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Citizen Cohn
National Review, Oct 5, 1992 by Sidney Zion
LOUIS ARMSTRONG woke Jack Teagarden late one afternoon in the long ago with the news that one of the cats in the band had suddenly met his Maker. What was wrong with him?" Teagarden asked.
"Hey, Pops," Louis said. "When you die, everything was wrong."
On the other hand, Citizen Cohn gets some of the names right.
Roy Cohn must have had an irrevocable marker on the producers of this HBO version of his life. How else can we explain the critical revulsion that greeted the premiere of this movie which makes him out to be what most people in the media thought he was, namely a rat bastard? It is a delicious thought, you must admit, and anyway it is the only delicious thing about this sub-moronic film that somehow manages to turn Roy M. Cohn into .the one thing even his worst enemies knew he was not: a roaring bore.
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They put him out here as the Devil Incarnate. But out of what Scripture did the producers divine a devil without allure? Eve wouldn't have taken a dry martini from a jerk like this. And even if Adam was gay...
Ooooo, baby, do these otherwise PC kids do a number on Roy Cohn. They open with him as a momma's boy in a fancy restaurant and then--fast forward-there he is, writhing on his death bed, sick with AIDS. What Bobby Kennedy couldn't do to him, or Robert Morgenthau, the good Lord does with HIV. And yet, I suspect that if you took Executive Producer Linda Gottlieb outside, she would give up her soap-opera income before she would confess that she was guilty of "gay-bash]."
As you can see, it is almost impossible for me to get serious about this thing. But there are the children to consider, by which I mean to include everyone from MTV viewers to the Clinton-Gore-Quayle generation. I can't just sit around and let the kids even consider that if Roy Cohn had never been born, the cold war would not have happened, nor McCarthyism; that except for Roy Cohn daisies would be pushing up through the mean concrete streets of America. This is the message of Citizen Cohn.
But the truth is, Roy Cohn was a legitimate child of the Truman Democracy. Let Roy tell it himself, as he told it to me in The Autobiography of Roy Cohn:
I know this will shock most people, including many who were there when it all happened, when the Truman Administration led the war against domestic and international Communism. In 1947, long before anyone heard of Joe McCarthy, Truman instituted by executive order the first loyalty-security program in United States history, opening every government employee to an FBI probe of his Americanism. The Truman Justice Department indicted and convicted the leading lights of the Communist Party, U.S.A., in the Dennis case. The Truman Justice Department indicted and convicted the Communist spy Judith Copion. The Truman Justice Department indicted and convicted Alger Hiss, and then William Remington, and then Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
All these cases were tried before Democratic judges by Democratic prosecutors and, except for Coplon, all were upheld on appeal by the United States Supreme Court, whose members included only one Republican--Harold Burton, a Truman appointee.
As a 21-year-old Assistant U.S. Attorney, Cohn was the favored lunch guest of some of the most liberal judges in the country, even as he was working on the Hiss and Rosenberg cases. This had to do with his family connections. His father had been Boss Flynn's chief lieutenant, and Flynn put Harry Truman on Roosevelt's ticket in 1944. Citizen Cohn depicts AI Cohn as a liberal judge who recognized that Roy was a bad seed and spent the rest of his life (and afterlife: ghosts are all over Roy's deathbed in this movie) bearing the cross of his monster boy. It's all pure fantasy. The only thing A1 Cohn did that his friends in the Democratic establishment didn't do was stick with Roy when Roy joined the McCarthy committee. The rest, or most of them, dropped out for the very logical reason that Joe McCarthy was blaming the Democrats for "twenty years of treason."
The only time I saw Cohn look pensive was when he told me that Jerome Frank "cooled" him after he hooked up with McCarthy. What surprised me was that a liberal icon like Jerry Frank would have had anything to do with a guy like Cohn. But that's the point: Until he went with Tailgunner Joe, Roy Cohn was family to the liberal Democrats.
All of this history was available to the producers of Citizen Cohn. But why let facts get in the way of liberal fascism? The irony is, they would have been able to paint him blacker by listening to his own words. The Rosenberg case is the stand-out example.
Roy covered up the role of Judge Irving R. Kaufman in this "Crime of the Century." But he later told me, off the record, about the constant backstage dealings he had with Kaufman before, during, and after the trial. When his publisher asked me to help him get his autobiography in shape, I made it a condition that he lay out the truth, and most particularly about Judge Kaufman, for that one I knew already.
