Behind the Bastards - Part One: Roy Cohn: The Man Who Made Donald Trump
Aired: 2020-12-08
Duration: 01:22:49


=== A Podcast About Terrible People (02:19) ===

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=== The Unhealthy Cohn Family Roots (15:00) ===

[00:02:19]  What?
[00:02:20]  Harassing people for their political beliefs, my Roy Cohn.
[00:02:27]  This is, I'm Robert Evans.
[00:02:28]  This is Behind the Bastards.
[00:02:30]  It's a podcast about terrible people.
[00:02:32]  And I'm just going to cut right to the chase, as I already did.
[00:02:35]  Today, we're talking about Roy motherfucking Cohn.
[00:02:38]  Oh, my God.
[00:02:39]  Joelle Monique is our guest, Joelle producer at iHeartMedia.
[00:02:44]  How are you doing today?
[00:02:45]  I'm good.
[00:02:46]  I'm slightly unprofessional.
[00:02:47]  I just bit into some peanut butter.
[00:02:48]  I'm so sorry.
[00:02:48]  I'm sorry.
[00:02:49]  Are you just doing yo?
[00:02:52]  This has been my favorite episode ever, you guys.
[00:02:56]  Thank you.
[00:02:56]  Joelle, what do you know about Roy Cohn?
[00:03:00]  Okay, so The Good Fight, which is one of my favorite TV shows of all time, had like a very strong leaning Roy Cohn arc.
[00:03:08]  I want to say season two.
[00:03:10]  There's a song called In the Past?
[00:03:13]  No, no, no.
[00:03:14]  It basically was an opportunity to educate people about how Trump could get away with some of the things he was getting away with.
[00:03:20]  Okay, okay, cool, cool, cool.
[00:03:21]  Yes, Roy Cohn is that guy.
[00:03:23]  Yeah.
[00:03:24]  So in that, they made this song, which I think you'll really appreciate.
[00:03:27]  It's called Roy Cohn Loves to Party.
[00:03:29]  There's an animated segment that goes along with it.
[00:03:31]  It's peak excellence.
[00:03:34]  And so I know like a two-minute real quick history of Roy Cohn.
[00:03:38]  I know he's an awful human.
[00:03:41]  A monster.
[00:03:43]  Yeah, a real terrible, terrible guy.
[00:03:45]  So I'm excited to find out how terrible today.
[00:03:48]  What's funny about Roy Cohn is that if you kind of measure him objectively against the standards of, you know, a lot of the people we talk about on this show, he doesn't seem that bad.
[00:03:59]  Like he's he's a bad person, but he's not like Stalin or Hitler.
[00:04:03]  He wasn't murdering him.
[00:04:04]  He's he was such an unpleasant, well, he may have.
[00:04:07]  He was such an unpleasant human being that his name has become kind of like a byword for a monster.
[00:04:14]  Like he's, he's up there just because of what a piece of shit he was to everyone around him.
[00:04:20]  And it's kind of amazing.
[00:04:21]  If you watch documentaries, there's a great documentary called Where's My Roy Cohn that interviews people who knew him.
[00:04:29]  And like at least two of like there are multiple people in that documentary who are friends of his who describe him as evil.
[00:04:35]  Like just because.
[00:04:36]  Oh my gosh.
[00:04:37]  Oh yeah, we I hung out with Roy, but he was evil.
[00:04:40]  Like he was, he's absolutely was the embodiment of human evil.
[00:04:44]  Wow.
[00:04:45]  How could you, I wonder what was he bringing to that friendship that they were like over the evil part.
[00:04:50]  He was he was kind of a great friend.
[00:04:54]  Oh, that kind of friend.
[00:04:55]  No, it's all like when you have like a super bitch of a friend, but she's good to you.
[00:04:59]  And she's good to you and a mom.
[00:05:01]  She's slaves.
[00:05:02]  Yeah.
[00:05:02]  Yes.
[00:05:03]  I kind of get it.
[00:05:04]  Yeah.
[00:05:05]  It's the kind of friend where you're like, yeah, I know they are a monster, but also if I ever need them, they will burn the world down for me.
[00:05:14]  My personal monsters.
[00:05:15]  Yeah, that's who Roy Cohn was.
[00:05:18]  And it's one of the, we'll talk about his relationship with Trump later.
[00:05:21]  It's what Trump learned a lot from Roy Cohn.
[00:05:24]  The thing he never learned from Roy Cohn was how to be loyal, because that is something Cohn was good at.
[00:05:28]  To his actual friends, he was very loyal.
[00:05:30]  And they weren't to him because it just turns out when you're friends with people who can be friends with a person who is pure unadulterated human evil, they're not good at being loyal to you, even if you are to them.
[00:05:40]  It's fun.
[00:05:41]  It's a fun story.
[00:05:42]  That documentary, Where's My Roy Cohn, I do recommend watching.
[00:05:46]  It gets its name from something Donald Trump said when Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself during the Moeller probe.
[00:05:53]  President Donald Trump reportedly cried out, Where's My Roy Cohn? in a moment of panic and fear.
[00:06:01]  Yeah.
[00:06:02]  So we're going to talk all about that today.
[00:06:04]  Roy Cohn was a lawyer.
[00:06:06]  It's accurate to say that, but just saying like that's describing Roy Cohn as a lawyer is such an incomplete explanation of who he was as to be totally inaccurate.
[00:06:16]  Roy Cohn was a blackmail artist, a political fixer of the highest order, maybe the best there ever was, a man famous for being infamous and a man who weaponized sociopathy more effectively than any other political actor in U.S. history.
[00:06:31]  He's a hoot of a dude.
[00:06:34]  He created the shortcuts to help us get where we got today.
[00:06:38]  Yeah, he's the man who built both Roger Stone and Donald Trump.
[00:06:42]  Like, he's a legacy.
[00:06:47]  He's a remarkable piece of shit.
[00:06:50]  I'd be off.
[00:06:51]  I love to see it.
[00:06:52]  Yeah.
[00:06:54]  So, Roy Marcus Cohn was born on February 20th, 1927 in the Bronx, New York City.
[00:07:02]  He was the only child of a wealthy Jewish couple, Dora and Albert.
[00:07:06]  His father, Albert, was a judge and a major figure in the local Democratic Party.
[00:07:10]  As a result, Roy grew up with politicians of all stripes dropping by his home for dinners and cocktail parties.
[00:07:16]  So he's born into the political upper crust, you know, from childhood.
[00:07:24]  Evolving life.
[00:07:25]  Oh, yes.
[00:07:26]  He was one of those kids who spoke like an adult way too early.
[00:07:29]  You were like, how do you know these things?
[00:07:31]  Yes.
[00:07:31]  Yes, absolutely.
[00:07:33]  Like his parents let him drink at the cocktail parties.
[00:07:36]  Absolutely.
[00:07:36]  They did.
[00:07:37]  They thought he was an adult, but he was really just an obnoxious trash child.
[00:07:42]  Yeah, he was definitely drinking at the adult table from a young age.
[00:07:48]  No, no, no.
[00:07:49]  And obviously, like, he came from money and not just like judge money, but his family has like wealth on all sides of it.
[00:07:57]  His great uncle was the founder of the Lionel Corporation, which makes, they make toy trains, and were for a while the largest toy manufacturer on the planet.
[00:08:06]  Roy's maternal uncle, Bernard Marcus, was the president of the Bank of the United States.
[00:08:12]  So again, ton of money in this family.
[00:08:14]  And obviously the fact that Bernard was the president of the Bank of the United States added to the family's gravitas and importance until October 29th of 1929, when the stock market crashed and the Great Depression got going, because the Bank of the United States was one of the main things that caused like its collapse, caused the Great Depression.
[00:08:34]  Now, Roy was too young to remember much of what happened at the time, the stress and the panic.
[00:08:38]  It would have been passed on to him, though, by the adults around him, especially because his uncle's bank was blamed for sparking the stock market crash.
[00:08:46]  This wasn't entirely fair because a lot of people and a lot of banks were to blame for the Great Depression.
[00:08:52]  But Bernard Marcus was the head of the bank that was most implicated, and he was also a Jew.
[00:08:58]  So he got blamed.
[00:08:59]  He became like the scapegoat of the financial crash.
[00:09:03]  America loves a scapegoat.
[00:09:04]  We can't hold everyone responsible, but we can't point to you and say you did it.
[00:09:08]  Yeah, so Bernard Marcus is Jewish.
[00:09:10]  The Bank of the U.S. is heavily frequented by Jewish immigrants, and everybody's angry at Jewish people when the economy collapses because racism.
[00:09:18]  So yeah, Bernard Marcus actually becomes the only banker to go to prison for the financial crisis for the Great Depression.
[00:09:26]  Like they pick one and it's the Jewish guy.
[00:09:29]  Lord Jesus, that's awful.
[00:09:32]  Which is not to say that he didn't do anything because he definitely did, but it was, he did not, he certainly shouldn't have been the only banker to go to prison.
[00:09:41]  He didn't row that boat alone.
[00:09:42]  He didn't single-handedly tank our economy.
[00:09:44]  Come on now.
[00:09:45]  Yeah.
[00:09:47]  And yeah, so this is like a huge fact of shame for the Cohn family.
[00:09:53]  And to this day, Cohn's survival, Roy Cohn's surviving relatives consider the case to have been a matter of scapegoating because again, he was the only banker to go to jail.
[00:10:03]  And this really left an impact on Roy because he visited his uncle in prison when he was a small child.
[00:10:08]  Some of Roy's earliest memories were seeing his uncle Bernard in Sing Sing.
[00:10:13]  One of his cousins later wrote, quote, that left Cohn determined to beat the establishment.
[00:10:18]  So from an early age, you got to think about it this way.
[00:10:22]  He grows up thinking like, yeah, we're Jewish, but like we're part of the ruling class, the wealthy class.
[00:10:28]  And we're all, it doesn't matter if you're Jewish or Christian or whatever, as long as you're in that upper crust.
[00:10:32]  And then when a crisis hits, it turns out that we're not all part of the same thing because all of the other rich people blame the Jew, right?
[00:10:38]  Like that's the way it goes.
[00:10:40]  Yeah.
[00:10:41]  I didn't expect to have any sort of empathy in this episode at all, but as somebody who understands the realization of racism, like, oh, me?
[00:10:50]  Yeah.
[00:10:51]  A fragment of empathy for baby Roy Cohen before he becomes the evil we know him to be today.
[00:10:57]  Yeah, this has an impact on the evil because he realizes like, oh, money won't protect me even like from like the fact that I'm different actually does matter.
[00:11:06]  We're not all the same, even though we're rich.
[00:11:08]  And so I just like, I am now, I like, I'm not a part of the establishment, so I must be at war with it.
[00:11:13]  That's, that's the idea that Roy Cohn, baby Roy Cohn, grows up with.
[00:11:20]  Lord.
[00:11:21]  Yeah, it's super fun.
[00:11:23]  So a family friend who was around at the time claimed, quote, the family had been absolutely shamed when Bernard Marcus went to prison.
[00:11:30]  Roy kept a scrapbook as a little boy of all the pictures of his uncle Bernie Marcus.
[00:11:34]  He would show them to his babysitters.
[00:11:35]  Once his mother saw him doing this and she yelled and took the scrapbook away because he loved his uncle.
[00:11:41]  He was proud of his uncle.
[00:11:42]  He had like a scrapbook of his uncle, who was like a big figure in his life.
[00:11:45]  And his mom wanted to like pretend he didn't exist after that.
[00:11:50]  there was a child psychologist here to like break down so like a child purposely uncovering what the family has tried to hide in shame to be like no this guy is good and they're just like no hide that and what does that do to your psych psyche that says if you make a mistake also we will just remove you from our family the scrapbook thing is like i like my i don't have a scrapbook and one of my relatives it's just so weird Yeah,
[00:12:17]  it's, it's, I mean, I, you know, it's, it's sweet.
[00:12:20]  He clearly cared about his uncle.
[00:12:22]  Um, and his mom is telling him, no, no, no, he made a mistake.
[00:12:25]  So we don't celebrate his existence anymore.
[00:12:28]  Which, yeah, you're right, Joel.
[00:12:30]  That has to, that transmits a message to a growing little boy.
[00:12:33]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:12:34]  And it's not a good one.
[00:12:36]  Don't fuck up, okay?
[00:12:37]  You can be disappeared.
[00:12:38]  It's his mother.
[00:12:39]  Yeah, you can be disappeared.
[00:12:40]  Queen Elizabeth.
[00:12:41]  That's my question.
[00:12:43]  I mean, emotionally, yes.
[00:12:45]  So fair enough.
[00:12:47]  Despite the family shame, Roy's father remained a judge and a connected person in Democratic Party politics.
[00:12:53]  When Roy was 10, his father introduced him to his first president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
[00:12:58]  So again, age 10 is when this kid starts hobnobbing with the president, not just the president of president of the United States, but like the president of the United States, because no president's ever had more power than fucking FDR.
[00:13:09]  Fair enough.
[00:13:10]  So yeah, that's who Roy's hanging out with at age 10.
[00:13:14]  He started giving speeches at political rallies the year before when he was nine, and he was so comfortable talking shop that as soon as he met FDR, he told the president he agreed with his plan to pack the Supreme Court.
[00:13:26]  So that's like this 10-year-old boy meets FDR, and the first thing he's like is like, yeah, you got to increase the number of people in the Supreme Court so that you can rule unchallenged.
[00:13:39]  That's where his head is.
[00:13:40]  So the Cohn family, as you might have guessed, was not what we would call healthy.
[00:13:44]  In fact, Roy's parents' marriage is generally described as loveless.
[00:13:48]  I found a...
[00:13:49]  Yeah, yeah, well, what did you, did you expect?
[00:13:52]  There was a lot of love in that relationship.
[00:13:54]  I'm always shocked when I hear about loveless marriages.
[00:13:57]  I'm like, how did you survive?
[00:13:58]  But also, I understand the era, you know, the marriages of convenience and, or this is a financial person in my bracket who won't steal from me.
[00:14:08]  So a political marriage.
[00:14:11]  Yeah.
[00:14:11]  Yeah.
[00:14:13]  So, yeah, I found a fun article in The Rap by David Marcus, who is the son of Roy's first cousin.
[00:14:20]  And by the way, his dad, David's dad, refused to talk to Roy Cohn for decades.
[00:14:25]  Now, David grew up to be a journalist.
[00:14:26]  And obviously, like, as a journalist with Roy Cohn as an uncle, you're going to interview him.
[00:14:32]  And he did interview Roy several times.
[00:14:34]  In 2019, he wrote an article titled Five Things You May Not Know About My Vile, Malicious Cousin Roy Cohn.
[00:14:42]  Wow.
[00:14:42]  Quite illistical.
[00:14:44]  Can we talk about the 360 of like Roy trying to show photos of his like imprisoned uncle to then his nephew sharing with the world via a paper the horribleness of his uncle?
[00:14:56]  There's something very balanced about uncle-nephew relationship.
[00:15:00]  It's a fun family.
[00:15:03]  So yeah, he wrote, he wrote, he writes this about Roy Cohn's mother.
[00:15:07]  Quote, my relatives couldn't stand Roy's overbearing mother, Dora Marcus Cohn.
[00:15:12]  She was the original helicopter parent long before anybody knew that term, fussing over her only son's grades, appearance, and relationships.
[00:15:19]  When Roy went to sleep away camp, Dora rented a room down the road.
[00:15:23]  He lived with his mother until she died when he was 40.
[00:15:26]  So some Norman Bates vibes coming off this boy.
[00:15:31]  Oh, no.
[00:15:34]  Oh, man.
[00:15:35]  Listen, kids, we're not talking about you.
[00:15:37]  We understand financial straits and everything, but if you could afford to not live with your mother.
[00:15:42]  If you are a wealthy lawyer.
[00:15:45]  Especially in an era where people used to clown on people so hard for still living with their parents.
[00:15:50]  You know, that's uh, that's what we call an unhealthy relationship.
[00:15:54]  Yeah, he's not like living with his mom, perhaps, because like he's got to take care of her or because like he's living with his mom because he can't imagine what to do without her for until he's 40.
[00:16:06]  Yikes.
[00:16:07]  Yeah, you get the feeling it wasn't there was some, yeah, there was, there was absolutely some weird shit going on there.
[00:16:12]  So by the 1940s, the family fortunes had recovered and the Cohns were again at the center of a deeply influential network of New York socialites and politicos.
[00:16:21]  As soon as Roy was a teenager, his parents pushed him to attend their parties.
[00:16:25]  According to one of those guests, Roy took naturally to politics, socializing and schmoozing like an old veteran.
[00:16:30]  One attendee later recalled, it was extraordinary to see 10 grown-up couples and then sit next to a 15-year-old.
[00:16:37]  Roy was always on the scene.
[00:16:39]  He fit right in.
[00:16:40]  One of his friends later told an interviewer, when he was 16, he was 40.
[00:16:46]  Yeah, those kids are not okay.
[00:16:47]  This is a kind of excuse we hear about like when we see very, very young girls with older men.
[00:16:53]  They're like, oh, well, they seem so mature.
[00:16:54]  That person needs help.
[00:16:56]  Get them.
[00:16:56]  Get out of here.
[00:16:57]  But she's 17.
[00:16:59]  It's not okay.
[00:17:00]  Your genius does not make you mature, nor does it give you the years of experience that you need to navigate situations with actual adults.
[00:17:08]  Well, and it's a bit different in Roy's case because like he's not in a relationship with these people, but they're the ones he's socializing with.
[00:17:15]  And they lead him to, I don't think Roy ever had a childhood.

