A Private War

by Brenner, Marie

  Cohn’s cousin David L. Marcus concurred. Soon after graduating from Brown in the early eighties, Marcus recalled, he sought Cohn out. While they had encountered each other over the years at family gatherings, Marcus’s parents had despised Cohn since his McCarthy days, and a chill had set in. But Cohn, intrigued by the attention of his long-lost cousin, welcomed him. Marcus, a journalist who would later share a Pulitzer Prize, recently said that he was astonished by the atmosphere of creepy intimacy that, in those days, seemed to perfume Cohn’s attitude toward his acolytes, including one in particular. “There was a party in the mid-1980s, where Mailer was, and Andy Warhol, [when] in walked Trump,” recounted Marcus. “Roy dropped everyone else and fussed over him . . . Roy had that ability to focus on you. I felt that Roy was attracted to Trump, more than in a big-brotherly way.

  “Donald fit the pattern of the hangers-on and the disciples around Roy. He was tall and blond and . . . frankly, über-Gentile. Something about Roy’s self-hating-Jewish persona drew him to fair-haired boys. And at these parties there was a bevy of blond guys, almost midwestern, and Donald was paying homage to Roy . . . I wondered then if Roy was attracted to him.”

  “Thwarted loves obsessed Roy Cohn’s life,” added a lawyer who first met Cohn in the sixties, characterizing some of the men, both gay and straight, in Cohn’s orbit. “He would become sexually obsessed with cock-tease guys who would sense his need and not shun him. These were unrequited relationships. The way he would expiate the sexual energy was possessive mentoring. Introducing them to everyone in town and taking them places.”

  Seeing Trump and Cohn enter a room together had a hint of vaudeville. Donald, standing six feet two inches, would typically enter first, with a burlesque macho-man’s gait, walking as if he led from his toes. A few feet behind would be Cohn, skinny, eyes darting, his features slightly caved in from plastic surgery. “Donald is my best friend,” Cohn said back then, shortly after he had thrown a thirty-seventh-birthday party for Trump. And over the years, several who knew Cohn would remark on Donald Trump’s resemblance to the most infamous of Roy Cohn’s blond, rich-boy obsessions: David Schine.

  PATRIOT GAMES

  Consider the episode—and the compulsion—that ended Roy Cohn’s time in the capital and Joe McCarthy’s Senate career. In the mid-fifties, Cohn was in the headlines for the malicious circus of the hearings. Scores of witnesses were being bullied by Cohn or McCarthy or both. “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” Cohn demanded in his nasal honk, a spectacle replayed in the evenings on TV and radio.

  It was amid this high drama that a young man had come into Cohn’s life. The heir to a hotel-and-movie franchise, the feckless David Schine had reportedly pulled Ds in his first year at Harvard. But in 1952, he wrote a pamphlet on the evils of communism and was soon introduced to Cohn. It was, for Cohn, a coup de foudre, and Schine came on the McCarthy committee as an unpaid “research assistant.” Dispatched on a tour of Europe to investigate possible subversion at army bases and American embassies—which included ridding the consular libraries of “subversive literature” (among them works by Dashiell Hammett and Mark Twain)—the pair were dogged by rumors that they were lovers. (Cohn told friends that they were not.) Whispers also began to swirl about McCarthy’s sexual orientation.

  In lavender Washington, Cohn was known as both a closeted homosexual and homophobic, among those leading the charge against supposedly gay witnesses who he and others believed should lose their government jobs because they were “security risks.” When Schine was drafted as a private and not a commissioned officer, Cohn threatened he would “wreck the army.” McCarthy even mentioned to Robert T. Stevens, the secretary of the army, that “Roy thinks Dave ought to be a general and operate from a penthouse in the Waldorf Astoria.” President Dwight Eisenhower, meanwhile, angered by McCarthy’s attacks and fearful that the senator’s zealotry was severely damaging the president’s agenda and the GOP itself, sent word to the army counsel to write a report on Cohn’s harassment tactics. According to historian David A. Nichols, the president secretly ordered the document to be released to key legislators and the press, and the revelations were explosive, resulting in the Army-McCarthy hearings.

