Documentary about the life of controversial lawyer Roy Cohn
who came to fame in the 1950s helping to prosecute the Rosenbergs and acting as
chief counsel to Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Committee ferreting communists out of
the government. Like a lot of recent political biographies about conservative
movers-and-shakers – Lee Atwater, Roger Ailes, Roger Stone, etc. - this one’s
thesis is that its subject seems to have been everywhere at once, was able to
take some degree of credit for the Nixon, Reagan and/or Trump presidencies, and
is most responsible for the modern climate of take-no-prisoners campaign
strategics in national politics. I don’t doubt it’s somewhat true in each
case, but it’s just a weird trend that each film has to be so narrowly focused
that it comes off implying that each person is almost single-handedly to blame
for everything awful about America. In any case, Where’s My Roy Cohn? is
a good film. The title comes from a quote attributed to Donald Trump, when the
exasperated president, in the middle of Russiagate, was longing for a lawyer
with the effectiveness and fearsome reputation of Cohn, who had worked for him
and mentored him in the 70s and 80s. Despite advocating for right-wing
positions his entire life, Cohn was a barely closeted homosexual and a
self-hating Jew. He was also notorious for a dearth of ethics, and got what he
wanted by threats and other strong-arm tactic. It says something about him, and it’s
not a mere coincidence, that his most famous clients were McCarthy, John Gotti
and Trump.
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