10

J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn

It probably will not strike people as shocking, even if they only know a little about the life of J. Edgar Hoover, to discover that the man who founded the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the domestic security and intelligence agency of the United States, and who ran it as his own personal fiefdom for nearly five decades, was something of a maverick. He possessed a force of personality and will that stopped at nothing to ensure his power was secure. It might strike you as shocking, however – even if you do know a good deal about his professional life – that he was also a deeply weird man.

He was a born cop – as a child, he kept a dossier on himself, which included a full formal report on his own birth.¹ A born authoritarian – as an avid member of his high school debate team, he argued that America should annex Cuba, women should be denied the vote, and that ‘all Christian nations’ should uphold the death penalty.² And a born perve, with one FBI official claiming the agency had ‘the largest and most comprehensive’ collections of pornography in history, for the purposes of suppression, blackmail, and Hoover’s personal enjoyment.³ Throughout his life, he was obsessed with two great, threatening horrors: communism, and fucking.

He was joined in the first of these horrors by another mummy’s boy and child of privilege, although of a different sort – another lawyer, another homosexual hellbent on destroying the lives of other queers, and of leftists, Roy Cohn. Unlike Hoover, Cohn held no fear of fucking – quite the opposite – although the idea he might be identified as gay was anathema to him.

Hoover came first, and set the standard for red-baiting that Cohn followed. The America the former was born into, on New Year’s Day 1895, was not yet the world superpower he would grow to see, and to control. Edgar, as he was known, was the youngest of four children of a well-to-do family, and throughout his upbringing was extremely close to his mother, who was still mourning the loss of a daughter when he was born. Despite his early success in life, he lived with his mother until she died, when he was forty-three years old. At school he was smart, and though he wanted to be a sportsman (he admired sporty boys greatly), he was small and too light to join the football team.⁴ (Even as director of the FBI, he had a small platform installed behind his desk for his chair to sit on, and generally avoided the promotion of tall agents, lest he have to stand next to them.)⁵

He studied law at George Washington University. When he was eighteen, he worked as a messenger at the Library of Congress. There, he learnt the usefulness of the Dewey Decimal System, and the importance and power of controlling communication and information.⁶

Hoover graduated in 1916, just as the United States was preparing to enter World War I in 1917. Despite his fervent patriotism, Hoover delayed enlisting straight away, and three months later, just a day after passing the bar exams, took a job at the Department of Justice – a job that included exemption from military service.⁷

Despite joining the department as a mailroom boy, his rise was meteoric, and he quickly took charge of the Alien Enemy Registration Section at the War Emergency Division, rounding up suspect foreign nationals.⁸ He tried, unsuccessfully, dating women at this time, but was deeply wounded when a secretary called Alice who he had been seeing got engaged to a returning soldier she had been romancing via mail. He was never to date again, although his niece, Margaret, suggested that even had it worked out, his mother would have prevented any marriage, saying she ‘was truly the matriarch … She would have stopped anything rumoured.’⁹

Hoover threw his energy into work, and there was plenty of work to be done. In the wake of the war, with much of Europe in ruins, debt, and political turmoil, America was in the ascendancy. But, as with Hoover’s personal life, the more power the US attained, the more insecure and fearful it became. In the immediate aftermath of World War I, the workers’ movement in the US, after decades of organising, was engaged in a series of strikes that had gripped the country. Anarchist, socialist, and communist organisations gained support from many workers, and the Russian Revolution offered a then-hopeful alternative to the US capitalist system. This situation deeply concerned the US government, and bosses, fearful that industrial action could escalate into revolution, fomented another resurgence in the nativist, anti-immigration politics which had always been present in US society.

The state decided to crack down on organisations like the Communist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World, and on dissidents like Emma Goldman and Sacco and Vanzetti, who they regarded as ‘importing’ radical ideas from the East. Congress approved funds for the Justice Department to establish a ‘General Investigation Division’ to monitor the activities of radicals. Despite being just twenty-four years old, J. Edgar Hoover was seen as the promising young talent who could make the unit work, and he did.¹⁰ With astonishing zeal, he collected huge amounts of data on radicals, established local squads, and organised agents to surveil suspects, effectively crushing the power of organised labour. By 1921 the supposed threat, known later as the ‘First Red Scare’, had been largely suppressed, with thousands of socialists, communists, or anarchist either jailed, deported, or killed. For the rest of his life, the fear of communism, something he called ‘the most evil, monstrous conspiracy against man since time began’, not only obsessed Hoover, but his inculcation of that fear into American society allowed him to accrue a vast amount of personal power.¹¹

