00:00:47.160And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.
00:00:49.060so today we are coming at you with part two of our opus our epic investigation of poll star of
00:00:57.860human evil and donald trump mentor roy cone so adrian when we left off we had gone through roy's
00:01:08.760biography and we had left off with the end of his time working for senator joseph mccarthy
00:01:15.560That's right. So we left off essentially with the last relatable thing that Roy Cohn was able to sneak into a long career of evil, which was that he had a boyfriend that he wanted to gallivant around Europe with. And when the army tried to, you know, cockblock him, basically, he was like, well, I'm going to do the next obvious thing and accuse you of communism. It did not go well.
00:01:38.920And it really ended with a kind of curby enthusiasm moment where just like everything just blows up in his face.
00:01:46.440Well, the relatable moments will now sort of vanish from Roy Cohn's biography to be replaced by mountains and mountains of cocaine.
00:01:55.900I mean, who among us has not called Senate hearings because we wanted to have a nice fling with somebody pretty in our mid-20s?
00:02:03.240You know, that's definitely how that always ended for me.
00:02:07.160So, like, today we're going to follow Roy out of D.C. and back to New York where he really makes his career sort of both coasting off of his reputation as the murderer of the Rosenbergs and the attack dog of Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare and Lavender Scares and becomes this sort of fixer to the stars who is the legal strong arm of a ton of corruption.
00:02:35.360among some of the most powerful people of the 20th century.
00:02:40.240So we're joined again for the second part
00:02:42.500by the amazing and dominable Matt Sitman of Know Your Enemy.
00:02:47.100We're a big fan of Matt's, and Matt is a longtime,
00:02:50.740well, I don't think fan is the right word,
00:02:52.340but has long harbored a real interest in Cohen and his networks.
00:02:57.400So I really think we were able to get into a lot of very interesting stuff.
00:03:00.800Before we get to it, I wanted to briefly mention our Patreon,
00:03:04.800We have lots of extra content. We just uploaded on Saturday a new episode on the anti-woke pundit in the age of Trump 2.0.
00:03:13.040If you only listen to one Patreon episode about what the cancel culture is coming for us set is doing with an incipient fascist movement, listen to the one from If Books Could Kill.
00:03:24.360But if you listen to two, listen to us.
00:03:26.580It's true. They did the exact same thing as us.
00:03:29.020We scooped them by two days, but honestly, what can I say?
00:03:32.620We're lucky to have such smart competitors monopolizing our share of the market.
00:03:40.860I think in a arm wrestle, they would win.
00:05:00.920Though at one time, he says he and Barbara Walters almost got married.
00:05:05.780Barbara won't comment except to praise Roy for his loyalty.
00:05:10.100This is the moment when Cone's excesses really bring down his mentor.0.96
00:05:16.100And I think this might be a decent moment to reflect on Cohn's relationships with these older, closeted, conservative gay men.
00:05:25.380These do not seem to have been like sexual relationships, but it is this recurring pattern in his early life where he is introduced to an older gay man on the political right and they become very close and they become very useful to each other.
00:05:38.780and Cohn will like defend these guys and retain his loyalty to them like long after they're dead,
00:05:46.320right? Like Matt, you keep referring back to this televised debate with Gore Vidal in which,
00:05:52.100you know, Cohn is defending Joseph McCarthy. That's like the early 80s or late 70s when
00:05:57.380they have that conversation. Late 70s. It's a while later, right? And something that does
00:06:02.560separate Cohn from his later protege Donald Trump is that he seems quite loyal. He does seem
00:06:08.480actually to have been in some ways a good friend to those who were on his side. But he also has
00:06:15.980this responsibility for the downfall of McCarthy that he never really seems to take responsibility
00:06:22.440for or be particularly tortured by, you know. McCarthy gets taken down. Cohn resigns. He
00:06:30.060tells the media that nobody wanted him to resign. It's like a very Trumpy clip. He's like, oh,
00:06:34.000they all beg me to stay, but it's time for me to go. And he decamps to New York and begins what
00:06:40.680will be his career as a, you know, hinge of corruption as a political fixer.