=== Trading Gossip For Political Favors (04:29) ===

[00:17:19]  And I'm not sure he ever.
[00:17:21]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:17:22]  Yeah.
[00:17:22]  That's the sad, like, it was stolen from him because he never had the opportunity to be treated like a child.
[00:17:27]  Yeah.
[00:17:27]  You know, and then you don't know the joys of childhood, which makes you a very weird, bitter old adult.
[00:17:32]  Yeah, which he absolutely is a weird, bitter old adult.
[00:17:36]  So as a rich kid, Roy's peers were from similarly august backgrounds.
[00:17:40]  His buddy Generoso Pope Jr. grew up to be the owner of the National Enquirer.
[00:17:45]  You wonder why that magazine is so close to Donald Trump.
[00:17:48]  His friend Cy Newhouse Jr. became the publisher of the National Inquirer.
[00:17:53]  That was really quick to go over.
[00:17:55]  Yeah.
[00:17:56]  Just like let that sink in.
[00:17:59]  Yeah, Roy's best buddy grew up to be own the National Enquirer.
[00:18:02]  His other best friend became the publisher.
[00:18:04]  And then Roy became Donald Trump's good friend.
[00:18:06]  And Donald Trump has had a lifelong positive relationship with the National Enquirer.
[00:18:10]  Yes, I just want to say it one more time.
[00:18:12]  Yeah.
[00:18:14]  Just so much in one little sentence.
[00:18:17]  Roy Cohn's friend Richard Berlin became the chairman of Condi Nast and his friend Bill Fughesi grew up to be the owner of a massive travel and limousine company.
[00:18:25]  So these are Roy Cohn's childhood buddies.
[00:18:27]  Like the only kids he spends his time around grow up to be those people.
[00:18:31]  And they're inheriting a lot of what they get, right?
[00:18:34]  Like they're not founding that shit, you know?
[00:18:37]  And if they are, they're inheriting a bunch of money to found that shit.
[00:18:40]  So from an early age, Cohn showed a strong inclination towards what would become his life's work.
[00:18:45]  He ran what his biographer calls the Roy Cohn Barter and Swap Exchange while he was in junior high school.
[00:18:51]  This was an influence and information peddling racket.
[00:18:55]  Roy wrote a gossip column for his local newspaper and he would trade stories and manipulate the stories he published in exchange for favors from popular kids.
[00:19:05]  Yeah.
[00:19:05]  What?
[00:19:06]  What?
[00:19:07]  How?
[00:19:07]  Okay.
[00:19:08]  I just, so many things have just happened in my head.
[00:19:12]  First of all, yeah, there's a lot going on there.
[00:19:14]  I had no idea Roy Cohen was actually Dan Humphrey from Gossip Club, which actually makes so much sense.
[00:19:22]  And then the idea of like a 12 or 13 year old, like, again, having the foresight and knowledge to understand how an operation like that could work seems just like the most batshit thing I've ever heard.
[00:19:35]  Like, I'll lie for you.
[00:19:36]  Yeah.
[00:19:37]  Spread that lie.
[00:19:38]  And, you know, you kick me back some favors.
[00:19:40]  Do we know what kind of favors he was getting in exchange?
[00:19:42]  They were like, he got jobs and stuff as a kid over this stuff, and you have to assume he got like invites to parties and whatnot.
[00:19:49]  Like, it was, you know, it was not the kind of favors he would be getting later, but he's experimenting because later his favors would be stuff like getting people in or out of prison.
[00:19:59]  But he's starting to learn how if you have control of a media organ, you can get things from people by either planting stories about them or refusing to plant stories about them.
[00:20:12]  Like that's he's trading gossip for favors.
[00:20:15]  And he's learning how to do that, again, as a teenager.
[00:20:17]  And he's learning to do that within the context of a high school, but he's also spending all of his time talking to adult politicians.
[00:20:24]  And he's putting this stuff together.
[00:20:26]  Like, he knows what he's going to be.
[00:20:28]  Roy Cohn knew what he wanted to be from a very young age.
[00:20:31]  And it was always a shady political fixer.
[00:20:34]  He is, you look at what Rudy Giuliani is doing these days, and he's bad at it.
[00:20:37]  Rudy Giuliani is terrible.
[00:20:39]  Terrible.
[00:20:39]  Terrible.
[00:20:40]  He can't even file a lawsuit correctly, sir.
[00:20:42]  Please look out the door.
[00:20:44]  Roy Cohn is the good version of that.
[00:20:46]  And not good in a moral sense, but good in Roy was good at this.
[00:20:50]  He knew how to do it.
[00:20:51]  He knew how to do it.
[00:20:52]  And you can see the reason Donald Trump keeps having Giuliani do all this shit is because he desperately wants to have a Roy Cohn, but he doesn't.
[00:21:00]  Because there was only one.
[00:21:02]  But I really feel like there's got to be somebody more capable than Giuliani.
[00:21:06]  You know, not who's also capable of the same kind of loyalty.
[00:21:10]  That's the thing.
[00:21:11]  Giuliani's loyal to the president, at least so far, but incompetent.
[00:21:16]  Roy was loyal and competent.
[00:21:18]  And that's what Trump wants.
[00:21:20]  But sadly, we'll talk about why Roy Cohn ain't around no more.
[00:21:25]  So Roy went to the kind of elementary and high schools that rich kids get to attend, the ones that cost as much as a small house for a year of tuition.
[00:21:32]  He went to Columbia Law School and he graduated at age 20 with both a bachelor's degree and a law degree.
[00:21:37]  So like very, very smart kid.
[00:21:41]  Yeah, so age 20, he's out of college.
[00:21:44]  He's an admitted to the bar lawyer and he is ready to make his mark on the world.

