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Citizen Cohn

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Loathed by some, well respected by others, Roy Cohn was known as the toughest and most brilliant lawyer in America. And indeed, his power brokering, love of glamour; controversy, and notoriety made him, in the end, one of the most influential men in our society. From his role in the Rosenbergs' trial and as chiefcounsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Senate hearings through his extraordinary friendship with J. Edgar Hoover and his own vendetta against Robert Kennedy, Cohn's reputation built. But his unique practice of law and power brokering was most notorious outside the courtroom. His unprecedented track record and his sensational and shocking behavior drew the rich and the powerful to him to solve their problems. His clients ranged from media barons to members of organized crime, to the owners and clientele of Studio 54, to glittering society names-especially if they were divorcing-and a host of the mighty in business and politics. At the same time Cohn, himself the target of numerous indictments, was haunted by professional misconduct charges and finally disbarred shortly before his death. His private life was even more startling than the public one. Roy Cohn's name was constantly in gossip columns, hobnobbing with the glitterati; then there were his lovers, his denials of his homosexuality and AIDS, and finally his death from AIDS-related cancer in 1986. Nicholas von Hoffman has created a remarkable and provocative biography. interviewing family members, colleagues, clients, friends, and lovers, he gives us an extraordinary portrait of the man, his ideological passion, and the patterns of power and money that controlled his life. From the hidden bank accounts, numerous incidents of political fixing, and surprising connections, to the clients who were bilked, the judges and politicians who made his singular practice of law possible, Citizen Cohn reveals the real Roy Cohn. Nicholas von Hoffman has written for the Chicago Daily News, the Washington Post, and King Features Syndicate, and reported through the electronic media on CBS's '60 Minutes, CBS Radio, and the Byline Radio Syndicate. He has also written for almost every major magazine and is the author of nine previous books, including Organized Crinies, Make-Believe Presidents, and, with Garry Trudeau, The Fireside Watergate.

He began his career by suborning the perjury that put an innocent woman in the electric chair. He was very proud of this. He lied, cheated and stole his entire life. He bribed judges and threatened witnesses. As a legal technician he was completely inept, unread in the law and ignorant of basic trial practice. His best and most frequently used courtroom tactic was the continuance. He was a fixer of the highest magnitude. He was disbarred just before he withered away from AIDS, way too late to do society any good. He is unmourned and unmissed. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Still, Roy Cohn did live a life that makes for interesting reading and Nicholas Von Hoffman has pieced it all together in this wonderful biography. "Citizen Cohn" will be the source book on this annoying gnat of a man long after Cohn has joined his pal Walter Winchell in obscurity. "Citizen Cohn" is both serious and blisteringly funny, anecdotal, and gossipy. Mr. Von Hoffman trods the well-worn path of Cohn's early years-how he got David Greenglass to lie from the witness stand and send his sister Ethel Rosenberg to the death house at Sing Sing, how he used the notoriety he gained from the Rosenberg trial to vault to a position as Senator Joe McCarthy's witch hunter in chief, how he was caught red-handed trying to arrange special favors for his "special friend" G. David Schine, a humble army private who was also a member of McCarthy's staff (in Lillian Hellman's great phrase, Cohn and Schine and McCarthy were "...Bonnie and Bonnie and Clyde")-but it is Roy Cohn in New York where "Citizen Cohn" sparkles.

Cohn the uber lawyer was both powerful and petty. He could make or break a federal judical nominee; he also wouldn't pay his electric bill. Cohn needed massive amounts of cash to maintain his dashing man about town persona (dashing, but closeted in the most transparent of closets) and he didn't care how he got it. He stole so much money from so many clients that the wonder isn't why it took so long to disbar him but why some outraged victim didn't simply shoot him. Mr. Von Hoffman minces no words in describing Cohn's lifetime of thievery and fortifies his revelations with the testimonials of those who were there. The writing is evocative, gray and somber during the McCarthy era, light and breezy during the disco years. There is an illuminating word picture of Roy Cohn at Studio 54, where he was royalty, standing with one of his handsome young men, both clad all in black, sunglasses, lights beating down on them in the middle of the floor, music blaring, the two standing stock-still, posing, profiling "...like secret service agents at the beach".