00:06:47.900In a shocking twist, Cohen went to a place that's basically Disneyland
00:06:50.740for registered Democrats that are actually real Republicans, you know, New York City.
00:06:56.160Yes. And I want to add one detail to that. So after Cohen resigns, leaves DC,
00:07:01.360comes back to New York City. I want to read here from Citizen Cone again, because some of this is
00:07:07.560just, man, it's delicious. Roy did not return to his natal city, New York City, a whipped puppy.
00:07:15.220A week and one day after his resignation, 2,000 people paid $7 a ticket for a banquet in Roy's
00:07:22.860honor at the Astor Hotel on Times Square, which then was still one of the better hotels in the
00:07:28.360city. And it mentions all these people there. And one of them was William F. Buckley Jr.
00:07:36.120Another bicurious individual, I believe.1.00
00:07:39.040Another one of our closeted queens.1.00
00:07:40.740Yes, yes. I've been saving the Buckley dish. But, you know, when we get to Cone's disbarment0.86
00:07:47.360just a few weeks before he died, I think 1986, one of his character witnesses was
00:10:14.420But I think because of the closet, right, because at this point in time, sometimes I just think back to the possibility of, you know, if you were in New York City in this time, 60s, 70s, and say you were in a gay bar that was raided, your name would be in the paper the next morning, right?
00:10:31.880Under the crime that was, I'm not sure what people would be charged with exactly, but it was code for anyone who cared to know that you were gay, right? That you had been arrested for that reason. So I think the closet and kind of the threat of that sort of punishment made gay people like Cardinal Spellman more power than they might have had otherwise. And for, you know, fellow closet cases like Roy Cohn, this was a potential source of blackmail, right?
00:10:59.580But Cardinal Spellman, I mean, yes, he was a very conservative Cardinal Archbishop of New York City, and he was just, I think, notoriously gay.
00:11:08.620And the fact that he knows Cohn at all, I just kind of wonder what some of the details were.
00:11:19.900But Cohn's involvement both with the mafia as one of their lawyers and then, you know, a lawyer for the Archdiocese of New York, it's just one of those details about his life that I find very interesting.
00:11:32.120Yeah. So, you know, Spelman was a big leader of conservatism in New York City, right?
00:11:37.660He was a big opponent of like Vatican II. So like, you know, conservative for a Catholic. And he was a big opponent of unionization efforts among the workforces at Catholic institutions in and around New York City.
00:11:51.540So this is a little bit of family lore. Actually, I had a great grandfather who tried to unionize janitors at Catholic schools where he was working as a janitor. And it was Cardinal Spellman who, among other things, directed the union busting effort, called my great grandfather a communist and then had him interrogated for signs of mental illness.
00:12:14.540who said you're too shell-shocked from being in World War I to know what you're doing.1.00
00:12:18.640So this guy's a piece of shit, very much in the, like, sort of red-baiting, blackmail-oriented way1.00
00:12:25.660that Roy Cohn was a piece of shit, right?1.00
00:12:44.540Yes. Well, I'm so glad you brought up his political role, because this was sort of an
00:12:49.420era when the Archbishop of New York had an almost veto over political decisions. Cardinal Spellman
00:12:56.040would have been consulted, and his opinion mattered about these things quite a bit. In a way,
00:13:01.080I don't think it's the same now. But also, when J. Edgar Hoover, like, supposedly his secret files
00:13:07.080contained a lot about Cardinal Spellman. So, it's one of these delicious ironies where it's,
00:13:11.000You know, J. Edgar Hoover had a file about Cardinal Spellman, given all his, you know, gay trysts. And Hoover himself was a closet case. It's just some of these connections, it's almost too much for me to bear when I, you know, was researching all this. It's like the levels of connection among gay men, closeted gay men, and then the way they tried to use that information about each other even sometimes was remarkable.0.94
00:13:36.040Yeah, there's always a little bit of like, well, how would you know, sir?0.93
00:13:39.400You know, what are you going to do with this black male?0.96
00:13:42.160Your Honor, I ran into him at a gay club.0.99
00:13:44.000It's like, what were you doing there?0.99
00:13:48.340Did you ever hear the story of the, there was a sociologist who wrote a book about men, you know, getting blowjobs or whatever at like truck stops off the highway.
