00:03:29.800After Moira's wind up and saying he's the worst person in the world, you say, and the
00:03:33.880The person who first came to mind to talk about this horrible person is Matt Sittman.
00:03:37.980Well, I feel like you and Sam have blazed a trail when it comes to treating awful people with compassion on your podcast.0.99
00:03:46.600And again, I think Moira is right that compared to someone like Whitaker Chambers, who seems to have been overall sort of decent, Roy Cohn is really truly a piece of shit.0.97
00:03:57.980And so I think that we need your compassion and your empathy with this person.0.98
00:04:03.880But also, you know, you and I share with Cohn the fact that, you know, we are gay men, although, as we were saying, of a very different generation.
00:04:12.840And in confronting him and his hypocrisies, you know, which are sort of legion and very easy to look up if you have HBO and can get your hands on Angels in America just about anywhere.
00:04:25.560You know, they're very different, but there are pangs of recognition of things that we sort of observe around us now.
00:06:03.680Like, I think I knew Cohn would fascinate me too much.
00:06:07.000And so he was a figure I hadn't fully explored up to this point.
00:06:12.640And I must say, since you mentioned the empathy Sam and I try to bring on Know Your Enemy to some of our, the people we talk about, the topics we raise.
00:06:23.120One thing I did do, and you mentioned the various documentaries about Cohn, which are very good, a number of them.
00:06:29.260Like, there's more than one very good documentary about Roy Cohn.
00:06:32.520So, there's lots of footage of him in those documentaries.
00:06:35.860But also, preparing for this, I would just kind of look up interviews with Cohn on YouTube.
00:06:41.620Because I do feel like seeing someone kind of live like that is important to giving a read on them.
00:06:49.020And I found him evil, yes, wicked, but also it's kind of like the allure of evil.
00:07:00.760Okay, I'm glad I'm not alone in that judgment because the specific clip, maybe your listeners will want to look it up, that really impressed me in precisely that way was he was in the late 70s on this show with Gore Vidal because this television movie called Tail Gunner Joe about Joe McCarthy.
00:07:19.020McCarthy had just come out and they were sparring over it. Now, there's other things that are said
00:07:24.640in the interview we can talk about later, but I just was watching and I thought, my God,
00:07:29.320this guy's holding his own with Gore Vidal, who's so handsome and suave and good on television,
00:07:34.540articulate. You know, Gore was like the best at that. And Cohn kind of held his own debating
00:07:40.260Joe McCarthy with him. I have the same intensity of feeling about the destruction of a person and
00:07:46.840a period in American history, which destruction, I think, has been very unfairly attempted
00:08:39.060Yeah, you know, I think like right now we're in a moment in our current conservative climate where we see a lot of evil that is impulsive, a lot of evil that is boorish, a lot of like id-driven evil, right? Stupid evil.1.00
00:08:55.060And Roy Cohn reminds me of this like 20th century vision of evil that is calculating and intelligent and has this ability to manipulate that almost requires a degree of understanding of others, right?1.00
00:09:12.160He is an evil that turns his very real capacities and virtues towards a politically malignant and amoral project, right?
00:09:24.620As opposed to the evil we have now, which feels a lot more like a temper tantrum by a toddler.
00:09:32.300At the same time, there is a kind of continuity too, right?
00:09:34.920Like, especially around the Rosenberg trial, there's every indication that he exaggerated what he did.
