The Cool School (58 page)

I mean, to look around today you would start to believe the biggest
evil in the world is the idea of having to work for a living. Sorry, that isn’t how Roy Cohn was brought up. And here we get to family values. I am rather proud of my family. My grandparents were born in four different European countries, and each chose the United States for a home. My father worked his way through City College and New York Law School at night while teaching during the day . . . Albert Cohn lived long enough to see his name engraved in the rotunda of the state courthouse.

I grew up with the movers and shakers of the Bronx right at the kitchen table. It’s true what they say about Roy Cohn, I do know every circuit judge and every minor politician’s second cousin twice removed, known them all my life and breathed the air of politics from this high. Frankly, I was not a boy for sports and activities, although I am in good shape. I water-ski (
makes a gesture of holding the tow-line
), not that water-skiing keeps you in shape, I must have good bone structure or, hey, maybe it’s genetics, the old family again, anyway, I was a shy kid, not shy exactly, reticent, whatever, and became interested in the law and the justice system and how it worked behind the scenes—very honestly, from about the age of five. My father would discuss his cases with me. “What do you think about this, Roy? What about that? Is that one out to screw me?” Well, I didn’t necessarily have all the answers at that age, but my father always listened to my opinion. My mother . . .

My mother was an intelligent and gracious lady, Dora Marcus (
wipes his nose again with handkerchief
), maybe I was a shy type or, as I say, reticent, the thing is, they both fussed over me a lot to get me out of there, you know, when I was . . . well, in the womb, because she wouldn’t, uh, they couldn’t, uh, well, they had to blow air up her fallopian tubes to get me out. So she wasn’t having any more after that. Unavoidably, I was the star attraction in the family. Dora Marcus of the well-to-do Marcuses of Park Avenue, married a little below her station, so the legend goes, good old Muddy, I called her Muddy, you know. But fuss, I kid you not, she had me at the dermatologist three weeks out of the womb. (
At this point he wipes his nose again.
) Anyway. I learned the value of a close-knit family. In the thirties you
learned to stick together, those were hard times, regardless how I look at things now, back then Franklin Roosevelt looked like a savior. I think back to the apartment we lived in on Park Avenue, after we left the Bronx . . . we gave an enormous Passover every year, relatives, ward bosses, the rabbi . . . and Muddy . . . had a slightly hysterical streak when it came to large affairs, you know, she always had to be the queen bee, it came from that rich upbringing, and something always went wrong . . . and one year, my Aunt Libby got there early and wanted to say hi to the cook, and Muddy said No, Libby, I don’t want you going in there . . . so later when they got to the part of the Passover service where the question is posed, “Why is this night different from other nights,” Muddy answered, “Because the serving girl is dead in the kitchen.” She’d keeled over with a heart attack and they had to get the coroner in and that was Passover.

Then every year there were summer camps, this is where all that fussing . . . Camp Menatoma in Maine, Camp Sagamore on Lake George, I’m put in the camp, Muddy checks into the nearest hotel, she comes to the camp every day and tells the counselors, Don’t make my Roy walk too far in the woods, the allergies he has, Only allow Roy to swim one half hour, he isn’t supposed to exhaust himself, he has weak lungs . . . which I didn’t, in fact but I hated those camps anyways, when one of those greasy shtetl Jews that ran Menatoma dropped in on Park Avenue to say what a great camper I was, what was his name, Friedenwalk, Dr. Friedenwalk, and that creep son of his Johnny Friedenwalk the sadist camp counselor . . . drumming up some sheckles for next year, I told that kike he was full of crap . . . pardon my English . . . is anybody here besides me Jewish? (
Pause
) Life is sure full of memories.

I remember afternoons in Mr. Baruth’s class at Horace Mann, memorizing Tennyson . . . “Oh purblind race of miserable men / How many among us at this very hour / Do forge a lifelong trouble for ourselves, / By taking true for false, or false for true; / Here, thro’ the feeble twilight of this world / Groping, how many, until we pass and reach / That other where we see as we are seen!”