=== Loyalty And Competence In Politics (13:42) ===

[00:21:49]  Using his father's connections, he gets a job at the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District.
[00:21:54]  And he got the gig the same day that he was formally admitted to the bar.
[00:21:57]  In case you're wondering what kind of impact his judge dad had on all that, the day he becomes a lawyer, he's working for the U.S. Attorney's Office.
[00:22:05]  That's very convenient.
[00:22:06]  Yeah, it helps.
[00:22:07]  Now, for reasons that are not exactly clear to me, Roy became fascinated with what was seen as the looming threat of Soviet influence on the United States.
[00:22:16]  His interest drew him in 1951 to the job of prosecuting Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage.
[00:22:22]  Now, do you know much about the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case?
[00:22:26]  I feel pretty educated on it.
[00:22:28]  Yes.
[00:22:29]  But I definitely need to hear more.
[00:22:31]  Yeah, the Rosenbergs were committed communists, and Julius was an electrical engineer with connections to all manner of science-y folks.
[00:22:39]  He spent years in the Army Signal Corps, and he fed the USSR information about a bunch of different U.S. weapons technologies, at one point even smuggling his handler a complete proximity fuse.
[00:22:50]  So Julius is absolutely a spy for the Soviet Union and giving them a lot of stuff.
[00:22:56]  He was eventually fired from the army when it was revealed that he had been a member of the Communist Party in the 30s, but he remained good at meeting science-y folks who were involved in the defense department.
[00:23:05]  And one of the folks that he met after getting fired from the army was working on the Manhattan Project.
[00:23:10]  Now, there's a lot of debate over exactly how helpful the nuclear secrets that he stole were.
[00:23:16]  And I think the consensus is that the USSR would have developed a bomb in more or less the same timeframe without Julius Rosenberg.
[00:23:23]  But he did give them information on the A-bomb.
[00:23:26]  And the Pentagon was, you know, the Soviet Union in the late 40s comes out with an A-bomb of their own.
[00:23:31]  And the Pentagon is really surprised because they had thought it would take the Soviets a lot longer to make an A-bomb.
[00:23:37]  And they assume that the only way they could have possibly built it is if a spy had given them all of the information.
[00:23:42]  And again, the Soviets had really good scientists, in part because they stole scientists from the Nazis too, in part because they just had good scientists.
[00:23:49]  Like they didn't need, it's probable that they would not have needed what Julius provided them with to have built the A-bomb, but he had provided them with some secrets.
[00:24:00]  And when he was eventually found out, the defense establishment uses him as a scapegoat for the entire fact that a nuclear arms race started, right?
[00:24:07]  They need someone to blame for the fact that the Soviets have a bomb, and they blame Julius Rosenberg.
[00:24:12]  They also blame his wife, Ethel Rosenberg.
[00:24:14]  Now, Ethel had been an actress, and there remains debate as to the exact extent of her involvement.
[00:24:20]  She was charged with being a full party to her husband's espionage.
[00:24:24]  So she is charged with being just as much of a spy as her husband.
[00:24:29]  Now, a lot of information has come out since the fall of the Soviet Union, and it suggests that while she was aware of and approved of her husband's activity, she was probably not playing an active role in spreading atomic secrets.
[00:24:41]  And there was evidence at the time that she was not playing an active role in spreading atomic secrets.
[00:24:46]  They didn't have any evidence that she was.
[00:24:49]  But Roy Cohn wanted both Rosenbergs convicted and executed.
[00:24:52]  He didn't just want Julius executed.
[00:24:54]  He wanted Ethel executed as well.
[00:24:57]  And yeah, I'm going to quote from a write-up in the magazine Forward.
[00:25:02]  Quote, The case that made him, the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, was a prime example of Cohn's law-skirting tactics and the demons that propelled his career.
[00:25:11]  Cohn saw the case as an opportunity to make his name as a ruthless prosecutor and recoup the status his family had lost.
[00:25:18]  He had a score to settle, said one person.
[00:25:20]  When Cohn was vicious in pushing for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg's execution, illegally communicating with Judge Irving Kaufman, who ironically called Cohn from a phone booth outside the Park Avenue synagogue, he may have been trying to lift the stigma of family shame.
[00:25:33]  He was responding, his relatives suggest, not just to anti-communist animus, but to its inevitable link to Jews like him.
[00:25:40]  He was the definition of a self-hating Jew, Cohn's cousin David Marcus says in the film.
[00:25:44]  He wanted to show the world that he wasn't Jewish.
[00:25:48]  So Cohn's family are Jewish people scapegoated for the Great Depression.
[00:25:53]  And then when Jewish people, when he has a chance to scapegoat another Jewish couple as responsible for the Russians getting the bomb, he does that in part to kind of wipe the shame away from his family and prove we're loyal Americans.
[00:26:07]  Like this Jewish family are traitors, but like the people prosecuting him and the judge, we're loyal Jews.
[00:26:15]  Like that's kind of the thing that's going on in Cohn's head.
[00:26:18]  Some real house slave shit.
[00:26:20]  Yeah.
[00:26:21]  Just be honest about it.
[00:26:23]  Like this idea that you could cleanse your family by destroying another is, I mean, it explains a lot about him and his ideology.
[00:26:32]  Yeah.
[00:26:32]  As a whole.
[00:26:33]  It's pretty dark.
[00:26:35]  Now, Roy's defining moment in the trial came during his cross-examination of David Greengrass, Ethel Rosenberg's brother.
[00:26:41]  The prosecution had initially relied upon getting Ethel to testify against her husband in exchange for clemency, but she refused to talk.
[00:26:48]  This pissed off Roy, but it also left the state in a bind because there was no hard evidence that Ethel Rosenberg had done anything.
[00:26:55]  So Cohn went to David, who had helped with the espionage and promised him that if he lied about his sister's role in the conspiracy, David and his wife would get lesser sentences.
[00:27:05]  Greengrass later admitted to lying on the stand at Cohn's direction, but it didn't matter.
[00:27:11]  Ethel was convicted.
[00:27:12]  So Cohn goes to this guy, says, I'll make sure you and your wife don't get exit.
[00:27:16]  You get lesser sentences if you say that Ethel was a part of the espionage.
[00:27:20]  And David gets up in court and he lies about Ethel Rosenberg's complicity in the espionage.
[00:27:26]  And so she gets convicted along with Julius, who, you know, for whatever you want to say about how fair or unfair the penalty was, Julius was guilty of espionage.
[00:27:36]  Did the crime, but he did the crime.
[00:27:38]  It's wild to me that like it seems, especially in this era, like not a lot, not a lot of women prisons, not a lot of females behind bars, certainly not a lot being executed.
[00:27:49]  It's kind of intense that, like how much his own self-hate was yeah, as far as like if, if that is in truth what stemmed a lot of these decision making, like the idea of like no, we got to fry them all is like just intense and horrifying, yeah now um, here's the thing that's fun about America in this period of time is no American at this point in time when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are being tried,
[00:28:16]  no American had ever been executed for treason or espionage outside of war, outside of a war.
[00:28:23]  So that hasn't happened.
[00:28:24]  So people are talking about, like most people who are like well yeah, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are probably guilty, they need to be punished.
[00:28:30]  Don't want them.
[00:28:31]  A lot of people don't want them to be executed because we don't do that as a country at this point.
[00:28:36]  Right, that's the idea.
[00:28:37]  That's not what we are.
[00:28:38]  We don't kill people outside of a war for engaging in this.
[00:28:42]  And we're coming hot off the Geneva Convention right yeah yeah, that's all pretty recent, with all these laws and stuff about how to conduct yourself wow okay, but Roy Cohn wants them dead and, as it turned out now, normally the prosecutor is not supposed to have any say in in the punishment.
[00:28:58]  That's, you know, the judges.
[00:28:59]  In this sort of a case, that's the judge's uh purview, but Coh would wind up having a strong say in her punishment.
[00:29:06]  He later claimed, number one, that he had pulled strings to make sure that Kaufman was the judge who got the case.
[00:29:12]  There's no evidence that this was true, except for the fact that Kaufman called Roy Coh Repeatedly when he had questions about the case, which kind of suggests that Kaufman was indebted to Roy Cohen and again, he's in his 20s at this point.
[00:29:26]  So the judge was calling Roy and being like, I have some questions about this case.
[00:29:30]  Yeah most, most particularly, the judge is calling Roy Cohen and saying hey, should I execute?
[00:29:38]  Should I have these people executed?
[00:29:40]  Is that fair, like that?
[00:29:42]  That's the kind of shit that, like he's he's, he's coming up to them with um oh yeah so, which is pretty dark um, yeah.
[00:29:52]  And of course, Roy Cohen is like, yeah, absolutely you should be, you should kill these people, win my case.
[00:29:59]  Yeah, so yeah again.
[00:30:02]  Like yeah, uh.
[00:30:05]  So the judge calls Roy on the phone and is like I don't know, I feel like weird about executing these people.
[00:30:11]  We've never done that before in this kind of context.
[00:30:14]  What do you think I should do?
[00:30:15]  And like, should I, should I execute uh, Ethel as well?
[00:30:19]  And Roy is like yes, you should execute them both.
[00:30:21]  And he tells the judge, the way I see it, she being Ethel is worse than Julius, so he's he's whole hog.
[00:30:27]  Like yes, you need to have these people hung um or exec, like electrocuted.
[00:30:32]  They were electrocuted, but yeah, I wonder if the silence now listen, i'm not a psychologist listeners, but i'm gonna play one for a second here.
[00:30:39]  I wonder if like, part of the reason he was like she's worse is because she was willing to not say anything, and this idea of like possibly this couple representing his parents and the idea of their like hiding and then being part of the downfall of America during the Great Depression, I wonder if there are are links in his brain to those things.
[00:31:04]  Yeah, you think you get the feeling.
[00:31:06]  Yeah probably, probably.
[00:31:09]  Yeah, what a up guy Robert.
[00:31:11]  Yeah, he's.
[00:31:11]  Do you know what time it is?
[00:31:13]  Oh, is it time for products and services.
[00:31:17]  Perhaps.
[00:31:18]  You know who won't order the executions of a probably innocent woman and her husband during peacetime for espionage.
[00:31:26]  I really hope it's our sponsors and the products and services.
[00:31:30]  Yeah, that's the only standard we have for our products is the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case.
[00:31:37]  We ask all of them about it and all of them say, that happened decades before you were born.
[00:31:42]  Why are you asking us about this?
[00:31:43]  None of these companies existed at that point in time.
[00:31:45]  And we demand a response.
[00:31:47]  And that's why we have so very few advertisers.
[00:31:50]  They think it's weird.
[00:31:51]  A lot of people think it's weird.
[00:31:53]  Here's ads.
[00:32:00]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:32:04]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:32:08]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:32:10]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:32:14]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:32:18]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
[00:32:21]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:32:24]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:32:28]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:32:30]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:32:32]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:32:34]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:32:37]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:32:39]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:32:41]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:32:46]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:32:47]  Trust me, babe.
[00:32:48]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:32:58]  What's up, everyone?
[00:32:59]  I'm Ago Mona.
[00:33:00]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:33:08]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:33:11]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:33:14]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:33:19]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:33:22]  I'm working my way up through it.
[00:33:23]  I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
[00:33:26]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:33:31]  Yeah.
[00:33:31]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:33:34]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:33:36]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:33:44]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:33:46]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:33:54]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:33:56]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:33:57]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:33:58]  Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:34:07]  In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
[00:34:13]  The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
[00:34:18]  This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
[00:34:22]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Ellis, correct?
[00:34:25]  I doctored the test once.
[00:34:27]  It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
[00:34:30]  I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
[00:34:34]  Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
[00:34:37]  They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:34:39]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:34:41]  Greg Oespi and Michael Marancini.
[00:34:43]  My mind was blown.
[00:34:45]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:34:47]  This is Love Trap.
[00:34:49]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:34:51]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:34:55]  Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
[00:35:02]  This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
[00:35:06]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:35:16]  10-10 shots fired, city hall building.
[00:35:19]  A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
[00:35:23]  From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach.
[00:35:28]  Murder at City Hall.
[00:35:29]  How could this have happened in City Hall?

