Citizen Cohn.

Citizen Cohn

WHEN ROY COHN knew he was dying, he began to write - and then, as weakness overcame him, to dictate - his autobiography. He died long before the job was done, and it was taken over and completed by his friend Sidney Zion. The result - ambiguously titled The Autobiography of Roy Cohn by Sidney Zion (reviewed in NR, April 29) - arrived in bookstores more or less simultaneously with this unauthorized biography by a well-known Washington gossip columnist.

Although Nicholas von Hoffman is personally a liberal, he was far from the worst choice to take on the assignment. For Roy Cohn is surely one of the juiciest subjects a semi-political gossip could possibly want: federal prosecutor; congressional Red-hunter; lawyer for scores of outraged wives, dubious millionaires, and Mafia dons; crony of judges, politicians, and cardinals; noisy conservative and closet homosexual; bete noire of the Internal Revenue Service (he named his yacht, which he "didn't own," Defiance). Cohn rode around New York in a Rolls Royce (which he also "didn't own") with his initials on the license plate, and died, at 59, of AIDS. In the words of Judge Harold Tyler, "He sort of lit up this town for many years. And he was part of the woodwork and the flora and the fauna, and maybe I should say the flotsam and the jetsam."

The result is about what you would expect: a big, colorful book, loaded with anecdotes and reminiscences, but not to be taken as the final word on any of the scores of controversial subjects it treats.

For one thing, von Hoffman is lazy. He quotes unnamed colleagues of Cohn's in the U.S. Attorney's office as charging that Cohn obtained numerous indictments that "had to be dismissed for lack of evidence" - but cites not a single one. For another, he is sloppy. He pokes fun at Joe McCarthy's investigation of alleged security problems at the Signal Corps' radar-research installation at Fort Monmouth, N.J., without mentioning that two technicians who worked there subsequently fled to the Soviet Union. My guess is that he doesn't even know it.

In any event, von Hoffman interviewed and tape-recorded scores of Cohn's friends and enemies, unfortunately using them, in many cases, as anonymous sources. He reports what they told him, faithfully noting differing versions of the same story and - to his credit - sometimes indicating that he personally believes the one more favorable to Cohn. Certainly there is no flavor of a mere hatchet-job about the book (which I had feared and half expected). Von Hoffman may have concluded that his subject simply didn't need that kind of treatment: if anybody is looking for material to discredit Roy Cohn, there is plenty of it here - along with much that is kinder to him, and which (of course) the haters can elect to disregard.

And that brings us to the ultimate question: What shall a disinterested observer think of Roy Cohn? (I exempt myself from that category, having known him casually and cordially across the years.)

The first thing such an observer would note is the number and ferocity of Cohn's enemies. The savagery with which they exhumed old charges and raced to disbar him before death could deprive them of that pleasure was a sickening thing to watch. Alan Dershowitz, a liberal Harvard Law professor who detested everything Cohn stood for, condemned it in those very terms: "I've seen so much of this kind of stuff, which gets quietly tucked away, where lawyers are given quiet admonitions; and to have dredged up old, old cases like this and to have done it with the kind of viciousness directed against a dying man just smacked of exactly the kind of McCarthyism that he was guilty of."

What accounted for such hatred? Barring the lawyers (and their clients) whom he had bested, the haters were liberals, for whom he would always be Joe McCarthy's smart-ass young counsel. They were careful to add other counts to their indictment, but that was at the root of it all. He consorted with, and represented, Mafia dons? So do scores of other lawyers, without condemnation. He was a fixer and an unethical attorney? Von Hoffman concedes, "as for the favoritism and corruption of judges, gossip is easy, proof hard to come by." He was a wildly promiscuous homosexual? In New York during the past twenty years, such conduct has been in many circles more often a passport to admiration than an occasion for reproach. (Von Hoffman joins in criticizing Cohn for inconsistency because he favored using against Communists the same sort of state power that could be used against homosexuals. It seems not to have occurred to him that Cohn might have considered Communists a more legitimate target.)

No, it wasn't Cohn's ethics that really infuriated the liberals, let alone his homosexuality. It was his anti-Communism, and the pugnacity of his attacks on Communists and fellow-travelers, and the stubborn, simplistic patriotism that accompanied and fueled these. That this brilliant little Jew from the Bronx should regularly end his parties with a chorus of "God Bless America," and become the head of the American Jewish League against Communism, and insist to his dying day on defending, whenever and wherever it was challenged, the memory of Joe McCarthy - that was unendurable.

The other thing a disinterested observer would notice is the number, the catholicity, and the loyalty of Roy Cohn's friends. From Barbara Walters to Cardinal Spellman, from Bill Safire to Donald Trump, they stuck by him through thick and thin. He had, unquestionably, a gift for warm and loyal friendship, and he evoked it in others. His sheer audacity amused and captivated people whose favor was beyond commanding. There were 750 mourners at his memorial service in Town Hall. There should have been an organ playing "My Way."