00:13:58.140It was a whole like sociological study of this.
00:14:00.440And someone did eventually ask him that question.
00:14:02.320Like, how did you know about all this or discover all this?
00:14:05.900And it actually kind of, like, got him in some trouble, I think, ethically, like, you know, to be a, shall we say, participant observer of such phenomenon.
00:14:14.420I would like to be on that, like, Internal Review Board Ethics Committee for that dissertation.
00:16:31.440Which I think gives an insight, a window into how he approached these matters, right?
00:16:36.720It was about kind of using the leverage you had and knowing who the judge was and calling in every favor or using every point of leverage you had to get your way.
00:16:48.060And so it's no kind of shock that, you know, his methods would get him in legal trouble, which he mostly evaded over the decades until just a few weeks before his death.
00:17:00.220He wasn't disbarred until the mid 80s, just like five or six weeks before he died from AIDS.
00:17:05.720Yeah, but, you know, he develops this like sort of Teflon reputation because these attempted prosecutions of him in like the late 50s and early 60s like fail, right?
00:17:14.560He beats them. He gets, I think, three acquittals and one mistrial on all these various fraud and professional ethics charges, right? And he takes the failure of the justice system to hold him accountable and uses it to feed into his personal mythos of invulnerability.
00:18:09.420Or at least that's sort of part of his pitch.
00:18:11.160But that's also the pitch he makes in some way
00:18:13.080to Rubell at Studio 54, to the mob, et cetera, et cetera.1.00
00:18:17.600Be like, look, I'm getting away with this shit.0.99
00:18:19.840Think about what else I can help you get away with, right?0.99
00:18:22.160Like in some way, the fact that he's always skating by
00:18:24.760is the pitch for the next mark in some way.
00:18:28.720In Angels in America, Roy Cohn is like the devil in Paradise Lost.
00:18:34.100You know, he's kind of this evil character who is nevertheless like kind of the most enticing and fascinating character and has this like magnetic pull.
00:18:42.940And Kushner gives him a lot of the best lines, including this wonderful monologue.
00:18:47.860Adrian, do you want to read it for us?
00:18:49.200Well, I thought maybe we just cut in Al Pacino doing it because I don't think I can do it justice.
00:18:53.980Al Pacino is quite good in that movie.
00:23:08.160It's like, you know, you talk about like you turning to beer at a certain point in your life. Yeah, I don't know. That betrays a certain involvement with the substances involved.
00:23:19.340The other thing that I think we might need to mark explicitly, even though I think we're dancing around it, is that this is a profoundly lonely man. This is a moment at which sort of the idea that, as Matt was saying, that men having sex with men might commit them to something communal starts really taking root, not just in like, you know, small activist circles, but really is kind of a widely shared understanding, including among some conservatives.
00:23:44.740But Cohn really still seems to operate according to this model where like he's sui generis, right? Like it sets him apart. It doesn't seem to me that any of these relationships really are mutual either. He's extremely invested in kind of hierarchy and dissimilarity, right, when it comes to these other men, right?
00:24:07.680Well, I mean, the men he's sleeping with are not his professional equals, right?
00:24:15.480No, this is an insight from an ex-boyfriend of his, Wallace Adams, who has this kind of like, oh my God, what's the name of that like 80s Swedish model who dated Grace Jones?
00:24:36.780And this Wallace Adams guy who was willing to be a talking head in one of these documentaries, I think it's Get Me Roy Cohn, has this insight that, like, you know, all of the guys Roy was with were younger than him.
00:24:50.600All of them had this kind of Nordic look.
00:24:53.340And they were all, at least according to Adams, uneducated, lower class, poor.0.52
00:24:59.500These are people who have access to spaces like Studio 54, like these social clubs where Cone was frequenting because of their looks, because of their attention from Cone and not because of their education, their background, their professional achievement.
