Roy Cohn: ‘The Evil Forrest Gump of the 20th Century’

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0:32I'm Carlos Ozada, a columnist for New York Times Opinion. And I'm here today with my colleague, Michelle Cottle, who covers national politics for Times Opinion. Michelle, it's great to see you back here. Carlos, always a pleasure. We're also joined by the historian Nicole Hemmer, who's a professor at Vanderbilt and focuses on media and conservatism and the presidency. Nikki, welcome. Big welcome. Thank you so much for having me. Go Doors. The reason we wanted to have you is because today we're going to talk about a figure from the country's past who still looms quite large. And that is the lawyer and all-purpose political fixer Roy Cohn, who's also the subject of a new biography by Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark called very unsubtly American Scoundrel.

1:23Cohn came to national prominence and infamy during the Red Scare of the 50s when he was chief counsel to Senator Joe McCarthy. So not only was he a force behind McCarthyism and something of a pop culture villain, what he became over time, but as Donald Trump's lawyer in the 70s and 80s, he also really helped shape a lot of Trump's approach to power, which, of course, we're still living with today. So Michelle, Nicole, this is going to be the all Roy Cohn radio hour. That's fantastic. That's a long time to spend with Roy Cohn, but he is a figure that deserves the time. It can be tempting when you're reading biographies or histories to always be hunting for the relevance to right now, right?

2:08To connect the dots from there to here. I try to be cautious about that. So I'm not just looking at history through the lens of my own particular moment. But when I read American Scoundrel, it's very hard to not see on just about every page just a very clear echo and connection between Cohn's life and work and our current era of American politics. So let's start there. How did Roy Cohn, who died in the 80s, influence Donald Trump and his exercise of power? What did he instill in him? Michelle, why don't you kick us off? Oh, Lord, you don't have to hunt for that. It is slapping you in the face in every chapter.

2:51It is as though Donald Trump sat at his knee at a master class of how to become a malignant narcissist and dominate the world around you. I mean, whether you're talking about big things like Cohn's philosophy of, you know, never apologize, never admit that you're wrong, when attack, just hit back harder until the people crumble around you, to, you know, just like this idea that rules are for suckers and you should violate every protocol you come across. You know that whole saying of it's easier to ask forgiveness and permission? Well, neither of those apply. It's just take what you can get, break what you can, and then dare somebody to come at you.

3:35So you have those big things, but then you also have little things like don't leave a paper trail, court the tabloids, don't pay your bills unless you absolutely have to. So it's just this just brilliant guide to watching a proto-Trump kind of create the mess that we're in right now. Yeah. And that idea of a proto-Trump, it raises some questions to me about your question, Carlos, which is Cohn's influence on Trump. And I think it's hard to say how much of the similarities between the two men is because Trump was the protege of Cohn or just that they're the same kind of political archetype. that they came up in the same aloo in a lot of ways.

4:20They were surrounded by amoral people and criminals who were making tons of money, and they are sort of walking in the same footsteps. And so because this is a biography of Cohn and not of Trump, we don't know all of the other influences on Trump that also helped to shape him into this particular type of person. And I think the other challenge with tracing the influence question is, I don't know if you noticed this, but in the sections where Cohn is talking about his influence on Trump and Trump is talking about his relationship with Cohn, you're just sitting there like this is like an unreliable narrator dance off where these two people are telling stories about their past.

5:07And you have no idea how much of it is actually true and how much of it is that they are both so practiced and adept at the art of self-aggrandizement and so unhitched from fealty to reality that you just kind of get them both saying like these big braggadocious things about one another and how they shape one another's careers. But that said, like as an archetype, I think Michelle has hit on so many of the things that just again on every single page, you know, it's not a book about Trump, but you're thinking about Trump as you're reading it pretty much the entire time. I do think that that tabloid savvy strikes me as something that he particularly learned from Cohn.

