Roy Cohn, born in the Bronx in 1927, was the son of Albert Cohn,(1885-1959), a NY State Supreme Court Judge, who appointed by Governor Herbert Lehman in 1929 and was a prominent Democrat. He attended both Horace Mann and Fieldston School in the Bronx. I was quite familiar with both schools and attended Horace Mann for a short time in the late 1950s.
He graduated from Columbia Law School in 1947, and the day he was admitted to the bar, he got a job in the office of the Manhattan United States Attorney, thanks to his father’s connections.
He became known for his arrogant courtroom style, notably in the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, American citizens convicted of conspiring to give information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. They were executed, and Cohn was promoted to assistant U.S. Attorney. After helping convict the Rosenbergs as a young federal prosecutor he then went to work in Washington as a top aide to McCarthy,
In Washington, his first assignment was to prepare the indictment of Owen Lattimore, an expert on China and professor at Johns Hopkins University, who had been accused of being “the top Russian espionage agent in the United States” by Senator Joe McCarthy.
The charges were ultimately dismissed, but Cohn’s aggressive performance left a lasting impact on McCarthy, who named him chief counsel to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. (Robert F. Kennedy was assistant counsel.)
During the Army-McCarthy Hearings, Senator McCarthy went after the Army Counsel, Joseph Welsh, the lead partner of the Boston Law firm Hale and Dorr. In that famous hearing, Welsh, famously remarked to Senator McCarthy. “…You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” But, what was forgotten was his aside to his counsel Roy Cohn, who, in most cases, initiated the whole investigation because of the supposed mistreatment of his buddy, G. David Schine, who had been drafted into the US Army. In stark contrast to the domineering, aggressive and snide hectoring demeanor of McCarthy, Welch appeared calm, genteel, and well prepared in the hearing room. He managed to inject a bit of humor into the proceedings on more than one occasion. When Welch questioned a witness about how he had come into possession of a photograph, he asked the witness if he thought it came from a pixie. Senator McCarthy interrupted to ask for the definition of a pixie. Welsh replied, “I should say, Mr. Senator, that a pixie is a close relative of a fairy. Shall I proceed, sir? Have I enlightened you?” Of course, this was a not so subtle hint to Cohn regarding homosexuality, which it seems was at the heart of the Cohn-Schine relationship and the whole reason for Cohn urging McCarthy to open an investigation of communists in the Army. After that remark Cohn was markedly changed.)
McCarthy and Cohn, who was gay and would later die of AIDS, claimed that foreign communists had blackmailed closeted, homosexual, U.S. government employees into giving them secrets. The charge resulted in President Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450, which allowed the government to deny homosexuals employment. Cohn helped McCarthy wage similar witch-hunts on the State Department, Voice of America, and the Army. When McCarthy was finally censured, in 1954, Cohn was thought to be finished, too.
Eventually, he moved back to New York City and joined the law firm Saxe, Bacon & Bolan. But instead of disappearing, Cohn reinvented himself and became a social butterfly. He represented Andy Warhol, Studio 54 (until its owners: Rubell and Schrager were convicted of charges of tax evasion), the Roman Catholic Church and Cardinal Francis Spellman, along with mafia leaders Carmine “Cigar” Galante and Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno. Cohn’s tactics were thought to be so unethical and dishonest by the legal establishment (he was eventually disbarred) that Esquire dubbed him “a legal executioner.” The reputation didn’t hurt his reputation with his mob contacts, a group of high-powered, infamous, and allegedly murderous clients.
Mr. Cohn eventually formed a “concierge style” practice in his sort of weather-beaten townhouse on East 68th Street. The structure of the assignments in the firm was eventually delineated. “We called him the rainmaker,” said Michael Rosen, a partner who handled many of the firm’s organized-crime cases. “We did all of the grunt work, if grunt work means preparing the case and trying the case.” Mr. Cohn lived on the third floor, often coming downstairs in his pajamas and bathrobe, long into the workday as he took clients upstairs to a small balcony style porch. The elevator was a mess and in the winter, the lawyers were often freezing because the windows were quite porous.