What’s striking to me looking back, and I do look back, and others
have commented on it too, is when I went down as chief counsel for Joseph McCarthy in 1953, I totally broke with my own background. Here I was, a young Jewish Democrat from New York, supposedly the most liberal, one of the most liberal cities in the United States, going down to become chief counsel for a fellow like Joe McCarthy. Now, you might wonder how that came about. When I was working in the US Attorney’s office during the Hiss, you know, espionage business, I didn’t believe Alger Hiss had been any kind of Russian spy, neither did my parents, neither did any Jewish liberals at the time, Alger Hiss was a hero, advisor to FDR at Yalta, victim of witch-hunt hysteria, et cetera, and then one spring afternoon in 1949, two FBI agents working on the case took me out to lunch at Gastner’s, around the corner from the Foley Square courthouse. You had a choice of Angelo’s or Gastner’s. And I preferred Gastner’s for its corned beef. And I mentioned to these FBI men, I said, Hiss is a scapegoat, and this thing stinks the way herrings stink.

One of the agents smiled and said, “How much do you really know about Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers?” I didn’t know enough to get through half a bloody mary. Like a lot of people, I couldn’t tell reality from fiction. The guy was a brilliant intellectual. He was an editor at
Time
magazine, but then again, he’d also translated Bambi, which made you wonder a little, that maybe he was off among the buttercups and bunny rabbits in never-never-land and it was said that Chambers, who had admitted his homosexual tendencies, had a romantic fixation on Alger Hiss—a handsome WASP, and Chambers, you know, was quite dumpy and fat, with a tendency to, you know, perspire, and Hiss had rejected his advances, which provoked the accusation of spying. Well. Call me irresponsible. I got a crash course in Communism in Gastner’s that afternoon that changed my orientation around three hundred and ninety degrees. Boy, did those guys fill me in to what was what, about the Kremlin cells in top secret US federal departments, I was an espionage virgin until that afternoon. After that rude awakening I picked up everything I could get my hands on about Communism.

And here you find the real threat to the American family and our way of life in the great flirtation with Communism that intellectuals like Hiss, and working-class socialists like the Rosenbergs, were swept away by . . . One reason that Jewish families like mine felt embattled during this period was because of a widespread idea associating Jews with a sympathy towards Communism. This is something that has always bothered me, and I’ve tried in every way I can to make it clear that the fact that the name is Cohn and the fact of my religion has nothing to do except perfect compatibility with my love for America and my dislike for Communism. When the opportunity arose to work on the Rosenberg prosecution, I felt that my overdue moment had arrived. Okay, the prosecution side were not complete strangers, my father put Irving Kaufman on the bench, and I got him the Rosenberg case, which he lobbied for like you wouldn’t believe, and once he got it he never stopped complaining. Irving Kaufman was an impossible human being.

Anyway, with the Rosenbergs, you had this idea that Jews would be more willing to betray their country, and we all fought against that idea. Here you had the prosecutor Irving Saypol, me, and Judge Kaufman, all Jews, bringing in a conviction, and imposing the maximum penalty. No one was going to accuse the Jewish judge or the Jewish prosecutors of leniency or lack of vigilance.

Was that a consideration in the trial? Yes and no. It was a scrupulously fair trial, there was a perfect chain of evidence linking Klaus Fuchs with the Rosenbergs, David Greenglass, Morton Sobell, the cut-in-half Jello box—I knew the death sentence would be imposed because Judge Kaufman told me when he got the case that he was going to send Julius Rosenberg to the electric chair. (
Pause
.)

Okay, as far as Ethel Rosenberg is concerned . . . Kaufman always told people he prayed for guidance about the sentences, that’s probably true. But. Besides asking God what to do, Irving used to call me from a phone booth next to the Park Avenue Synagogue. (
Ruminative
). In the courtroom, there was a phone I could use, out of sight of everybody walking through—and I told Judge Kaufman, which was
certainly true, I said a criminal defendant reveals everything about himself in the courtroom. And if you watched her in the courtroom you could see Ethel Rosenberg was the strong one, Ethel Rosenberg got her brother David Greenglass started with the Young Communist League to begin with. She was the one who kept drilling him full of Communist propaganda. It was as obvious . . . as the nose on her face that Ethel Rosenberg was the queen bee of the whole hive . . . If Judge Kaufman had declined to execute Ethel because she was the mother of two small children, it would be basically a case of reverse sexism not that we had that term back then, saying a woman wouldn’t be as much of a traitor, or as guilty as a man.