5:53You know, Cohn grew up next to the people who would end up running the National Enquirer. He's somebody who delighted in seeing his name in gossip sheets and tabloids, right? It was less about like being on the front page of the New York Times and more about like, am I going to be in these tabloids and in these papers that people are reading almost in more of a like celebrity way? It's interesting to draw that distinction that you make between just in what ways were their lives similar because they kind of grew up in a in a similar time in a similar environment. And in how many ways did did Cohn specifically influence Trump from an early age?

6:33Both of them really traded on their father's influence and in Trump's case, wealth. You know, Cohn's father was a was a New York judge. and when he was 16, one of his high school teachers got a traffic ticket and Cone calls the police precinct and says, look, I'm sure you know who my dad is, right? You know, Cone was indicted a bunch of times and managed to escape. You know, he was always under IRS audit, right? Like there's some very, it's very similar lives that these two men led, you know, sometimes in substantive and just sort of stylistic ways. They both had this performative populism, you know, where like talking about the working man while Cohn is riding around in his Rolls Royce or on his luxury yacht, which is called the Defiance, which is such a perfect name for Roy Cohn's yacht.

7:20There's one moment in the book where Roy Cohn is, I think he was interviewed for like Penthouse Magazine or something. He said, quote, I decided long ago to make my own rules, to act according to my own choices, my own judgments, my own conscience, right? And this immediately reminded me of Trump's interview earlier this year with New York Times reporters. He's asked about constraints on his own power. And he says, it's only my own morality, my own mind. It's the only thing that can stop me. And that, you know, to me, that was such a clear echo of Cohn talking about how really, you know, the rules don't matter.

8:03Because the question to Trump was in the context of international law and the rest. He's like, no, forget all that stuff. It doesn't matter. And here Kohn is saying, look, no, it's only, you know, my own judgment, my own conscience, my own choices. And to me, that's one of the core sort of parallels or similarities or lessons, however you want to adjudicate that, between these two men. That sort of ultimate self-confidence paired with ultimate disdain for rules and traditions and norms. Rules are for little people. That's right. Well, it's something that was reinforced for him his entire life.

8:40There's this little, it's such a small thing, but it really jumped out at me when he was at Columbia as an undergrad. He was supposed to take math and gym, and he didn't want to take either of them because they were requirements, but he didn't want to do it. And so he talks to a dean and talks his way out of it. And he talks about it later, and he's like, what's compulsory if you have friends? Right? The rules don't count if you're connected enough and you can just get out of it. And I don't want to be like broken windows policing about how to keep people like Cone from emerging as adults. But maybe not letting him get away with little things might have disabused him of the notion that he could get away with the big things when he was older.

9:23Leave it to the college professor who wants to keep the requirements in place. That's right. Everyone take the required classes. All right. So let's step back and actually get into the meat of this book. For those listening and watching who haven't yet read American Scoundrel, Michelle, what is this book actually about? What's the story that's being told? So it is a classic Kyber deep dive into the wild ride that was Roy Cohn's life. I mean, he, He, you know, Bert is great at doing these very involved portraits. So I loved some of the early stuff from his childhood and how overindulged he was by his mother.

10:09You know, as you mentioned, just how much he relied on his father's connections and how early he learned to be a fixer. It takes you up through the McCarthy era. And then just everything from his time at Studio 54 to his business shenanigans. There's a chapter called Political Shenanigans and then Shady Business Deals or something like this. I think everything is in there. And you can, it's so amazing just what a character he was. I was just constantly going through thinking regular people, normal people are not equipped to deal with someone like this. Just the kind of force of nature coming through, totally shameless, just through sheer force of will dominating the world around them, whether it's the Justice Department, the Eisenhower presidency or private law firms later on.