00:25:17.320right this is not a guy who is having a quasi-secret affair with like another attorney0.68
00:25:24.780this is a guy who is fucking a dancer like at the end of a long night right and after david shine0.96
00:25:33.040and i you know i'm almost tempted to speculate maybe because of david shine and what his0.99
00:25:37.880relationship with that guy led him to he never has what could be considered like a romantic
00:25:43.480entanglement. Like, Roy Coyne does not fall in love, you know? He's fucking, and it's very
00:25:50.380boundaried. Yes. And, you know, to that point, I wanted to mention Coyne's whole operation,1.00
00:25:57.620once he moved back to New York, he eventually gets this townhouse on the Upper East Side,
00:26:02.920somewhere in the 60s. It's East 68th Street. So it's kind of this mix of all these young men he
00:26:09.940was fucking slash semi-employing slash helping in some way, you know, mixed with his law0.93
00:26:17.900business in this townhouse in the Upper East Side.0.99
00:26:21.880It just seems like this crazy combination.
00:28:17.420But so, you know, in part because he had helped the Reagan campaign, there are these stories and even photos of Cohn going to the White House.
00:28:26.120Meeting Ronnie and Nancy, you know, with his boyfriend in tow, so to speak, you know, some like, you know, 6'2 blonde guy with this 5'8 Roy Cohn, right? I'm sure they stood out. But he did that. He like brought the guy he was fucking to the White House. And it's fascinating in part because, you know, the Reagans clearly knew lots of gay people.
00:28:50.040And their, you know, kind of homophobia, especially in response to the AIDS crisis, was this sort of, you know, what the hell moment where they almost pretended not to know the people they did and not to care about some of the people they did.
00:29:04.480When Roy Cohn is dying of AIDS in the mid 80s, he uses his connections in the Reagan administration to get himself enrolled in the NIH's trial of AZT, right?
00:29:17.140Yes, that's right. I mean, they think bribing, you know, he probably bribes someone.
00:29:21.440Yeah, he pretty clearly bribes his way through. Yeah, but he knows the people he knows to bribe because he's got all these connections, right? And on the one hand, the Reagan administration is leaving millions of gay men to slow, painful, neglected deaths. And on the other hand, they're slipping this advantage and possibility of survival to a guy who's done them favors in the past.
00:29:41.920Yeah. And I think that the Hollywood connection there seems really key because I'm sure that is the kind of gay man that at least Nancy sort of was familiar with, right? Who sort of, you know, didn't have age appropriate relationships. No one's ever said anything, but they were always together, right? Probably, you know, both powerful and like you could sort of make fun of him.0.61
00:30:05.360And, like, this was the kind of, this is the house gay you can hold yourself.0.98
00:30:09.040And I think that that's exactly what Cohn ends up being for them.0.93
00:30:13.500It's also, didn't Cohn mostly lobby Reagan on behalf of Rupert Murdoch?
00:30:44.620The descriptions of Cohn's place on the Upper East Side, his townhouse,
00:30:48.480there was like a video that C-SPAN shot of going into the New Republic offices
00:30:52.700sometime in like the late 80s, early 90s.
00:30:56.000And at the time, this British journalist, Henry Fairley, I think, you know, was employed by them.
00:31:01.460But, you know, this is the era of Marty Peretz, you know, hiring all these handsome young men, right, in succession to be editor of the New Republic. And someone asked Henry this kind of, you know, gin besotted, you know, like old school Fleet Street British journalist who happened to be in D.C. working for the New Republic about this.
00:31:22.140And he had the great line. He said, are you fucking kidding me? It's like a Greek gymnasium in there. And that line kept coming back to me when I was watching these documentaries about Roy Cohn and these kind of descriptions of the mix of personal and professional. Are you kidding me? It's a Greek gymnasium. I'll never forget that line.0.98
00:31:52.120So his deployment of the closet is an expression of his power, right, in a way that I don't think exactly exonerates him from all the compromises and vulnerabilities of being a gay man, as we're going to see when he gets sick.0.97
00:32:07.300But it also means that he is regarded as sort of immune from consequence, right?0.58
00:32:15.680And I think that's something that is really magnetic and attractive about Cohn to a young gentleman from the outer boroughs named Donald Trump.