00:09:42.160right? He does present as a heel, right? He does have this kind of heel evil that, like,
00:09:47.660his, at this point, most famous associate, Donald Trump, would kind of perfect in some way,
00:09:53.520I would say, right? Like, he's the guy you're supposed to boo and jeer when he walks onto the
00:09:58.160stage, and he kind of inhabits that with a kind of relish. Like, there is a kind of Vince McMahon
00:10:02.460quality, I mean, very, very different, but, like, he's magnetically bad and commands a stage in a
00:10:08.780way that feels very much of our moment. This guy is a great troll. He would have made an amazing0.95
00:10:13.800troll. Yes, definitely. And I'm sure most people listening to this know that Cohn was a kind of0.74
00:10:22.140mentor and lawyer for Donald Trump in the kind of 70s and 80s, almost a mentor to Trump. That basic
00:10:28.840fact now is, you know, well reported and well known. But I think this foray into Cohn's life
00:10:35.520times really impressed upon me that he wasn't just like Trump's lawyer. He wasn't just like a
00:10:42.360guy who did some favors for Trump. I really see him as kind of initiating Trump into or being the
00:10:51.100kind of midwife into kind of who Trump became politically and ideologically. Yeah. Trump was
00:10:58.060relatively, I mean, he had his instincts. He was Trump, but relatively unformed when they first
00:11:04.320met and when Cohn took on, you know, this case of the Trump, their apartment buildings, right,
00:11:10.780discriminating against African-Americans from renting the apartments. And it wasn't just like
00:11:16.520Cohn helped them get out of that or, you know, Cohn was Trump's consigliere in that particular
00:11:22.020case. It was really, yeah, like this guy was a mentor to Trump. And I think there's a lot of
00:11:27.320blame for who trump became so with that all in mind this man's talent his charisma his sort of
00:11:37.980self-styled legend and his impact on you know the conservative of our own age let's dig into it
00:11:45.300let's go through the life of uh mr roy cone let's do it okay so a lot of i think people of our
00:11:53.220generation, the sort of like millennials first came to know Cone after he died through really
00:12:00.160Angels in America, the Tony Kushner epic about the AIDS crisis in New York, in which Cone is a
00:12:06.940central figure. He is called in that work, the pole star of human evil. And he is sort of a symbol
00:12:15.040there of the rapacious indifference of AIDS, right? Like how it comes after gay men, even when0.95
00:12:21.560they are, you know, not members or do not understand themselves as part of this, like,0.80
00:12:26.340righteous, oppressed minority. Right. But more recently, he's come in for this secondary0.93
00:12:31.240reappraisal as a mentor of Donald Trump. But I think it makes a little bit of sense to just
00:12:39.660start at the beginning with Cohn's childhood, which was on the one hand, very privileged and
00:12:45.560also like very very unhappy so he was born in the bronx in february of 1927 and he was the only son
00:12:55.000of a marriage that is basically universally described as loveless between the mother
00:13:02.060who was the daughter of a very powerful very wealthy new york banking family the marcuses
00:13:08.000And the man who they sort of corralled into marrying their quite ugly daughter in exchange for making him a judge. Right. So he is completely doted upon by his mother, but in some like weird ways, like both him and his mother had the same like big nose and his mother tried to get what seems like an early nose job for Roy when he was still a child that got botched.
00:14:11.920So a childhood Passover at Roy Cohn's house, the whole family, the big Marcus, powerful cousins are all assembled.
00:14:20.360And as is typical of Passover's, you know, the youngest child, one of Roy's baby cousins, gets up and asks the four questions, which begin with, why is this night different from all other nights?
00:14:32.120and Roy Cohn's mother who in recounting of the story that I've heard sounds like she was a little
00:14:37.980bit drunk sort of bursts out laughing and she goes this night is different from all other nights
00:14:43.220because the maid is dead in the kitchen uh and indeed the maid had dropped dead in the kitchen
00:14:50.220some sort of like heart attack or stroke or something and Roy Cohn's mother to preserve
00:14:57.560the Passover and not disturb the dinner that she was hosting, had the maid's body shoved under the0.98
00:15:05.400table in the kitchen and was just going to like wait till dinner was over to deal with it.0.99
00:20:16.760But yeah, that's like he was never exactly a child. Right. This is a guy who was in a rush to power almost from the time he was born.
00:20:23.880Yeah. And he's basically a teenager when he bursts onto the public stage.
00:20:27.400The other thing to point out is, of course, that Cohen comes from great privilege, and we're going to talk about him as a conservative, but it essentially comes out of a democratic establishment, I think.
