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Are We All Living in the World Roy Cohn Created?

A new documentary about Cohn makes us face an uncomfortable fact: We may all just be a bunch of hypocrites.

By Dwight Garner
Town & Country, September 20, 2019

Roy Cohn was not a conventionally handsome man, but it was hard to peel your eyes from him. He had a reptilian glamour. His tongue, like William F. Buckley Jr.’s, darted from his mouth. His sky-blue eyes were hooded and seemed ready, like a shark’s, to roll back into his head during an attack. Orwell said that every person at 50 has the face he deserves. Cohn had bloodshot eyes, a botched face-lift, thinning hair, and a leathery tan, as if he’d been left too long on the griddle. Yet his brand of antiglamour and his hangman’s gaze burned steadily until the end.

Excerpt...

One gets a sickening sense, watching Where’s My Roy Cohn?, that we’re living in a world Cohn created and that it extends far beyond politics. (The title is something Trump reportedly said during the early days of Robert Mueller’s investigation into his alleged corruption.) More than a year after it broke, the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse scandal continues to flush out hypocritical actors—most recently an ambidextrous class of lawyer, Lisa Bloom and David Boies among them, that touts its work for victims of sexual assault while also offering its services to the attackers. In this year’s college admissions scandal—a gift that keeps on giving—virtue-signaling celebrities like Felicity Huffman were caught bribing or cheating their way into elite colleges.

Dante, in The Inferno, placed hypocrites in the eighth circle of hell, down among the counterfeiters and flatterers. In America, where there barely seems to be a concept of shame any longer, bad faith fills the air like humidity and Cohn’s ghost wanders the corridors. It feels as if we’ve all been pulled down to smolder in that eighth circle.

And where does that other legion of hypocrites—the hangers-on, the willfully blind, the socially adjacent—fall? Even after he was a registered sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein was a popular dinner guest. His power, money, craggy good looks (a mashup of Leonard Cohen, Loudon Wainwright III, and Warren Beatty), and ability to get into the right parties made him attractive despite the moral taint.

Who knew what when? In Palo Alto, after Epstein’s conviction, he was a guest at a dinner for the MIT neuroscientist Ed Boyden that was hosted by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. At the same dinner Elon Musk introduced Epstein to Mark Zuckerberg. Is money so powerful that it tramples all other considerations? As James Baldwin put it, “I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.”

One of the most remarkable moments in Tyrnauer’s documentary comes near the end, when it’s no longer possible to pretend that Cohn isn’t a liar and a fraud, when it’s no longer possible to deny that he lacks both shame and conscience. When Cohn was about to be disbarred in 1986 for defrauding his clients and for taking advantage of a dying and incompetent man, character witnesses began to emerge. There were letters to the court from William F. Buckley Jr., Barbara Walters, William Safire, and, of course, Trump, who wrote that Cohn “has been extremely loyal and extremely honest.” Were Cohn’s parties—was his protection—really that good?...

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https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/money-and-power/a29130905/roy-cohn-documentary-wheres-my-roy-cohn/