BEFORE:The title of this documentary comes from something that Donald Trump reportedly said to his attorney general, Jeff Sessions (remember him?) when Trump learned that Sessions was going to recuse himself from the Justice Department's investigation of the Trump campaign's possible involvement in the Russian plan to interfere with the 2016 election (remember that?). I guess it was a dig at Sessions, Trump wanted him to be more like Roy Cohn, and I guess, stand up for Trump and not investigate him at all? Not really sure, but perhaps I'll get some understanding by watching the film.
Walter Cronkite carries over again from "Attica".
THE PLOT: Roy Cohn personified the dark arts of American politics, turning empty vessels into dangerous demagogues, from Joseph McCarthy to his final project, Donald Trump
AFTER: I feel like maybe I missed something, I just watched this whole documentary about Roy Cohn, and I still have no idea what he DID. For a living - lawyer? Politician? Influencer? Jeez, could you guys have maybe dumbed it down for me a bit? At least with a tennis player like McEnroe or Arthur Ashe you can say "He won Wimbledon" and I'll know what that means, or you can say, "Muhammad Ali beat George Foreman to become the heavyweight champion again" and I'll GET IT. But I still have no idea what Roy Cohn did on a daily basis, or what made him so important that somebody decided to make a documentary about him. Did I fall asleep? Again?
Oh, right, the Rosenbergs. He was a D.O.J. prosecutor in the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were found guilty and then executed. So there's that. There's apparently some controversy about how the trial all went down, and some people are now saying there was prosecutorial misconduct, and maybe the Rosenbergs should not have been executed - Alan Dershowitz's take on the case was that they were both guilty, and framed.
Then Cohn had a role in Sen. Joe McCarthy's anti-communist hearings - this was the big Red Scare in the 1950's, and McCarthy hired Cohn on the recommendation of J. Edgar Hoover. (Nope, no red flags there, not a one.). Then apparently there was something called the "Lavender Scare", where Cohn and McCarthy claimed that Soviet intelligence agents had blackmailed U.S. Government employees into committing espionage in return for not exposing their homosexuality. And somehow, Roy Cohn knew just where to find all the gay government employees. Cohn was later in trouble for getting his "very close friend" David Schine special treatment to keep him from being drafted in 1953.
Cohn then left the political swamp of Washington DC for a career as an attorney in NYC, where his clients included Donald Trump, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, Mafia bosses like Tony Salerno, John Gotti and Mario Gigante, Steve Rubell (owner of Studio 54) and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. And if you start singing the song about how "One of these things is not like the others", you're way off base - we now know the Roman Catholics are just as bad as all the rest of the scum and villainy that made up Cohn's clientele. Cohn rapidly built up a career filled with accusations of theft, obstruction, extortion, bribery, tax evasion, blackmail, fraud, perjury and witness tampering. Meanwhile he had an active social life, most likely at Studio 54, and Barbara Walters was his "beard".
Cohn defended Trump in 1973 when he was accused of violating the Fair Housing Act on 39 different properties. I'm sure it was all just a misunderstanding, though. Trump's corporation apparently quoted different rental terms and conditions to African-Americans, pulling the old "no vacancy" scam when they saw the color of the applicant's skin. Yeah, that tracks. As part of a settlement in 1975, Trump Corp. was required to send a list of rental vacancies on a bi-weekly bases to the New York Urban League, but three years later they were back in court for not doing that. Cohn also got involved with the construction of Trump Tower, which somehow managed to be built with concrete during a city-wide Teamster strike, so it's possible that organized crime was somehow involved. YA THINK?
Cohn went on to help get Ronald Reagan elected by arranging the success of third-party candidate John Anderson, who somehow got the Liberal Party endorsement and drew enough votes from Jimmy Carter for Reagan to seal the deal in the Electoral College. Cohn worked with Alan Dershowitz on the Claus Von Bulow trial, was friends with CIA director William Casey, and in what was probably a "quid pro quo", then got Reagan to help further the interests of Rupert Murdoch, and we all know how great THAT has turned out for the country. So if there was anything really bad or evil or legally questionable in the 1960's through 1980's, it seems like Roy Cohn was somehow involved - he was like the Forrest Gump of political malfeasance.
Cohn also denied his homosexuality in public, despite having close associations with J. Edgar Hoover (gay), Cardinal Spellman (probably gay) and McCarthy consultant David Schine (totally over-the-top gay). Cohn denied being gay right up until he died from AIDS in 1986 - well, it's not a total tip-off, Arthur Ashe wasn't gay, but then again, Roy Cohn never had heart surgery and several blood transfusions. Roger Stone once cleared the whole thing up in a New Yorker article by saying "Roy was not gay. He was a man who liked having sex with men." Oh, sure, that clears everything up, it's so simple. Roy was directly involved with getting hundreds of gay men fired from the U.S. government, some of whom then committed suicide, so I don't know what that says about Roy Cohn, he was either in deep denial or he hated himself on a very deep level.
Cohn's goal was to "die completely broke, owing millions to the IRS". Mission accomplished. They gave him a square on the AIDS Memorial Quilt that reads "Roy Cohn. Bully. Coward. Victim." and I'm not sure how we're supposed to reconcile all of those things in one man. Another writer described him as a lawyer who hated lawyers, a Jewish person who hated Jewish people, and a gay person who hated gay people. Well, maybe that does clear everything up. But was he so screwed up that he had to screw up the whole country while he worked this stuff out? Cohn was, after all, the guy who introduced Donald Trump to Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, the people who helped get him elected. Thanks, Roy Cohn, and EFF YOU while I'm at it.
Also starring Ken Auletta, Marie Brenner, Robert Cohen, Thomas Doherty, Joseph Epstein, David Cay Johnston, Elizabeth Kabler, Martin London, David Marcus, Gary Marcus, Sam Roberts, Anne Roiphe, David Rosenthal, Roger Stone, Peter Sudler, John Vassallo, Adam Wallace, Jim Zirin,
with archive footage of Roy Cohn, John Anderson, Bill Boggs (last seen in "Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool"), William F. Buckley, Thomas Eagleton, Geraldine Ferraro, Carmine Galante, John Gotti (last seen in "Let's Go to Prison"), J. Edgar Hoover (last seen in "Lucy and Desi"), Larry King (last seen in "Val"), Ed Koch (last seen in "Barry"), Norman Mailer (last seen in "When We Were Kings"), Joseph McCarthy, Robert Morgenthau, Rupert Murdoch, Richard Nixon (also carrying over from "Attica"), Nancy Reagan (also last seen in "Lucy and Desi"), Ronald Reagan (last seen in "Dionne Warwick: Don't Make Me Over"), Franklin Roosevelt (last seen in "Walt & El Grupo"), Ethel Rosenberg, Julius Rosenberg, Steve Rubell, Morley Safer (last seen in "Citizen Ashe"), Mike Wallace (ditto), Anthony Salerno, G. David Schine, Liz Smith (last seen in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"), Tom Snyder (last seen in "Julia"), George Steinbrenner, Harry Truman (last seen in "The Good German"), Donald Trump (last seen in "Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists"), Fred Trump (last seen in "Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump"), Gore Vidal (last seen in "Igby Goes Down"), Barbara Walters (last seen in "The Velvet Underground"), Andy Warhol (last seen in "Mr. Saturday Night")
RATING: 4 out of 10 character witnesses
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