<Archive Obituary> Roy Cohn (August 2nd 1986)
Bill Schenley
Photo: http://www.american-buddha.com/amapnew89b.jpg
FROM: The New York Times (August 3rd 1986) ~
By Albin Krebs
Roy M. Cohn, the flamboyant, controversial defense lawyer who was
chief counsel to Joseph R. McCarthy's Senate investigations in the
1950's into Communist influence in American life, died yesterday at
the age of 59. He lived in Manhattan and in Greenwich, Conn.
Mr. Cohn, whose 38-year career brought him prominence, political
influence and personal celebrity but ended in disbarment in New York
State, died at 6 A.M. at the Warren Grant Magnuson Clinical Center of
the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.
Irene M. Haske, speaking for the center, said the immediate cause of
death was ''cardio-pulmonary arrest.'' She said the death certificate
also listed two secondary causes of death: ''dementia'' and
''underlying HTLV-3 infections.''
Most scientists believe the HTLV-3 virus is the cause of AIDS, or
acquired immune deficiency syndrome, the fatal disease that cripples
the body's immune system and is statistically most common among
homosexual men and intravenous drug users. The virus is also believed
to produce dementia and other neurological disorders.
In several newspaper and television interviews in the past year, Mr.
Cohn repeatedly denied widespread rumors that his treatment at
Bethesda had resulted from his contracting AIDS.
On June 23, near death with what he said was liver cancer, Mr. Cohn
was disbarred from the practice of law in New York State. In a
unanimous decision, a five-judge panel of the Appellate Division of
State Supreme Court said his conduct in four legal matters was
''unethical,'' ''unprofessional'' and, in one case, ''particularly
reprehensible.''
Allegations Called Smears
Mr. Cohn denied that there was any substance to the allegations and
contended that his disbarment was the result of a smear campaign
engineered by his enemies - ''a bunch of yo-yos'' - because ''the
establishment bar hates my guts.''
Nearly two decades after he had become, almost overnight, a nationally
known personality, Mr. Cohn predicted that even if he died at age 100,
his obituary would be headlined: ''Roy Cohn Dead; Was McCarthy
Investigations Aide.''
Indeed, such a conclusion by Mr. Cohn was almost inescapable, for it
was for his work as chief counsel to Senator McCarthy's
Communist-hunting subcommittee in the early 1950's, the age of
McCarthyism, that he became an often celebrated, often denigrated
national figure.
But when Mr. Cohn left the Washington scene in 1954, he did not
become, as some predicted, a has-been. Instead, he returned to New
York to practice law and in the process became a political power
broker, a friend of the rich and the fashionable, one of the city's
most sought-after legal talents and probably a very wealthy man.
The young man with the heavy-lidded eyes, the perpetually tanned skin
and the knowing grin that the public came to know during the televised
Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 never lost his enormous energy, his
fiery intensity, his quick, dagger-like wit.
He won a reputation for loyalty to his friends and clients, and they
returned it. Devoted to celebrating his birthday, he gave lavish
annual parties, usually at his estate in Greenwich, and his famous
friends and clients all came.
At the 1983 gathering, for instance, the guest list included such
diverse personalities as former Mayor Abraham D. Beame of New York,
the former Tammany boss Carmine G. de Sapio, Andy Warhol, Calvin
Klein, the Brooklyn Democratic leader Meade H. Esposito, several
Federal judges, the lawyer Marvin Mitchelson and Richard A. Viguerie,
the publisher of the Conservative Digest, who praised his host as
''24-carat, one of life's great Americans.''
Mr. Cohn counted among his friends such people as President Reagan
(although a Democrat, Mr. Cohn tended to support Republican
Presidents), Norman Mailer, Bianca Jagger, Barbara Walters, Rupert
Murdoch, William F. Buckley Jr., William Safire, George Steinbrenner,
Estee Lauder, Warren Avis and dozens of politicians, Democrats and
Republicans alike, at every level, from Cabinet members to county
judges.
As a lawyer he represented such diverse clients as Donald Trump and
Sam Lefrak, the real-estate executives; Francis Cardinal Spellman and
Terence Cardinal Cooke and, on occasion, the Roman Catholic
Archdiocese of New York. He also represented Carmine Galante, who
before his death was said by authorities to be Mafia ''boss of all
bosses,'' and Tony (Fat Tony) Salerno, also said to be a Mafia
chieftain.
''Truth is hardly ever an absolute -there are so many elements,'' Mr.
Cohn said after sucessfully defending Mr. Salerno, who was accused of
income-tax violations. He said Mr. Salerno, known as a gambling
kingpin, was ''technically guilty,'' but the lawyer said he had won
the case because he had shown that Mr. Salerno, unlike most gamblers,
had actually declared and paid taxes on most of his income. U.S.
Audited Taxes 20 Years in a Row Mr. Cohn himself was almost constantly
in conflict with the Internal Revenue Service, which audited his tax
returns more than 20 years in a row and collected more than $300,000
in back taxes. In 1979 alone, the I.R.S. had claims of almost $1
million against him, and there were liens against any assets he might
accumulate. The I.R.S. had liens against him totaling $3.18 million,
dating back a quarter century.
He had many other legal troubles, some of which he seemed to enjoy. He
was tried and acquitted three times in Federal court on charges
ranging from conspiracy to bribery to fraud. Mr. Cohn maintained that
he was subjected to these ''ordeals'' because of ''vendettas''
arranged by Robert F. Kennedy or by Robert M. Morgenthau, the former
United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York who is
now the Manhattan District Attorney.
There were other troubles, stemming from legal dealings that many of
Mr. Cohn's fellow lawyers considered shady. It was four of these cases
that led to his disbarment.
One went back to 1976, when a Florida court found that Mr. Cohn had
entered the hospital room of Lewis S. Rosenstiel, the multimillionaire
head of Schenley Industries, and ''misrepresesnted the nature, content
and purpose of the document that he offered Mr. Rosenstiel for
execution.'' The document, which the dying client shakily signed, was
a codicil to his will that would have made Mr. Cohn and certain others
the executors of the will. The court refused to probate the codicil.
