Where's My Roy Cohn?

In Matt Tyrnauer's illuminating and timely documentary "Where's My Roy Cohn," friends (or at least acquaintances), family, and others who crossed paths with Roy Cohn describe a man who was cold, calculating, vicious, and very much the godfather of today's style of evisceration politics. It's no surprise that Cohn was a mentor to Donald Trump – the man who taught our current president the value of answering questions with attacks and fighting facts with torrent upon torrent of bold, bald-faced, and unapologetic lies.

If the name sounds only vaguely familiar (or maybe even not familiar at all), Cohn was the closeted lawyer who famously worked with "red scare" monger Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s in a demagogic, disingenuous quest to root out "communists" and gays. He's also the ruthlessly power-hungry historical figure who plays a prominent role in the landmark LGBTQ play "Angels in America."

But those are just the highest of the high points (or, perhaps, the lowest of many low points) in Cohn's long career. Described here as a master "string puller" whose M.O. was to "ingratiate" and then "manipulate" people of wealth and power, Cohn was a brilliant man in his own right... but also one, we're told by armchair psychologists who weigh in here, who was deeply damaged by his mother and father. (The story we hear is that Cohn's parents only married because his father was offered a judgeship if he would consent to the union.) Cohn was both spoiled and scarred by his parents, who – we are told – left him filled with shame and insecurity.

This documentary, then, joins the ranks of others that place putatively damaged, toxic souls who helped create today's dysfunctional democracy; people like Fox News creator Roger Ailes, for instance. (Ailes doesn't figure in this documentary, but Rupert Murdoch does; evidently, Cohn worked matters such that Murdfoch was able to cozy up to Reagan, after Cohn massaged the political situation in such a way that Reagan won the presidency.)

Even as Cohn immersed himself in the machinery of political power, pushing the levers of the law, the press, and public notoriety, he was isolating a completely different version of himself from the public; a man who had a taste for (as former boyfriend Wallace Adams tells Tyrnauer's camera) men with a "blond-haired, Nordic look." (Cue the flashback to Trump bemoaning a lack of Nordic immigrants; perhaps Cohn had more of an influence over the president than one might at first have thought.)

But early in Cohn's career that hidden truth destroyed a mentor. After he'd launched himself into the powerful circles he so wished to move among – stopping on the corpses of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on his way up – Cohn worked with another famously gay power player, J. Edgar Hoover. From there, Cohn ended up at Joe McCarthy's side. It was during this time that he evidently fell in love with another Nordic-looking man by the name of G. David Schine. When Schine was drafted by the Army, Cohn – who, we're told, achieved his first bribe at the age of 15 – worked every angle he could to secure Schine favorable treatment – and when the Army rejected his attempts on Schine's behalf, Cohn and McCarthy leveled charges at the Army that it was harboring communists. That led to the Army McCarthy hearings, and the watershed moment at which McCarthy was shredded on national television and discredited.

Cohn, forever marked by this, did what he did best: He grabbed the defeat with both hands and embraced it in a way that enabled him to turn it into a victory, going into private practice and forging a fearsome reputation. Along the way, however, he managed to rack up enough ethics violations that he finally ended up being disbarred in 1986. That same year, Cohn died of complications from AIDS – still denying that he was either gay or had the disease.

Given he placed huge emphasis on personal loyalty (we're told that he was very loyal to Donald Trump), Cohn must have suffered terribly when his friends, including Trump, showed him little loyalty in return at the end of his life. But his influence – it's pointed out to us – lingers on, and has penetrated to the very bones of our democracy, where it undermines the nation to this day through what's called here "the infiltration of the political right media" into every branch of our government. As one relative puts it, Cohn was "an evil produced by certain parts of the American culture."

Or, as someone else has it, "Power in the hands of someone who is that reckless and that arrogant is a very dangerous thing."

Sound like anyone still currently, and dominantly, on the scene?