cover image The Autobiography of Roy Cohn

The Autobiography of Roy Cohn

Sidney Zion, Roy Cohn. Lyle Stuart, $18.95 (284pp) ISBN 978-0-8184-0471-9

As Cohn tells it, Joseph McCarthy destroyed himself by coming across in the public eye as a brutal, dictatorial bully, when, in fact, he was a loyal, warm person and a public servant. In this outspoken, brash, self-serving autobiography, Cohn defends McCarthy's anti-Communist campaign, and his own role in it, by arguing that the senator's anti-subversive tactics merely carried out mainstream Democratic policies of the Truman era. Cohn offers seamy revelations concerning his secret conversations with the judge in the Rosenberg espionage trial and how he got a United States Attorney his job with an assist from a Mafia boss. He makes wicked, wisecracking comments about Bush, Mayor Koch, Ford and Mondale, and bitterly settles accounts with Robert Morgenthau and Robert Kennedy. Zion, former correspondent for the New York Times, worked with Cohn on this tell-all, adding some chapters after Cohn's recent death from AIDS. He provides an ironic glimpse of Cohn sporting in the gay underworld while he publicly bashed homosexual rights. Photos. 50,000 first printing. (April)