Review: Chillingly, 'Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn' Reveals the Evil and Pathos of Trump's Mentor

Having already addressed the family tragedy of her grandparents, Julius and Ethel; Rosenberg, in the documentary "Heir to An Execution," filmmaker Ivy Meeropol revisits the Rosenberg case from a fresh angle - the lawyer who kick-started his career on that controversial case, before going on to forge a long, highly successful career that exerted a kind of deeply damaging influence still felt keenly today.

In "Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn," Meeropol demonstrates how the history of demagoguery in America follows a more or less straight line from "red scare" opportunist Sen. Joseph McCarthy to our "vicious dogs and ominous weapons" president, Donald John Trump. The dots that line connects along the way include Ronald Reagan and Fox News architect Roger Ailes. What they all have in common is Cohn's signature style of politics, a m�lange of lies, attacks, insinuations, and manipulation, all wrapped up in more lies.

But there's also a tragic element of Cohn's story: The way his brutally effective strategies and methods seemingly emerged from fear. Being Jewish, Cohn was sensitive to the association of 1950s America between Jews and Communists (a holdover of both the Great Depression and World War II, the latter of which saw the Soviet Union kick Nazi ass, something that Russia had in common with America before the cold war). That same era also linked Communism and gays, putatively because gays working in sensitive government positions could be blackmailed, but more broadly because Americans had long been fed homophobic propaganda. (This film includes a brief, but well-placed snippet from the scurrilous, slanderous CBS report "The Homosexuals.")

Cohn used the Rosenbergs as a stepping-stone to higher circles of power, including McCarthy - who, we're told, he essentially led by the nose, even as he was hooked up with an early lover named David Schine. Famously, Cohn tried to get Schine favorable treatment when Schine was drafted into the Army; when that failed, Cohn - with McCarthy at his side, "drunk" and "stupid," as one interviewee in this doc calls him - mounted an attack on the Army, accusing that branch of the military of harboring Communists. It was a rare misstep for Cohn and the downfall of McCarthy.

But Cohn, always more comfortable working behind the scenes and in the shadows, tunneled his way to further success, going into practice as an attorney in New York, where he serviced a host of sketchy and unsavory clients... among them a future U.S. president named Donald Trump, who learned Cohn's methods all too well. To summarize this film, Cohn was all about a few core principles: Strike back hard, without regard to truth; never apologize or admit to being wrong; and never pay your bills.

These bullet points could more or less stand in for tomes on the guiding principles of the country's political conservatives from Nixon on through Gingrich and, finally, to their fullest flowering in Trump. (Roger Ailes was a pioneering media guru for Nixon who subsequently lent his skills to the Reagan campaign in 1980.) But "Bully. Coward. Victim." doesn't dwell on this deep web of power players and their cavalier attitude toward niceties like law and democracy. Actually, the film doesn't really dwell on anything; it has its touchstones, such as the crusade that the Rosenberg's sons Michael and Robert Meeropol, launched in the post-Nixon era to try to exonerate their parents, with Michael going so far as to challenge Cohn numerous times to disprove his allegations or even take him to court, where evidence could be presented. Cohn, however, never took the bait; he was content to stick to his story... a story that, as the film finally reveals, possessed still more wrinkles and twists.

Cohn's homosexuality was another driving force. Though he summered in Provincetown, hung out at Studio 54, and was open about his succession of young male companions (all of them "good looking," as a friend and gossip columnist recalls; "We all knew" that Cohn was gay, she adds), Cohn - who insisted he was open about everything, truthful about everything, and not a hypocrite - became an anti-gay force to be reckoned with.

The tragedy of his death in 1986 of complications from AIDS is almost Greek, and not because of Cohn's sexual orientation. At one point, we learn where this film's title comes from: "Bully. Coward. Victim" were the words stitched onto Cohn's panel of the AIDS Quilt. It's a startling moment when this tidbit comes to life, and even though many of those interviewed in this doc - including Cohn's own cousins - describe him as "evil," or even as "pure evil," it's possible, for a moment to feel... almost, anyway... a twinge of sympathy for the devil.

Though Meeropol's doc doesn't fully capture the conflicts and contradictions of Cohn's life (or the dramatic complexities and still-resonant political implications of her grandparents' railroading), the filmmaker does create a vivid and chilling portrait of a flawed, brilliant, and utterly contemptible human being... but a human being all the same. When books about the Trump era are written in some future age, the name Cohn will dominate the pages right along with that of Machiavelli and, perhaps, Satan.

"Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn" is available Thursday June 18 at 9:00PM on HBO