ROY COHN

CHARACTER SKETCH DETAIL

27, aggressive, unprincipled, secretly gay former federal prosecutor whose crusade against communists as Joe McCarthy's chief counsel and closest advisor serves his unquenchable desire for power and domination. 

Roy has fallen from grace. He gambled with his threats to “wreck” the U.S. Army if generals did not bend to his will and he lost in front of the entire nation during the highly publicized Army-McCarthy hearings. Cohn now sees Harvey Matusow as his way back into the limelight. But getting there will require a deft and unscrupulous touch that tests even Cohn’s notorious talent for manipulation.

What does Roy believe? That they’ll all get what’s coming to them. Every one of his enemies has asked for it; whether they intended to or not is immaterial. In a zero-sum world, those that see opportunity take it. Those who take it, win. Those who win, rule. Those who don’t are asking to be added to the heap of discarded humanity life leaves behind. For most of his life, Roy has stood victorious over his opponents. After a rare but monumental misstep, Roy stews on the sidelines, gathering his strength and setting his sights on Harvey Matusow.

Perhaps one of the most paradoxical characters in twentieth century American history, Roy Cohn is a gay, Jewish man who makes it his mission to attack politically liberal Jews and undermine gay rights. He can be heartless, known for saying "I bring out the worst in my enemies and that's how I get them to defeat themselves." He’s equally relentless. Roy’s lasting legacy is a combative dogma: “Never admit wrongdoing; never back down; if they hit you, hit them back a thousand times harder and never, ever let up.” One can almost forgive his dark worldview when considering that his tragic origin tale is that of a real-life super villain.

From birth, his mother declares that he isn’t good enough, evidenced by the brutal scar of a botched nose job performed in his infancy. His childhood is a sad one of an only child at adult parties and networking events. He gauges his formative years by the power he amasses, not in friends or adventures. Roy makes his way into the Asst. U.S. Attorney’s office, determined to make his name. He promptly does so with the lives of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the progressive Jewish couple tried for espionage. Despite J. Edgar Hoover and much of the Justice Department recommending prison for the Rosenbergs, Roy uses his connections to personally lobby the judge to deliver a sentence of execution by electric chair. Roy is successful.

Roy’s anti-communist crusade has been directly behind the destruction of countless lives, including death by execution and suicide. It’s a crusade he takes most seriously; communism is a very real threat to his zero-sum world view. Any ethos which attempts to level the playing field for all is an abhorrent aberration of the natural order. And he needs the order in place so that he might climb atop it.

Roy’s brutality is bizarrely balanced by a side that is giving. He is equally known for his crusades as he is for showering select friends with gifts, cash and lavish parties, at which he endlessly sings patriotic songs to the point of getting visibly aroused.

STAKES

Roy needs to return to the privileged circle of the powerful, lest he be cast out forever.

CHARACTER ARC

Roy, already darkly twisted by a tragic childhood, looks like he’s finally found salvation in a new love, but it sours, blinds him, and leaves him even further twisted.

BIO NOTES

Born into a prominent Bronx, New York Jewish Democratic family, Cohn learned lessons of power and persuasion at an early age from prominent political operatives. By the age of 21 he had earned a law degree from Columbia University and a job as a prosecutor in the politically-influential United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. There, he played a role in the 1951 prosecution of accused spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, during which he enjoyed particular success calling attention to himself by currying favor with influential newspaper columnists and personally lobbying the presiding judge for a death sentence. Despite the fact that many government operators, including J. Edgar Hoover, were against such a punishment, Cohn’s efforts at persuasion won out and the Rosenbergs became the only people to be executed for espionage during the Red Scare.

Building on the notoriety he gained in the Rosenberg case, Cohn played an even larger part in securing guilty verdicts against twelve "second string" Communist Party leaders in 1952.  Among Cohn's key witnesses at that trial was none other than Harvey Matusow, who would later claim that Cohn had coached him to lie under oath.  

Cohn was an active participant in the purge of homosexuals from positions within the U.S. government, institutions, and schools known as the Lavender Scare, which coincided with the Red Scare and added to the widespread paranoia of the time.

In 1953, Cohn took a post as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s powerful senate subcommittee investigating alleged communists in government.  Cohn was forced to resign as counsel to the committee, however, after the Army-McCarthy hearings exposed his attempts to strong-arm military officers into giving preferable treatment to his close friend G. David Schine.  The same brand of sociopolitical bullying and demagoguery which had become the hallmark of Cohn’s strategy was ironically used to humiliate him during the hearings. Casting thinly veiled homosexual slurs and innuendo at him, questioning Senators gave Roy the tragic distinction of quite likely being the first man to be publicly outed on national television.

At the opening of FOOL THEM ONCE, Cohn is nursing his wounds and plotting a return to private law practice in New York City (where, much later, he would famously become a power broker and an influential mentor to the young real estate scion Donald Trump).

Cohn’s death from AIDS in 1986 is memorialized in Tony Kushner’s award-winning play Angels in America.