  Over thirty-six days, 20 million Americans watched. It was all there: Cohn and Schine’s jaunt to Europe, Cohn’s ultimatums, McCarthy’s smears. The high point came when the army’s sly Boston lawyer, Joseph Welch, shook his head in pained disbelief at McCarthy’s attempt to slander one of Welch’s own assistants, imploring the senator, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last . . . ?” Within weeks, Cohn was banished and McCarthy was soon censured.

  Cohn played it as a win. After the debacle, he returned to New York and attended a party thrown in his honor at the Hotel Astor. It would be the first example of his ability to project victory from defeat and induce moral amnesia upon a mesmerized New York—a gambit not dissimilar to those later utilized by his confrère Donald Trump.

  Another of Cohn’s tactics was to befriend the town’s top gossip columnists, such as Leonard Lyons and George Sokolsky, who would bring Cohn to the Stork Club. He was irresistible to tabloid writers, always ready with scandal-tinged tales. “Roy would be hired by a divorce client in the morning and be leaking their case in the afternoon,” New Yorker writer Ken Auletta recalled. Columnist Liz Smith said she learned to distrust most items he gave her. A similar reliance on the press would also become a vital component of the young Trump’s playbook.

  “[Roy] would call me up and it was always short—‘George, Roy,’ ” said former New York Post political reporter George Arzt, who was later Mayor Ed Koch’s press secretary. “He would drop a dime on someone, hoping I would print it.”

  * * *

  My initiation to the louche world of Roy Cohn came in 1980—at a lunch with Trump in the room upstairs at the “21” Club, the first time I had been there. “Anybody who is anybody here sits between the columns,” Trump told me. I was expecting our meal to be one-on-one, but a guest joined us that day. “This is Stanley Friedman,” Trump said. “He is Roy Cohn’s law partner.” The lunch agenda, not surprisingly, turned into a sales pitch, with Friedman offering a monologue on what Roy Cohn had already done for Trump. (Friedman, in pure Tammany Hall style, worked for the city while assisting Cohn, and would later go to prison for taking kickbacks in a parking-ticket scandal.)

  “Roy could fix anyone in the city,” Friedman told me that day. “He’s a genius. . . . It is a good thing Roy isn’t here today. He would stab all the food off your plate.” A Cohn quirk was to rarely order food and, instead, commandeer the meals of his dining partners. I wrote then about the moment when hotel titan Bob Tisch came by the table. “I beat Bob Tisch on the convention site,” Trump said loudly. “But we’re good friends now, good friends. Isn’t that right, Bob?”

  Trump, at the time, was developing a sullen moxie that rivaled Cohn’s. The lawyer Tom Baer, for instance, did not know what to expect when he got a call one day to meet with Trump. Baer had been recently appointed by Mayor Koch to represent the city in all aspects of what was to become its new convention center, and Baer was trying to line up possible partnerships. “Donald said, ‘I would be willing to contribute the land,’ ” Baer would remember. “ ‘I think it is only fair that it be named Trump Center’ ”—after his father.

  “I called Ed Koch, and he said, ‘Fuck him! Fuck him.’ I said, ‘I don’t talk that way.’ He said, ‘I don’t care how you talk! Fuck him!’ So, I used my best lawyerese, and I called him back and said, ‘The mayor is so grateful for your offer. But he is not inclined to agree.’ ” Some time later Trump went to Deputy Mayor Peter Solomon and reportedly proposed a deal entitling him to a $4.4 million commission. (He eventually got $500,000.) Recalled Baer, “He spoke to the representatives of the governor [too]. He wasn’t going to be deterred because pisher Tom Baer told him he couldn’t do it. . . . Koch [just shook his head and] thought, This guy is ridiculous.”


  “YOU NEED TO SEE DONALD”

  “Come and make your pitch to me,” Roy Cohn told Roger Stone when they met at a New York dinner party in 1979. Stone, though only twenty-seven, had achieved a degree of notoriety as one of Richard Nixon’s political dirty-tricksters. At the time, he was running Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign organization in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, and he needed office space.

