For readers with certain interests, there has been a great deal this year to absorb.
Voluminous documents related to the Justice Department’s investigation of the late Jeffrey Epstein were finally released. Then came Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s blockbuster book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. Now there is the publication of another book, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump by Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark.
These portraits of the whys and wherefores among a prominent sector of Americans are illuminating in their description of power perversions and social corruptions. There are a great many famous names, but one in particular resounds, that of Donald Trump.
The friendship between Roy Cohn and Donald Trump started in the 1970s, as the lawyer mentored the young real estate developer in behavior and tactics that went on to frame Trump’s persona long after Cohn’s death from AIDS forty years ago and have proved to be so important in his defiant approach to the presidency.
In the Epstein files, Trump appears often in lecherous photos and as a player in the saga of Epstein’s escapades. To determine how many people from Cohn’s cohort are mentioned in the Epstein files would require an Artificial Intelligence probe I am not prepared to undertake. (Somebody should, however.)
Of that group Trump is certainly the most recognizable.
There is a great deal of licit and illicit sex in the narratives of Cohn and Epstein. Cohn was a gay man who refused to be publicly identified as such but was active, especially with young men. Epstein’s preference, for which he was convicted of a felony, was underage girls.
Trump has had to pay the writer E. Jean Carroll $5.625 million (including interest), a judgment rendered by a jury in a civil trial for defamation and sexual abuse. A jury verdict in another case awarded Carroll an additional $83.3 million. The first judgment was upheld by the Supreme Court; Trump has posted a bond for the second verdict and is appealing.
But by comparison to Cohn and Epstein, Trump’s involvement with sex has been less central to his life story. He is, after all, the world’s most powerful man, elected twice to the presidency of the United States.
The common thread among the three men is how enmeshed they became in elite circles in New York, Washington, Palm Beach, Cambridge, and high-end resort communities in New England and Long Island.
In the 1950s, while still in his twenties, Roy Cohn was a pivotal aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin Republican whose anti-communist crusade symbolized an era of persecution of anyone whose “leftist” sympathies could be portrayed as a threat to national security.
That took place seventy-five years ago. Trump’s MAGA drive against “woke” or “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies has the same tone as McCarthy’s and even includes tirades against “socialism” and accusations of communism.
While Trump as president has been a looming factor in American life for a decade now, his earliest engagement with Cohn and those personal and political strategies took place a half-century ago.
My takeaway from all of this year’s reading material is the interplay between formidable public figures — Larry Summers, a former president of Harvard and secretary of the treasury, and Bill Gates and many more — who wined and dined with Epstein and the resemblance to the Hollywood stars, among others, who under scrutiny “named names” in the McCarthy era.
As a New York power broker, Cohn exerted a corrupt reach into the judiciary and politics, which was by modern standards generally sub rosa, outside the risks of revelation.
The tech moguls and finance billionaires who have so publicly solicited Trump’s approval seem to have a different motive from those who supported McCarthy’s Red Scare and those who abetted Epstein’s salacious lifestyle.
Today the associations are mainly about money, because Trump wields power over enormous government contracts and favors.
In assessing why so many people of note have been drawn to Cohn, Epstein, and Trump over the years, something has to be said about their personalities. Fortunately for me, I never came close to encountering Epstein.
But I did have a dinner with Roy Cohn at the New York restaurant “21” in 1984, when he was considering writing an autobiography to be published by Random House (which we did not publish in the end), and I did get a close-up view of Trump in the late 1980s, when he was publishing his books at Random House.
Cohn’s reputation was already sleazy, but over a meal he was chatty and good-natured. He even gave me a lift to my apartment in his limo. And my interaction with Trump was fascinating but he was then a colorful and flamboyant real estate developer; the notion that he might one day be president of the United States was inconceivable.
As a book editor and by instinct mainly an observer in whatever scene I find myself in, it never occurred to me to imagine a friendship with either man, so I’m left with this question: Why did so many people of accomplishment and stature get drawn into the Cohn-Epstein-Trump orbit?
I did not get an answer in all the pages I read. In sum, these are a portrait of modern-day bacchanalia. And we all know what eventually happened to ancient Rome.
Q
Sordid indeed, Peter ! Bravo for this pointed reminder !