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(The director is the daughter of our comrade Michael Meeropol.)
NY Times, June 18, 2020
Roy Cohn Got Her Grandparents Executed. She Made a Film About Him.
By Scott Tobias
The word “evil” gets thrown around a lot in reference to Roy Cohn, the
notoriously rapacious lawyer and “fixer” whose client list included
Joseph McCarthy, several mafia bosses and New York elites like George
Steinbrenner and Donald Trump, a Cohn protégé. And it comes up often in
the new HBO documentary “Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn,”
debuting Thursday, a profile that weighs his influence and legacy
against the contradictory details of his private life.
If anyone is entitled to use the word, it’s the film’s director, Ivy
Meeropol. As a young attorney in 1951, Cohn pushed for the execution of
Meeropol’s grandparents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on espionage charges.
Key to the prosecution’s case was testimony by Ethel’s brother, David
Greenglass, who claimed that the Rosenbergs had passed atomic secrets to
the Soviet Union. Greenglass later confessed to lying under oath, but
Cohn never wavered in his pride over the verdict, despite evidence of
legal improprieties.
Meeropol had wrestled with her grandparents’s story before in her debut
film, “Heir to an Execution” (2004), but here the Rosenbergs are only a
piece of a much larger puzzle. Meeropol’s documentary attempts to
understand a lawyer who gamed the system on behalf of powerful, often
arch-conservative figures but who lived as a closeted gay man, publicly
denying his AIDS diagnosis until the day he died from AIDS-related
complications in 1986.
But “Bully. Coward. Victim.” is about Cohn-ism as much as it is about
Cohn, which is why Meeropol thinks a label like “evil” is insufficient.
‘Bully. Coward. Victim.’ Review: The Paradox of Roy CohnJune 18, 2020
“It’s not like Roy Cohn just comes up from hell and is this evil being,
and that’s how he’s able to operate,” Meeropol said by phone on Monday.
“It’s like saying that Trump is just so evil and then if we get rid of
him, everything will be fine. We know that’s not true.”
Throughout the documentary, Meeropol intersperses footage from the 2018
Broadway revival of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on
National Themes,” which has Nathan Lane playing Cohn as a frail and
rage-filled power broker haunted by Ethel Rosenberg’s ghost. In a brief
phone interview, Kushner said he considered it his job as a playwright
“to understand why people do the things they do and how they see
themselves and how they explain themselves to themselves.” But Kushner,
who offers commentary in the film, draws a sharp distinction between
Cohn and his most notable client.
“I feel strongly that Roy Cohn is an infinitely more interesting human
being than Donald Trump,” Kushner said. Trump’s “vocabulary, his
repertoire and his worldview,” he added, “is shockingly constricted and
impoverished.”
The connection between Cohn and Trump — and Cohn-ism and Trump-ism — is
a running theme in “Bully. Coward. Victim.,” which doesn’t divorce them
from the corruption and hypocrisy of the New York City ecosystem in
which they thrived. Speaking from her father’s home in Cold Spring,
N.Y., Meeropol talked about why she returned to this painful chapter in
her family history, how Cohn could be called a “victim” and what can be
done to keep more Roy Cohns from gaining power. These are edited
excerpts from the conversation.
What inspired you to return to your grandparents’ story now and consider
Roy Cohn through a broader lens?
The simple answer is Donald Trump. I did not relish returning to my
family story, and in fact I never thought I would. Maybe in some other
form, but not in a documentary. I really thought after “Heir to an
Execution,” that was it. That film took almost five years of buildup and
then production and then a whole year of my life, and it was an
exhausting and emotionally draining process.
I always felt that Roy Cohn was a very interesting figure to look at and
would make a great film subject. I really hoped that someone else would
do it. He’s such a rich and important and complex subject and it just
didn’t happen, except for fictional narrative treatments of him. So
after Trump was elected, I felt that it was something I had to do. It
was that similar feeling I had when I embarked on “Heir to an
Execution.” I felt compelled.
You’re obviously so close to this story. Was journalistic objectivity
important to you going in? To what extent did you feel like it was even
possible to get any distance from him?
I was absolutely focused on having journalistic integrity in this film,
of course, and I had to actively work against my own preconceived
notions and feelings about Cohn. I did a similar thing when I made a
film about Indian Point, the nuclear power plant north of New York City
where I grew up. I try in everything I do to work against those
feelings, and this one was particularly hard. I knew right off the bat
that I did not want this to be what many people would assume it would
be, like a Rosenberg revenge film. And there’s certainly some element of
wanting to expose Cohn. But it was more in the service of wanting to
expose where we are now and understand more about how Donald Trump and
Cohn operated similarly.