In 1921 Hoover was named deputy head of the Bureau of Investigation, and in 1924, after less than a decade in the organisation and aged just twenty-nine, he had gone from mailroom boy to the boss. He set about reforming the image of the organisation into a tough, ruthless, and masculine investigating machine, implementing a ban on women agents that lasted until his death.¹²

If the ‘red scare’ had subsided, there was still plenty to occupy him, as in January 1920 the Eighteenth Amendment came into force, and the Prohibition Era began. Alcohol was effectively illegal across the United States. Unfortunately, prohibition did not work, and a whole new market opened up for organised crime, alongside racketeering, gambling, and prostitution. Hoover, however, recognised the limitations of the agency and focused its work only on achievable, high-profile cases, often piggybacking off the fame of criminals like John Dillinger, the handsome and charismatic bank robber who achieved some popular support after destroying mortgage records during his raids.¹³ Bureau of Investigation agents finally cornered and killed Dillinger in 1934; in the wake of the case, Hoover approved a new name for the organisation, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This combined process of marketing, high-profile law enforcement, and gradual accrual of powers made Hoover a popular public figure, and therefore almost untouchable by the judiciary, who struggled, and ultimately failed, to rein in his powers.

As well as cracking down on leftists more generally while leaving organised crime to develop largely without interference, in the 1920s and 1930s Hoover also focused on the new generation of Black writers, artists, and intellectuals who were emerging in what became known as the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance was a period of intense cultural creativity by Black Americans and Caribbean people in New York from the end of the First World War until the mid- ‘30s, stimulated, in part, by the arrival of thousands of migrants bringing different Black American cultures from the South. They came to the city as part of the First Great Migration, attempting to escape Jim Crow laws and find work in the industrialising northern cities. They brought with them not just musical, literary, and fashion cultures, but also different attitudes towards sexuality, emerging partly from the dislocation of the migration, creating a Black queer culture and nightlife within the wider cultural explosion. Black women were at the forefront of Harlem’s queer culture, but often that queer culture found itself opposed not just by white bourgeois moral guardians but also by Black Nationalist leaders; in the words of historian Cookie Woolner, ‘there was no room for women’s sexual deviance in an increasingly masculinized struggle for racial equality and full citizenship’.¹⁴ As discussed in our chapter on Margaret Mead, anthropologists, too, were among those policed by this strict regime of political repression, even though their politics did not challenge but in fact actively collaborated with the US security state.

Hoover’s ‘observation list’ on Black American writers is not so much a surveillance file as a syllabus of the country’s greatest literary talents, with Hoover setting his goons on everyone from Claude McKay and Alain Locke to Langston Hughes and Georgia Douglas Johnson. According to the academic William J. Maxwell, Hoover surveilled ‘nearly half – 23 out of a total of 48 – of the historically relevant writers featured in the classroom staple The Norton Anthology of African American Literature’.¹⁵

The cultural ‘revival’ of the Harlem Renaissance – actually the fruition of generations of Black American cultural and political life – was in Hoover’s view a threat to the white-supremacist system over which he presided, and such a potent source of socialist thinking, that, as with the wider labour movement, it came into his sights as the site of the political sedition that, in reality, was always the FBI’s main concern. This became evident again much later in his career, as he attempted to suppress the civil rights movement that emerged in the 1950s. Not only were writers again in his focus – James Baldwin, a Black, gay New York writer whose powerful prose and oratory made him a moral backbone for the movement, had a file almost half the size of that of Malcolm X – but also the leadership of the nonviolent civil rights movement itself.¹⁶

Here, Hoover’s racism was bolstered by his sexual obsessions; the Bureau went to extraordinary lengths to uncover evidence of the extramarital affairs of Dr Martin Luther King, using the evidence to compile a ‘sex tape’ of his sexual liaisons and sending it to King’s house in November 1964, complete with a letter accusing him of ‘countless acts of adultery and moral conduct lower than that of a beast’, before going on to demand King kill himself, or, presumably, the evidence will be made public. ‘You are finished,’ it continued. ‘You will find on the record for all time your filthy, dirty, evil companions, males and females giving expression with you to your hideous abnormalities.’¹⁷ The accusation that King was having sex with men was totally unsubstantiated, but it must have been concerning, for he was in the public eye and receiving much attention following the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which had taken place the year before, and at which he had given his famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.