00:20:39.380And it's interesting to think about his path then, like Horace Mann, Columbia, BA, Columbia, law degree, with someone like another Know Your Enemy fave, someone like Irving Kristol, Brooklyn Boys, City College of New York.
00:20:56.000Like, Cohen is taking a different route.
00:20:58.100He's taking the route that kind of was only opening up to, you know, Jewish Americans at the time when they were extremely privileged, it seems to me.
00:21:06.260And, you know, part of the privilege, the money we've mentioned his mother's side having was like the Lionel Train Company, right?
00:21:14.960Toy Train Company was part of the money.
00:21:17.260The founder of Q-Tips, the inventor of that, was part of the family money.
00:21:22.520but also the Bank of the United States, which in 1930, right, there was a run on the bank.
00:21:29.720And long story short, Cohn's uncle, the only banker, I think, jailed for their bank going under,
00:21:38.620even though he was seemingly an upright man who kind of the reason the bank got started was the family was so trusted.
00:21:45.480When they were in like the garment industry, you know, decades earlier, people would ask him to keep their money.
00:21:51.620But he kind of got caught holding the bag.
00:21:54.640There was a run on the bank, and he went to jail at Sing Sing, right?
00:21:58.620And Cone would visit him, right, in jail.
00:22:02.480And I would say of all the facts about Cone's childhood, in addition to the overburied mother, this uncle who had been jailed, like Cone viewed his uncle being put in that position as like, what happens when you're on the wrong side of power?
00:22:39.720However many decades later, the same prison.
00:22:41.920So, that experience of visiting his uncle in jail at Sing Sing was formative for him.
00:22:47.420And that's something kind of most of the documentaries and biographies really, I think, rightly point to as something that really shaped young Roy Cohn.
00:22:55.800Yeah. In the Bully, Coward, Victim documentary, one of his nephews, actually, one of Cohn's nephews proposes basically that he was so traumatized by this uncle going to jail.
00:23:05.740I think it's a cousin, not a nephew. Sorry, Adrian, being a little pedantic.
00:23:09.060I think it's David Marcus, who later became a journalist, a maternal cousin.
00:23:12.460Marcus, that's right. Yeah, sorry. But yes, I think they propose basically that this is about a kind of identification with the aggressor here, right? Like, the only way to fight this is to join the carceral system. As Matt is saying, the very institution that jailed my uncle, I will work towards killing my enemies, basically, right? Like, there's a full on identification with the aggressor. They don't say it. I think the cousins don't say it. But there is an element of like, he must have been aware that like, one way to end up in jail is being a gay man.
00:24:12.160What would have been impressed on Roy Cohn was not only the risks of homosexuality, but the risks of being Jewish.0.90
00:24:16.620Something that the family really understood was that the Bank of the United States was not unique in terms of its financial malfeasance around the time of the stock market crash.0.99
00:24:27.460It was unique in that it was controlled by a Jewish family.1.00
00:24:30.500Right. And, you know, Matt mentions that Cohn's uncle was the only banker to go to jail for that crisis.0.52
00:24:37.420and the family really interpreted their uncle's misfortune
00:24:41.640as a product of anti-Semitism as much as a product of his own misbehavior.
00:24:47.080Yes. I think at one point in the Citizen Cone biography,
00:25:11.240Because Adrian, as you mentioned, Cohn sort of like rams his way through his education.
00:25:18.160You know, Horace Mann, Columbia University, Columbia Law.
00:25:21.040He graduates from Columbia Law at 20, right?
00:25:24.540Before he could even be admitted to the bar.
00:25:26.500Right. He gets admitted to the bar on his 21st birthday, which is the first moment that he's legally possible, right?
00:25:32.580And he pretty quickly gets recruited as a prosecutor for the trial of Julius and Essel Rosenberg, in part because the prosecution was worried that the trial was going to look anti-Semitic, right?
00:25:48.300So they wanted a Jewish prosecutor, and that's part of how Cohn got the job.
00:25:51.820On the mere technicality that it probably was.