That case and the others that eventually led to his disbarment
prompted Mr. Cohn to charge there was an attempt to ''smear'' him.
That kind of combativeness came naturally to Mr. Cohn, who once said:
''My scare value is high. My area is controversy. My tough front is my
biggest asset. I don't write polite letters. I don't like to
plea-bargain. I like to fight. You might want a nice gentle fight, but
once you get in the ring and take a couple of pokes, it gets under
your skin.
''It's fair to say that in an adversary situation I've got one role -
to win for my client. Law is an adversary profession. But within the
bounds which are permitted, most lawyers are Caspar Milquetoasts. They
don't realize that they are in a fight. To them, a lawsuit is nothing
more than going to court, then going out to lunch with your adversary.
To me it's serious business.'' Son of Judge With Party Power Roy
Marcus Cohn, who was born in New York City on Feb. 20, 1927, was the
son of Dora Marcus and Albert Cohn, and was brought up in a Park
Avenue apartment. His father, a justice in the Appellate Division of
State Supreme Court, was a onetime protege of the Tammany boss Ed
Flynn and wielded substantial power in the Democratic Party.
Young Roy was precocious and liked to impress his friends by
telephoning famous family friends such as ''Bill'' -Mayor William
O'Dwyer - on the spur of the moment to make small talk. His parents,
particularly his mother, doted on their only child, bragging about how
clever he was.
Indeed he was. By age 20 he had breezed through the Fieldston School
in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, Columbia College and Columbia
Law School.
He had to wait until he was 21 to be admitted to the bar, and the day
he was admitted, he used his political connections to get on the staff
of the United States Attorney in Manhattan. As an assistant United
States Attorney specializing in subversive activities, he was soon to
come to public attention as a boy wonder.
''He was a precocious, brilliant, arrogant young man,'' one of his
contemporaries recalled years later, ''but he performed ably and
energetically on such cases as the William Remington perjury trial,
the Rosenberg spy trial and the big New York trial of top Communist
leaders.''
Mr. Cohn, in the courtoom, was agile, cool and impressive. He became
closely identified in the public eye with the trial of Julius and
Ethel Rosenberg after conducting what was described as a brilliant
direct examination in which David Greenglass identified his sister,
Mrs. Rosenberg, as a member of a Soviet spy ring. The Rosenbergs were
convicted of conspiring to pass atomic secrets to the Russians and
were eventually electrocuted.
In 1950, Irving Saypol, then the United States Attorney, promoted Mr.
Cohn, making him his confidential assistant. By then Mr. Cohn had
built up what amounted to a claque of some reporters and columnists,
including George Sokolsky and Walter Winchell. When Mr. Cohn was to be
transferred to Washington in 1952, to become special assistant to
Attorney General James McGranery, he tipped off his favored
journalists, a practice he was to continue throughout his life.
McCarthy Impressed By Young Lawyer One of Mr. Cohn's first duties in
Washington was to prepare the indictment of Owen Lattimore on perjury
charges. The charges against Mr. Lattimore, a China expert who taught
at Johns Hopkins University, stemmed from the rampaging McCarthy
subcommittee, which in the early 1950's was branding dozens of
Americans -government officials, writers, actors and others - as
traitors, Communists or fellow travelers.
Senator McCarthy, the subcommittee chairman, called Mr. Lattimore
''the top Russian espionage agent in the United States.'' The
indictment of Mr. Lattimore prepared by Mr. Cohn contained seven
charges of perjury, but two charges were dismissed and the others were
ultimately dropped by the Justice Department.
Mr. Cohn, while impressing Senator McCarthy with his efforts in the
Lattimore case, also impressed a House subcommittee investigating the
Justice and State Departments for purported ''foot dragging'' in their
investigations of American Communists supposedly on the staff of the
United Nations. Mr. Cohn strongly implied that most of his Justice
Department superiors had opposed him on making public the grand jury's
findings in the inquiry on United Nations personnel. In the end, the
subcommittee exonerated the Attorney General and his staff, but noted
that Mr. Cohn left it with ''the impression that he is an extremely
bright young man, aggressive in performance of his duties and probably
not free from the pressures of personal ambition.'' It was an
observation that was to be echoed, in one form or another, for years
to come.
By early 1953, Mr. Cohn's brand of anti-Communism had won him so much
admiration from Senator McCarthy, the Wisconsin Republican, who was
the chairman of the Senate's permanent investigations subcommittee,
that Mr. Cohn was named chief counsel to the subcommittee. This was
much to the chagrin of Robert Kennedy, the Democratic minority's
counsel, who coveted the job, and was the beginning of an enmity
between the two men that was to last for years.
To assist Senator McCarthy in his much-publicized crusade to ''root
out Communism in government,'' Mr. Cohn enlisted the services of his
closest friend, his fellow 25-year-old, G. David Schine. Mr. Schine
was the son of J. Myer Schine, a multimillionaire who owned a string
of hotels and movie theaters.
Mr. Schine, who received no pay, was billed as the subcommittee's
consultant on psychological warfare. At Mr. McCarthy's urging, Mr.
Cohn and Mr. Schine made a highly publicized, 18-day tour of Army
bases, embassies and offices of the United States Information Service
in Europe. Their object was to ''see if there's waste and
mismanagement,'' they said, and to determine whether American
officials abroad were sufficiently aware of the dangers of Communism.
Along the way, they charged that Peter Kaghan, a key member of the
staff of the High Commissioner for Germany, had ''once signed a
Communist Party petition.'' That charge impelled Mr. Kaghan to dub the
investigators ''junketeering gumshoes.'' Parts of the press gleefully
picked up the ''gumshoe boys'' label, but Mr. Kaghan was dismissed by
the State Department, which was then reacting to pressures from the
McCarthy committee.
