay man, right?

And he has hired this young gay man, Roy Cohn, as an assistant in his, you know, red hunting project and also in his like lavender hunting project, right?

Both, yes.

This is a prosecution of gay men led by two allegedly gay men.

The irony of this exercise is like not exactly lost on people at the time.

I just want to mention, too, that Gourvadal Roy Cohn debate we mentioned over Joe McCarthy.

It was during that interview that Gourvidal said, claimed that Joe McCarthy was a full-time homosexual and that he was told this by none other than Senator from Vermont Ralph Flanders, who was the one who introduced the censure resolution against McCarthy in the Senate.

And I don't like this double standard where we make heroes out of people who have been exposed for support of communist cause.

Well, maybe there was a point in making heroes out of the victims of a reckless, gallivanting intriguer.

To me, the nicest thing, let's be affirmative, the nicest thing that I have ever heard about Joe McCarthy was told me by Senator Flanders of Vermont that he was a full-time homosexual.

Is this true?

No, I'm sure you'd think that merited a badge of honor, but it is not true.

Well, I'm getting to you in a minute.

What about Senator McCarthy?

Sure, you, I mean, that's your favorite topic of conversation.

I know that.

I know.

It's

aroused by the audience.

I know.

And, you know, this detail, Moira, I think you're going to jump on this when I mention it.

This isn't like speculation or rumor or gossip, but, you know, Joe McCarthy and his wife, they adopted a baby girl, a daughter.

And do you know who helped facilitate the adoption process?

Who?

Cardinal Spellman.

Oh, my God.

Yes.

Himself, an inveterate homosexual, who was put into contact with McCarthy by Roy Cohn.

That's crazy.

And that detail of Joe McCarthy probably being gay,

put in contact with this gay cardinal of New York, Cardinal Spellman, by another gay guy, Roy Cohn, to adopt a daughter.

It was just too much for me to handle almost.

Just kind of the depths of absurdity.

And tricky or not, it's McCarthy and Cohn like waging this campaign against both communists and homosexuals.

And, you know, this is the time

when

Roy meets what will be like the first major man in his life, a guy named G.

David Shine, a hotel heir and a kind of like Nordic-looking pretty boy.

He looks kind of like a Ken doll.

Does anybody want to tell me about G.

David Shine?

Well, I don't know much about him other than that he is the Jenga piece that brings this entire power of what Elias calls security state masculinity tumbling down, right?

Shine is supposed to be drafted.

As a mere private.

The drafting comes later, right?

Because first,

Roy Cohen seems to get Shine a job working for Joe McCarthy on a project going around the world to State Department-owned facilities and trying to purge all the communist or subversive books from their libraries, right?

So he's got a little crush on this guy.

He gets him a job that involves the two of them functionally going on a vacation together.

To Europe.

So largely around Europe.

They're galavanching around Europe together, yes.

They're like in their mid-20s, and there's, you know, there's accounts of them sort of like running up and down these hotel stairs, like snapping towels at each other's asses.

Straight stuff.

Straight stuff.

Yeah, there's one driver, or a private driver who works for them at the time, who later claims that they're doing gay stuff in the back of his cab.

Shine, it should be said later, goes on to marry a beauty queen and have about 100,000 children.

So this does not not seem to have been as permanent a part of his life.

And people who knew him at the time said that Cohn was sort of more into it than Shine seemed to be.

But they were broadly rumored to be dating.

And this was, again,

not exactly a secret.

The quality of Cohn's closet is something I keep returning to, right?

Oh, yeah.

Yes.

Because it is more about plausible deniability and the respect imposed by the ability to command deniability than it is about actual concealment of what he's doing.

Yeah.

Yes.

I mean, not to get ahead of ourselves, but that's such a fascinating comment, Moira, because I kept thinking that to myself.

Like, as I was reading about Cohn, watching these documentaries, I think because he did have this kind of oppositional personality, someone who, you know, he did like to challenge, right, the establishment, kind of like take people on, there was almost this like daring quality to the flimsiness of Cohn's closet.

Yeah.

Right.

And this, I mean, we're talking the 1950s.

This Roman holiday with David Schein, this beautiful, tall, blonde man who kind of did seem to be Cohn's type.

I mean, my jaw just dropped, right?

Because it did seem like if you wanted to be discreet as you're persecuting communists and homosexuals, like if you didn't want this to come back to you in a certain way, you just wouldn't have behaved that way.

And it is kind of just a bit shocking how much Cohn almost dared people to call him out, which they did when the fallout from this gallivantine was shine

crashed down upon him.

Adrian, do you want to tell us about that fallout?

I interrupted you earlier.

Yeah.

Well, let me first also just briefly add that like, yeah, what Elias calls surveillance state masculinity really is about the operationalization, I guess, of masculinity.

and media in a really interesting way.

So that's the other thing that I wanted to add to what Matt was just saying, which seems exactly right to me.

Like, not only is he doing the last thing you kind of want to do if you wanted to stay off the grid, he's doing it on camera.

And his downfall, which is identical with the downfall of McCarthy, ultimately, it happens in front of the cameras.

You can watch the romance with Shine take the worst possible turn, which is rare for the 1950s on live TV, basically.

This is during the Army McCarthy hearings.

And essentially, there is this really amazing exchange where it's what's his name?

Welch I guess

there's a kind of question about a doctored picture and Welch asks Jim Giuliana who's a McCarthy assistant if maybe the photograph came from a pixie and then I believe McCarthy asks well what do you mean by pixie and Welsh replies well a pixie is a close relative of a fairy does that enlighten you senator right and everyone snickers I asked him what would happen if Shine got overseas duty he responded with vigor and force we'll wreck the Arch.

I never knew what Hongon Shine was.

You did know what Hongon Shines were when that was handed to you, sir.