=== International Anti-American Movements (04:16) ===

[00:35:31]  Somebody tell me that.
[00:35:32]  Jeffrey Hood did.
[00:35:34]  July 2003.
[00:35:35]  Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
[00:35:40]  Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
[00:35:43]  And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
[00:35:52]  Everybody in the chamber deducts a shocking public murder.
[00:35:56]  I scream, get down, get down.
[00:35:58]  Those are shots.
[00:35:59]  Those are shots.
[00:36:00]  Get down.
[00:36:00]  A charismatic politician.
[00:36:01]  You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
[00:36:04]  I still have a weapon.
[00:36:06]  And I could shoot you.
[00:36:09]  And an outsider with a secret.
[00:36:11]  He alleged you.
[00:36:12]  A victim of flat down.
[00:36:14]  That may or may not have been political.
[00:36:16]  That may have been about sex.
[00:36:18]  Listen to Rorschach.
[00:36:19]  Murder at City Hall on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:36:31]  We're back.
[00:36:33]  So, Judge Kaufman, having consulted with Roy Cohn, sentences both Rosenbergs to die, telling them in court, I consider your crime worse than murder.
[00:36:42]  I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb has already caused, in my opinion, the communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000.
[00:36:53]  And who knows, but millions more of innocent people may pay the price for your treason.
[00:36:58]  Indeed, by your betrayal, you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country.
[00:37:02]  No one can say that we do not live in a constant state of tension.
[00:37:05]  We have evidence of your treachery all around us every day for the civilian defense activities throughout the nation are aimed at preparing us for an atom bomb attack.
[00:37:13]  So he's not wrong that Russia getting the bomb made everybody scared, but also not really right in saying that the fact that Russia, number one, that the Rosenbergs were responsible for Russia getting the bomb earlier, but also like, you know, the fact that the United States had been so willing to use the bomb on Russia before they got a bomb of their own might be responsible for some of the paranoia and fear.
[00:37:39]  Like the fact that, you know, Truman dropped the bomb on Japan largely to scare Russia and the fact that MacArthur attempted to use the bomb on Korea and had to be forced.
[00:37:48]  You know, there's a lot going on there.
[00:37:51]  Anyway, internationally, the cause of the Rosenbergs became one of the first major anti-American movements of the post-war era.
[00:37:58]  And remember, fucking post-World War II, basically everybody likes the United States.
[00:38:02]  Like very popular country worldwide because, you know, the Nazis and we're not the Nazis and a lot of refugees had come here.
[00:38:09]  And like not to say that the horrible things the U.S. had done, you know, genocides of the Native Americans and slavery and stuff hadn't happened, but like internationally, pretty popular country in 1946.
[00:38:20]  Those were our golden days.
[00:38:21]  Yeah.
[00:38:22]  Yeah.
[00:38:22]  Industry booming.
[00:38:23]  Yeah.
[00:38:24]  People happy.
[00:38:25]  Yeah, people are pretty happy with us.
[00:38:27]  The fact that we condemned the Rosenbergs to execution pisses off a lot of people.
[00:38:32]  And again, starts like one of the first international anti-American movements.
[00:38:36]  A lot of people thought they were innocent, and those who didn't feel they were innocent at least felt that the punishment didn't fit the crime.
[00:38:42]  Marxist John Paul Sartre described the whole conviction as a legal lynching, which smears with blood a whole nation.
[00:38:49]  By killing the Rosenbergs, you have quite simply tried to halt the progress of science by human sacrifice, magic, witch hunts, autos defait, sacrifices.
[00:38:58]  We are here getting to the point.
[00:38:59]  Your country is sick with fear.
[00:39:01]  You are afraid of the shadow of your own bomb.
[00:39:06]  Which is very much what's happening.
[00:39:08]  We invent a doomsday device and assume we'll be the only ones to ever have it.
[00:39:12]  And then when we have to fear it, we're like, oh, God, this is what we were doing to the rest of the world, but we don't.
[00:39:17]  Everybody else is evil.
[00:39:18]  We've never done anything like it.
[00:39:21]  Yeah.
[00:39:22]  And it continues today.
[00:39:24]  So much fun.
[00:39:24]  Yeah, our country's really stupid.
[00:39:26]  It's really.
[00:39:27]  Yeah.
[00:39:27]  Yeah.
[00:39:28]  So the United States and President Eisenhower did not listen to international outrage.
[00:39:32]  The Rosen, and there's huge protests in the United States, too, by the way.
[00:39:35]  Thousands and thousands of people taking to the streets.
[00:39:38]  Nobody in the government listened.
[00:39:40]  The Rosenbergs were executed on June 19th, 1953.
[00:39:44]  Julius's execution went smoothly enough, but the first several shocks failed to kill Ethel.