What came to be known as McCarthyism was in its heyday. As they plowed
through investigations of the State Department and the Voice of
America, relentlessly trying to sniff out Communists or their
sympathizers, Mr. Cohn, Mr. Schine and Senator McCarthy, all bachelors
at the time, were themselves the targets of what some called ''reverse
McCarthyism.'' There were snickering suggestions that the three men
were homosexuals, and attacks such as that by the playwright Lillian
Hellman who called them ''Bonnie, Bonnie and Clyde.''
Years later, Mr. Cohn denied that he was ''ever gay-inclined'' and
pointed out that Mr. McCarthy got married and had a son, and that
''Dave Schine married a former Miss Universe and had a bunch of
kids.'' Declaring War On the Army Nevertheless, it was Mr. Cohn's
intense devotion to Mr. Schine at the time they were working for the
McCarthy committee that got them both into serious trouble. After Mr.
Schine was drafted into the Army in November 1953, and Mr. Cohn, with
Senator McCarthy's aid, was unable to help him win a commission, Mr.
Cohn in effect declared war on the Army.
The Army had already run into trouble with the McCarthy committee,
which accused Army Secretary Robert T. Stevens and other officials of
trying to conceal evidence of espionage activities that Mr. Cohn and
his staff were said to have uncovered at Fort Monmouth, N.J. Mr.
McCarthy also pounded the Army with the question ''Who promoted
Peress?'' - a reference to Maj. Irving W. Peress, a dentist from New
York who had refused to sign a loyalty oath.
When Mr. Schine became Private Schine, Mr. Cohn was initially able to
win many concessions for him from the Army, such as nightly passes
while he was in basic training at Fort Dix, N.J., and guarantees that
there would be no noxious kitchen duties for his friend and that he
was to be treated generally as an important person. Finally, however,
Mr. Stevens, fed up with Mr. Cohn's frequent interference on behalf of
Private Schine, released a detailed 34-page report on the Cohn
demands.
Included in the report was Mr. Cohn's threat to ''wreck the Army'' for
not giving Private Schine all the special treatment that had been
sought for him by Mr. Cohn and Senator McCarthy. Mr. Stevens formally
charged Mr. McCarthy, Mr. Cohn and another subcommittee staff member
with seeking by improper means to obtain preferential treatment for
Private Schine.
In the resulting televised Army-McCarthy hearings, Mr. Cohn and
Senator McCarthy were cleared in August 1954 of the Army's charges.
But the public had witnessed Senator McCarthy's often irrational
behavior in action and the methods of McCarthyism in the raw, and the
Senator's popularity quickly began to wane.
Finally, in December 1954, Senator McCarthy was formally censured by
his colleagues, when the Senate voted to ''condemn'' him on a number
of points, including contempt for a Senate elections subcomittee that
had investigated his conduct and financial affairs, and insults to the
Senate itself during the censure proceedings.
After that rebuke, and with the Democrats back in control following
the 1954 elections, Mr. McCarthy's influence in the Senate and on the
national scene steadily diminished until his death in 1957. A
'Has-Been'
Devoted to Work
As for Mr. Cohn, whose job with the McCarthy subcommittee ended in
1954, he seemed at the time to be, as one observer put it, ''the
biggest has-been since Jackie Coogan.'' As it turned out, however,
that could not have been further from the truth.
Joining the New York law firm that became Saxe, Bacon & Bolan, Mr.
Cohn put his family's political power to work, along with his
considerable knowledge of the law. Devoting himself almost entirely to
his work, he brought into the firm a long list of high-paying clients.
So close was he to his job that he even made his New York home in the
East Side town house that served as Saxe, Bacon's offices.
Through the years Mr. Cohn honed his reputation as a ferociously loyal
advocate, one whose courtroom technique was admired even by his
detractors. He seemed always on the attack, intimidating prosecutors,
flustering witnesses and impressing jurors by seldom referring to
notes. He was said to have a photographic memory.
Along the way, Mr. Cohn was slapped with judicial reprimands for
unethical conduct and with civil actions, some brought by former
clients, one of whom sued him for the return of a $109,000 loan. His
conduct in that case led to another one of the allegations that
prompted his disbarment. Another of the charges accused him of lying
on his application to the District of Columbia bar.
Perhaps the darkest disbarment charge concerned the sinking of the
Defiance in 1973. The leased yacht was owned by the Pied Piper Yacht
Charters Corporation, a company whose escrowed funds Mr. Cohn was
accused of having often used as his own.
In Miami, one sea captain pronounced the Defiance unseaworthy and quit
his job. The charter yacht put out to sea with a new captain, a
mysterious fire broke out and the Defiance sank. The captain and two
crew members survived, but another, Charles Martenson, lost his life.
Mr. Martenson's father charged that Mr. Cohn ordered the Defiance
scuttled to collect on a $200,000 insurance policy and was hence
responsible for his son's death.
Denying any part in the affair, Mr. Cohn insisted that the yacht
belonged not to him but to Pied Piper and that he in no way benefited
from the insurance. Actually, court records showed that his law firm
received $15,875 in legal fees, and Mr. Cohn himself was paid almost
$8,000 for personal property lost on the yacht. The balance of the
insurance money went to a dummy corporation set up by Pied Piper.
There was never any evidence presented to connect Mr. Cohn with the
sinking, and for his part, Mr. Cohn refused to rebuke the elder Mr.
Martenson for his allegations.
However, the Defiance case was to figure prominently in Mr. Cohn's
disbarment. The Appellate Division ruled that following the yacht's
sinking, ''the events which ensued cast serious doubts upon'' Mr.
Cohn's ''professional conduct and integrity, both as an attorney and
as an escrow agent.''
Two weeks after an appeal of the disbarment order was denied, Mr. Cohn
entered the National Institutes clinical center in Bethesda. With him
when he died there was his friend and aide, Peter Frazier. The center
specializes in testing experimental therapies for a wide variety of
diseases, among them cancer and AIDS. Mr. Cohn had also received
experimental treatment there in 1985. Acquitted 3 Times In Federal
Court Mr. Cohn's three earlier trials - in 1964, 1969, and 1971, all
in Federal court and all ending in acquittal on a variety of charges,
including fraud, conspiracy and corporate manipulations - were part of
a vendetta to ''get'' him, Mr. Cohn often said.