One of the key organisers of that march was the conscientious objector, Quaker, and former Communist Bayard Rustin, whose considerable skills acquired as a labour organiser made him the formidable logistical brain who pulled off the extraordinary event. Rustin, however, was also homosexual, and an earlier march planned for the 1960 Democratic National Convention had been dropped when Democratic politician Adam Clayton Powell Jr told King he would release a fake rumour that King and Rustin were lovers were the march to go ahead and embarrass the Democratic Party. Just weeks before the actual March on Washington, South Carolina Democratic senator Strom Thurmond, a racist bigot and segregationist, produced a photograph of King in a bathtub while talking to Rustin, with the implication, again, that they were lovers. The photo had been given to Thurmond by the FBI.

Focused on Black people and leftists, the FBI fundamentally failed to suppress the organised crime cartels that profited so much from prohibition. Why did a man as ruthless and powerful as Hoover fail to ever really crack the power of the Mafia? According to mobsters, the reason was that Meyer Lansky, the mob financier who was one of the key players in mid-century organised crime in the US, held a cache of compromising photos of Hoover ‘in some sort of gay situation with Clyde Tolson [Hoover’s long-time deputy]’.¹⁸ Hoover refused to acknowledge that the Mafia even existed, stating ‘no single individual or coalition of racketeers dominates organized crime across the nation’,¹⁹ despite the fact that hidden FBI microphones had just caught Sam Giancana, Chicago’s mob boss, repeatedly refer to ‘the Commission’, the Mafia’s governing organisation in the US. John Weitz, an intelligence agent with the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the World War II precursor to the CIA), also attested to having seen the photos, suggesting a similar dynamic kept Hoover from really claiming ground from his rivals, the CIA.²⁰

It is Clyde Tolson’s relationship with Hoover that offers the most convincing case that Hoover was homosexual. Tolson had been made assistant director of the FBI in 1930, aged just thirty, and rumours about the nature of their relationship began almost immediately. The two quickly became inseparable, dining together five nights a week for four decades, spending their holidays and even Christmases together.²¹ One Democratic congressman complained that Hoover and Tolson ‘have been living as man and wife for some twenty-eight years at the public’s expense’.²² By the 1960s FBI agents had begun referring to the pair as ‘J. Edna’ and ‘Mother Tolson’.²³

Hoover died in 1972, still in his role as director of the FBI, a job he’d held for nearly half a century. His body lay in state in the US Capitol, the only civil servant to receive such an honour, and, ‘in the absence of a widow’ it was Tolson who received the flag that was draped over his coffin, as well as inheriting Hoover’s estate, home, and dogs.²⁴ Tolson soon slumped into a depression, essentially only leaving the house to visit Hoover’s grave. He had the dogs put to sleep. Three years later, Tolson died, and was buried a few yards from Hoover, as per both men’s request.²⁵

A few years after their death, Hoover was outed by a surprising friend, the Broadway legend and gay icon Ethel Merman. She had been close friends with Hoover and Tolson. Asked her opinions on homosexuals, she replied, ‘Some of my best friends are homosexual,’ which must have surprised nobody. Then she followed it up with, ‘Everybody knew about J. Edgar Hoover, but he was the best chief the FBI ever had.’²⁶

There are other, more outlandish allegations about Hoover’s sex life, including one, provided with a sworn affidavit, by Susan Rosenstiel, that she attended an orgy with her husband at the Plaza Hotel, New York, in which Hoover was in attendance, dressed in full drag, and watched as he had two boys in leather read Bible verses to him, before he seized the Bible, threw it to the floor, and proceeded to have sex with them.²⁷ The accusation might sound outlandish, but she was not the only one to have made it. One FBI agent, Guy Hottel, who had been Clyde Tolson’s flatmate for years before joining the agency and becoming Tolson and Hoover’s ‘constant companion’ for a decade, also made similar claims after becoming a problem drinker in the 1940s. Despite his indiscretions and alcoholism, he was not fired.²⁸

Susan’s husband, Lewis Rosenstiel, was a powerful bisexual businessman who was an associate of Meyer Lansky’s, and who had leant on Hoover to ensure the passing of the Forand Act, saving him a huge amount in potential taxes on hoarded whiskey.²⁹ The orgy was, Susan alleged, organised by Roy Cohn, a lawyer whose clients included Rosenstiel as well as various crooks from mobster ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno to Roger Stone, Rupert Murdoch, and Donald Trump, and whose career had received a major boost thanks to a recommendation provided by J. Edgar Hoover.

