DN:FILM Where’s My Roy Cohn?
Matt Tyrnauer’s WHERE’S MY ROY COHN? is grimly captivating, a relentless montage of ruthless behavior with dreadful results, performed with cold disassembly by one of America’s greatest villains. The doc’s score contributes early, sowing seeds of dreadful anticipation of the attacks from of an unstoppable, all-consuming monster. It’s Jaws-meets-Zelig, with Cohn not just nearby but instrumental to so many of the United State’s darkest machinations. After graduating Columbia in 1946, Cohn worked with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover; after that, he helped convict and eventually bring about the 1953 executions of Soviet spies Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg; and he was merely 24 when he began serving as chief counsel to Joseph McCarthy during the senator’s infamous Red Scare committee days. By his 30s, Cohn was a fixer extraordinaire for the famous and mobbed up throughout New York society; and eventually he served as Svengali to a certain future president.
Tyrnauer maintains that it’s that final credit—Cohn’s role in creating Donald Trump—that warrants his current examination. The doc begins long before, though, because it starts building the explanatory framework for Cohn’s moral bankruptcy with its presentation of his parents’ coldly transactional marriage, and runs through present day, crediting Cohn with much of Trump’s strategic and philosophical architecture: Win at all costs, truth be damned, never concede. (The title is a quote from the president, which he exclaimed when he was disappointed by his attorney general’s unwillingness to extend the kind of ruthless bulldog loyalty he identified with Cohn.) And whether or not Trump is purely the result of Cohn’s mentorship, Cohn’s techniques are now discouragingly ubiquitous.
Tyrnauer moves fast to cover all the kinds of peculiar and frequently sad facts about Cohn that he wants to bring up: Cohn’s mother, considered the ugliest girl in the Bronx, was paired off in an arrangement with Cohn’s attorney father so that he could be funded to be named a judge; he was raised a doted-upon only child, likely feeding his lifelong need for attention. His precocious intelligence helped him graduate law school at 20, before he was old enough to join the New York bar, and he was soon off to the races, a homely short man with a giant intellect who’d been schooled by his mother to think he could do no wrong, and by his political-machine father in how to win by extensive use of the exchange of favors. By the end of his twenties, Cohn—Jewish and gay—had served as a key aide two of the country’s ugliest legal entanglements, variously laced with anti-Communist, anti-Semitic and homophobic overtones. The remarkable Army-McCarthy hearings arguably resulted from the collision between Cohn’s closeted homosexuality and his legal fervor; during his time on the McCarthy committee, he’s seemingly smitten by G. David Schine, who also ends up on McCarthy’s committee, before Schine is drafted into the army. Cohn, not wanting to lose his traveling companion, gets McCarthy to take on the Army. Those hearings—which gave rise to the famous line indicting McCarthy, “At long last, have you no sense of decency?,” that eventually knock the wheels off the McCarthy wagon: Cohn resigns, McCarthy’s popularity plummets, and that’s the beginning of the end for McCarthy.
It’s just the beginning for Cohn, though, who goes on for decades more, serving as ruthless lawyer for a rogues gallery of rogues, from the top dogs of the mafia to the up-and-coming real estate magnate Trump. Tyrnauer, who previously made the doc Studio 54, puts together a remarkable assembly of photos and B roll showing Cohn in his ‘70s and ‘80s elements, New York of those eras in full, flamboyant, hollow-cored swing. The things Tyrnauer credits with Cohn during his reign make a remarkable list, including his contributions to rigging the New York State primary to ensure Ronald Reagan’s election to president; his derailment of Geraldine Ferraro’s campaign; his extensive mob connections; his malfeasance as a lawyer (one rich anecdote in the film suggests he donned a medical costume in order to extract an illegible scrawl of a signature from a client, in order to have him appointed a trustee of an estate); the allegations suurounding the death of a guy on his yacht; his continued denial of his homosexuality and the fact that he had AIDS, right up to his death from complications from the disease in 1986, just five weeks after he was finally disbarred. Meanwhile, he surrounded himself with the rich and glamorous, the strapping and the blonde, and seemed to have an extensive list of true friends—true, at least, until those final, dying days, when the value he could bring to his relationships seems to have finally run out, even if his influence had not.