Finished Th 4/29/21
His name is 'Cohn', not 'Cohen'. I have been misspelling it dozens of times.
This is one of my ancient paperbacks that I had never read. I am looking for biographies of 'American Villains', especially Robert Moses and Harry J. Anslinger, but Roy Cohn certainly belongs on that list.
I read 3/4 of the book and skimmed to the end.
Roy's parents had an almost 'arranged marriage'. His father, Al, was a judge without connections, and his mother was from a well connected family, but Dora was not very pretty and might never have married.
Dora had absolute control over Roy. In his youth he went to a summer camp and his mother traveled to the camp and also stayed with him. I can only imagine how this went over with Roy's friends at the camp. Roy lived with Dora until he was forty.
Roy first came to infamy where he played a prominent role in the 1951 espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The trial was shrouded in controversy and the consensus is that 'the Rosenberg's were guilty-and framed'.
Then Roy was able to get the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, to appoint him chief counsel to Joseph McCarthy. Cohn and McCarthy went on to smear numerous Americans with their 'Red Scare'. Rooting out American communists even though they were no more harmful than the Elks.
'Lavender Scare'- The idea that gays in government could be blackmailed by communists, so homosexuals should be banned from government work because they could be compromised.
And all during this time, Roy was traveling the world with David Schine. Roy might have had a platonic relationship with this man, but it was definitely not kosher.
He made a lot of money in the early sixties in shady NYC deals, and during the early 70's he worked for Donald and Fred Trump to keep out people of color from their apartment buildings.
Robert Murdoch was also a client of Roy Cohn.
Cohn was the grandnephew of the founder of Lionel model train company. By the mid 60's Cohn had run that company into the ground.
Cardinal Spellman was gay?
Barbara Walters was a girlfriend of Cohn's for many years. That was a real shocker for me. How could this woman not know what kind of guy he actually was?
Cohn died of AIDS in 1986, but he claimed that he had liver cancer. He never did anything about the AIDS epidemic.
An interesting book, but I felt it was time to move on.
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