When it was almost over he took to wearing an orange phosphorescent tuxedo. This blatant self-promoter was reduced to wearing an outlandish coat that screamed "Look at me! Look at me!". It was a pathetic, but fitting, end to a pathetic man.

Watching Mike Nichols' superb adaptation of Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," I was struck by Al Pacino's fierce interpretation of Roy Cohn. It reminded me of Nicholas Von Hoffman's work. It made me think "if anyone is watching this & wants to know where to turn to find out more about the life and times of Roy Cohn, I would start with Von Hoffman."

So do that. Pick up a used copy of 'Citizen Cohn' and be prepared for a great read. Love him or loathe him, Roy Cohn was a one-of-a-kind individual whose actions and behavior (both professional and personal) will have you dropping your jaw and shaking your head.

Passages of this book have stuck with me verbatim for 15 years. Von Hoffman's writing is that good. Roy Cohn is that memorable.

Nicholas von Hoffman is a brilliant columnist who, if this book is any indication, should stick to shorter-format works. CITIZEN COHN is fact-packed, and has some well-drawn anecdotes, but overall it is an unwieldy and disorganized tome. Von Hoffman jumps forward and back in time, in an almost stream-of-consciousness style, which bogs down the narrative and muddies the chronology of events he recounts. In the space of one paragraph, he darts from 1954 to 1980-something and then back to 1964, bringing in a parallel but unrelated incident involving entirely different players.

If you have a lot of time on your hands, and access to a high-speed internet connection to provide additional context for his stories, this great lump of a book can help kill a few hours here and there, but to someone who admires von Hoffman's usual style, it was a serious disappointment.

True to his usual form, Nicholas "Von" Hoffman dishes up endless servings of
scabrous gossip. But the net result of this festival of trivia is to
hopelessly blur the essential evil of a Sadean monster who had absolutely
no moral compass whatsoever. He was a loose cannon who followed his iron
whims wherever they led him. Like a scorpion, his forte was the treacherous
backstabbing sting, delivered whenever it suited him.

And yet this strange "Von" Hoffman book is almost loving in portraying Cohn
as an endearingly affectionate character who was often liked and even adored.
I'd really like to read a "Von" Hoffman biography of Adolf Hitler. We might
read gems such as the following: "It's perfectly true that our Adolf was
busy invading Poland at that period of his life, but his domestic situation
had its humorous side. His beloved German Shepherd dog had become ill after
biting Joseph Goebbels, a result that had the Fuhrer's inner circle
chuckling about cause and effect. And his attempts to convert Goering to
a vegetarian diet had caused such flatulence in the portly Riechsmarshal
that the veggies had to be abandoned completely."

It's possible to dilute, cover, and almost extenuate gross evil in a
human being by emphasizing endearingly eccentric personal gossip, and "Von"
Hoffman does this marvelously well. But a gossip festival is not really
an appropriate format for the life of an evil person like Cohn who
delighted in subverting every possible ethical principle. Cohn was
totally loathsome and vile, and any biography that attempts to gloss
over his fascist personality is dishonest and worthless.

You can turn to page 459 of the Doubleday hardbound edition of this bio
for just one example of "Von" Hoffman's deceptive technique. The second
paragraph describes in a glibly casual style one of Cohn's nastiest
acts, which was to invade the hospital room of a dying man, force a pen
into his palsied hand, and attempt to create a signature on a legal
document that would convert Roy and two of his stooges into trustees of
the dying man's estate. But in the very next paragraph, "Von" Hoffman
attempts to defuse these disgusting facts with an account of how he
and this person were "close friends" for many years. How anybody's
"close friend" could act in such a way is not explained by the
omniscient "Von" Hoffman because no such explanation is possible.
It would be like saying, "True, Roy was known to knock down little old
ladies and steal their diamond rings, but in spite of this small
eccentricity, he was a lovable character and a loyal friend when he
chose to be."

This book is so blatantly misleading that it is IMHO a pile of junk
that should not be relied on as a factual account of anything at all.

Nicholas von Hoffman has done an admirable job at portraying a man who never stood still long enough to be known to those around him. Roy Cohn purposely left others guessing at his next move, until the unexpected became routine. The last fifteen pages or so of this book pack the greatest punch in the drama of Cohn's life, and you can't help but shake your head at the enormity of it all.