11:06And he was just a complete monster on some level. And I do think absolutely Trump is the new incarnation of that. The other thing that really jumped out at me from the book is, you know, there's this moment early on when he's like 10 and he goes to Washington, D.C., and he and his dad hang out with Justice Benjamin Cardozo. And then he goes into the Oval Office and he meets Franklin Roosevelt. And actually every chapter of the book is like this, where some famous person suddenly emerges and he's somehow connected to them as friends. It's Barbara Walters. It's Andy Warhol. It's somebody in just about every single chapter to the point where you're just like, this guy is like the evil Forrest Gump of the 20th century.

11:54He's there everywhere in this way that I don't think that I had fully appreciated until I read this. The story about him arranging, helping arrange Barbara Walters' adoption of her daughter, I'm like, what? What is going on? It was, Andy, everybody from, you know, the conservative or it didn't matter your politics. He was completely non-ideological in some ways. And so he befriended everyone who saw that charming side. You had to kind of be important, I think. Absolutely. I was just thinking about, you know, that Barbara Walters story. And he had earlier helped her dad get out of some legal trouble that he was having.

12:34He's somebody whose relationships were deeply transactional. I don't think that he could conceive a friendship outside of this idea of a loyalty that is bound by the trading of favors or him doing things for other people. that power is sort of the metric by which he understands his relationship to other people. And his favors are the ways that he wields his power and accesses other people's power. Well, I mean, obviously, Cohn's this character who's been around and been profiled, and there have been documentaries and movies. He appears in Angels in America. He's this figure that we all have kind of known something about.

13:16What's new about this? What more do you think we're getting out of this particular portrait? Yeah, you know, you're right. There has been a ton about him over the decades. There was another big book about him in the 80s called Citizen Cone. And when you've been played in movies by James Woods and Al Pacino and Jeremy Strong, that's kind of an amazing trifecta. But when I think about what's new here, I kind of think of it in terms of what's new in Kai Bird's body of work, right? And he gets into this a little bit towards the end of the book. You know, he's a student of the American establishment, right?

13:56His prior subjects have been, you know, presidents like Jimmy Carter, advisors like McGeorge Bundy, you know, scientists like Robert Oppenheimer, right? His first book was subtitled The Making of the American Establishment about John J. McCloy. And Roy Cohn kind of appears in lots of these stories, but just as this figure kind of lurking in the background, you know, not the essential figure, but just kind of hovering this sort of anti-establishment force within the establishment story. Now, especially with the rise of Donald Trump, Cohen's politics, right? Those rules that you talked about, Michelle, they've won, right?

14:38The establishment has been dispatched or co-opted or emasculated or remade in some ways. Byrd at least writes in the end that, you know, that the establishment is gone. And what remains is this, what he calls the subversive counter narrative of American power that someone like Cohn embodies. So to me, when I think of the novelty factor, I kind of think of it in that, in terms of how this fits in the story of America that Kuypert thought he was telling all along, but now has to pivot in a new direction. I think one of the things that I find fascinating about Cohn, though, is he exists in this space that I don't think is unusual.

15:19And Nikki, you probably can think of other people over the course of history who've done this. The establishment always has to have these figures who they turn to when they need stuff done that isn't quite kosher. You know, you have these dark, gluey figures who hold these things together, like when your dad is in trouble and you need to have something fixed, or when you're in financial, you know, difficulties, or you've got a scandal or, you know, Cohn did a lot of divorce work. When you have these ugly things pop up, the establishment people need to be able to keep their hands clean and hand this off to somebody as their fixer, their attack dog, their whatever.

15:59And he was the consummate one of those. He's definitely it's interesting to think about his relationship to the quote unquote establishment because he he is a member of it. I mean, again, like he's hanging out with Supreme Court justices and presidents as a kid. And his best friend is going to be a magazine mogul. He is deeply seated in the heart of the American establishment. It's just not the establishment that gets celebrated, right? In the same way that McCarthy was part of the American establishment, in the same way that Nixon ends up being part of the American establishment. And from within that position of being part of the elite, and I think that Cohn, much more so than somebody like McCarthy or Nixon, was part of the elite his entire life.