=== Welcome To The Lavender Scare (14:38) ===

[00:39:48]  The executioner was forced to repeat the process so many times he nearly lit her on fire.
[00:39:53]  Smoke was pouring out from her head.
[00:39:55]  It was and remains a profoundly gross story.
[00:39:58]  And a lot of people at the time knew it was disgusting.
[00:40:01]  Many of Roy Cohn's family were horrified about his actions.
[00:40:04]  He later told a reporter with pride, I very early in my life broke with tradition and left my Jewish upper class oriented life in New York and became a contradiction of everything I was supposed to stand for.
[00:40:15]  Yikes.
[00:40:16]  Yeah.
[00:40:17]  So he knows what he's doing.
[00:40:19]  Yeah, it's really great to shit on your entire family and everything that he stood for.
[00:40:23]  Cool.
[00:40:23]  Yeah.
[00:40:24]  So there were, of course, people who deeply appreciated Cohn's tactics and motivations.
[00:40:28]  One of them was J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI.
[00:40:32]  The two struck up a fast friendship and would actually exchange Christmas gifts for more than 20 years.
[00:40:37]  If you're looking at the kind of guy who Roy genuinely appreciates and vice versa.
[00:40:42]  One reporter described the two as ideological soulmates.
[00:40:46]  Cohn became the FBI.
[00:40:47]  Yeah.
[00:40:49]  You don't want to be, you don't want to be J. Edgar Hoover's soulmate.
[00:40:53]  No, you do not.
[00:40:56]  Real bad person.
[00:40:57]  So Cohn became the FBI's unofficial liaison to the press.
[00:41:01]  And I'm going to quote here from the LA Times.
[00:41:03]  Anything Hoover wanted to plant about someone, friend or foe, he directed to Cohn.
[00:41:07]  So reliable was this gossip network that Walter Winchell's secretary, and Walter Winchell is a very influential gossip columnist at the time, dutifully awaited Cohn's reputation-destroying phone calls.
[00:41:17]  When they wanted to stick it to somebody, former rep Neil Gallagher told Von Hoffman, who's Roy's biographer, that was Roy's job.
[00:41:26]  Oh, man, to be wealthy and be able to destroy somebody with a phone call is power I don't think I will ever possess.
[00:41:33]  That is Roy Cohn.
[00:41:35]  Absolutely.
[00:41:36]  That is just, it's too much power.
[00:41:39]  It's way too much power to just be like, I don't like you.
[00:41:42]  LA Times, print me something up bad about this guy.
[00:41:45]  Who cares about facts?
[00:41:47]  Yeah.
[00:41:47]  And we are.
[00:41:48]  What's fun about this episode is, you know that Billy Joel, We Didn't Start the Fire song?
[00:41:52]  There's like five different people who are named in that song that are in this episode, including Roy Cohn.
[00:41:57]  He's right before one poron.
[00:41:59]  Yeah.
[00:42:00]  Also Walter Winchell and Joe McCarthy, who we're about to talk about, is in the song.
[00:42:04]  So yeah, this is really, we're really burning through that song here.
[00:42:08]  Love it.
[00:42:10]  So it was Hoover who introduced young Roy Cohn to a man who would come to define the early part of his career, Senator Joseph McCarthy.
[00:42:19]  Another gem of a person.
[00:42:20]  Another real hero.
[00:42:23]  In short order, Roy became the senator's right-hand man as the Red Scare kicked up into high gear.
[00:42:28]  And this is where we need to peel away from Roy Cohn for just a moment to talk about the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC.
[00:42:35]  It was established in 1938 by a Congress fuck named Martin Dees.
[00:42:40]  And at first, it wasn't entirely a bad thing.
[00:42:43]  There were a ton of Nazi organizers and spies in the United States doing their best to cockslap American democracy.
[00:42:49]  And the D's committee, which turned into HUAC, helped to identify and punish some of these guys.
[00:42:53]  So not entirely a bad thing.
[00:42:55]  If there's Nazis in your country, probably out of deal with that.
[00:42:59]  Probably at a.
[00:43:01]  Yeah, you should probably have a committee who's responsible for being like, we got to get these Nazis out of here, huh?
[00:43:06]  Unfortunately.
[00:43:06]  You're going to be happy when you read a paragraph that I can tell you felt good about when you wrote it.
[00:43:12]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:43:13]  Now, as is always the case with the U.S. government, the committee's attention soon turned away from the dangerous right-wing activists to left-wing activists.
[00:43:21]  Huak was at the forefront of an unhinged and fundamentally irrational investigation into Hollywood communists.
[00:43:28]  So they go from like actual Nazis trying to destroy the country, trying to destroy democracy, to, and there's some commies in Hollywood who think people ought to have health care and shit.
[00:43:39]  Yeah, it's very funny.
[00:43:41]  And the list of people in Hollywood that HUAC investigates is just fundamentally absurd.
[00:43:46]  Humphrey Bogart made the list, as did Clark Gable and 10-year-old Shirley Temple.
[00:43:51]  That bench.
[00:43:52]  10-year-old Shirley Temple.
[00:43:54]  She's dancing with the blacks, okay?
[00:43:56]  Fundamentally.
[00:43:58]  But she's a commie batch, didn't you know?
[00:44:01]  Yeah, because she's dancing with black people.
[00:44:03]  Yeah, can't have that shit.
[00:44:05]  She's hiding all the secrets in each one of her individual curls.
[00:44:10]  I'm trying to imagine like Jan Hoover listening to Shirley Temple's phone calls at 10.
[00:44:14]  Is she talking to her grandmother?
[00:44:17]  She's like, Animal Crackers.
[00:44:19]  And my supplement is like, what's that code for?
[00:44:20]  What is that code for?
[00:44:23]  She's got to break him out of the zoos.
[00:44:27]  Yeah, it's very funny because when I was a kid, like, Shirley Temple was like the symbol of American innocence in the 1950s.
[00:44:34]  And the reality is that at age 10, she was interrogated by the FBI as to the nature of her connections to the Communist Party.
[00:44:40]  Jesus Lord.
[00:44:42]  Oh, my.
[00:44:43]  It's so good.
[00:44:45]  You'd have to be like, this is unhinged.
[00:44:47]  If you're part of, if you're like calling one of like three sane people in the world and you're like, what is going on?
[00:44:55]  Yeah, there was, there was briefly a tiny amount of rationality crept into things in the, like, during World War II.
[00:45:02]  And I'm going to quote from a write-up in the Minnesota playlist about that.
[00:45:05]  World War II put a stop to these activities.
[00:45:07]  But in 1947, the committee renewed their investigations.
[00:45:10]  Joseph McCarthy, a junior senator from Wisconsin, wanted to make a name for himself.
[00:45:14]  And along with attorney Roy Cohn and senator, later president Richard Nixon, the committee assured blacklisted individuals wouldn't work for years to come.
[00:45:23]  Among those first listed, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Catherine Hepburn, Gail Sondergaard, Melvin Douglas, and Frederick Marsh.
[00:45:29]  Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo was branded a communist, but continued writing under different aliases and won Oscars.
[00:45:35]  In 1956, when Robert Rich's name was called for the Brave One, no one accepted the award, causing suspicions to rise.
[00:45:41]  Trumbo, under the name Sam Jackson, wrote the screenplay for Spartacus, which parallels the Huak hearings.
[00:45:47]  Arthur Miller's play, The Crucibles, is an allegory of these witch hunts.
[00:45:52]  So if you ever had to read The Crucible, you know, or the play, at least by Miller, you can blame Roy Cohn and Joe McCarthy.
[00:46:01]  Now, one particularly cowardly actor, Adolph Minjou, cooperated with the committee, Huak, and named names.
[00:46:09]  The named people, yeah, yeah.
[00:46:11]  And the named people were interrogated publicly.
[00:46:13]  Their careers were shattered.
[00:46:14]  Ten brave actors and screenwriters protested this and refused to name names.
[00:46:18]  They included Iva Bessie, Herman Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dimitric, Ring Larder Jr., John Howard Larson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo.
[00:46:29]  Huak punished these brave people by subpoenaing the shit out of all of them and calling them before Congress.
[00:46:34]  They were asked the now famous question: are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?
[00:46:39]  All but one refused to answer the question.
[00:46:42]  The House of Representatives held them in contempt.
[00:46:44]  The Screen Actors Guild was forced to make its members swear oaths of loyalty to the United States.
[00:46:49]  And members of workers have to because unions are commie things.
[00:46:58]  You gotta, you gotta show that you're loyal to the United States if you're gonna be a union.
[00:47:02]  Yeah, yeah, it was great.
[00:47:04]  Members of the Hollywood 10 weren't allowed to resume their careers until they had sworn the oath and been cleared of any involvement in the Communist Party.
[00:47:12]  Many of the Hollywood 10s served one-year prison sentences.
[00:47:16]  It's not cool.
[00:47:17]  It's a bad time that all this happens.
[00:47:19]  And this is also, by the way, why Charlie Chaplin stops becoming a major figure in Hollywood because he kind of leaves the country and can't be in movies for a while because he's seen as being a dirty commie.
[00:47:32]  He robbed us of a lot of really important talent and again, very unfairly targeted a lot of the Jewish population.
[00:47:39]  That's what Hollywood is where the Jews hang out.
[00:47:42]  Yeah.
[00:47:43]  Yeah.
[00:47:43]  Now, Joe McCarthy was not a member of WHO AC, although Richard Nixon was and he was a part of all of this.
[00:47:48]  But the committee's tactics served as the blueprint for what would come to be known to history as McCarthyism.
[00:47:54]  By 1954, Senator McCarthy had launched his own crusade to ferret communist agents and homosexuals out of the U.S. government.
[00:48:01]  Roy Cohn was his chief counsel.
[00:48:04]  Now, does it seem weird to you that Conan McCarthy would use the power of the Senate to hunt down both gays and communists?
[00:48:09]  Welcome to the Lavender Scare.
[00:48:11]  Have you heard of the Lavender Scare?
[00:48:13]  Oh, I know all about the Lavender Scare.
[00:48:15]  Yeah, yeah, this is some good shit.
[00:48:17]  And by good shit, I mean terrible shit.
[00:48:21]  It's bad.
[00:48:22]  It started in 1950 when Senator McCarthy had held up a list during a speech in West Virginia and claimed that the names of 205 card-carrying communists who worked in the State Department were on it.
[00:48:32]  A few weeks later, the deputy Under Secretary of State had testified to the Senate Appropriations Committee that his department did not hire communists, but that they had fired a number of people for being security risks, including 91 homosexuals.
[00:48:44]  This sparked mass panic within the government.
[00:48:47]  And a month later, congressional Republicans ordered an investigation into the homosexual problem and the infiltration of sexual perverts in government.
[00:48:56]  Now, first of all, fuck you.
[00:48:59]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:49:01]  Yeah, it's not great whenever large political parties start talking about Group X problem, you know?
[00:49:08]  Yeah.
[00:49:08]  Yeah, not great.
[00:49:11]  So it just so happens that Roy Cohn was super gay.
[00:49:15]  Like real, real, very much, very, very much gay.
[00:49:19]  And Joe McCarthy, also probably pretty gay.
[00:49:23]  And yeah.
[00:49:26]  And again, Roy is like Roy is famous later in his life for taking a new lover every single day, like young male prostitutes, like every single day.
[00:49:35]  Like, and at this point in time, he is gay.
[00:49:38]  And so is probably McCarthy.
[00:49:40]  And not just that, but before like all of these trials get going in earnest, Roy Cohn gets together with one of Joe McCarthy's with an aide that he and Joe McCarthy had hired that both he and McCarthy had a gigantic crush on.
[00:49:54]  And Cohn and this guy travel around Europe looking for like in military bases.
[00:49:59]  They have like libraries and shit, looking for communist books in libraries and like also just traveling around Europe together and going to bars and clubs and fucking.
[00:50:08]  Yeah.
[00:50:08]  Like they're, you know, they're partying and making love by night and banning books from like State Department libraries by day for being communists.
[00:50:19]  Like it's a very weird honeymoon that those two have.
[00:50:22]  It's like, it's, I really feel like this is a reaction of like, if we don't get these other people, there, other people will come for us.
[00:50:31]  Like it's very much like, oh, we're, we're not gay.
[00:50:35]  Ha ha, them over there.
[00:50:37]  The fact that you know all of the inside scoop, like if you're gay, especially in this time, even nowadays, you like know where the other gays are.
[00:50:44]  You know where to go, you know what to look for, you know the trade secrets, you know the lingo.
[00:50:48]  It is unit is beyond immoral to like their own people, but then these people who are already scared and afraid for their lives, he just set them on fire.
[00:51:00]  That's well, ugh.
[00:51:01]  We'll talk about this a bit too.
[00:51:02]  One of the things that's also extra evil about all this is that it's not just that Roy Cohn and probably Joe McCarthy are gay.
[00:51:09]  It's that most of their fellow congresspeople who are persecuting the gay people that Cohn and McCarthy bring to them in like in Congress know that Cohn and McCarthy are gay.
[00:51:20]  They make jokes about it.
[00:51:22]  Like, but they're also not punishing them and punishing other people.
[00:51:25]  Like, it's all, it's very bad.
[00:51:28]  Because these are the gays we can trust.
[00:51:30]  Yeah, these are like themselves.
[00:51:32]  This is the Candace Owens problem today, where Candace Owens just clearly hates being black and black people so goddamn much that she'll do anything to make sure people know that she hates it.
[00:51:43]  Yeah.
[00:51:44]  It's ridiculous.
[00:51:45]  It's wild because like family members who give interviews will say that Roy would have done anything to hide his homosexuality from the public eye.
[00:51:51]  And at the same time, a lot of people knew that he was gay while he was prosecuting other gay people.
[00:51:56]  It's a very strange situation.
[00:51:58]  Who was going to cross him, though, if you're the king of gossip and you know all of the things.
[00:52:02]  Also, Rokhine being gay and the king of gossip is just, sir, sir, I can see you.
[00:52:08]  What a ridiculous man.
[00:52:09]  Okay, Perez Hilton, like calm down.
[00:52:12]  And one of the things that...
[00:52:14]  So there's debate historically over how much Joe McCarthy is the driver of the Red Scare and how much it's Roy Cohn manipulating Joey McCarthy because McCarthy is, again, not just a drinker, but like, and not just an alcoholic, but like an alcoholic who cut his life short by like 30 years because of the sheer shocking quantity he drank.
[00:52:35]  So there are people who will argue that McCarthy was very easy for Cohn to manipulate and that the Red Scare was largely orchestrated by Cohn and that he just wanted McCarthy up front to kind of take the hits if it blew back on them, which is what happened.
[00:52:49]  So again, people will make that argument and you can make it.
[00:52:52]  There's also people who will say that, no, no, no, McCarthy, while he was a drunk, was as much a driver of this as Roy Cohn.
[00:52:58]  I don't, I'm not an expert on either man, so I'm not going to weigh in there, but you can find people who will make either case.
[00:53:05]  Yeah.
[00:53:05]  So the panic over gay people and gay people being, you know, communist infiltrators came at a great time for Joe McCarthy because the panic, this, like the lavender scare started when it started to become clear that old tailgunner Joe, which was McCarthy's nickname, had no proof that any of the 205 names on that list that he held up were actually communists.
[00:53:27]  And I'm going to quote from a paper titled The Power of Masculinity by Layla Talley now.
[00:53:32]  Quote, to save face with his colleagues in the American public, he changed his tactics, calling out those he was unable to trace back to communism as being homosexual.
[00:53:40]  This began what is now called the Lavender Scare.
[00:53:43]  According to McCarthy, homosexuals presented a huge security risk because of the ease with which they could be blackmailed.
[00:53:48]  Therefore, they could not be trusted to hold government jobs during a time when the threat of communist infiltration was so high.
[00:53:54]  Although McCarthy was the man responsible for making the initial allegations, he was not the party responsible for rounding up the sexual deviants and questioning them.
[00:54:02]  Clyde Hoey was recruited to lead the investigation.
[00:54:05]  And according to the transcripts from the hearings, Roy Cohn was responsible for the majority of the questioning.
[00:54:10]  Now, obviously, a lot of this questioning happened under raps, but thankfully some of the victims of the lavender scare later discussed what they experienced.
[00:54:17]  And I'm going to quote from a write-up on the lavender scare in the Feminist Review, which describes the story of one Department of Commerce employee who was interrogated, probably by Roy Cohn.