00:32:28.000Does anybody want to take us through Mr. Cohn's relationship with Donald Trump?
00:32:32.380Yeah, so Trump was then working for his father's business, Fred Trump.
00:32:36.740And in a shocking twist that would never repeat ever again, that business was being investigated by the Justice Department, in this case by the Civil Rights Division.
00:32:45.680for discriminating against black tenants.
00:32:49.220Trump, or Donald, then just 23, approached Cohn,
00:32:54.340basically, I think, retained him as their lawyer for this thing.
00:32:57.660Specifically because Cohn has a reputation for being so aggressive as a lawyer.
00:33:42.220And I thought it was fantastic. I thought it was really good. And so watching that like right now as Trump is, you know, his tariff madness, right? These kind of crackpot schemes of his, the three rules that Roy Cohn taught him, right, for handling controversies in public were what? Rule number one, always attack. Rule number two, deny everything. And rule number three, always claim victory.
00:34:10.260Right. That is Trump, right? Like Roy Cohn taught him that and Trump never forgot it. Because my sense is that the lawsuits that the Trump corporation was facing from the Department of Justice, as you're saying back in the 70s over racial discrimination, there were apparently records, right, documents of Trump corporation employees responsible for renting out these apartments, marking certain applications with like a B for black.
00:34:40.260right like something something like almost comically straightforwardly racist and prejudicial
00:34:46.520and my sense is a lot of lawyers told Trump yeah you know this is going to be tough and Cohn was
00:34:53.540the one who said no you can get out of this and he taught him how to do it and that kind of stamped
00:34:58.540Donald Trump for the rest of his life and so that that line where's my Roy Cohn when like Robert
00:35:04.160Mueller's going after Trump? Of course, because Trump viewed Cohn as the man who was Teflon,
00:35:10.820who could get out of situations where you're obviously guilty, frankly. And that's one of
00:35:17.260my main takeaways from all the reading and watching and listening I did to learn about Roy
00:35:22.840Cohn is just the extent to which he was a mentor to Trump in the most kind of decisive and important
00:35:31.160sense you can use the term yeah the uh notion that like there's nothing that is not justified
00:35:36.680in the service of your own winning and aggrandizement right like that's like really0.94
00:35:41.220the takeaway and that the the truth means nothing and that principles are for suckers you know the
00:35:46.300movie the apprentice which i agree with you matt i really liked it i think i think jeremy strong
00:35:51.960our truest freak uh yeah in an old hollywood mode does a really fantastic performance as roy cone
00:35:59.240and like kind of nails the uncanniness of Cone's affect in this way that I really like.
00:36:04.720But that movie sort of depicts Trump as this like provincial outer borough innocent who
00:40:25.060Right. Because he is in a very Trumpian fashion, a guy who esteems himself to will truth in the service of his own interests and ego. Right. Yeah. And you alluded to this before, Matt, but he does get disbarred. I think his physical illness sort of mirrors a bit of a decline in his influence. Right.
00:40:46.380And they do finally manage to disbar him in part because his misconduct has accumulated so much.
00:40:52.960And the New York State Bar Review Committee finally has some people on it who are no longer on Roy Cohn's pocket.
00:41:00.880And I want to like quickly go through the charges that he was actually disbarred on.
00:41:06.260Like it could have been a lot of things, but it was these things.
00:41:08.680So a yacht club that was represented by Cohn went through bankruptcy and all the assets of the club wound up going to Roy Cohn instead of to the creditors.
00:41:19.600A woman represented by Cohn is convinced to, quote unquote, lend him $100,000.
00:41:42.220He's like sometimes thought of as being in a coma, sometimes described as just being like not mentally competent, right?
00:41:48.600He is past the point where he is able to make decisions for himself and he's at death's door.
00:41:55.600And Cone sneaks in to the old guy's hospital bed and manipulates him either like by actually physically moving his hand or trying to get the guy to do it himself to sign over a change in Mr. Rosenstile's will that would make Cone a beneficiary of the will.
