By David Langwallner

Bully, Coward, Victim (HBO 2020).

The art of advocacy is of course a non linear art as I have written elsewhere. It is deeply morally ambiguous. Indeed you have to be. An understanding of ethics restrains but not all advocates have same.

The criminal defense barrister is the most noble of professions for the reason that the complex ethics and low pay normally induce humility and restraint. Where it is all about money then all bets are off.

Thus to the most controversial in this series. Roy Cohn.

The editor of Cassandra Voices, an International public intellectual forum, has just sent me a piece on the relationship and mentorship between Donald Trump and Roy Cohen. Two sides of the same coin.

Trump’s presidency has revived interest in Cohen.

In fact Cohen is a pivotal figure in the decline of what Vidal called The Republic of Amnesia. The recent documentary displays the beginning of the end. An anticipation of disasters to come as we have now. Yet of course Cohn was a great advocate but a horror story of a human being and with no ethical or moral compass. In fact the personification of corporate neo liberalism.

His views on advocacy and the role of the litigator display that lack of compass.

There is nothing I would not do for my clients because I believe the only answer is winning.

In short win at all costs.

Cohen was the most venal of human beings but to understand that venality it is necessary to understand America and indeed Ireland.

To enter the dark heart of ambition and circumstance and indeed lawyerdom.

It is also of course necessary to understand the art of persuasion and the art of advocacy. For persuasion is intrinsic to same and Cohen was a great persuader.

Indeed, let us be clear, there is no moral distinction between many of the commercial mullah lawyers now in resplendent nefarious garb on the higher courts of Ireland or America or other countries peddling their neo liberal agenda through the ever receptive and often bought judges and Roy Cohn. He is just writ a little larger.

It is always when money for the pursuit of it independent of moral considerations takes over that a problem is created which is why I have tried to avoid it as much as possible. It is also always when it is about me and my ambition that a non Kantian universe takes over.

So Cohen represented the mob and took monies from them as do many commercial lawyers take money from the corporate mafia who serve Ireland or America or many countries.

There is no in fact distinction between the mafia and the corporate mafia and his close association with Trump shows the tramlines were blurred to non existence. Everyone charitably is a victim of circumstance or environment.

Thus, in 1973, Trump was sued by the government for violating the Fair Housing Act and illegally discriminating against black tenants. Cohn’s advice was to countersue the government for $100 million. Which Trump did but ultimately settled.

Trump loved Cohn’s machodom, fake and displaying underlying insecurities and Trump also liked Cohen’s advice never to admit defeat.

When Trump Tower was being built, Cohn also introduced Trump to his Mafia connections, who helped facilitate (word used advisedly) construction during a strike and ensured it was built affordably. Thus Cohen facilitated criminality to break a strike.

Trump did in fact distance himself from Cohn at the end of the latter’s life, when the lawyer was dying of AIDS but still insisting to anyone who would listen that he had liver cancer.

“Donald pisses ice water,”

Cohn reportedly said at the time. A curiously self reflexive remark. Cohen clearly did not piss water but understood those who did.

Now Cohen of course that curious satanic hybrid he was sold his soul to the devil who was Joe McCarthy initially. He persecuted communists or liberals or anyone he could target including homosexuals even though he was one. He is portrayed I think by Al Pacino twice once as the self loathing dying homosexual in Kushner’s Angels over America (2003) and once also I think referentially as partner in a New York law firm.

A recent documentary about Cohen Bully. Coward. Victim (2020) captures him well and is in fact is directed by Ivy Meeropol, whose paternal grandparents were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Thus as a matter of historical record and infamy In 1951, when Cohn was barely 24 years old but already an assistant U.S. attorney for the state of New York, he played a perhaps the central role in the Rosenberg’s’ espionage trial, relentlessly and vindictively lobbying the judge for their execution. Both were found guilty of passing information to the Soviet Union and electrocuted at Sing Sing in 1953.

It was quite clear that this was utterly malicious in that he knew Ethel Rosenberg was innocent but used forged documents, perjured evidence and the art of persuasion in that he believed her indictment would force Julian Rosenberg to reveal his espionage sources. The end justified the means. The amoral compass.

The documentary film clearly shows even his family did not like him “He was the personification of evil,” the journalist David Lloyd Marcus, Cohn’s cousin, declares in the film, adding for good measure “Every family has their own Roy Cohn.”

.He was a mob figure in New York in the 1980’s when Trump knew him. At various clubs or studios or the riverside parking lots he reportedly co-owned with the mob. His clients are a list of American infamy such as George Steinbrenner and John Gotti. One a mafia baseball owner the other a real Mafiosi as if there is a distinction.

Cohn wore tiaras, in such camp style to the club Studio 54. H e appalled even the great camp film maker John Waters who remarked of him in the documentary

“I wouldn’t have had my nostril on the same straw as that pig,”

To add to the bill of indictment He helped Rupert Murdoch get a New York Post interview with the Mafia boss Carmine “The Cigar” Gal antes.

He told people he was engaged to Barbara Walters, The CBS anchor, a frequent ambiguous date, even as he took his gay lover toward the end of his life, to the White House and even posed for a picture with him and Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

Well there are the Doonesbury cartoons about the Regan white house which shows the White House then and their ambiguous attitude towards the mafia and in particular Mr. Sinatra.

Of course before Cohn died, he was also professionally humiliated, getting disbarred for trying to give himself control over a dying client’s estate. And after his death, the IRS confiscated everything he had houses, cars, a plane.

But I doubt he would have cared Posterity what has it ever it done for me as Groucho Marx said.

He ruled by fear and intimidation and everyone deserted when they no longer feared him. Thus people only fear bullies or sociopaths when they have something to gain as Harvey Weinstein recently found out.

Yet it was a form of weakness and he was ultimately a victim but a great persuader and thus though mostly bad a great advocate. A difficult perception for the none initiated to understand.

Great advocates or persuaders are not always great human beings. Though most in the series are shiny white knights with blemishes some are not.

David Langwallner