What compelled you to try to understand Cohn’s humanity as much as you
do here?
I was always fascinated by the fact that he was gay and that he lived,
on one hand, so deeply in the closet, but also so openly in a way, too.
He was able to amass this kind of power and scare people enough, I
think, and have people in his debt so much that he could behave in a way
where he’s just very open without fear of being exposed.
I found it poignant to see how different he looked in those photos [of
Cohn vacationing] in Provincetown as compared to how he looked so
miserable [in other contexts]. And people say, like, “He looks like he’s
just so unhappy.” Right? But then you see the photos in Provincetown and
you hear the stories of how he lived there, and he looked happy and he
looked more relaxed. And it’s painful but important for us to recognize
that yes, he did it to himself in some ways, and he made choices, but I
know how hard it was to be openly gay at the time.
In an interview you gave years ago, you talked about “Angels in America”
as a play about forgiveness and how that wasn’t easy for you or your
family. Where do you stand on that now? Let’s put it this way: I don’t
even know if I would say any more that the message of “Angels in
America” is that you forgive Roy Cohn. You don’t have to forgive
someone, but you can try to understand. You can still hold both
feelings. You can empathize with how they became who they are or what
they had to suffer through so that the rest of us can grow. We can
understand and change things. I don’t want anyone to have to live in the
closet and be ashamed and terrified that they’re going to be found out
for being gay. So if understanding what Roy Cohn had to go through helps
that greater process of overcoming all that, that’s great. But that
doesn’t mean I forgive him.
“I had to actively work against my own preconceived notions and feelings
about Cohn,” said Ivy Meeropol, whose earlier film “Heir to an
Execution” was about her grandparents.Credit...HBO
Cohn’s patch on the AIDS Memorial Quilt informs the title and the film’s
vision of him. The “bully” and “coward” parts are well understood. But
in what ways was he a victim?
I think anyone who has to suffer in the closet the way he did — or the
way anybody has to — is a victim. He’s certainly a victim because he
died of AIDS. And I think he’s a victim of his own ideas of what it
meant to be a man and what it meant to be tough. But taking that title
also has to do with my own coming to terms with him and the moment that
I learned for the first time that the guy who had pushed for the
execution of my grandparents was also gay and had died of AIDS. So it’s
a nod to that moment in my life.
But there’s something bigger at work here. I want people to see him as
this horrific example of a person who helped shape the person in the
White House, who I feel is also so destructive and dangerous and
hateful. It doesn’t serve us. We’re not going to learn anything or get
past it if we just think of these people as coming out of nowhere as
fully formed evildoers who were just dropped into our society to do
harm. So it’s not forgiveness. It’s more like recognition and not
letting society off the hook.
How do you build a justice system or even a social system to keep more
Roy Cohn types from thriving? What have we learned from four years under
a Cohn protégé?
Going back to McCarthy, Communist Russia wasn’t necessarily planning to
overthrow our country and take over. What he and Cohn were talking about
is the threat to their way of life. A threat to their ability to amass
incredible amounts of wealth, and undermine the rest of society’s
ability to thrive and prosper. Because it works against our own
interests. The way to avoid having more Cohns and more Trumps is if we
look at our history and look at what actually is happening and the
disconnect between the language that’s used and the promises that are
made, and the actual policies.
This film is not a profile of Roy Cohn in an exclusive sense. It’s about
a whole system. Has Cohn become a convenient scapegoat for the New York
power elites, celebrities of his day? If there were no Roy Cohn would we
have had to invent him?
I think the problem is that so many of the elite — and Frank Rich
covered this in his New York magazine cover story about Cohn — are
people who you would think would have run the other way from Cohn, but
they were his colleagues, his friends, and his clients. They worked with
him, supported him, went to his parties. Like Andy Warhol. So I think
that idea that now to say, “Oh, well, he was so bad,” is a way of
distancing themselves from any participation in the larger and the
greater problems, the structural problems.
There’s a photo of Senator Schumer in the film. You see him in a tux at
a Cohn party. Cohn was a lifelong Democrat. Judge Irving Kaufman [of the
Rosenberg trial] was a Democrat. It’s not Republican versus Democrat.
It’s bigger than that. It’s a systemic problem that we’re facing. And I
think that we have to remember if you have the power and the money, you
are going to do whatever you can to hang on to it. Cohn was just more
ruthless about that.
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