At times he said his chief persecutor was Robert Kennedy, his fellow
staff counsel on the McCarthy committee, who later became Attorney
General of the United States. Their mutual hatred had been so intense
that at one point during the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954, they got
into a hallway push-and-shove match that nearly turned into a
fistfight.
Mr. Cohn also liked to identify as his chief tormentor Robert
Morgenthau, then the United States Attorney in Manhattan, the son of
Henry M. Morgenthau, the Treasury Secretary in the Franklin D.
Roosevelt Administration. Mr. Cohn maintained that Robert Morgenthau
bore a ''mortal grudge'' against him because, during his McCarthy
days, he ''exposed'' Henry Morgenthau's decision to allow the Soviet
Union to use United States-occupation currency plates briefly at the
end of World War II.
Mr. Cohn was a short, ungainly man with thinning hair and blue eyes,
which were often bloodshot, perhaps because he kept late hours at
fashionable discotheques such as Studio 54 and the Palladium, although
he said he ''adored'' the sun. He also admired animals, chiefly dogs,
and his office contained an extensive collection of stuffed animals.
In his early 50's there were telltale scars in front of and behind Mr.
Cohn's ears, usually signs of having had cosmetic surgery. But he
insisted that he had only had ''an eye operation, not a face lift -
there's been a pull.'' He said the surgery was to correct his
heavy-lidded appearance.
Despite his tan, Mr. Cohn's bantam body (he weighed 145 pounds) gave
the impression that his physique was fragile, but he kept in shape by
water-skiing on Long Island Sound near his Greenwich home. A Royal
Life On Expense Account A lifelong bachelor, he lived extremely well.
To avoid high taxes, he drew a comparatively low salary of $100,000 a
year from his law firm, which compensated him further, and regally, by
giving him a rent-free Manhattan apartment, paying part of the rent on
his Greenwich home, supplying him with the use of a chauffeured
Rolls-Royce and other fine cars and paying all his bills at expensive
restaurants such as Le Cirque, ''21'' and many others. These expenses
were said to run to $1 million a year.
Mr. Cohn's friends, some of whom said they loved him despite his
roguish ways, prized his ability to represent them in court or just to
get them tickets to sports events and the theater or easy entry into a
popular discotheque.
''My idea of real power is not people who hold office,'' he said in
1979. ''They're here today and gone tomorrow. Power means the ability
to get things done. It stems from friendship in my case. My business
life is my social life.''
He seemed to relish the fact that most of his fellow lawyers looked
down on him and his tactics, contending that he gave their profession
a bad name. ''I'm pleased to say that among my hundreds of really
close friends, few are lawyers,'' he said. Yet he seemed pleased when
told that another flamboyant lawyer, Melvin Belli of San Francisco,
had said of Mr. Cohn: ''He's a good lawyer. He has two of the classic
prerequisites. First, he has imagination. Second, he has guts. And it
helps he knows the law.''
It mattered little to Mr. Cohn that he was called ''a legal
executioner'' by Esquire, that the American Lawyer magazine labeled
him an ''an embarrassment'' and that the National Law Journal
pronounced him an ''assault specialist.''
He shrugged off such criticism, as well as accusations that had
continued over the years that he was a ''Red-baiter'' and a
''McCarthyite.'' In fact, he seemed to cherish the celebrity that
Senator McCarthy maintained even long after his death, and did not
mind sharing that limelight.
''His name is still a household word,'' Mr. Cohn said. ''It will never
go away.'' He added, when asked about his own part in making
McCarthyism a household word: ''I sleep well at night. I won't be
saying 'please forgive me' on my deathbed.''
Mr. Cohn is survived by an aunt, Libby Marcus, of New York City.
Funeral services will be private.
CORRECTION:
An obituary of Roy M. Cohn on Aug. 3 misidentified a staff member of
the High Commissioner for Germany who resigned during an investigation
by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's subcommittee in 1953. The official,
who admitted having signed a nominating petition for a Communist
candidate for the New York City Council in 1939 but denied having been
a member of the Communist Party, was Theodore Kaghan, not Peter
Kaghan.An obituary of Roy M. Cohn on Aug. 3 incorrectly reported his
educational background. Mr. Cohn was a graduate of the Horace Mann
School.The obituary of Roy M. Cohn on Sunday incorrectly described
Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's family. He had one daughter.
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Photo:
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The Snarling Death Of Roy M. Cohn
Elevated By Joe McCarthy, Felled By AIDS, He Went With No Regrets
FROM: Life Magazine (March of 1988) ~
By By Nicholas von Hoffman
Four months before the end, a haggard Cohn posed willingly, just as he
'd sought the spotlight with McCarthy 35 years earlier.
A the time of his death on August 2, 1986, Roy Cohn was 59 and a
generation had come to adulthood knowing of no senator named Joe
McCarthy. But people born in the 1940s or earlier remember Cohn and
his master performing on television. They remember coming home to be
hushed by a mother or aunt who was watching the hearings; they
remember a father's opinion, expressed at the family table when
families still ate together. Roy served as chief counsel on Senator
McCarthy's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. But exactly what
was the subversive menace that Cohn investigated?
Today the United States, alone among the major democracies, has no
Communists, no socialists, no anarchists, no left wing political
groups except in microscopic numbers. Few Americans under 50 have seen
or heard a Communist who didn't speak with a foreign accent. The
purging of American society in which Roy Cohn took such a conspicuous
part in the early 1950s may seem like a gratuitously malevolent
lunacy. In actuality, domestic Communism posed a problem like that
posed by the Catholic Church to Protestant England in Elizabeth I's
time. Both were sometimes public, sometimes clandestine organizations
ideologically connected to a foreign power. Some of the members of the
CPUSA were connected to the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin.
The fact that these smart, tough men and women often did not identify
themselves as Communists gave non Communists a permanent case of the
jitters. Citizens were taken before commissions, subcommittees, grand
juries, courts and other instruments of inquiry. They were asked, by
Roy Cohn and others, that terrible question: "Are you now or have you
ever been a member of the Communist party?
