If you have ever watched a US politician lose something, an election, a court case or a vote, and then call it a triumph, you have seen Roy Cohn’s work. He died in 1986. In politics, as it turns out, that doesn’t stop anyone.
Cohn is having a moment again. A new wave of biographies, documentaries and dramas keeps going back to the lawyer who linked Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare to Donald Trump’s Manhattan. For British readers who follow American politics with the grim fascination usually kept for motorway pile-ups, his story is the missing back episode.
Who was Roy Cohn and why does he matter now?
Roy Cohn was a New York lawyer who seemed to turn up at every rotten moment of post-war American history. History.com sums him up well: a prosecutor in the Rosenberg spy trial, chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy, a close friend of Nancy Reagan and Donald Trump’s personal lawyer. He was also a closeted gay man who helped drive gay and lesbian employees out of government jobs. That hypocrisy is still breathtaking 70 years on.
He was barely out of law school when he helped prosecute Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 for passing atomic secrets to the Soviets. The case against Ethel has looked shaky for decades, and Cohn’s role in her conviction is the first stain on a CV that is mostly stains.
Then came McCarthy. As the senator’s chief counsel, Cohn led the hunt for communists in government, the army and anywhere else a headline could be found. It fell apart in 1954 at the televised Army-McCarthy hearings. Cohn’s efforts to get special treatment for his friend G. David Schine, who had been drafted into the army, became part of the scandal. And the army’s lawyer, Joseph Welch, asked McCarthy the famous question about whether he had any sense of decency left. McCarthy was finished soon after. Cohn wasn’t. He went back to New York and started again.
Mobsters, nightclubs and the art of the countersuit
The second act is where the story turns into something Martin Scorsese might reject as too much. Cohn built a practice that took in Mafia figures, including the Genovese boss Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, alongside society names, Catholic bigwigs and the Studio 54 owners Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager. He threw parties, collected favours and dodged several federal prosecutions of his own.
His method was simple and brutal. Never apologise. Never settle if you can bully instead. If you’re sued, sue back for more. If you’re accused, accuse the accuser. And whatever the result, tell the press you won. It’s a playbook that sounds like a pub bore’s guide to arguing, except Cohn ran it for real, for decades, against federal prosecutors.
The end was grim. In 1986 the New York courts disbarred him for professional misconduct. Weeks later he died of AIDS-related complications, still telling anyone who asked that he had liver cancer. He denied it to the last, which was the most Roy Cohn ending possible.
Cohn never really lost a fight. He just refused to accept that he had, and found that if you shout it loudly enough, a lot of people believe you.
How did Roy Cohn shape Donald Trump?
This is the part that brings most of us to the story. Cohn met the young Donald Trump in the early 1970s, around the time the US Justice Department sued the Trump family business for discriminating against black tenants. Cohn’s answer was pure Cohn: a huge countersuit against the government and a loud public campaign calling the case an outrage. The matter ended in a settlement. Trump called it a win anyway, and a lifelong habit was born.
Over the next decade Cohn was Trump’s lawyer, fixer and teacher. The lessons people usually credit to Cohn are attack, deny everything and always claim victory, however bad things look. Anyone who has watched American politics since 2016, or January 2021, will recognise them. Trump himself reportedly wondered aloud during his first term, when his attorney general wouldn’t shield him from the Russia investigation, where his Roy Cohn was. That line became the title of a documentary.
Of course, a mentor can only explain so much. Trump had his own appetite for publicity long before Cohn. But the shape of it, the refusal to concede, lawsuits as a weapon, grievance as fuel, carries Cohn’s fingerprints all over it. Every good biography of either man ends up as half a biography of the other.
What should you read and watch about Roy Cohn?
If you want the long read, the classic is Nicholas von Hoffman’s Citizen Cohn from 1988. It’s still the benchmark, and the newer biographies cover the same ground with the Trump years added. HBO made it into a 1992 TV film with James Woods, who plays Cohn like a man who has never been told no.
For something with an evening’s commitment, there are two very good documentaries from 2019. Matt Tyrnauer’s Where’s My Roy Cohn? is a brisk, well-sourced portrait. Ivy Meeropol’s Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn, made for HBO, is the more personal and unsettling of the two, because Meeropol is a granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. It is hard to think of a filmmaker with more reason to look Cohn in the eye.
On the drama side, The Apprentice from 2024 is the obvious pick. Ali Abbasi directs, Sebastian Stan plays the young Trump and Jeremy Strong, Kendall Roy from Succession, plays Cohn. Strong earned an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor, and he’s terrifying: clipped, cold and oddly sad. It opened in UK cinemas in October 2024 and can now be rented or bought digitally. Trump’s lawyers tried to stop its release, which Cohn would have admired.
For the theatre-minded, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America puts a dying Cohn at the heart of its story about AIDS-era America. Al Pacino played him in the 2003 HBO miniseries, and Nathan Lane took the role at the National Theatre in London in 2017. It is long, but it’s worth every minute, which isn’t something you can say about most seven-hour commitments.
Is it worth your time?
Yes, with a warning: none of this is comfort viewing. Cohn’s life is a lesson in how far you can get when shame isn’t a factor, and it doesn’t come with a satisfying comeuppance. Disbarment and an early death arrived too late to undo much.
Still, if you’ve watched the news from Washington and wondered how we got here, his story goes a long way to answering that. Start with The Apprentice for drama, Bully. Coward. Victim. if you want it raw, and a proper biography if you want to see how an obscure young prosecutor’s methods ended up in the Oval Office.
In short
Roy Cohn went from prosecuting the Rosenbergs and serving as Joe McCarthy’s attack dog to defending mobsters, partying at Studio 54 and mentoring the young Donald Trump. His rules were never admit fault, always hit back and claim victory whatever happens, and they still shape American politics today. For the best way in, try Jeremy Strong’s Oscar-nominated turn in The Apprentice, the 2019 documentaries about him, or a full biography such as Citizen Cohn.
Sources
Midcent Entertainment
Ashley Isaacs picks what's worth your evening – film, TV, streaming, music and books for men 45 and over with limited evenings and too many subscriptions. Reviews of what's new on Netflix, Prime Video, BBC iPlayer and the rest, crime dramas worth a weekend, and classics worth a second look. What's worth watching, what isn't, and where to find it in the UK.
One of Midcent's writers. Spotted something? Write to ashley@midcent.uk.