Should we believe these allegations? On the one hand, the allegations are multiple, and spread across his career. However, as the historian David K. Johnson points out, ‘this account is more of a reflection of Cold War political culture than an analysis of it. It utilizes the kind of tactics Hoover and the security program he oversaw perfected – guilt by association, rumor, and unverified gossip.’³⁰ It’s true that this account of Hoover’s sex life is salacious and at the very least embellished, while also perpetuating many homophobic Cold War tropes. Yet, without guilt, rumour, and gossip, most of history’s homosexuals would go unnoticed in the torrent of assumed heterosexuality that culture imposes. Conversely, there is very little gossip or rumour about Hoover’s hypothetical girlfriends.

Is it not hard to see what Hoover saw in Cohn? Both men were driven by a hatred of communism, both were ruthlessly cruel, and both lived with their mothers until their forties. Sure, Cohn was a Jew – and Hoover had no time for Jews – but he might not hold that against him … much. Roy was born in the Bronx in 1927, the product of an unhappy marriage and an unhappy home.³¹ His father, Al Cohn, came from a family of Polish Jews who had migrated to the US in the nineteenth century, and his mother, Dora Marcus, from German Jews who migrated at the same time. The Marcus’ had done well by providing banking services, while Al Cohn grew up in poverty on the Lower East Side, but was ambitious and had studied hard in law. The dowry from the marriage provided enough money for Al to become a judge, but that was probably the only upside of the nuptials.³²

Roy’s father was aloof and cold, Dora obsessive over her son, doting but also cruel. She employed her poor in-laws as servants and kitchen staff, and cultivated in Roy, her only child, a sense of superiority and disdain that he seemed to be able to turn on and off at will.³³ School friends remembered a teenage Cohn calling the local police precinct to have his teacher’s traffic ticket cancelled;³⁴ relatives remembered him at age eleven sending food back at restaurants.³⁵

Al was deeply involved in the Democratic Tammany Hall ‘machine politics’ that had dominated New York for over a century, a political system built for reproducing power, wealth, and corruption. Thus from a young age Roy understood that law, money, and politics were interconnected tools for wielding power, something he learnt not just from Al, but also from Dora, who built a personal fiefdom amongst Democrat socialites. Even senators’ wives were warned, ‘Be nice to Dora because if you’re not nice to Dora she’s gonna make life miserable’.³⁶

Roy did not play ball out in the street; he collected political campaign pin badges, and he attended his parents’ dinner parties, something unheard of at the time.³⁷ He studied law at Columbia, and, like Hoover, managed to avoid being drafted in the final days of a war by getting himself sent to West Point military academy, on the recommendation of a New York politician. There was no chance that Cohn, only marginally taller than Hoover but without his mass, would have passed the physical entry requirements, yet he was recommended on three occasions, with the surely coincidental effect that the boy was repeatedly pushed down the draft. He received his lawyer’s diploma when he was only twenty, and had to wait almost a year before being sworn into the bar on his twenty-first birthday.³⁸

Within a year, Cohn was an assistant US attorney, and began what became a lifelong passion he shared with Hoover: hunting Reds. As after the First World War, the period following World War II, as the Cold War started to crystallize, led to a concerted suppression of not just members of the Communist Party USA, but also of labour organisers and socialists more generally.

Politicians were already taking advantage of these new anxieties. In 1947 Truman passed Executive Order 9835, giving the FBI sweeping powers to investigate state employees for potential allegiance to ‘subversive’ organisations – largely speaking, communist ones. It also facilitated the creation of the ‘Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations’, detailing suspicious organisations to help facilitate the outing of ‘subversives’.

Stoking public fears of communist subversion of the US government and institutions, it gave the state increased opportunities to crack down on political undesirables, especially trade unionists and racial justice organisers. Cohn relished the chance to persecute any he could find, including the economist William Remington. Remington worked for the Council of Economic Advisers, a federal agency that advises the executive, and was accused by Elizabeth Bentley, a KGB agent turned informant, of having passed her government information during the war. On top of this, his former wife alleged that he had been a member of the Communist Party, something he denied. In the end they did not get him for espionage, but for perjury. When the first sentence was overturned, he was tried again, for lying in the first.³⁹ Sentenced to three years in prison, he was beaten to death a year later by anti-Communist fellow prisoners.