For younger people, however, Roy Cohn was simply another name for a
trčs smart lawyer, for Disco Dan, for the international, I go by
private plane man. He hosted parties in Washington; he was a lawyer
with famous friends and rich, rich clients. He was a figure very tough
and in on things, a champion of the underdog, though definitely
running with the overdog pack. He nested on the nighttime radio call
in shows; he spread his wings over Koppel on Nightline. He appeared to
be able to avoid all taxes and all penalties, maybe because he was
connected, or on the A list, or known to the headwaiters and hostesses
of New York.
But just as his Communist foes hid their secret beliefs, Roy Cohn hid
his private life as a homosexual. When AIDS killed him in the bloom of
the Reagan years, the public discourse had turned to family values and
Americanism. The triumph of patriotic kitsch must have pleased Cohn,
for he himself reveled in little flag waving displays. At his parties
he'd haul people to their feet to sing "God Bless America," evidently
his favorite song, and though he was a lifelong operagoer, Roy's idea
of a good time was to sing patriotic ditties at a piano bar in
Provincetown, on Cape Cod. A friend recalled going home early one
summer evening, and, on inquiring the next morning about the rest of
the night, being told, "We all stood around the piano. Roy sang three
choruses of 'God Bless America,' got a hard on and went home to bed."
My vision of him in my youth was like everybody else's. I was living
down in Texas, reading about the McCarthy era and was appalled, since
I was a very liberal kid, raised in a liberal tradition, and I thought
he was just the devil incarnate. But after I came to New York and was
a little more cynical myself I got a big kick out of watching him
operate here. This (New York) was really his dominion. And, you know,
to the end of his life he remained this very strange Jewish son who
was still trying to please his mother and father's portrait over his
piano. Liz Smith, syndicated gossip columnist.
Labor Day, 1984. Provincetown was readying itself for another night of
dancing and partying, for this was the last holiday of the season.
Lying on a chaise on the deck of Roy's cottage, Russell Eldridge was
sick. He was 20 years younger than Roy, but misfortune had come to
Russell first. At one time or another Russell had done everything for
Roy but get into bed with him. He had mixed the drinks, cut Roy's
hair, brought in the cash from Roy's various businesses. He ran
strange errands, such as rounding up the night's boys at the Boat Slip
bar in Provincetown. Gay people, straight people cottoned to Russell.
He had a way of being a part of Roy's madnesses and yet standing apart
from them, looking on with sardonic good humor. Years ago he was
supposed to have been wicked, the mean kind of man hustler. He had
outgrown his bad self, but now Russell was 50 pounds lighter, a
shaking scarecrow, wrapped in towels and lying on Roy's deck.
There had been great times in Provincetown, but this time Russell
hadn't wanted to come. He couldn't even walk by himself. "He knew he'd
have to pretend he was feeling better than he was for Roy," Russell's
friend Sue Greenig remembers. "That's what he did until he couldn't
pretend anymore." Roy acted as if there were nothing wrong with
Russell, though he knew the virus was in both their bodies. Roy wasn't
admitting it, and Russell shouldn't either.
Roy would look at Russell and say, "Let's go to dinner," and they all
would put Russell in the car and go, but Russell wasn't able to eat.
Roy wasn't being cruel. "He was very good with him," Sue says, "but he
refused to let him know that he knew Russell was really sick. Roy
didn't want anybody to baby him." At the same time Roy could be heard
blowing up at Roger, the houseboy, because he didn't bring Russell
orange juice or water quickly enough.
The cottage was jammed with holiday people. It was a small place:
Upstairs Peter Fraser and Roy shared the big bedroom, Sue and Russell
were in the small one, and downstairs more casual friends came and
went. "That's the way he liked it," Sue says. "People stacked up." Roy
wasn't permitting any dying on these premises. "Russell doesn't have
AIDS," he'd say. "He is fine; he is going to be O.K."
It was about a year after Russell's diagnosis that Roy was given his,
and it happened the same way, beginning with a visit to the doctor's
office for a small nothing. Roy apparently cut himself shaving, and it
wouldn't stop bleeding. "He went to the doctor," one of Cohn's friends
recalls, "and they removed two growths plus something on his leg."
Roy's own account, which may be less than 100 percent reliable, was
that he was in his plane flying to Washington when the call came
through on the radiotelephone telling him that a growth on his ear was
malignant. His story to the end was that he had cancer, not AIDS.
Roy thought he'd have six months to live, although in fact he would
have two years. To his lover Peter Fraser, 28, it seemed that Roy
dealt with the news very practically. "When he found out, he didn't
cry but a couple of tears," Peter says. "He was thinking about his
Aunt Libby and his friends who would be affected by him dying. He
tried to make sure I would be taken care of."
Yet Cohn would die hard; he would clamp onto the doorjambs, and when
death yanked him through to the other side, he would go without grace
and without the consolations of philosophy, arms flailing, legs
kicking. But for now, in the summer of '84, he made ready. He took out
his yellow legal pads and worked on his memoirs. "He just started
doing it on the boat or in the sun somewhere," Peter says. "He'd write
longhand, page after page after page."
The only child of Dora and Albert Cohn was born on February 20, 1927,
at Manhattan's Woman's Hospital. Roy's father was a judge who had
married into the well to do Marcus family. "When Roy was born, he was
a cute little baby, an adorable looking kid, but he had a little spur
on his nose and that drove Dora crazy," one of the family says. "She
took him to some surgeon or other who botched the job of trying to get
rid of the spur. All his life Roy had that scar down his nose."
Roy lived at home until Dora died in 1969. He was a middle aged man
before he and this driving, loving, shy, combative woman parted. The
young lawyers who worked in Cohn's law office in the '50s and '60s,
after he'd returned from Washington, were amused by Dora. They were
fond of her in a teasing way. Howard Krantz, one of the associates,
recalls that she had a slight speech impediment that caused her to
call her son Woy. Dora also called him "my child" so often they came
to refer to Roy as "the child."