16:48Even from within the elite, he has this collection of grievances that form the basis of his worldview. And he feels no loyalty to the values that that establishment expresses about things like rule of law or things about like dignity or factuality or objectivity or any of those things. Truth, honesty, that's something. So that sets him apart. But he's still like this is a man who had access to all the money he wanted, all the connections he wanted, but still like Donald Trump, just was was weighed down his entire life or motivated his entire life by just endless grievances. So better. So better.

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18:43Nikki, I want to just go back for a second and ask you what you felt was new in this book. because, you know, you see it differently as a historian than, you know, these mere journalists here who read the book and sort of can't get out of the presentism of right now. Well, I too found it hard getting out of the present moment with this book because it speaks so strongly to it. But I do think that there are, you know, historical stories, stories about the past that we carry with us about things like McCarthyism. We have a very neat story to tell about McCarthyism, that it is at full strength in the early 1950s.

19:26And then there's the Army McCarthy hearings and Joe McCarthy is ultimately censured. He dies in disgrace just a few years later. And that's the neat, tidy arc. There was this bad man who did bad things and then it came to an end. Have you no sense of decency, sir? Exactly. Yes. But Roy Cohn didn't go away. Roy Cohn wasn't held responsible for his perjury or any of his bad acts during the McCarthy era, even though it tarnished his reputation. Boy, did a lot of establishment liberals get over that in their desire to have some kind of relationship or access to Cohn's ability to get them and people around them out of trouble or to do things for them.

20:11So I think part of what it tells us that, if not new, really reinforces is that McCarthyism doesn't go away. It just transforms, given the changing politics of the era, that McCarthy himself goes away. But here's the guy who was the beating heart of McCarthyism, who does not slink away in disgrace, but continues to be a pivotal figure in U.S. politics and in U.S. elite culture for all of these years. Yeah, demagogues whipping up the masses over some kind of paranoid fantasy is still very much alive in politics, especially in the midterms now. We even have our own fresh round of red baiting. So it's gone nowhere.

21:01I'm so glad you guys teed this up because this gets to the heart of of an aspect of this book that I think will get less attention because so much of the attention will focus on the sort of Cohn-Trump relationship as we've discussed at length here, right? But Kuybert really gets into the legacy of McCarthyism. And he says exactly what you're saying, that McCarthy was discredited and died shortly after those hearings just a few years later, but the McCarthyism endured. He writes that the paranoia persisted as a routine feature of American life. And so that kind of got me thinking about, okay, like what are the ways that McCarthyism still influences American life, you know, in a paranoid style kind of way, right?

21:47But also it got me thinking about, you know, as we're getting closer sort of day by day, to the end of the Trump presidency, to what extent will Trumpism in some form or another outlast Trump himself. And just the way McCarthyism kind of mutated, became something else, but really kind of remained as this undercurrent of American politics, how Trumpism might do the same. That's a question that kept coming up for me as I was reading those portions of that book. Well, McCarthyism, I agree. Not only does it not go away, you think about something like in 1964, Walter Jenkins, who was so close to LBJ, who was his right-hand man in many ways, ends up losing his job because he is arrested for having same-sex sexual contact with a man.

22:37You have all sorts of people who are deemed too radical, people who lose their passports by the U.S. government because of their ideas. Or, you know, there has been, you know, in the age of the War on Terror, the ways that a new McCarthyism against Muslims in the United States emerges, or even more recently against Palestinian activists. Like it is a persistent feature in U.S. politics. We organize it in the 1950s under McCarthyism. And I think that kind of leads into your question about Trumpism, which is Trumpism becomes a kind of organizing framework for a bunch of different ideologies and impulses that are fairly constant in U.S.