  Stone appeared on East Sixty-eighth Street to find Cohn, just awakened, in his robe, sitting with one of his clients, Mob boss “Fat Tony” Salerno, of the Genovese crime family. “In front of [Roy] was a slab of cream cheese and three burnt slices of bacon,” Stone remembered. “He ate the cream cheese with his pointing finger. He listened to my pitch and said, ‘You need to see Donald Trump. I will get you in, but then you are on your own.’ ”

  “I went to see him,” Stone told me, “and Trump said, ‘How do you get Reagan to 270 electoral votes?’ He was very interested [in the mechanics]—a political junkie. Then he said, ‘Okay, we are in. Go see my father.’ ” Out Stone went to Avenue Z, in Coney Island, and met Fred Trump in his office, which was crowded with cigar-store Indians. “True to his word, I got $200,000. The checks came in $1,000 denominations, the maximum donation you could give. All of these checks were written to ‘Reagan For President.’ It was not illegal—it was bundling. Check trading.” For Reagan’s state headquarters, the Trumps found Stone and the campaign a decrepit town house next to the “21” Club. Stone was now, like Donald Trump, inside the Cohn tent.

  And Stone soon seized the moment to cash in. After Reagan was elected, his administration softened the strict rules for corporations seeking government largesse. Soon Stone and Paul Manafort, Trump’s future campaign manager, were lobbyists, reaping the bonanzas that could flow with Favor Bank introductions. Their first client, Stone recalled, was none other than Donald Trump, who retained him, irrespective of any role Manafort might have had in the firm, for help with federal issues such as obtaining a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers to dredge the channel to the Atlantic City marina to accommodate his yacht, the Trump Princess.

  “We made no bones about it,” Stone recently said. “We wanted money. And it came pouring in.” Stone and Manafort charged hefty fees to introduce blue-chip corporations—such as Ronald Perelman’s MacAndrews & Forbes and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.—to their former campaign colleagues, some of whom were now running the Reagan White House. It was all cozy and connected—and reminiscent of Roy Cohn.

  By 2000, Stone had offered his talents to a new candidate: Trump himself. That year Stone traveled the country to help Trump explore the viability of running as a Reform Party candidate. But at a stop in Florida, things halted abruptly. “I’m tired,” Stone recalled Trump telling him. “Cancel the rest of this. I am going to my room to watch TV.” In Stone’s view, “His heart was never in it.” (A White House spokesperson disputes this account.)

  “You have to let Donald be Donald,” Stone explained. “We have been friends for forty years. . . . Look what happened with the ‘birther’ push. You don’t want to hear this, but when he started that campaign seven out of ten Republicans at the time believed that Obama was born in Kenya. And, let’s face it, many still question it. Donald still believes it.” (In fact, candidate Trump released an official statement two months before Election Day asserting, unequivocally, that “Barack Obama was born in the United States.”)

  Stone’s modus operandi, even to this day, has seemed to be vintage Cohn. Fired by Trump for what one of his spokesmen called Stone’s desire “to use the campaign for his own personal publicity,” Stone went into overdrive, fighting back and scheduling interviews in which he praised candidate Trump. (Stone denied he was fired and says he resigned.) Stone recently expressed concern that Jared Kushner’s inexperience and façade of centrist policies might very well scuttle the already beleaguered Trump presidency. And he fretted about Trump’s daughter Ivanka as well, saying that he found it “disturbing” when Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, in May, pledged $100 million to a World Bank women’s entrepreneurial fund—a project she had promoted.

  Yet Stone would not concede that his decades-long relationship with Trump had become strained, even though Stone, along with some members of the administration, are facing allegations that they’ve had questionable contacts with a variety of Russian nationals. (All have denied any wrongdoing.) “There is nothing to any of this,” Stone claimed. “Donald knows he has my loyalty and friendship. I leave a message when I want to speak with him.”

  All along there had been something deeper connecting Stone and Trump and Roy Cohn: the climate of suspicion and fear that had helped bring all three to power. Although Stone, like many around Cohn in the seventies and eighties, was too young to have observed how Cohn helped poison America in the McCarthy years, Stone had learned at the feet of Richard Nixon, the ultimate American paranoid. And the politics of paranoia that Cohn and Stone had cynically mastered would eventually make them kindred spirits. Just as the two of them had come to prominence by exploiting a grave national mood (Cohn in the fifties, Stone in the seventies), it was this same sense of American angst, resurgent in 2016, that would ultimately help elect Donald Trump.