Having one's mother wandering around one's law office is not the way a
practice is ordinarily run, but Roy always said that he mixed his
personal and professional lives so thoroughly that they were an
amalgam. It was thought he said this only because on his tax returns
he wrote off his personal spending as business costs. But Roy was
speaking the truth. Mother came and went in the office, and business
meetings were often held at Dora's Park Avenue apartment.
Roy would leave a note at night: "Wake me up at ten o'clock " This was
1959. One morning Nixon called. Dora picked up the phone at a quarter
of ten. He said, "Hello, is Ro ythere? "She said, "Who's calling,
please? "He said, "This is Vice President Nixon. "And she said, "Could
you call him back in fifteen minutes?" He said "Well, I'm at the
airport and I'm getting a plane to Washington. " She said, "I suggest
you call him when you get to Washington. ' Neil Walsh, a childhood
friend of Cohn's
Roy never fussed over anyone the way his mother had fussed over him.
But that summer on the Cape, there was a tenderness in the way he
helped Russell Eldridge down to the beach. His neighbors next door
were struck by his solicitude markedly different from the pro forma,
stylized gestures they were familiar with. For example, Roy asked them
to give a dinner party for TV personality Barbara Walters, his friend
for 30 years. In the 1950s the two had dated (Roy even said they'd
been engaged). Now, visiting the Cape, Barbara was bored and without
inner resources, according to Roy. So he made this big, ostentatious
entertainment gesture and afterward sent the hosts flowers. But what
he did for Russell was private, done for Russell alone.
Russell died in January 1985. Roy and Peter and Ed Gillis, another
friend, were in Florida at the time. They flew back the next day, and
at dinner that night Gillis said, "Roy didn't cry, and he wasn't about
to cry. He was angry but very reserved in his anger, and maybe he just
cursed the disease and talked about how he had been trying to get
somebody in the Office of Management and Budget to increase funding
for research."
The politicians of the gay community held it against Roy, when he was
stricken, for not facing the lenses, telling the world he had the
disease and campaigning for money for research. Apparently Cohn didn't
use his power or his contacts to help when he was uniquely positioned
to do so. But Peter Fraser is certain Roy worked behind the scenes.
"While this [his illness] was going on," Fraser says, "Roy made a call
and got a large amount of money-many millions of dollars. Of course,
he would never tell anyone he had done it."
Roy decreed that there should be a memorial service for Russell in the
town house on East 68th Street, the moldering old building in
Manhattan where Cohn lived and kept his law offices. There was a
controversy over whether the casket should be open or closed. Before
it was resolved, Roy had a screaming fit about the undertaker,
swearing he'd have the man's license pulled.
The large second-floor living room where Roy had his
caviar-and-champagne parties was so crowded that some people had to
stand in the hall. Roy, with that marvelous memory still working for
him, recited a poem by Omar Khayyam that he said had been his father's
favorite. Russell Eldridge was dead, and now Roy was facing the last
full year of his own life.
During the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, Cohn was testifying on the
stand and he used the moment to pay tribute to Tailgunner Joe
[McCarthy]. Afterward we were standing outside the Senate Caucus Room
when we were approached by a little old lady. And she really was just
that. This tiny little woman with white hair, wearing tennis shoes,
with tears coming from her eyes. "Oh, Mr. Cohn, " she said "I just
couldn't believe your wonderful tribute to the senator. It meant so
much to me. " Cohn turned to me-although she was standing right
there-with that cold look he had. "I almost believed it myself "he
said. She looked like she had been hit with a whip, and l said to him:
"You dirty SOB."-historian William Manchester.
People would put the question to Roy, but the only ones who knew for
certain that Cohn had AIDS were Peter Fraser and law partner Tom
Bolan. Robert Blecker recalls going to see Cohn at his small stone
house in Greenwich, Conn., a charming place in a glen by the side of a
fast-running brook. Blecker, a New York Law School professor, had
ghost-written one of Roy's books. "We talked a lot about life and the
meaning of it, and his illness," Blecker says. "I asked Roy, 'You
don't have AIDS, do you?' And he said, 'Oh, God, no! If I had AIDS, I
would have thrown myself out the window of the hospital. I have liver
cancer. There would be no reason to stick around and live if I had
AIDS.' He was denying it to somebody who knew he was gay-with whom he
was open about being gay-and who knew he was very sick."
For as long as he could, as hard as he could, Roy forced himself to
carry on his normal life. He lunched, he partied, he water-skied, he
traveled. He kept the telephone in his ear; he kept moving in
business, politics, deal making and even in sex. And he continued to
practice what one colleague called his "other perversion "-publicity.
New York lawyer Roy Cohn is flanked by U.S. Information Agency
Director Charles Wick and Sen. Chic Hecht (R.-Nev.) after Cohn
received the Americanism Award at a Washington reception over the
weekend. President Reagan congratulated Cohn via video.-the New York
Post March 1985
Peter Fraser had been delighted to meet the President when Roy took
him to dinner at the White House a few years before. Peter traveled as
Cohn's "office manager." "We went into a small room," Fraser recalls.
"Several people were milling there. Roy said, 'Why don't you come meet
a friend of mine?' As I was walking over, I scuffed my shoe and the
sole came off. I was dragging my foot so I wouldn't go flop-flop, and
Roy said, 'I want you to meet the President and Mrs. Reagan.' The
President was very warm. He was probably so nice to me because he
thought I was handicapped. This poor boy dragging his foot."
Peter and Roy were a complementary pair-Roy from the grand world and
Peter from a distant rural one. He had grown up on a farm in New
Zealand. The name Roy Cohn didn't evoke in Peter what it did in
Americans. "People would ask me how could I be associated with
somebody who did all these awful things in the 1950s," he says. "I
don't know about any of that.
"Once, at a lunch given by [New York socialite] C.Z. Guest, he
introduced me as Sir Peter Fraser. I thought: Oh, God! What are you
doing? The next day it was in the Eugenia Sheppard column. She wrote
about who came to C.Z.'s for lunch-Peter Fraser, the Prime Minister of
New Zealand."