The victory must have given Cohn a taste for blood. In 1951 he took a central role in one of the most notorious espionage trials of the century, that of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs were a young Jewish couple from New York who were accused of having passed nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union during the war. Cohn’s role included the high-profile interrogation of Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, David Greenglass, on the witness stand. Greenglass, a Communist machinist who had worked on the US Manhattan Project to build a nuclear weapon before being recruited by Julius Greenberg, had struck a plea bargain with the state in order that his wife could stay with their children. His testimony, extracted by Cohn, was crucial to the conviction of the Rosenbergs, who were sentenced to death.⁴⁰

The case caused an international furore, as public figures from Bertholt Brecht to Pope Pius XII appealed for clemency. Many doubted the couple’s guilt, or they regarded the harsh sentence, particularly Ethel’s, to be motivated by anti-Semitism.⁴¹ Writing in the French newspaper Libération the day after the execution, Jean-Paul Sartre astutely diagnosed America as being ‘sick with fear … afraid of the shadow of your own bomb’.⁴² While the Rosenbergs almost certainly were guilty of the crime of which they were accused, the case was also a miscarriage of justice. In his co-written autobiography Cohn bragged of his discussions with the judge outside of court, via a secret telephone protocol they had established, during which he agitated for Ethel to receive the death penalty too. The judge ‘had already decided before the trial that he was going to sentence Julius Rosenberg to death’, but was reticent about also executing Ethel, a mother of two young sons. ‘What was plainly at work here’, recalled Cohn, ‘was a kind of reverse sexism.’⁴³ Two years later, both were dead.

Roy Cohn’s star, as anti-Communist witch hunter, was on the rise. Hoover had noticed his outstanding role in the Rosenbergs’ trial, and saw his potential, recommending him to Senator Joe McCarthy. McCarthy had been an unremarkable Republican senator, elected to the state of Wisconsin in 1946, who, like Cohn and Hoover, had trained in law. He had propelled himself into the headlines, and into the centre of American public life, when in early 1950 he made an explosive speech claiming he had the names of over two hundred people who were ‘known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department’.⁴⁴

It’s important to note that McCarthy wasn’t the first to warn of Communist subversion in America: three years previously the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) had already, to take one example, run a series of hearing on supposed Communist influence in Hollywood, leading to the persecution and blacklisting of scores of writers, directors, and actors. Nor was it the first time paranoid accusations were levelled against members of the State Department: it was Democrat President Truman who had implemented the loyalty programme, and in fact McCarthy’s speech was riding off the back of the conviction of a senior government official, Alger Hiss, for perjury relating to espionage charges. But McCarthy brought a vituperative, unhinged attitude to red-baiting that thrilled Hoover, made headlines, and both rode, and fuelled, popular paranoia.

It is wrong to characterise McCarthy’s brand of anticommunism as hegemonic in the America of the 1950s. While he held a certain degree of power on account of his rhetoric, he faced some pushback from both Republicans and Democrats, and notably lost a large share of his vote in the 1952 election, when in general Republicans fared well across the board, and Dwight D. Eisenhower became the first successful Republican presidential candidate since Herbert Hoover in 1928.

While there may not have been much love lost between Mc Carthy and Eisenhower, the president was undoubtably helped by an official memorandum, produced by the FBI on J. Edgar Hoover’s order, on Eisenhower’s opponent, Adlai Stevenson, which smeared him as a homosexual who had ‘once harbored communist sympathies’.⁴⁵ The rumours that resulted from the memorandum were made concrete in the mind of the electorate in October, when McCarthy appeared on TV clutching papers that reported the accusations, charging Stevenson of being a ‘wartime Communist collaborator’.⁴⁶

With Eisenhower in power, his fellow Republicans made efforts to sideline McCarthy, refusing to appoint him to the Internal Security Subcommittee, which was in charge of rooting out communism. The Senate majority leader, Robert A. Taft, was very pleased with himself, saying, ‘We’ve got McCarthy where he can’t do any harm,’ on the Senate Committee on Government Operations.⁴⁷ They underestimated the man, who after his appointment made himself the chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, a role with a wide enough remit that he could relaunch his aggressive investigations into Communist subversion (it was on this subcommittee where McCarthy conducted his investigations; he never appeared on the HUAC).

It was at this point that Hoover recommended the young lawyer Roy Cohn, who would serve as McCarthy’s chief counsel. Cohn bought with him a ‘friend’, David Schine, a Harvard graduate and son of a wealthy hotel magnate; this nepotism, perhaps motivated either by Cohn’s lust for the tall, handsome Schine or even on the basis of a sexual relationship, would have disastrous consequences for McCarthy.