Business meetings tended to morph into social get-togethers, with all sorts of New York personalities, including the young Donald Trump. He and Mr. Cohn became social companions, lunching at “21” or attending games at Yankee Stadium as the guest of George Steinbrenner, the Yankees blusterous and bombastic owner, another Cohn client.
Cohn was known for his parties, thrown in his Greenwich Village home, and attended by politicos, the glitterati of the artist world and the usual NY characters. He intimated that the news personality Barbara Walters, a friend, was his girlfriend. “He was a very complicated man,” she told SFGate in 2008. “He was very smart and funny. And, at the time, seemed to know everyone in New York. He was very friendly with the cardinal, he was very friendly with the most famous columnist in New York, Walter Winchell. He had a lot of extremely powerful friends.”
According to The New York Times’ obituary for Cohn, those friends included “dozens of politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, at every level, from Cabinet members to county judges,” including President Reagan. Trump saw in Cohn the power of “celebrity.” It is said that Cohn saw in Trump “front page stuff, and Roy was always attracted to celebrity,” He clearly wasn’t lacking for celebrity in his life. It was quoted from a Cohn associate, “I think he saw in Trump a kindred spirit,” the friend said. “He saw a certain toughness that he also saw in himself.”
The young, brash and obnoxious Trump, who had been sent off to boarding school, finally graduated and went to Fordham College in the Bronx. He later transferred, after his sophomore year into a “real estate” discipline, probably funded by his slum lord father at the University Pennsylvania’s undergraduate business school (Wharton.). It seems like Trump managed to not only stay unnoticed by the administration but by his classmates as well. The Daily News reports that none of the students that attended Wharton between 1966 and 1968 have any recollection of Trump. Even though he claimed he was a top student, no one has seen his academic records, and for sure, “He was not first in the class. He was not known on campus for any reason at all,” his Wharton classmate Nancy Hano told Daily News. Another classmate, Stanton Koppel, told the publication, “I have no memory of him whatsoever. “Salon also looked into the matter back in May, and found nothing that would support Trump’s claims that he was an honor student:
After graduation and successfully avoiding the military with a questionable “1Y” deferment for bone spurs, joined the family real-estate business and in 1971, moved to a studio apartment on the Upper East Side. He quickly began his campaign of social climbing. “One of the first things I did was join Le Club,” he wrote in his 1987 book The Art of the Deal, (written by Tony Schwartz, who said the book was almost a total fabrication!) “Which at the time was the hottest club in the city and perhaps the most exclusive—like Studio 54 at its height. Its membership included some of the most successful men and most beautiful women in the world.” Le Club, Trump wrote, “turned out to be a great move for me, socially and professionally.” This social-mixing helped match up Trump with Cohn and he became his lawyer. Trump had great admiration for his unconventional style. “If you need someone to get vicious toward an opponent, you get Roy,” he was quoted as saying by the Associated Press. “People will drop a suit just by getting a letter with Roy’s name at the bottom.” In 1973, at Cohn’s urging, Trump sued the federal government for $100 million in damages, after the government sued the Trump Management Corp. for allegedly discriminating against blacks in its leasing of 16,000 apartment units throughout New York.
Trump accused the government of making “irresponsible and baseless” charges. “I have never, nor has anyone in our organization ever, to the best of my knowledge, discriminated or shown bias in renting our apartments,” Trump said at a press conference, held at the New York Hilton Hotel, according to a December 13, 1973 New York Times report. Trump said, in true Trump fashion, that the government had singled out his business because it was big. The judge dismissed Trump and Cohn’s suit, saying they were “wasting time and paper.”
When Trump was accused of using his political contacts to engineer deals for himself, Cohn jumped into the fray and his defense. “Donald wishes he didn’t have to give money to politicians, but he knows it’s part of the game,” he told the Times in 1980. “He doesn’t try to get anything for it; he’s just doing what a lot of people in the real estate business try to do.” In other words, in today’s parlance, he wasn’t “draining the swamp,” he was adding to it as a political fixer.