Roy liked to play games with his friends in the gossip columns, and
not always nice ones. A lawyer closely associated with Roy in the
1960s remembers, "He once let something happen in a column, something
like, 'Rumors are circulating that Roy Cohn may be tying the knot with
So-and-so.' Miss So-and-so would be calling the office to talk to him
because she didn't know anything about it. He'd dodge her. His
secretary would say, 'So-and-so is calling. She's called four times
this morning. She wants to know about the Jack O'Brian column.' He'd
say, 'Tell her I'll talk to her tomorrow. I gotta run.' And it was he
who planted the item!"
In the early 1950s my wife and I lived in a small one-room apartment
on West 70th Street, and we had Roy to dinner. I had known Roy since
we went to high school together. I remember Roy came in and said, "Can
I use the telephone? "He dialed the operator and said so we could hear
it "Get me Walter Winchell at the Boca Raton Hotel in Boca Raton,
Florida. "He got Winchell on the phone, and he proceeded to plot out
with Winchell how to do something nasty to Jimmy Wechsler. James
Wechsler had been a young Communist, but by then he was a columnist on
the New York Post, or perhaps even the editor, and had long since
given that up. And here was Roy Cohn saying, "Now, Walter, we could
play this up, and we could do that, "and listening to this thing, I
should have said, if I had had any guts, "Roy, that's outrageous,
please leave. "But I didn't.-Anthony Lewis, columnist for The New York
Times
Roy wanted to do everything and go everywhere one more time. Half his
life he had spent traveling. He could never stay still, he didn't have
the attention span for it, so in the summer of 1985 he took off for
Monte Carlo. When he got back, he took off in the August heat for
Israel with Peter and two Republican senators, Jesse Helms from North
Carolina and Chic Hecht, a backbencher from Nevada who was devoted to
Roy. The Israeli military took their important guests off on
automobile and airplane tours; they kept moving until eight o'clock in
the evening.
All the while Roy was taking shots of Interferon, which, says Peter,
not only was sapping his body but, worse, was affecting Roy's mind.
"It wasn't so much a dementia, it was more disorientation and
confusion. Sometimes he would all of a sudden realize he'd said
something totally wacky." This would panic Roy, and then depress him,
because the one thing he'd always prided himself on was his intellect,
being fast on his feet. "How he ever struggled through that trip..."
marvels Tom Bolan. "When he came back, he had had it."
With his old friends, Roy no longer had the self-mastery to hide his
trouble. Barbara Walters recalls an emotional lunch they had in a
restaurant when he returned from Israel. As the tears ran down his
face, she tried to distract him with news and bits of gossip.
Afterward she told friends that if his cancer was a judgment from God,
then Roy Cohn had been punished enough.
He was engaged at one time to Barbara Walters and his mother broke
that up. Dora used to call me and say, "Have you seen him out with
'that girl'?" She'd say, "I'm not mentioning the name. "Id say, "Then
don't ask me. "Barbara took it long enough, and I guess Roy realized
it wouldn't work out. -Mrs. George Sokolsky, widow of the Hearst
newspaper columnist of the 1950s
By the fall of '85 Roy was having trouble breathing and was suffering
from short-term memory loss. The Roy Cohn barter-and-swap exchange,
specializing in deals, favors and reciprocities of all kinds, was in
abeyance. When Si Newhouse's son Sam wanted the impossible-a berth for
his yacht at the East 23rd Street marina-the chore fell to one of
Roy's law partners, Stanley Friedman. (Friedman was later to be
convicted on unrelated corruption charges.) For 40 years Roy had been
taking care of the Newhouses, billionaire owners of newspapers and
magazines, and for 40 years the Newhouses had been taking care of Roy.
No longer.
In early November he went to Bethesda, Md., outside Washington, for
treatment at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. He
used his clout to get to the head of the line for AZT, then an
experimental drug. But as he began his long dying, Cohn lost control
over the image he had always projected of himself. Ambitious
reporters, greedy people, old enemies began to move in on his secrets.
"Roy Cohn Reported on Verge of Death," blared the New York Daily News,
the city's largest circulation paper. The little Chelsea Clinton News
headlined, "Cohn Has AIDS?" and then answered its own question: "Roy
Cohn, reported in the Daily News and The New York Times as having
liver cancer, is being treated by Dr. Bijan Safai, whose field of
expertise is Kaposi's sarcoma, a form of AIDS."
The deathwatch was on. Michelle Golden, a young real estate dealer and
daughter of a powerful Brooklyn politician, calculated the commercial
opportunities. She began calling Roy's law firm in hopes of getting
the listing for the town house on 68th Street. It would sell for
millions, and so Golden persisted, phoning seven times and meeting
twice with Stanley Friedman about future dispositions of property. Roy
would have appreciated her grasping hand.
Cohn responded to the AZT. But the files hint at a not wholly
cooperative patient: ". Reinforce need for celibate state . Caution
against spread of disease . Pat [patient] stat'd somewhat reluctant to
become celibate. On the other hand, "Patient asked for information on
sexual practices. I [an unnamed doctor) stated that the safest sex was
none but if he wanted to have sex, he would need to use condoms and
especially inform his partner that he had AIDS."
Roy wasn't confined to the hospital. Once he went to downtown
Washington for lunch, and he made sure the event found its way into
the gossip columns. There was a fighting, in character quote: "I'm
recovering faster and better than anyone anticipated. Those people who
have had me at death's door may be surprised to see Roy Cohn leaving
his deathbed to have lunch at the posh Madison Hotel in Washington."
Peter Fraser, however, remembers the bouts of dementia. "He would say
things like, "The six senators who were here this afternoon I'm going
to talk to them, and you are all going to be sorry.' That wasn't Roy,
it was the disease."
Peter goes on: "Once I woke up, hearing him, and asked, 'Roy, what's
wrong?' This was the one time he reacted negatively to me. He said,
'You! You tried to kill me. Get out!' It wasn't until about seven a.m.
we were up all night with the doctors, talking to him that he was
finally convinced I hadn't tried to kill him and that I was his
friend." They would celebrate Thanksgiving six times because Roy
couldn't remember eating the turkey.
