The Devilish Legacy of Roy Cohn

“Where’s my Roy Cohn?” President Donald Trump demanded in March 2017, barely two months into his first administration. Trump was just given the unwelcome news that his attorney general had recused himself from the Justice Department investigation into his campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia, and he needed someone to rescue him.

The plaintive cry—later adopted by director Matt Tyrnauer as the title for his revelatory 2019 documentary about Cohn—spoke to the singular importance that the late lawyer and political fixer held in Trump’s life. Like many powerful men of dubious morality, Trump had relied on Cohn to extricate him from messes of his own making. During his heyday as a real-estate tycoon, Trump kept a framed photograph of Cohn in his office; during contentious meetings, he would point to it and ask—not so much as a question but as a threat—“Would you rather deal with him?”

There has never been, nor will there ever be, anyone like Roy Cohn. Who else could work as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s henchman and rent a cottage on the Provincetown property of Norman Mailer? Who else would allow for the filming of a pornographic movie in his Upper East Side town house and count the archbishop of New York as one of his closest acquaintances? Who else could sit for the avant-garde photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (whose homoerotic images set off a national firestorm over public funding of the arts) and call upon William F. Buckley Jr. as a character witness at his disbarment hearing?

Roy Cohn, that’s who. Notorious is the word most often used to describe Cohn, so much so that an image of his face ought to sit adjacent to it in the dictionary. It was a face, write Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark in American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, that “possessed the kind of ugliness that made you take a second look.” Behind the droopy eyelids and misshapen nose—ravined by a scar resulting from a botched childhood surgery—resided an even uglier soul.