00:42:16.900One of the documentaries I watched for this had an image of the signature, and to call it a scribble is generous to somebody who's not capable of holding a pen.0.99
00:42:27.000I mean, it's soap opera shit, isn't it?0.99
00:42:29.080He fucking weakened at Bernie's this guy to get the money, right?1.00
00:42:32.100He's basically manipulating the hand of a corpse, and it is really dark.0.97
00:42:37.100And he dies a couple weeks after he is disbarred, and he is no longer a lawyer.
00:42:42.580He is disbarred in June of 1986, towards the end of the June, and he dies in August.
00:42:48.460And he is largely abandoned by his friends.
00:42:56.680And foreshadowing for the story we're all living through, you know, Cohen, if anything, was loyal when he was not guiding your hand to sign over all your effects to him.
00:43:13.260He backs away when it's inconvenient for him, telegraphing kind of what he will do to an escalating number of people and peoples over the next 40 years.
00:43:23.300I mean, I thought one of the most kind of striking scenes of The Apprentice, the film, was after this kind of last birthday party for Cone, I think at Mar-a-Lago, actually, the scene where, you know, germaphobe Trump is having all the seats at the table, like, steam cleaned, is really striking.
00:43:41.260Like, I think that was part of his reaction to Cone dying of AIDS was, like, Trump's germophobia.
00:43:46.440But, you know, as Cohn is going through this disbarment hearing, I mentioned earlier that, like, one of his character witnesses was William F. Buckley Jr.
00:44:18.360And, you know, as Cohn is dying of AIDS, we kind of mentioned this earlier, but he participated in these clinical trials of AZT, which he probably had to bribe his way into those trials.
00:44:30.140He kept telling everyone he was dying of liver cancer.
00:44:33.080And at the start of Citizen Cohn, the Nicholas von Hoffman biography, it begins with Cohn dying, you know, kind of on his last legs in Provincetown.
00:44:43.520And it was a reminder of just how brutal these deaths could be, right?
00:44:50.500Frankly, it puts me in this position of, like, as Cone is dying, as you read about it, as you learn about it, like, it's such a horrible death.
00:45:12.620I feel you, Matt. You know, it's my fascination with Cone makes me feel almost implicated in his wrongdoing because he does have this charisma and this magnetism. And I sort of wanted him, you go through this life and you want him to get his comeuppance. And a lot of times when you have that impulse in a narrative, it doesn't come true, right?
00:45:32.820Yeah. Like Cohn suffered at the end of his life in a way that has a note of justice to it. A lot of those same talking heads in the documentaries that will describe him as evil or say something to the effect of like, I didn't really consider evil or think about evil until I met Roy Cohn. There's just something like a shocking number of people say.
00:45:53.520A lot of those same people say, you know, like, at the end, I felt bad for him.0.94
00:45:58.120I think it is a testament to how we are, in fact, different from Roy Cohn, because I'll tell you, he sure as shit wouldn't have felt bad for any of us.0.96
00:46:06.180Yes. And there's even, you know, I can't speak to this precisely, but a number of comments, whether in interviews or in these documentaries, you know, Cohn was dying of AIDS.0.91
00:46:16.020He refused to say it, right? He was dying of liver cancer, officially. He would say, no, I don't have AIDS.
00:46:22.460who was he fucking then and did he tell them yeah like there there are comments that like genuinely0.96
00:46:28.740make it seem and this isn't implausible you know more broadly but that when he first started the0.99
00:46:34.560azt and he felt a little better you know he was asking doctors who can i fuck and they said you0.83
00:46:41.000can't you really shouldn't do that now uh and it seems to me that you know his line implicated the1.00
00:46:47.920people he slept with too in ways that you know could have destroyed their lives yeah a bastard0.51
00:46:54.220to the end yeah yeah thank you matt sitman so much for joining us thank you to our listeners0.98
00:47:00.160for coming along with us on this dark weird journey it was my pleasure uh i guess
00:47:05.440and we'll see you next time see you next time on in bed with the right
00:47:09.580in bed with the right is made possible by hundreds of listeners who support us via patreon.com
00:47:16.240Our episodes are produced and edited by Mark Yoshizumi and Katie Lau.