23:20life. But because it is all present in Donald Trump and in the MAGA movement, that does give it more power and it gives it more institutional space, right? It is embedded at the moment in a number of different U.S. institutions. And if Donald Trump wasn't president tomorrow, would we still have a militaristic immigration deportation state? Almost certainly. Would we still have an anti-trans movement? Will we still have the sort of Islamophobia that we see today? I think that would very much still be the case. The question is, like, how long would it cohere something that we call Trumpism? And if you look at McCarthyism, it seems like it has the potential to have very long legs.

24:04Yeah, and Trump has drilled home the idea that institutions cannot be trusted. His cult of personality rests on the idea that only he is the voice to follow. So you're going to have huge chunks of the country who don't trust the electoral system, who believe the deep state, you know, that's the new communist, right? The communists in the State Department, you have the deep state at work against the American way of life. You know, the president has been busy trying to tear down guardrails and promote anti-democratic ideas, you know, destroying checks and balances, you know, stiff arming Congress, all of these politicizing the Justice Department, that sort of thing.

24:44All of these things will take a lot of time to unwind. And the best case scenario is that over the next couple of years, Trump gets wildly discredited because he's doing such a poor job as president and his party starts to abandon him. But even then, he still has a very loyal core following that is going to take some doing to kind of forget the damage he's done. And to kind of bring it back to Cohn as well, one of the things that I was thinking about when I was thinking about Cohn's influence on Trump is that Cohn serves as a kind of proof of concept that you can stiff your vendors and get away with it, that you can lie blatantly about your life and the tabloids will print it and your fame will grow and you will benefit from that.

25:31And in a lot of ways, Trump is a proof of concept for the folks who come next, right? That he has not only sort of embedded that idea that institutions can't be trusted, but also that you can get away with a lot of stuff that people just didn't think you could get away with before. There are ways to use presidential power. There are ways to use the attention economy to enrich yourself personally and also to get power for yourself. And he is going to have quite a lot of imitators because they've seen it work for him. So one of the things that I thought was interesting with both men is that the way that they sometimes get stopped or at least kind of, you know, their basic trajectory derailed is through the court system.

26:21You know, Cohn did lose cases. You know, he had this famous, famous episode where he basically went in to try and change this guy's will and add a codicil to it. He took the guy's hand who was in a vegetative state and scrawled some chicken scratch and then tried to pass. That was an amazing moment. That did not go through. You know, like he had some failures there. And same thing with Trump. It's like while the political system seems to have no interest in slowing Trump down, certainly not the Republican Congress, the courts on occasion will slap him down. I was reflecting on this too, like how is he ever held accountable?

27:02The courts are one way. And then of course there's that famous Army McCarthy hearing, have you no decency? And that was also a rare moment. And I was wondering, like, why did this work? And there are lots of historical reasons. But I think one reason it works is because Joseph Welch in that moment was putting forward a different moral universe to the McCarthy-Cone moral universe. and that there is real power in that, in pointing out the sort of amorality of the people like Cohn or Trump and that people can recognize the gulf between the sort of impassioned ethical care and concern that Welch is expressing in that moment for an aide of his and the universe in which somebody like Cohn lives.

27:51But he sees the law as a tool for expressing support for his friends and for attacking his enemies and doesn't see any other real use for the law. And so when he is under the pressure of a lawsuit or under a court, he sees it through the same framework. If he's being attacked by the courts or being held accountable by the courts, it's not because he did something wrong. It's because his enemies are out to get him. And Donald Trump has that exact same view. It's just more poisonous because Donald Trump is president. Just to follow up on Nikki's point here, there are ways in which people and institutions, you know, tried to challenge Cohen in those moments.

28:35I mean, you mentioned, Michelle, how it was just hard for regular people to be able to deal with, you know, these kind of forces of nature for whom rules did not seem to apply. But there's a whole chapter in this book about how Robert Morgenthau, who was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, pursued Cohn extensively, obsessively. A colleague says that Cohn was Morgenthau's white whale. Cohn was also eventually disbarred shortly before his death by the state of New York. And it could seem sort of meaningless happening at that point, but his own identity as a lawyer really mattered to Cohn.