  “Pro-Americanism,” Stone said, “is a common thread for McCarthy, Goldwater, Nixon, [and] Reagan. The heir to that tradition is Donald Trump. When you combine that with the bare-knuckled tactics of Roy Cohn—or a Roger Stone—that is how you win elections. So Roy has an impact on Donald’s understanding of how to deal with the media—attack, attack, attack, never defend.”

  THE LONG GOOD-BYE

  Roger Stone was there in 1982 when Roy Cohn was at his peak. At the time, Cohn was trying to help Trump realize his dream of opening casinos in Atlantic City. Crucial to his success would be a sympathetic New Jersey governor. And Cohn and Stone were working hard to elect their candidate: Republican Tom Kean. Stone, as it turned out, was Kean’s campaign manager, and after Kean won in a close race, Stone would remain as an unofficial adviser.

  Trump began to purchase boardwalk real estate. He built one casino and bought another. His prospects looked bright. But Cohn’s downfall was imminent. Word would soon begin to circulate that Cohn was battling AIDS. He denied it. He was also battling disbarment—under a cloud of fraud and ethical-misconduct charges. (Cohn, along with other misdeeds, had stiffed a client on a loan and altered the terms of a virtually comatose client’s will—in his hospital room—making himself its coexecutor.)

  Cohn tried to keep up a good face. But Trump, among other clients, began to shift his business elsewhere. “Donald found out about [Cohn’s condition] and just dropped him like a hot potato,” Cohn’s personal secretary, Susan Bell, was quoted as saying. (A White House spokesperson says this claim is totally false.)

  Cohn sensed his growing isolation. And for whatever reason, he decided, according to journalist Wayne Barrett, to help the efforts of Trump’s sister Maryanne Trump Barry, who was seeking an appointment to the federal bench. “Maryanne wanted the job,” Stone would recall. “She did not want Roy and Donald to do anything. She was attempting to get it on her own.”

  Stone remembered that when it appeared someone else was in line for the job Cohn approached Reagan’s attorney general, Ed Meese, for help. In the end, Barry got the plum post. “Roy can do the impossible,” Trump reportedly said when he heard the news. The next day, Barrett noted, Barry called Cohn to thank him. (According to the Times, Trump, when asked in 2015, said his sister “got the appointment totally on her own merit.” For herself, Barry admitted to Trump-family biographer Gwenda Blair, “There’s no question Donald helped me get on the bench. I was good, but not that good.”)

  * * *

  By 1985, Cohn was seriously ill—“I have liver cancer,” he contended—and he started calling in his last markers. He phoned New York Times columnist William Safire, whom he’d known since Safire’s days as a publicist. And, sure enough, Safire ran a piece attacking the “buzzard
s of the bar” who had “dredged up” fraud charges to get even with Cohn, “[the] hard-hitting anti-legal-establishment right-winger at a time when he is physically unable to defend himself.” Roger Stone would recall Trump phoning him and asking, “ ‘Have you seen Bill Safire’s column?’ He called me to point it out to me. He said, ‘This is going to be terrific for Roy.’ ”

  Cohn also had asked a favor of Trump: Could he give him a hotel room for his lover, who was dying of AIDS? A room was found in the Barbizon Plaza Hotel. Months passed. Then Cohn got the bill. Then another. He refused to pay. At some point, according to the New York Times’ Jonathan Mahler and Matt Flegenheimer, Trump would present Cohn with a thank-you gift for a decade of favors: a pair of diamond cuff links. The diamonds turned out to be fakes.

  Relations between the two became progressively strained. And the dying Cohn, as Barrett would describe him in those waning days, would say, “Donald pisses ice water.”

  That said, Trump did come out to testify on Cohn’s behalf at his 1986 disbarment hearing, one of thirty-seven character witnesses, including Barbara Walters and William Safire. But none of it mattered. Cohn, after putting up a four-year fight, was kicked out of the New York Bar for “dishonesty, fraud, deceit, and misrepresentation.” Cohn’s nefarious practices had finally caught up with him.

  Trump, by then a presence in Atlantic City, was setting his sights on a third casino. Roy Cohn, in contrast, would die almost penniless, given how much he owed the IRS. And his funeral made it clear what Cohn and his friends and family had felt, in the end, about Trump. The real-estate developer was not one of the speakers. He was not asked to be a pallbearer. Trump, in Barrett’s account, did show up, however, and stood in the back.