Well, that’s ancient history, and I’m not gonna say now, looking back, I would do everything I did then the same way today . . . blah blah. But I’ve never felt the slightest qualm about the execution of the Rosenbergs, frankly. But to get back to the point I was getting to, and not to stray too far from the subject of families—maybe the Rosenbergs are an unfortunate example of one, since Ethel’s own mother was eager to testify against her—among the Cohns, there was never any family schism during the McCarthy era or later on. As a lifelong bachelor whom luck has eluded in finding the right partner—I’m told the matchmakers have given up, but I haven’t; anyway, Barbara Walters and I are going to get married when we’re both sixty. At any rate, not having gotten married, I can say that the unconditional approval of my mother and father in those early career days was probably the main thing that kept me in one piece.

I wouldn’t mind getting married, by the way, if there’s anybody out there—who doesn’t mind a halfway attractive guy in middle age— well, young middle age—

It’s no wonder that supporters of the traditional family . . . family values . . . like those of us here, in this room . . . feel besieged in this period of women’s lib and letting it all hang out, with male and female roles breaking down among the young, more and more couples living together outside wedlock . . . and all the more reason why organizations
like yours need to send a message to the Carter Administration and the democratic Congress, and to the city councils of this city and other cities around the country. That message is being sent. In St. Paul, Minnesota, 54,101 against 31,689 voters to rescind the local Gay Rights ordinance. And the same pattern in Eugene, Oregon, and Dade County, as we’ve seen. In Wichita, Kansas, an overwhelming 29,402 votes against 6,153.

The lesson couldn’t be more clear. The vast majority of people in this country are hard-working men and women who get engaged and marry and have children in the traditional pattern, the majority are not the liberal political establishment, the country club set and the martinis and the uh tennis matches on Saturday afternoon and all of that—the majority are the workers and the middle-class, the white-collar people, the blue-collar people, who are fed up with homosexuality and feminist lesbianism being rammed down their throats by the media every 15 seconds. It’s a historically proven fact that a decline of masculinity and clearly defined sex roles as well as a tremendous increase in sodomy and other immoral practices always follows in the wake of a humiliating defeat or national catastrophe. The United States has suffered two very dramatic blows in the past years, one right after the other, that have eroded some of the bedrock of American family values. The first was the Vietnam disaster, where American boys were forced to fight in a foreign jungle with their hands tied behind their backs. Undermined by Washington and the TV reporters, the something-for-nothing peaceniks and rabble rousers, the leftist college professors, the Jane Fondas—I saw that god-damned piece of shi—pardon my English, I saw that piece of sleaze coming out of George Steinbrenner’s hotel in Tampa in a fur coat, I guess she forgot her black pajamas at home for a change. Hanoi Jane, and her commie husband Tom Hayden. They’re both climbing into the back of a stretch Lincoln. Yeah. The Jane Fondas, the Abbie Hoffmans, the flag-burners, the Vanessa Redgraves with their pro-PLO terrorist propaganda, the communist sympathizers all across the
board. They won’t stoop to support America, but America supports them, in a lifestyle most people can’t even dream about. There’s Hanoi Jane in her god-damned feature-length mink at the Super Bowl!

The main point is, the war was opposed by people with an unsympathetic point of view towards strong patriotism, and they were able to demoralize the American public through the media.

The second blow was the Watergate brouhaha. Which, partly because of the mass media’s enjoyment of playing God after Vietnam, permitted the Democratic congress to railroad Nixon out of the White House for a third-rate burglary he had nothing to do with, and which, on a scale of Presidential transgressions, would have to rank on a par with short-changing the milkman, compared to some of the things every Democratic president from FDR to LBJ has done.

These two blows to America’s self-esteem and confidence opened the floodgates to every malcontent with a grudge against this country, from the Symbionese Liberation Front to the bra-burning feminists, the Kate Millet lezzies and the man-eating Ti-Grace Atkinsons and the Gloria Steinems—simple common sense has been chucked out the window.

Today you’ve got a society riddled with whining, professional victims. Naturally America has got her problems, you don’t throw every race and nationality together in a big melting pot without a little friction. But to believe that contentious attitudes can be legislated away, presto chango with some type of magic wand, that’s typical of the ultraliberal philosophy of the federal government as everybody’s piggy bank.