00:26:09.260So Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the only two people executed during the Red Scare of the early 50s, and Cohn would take ample credit for that,
00:26:22.160were basically accused of, in 1950, I believe,
00:26:27.640of having given the Soviets the secrets to the bomb.
00:26:31.960They were convicted in 1951 of espionage
00:26:48.800I believe they were both American-born,
00:26:51.120But they were descendants of this group of Jewish, like Russian and Eastern European emigres who formed a like strong Jewish community on New York City's Lower East Side. Right. And they were indeed members of the Communist Party as a lot of Jews on the Lower East Side in the 1930s and 40s were.
00:27:08.820Julius Rosenberg had served in the U.S. Army, and he spoke about his commitment both to the
00:27:17.460United States and to communism as sort of this like fusion that was much more typical, like
00:27:22.960during and immediately after World War II of like a popular front fusionism, right? He's like,
00:27:26.900I am a communist and I am an American because these are the forces that defeated Nazism.0.66
00:27:31.660And that was like something that you would hear from a lot of American communist Jews
00:27:35.620at the time and they were like kind of like workaday people right they weren't very elite
00:27:42.420Julius had an engineering job and some old army connections by which he does indeed seem to have
00:27:48.840been funneling some technical aspects of America's military development to the Soviets so like in
00:27:57.000terms of like were they actual spies it seems pretty firmly established in the historical
00:28:02.280record that Julius Rosenberg was, yes, a spy for the Soviet Union. Ethel's involvement is a lot
00:28:10.960murkier. And the choice to prosecute her as well as her husband, and specifically the choice to
00:28:17.020seek the death penalty for either of them, but particularly for Ethel, was something that was
00:28:22.160really Roy Cohn's pet project. Yes. When the Venona papers, right, were kind of released and
00:28:29.400decoded after the Cold War ended, like it was pretty much confirmed, as you say, that Julius
00:28:35.120was in some sense a spy passing along information, even if, you know, kind of how important he was
00:28:42.780to the overall operation might not be certain. But Ethel, she didn't have a code name, right?
00:28:49.100So she's not in these papers. And the fact that she was executed too was because of Cohn's
00:28:55.160obsession with it. And it really seems like maybe this was Cone's chance to kill his mother,0.85
00:29:01.340so to speak, to offer that analysis, because he was really obsessed with her. And really,0.63
00:29:10.060it was him who really, really, really seemed to want her to be executed as well.
00:29:15.600And he did this according to his own autobiography, which, Adrienne, you said is not the most
00:29:21.020reliable narration. But he did this at age 23 through a series of really illegal and wildly
00:29:30.960immoral gestures. So one of the first things he did was he persuaded Ethel's brother, David
00:29:37.420Greenglass, to lie under oath about the extent of Ethel's involvement in the espionage scheme.
00:29:44.400And he also had ex parte conversations, sort of like outside secret conversations, which are illegal, with the judge, Irving Kaufman, in which he persuaded the judge to pursue the death penalty, even though the Department of Justice and the FBI were both trying to avoid the death penalty, which they thought would have like bad PR effects.
00:30:06.120It was Cohn, at least in Cohn's telling, who both fabricated this evidence and convinced the judge to pursue the maximum punishment.
00:30:16.840So Cohn is at least presenting himself really as the Rosenberg's murderer.
00:30:21.640He's like, I am the one who got these people killed.
00:30:23.900Yes. Can I read something from the Citizen Cohn biography about his posture towards Ethel Rosenberg?
00:31:01.140Roy spoke of her, quote, den mother supervision of the family's part in the communist movement.
00:31:06.780And I mean, we should say that by contrast, I think J. Edgar Hoover initially pushed for a arrest of Ethel in order to use it as a lever, I believe, to make Julius talk.
00:31:20.160So it's not like Roy is reflecting on a change in the perception of the case among law enforcement.
00:31:26.080I mean, he's really kind of a lone voice in like, we have to kill this woman.
00:31:31.680And I mean, this is why she's in Angels of America as sort of his chief tormentor and not he.