=== Roy Cohns Influence On Gay Identity (07:04) ===

[00:54:27]  This is so you get an idea of what these interrogations were like.
[00:54:31]  Let's hear it.
[00:54:32]  Like all civil service employees working during the Eisenhower administration, Madeline Tress, a 24-year-old business economist at the Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C., was required to pass a security investigation as a condition for employment.
[00:54:44]  At her position for only a few months on that April day in 1958, Madeline was led into a room by two male interrogators who began the interview by asking her a few mundane questions regarding her name, where she lived, and her date of birth.
[00:54:56]  Miss Tress, one of the interrogators, then retorted, the commission has information that you are an admitted homosexual.
[00:55:02]  What comment do you wish to make regarding this matter?
[00:55:05]  Shocked, Madeline froze and refused to answer the question.
[00:55:08]  The men disclosed that they had reliable information that she had been seen frequenting a gay bar, the Redskins Lounge, and they named a number of her lesbian and gay male friends.
[00:55:16]  One of the men then sneered, How do you like having sex with women?
[00:55:19]  You've never had it good until you've had it from a man.
[00:55:21]  Tormented into silence following the interrogation, she refused to sign a document admitting her alleged crime.
[00:55:27]  And she quit the next day.
[00:55:29]  As any sane person would listen, if you're going, it shouldn't, but it does add more insult to me that you went with the lamest, most common thing lesbians here were like, you never had a good dick.
[00:55:43]  Sir, they don't want your dick.
[00:55:44]  They never wanted it.
[00:55:45]  They're not interested.
[00:55:46]  Please leave them alone.
[00:55:48]  It is, again, nothing that happens in America should be shocking to me.
[00:55:54]  And yet it's still always so upsetting to hear that you can be dragged into a room and berated within an inch of your life simply because maybe somebody saw you walking into a building.
[00:56:07]  Yeah, and it's, I want to be clear here.
[00:56:10]  Actually, that took place in 1958, and Cohn was out of the government at that point because of stuff that we'll talk about that happens later.
[00:56:16]  But that's the kind of, like, number one, he set that into motion.
[00:56:18]  It continues for decades after he leaves government.
[00:56:21]  And that's what the interrogations were like.
[00:56:23]  Like, you can assume that's more or less like the ones Cohn carried out, even though we don't necessarily have a ton of transcripts from those.
[00:56:30]  So the lavender scare was a calamity for the gay community in the 1950s, which had enough problems on its hands as it was.
[00:56:36]  Like 1950s, already not an easy time to be gay.
[00:56:39]  You don't need this shit.
[00:56:41]  Absolutely not.
[00:56:42]  Yeah.
[00:56:42]  And it was also a calamity for a bunch of random straight people who got falsely accused.
[00:56:46]  Hundreds of people lost their jobs.
[00:56:48]  Unknown but significant numbers committed suicide due to the public shame.
[00:56:52]  The long-term fallout lasted more than two decades, and the federal government went so far as to calculate estimates of the total number of homosexuals in D.C.
[00:57:01]  The number swung from 5,000 to 50,000 depending on who did the calculations.
[00:57:05]  Layla Talley...
[00:57:08]  I mean, yeah, they think gay people breathe fire at this point, so we shouldn't be able to do it.
[00:57:12]  Is it an irrational fear?
[00:57:14]  Have you ever heard one?
[00:57:15]  The idea that, like, none of them can keep a secret.
[00:57:18]  Y'all are wild.
[00:57:19]  Yeah.
[00:57:20]  Layla Talley writes, quote, the Metropolitan Police were also asked to index the name, address occupation, and age of almost 5,000 suspected sex perverts in the area.
[00:57:28]  A Vice Squad was created to investigate a possible link between homosexuality and communism, but the government never agreed that the two were related.
[00:57:35]  The individuals let go this time due to their sexuality were officially fired because they were uncommonly susceptible to blackmail.
[00:57:41]  About 20% of the total United States workforce had been investigated and interviewed in the three-year period between when McCarthy named gays in the State Department and when President Eisenhower issued his order demanding all homosexuals be terminated from the U.S. government with Executive Order 10450.
[00:57:57]  So again, because of this shit that Cohn and McCarthy start, 20% of the entire U.S. workforce gets interrogated for their possible homosexuality.
[00:58:06]  20% of the truly wild of the nation's workforce.
[00:58:11]  Yeah.
[00:58:13]  I mean, if you were out in the 50s, like I am, I have to stand and applaud your ability to stand in the face of that kind of oppression.
[00:58:23]  I've lived through Prop 8 and through Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
[00:58:28]  And I thought all of that was harrowing.
[00:58:30]  I had no, I knew about the lavender scare.
[00:58:33]  I had no idea that it extended that far and affected that much of the entire population of the United States.
[00:58:40]  Harrowing stuff, man.
[00:58:42]  I mean, like, and this is the thing, like, you talk about Roy Cohn.
[00:58:45]  He affected millions of people's lives because like just at this point, just because of this shit that he starts.
[00:58:52]  Now, during this whole period, Roy was the government's main anti-gay attack dog.
[00:58:56]  He was the guy Joe McCarthy sent in to carry out interrogations, possibly including, you know, including a lot of interrogations.
[00:59:01]  And Roy was not living the repressed life of a self-hating gay man during this period.
[00:59:06]  In fact, it was literally the opposite.
[00:59:07]  He spent his nights out at a rotating carousel of gay bars.
[00:59:10]  He had sex with men constantly, but he denied that made him the same as the gay men he spent his days playing with.
[00:59:16]  No, not this fucker.
[00:59:17]  Yeah.
[00:59:18]  Listen.
[00:59:19]  Roy had sex with other men every single day of his life, basically, and also never considered himself gay.
[00:59:25]  Bro, first of all, everybody's a little gay.
[00:59:28]  Everybody.
[00:59:29]  Yeah.
[00:59:29]  Second of all, come on, my guy.
[00:59:31]  Come on.
[00:59:33]  The repression and mental gymnastics to pull that off, to be like, no, I'm attracted and I'm going to sleep with, but it doesn't make me gay.
[00:59:41]  Sir, what is your definition of gay?
[00:59:44]  What are you doing?
[00:59:45]  He wouldn't even say that he was attracted to men.
[00:59:48]  He preferred to say that he said all he would say is that he preferred to, quote, expend his sexual energies on men, but not women.
[00:59:56]  Bro, he's into the whole, like, I am positive Roman idea of like, oh, it's more masculine to take a man.
[01:00:06]  I know that he was a power top and it's disturbing and disgusting.
[01:00:11]  Yeah, it's not cool.
[01:00:12]  I mean, it's not, it's fine to be a power top, but it's not cool to do what Roy's doing.
[01:00:17]  And he would also tell anyone who asked that he was no pansy.
[01:00:23]  He's a terrible person.
[01:00:24]  Like, again, his friends said that he was the embodiment of human evil.
[01:00:27]  The people who liked him said that.
[01:00:29]  So quote, he'd tell anyone who asked that he was no pansy.
[01:00:33]  And by this, quote, he meant that even though he engaged in sexual relations with men, he did not consider himself to be homosexual because he was a better man than that.
[01:00:42]  During the actual Senate hearings pertaining to the higher risk of employing homosexuals, Cohn was often condescendingly and accusatory in his line of questioning.
[01:00:49]  McCarthy, who presided over most of the hearings, allowed this line of questioning with no objections.
[01:00:54]  In the case of Eric L. Kohler, for example, Cohn delved into Mr. Kohler's personal life and presented personal letters that had absolutely nothing to do with his job as evidence.
[01:01:02]  Cohn also used the technique of frequently repeating Mr. Kohler's responses to him for emphasis and intimidation.
[01:01:08]  By questioning Mr. Kohler in this manner, Cohn was able to easily confuse Kohler and made him appear to be lying.
[01:01:14]  He's a very abusive guy.
[01:01:16]  He's a bitch ass.
[01:01:17]  Like fundamentally, just an abusive bad person.
[01:01:20]  I would like a collection of essays from as many people as he slept with as possible so that I can understand the experience of being with somebody who hates themselves.

