I have just come from seeing the film, Where’s My Roy Cohn? Despite the title’s seeming reference to a lamentation attributed to Donald Trump (who does gets a small bit of reference towards the end of the film), it is wholly a documentary about Roy Cohn: his life, his nature, and his actions
However, it is an extremely important film to see if one wants to fully understand our current political situation. Donald Trump is the poor man’s Roy Cohn—he uses Cohn’s techniques, but without having Cohn’s brains.
Cohn was the originator of the lie, the attack, the “leave no paper trail” (oops-given this week’s news, Donald missed that one, didn’t he?), and if “they” are on to you, rat out other people. According to the film, Cohn, in his early 20s, was one of the prosecutors of the Rosenbergs and spoke, outside of court, with the Judge, Irving R. Kaufman, to make sure they got the death penalty. Later in his career, after his Joe McCarthy days, he was the go to lawyer for Gotti, and for the Gambino and Genovese crime families. Cohn was also the attorney for Fred and Donald Trump in the 1973, case involving violations of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 at 39 Trump-built-and managed buildings in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island and, according to the documentary, when Donald wanted to get involved in construction in New York, Cohn put him in touch with the Gambino-Genoveses.
But Cohn’s connections to the development of our current political environment is not limited to mentoring Mr. Trump. According to the film, Cohn helped Roger Stone “arrange” for John Anderson to get the nomination of the Liberal Party of New York, to facilitate the split of the vote opposing Ronald Reagan, thus ensuring that Reagan carried that state in 1980. Cohn was also Rupert Murdoch’s attorney, furthered Murdoch’s interests with the Reagan administration, and is said to have introduced Trump and Murdoch in the 1970s, those two then developing a long relationship. (Gee. I wonder why Fox News has promoted Trump and attacked anyone who stands up to him.)
I don’t necessarily think that Roy Cohn was THE country’s king-maker, THE one and only Machiavelli-Supreme, single-handedly manipulating everything that has happened in and to our country during many past decades—something the film, by its singular focus, cannot help but suggest. But the film gives one details of corruption by people who have a total scorn for right and wrong, for law, and for anyone who believes in such things, as well as by those who enable them or look the other way because they benefit. And while the film does not necessarily accuse anyone besides Cohn of illegal activity, one cannot help but come away with a sense of an all-encompassing corruption in our society.