00:31:38.920Yeah, she's a ghost played by Meryl Streep, who does a very unconvincing Yiddish New York accent in the famous like Ethel Rosenberg coat and hat, tormenting Al Pacino as Roy Cohn as a ghost figure while he's dying of AIDS in the hospital.
00:32:08.920The Rosenbergs are executed by electric chair in 1953 at Sing Sing.
00:32:22.680The electric chair is always a bad way to die, but Ethel Rosenberg's execution in particular seems to have been botched.
00:32:28.560So they had to shock her over and over and over again in order to get her to die.
00:32:34.460She had two children, two sons under 10 at the time.
00:32:38.920And this is, you know, for all the differences they may have had in their approach to the case, Cohn's conduct in the prosecution of the Rosenbergs is really impressive to J. Edgar Hoover, who hires Cohn to come work for him in Washington as sort of a like media fixer.
00:32:56.660And he's working for J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI for a couple years, essentially working as like a media liaison, right?
00:33:05.740When J. Edgar Hoover wants to embarrass someone who is not cooperating with him, it is Roy Cohn who he has call up the papers and place this damaging information about them.
00:33:18.000And this is part of the beginning of Cone's lifelong vocation, really, like as a blackmail artist, as somebody who can extort favors from people he's targeting by threatening to or actually embarrassing them in the public sphere.
00:33:34.640And it seems to be J. Edgar Hoover who introduces Roy Cone to the next major figure in his life, Joe McCarthy. Either of you guys want to tell us about his relationship with Joe McCarthy?
00:33:48.000Yeah. I was going to say, I don't know who should go first. You go first.
00:33:53.320So McCarthy, right, senator from the great state of Wisconsin, the last Republican to serve in that job, for some reason, started basically in 1950, more or less, to warn about the presence of communists and homosexuals in, I think, initially the State Department, but really it expanded very, very quickly and broadly.
00:34:16.260And by the time Cohn joins him, he's already a few years into this campaign.
00:34:22.900I mean, Cohn was 24 when he came to the attention via the Rosenberg trial of J. Edgar Hoover.
00:34:29.200And yes, by the time he's working for McCarthy, I do think McCarthy had already started getting going on the anti-communist hearings.
00:34:36.840And something that's pretty important that a book that Matt recommended to us and that I loved reading, Christopher Elias's Gossip Men, J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn and the Politics of Insinuation from University of Chicago Press.
00:34:51.640But something that it made sense of to me is like, unlike the Rosenbergs, the question of gossip is sort of central to the McCarthy hearings, right?
00:34:59.280Like for listeners who don't know that period so well, McCarthy bursts into the national spotlight in February of 1950 with this famous speech where he claims to have a list of members of the Communist Party employed by the State Department, right?
00:35:13.680So from the very beginning, this is a politics of gossip.
00:35:18.140This is really about like, what did who say to whom?
00:35:35.980And the part about kind of whispers and rumors, I've mentioned this maybe once or twice before, but some of your listeners might know I'm an ex-conservative.
00:35:45.480When I was 22 years old, I was an intern at the Heritage Foundation for a guy named Lee Edwards.
00:36:24.100And by the way, since I mentioned this to Rachel Maddow about a year or so ago,
00:36:29.840because she's doing a bunch of research into McCarthyism and Red Scare for her,
00:36:33.960I think, next big podcast project.0.99
00:36:36.220And she looked into it, and it's true.
00:36:40.020Like, all of Willard Edwards' columns for the Chicago Tribune were floating0.58
00:36:43.980these kind of communists infiltrating the federal government around the time of the speech.
00:36:49.100But that's just to say, in terms of rumors and whispers, yes, it was a list given by a journalist, Joe McCarthy, right, that he used in this speech.
00:36:59.200And who knows how it had been passed around until it got to Willard Edwards, who gave it to McCarthy.
00:37:15.020Yeah. And so Cohn joins this via, as you say, via J. Edgar Hoover. And part of it is that he's just a different person, right? There is an idea that he's still a Democrat, I guess, technically. And at this point, one should say that like the famous kind of like, are you now or have you ever been kind of stuff, I think is receding into the background and really the lavender scare is sort of taking over.