=== Incalculable Damage From Hearings (05:11) ===

[01:01:31]  Yeah, you could.
[01:01:34]  Sorry, there's two good documentaries.
[01:01:35]  One is Where's My Roy Cohn?
[01:01:37]  And one is Bully Coward Victim, I think is the name of it, which is another documentary about Roy Cohn.
[01:01:44]  And we'll explain that title.
[01:01:46]  We'll explain why it says that title.
[01:01:49]  There's actually a good reason behind why that title is what it is.
[01:01:53]  But yeah, and they talk to, at least one of those has an interview with one or two of his former sexual partners.
[01:01:59]  I don't know if lovers is the right term because I'm not sure that Roy Cohn.
[01:02:02]  It sounds to me that Roy was the kind of gay who was like, well, and we saw this more in the 90s, probably because of Roy Cohn's influence, but the idea that if you're not falling in love with the people you're having sex with, then that's not your sexual, I forget how we title these things, but yeah, then that makes you not gay.
[01:02:20]  Which is, again, bananas.
[01:02:22]  It's bananas.
[01:02:23]  If you're attracted strictly to males and you do not want to have sex with females, that is just categorically, you're gay.
[01:02:29]  Yes.
[01:02:29]  It's okay.
[01:02:30]  And it's fine.
[01:02:31]  That's perfectly fine.
[01:02:32]  But if you are a man who exclusively has sex with other men every day of your life, you should, you're gay.
[01:02:39]  Like, and it's fine, Roy.
[01:02:41]  It would have been fine if you hadn't been such a piece of shit to everybody.
[01:02:44]  You know, the gay community really, we love, we love other gays, man.
[01:02:48]  You could have been in here getting in on this love fest.
[01:02:50]  Like, well, not after the lavender scare.
[01:02:53]  No, before that.
[01:02:54]  Before that, you could have made a choice to be proud of who you were and been accepted and loved.
[01:02:58]  And instead, you know, you made some choices.
[01:03:01]  He made some choices.
[01:03:02]  Now, obviously, the damage that Cohn helped to do during the lavender scare was incalculable.
[01:03:07]  But you know what damage isn't incalculable.
[01:03:10]  Uh-oh.
[01:03:11]  Joelle.
[01:03:12]  What kind?
[01:03:13]  The damage done by our products and services to your wallet.
[01:03:16]  Yay!
[01:03:19]  A segue.
[01:03:27]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[01:03:31]  Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
[01:03:34]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[01:03:37]  And rule two: never mess with her friends either.
[01:03:41]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[01:03:44]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
[01:03:50]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[01:03:55]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[01:03:57]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[01:03:59]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[01:04:01]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[01:04:04]  I said, oh, hell no.
[01:04:05]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:04:08]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:04:12]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:04:14]  Trust me, babe.
[01:04:15]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:04:25]  What's up, everyone?
[01:04:26]  I'm Ago Modern.
[01:04:27]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[01:04:34]  It's Will Farrell.
[01:04:38]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[01:04:41]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[01:04:46]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[01:04:49]  I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[01:04:53]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[01:04:58]  Yeah.
[01:04:58]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[01:05:01]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[01:05:02]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[01:05:11]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[01:05:13]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[01:05:20]  Yeah, it would not be.
[01:05:22]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[01:05:23]  There's a lot of luck.
[01:05:25]  Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:05:33]  In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
[01:05:40]  The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
[01:05:45]  This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
[01:05:48]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[01:05:52]  I doctored the test once.
[01:05:54]  It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
[01:05:57]  I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
[01:06:01]  Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
[01:06:03]  They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
[01:06:06]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[01:06:08]  Greg Olespi and Michael Marancini.
[01:06:10]  My mind was blown.
[01:06:12]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[01:06:13]  This is Love Trap.
[01:06:15]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[01:06:17]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[01:06:22]  Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
[01:06:28]  This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
[01:06:33]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