After three weeks of treatments, Cohn was discharged on November 23.
Telegrams came. "I just learned that you are being sent home from the
hospital," read one. "Nancy and I are keeping you in our thoughts and
prayers. May our Lord bless you with courage and strength. Take care
and know that you have our concern. Ronald Reagan." During the last
months, there was a succession of such messages. Each one was framed
and hung in the den of the house in Greenwich.
In Palm Beach before Christmas, Roy told Lois Romano of the Washington
Post that his liver cancer was in remission. But he confessed to
musing about his funeral. "I've envisioned who would be strong enough
to give the eulogy," he said. "I've even imagined White House
meetings, with them trying to decide whether the President or Mrs.
Reagan would attend. [I've imagined] what this senator said, what that
senator said. It was really as though I had passed away and I was back
on the scene from some place above or below."
In March 1986, looking awful, Roy was interviewed on 60 Minutes. Mike
Wallace put it to him: Are you now or have you ever been a homosexual?
Ditto with AIDS. Roy fought it off the best he could: "I'll tell you
categorically, I do not have AIDS." Well, then how did all this talk
about you get started? "Oh, it's a cinch, Mike. Take this set of
facts: bachelor, unmarried, middle aged -well, young middle aged. The
stories go back to the [McCarthy] days."
At home he talked about suicide. He would use his store of Valium and
sleeping pills, he told Peter. "One night I woke up," Fraser says,
"and I heard the rattling of the pills and the bottles. Roy was out of
bed going through his medicine bag, trying to open bottles that he
could never open, because they're all childproof."
"What are you doing?" Peter wanted to know.
"I'm trying to get enough pills to finish it," Roy told him.
"O.K."
"I can't get the damn bottle open .... Open it."
"No," Peter said, "you open it, and if you can't, go back to bed." Roy
threw the bottles down and went back to bed.
As attached as he was to Peter, Roy still kept in contact with other
boyfriends. Peter says, "Of course, I used to get extremely jealous.
He would fly Mark in every couple of months from San Francisco. He
would always try to keep it secret, and I would always find out. Roy
used to think I had a spy. I'd see the tickets being delivered to the
office, or I'd see a bill from the travel agent, and I'd make Roy's
life miserable."
"What's he coming in for?" Peter would demand.
"I'm dying, goddamit! "Roy would shout back. "It may be the last time
I see him."
"You said that the last four times!"
The New York Bar Association had begun disbarment proceedings against
Cohn. He was charged with unethical conduct in four old cases he'd
handled. One of Roy's defense team remembers that rather than slipping
discreetly into the closed hearing room that spring, Roy would tool
down Fifth Avenue in a red Cadillac, top down, and swagger into the
NYBA offices. In federal trials in 1964, 1969 and 1971 Roy had been
acquitted on a variety of more serious charges. But this time his
enemies prevailed. Peter Fraser was with Roy in Greenwich when he got
the news in June that he was a lawyer no more.
"I had been taking all his calls and making all his calls for him,"
says Peter. "But he happened to be by the phone as it rang. He picked
it up and it was [TV reporter] Gabe Pressman, asking if Roy had any
comment on his disbarment.
Of course Roy said, '1 couldn't care less.' Then he went up to his
room. He talked to Tom Bolan and cried, and from that day on I had to
force him to eat. He just wouldn't eat."
In July, instead of taking off for Provincetown as he'd always done,
Roy went to the hospital again in Maryland, his last trip. Shortly
before he left, a friend going away on vacation popped in, and Roy
told him, "I don't think I'll be here when you come back, so goodbye."
In New York it was common knowledge that Roy was hospitalized again.
Among those gays who'd made the disco scene in the last wild years
before the plague, there were remarks to the effect that if anybody
would get the infection, it would have to be Roy M. Cohn, such was his
behavior. One man, seized with a hatred of operatic proportions, went
around Greenwich Village boasting that he had arranged to put Roy
together with an infected lover. The story was malarkey, but it showed
the depth of Roy's still unforgiven crimes.
During the last few weeks of Cohn's life a Jack Anderson Dale Van Atta
column publicized inside information about his AZT treatments and his
ghastly suffering. The two journalists were attacked for breaking the
seal of medical secrecy, and the NIH let it be known that prosecution
was not out of the question, thereby certifying the story.
If he had been able to add his voice to the quarreling about this last
shot of publicity, doubtless Roy would have come down against
Anderson, whom he'd broken with long ago. However, before falling
sick, Roy had told a friend that at the beginning of the Nixon
McGovern campaign of 1972, it was he who had arranged for Senator
Thomas Eagleton's medical history to be made public. The news that the
Democratic candidate for Vice President had once been treated with
electroshock therapy for depression forced Eagleton off the ticket. Of
course, Roy didn't do everything he said he did. He liked to take
credit for other men's villainies when he could.
At about six in the morning, before the August heat could build, death
finally stilled him. Roy in his hospital bed gasped his last, and
Peter was there holding his hand. Some 400 or more came to the
memorial service in October, including Senator Hecht, but not the
President and First Lady. It must have been a prickly problem for the
Reagans, who practiced the politics of propriety with the same
unyielding rigidity as Roy had. Perhaps on account of their show
business background, the Reagans have a history of personal tolerance
toward homosexuals. Several worked on his gubernatorial staff in
California until a scandal forced their resignations. Yet during all
these years, Ronald Reagan, like Roy himself, has never supported gay
rights legislation. In his casket Roy wore a tie bearing the
President's name.
He gives not only to big charities, but little charities. I can give
you dozens of instances. A man who loves people, loves animals. He
once jumped into a river to save a dog. He is a man who likes to help
the underdog. He has always been a sucker for a letter from a person
in prison, much to his great disappointment later, but he has helped
people without counsel. He has helped big people, judges, lawyers,
without fee, because he felt the charges against them were unfair. He
does the work of any five lawyers. Tom Bolan, testifying at the
disbarment hearings of Roy Cohn.
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