1985 THROWBACK: "Roy Cohn VS. Alan Dershowitz"

A the time of his death on August 2, 1986, Roy Cohn was 59 and a generation had come to adulthood knowing of no senator named Joe McCarthy. But people born in the 1940s or earlier remember Cohn and his master performing on television. They remember coming home to be hushed by a mother or aunt who was watching the hearings; they remember a father's opinion, expressed at the family table when families still ate together. Roy served as chief counsel on Senator McCarthy's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. But exactly what was the subversive menace that Cohn investigated?

Today the United States, alone among the major democracies, has no Communists, no socialists, no anarchists, no left-wing political groups except in microscopic numbers. Few Americans under 50 have seen or heard a Communist who didn't speak with a foreign accent. The purging of American society in which Roy Cohn took such a conspicuous part in the early 1950s may seem like a gratuitously malevolent lunacy. In actuality, domestic Communism posed a problem like that posed by the Catholic Church to Protestant England in Elizabeth I's time. Both were sometimes public, sometimes clandestine organizations ideologically connected to a foreign power. Some of the members of the CPUSA were connected to the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin.

The fact that these smart, tough men and women often did not identify themselves as Communists gave non-Communists a permanent case of the jitters. Citizens were taken before commissions, subcommittees, grand juries, courts and other instruments of inquiry. They were asked, by Roy Cohn and others, that terrible question: "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?

For younger people, however, Roy Cohn was simply another name for a très smart lawyer, for Disco Dan, for the international, I-go-by-private-plane man. He hosted parties in Washington; he was a lawyer with famous friends and rich, rich clients. He was a figure very tough and in on things, a champion of the underdog, though definitely running with the overdog pack. He nested on the nighttime radio call-in shows; he spread his wings over Koppel on Nightline. He appeared to be able to avoid all taxes and all penalties, maybe because he was connected, or on the A list, or known to the headwaiters and hostesses of New York.

But just as his Communist foes hid their secret beliefs, Roy Cohn hid his private life as a homosexual. When AIDS killed him in the bloom of the Reagan years, the public discourse had turned to family values and Americanism. The triumph of patriotic kitsch must have pleased Cohn, for he himself reveled in little flag-waving displays. At his parties he'd haul people to their feet to sing "God Bless America," evidently his favorite song, and though he was a lifelong operagoer, Roy's idea of a good time was to sing patriotic ditties at a piano bar in Provincetown, on Cape Cod. A friend recalled going home early one summer evening, and, on inquiring the next morning about the rest of the night, being told, "We all stood around the piano. Roy sang three choruses of 'God Bless America,' got a hard-on and went home to bed."