=== Abuse Directed At Senator McCarthy (13:08) ===

[01:06:43]  10-10 shots fired, city hall building.
[01:06:46]  A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
[01:06:50]  From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
[01:06:54]  This is Rorschach.
[01:06:55]  Murder at City Hall.
[01:06:56]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[01:06:58]  Somebody tell me that.
[01:06:59]  Jeffrey Hood did.
[01:07:00]  July 2003.
[01:07:02]  Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
[01:07:07]  Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
[01:07:10]  And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
[01:07:19]  Everybody in the chamber ducks.
[01:07:21]  A shocking public murder.
[01:07:23]  I scream, get down, get down.
[01:07:25]  Those are shots.
[01:07:25]  Those are shots.
[01:07:26]  Get down.
[01:07:27]  A charismatic politician.
[01:07:28]  You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
[01:07:31]  I still have a weapon.
[01:07:33]  And I could shoot you.
[01:07:36]  And an outsider with a secret.
[01:07:38]  He alleged you.
[01:07:41]  That may or may not have been political.
[01:07:42]  That may have been about sex.
[01:07:44]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:07:57]  Oh, we're back.
[01:07:59]  So we're talking about Roy Cohn and the horrible, horrible impact of his crimes on the world.
[01:08:08]  All over the nation, Americans, particularly Americans working in the government, started spying on each other as a result of the Red Scare that Cohn and McCarthy kicked up.
[01:08:16]  They were spying not just to see who might be a Red, but to see who might be gay.
[01:08:20]  And in fact, some people will make the case that the entire national security establishment that we have now, the espionage state that is spying one way or another in all of our communications, was started by Cohn and McCarthy.
[01:08:33]  That they are the reasons for everything that Snowden uncovered about the NSA, that that ball got rolling because of McCarthy and Cohn.
[01:08:42]  I don't know if that's a comprehensive case that you can make, but some people will argue it.
[01:08:46]  Now, yeah, and again, it was, you know, it starts this avalanche of paranoia within American culture.
[01:08:53]  And in one particularly absurd case, a woman accused her boss of being a lesbian on the basis that she had peculiar lips, not large, but oddly shaped.
[01:09:01]  Quote, a funny feeling, the fact that this woman was single and the fact that she had spent a lot of time in China.
[01:09:08]  So that's the sort of like people are like, one person is like, this woman is accused of being a lesbian and a communist because she has very little in the way of hips.
[01:09:17]  Like that's the kind of shit that starts coming out at this point.
[01:09:24]  Yeah, the whole of America goes kind of fucking bonkers.
[01:09:28]  So during this whole period of the lavender scare, Cohn was also helping his boss carry out the Red Scare because again, everyone with power just sort of decided that gay and communist were synonyms.
[01:09:37]  It was usually Cohn's job during interrogations in the committee to ask the question, are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?
[01:09:46]  After the 1952 elections, the Republicans won control of both houses of Congress for the first time in a generation.
[01:09:52]  McCarthy became the chairman of the Senate Committee on Government Operations and its subcommittee on investigations.
[01:09:58]  This allowed him to expand his search outside the State Department to other government agencies and to the broadcasting and defense industries.
[01:10:04]  He started prowling around university faculties in the United Nations.
[01:10:08]  Wherever McCarthy and Cohn went, their investigations shattered careers and lives.
[01:10:12]  What they didn't find were communist sleeper agents.
[01:10:15]  The whole affair came to a disastrous conclusion in 1954, largely as a result of Roy Cohn's horniness.
[01:10:21]  G. David Schein had been one of McCarthy's aides in Roy Cohn's big-time crush.
[01:10:26]  In fact, probably both men had a big crush on David Shine, but he was definitely Cohn's boyfriend.
[01:10:31]  This is the guy he was traveling around Europe with, David Shine.
[01:10:34]  Yeah.
[01:10:34]  Now, unfortunately, Shine was drafted in 1953.
[01:10:38]  Either out of genuine affection or out of a desire to make sure that a hot guy didn't get mangled in a war, Roy immediately tried to intercede on Shine's behalf to the Army.
[01:10:47]  He first tried to convince them to commission his friend as an officer.
[01:10:51]  The Army said no, because he didn't have any skills that would, you know, justify commissioning him.
[01:10:56]  So Cohn demanded that Shine get extra leave so he could go home and fuck Roy more often.
[01:11:01]  Shockingly, the Army did not agree to do this either.
[01:11:04]  Now, Joe McCarthy was just as enraged as Cohn because, again, Joe was also kind of had the hots for this guy.
[01:11:11]  And rather than accept that their friend had to do his time in the service, Cohn and McCarthy accused the Army of drafting Shine in retaliation for their attempts to uncover communists hiding in the military.
[01:11:22]  The investigation they carried out on the U.S. Army lasted two months.
[01:11:26]  And one of the really bizarre things about it is that you get the feeling, again, everyone involved knew that Cohn and McCarthy were gay and doing this to get a lover out of the service.
[01:11:34]  Congressmen joke about Roy Cohn being a fairy in, like, you can find video of this.
[01:11:40]  Like, wow.
[01:11:41]  Yeah, while he is, yeah, it's really something else.
[01:11:46]  It's very gross.
[01:11:47]  It's one of those things you almost feel, you start to feel sorry for Cohn for a second during that part of the video, and then you realize, like, oh, you persecuted thousands of gay men.
[01:11:54]  Like, fuck you, Roy.
[01:11:56]  Am I going to feel bad for you?
[01:11:58]  Did you?
[01:12:00]  Well, and like, you made it this sham, right?
[01:12:03]  Like, you, you put yourself.
[01:12:05]  You're why this is happening.
[01:12:06]  Yeah.
[01:12:06]  Exactly.
[01:12:07]  Like, before gays were just persecuted by the religious, and now they have to worry about their entire government coming down on their house.
[01:12:14]  Fuck you forever, dude.
[01:12:15]  Yeah, you piece of shit.
[01:12:17]  Yeah.
[01:12:17]  It's it's remarkable.
[01:12:19]  The army spokesman referred to Shine and Cohn Snidely as warm personal friends, to which Roy responded, he is one of my many good friends, sir.
[01:12:28]  Yes.
[01:12:29]  The courtroom behind him laughed uneasily in response because they knew what was being discussed.
[01:12:34]  We have transcripts from the investigation, and I want to read from them now.
[01:12:38]  It starts with one fellow, Mr. Adams, being questioned by the Army about a conversation he witnessed between Roy Cohn and Senator McCarthy.
[01:12:46]  Mr. Adams, I said, let's talk about Shine.
[01:12:48]  That started a chain of events, an experience similar to none which I have had in my life.
[01:12:53]  Mr. Cohn became extremely agitated, became extremely abusive.
[01:12:56]  He cursed me and then Senator McCarthy.
[01:12:58]  The abuse went in waves.
[01:13:00]  He would be very abusive and then it would kind of abate and things would be friendly for a few moments.
[01:13:04]  Everyone would eat a little bit more and then it would start in again.
[01:13:07]  It just kept on.
[01:13:08]  I was trying to catch a 1.30 train, but Mr. Cohn was so violent by then that I felt I had better not do it and leave him that angry with me and that angry with Senator McCarthy because of a remark I had made.
[01:13:18]  So I stayed and missed my 130 train.
[01:13:20]  I thought surely I would be able to get out of there by 2.30.
[01:13:23]  The luncheon concluded.
[01:13:24]  And then at this point, someone named Mr. Jenkins, who's a member of the committee, asks him, you said you were afraid to leave Senator McCarthy alone there with him?
[01:13:31]  Mr. Adams, what did he say?
[01:13:32]  You said he was very abusive.
[01:13:34]  Mr. Adams, he was extremely abusive.
[01:13:36]  Mr. Jenkins asks, was or not any obscene language used?
[01:13:40]  Mr. Adams, yes.
[01:13:41]  Mr. Jenkins, just admit that and tell me what he did say, which constituted abuse, in your opinion.
[01:13:46]  Mr. Adams, I have stated before, sir, the tone of the voice has as much to do with abuse as the words.
[01:13:51]  I do not remember the phrases.
[01:13:53]  I do not remember the sentences, but I do remember the violence.
[01:13:56]  Mr. Jenkins, do you remember the subject, Mr. Adams?
[01:13:59]  The subject was Shine.
[01:14:01]  The subject was the fact, the thing that Cohn was angry about, the thing that he was so violent about, was the fact that one, the Army was not agreeing to an assignment for Shine, and two, that Senator McCarthy was not supporting his staff in its efforts to get Shine assigned to New York.
[01:14:13]  So his abuse was directed partly to me and partly to Senator McCarthy.
[01:14:17]  As I say, it kind of came in waves.
[01:14:19]  There would be a period of extreme abuse, and then there would be a period where it would almost get back to normal, and ice cream would be ordered.
[01:14:25]  And then about halfway through that, a little more of the same.
[01:14:27]  I missed the 2.30 train also.
[01:14:30]  This violence continued.
[01:14:31]  It was a remarkable thing.
[01:14:33]  At first, Senator McCarthy seemed to be trying to conciliate.
[01:14:36]  He seemed to be trying to conciliate Cohn and not to state anything contrary to what he had stated to me in the morning.
[01:14:41]  But then he more or less lapsed into silence.
[01:14:43]  So I went down to room 101.
[01:14:45]  Mr. Cohn was there, and Mr. Carr was there.
[01:14:47]  As I remember, we lunched together in the Senate cafeteria and everything was peaceful.
[01:14:50]  When we returned to room 101, toward the later part of the conversation, I asked Cohn, I knew that 90% of all inductees ultimately face overseas duty.
[01:14:58]  And I knew that one day we were going to face that problem with Mr. Cohen as to Shine.
[01:15:01]  So I thought I would lay a little groundwork for future trouble, I guess.
[01:15:04]  I asked him what would happen if Shine got overseas duty.
[01:15:08]  Mr. Jenkins, you mean you were breaking the news gently, Mr. Adams.
[01:15:11]  Mr. Adams, yes, sir, that is right.
[01:15:13]  I asked him what would happen if Shine got overseas duty.
[01:15:15]  He responded with vigor and force.
[01:15:18]  Stevens is through as secretary as the army of the army.
[01:15:21]  I said, Oh, Roy, something to this effect.
[01:15:23]  Oh, Roy, don't say that.
[01:15:24]  Come on, really.
[01:15:25]  What is going to happen if Shine receives overseas duty?
[01:15:28]  Cohn responded with even more force: We will wreck the army.
[01:15:34]  Okay.
[01:15:36]  So there's a lot there.
[01:15:38]  America said, Skirt.
[01:15:40]  What?
[01:15:40]  Yeah.
[01:15:41]  You can't turn the same victory you used on communists and throw it at the army, Roy.
[01:15:46]  You've lost sight of the goal here.
[01:15:48]  You've lost sight of the goal and also have gone after the one thing that Americans actually consider sacred, which is our army.
[01:15:54]  And like, yeah, that's not going to end well for you, Roy.
[01:15:58]  You can go after a bunch of powerless gay people and accuse communists, but if you attack the army, things are going to end badly.
[01:16:03]  But what I think is really fascinating there is because there's, again, this debate over, was Joe McCarthy the driving force behind the Red Scare or was it Cohn driving him?
[01:16:12]  And that transcript makes me think that the people saying it was Roy have a point because that is textbook abusive behavior.
[01:16:20]  That is absolutely the textbook of like he's screaming at you, he's screaming at you, and then he's nice and he's normal and things get back to normal.
[01:16:26]  And then he starts screaming ice cream.
[01:16:28]  Yeah, and you get ice cream.
[01:16:29]  And like he's, he's, he's doing that thing that abusive people do, like abusive partners do.
[01:16:34]  And I don't know, I don't think he and McCarthy had any sort of romantic connection, but I do think that emotionally they kind of had that sort of thing going on.
[01:16:42]  And Roy is basically vacillating between when you make me angry in the slightest, I will become so horribly abusive to you that this guy, Mr. Adams, who's like an army dude, is horrified by how cruel I am to you.
[01:16:56]  And then everything will be nice and normal and we'll be friends again.
[01:16:59]  And then if you say anything that's set like.
[01:17:01]  Yeah, and you see the chaos and confusion that caused for this poor guy.
[01:17:04]  He's like, I couldn't even tell you what was being said.
[01:17:06]  I just know I was afraid.
[01:17:08]  I was just struck by the violence.
[01:17:10]  Yeah.
[01:17:12]  I, yeah, woof, woof.
[01:17:15]  I can't feel bad for McCarthy because you allowed yourself to be.
[01:17:18]  No, no, no, no.
[01:17:18]  Fuck Joe McCarthy.
[01:17:19]  What a way to hand your person to hand your career over to.
[01:17:24]  One of the things that is striking about this, I have to assume this guy, Mr. Adams, is like a pretty normal man for his time and position.
[01:17:31]  But that's a very nuanced and like complicated understanding of an abusive personality that he just laid out to Congress.
[01:17:39]  Like that's.
[01:17:40]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:17:42]  And to be able to, like, I feel like a lot of men would have been like, oh, well, he was just yelling.
[01:17:46]  And guys get sometimes.
[01:17:49]  But for him to be like, nope, it was dangerous.
[01:17:51]  And so I put myself in the line of danger to try to protect him.
[01:17:54]  I couldn't leave McCarthy alone with him.
[01:17:57]  Oh, man.
[01:17:57]  That's a really big thing to do.
[01:17:59]  I think.
[01:18:00]  I think the thing, the thing that Adams recognizes that I'm most impressed with is the understanding that, like, no, it doesn't matter what he said.
[01:18:08]  It's the way he said it.
[01:18:10]  It's the violence with which he said it that was the disturbing thing.
[01:18:15]  That's a really kind of an impressive recognition for a 50s dude, you know?
[01:18:19]  Absolutely.
[01:18:20]  Yeah.
[01:18:22]  Anyway, that's episode one of Roy Cohn.
[01:18:26]  Wow.
[01:18:28]  Fun guy.
[01:18:30]  No bitch ass.
[01:18:32]  Yeah, we're going to talk about the conclusion of the Red Scare and also the conclusion of Roy's life, which unfortunately happens many decades later after a lot more fucking around.
[01:18:41]  We'll be talking about trains.
[01:18:42]  We'll be talking about Reagan.
[01:18:43]  It's going to be great.
[01:18:44]  It's going to be terrible.
[01:18:45]  We're going to be talking about trains, like choo-choo.
[01:18:48]  Lots of trains.
[01:18:49]  Lots of trains.
[01:18:50]  Toy trains.
[01:18:50]  They're coming back.
[01:18:51]  He comes from train money.
[01:18:52]  Toy train money.
[01:18:55]  Yeah.
[01:18:56]  Joelle, do you have anything you want to plug?
[01:18:59]  Uh, not really.
[01:19:01]  I'm Joelle Monique.
[01:19:02]  You can find me all over the internet at Joelle Monique.
[01:19:05]  That's J-O-E-L-L-E-M-O-N-I-Q-U-E.
[01:19:08]  If you're not following her, what the fuck?
[01:19:13]  Get into my Beyoncé love.
[01:19:14]  Beyonce.
[01:19:16]  All right.
[01:19:17]  Well, that's the end of the episode.
[01:19:19]  Joelle, thank you for talking with me about Roy Cohn, a fun guy who's super fun.
[01:19:25]  Robert, thank you for breaking it down.
[01:19:28]  Please, please, I really feel like you're going to appreciate the animated musical cartoon they did over at The Real Fight.
[01:19:36]  Yes.
[01:19:37]  And also, listeners, go watch it.
[01:19:39]  It's on YouTube.
[01:19:40]  It's like three minutes, but it's basically all the goodness Robert gave you condensed into three minutes, and it makes Roy Cohn look stupid and hilarious.
[01:19:47]  And that's always fun.
[01:19:48]  Yeah.
[01:19:48]  Robert, do you have anything you want to plug?

=== Watch The Animated Musical Cartoon (02:58) ===

[01:19:51]  No, I've never done anything in my entire life other than this exact episode of this podcast.
[01:19:57]  It's my only, my only completed work.
[01:20:01]  Oh, oh, Uprising.
[01:20:03]  Yeah, I've got, I also did one other thing.
[01:20:05]  It's a podcast about the protests, the BLM movement, and the fighting with right-wing fascist paramilitaries in Portland over the summer and autumn of 2020.
[01:20:16]  It's called Uprising, A Guide from Portland.
[01:20:19]  Check it out.
[01:20:20]  It'll be out by the time this episode drops.
[01:20:23]  Yes, we vital listening.
[01:20:24]  Check it out.
[01:20:25]  I can't wait.
[01:20:27]  All right.
[01:20:28]  That's episode one.
[01:20:30]  Yep.
[01:20:33]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[01:20:42]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:20:44]  He is not going to get away with this.
[01:20:46]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:20:48]  We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
[01:20:53]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:20:54]  Trust me, babe.
[01:20:55]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:21:05]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
[01:21:11]  On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
[01:21:18]  The entire season two is now available to bench, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
[01:21:25]  I'm an alcohol.
[01:21:26]  Without this probe, I'm going to die.
[01:21:29]  Listen to Ceno's show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:21:35]  Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
[01:21:43]  Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
[01:21:50]  Coming up this season on Math and Magic, CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario.
[01:21:55]  People think that creative ideas are like these light bulb moments that happen when you're in the shower.
[01:22:00]  Where it's really like a stone sculpture.
[01:22:02]  You're constantly just chipping away and refining.
[01:22:05]  Take to interactive CEO Strauss Selnick and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
[01:22:10]  Listen to Math and Magic on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:22:16]  On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dickin Pole Show are geniuses.
[01:22:20]  We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand.
[01:22:28]  Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
[01:22:31]  Yes.
[01:22:31]  Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
[01:22:34]  I actually, I thought it was.
[01:22:35]  I got that wrong.
[01:22:36]  But hey, no one's perfect.
[01:22:37]  We're pretty close, though.
[01:22:38]  Listen to the Nick, Dick, and Paul Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:22:45]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:22:48]  Guaranteed human.