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“From beyond the grave,” writes Fintan O’Toole in the magazine’s October 8 issue, Roy Cohn “has forced himself into American history.” Cohn has been dead for forty years, but, as a new biography demonstrates, his venal, mendacious, obscene, amoral approach to life and politics haunts the country to this day:

At once not quite real and all too real, Cohn has the uncanny presence of a ghoul or a fiend. He is a creature from the depths of the American political imagination, too pure in his utter malignity to be entirely credible, too potent in his continuing consequence to be safely interred in the past.

Cohn made his reputation helping send Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair—in typically corrupt fashion, “discussing the evidence behind the scenes with Irving Kaufman, the judge, and urging him to impose the death sentence”—and helping Joseph McCarthy persecute gay men and alleged Communists. In his later years he became a New York City power broker, infamously coaching a young Donald Trump on the finer points of avoiding creditors, but he was also a practicing lawyer, and it was in that capacity that Martin Filler, writing today in the NYR Online, once met “this guttersnipe of the law.” In the 1980s Filler, looking for a divorce lawyer for a relative in need, visited Cohn’s “shabby and barren” Beaux-Arts mansion, where the man emerged “in a loosely tied, silk paisley dressing gown, [clearly] wearing nothing underneath.” After a short meeting, “we soon left the premises with a vague sense of having done something not quite kosher.”

Below, alongside O’Toole’s and Filler’s essays, are five articles from our archives about creatures from the depths of the American political imagination.

Fintan O’Toole
Devils in America

The lessons that Donald Trump learned from Roy Cohn—lie, cheat, engage in unlimited corruption—now shape official government policy in the US.

Martin Filler
Doing Business with the Devil

The sinister influence of Roy Cohn, political fixer of them all, pervaded New York high and low life for four decades, and we are still living with the consequences.

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Martin Filler
The Apprentice’s Sorcerer

Condé Nast’s editors shone brightest in its premillennial heyday, but the media company’s opaque proprietor, S. I. Newhouse Jr., made his most consequential discovery in Donald Trump.

—August 10, 2025

A. S. Hamrah
You’re Brutal, I’m Brutal

“The Apprentice shows us Cohn behind closed doors. We see him preparing for his sex parties by doing two hundred sit-ups every morning in his underpants, amid his collection of frog figurines. Trump, on the other hand, sleeps late on his couch under a Citizen Kane poster, roused only when the phone rings with possible deals.”

—November 21, 2024

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Anthony Lewis
Nearly a Coup

“Kenneth Starr’s attempt to drive Clinton from office was the climax of years of effort by others to destroy him, not through ordinary political means but by dubious legal action and tales of wrongdoing larded with fantastic lies. People on the political right set out to unseat a president, and they almost succeeded. In his folly, Clinton played into their hands. But that does not alter the fact that this country came close to a coup d’état.”

—April 13, 2000

Nicholas von Hoffman
Gong Ho

“Among all the Watergate confessional literature this book is far and away the best. It is the only entertaining one, the only funny one, although it isn’t always clear when the jokes are intended. By the end, you may still not have formed a settled opinion on whether G. Gordon Liddy is a Nazi sociopath or a case of arrested development, an eleven-year-old boy in a grown man’s body.”

—July 17, 1980

Richard H. Rovere
The Untold Story of McCarthy’s Fall

“Being part of a majority was something McCarthy could not endure or survive. He was a seditionist. His only gift was for insurrection and disorder. Sooner or later he had to attack Eisenhower, and sooner rather than later he did, and then Eisenhower, through his deputies, had to crush him.”

—October 28, 1965

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