Did you think this came from a pixie?

The council for my benefit.

They find,

I think he might be an expert on that.

Yeah.

Yeah, I should say.

I should say, Mr.

Senator, that a pixie is a close relative of a fairy.

Everyone snickers.

And the camera, like, I don't know if this is in the original tape or if this is something that people have then done with the tape, but like you kind of feel like the camera sort of zeroing in on

Cohn.

And you almost think like if this were a rest of the development, you know, like you'd have the sound of silence playing and Roy Cohen going, I've made a huge mistake.

It just falls apart in this massive way.

And to me, I agree with you that there is this kind of threadbare quality to his closetedness at the time.

and here we sort of get the opposite of this this is what i think yves kosovsky sedgwick calls the epistemology of the closet right like the same gossip that can undo the people that coh and mccarthy are ruining can of course bounce back on them very easily that's the wonderful thing about gossip it's hard to control it goes in every which direction it it gets on you too if you spread it right um

And here he is basically being called out on like, wait, why don't you want this shine guy to be drafted?

What's it to you?

Right.

We should probably like let our listeners know that the only reason the Army and McCarthy hearings were called is because Roy Cohn had tried to get his boyfriend out of the army.

That's right.

Yes.

He tried to get his boyfriend out of being drafted.

The army resisted that imposition, right?

They're like, this is actually not really how we do business in the army.

They're very self-serious.

And Cohn says, well, if you're not going to play ball with me, I'm going to accuse you of having a lot of communist subversives and I'm going to drag you in front of the Senate subcommittee for which I am the general counsel and I'm going to give you the McCarthy treatment.

And it's the Army playing hardball in response to Cohn's attempt to wheel and deal his own power to get what he wants in terms of, you know, continued sexual access to David Schein that eventually brings all of Joe McCarthy's career crashing down.

That

have you no decency, sir, at long last, have you no decency.

That is a line from the Army McCarthy hearings.

And it's a line that never would have been delivered if Roy Cohn hadn't overstepped his own power.

I hadn't thought with this dick row.

Yes.

Yes.

And I mean, to me, that line where like everyone is kind of laughing at this guy and, you know, this guy who has tried to make a victim of the U.S.

Army, frankly, like being suddenly the one everyone is pointing and laughing at, right?

Like is just so powerful because it shows this kind of razor's edge that this guy walks, where he sort of marshals the very same prejudices that would normally undo him, right?

And at the same time, it shows that among certain aspects of the security state, in certain parts of conservative politics, there is a real comfort with the closeted gay man as long as he's closeted in the right way.

I tend to think of this as the Lindsey Graham paradox, right?

Conservatives love gay men whom they feel they can sort of do with what they want because...

that gay man is ashamed of who they are and is trying to hide it and thinks he's getting away with it, right?

This is the thing that Yukosovsky Sedgwick talks about in that book.

She's mostly talking about Marcel Proust, about these gay characters that think they're fooling the world, but they're fooling no one.

And that's what makes them pliable, it makes them predictable.

It's what assigns them a safe place in everyone's cosmos.

And people love that about them.

They love the fact that this guy thinks, he's like, wow, I can't believe I got away with this.

And everyone's like,

check out that homo over there, right?

Like, everyone knows, but in some way, it's a bad thing to mention it because it in some way destroys the ability to have power over this person.

And in the case of the Army-McCarthy hearings, that's kind of a slap on the hand to say, like, oh, we do know, by the way.

Do not take our, not bringing this up as a kind of cluelessness.

We also gossip, you know?

Yes.

And I want to add just a couple of details here.

I mean, what Cohn via McCarthy, you know, what they were asking for for David Schein was what's called a direct commission, meaning you're kind of given a commission in the military that's not, that you don't actually have all the qualifications for, right?

Or the prerequisites for.

So they were kind of asking the Army to give Shine this direct commission, so asking for a favor for him.

And as part of the Army McCarthy hearings, one piece of evidence kind of introduced to sort of justify why perhaps Shine, you know, could have gotten such a commission was this photograph, right, of him with Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens.

And from what everything I know about it, it seems like it really was doctored, like in Stalin-esque fashion, to cut out the other people in the photograph.

So it looks like the Secretary of the Army was like, you know, having this one-on-one chat with David Schein.

And, well, if he's talking to the Secretary of the Army by himself, of course he might have gotten this commission, right?

But it turns out that was doctored.

And like, this is what Roy Cohn's like.

Yeah.

It's so brazen, right?

And it's also so campy.

I mean, this is why Kushner is clearly attracted to this.

That's why, I mean, many gay actors have attempted that role since and have done it very, very well, right?

That's why Appacino loves it.

It's like, I mean, this is just like the kind of scenery chewing that you get out of Scarface and Roy Cohn.

That's it.

End of list.

Yes.

So at this point, you might be saying to yourself, wait, Embed with the Right finally got to one of its white whales, Mr.

Roy Cohn, and it got the amazing Matt Sipman to sit down with them and talk to them about Roy Cohn.

And they think they're going to be done with this in one one episode.

Well, you were faster than we were.

This is one of the granddaddies.

This is one of the people we really have been wanting to delve into for quite some time.

And so we're going to make this a two-parter.

It gives us enough time to really dwell on the back end of Roy Cohn's checkered and horrible career.

You know, if you thought you've met some of the worst people of the 20th century in this episode, you're going to meet some of the worst people of the 21st century.

So expect the next episode from us in a week's time.

We thank you for your forbearance.

Stay tuned for the second part of our deep dive into the life and times of Mr.

Roy Cohn.

Embed with the Right is made possible by hundreds of listeners who support us via patreon.com.

Our episodes are produced and edited by Mark Yoshizumi and Katie Lau.

Our title music is by Katie Lau.