There had been a sense of growing anxiety about the prevalence of homosexuals within the US army and within the State Department for years. Attempts to weed them out during the draft in World War II eventually resulted in the codification of a myriad of different prohibitions on gay men and women in 1943, when any ‘persons occasionally or habitually engaged in homosexual or other perverse sexual practices’ were prohibited from serving in any branch of the armed services.⁴⁸ In 1947 the Senate Appropriations Committee had, in a more general warning about potential Communist subversion, also warned of ‘the extensive appointment in highly classified positions of admitted homosexuals, who are historically known to be security risks’.⁴⁹

Their reasoning was twofold: they believed that one, ‘sexual perversion’ was a character weakness, and two, the blackmail of those engaged in illegal and socially taboo behaviour was a risk. However, the deluge of press coverage in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s helped link homosexuality and communism in the minds of many people, until both became inseparable, confusing ‘security risks’ with ‘disloyalty’.⁵⁰ This fear manifested in many forms, such as the assumption (probably reasonably well founded) that homosexuals tended to congregate and socialise together, and, like Communists, had their own codes of behaviour and language with which they recognised each other, thus increasing the sense of collusion or conspiracy. According to one 1952 article on the subject, homosexuals ‘belong to a sinister, mysterious and efficient international’, clearly alluding to the Comintern (Communist International): the ‘Homintern’, as it was sometimes known.⁵¹

Were these fears unfounded? Not entirely. After all, the blackmail of gay men was, and remained, a security risk. In the UK the combination of communist ideology, homosexual fraternity, and Oxbridge networks underpinned the Cambridge Five spy ring, while the effective use of a KGB gang-bang honeytrap to blackmail civil servant John Vassall in 1954 led to almost a decade of using him as a spy, sourcing huge amounts of information with which to upgrade the Soviet Navy. Meanwhile, on the left, there were, quite understandably, a good deal of homosexuals for whom the promise of overthrowing the bourgeois order made communism an attractive prospect, and who were equipped with a huge range of organising skills provided by the Communist Party.

One such activist, Harry Hay, went on to become a founding member of one of the United States’ first gay activist groups that emerged at this time, the Mattachine Society, and adopted the Popular Front model of a minority group agitating for social and political recognition as a social group with a distinct culture, whose legacy endures today in the idea of the ‘LGBTQ community’.⁵²

This wider conflation of homosexuality and communism in the American popular imagination was ideal for McCarthy, however, giving him a two-way smear tactic. He played up to it, depicting communism as a movement of underhanded, subversive queers, and himself as the tough, macho defender of America and her values. ‘McCarthyism’, he would rail, ‘is Americanism with its sleeves rolled up.’⁵³ Yet the groundwork was already laid. Even before McCarthy took over as chair, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations had released a report, based upon two years of investigations into government employment of homosexuals that were conducted under its previous chair, the segregationist Dixie Democrat senator Clyde Hoey. Just a few months into his presidency, in April 1953, President Eisenhower introduced Executive Order 10450, prohibiting homosexuals from federal employment. Hoover had already authorised the FBI to begin passing all information collected under his Sex Deviates Program, instigated in 1950, to the Civil Service Commission, which oversaw federal recruitment and employment.

Between these organs and laws, Washington now had a comprehensive system for the surveillance and purging of homosexuals from the State Department. All homosexual activity caught by the DC was referred to the FBI as a matter of course, who stored it for future ‘leverage’ or passed it straight to the Civil Service Commission. Mere weeks passed between arrest and dismissal, and you would never work in the civil service again. Anyone applying to work for the federal government had their details cross-checked with the State Department’s list of known or alleged homosexuals. Special investigators in the State Department devoted to uncovering homosexuals dug into employees’ lives, checking credit records and references and even investigating whether the employees knew other potential homosexuals, as even association suggested guilt.⁵⁴

It is difficult to know how many homosexuals were purged; David K Johnson notes that the undersecretary of state, Donald B Lourie, testified that at the height of the purges his department alone was losing an employee a day. Johnson estimates that five thousand federal government employees lost their jobs over the course of the purges, not including those who, seeing which way the wind was blowing, resigned, nor those who were never employed on the basis of their sexuality.⁵⁵

McCarthy, with his bully pulpit, was neither the first nor the last of the purgers, but rather the public face of a much wider purge of both homosexuals and leftists. Still, the fear, hatred, and malevolence he managed to sow in the public imagination was unparalleled. As he told two journalists visiting his office, ‘If you want to be against McCarthy, boys, you’ve got to be a Communist or a cocksucker.’⁵⁶ He would prove a powerful influence on Cohn’s life.

Yet, for Cohn, serving McCarthy was the highlight of his life, as he commented later: ‘I never worked for a better man or a greater cause.’⁵⁷ Meanwhile, the thousands purged often struggled to find work, or were outed to their families and communities. Inadvertently, this had an effect on the nascent gay rights movement that was starting to emerge in tentative, closed circles in cities around the country. The influx of many talented minds, who understood the politics of state, into an ostracised community gave new recruits to what was called the ‘homophile movement’, including Frank Kameny.