00:37:37.520So here's a gay man very much in charge of unmasking gay men, mostly within the administrative apparatus of the U.S. government, who people think are basically blackmailable and therefore must be removed.0.56
00:37:51.820And that's before we even get to Cohn, right?0.65
00:37:53.580Because the other elephant in the room is that, you know, like J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy is widely rumored to also be a gay man, right?0.68
00:38:03.300And he has hired this young gay man, Roy Cohn, as an assistant in his, you know, red hunting project and also in his, like, lavender hunting project, right?
00:38:14.960This is a prosecution of gay men led by two allegedly gay men.
00:38:21.140The irony of this exercise is, like, not exactly lost on people at the time.
00:38:25.880I just want to mention, too, that Gore Vidal-Roy Cohn debate we mentioned over Joe McCarthy, it was during that interview that Gore Vidal said, claimed, that Joe McCarthy was a full-time homosexual and that he was told this by none other than Senator from Vermont, Ralph Flanders, who was the one who introduced the censure resolution against McCarthy in the Senate.
00:38:50.560Huh. And I don't like this double standard where we make heroes out of people who have been exposed for support of communist forces.
00:38:59.860Well, maybe there was a point in making heroes out of the victims of a reckless gallivanting intriguer.
00:39:06.980To me, the nicest thing, let's be affirmative, the nicest thing that I ever heard about Joe McCarthy was told me by Senator Flanders of Vermont that he was a full-time homosexual.0.63
00:40:28.440against both communists and homosexuals.0.91
00:40:31.140And you know, this is the time when Roy meets0.57
00:40:36.260what will be like the first major man in his life,
00:40:40.920a guy named G. David Schein, a hotel heir and a kind of like Nordic looking pretty boy. He looks
00:40:48.340kind of like a Ken doll. Does anybody want to tell me about G. David Schein?
00:40:52.300I don't know much about him other than that he is the Jenga piece that brings this entire
00:40:57.300tower of what Elias calls security state masculinity tumbling down, right? Schein
00:41:04.500is supposed to be drafted as a mere private.
00:41:07.060The drafting comes later, right? Because first, Roy Cohn seems to get Shrine a job working for Joe McCarthy on a project going around the world to State Department-owned facilities and trying to purge all the communist or subversive books from their libraries, right?
00:41:25.580So he's got a little crush on this guy. He gets him a job that involves the two of them functionally going on a vacation together.
00:41:33.880They're gallivanting around Europe together, yes.0.97
00:41:36.200They're, like, in their mid-20s, and there's, you know, there's accounts of them sort of, like, running up and down these hotel stairs, like, snapping towels at each other's asses.0.97
00:41:47.040Yeah, there's one driver, a private driver, who works for them at the time, who later claims that they're doing gay stuff in the back of his cab.
00:41:54.060Shine, it should be said, later goes on to marry a beauty queen and have about 100,000 children.
00:41:59.160So this does not seem to have been as permanent a part of his life.
00:42:03.160And people who knew him at the time said that Cone was sort of more into it than Shine seemed to be.
00:42:10.680But they were broadly rumored to be dating.
00:42:13.680And this was, again, not exactly a secret.
00:42:17.100The quality of Cone's closet is something I keep returning to, right?
00:42:21.560Because it is more about plausible deniability and the respect imposed by the ability to command deniability than it is about actual concealment of what he's doing.
00:42:32.480Yes. I mean, not to get ahead of ourselves, but that's such a fascinating comment, Moira, because I kept thinking that to myself. Like, as I was reading about Cohn, watching these documentaries, I think because he did have this kind of oppositional personality, someone who, you know, he did like to challenge, right, the establishment, kind of like take people on.
00:42:54.320There was almost this, like, daring quality to the flimsiness of Cone's closet, right? And this, I mean, we're talking 1950s, this Roman holiday with David Schein, this, you know, beautiful, tall, blonde man, who kind of did seem to be Cone's type.
