Roy Cohn is known today as a fairly awful human being, someone who worked for the likes of Joe McCarthy and aided and abetted the infamous Senator in his Red Scare activities, all while keeping his homosexuality a secret. Admittedly, that’s all I knew about him aside from a few random Simpsons jokes. His reputation isn’t that great.
As it is, HBO has a documentary about him now called Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn. That looked like the sort of place I could go to learn a bit more.
Taking its name from the words on the panel of the AIDS Quilt dedicated to Cohn, the film comes from director Ivy Meeropol. Meeropol is the granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the married couple executed for treason, namely selling atomic secrets to the Soviets, back in the 50s. What I didn’t know was that Cohn acted as their prosecutor and the Rosenbergs’ two sons fought decades later to clear their parents’ names. Meeropol’s father, who appears in the film, claims that Cohn manipulated evidence to get false convictions on both his parents, and his evidence for the longest while was he said that in public many times and Cohn never sued him for libel. If it was untrue, surely Cohn could have proven it in court is his reasoning.
As it is, Meeropol does offer some evidence that suggests the Rosenberg conviction was not as cut and dried as most people believe. And all that comes from Cohn, a gay man who kept his homosexuality deep in the closet, a Jew who hated communism with the fire of a thousand suns, and a man who believed in ideas like “never apologize,” “always attack,” and, apparently, “never pay for anything especially the IRS”. It probably isn’t that much of a surprise he acted as a mentor to Donald Trump, a man whose detractors point out he does all of those things as much as he can.
Meeropol doesn’t just use the movie as an axe to grind against the man who worked to have her grandparents killed. Yes, she does return to that action many times over during the course of the film, but she instead seems to be trying to do what so many other people have done since he first became something of a public figure: figure out who Roy Cohn really was. The answer seems to be he was a fairly rotten man whose influence we’re still feeling today even as his name fades from memory. Roy Cohn was a man who didn’t care how much other people got hurt as long as he got what he wanted, and people like that are far too plentiful in this world as it is.
Grade: A-
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