After Kameny was fired as an astronomer in the Army Map Service, he unsuccessfully appealed his dismissal. He had little to lose in throwing his hand in with the gay rights movement, and went on to help found the Washington, DC, branch of the Mattachine Society, and was influential in overturning the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder.

McCarthy put Cohn and Schine to work, alongside assistant counsel Bobby Kennedy. (Yes, that Bobby Kennedy – the Kennedys are too flagrantly heterosexual to fit into our narrative, though they were certainly bad enough.) They turned their fire first on Voice of America, a publicly funded shortwave radio station broadcasting internationally, established in 1942 to help counter Nazi propaganda abroad. Then, having repeatedly purged it of its leaders, McCarthy had Cohn and Schine dispatched to Europe to purge the International Information Administration, a State Department agency that helped run pro-US libraries in Europe, of literature McCarthy had deemed subversive.⁵⁸

Their trip was a farce, a sort of ‘National Lampoon’s European Suppression’, as the two men gallivanted between US embassies; besides, having heard that McCarthy was looking to purge them, many libraries had already removed most offending books.⁵⁹ Just the fear of McCarthy’s boys saw bonfires of leftist and degenerate books relit across the continent, two decades after Hirschfeld’s archives had been destroyed in the pyres and barely a decade after the Battle of Berlin. Nonetheless, the two men had plenty to do: shopping for expensive cigars, paying European officials for dirt on American staff, and, as McCarthy would have wanted, holding press conferences.⁶⁰

In the end, Cohn proved McCarthy’s downfall. His attachment to Schine – possibly not platonic, although also possibly not reciprocated – led Cohn to attempt to secure him favourable treatment when he was drafted into the army as a private. When the corruption was discovered, there was a series of hearings into the affair in 1954. In reality, it was a proxy war for a bigger issue: McCarthy had been intending to purge the army, while McCarthy’s enemies, from Eisenhower down, wanted to put an end to his reckless publicity shenanigans. The entire proceedings were broadcast live, bringing in over 20 million viewers.⁶¹ McCarthy attempted his old tricks, including suggestions the US Army had been subverted by Communists, but ultimately his showboating had run its course. Although he was acquitted by the hearings, he was censured later that same year by the Senate, spelling an effective end to both his public support and his political career as an influential player.

Cohn, meanwhile, had ostracised most of his support in Washington, and returned to New York, where he returned to practise as a private attorney. He spent the next three decades in the city, living a strange, closeted life of wealth, power, and abuse in which he was, to some extent, the victim of the homophobia he helped stoke in the 1950s.

His record in private practice was as reprehensible as his record as a public prosecutor. His list of clients and friends represents a ‘Who’s Who’ of the most exploitative, greedy, amoral, corrupt, violent, and racist shits in US history, from Donald Trump to Richard Nixon, Roger Stone, and Rupert Murdoch. However, during the whole time he was providing legal and strategic support to the American Right, he was conducting a private sex life that was anathema to their values.

Some later claimed he was straight, or perhaps bisexual, up to his mother’s death, and then ‘turned’. This seems unlikely, as his biographer Sidney Zion claimed that his homosexual career, like his legal one, started early, at age fifteen, while Cohn was a precocious freshman at Columbia. Also, during the Army– McCarthy hearings there were barely veiled references to him being a ‘pixie’: a close friend of a fairy.⁶² He denied it, of course, as he did throughout his life, but he played a strange game of public and private identities, probably one that would only be viable during the interval between the birth of gay liberation and the eventual acceptance of a certain type of respectable, Mayor Pete–style homosexuality.

One could not really say he was ‘closeted’: anyone who was anyone in the New York gay nightlife knew he was gay. He partied at Studio 54; his townhouse and country pile were always well-stocked with young, blonde men draped over the furniture or in the pool;⁶³ he holidayed in his own beach house in Provincetown.⁶⁴ To not see that Roy was gay, you had to choose not to see it – which is what his network of conservative clients, politicians, and businessmen chose to do. Keeping his side of the bargain, Cohn simply refused to acknowledge what was clear to everyone, and went to great lengths to maintain the fiction.

