Above: Cohn in 1986, a few months before he died.
Amid the aftershocks of Donald Trump’s firing of James Comey last May, I went to see Angels in America at the same theater in London, the National, where I’d first seen it as a New York Times drama critic some 25 years earlier. The play didn’t transport me quite as far from the lamentable present as I’d hoped. The new production, now on Broadway, doesn’t radically depart in tone or quality (high) from the first. But the play’s center of gravity had shifted. While Tony Kushner’s epic had been seared into my memory by the frail figure of Prior Walter, a young gay man fighting AIDS with almost the entire world aligned against him, this time it was Roy Cohn who dominated: a closeted, homophobic, middle-aged gay man also battling AIDS but who, unlike the fictional Prior, was a real-life Über-villain of America’s 20th century. “The polestar of human evil,” as one character describes him. “The worst human being who ever lived … the most evil, twisted, vicious bastard ever to snort coke at Studio 54.”
What has changed is not Angels but America. Even if you hadn’t known that Cohn had been Trump’s mentor and hadn’t read the election-year journalistic retrospectives on their toxic common tactics (counterpunch viciously, deny everything, stiff your creditors, manipulate the tabloids), you’d see and hear the current president in Cohn’s ruthless bullying and profane braggadocio. That isn’t because Nathan Lane, a Cohn for the ages, is doing a Trump impersonation. The uncanny overlap between these two figures is all there in the writing. “Was it legal? Fuck legal,” Cohn rants at one point, about having privately lobbied the judge Irving Kaufman to send Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair. “Am I a nice man? Fuck nice. They say terrible things about me in the Nation. Fuck the Nation. You want to be Nice, or you want to be Effective?” It turns out that in his rendering of Cohn a quarter-century ago, Kushner had identified an enduring strain of political evil that is as malignant in its way as the AIDS virus, just as dangerous to the nation, and just as difficult to eradicate.
Cohn, after all, was supposed to have been washed up in 1954, after he and his superior in witch-hunting, Joe McCarthy, imploded in the televised Army-McCarthy hearings. McCarthy drank himself to death, and Cohn fled Washington a pariah, his brief career in government service in ruins. Yet as Kushner accurately picks up the story three decades later, Cohn had reinvented himself as a power broker after returning to his hometown of New York, and he would remain so right up until disbarment and AIDS finally leveled him in 1986. How could that be? Sure, the right-wing resurgence of the 1980s gave him a late-in-life boost. Cohn’s juice with Ronnie and Nancy, as Kushner dramatizes, gained him access to the experimental medication AZT denied most everyone else. (He may have been the only AIDS patient the Reagan White House lifted a finger to help.) But the question of how Cohn both survived and flourished as a Manhattan eminence in the quarter-century between McCarthy and Reagan is beyond the play’s already-considerable scope.
It’s an ellipsis that gnawed at me because the same question applies to Trump. Cohn thrived throughout a New York second act rife with indictments and scandals that included accusations of multiple bank- and securities-law violations, perennial tax evasion, bribery, extortion, theft, and even precipitating the death of a young man in a suspicious fire. Trump may never have been suspected of manslaughter, but he also flourished for decades despite being a shameless lawbreaker, tax evader, liar, racist, bankruptcy aficionado, and hypocrite notorious for his mob connections, transactional sexual promiscuity, and utter disregard for rules, scruples, and morals. Indeed, Trump triumphed despite having all of Cohn’s debits, wartime draft dodging included, but none of his assets — legal cunning, erudition, a sense of humor, brainpower, and loyalty. (The putz-cum-fixer Michael Cohen, who is to Cohn what Dan Quayle was to Jack Kennedy, boasts none of these attributes either.) And Trump, like Cohn, got away with it all under the ostensibly pitiless magnifying glass of New York. Much as one hates to concede it, it’s no small achievement that he succeeded where so many of his betters failed in becoming the first New Yorker to catapult himself to the White House since Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The story of Trump’s ascent complicates the equation for those who want to believe that it was exclusively a product of his genius for publicity, or his B-stardom in a long-running reality show in NBC’s prime time, or a vast right-wing conspiracy abetted by deplorable voters like those in Wisconsin who sent McCarthy to the Senate in 1946 and helped Trump take the Electoral College in 2016. Nor is Trump’s New York backstory comforting to those of us in the habit of quarantining the blame for his unlikely victory to Russian and/or Comey’s interference, the ineptitude of the Clinton campaign, the Fox News–Breitbart complex, and the cynical, feckless Vichy Republicans who stood by as Trump subverted every principle they once claimed to have held dear.