But the intimacy of their association and friendship didn’t end with Cohn’s spirited defenses of his client. Cohn, in his own words to the NY Times, was “not only Donald’s lawyer, but also one of his close friends.” When Cohn first got ahold of him, according to a close source, “Donald was a bit of a political neophyte.” It was Cohn who molded him politically.
Eventually, Cohn, the master manipulator, was a frequent guest Donald and Ivana’s Trump Tower apartment, with its garish, neo classical wall hangings. They were also regulars at Mr. Trump’s box at the Meadowlands, the home of his ill-fated sports team, the New Jersey Generals of the short-lived United States Football League. Mr. Cohn was host and MC at a Trump birthday party at Studio 54; years later, Mr. Trump returned the favor with a birthday toast of his own at a party in Trump Tower, joking that Mr. Cohn was more bark than bite. “We just tell the opposition Roy Cohn is representing me, and they get scared,” Mr. Trump said, according to a cousin of Mr. Cohn’s, David L. Marcus, who attended. “He never actually does anything.”
Cohn, nominally a Democrat, was a Reaganphile. In his law office he had a framed photo of the former president and a signed letter of thanks he sent to Cohn. He and his law partner, Thomas Bolan, fundraised for Reagan’s 1980 campaign. According to sources, Cohn acted to “recruit Donald and Donald’s father for Reagan’s finance committee.” In an 1983 Times report, Trump was characterized as a Reagan supporter and was said to have visited the White House “several times.” There’s a picture of the two together, shaking hands. Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan was “Make America Great Again!, which was Reagan’s slogan in 1980. Trump has claimed he invented the slogan and trademarked it in order to prevent other candidates from using it in speeches. “I mean, I get tremendous raves for that line,” Trump told The Daily Mail. “You would think they would come up with their own. That is my whole theme.”
In 1983, according to Trump: The Deals and the Downfall, Trump met with Cohn client Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, the boss of the Genovese crime family, in Cohn’s New York apartment. Trump had employed S&A Concrete, owned by Salerno and Paul “Big Paul” Castellano, head of the Gambino crime family, to build Trump Tower. (In response to the allegations made in the book, in 1993, Trump said its author, Wayne Barnett, was “a second-rate writer who has had numerous literary failures, who has been writing negative stories about me for the past 15 years. The book is another example of Mr. Barrett’s personal prejudice and animosity towards me. The book is boring, non-factual, and highly inaccurate.”)
A year after the alleged meeting, Trump was doing an interview with The Washington Post. He told the reporter, Lois Romano, that he knew how the United States should negotiate nuclear policy with the Soviets, and Cohn, Trump told her, advised him that it was a good idea to use the interview as an opportunity to talk about the issue. “Some people have an ability to negotiate,” Trump said. “It’s an art you’re basically born with. You either have it or you don’t.”
For Mr. Cohn, who died of AIDS in 1986, not long after being disbarred for all sorts of ethical violations, Trump was something of a final triumph. If Trump’s father got his son’s career started by bringing him into the family business of slumlord housing in Brooklyn and Queens, Mr. Cohn escorted him personally across the East River and into Manhattan, introducing him to the social and political movers and shakers, while ferociously defending him against a growing list of enemies.
Years later, Roy Cohn’s influence on Mr. Trump is unmistakable. Mr. Trump’s wrecking ball of a presidential bid — the gleeful smearing of his opponents, the embracing of character assassination — has been a Roy Cohn-style modus-operandi for years. Mr. Trump’s response to the Orlando massacre, with his specious harangue regarding a jihadist-sponsored attack that could wipe out America and his conspiratorial suggestions of a Muslim fifth column in the United States, seemed to have been taken directly out of the Cohn political manifesto!
.“I hear Roy in the things he says quite clearly,” said Peter Fraser, who as Mr. Cohn’s lover for the last two years of his life spent a great deal of time with Mr. Trump. “That bravado, and if you say it aggressively and loudly enough, it’s the truth — that’s the way Roy used to operate to a degree, and Donald was certainly his apprentice.”