In the late 1970s, Cohn refused to represent a teacher fired on account of his homosexuality, stating that ‘the school system is a hundred percent right … I believe homosexual teachers are a grave threat to our children, they have no business polluting the schools of America.’⁶⁵ Cohn additionally engaged in the most brutal tactics to avoid being outed. For example, a former lover undertook a campaign of harassment against him in the early 1980s, including publishing not one but two magazines dedicated solely to pornographic cartoons that outed Roy Cohn as an ‘Attorney. Lecturer. Statesman. Fairy’, as well as a size queen and bottom whose butler woke him in the morning with a ready-prepared anal douche.⁶⁶ In response, Roy went as far as to bury the hatchet with one of his lifelong enemies, district attorney of New York County Robert Morgenthau, to ensure his former lover was silenced and jailed.⁶⁷

He railed constantly against ‘fags’, refusing to identify with them – and why would he? He had spent half his career succeeding in using allegations of homosexuality as weapons to discredit and destroy his enemies. He had been instrumental in securing in the mind of the American public the idea that homosexuals were subversive, corrupt, weak, and treacherous: the concept of the homosexual was everything he pretended to hate.

When Tony Kushner wrote Cohn into his landmark play depicting the AIDS crisis in New York, portraying the character as ‘the polestar of human evil’, he nailed Cohn’s attitude. ‘To someone who doesn’t understand this,’ the play’s Cohn says, ‘homosexual is what I am because I sleep with men, but this is wrong. Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who, in fifteen years of trying, can’t get a pissant anti-discrimination bill through City Council. They are men who know nobody, and who nobody knows. Now, Henry, does that sound like me?’⁶⁸

Like Hoover, Cohn was driven more by a thirst for power than greed for wealth. He had few actual assets, having used complex accounting mechanisms throughout his life to avoid paying taxes. He had been subject to investigation throughout his life, from the Army–McCarthy hearings on, yet always seemed to evade the law, counting on his powerful contacts and networks of people who owed him favours. Yet the net was always getting tighter, and in 1986 it was money that finally trapped him, and saw him disbarred.

Cohn had been a close friend with his fellow red-baiter Lewis Rosenstiel; it had been Rosenstiel’s ex-wife who had dubiously claimed to have visited Cohn’s orgies at which Hoover appeared in drag. In 1975, as Rosenstiel lay dying, Cohn had misrepresented a document to him that resulted in a semi-comatose and insensate Rosenstiel signing over Cohn as co-executor of his will. This, combined with a charge that a loan Cohn had received for a divorce case in the 1960s was not in fact a loan, but rather a fee, led to him being stripped of the right to practice law.⁶⁹ Asked for comment, he declared ‘I could care less,’ but in reality, losing his status as a lawyer was a body blow, and he cried following the ruling.⁷⁰

For the courts, the prosecutors, and the myriad enemies he accumulated throughout his life, it was something of a pyrrhic victory, for two years earlier, he had been diagnosed with AIDS, another victim of an epidemic that had swept through the population of homosexual men and intravenous drug users in New York. He had always denied he had it – it was, after all, seen as a ‘gay plague’ at the time – and when the physical manifestations of the illness became undisguisable, he claimed he had liver cancer. Many people involved in the fight against AIDS at the time were furious that, despite being a person with AIDS, his refusal to acknowledge it meant he could not lend his considerable influence to help increase funding into research to tackle the disease. Their anger only increased when it became known that Cohn, publicly refusing to be identified with the disease, had privately used his influence to jump the queue for access to the experimental treatment for the disease, AZT.⁷¹

Suffering from dementia, he proved a difficult and unruly patient, especially when told that, as part of the drug trials, he was required to stay celibate.⁷² Although the drug trial gave him a short period of recovery, as with many of the participants, it was still only temporary; by the time he was disbarred, he had entered the hospital for the final time. At 5 a.m. on 2 August 1986, he died. His only companion by the bedside was his boyfriend, Peter Fraser, loyal to a relationship that Cohn had publicly denied right to the end.

A year after Roy’s death, a group of AIDS activists began the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, a public monument to the personal grief experienced by millions of lovers, friends, and families of people who died with AIDS. Each panel, normally produced by someone who knew the deceased, remembers that person’s life. The quilt continues to grow to this day, a testament to the fact that the AIDS crisis is not over. It is an almost unbearably beautiful and painful act of remembrance, at times touching and even funny, that recalls the human cost of the AIDS crisis. One of its founders, Cleve Jones, recalls talking to someone who arrived with a panel remembering the life of Roy Cohn. ‘Did you actually know Roy Cohn?’ asked Jones. ‘I knew him very well,’ the man responded. The panel remains part of the quilt to this day – its simple design reads ‘Roy Cohn. Bully. Coward. Victim.’⁷³