There are Vichy Democrats too. From the mid-1970s to the turn of the century, well before Trump debuted on The Apprentice or flirted more than glancingly with politics, he gained power and consolidated it with the help of allies among the elites of New York’s often nominally Democratic and liberal Establishment — some of them literally the same allies who boosted Cohn. Like Cohn (a registered Democrat until he died) and Trump (an off-and-on Democrat for years), their enablers were not committed to any party or ideology. Their priority was raw personal power that could be leveraged for their own enrichment, privilege, and celebrity. Cohn’s biographer Nicholas von Hoffman described what he called the “Roy Cohn Barter and Swap Exchange”: It specialized in “deals, favors, hand washings, and reciprocities of all kinds.” And while Cohn is gone, the exchange never shut down. Its unofficial legislative body is the floating quid pro quo Favor Bank that has always made New York tick at its highest levels, however corruptly, since Tammany Hall. It’s a realm where everyone has his (or her) price, and clout is always valued higher than any civic good. All that matters is the next transaction. Since time immemorial, those who find it unsavory are invariably dismissed as naïve.
The more I’ve looked back at the entanglements of Trump, Cohn, and their overlapping circles and modi operandi, the more I think the crux of their political culture could be best captured if Edward Sorel were to create a raucous mural depicting the Friday night in February 1979 when Cohn celebrated his 52nd birthday at Studio 54. That sprawling midtown Valhalla of the disco era, a nexus for boldface names, omnivorous drug consumption, anonymous sex, and managerial larceny, was owned by Cohn’s clients (and soon-to-be-imprisoned felons) Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager. The guest list? “If you’re indicted, you’re invited,” went the comedian Joey Adams’s oft-repeated joke about Cohn’s soirées. Among the (all-white) Democratic revelers joining Republican and Conservative party leaders at Cohn’s black-tie testimonial were the borough presidents of Queens (Donald Manes), Brooklyn (Howard Golden), and Manhattan (Andrew Stein), not to mention the former Democratic mayor Abe Beame and a bevy of judges, including the chief of the U.S. District Court. The investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, who covered the scrum from the sidewalk for the Village Voice, noted that, among the usual Warhol celebrity crowd, politicians, and fixers, was a “surprise” attendee — “newcomer Chuck Schumer, a ‘reform’ assemblyman from Brooklyn who insisted he was just the date of a gossip columnist.” Also in attendance, less surprisingly, and camera-ready for the paparazzi, was the 32-year-old Trump, who by then had been in Cohn’s orbit for six years.
Like the other developers on hand, Trump had sought and won favors from some of the older, more powerful Democrats who were present. With Cohn’s imprimatur, Trump gained easy access to the ostensibly nonpartisan press Establishment as well. Si Newhouse, the chairman of Condé Nast magazines and Cohn’s best friend since their high-school days at Horace Mann, showed up for the Studio 54 blast. Earlier in the day, Abe Rosenthal, the executive editor of the Times, had brought his companion, Katharine Balfour, to pay homage to Cohn over lunch at the ‘21’ Club. In years to come, Rosenthal would enjoy Trump’s hospitality at Mar-a-Lago.
Neither the Newhouse magazine-and-newspaper empire nor Rosenthal’s Times was in those days conspicuous for prying too deeply into the shadows surrounding Cohn or Trump. Some journalistic big guns preferred to be behind velvet ropes with McCarthy’s former henchman than out on the pavement casing the joint like Barrett. A few months after the Studio 54 bacchanal, Morley Safer would front a soft 60 Minutes Cohn profile in which, among other euphemisms, viewers were informed that Cohn had never tied the knot with his oft-rumored fiancée Barbara Walters because “he’s just not the marrying kind.” In its effort to be “balanced,” the piece came off as a free ad for Cohn’s supposed legal wizardry and cast him as something of a victim. (Intriguingly, this 60 Minutessegment cannot be found on YouTube, while a tougher, if tardy, Mike Wallace profile, made as Cohn was dying seven years later, can be.) By that point, Walters had long since delivered for her platonic fiancé with her first promotional profile of his shiny young protégé for ABC’s 60 Minutes rival 20/20. Titled “The Man Who Has Everything,” it was, in the Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio’s description, “wealth pornography.” Among other superlatives, it floated the dubious claim (for the 1970s) that “the Trumps are treated like American royalty.”
WM BARR . =ABSOLUTE TRASH 