00:43:11.260I mean, my jaw just dropped, right? Because it did seem like if you wanted to be discreet, as you're persecuting communists and homosexuals, like, if you didn't want this to come back to you in a certain way, you just wouldn't have behaved that way.
00:43:25.400And it is kind of just a bit shocking how much Cohn almost dared people to call him out, which they did when the fallout from this gallivanting with Shine crashed down upon him.
00:43:39.040Adrian, do you want to tell us about that fallout?
00:45:30.600I don't know if this is in the original tape
00:45:32.840or if this is something that people have then done with the tape,
00:45:35.880But like you kind of feel like the camera sort of zeroing in on Cohn and you almost think like if this were Arrested Development, you know, like you'd have the Sound of Silence playing and Roy Cohn going, I've made a huge mistake.
00:45:50.820It just falls apart in this massive way.
00:45:53.660And to me, I agree with you that there is this kind of threadbare quality to his closetedness at the time.
00:45:59.920And here we sort of get the opposite of this.
00:46:01.800This is what I think Yves Kosovsky-Sedgwick calls the epistemology of the closet.
00:46:05.880The same gossip that can undo the people that Cohn and McCarthy are ruining can, of course, bounce back on them very easily.
00:46:14.480That's the wonderful thing about gossip.
00:46:31.700Right. We should probably like let our listeners know that the only reason the Army McCarthy hearings were called is because Roy Cohn had tried to get his boyfriend out of the Army.
00:46:41.500He tried to get his boyfriend out of being drafted. The Army resisted that imposition. Right.
00:46:48.000They're like, this is actually not really how we do business in the Army. They're very self-serious.
00:46:53.040And Cohn says, well, if you're not going to play ball with me, I'm going to accuse you of having a lot of communist subversives.
00:46:58.420And I'm going to drag you in front of the Senate subcommittee for which I am the general counsel.
00:47:02.540And I'm going to give you the McCarthy treatment.
00:47:04.240And it's the army playing hardball in response to Cone's attempt to wheel and deal his own power to get what he wants in terms of, you know, continued sexual access to David Schein that eventually brings all of Joe McCarthy's career crashing down.
00:47:23.680that, have you no decency, sir, at long last, have you no decency?
00:47:28.000That is a line from the Army McCarthy hearings.
00:47:30.340And it's a line that never would have been delivered
00:47:32.120if Roy Cohn hadn't overstepped his own power.1.00
00:47:34.920Hadn't thought with his dick, Rob.1.00
00:47:38.300And I mean, to me, that line where like everyone is kind of laughing at this guy
00:47:42.880and, you know, this guy who has tried to make a victim of the U.S. Army, frankly,
00:47:47.060like being suddenly the one everyone's pointing and laughing at, right,
00:47:50.500It's just so powerful because it shows this kind of razor's edge that this guy walks where he sort of marshals the very same prejudices that would normally undo him, right?
00:47:59.600And at the same time, it shows that among certain aspects of the security state, in certain parts of conservative politics, there is a real comfort with the closeted gay man as long as he's closeted in the right way.0.60
00:48:11.560I tend to think of this as the Lindsey Graham paradox, right?0.77
00:49:11.300And I want to add just a couple of details here.
00:49:13.740I mean, what Cohn via McCarthy, you know, what they were asking for, for David Schein, was what's called a direct commission, meaning you're kind of given a commission in the military that's not, that you don't actually have all the qualifications for, right, or the prerequisites for.
00:49:30.740So they were kind of asking the army to give Schein this direct commission, so asking for a favor for him.
00:49:38.380And as part of the Army McCarthy hearings, one piece of evidence kind of introduced to sort of justify why perhaps Schein, you know, could have gotten such a commission was this photograph, right, of him with Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens.
00:49:54.160And from everything I know about it, it seems like it really was doctored, like in Stalin-esque fashion, to cut out the other people in the photograph.
00:50:02.600So it looks like the Secretary of the Army was, like, you know, having this one-on-one chat with David Schein.
00:50:08.480And, well, if he's talking to the Secretary of the Army by himself, of course he might have gotten this commission, right?