Behind the Bastards - Part One: Roy Cohn: The Man Who Made Donald Trump

Episode Date: December 8, 2020

Robert is joined by Joelle Monique to discuss Roy Cohn.FOOTNOTES: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/roy-cohn-and-the-making-of-a-winner-take-all-america https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/roy-cohn-mafia-politics/599320/ https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-03-18-vw-1638-story.html https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/eavesdropping-on-roy-cohn-and-donald-trump https://forward.com/culture/431851/how-roy-cohns-shame-made-him-and-trump-shameless/ https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a46616/dont-mess-with-roy-cohn/ https://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/21/books/books-of-the-times-2-works-trace-the-turbulent-life-of-roy-cohn.html https://www.actl.com/docs/default-source/default-document-library/journal_87_summer_2018_cohn_article.pdf?sfvrsn=4 https://newrepublic.com/article/155066/covering-roy-cohn http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6444/ https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/educational-resources/age-of-eisenhower/mcarthyism-red-scare https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/15/ethel-rosenberg-conviction-testimony-released-atom-spy https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2016/02/04/how-red-scare-destroyed-small-town-teacher/OyzaMTrsxMsx54liP1YX9I/story.html https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/15/weekinreview/nation-rosenbergs-50-years-later-yes-they-were-guilty-but-what-exactly.html https://minnesotaplaylist.com/magazine/article/2018/blacklisted https://ir.una.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=nahrd https://www.jstor.org/stable/3874391?read-now=1&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a33350476/fear-city-new-york-mafia-donald-trump-tower-mob-ties-explained/ Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's harassing people for their political beliefs? My Roy Cone. I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards. It's a podcast about terrible people. And I'm just going to cut right to the chase, as I already did. Today we're talking about Roy motherfucking Cone. Oh my God. Joelle Monique is our guest.

Joelle, producer at iHeart Media. How are you doing today? I'm good. I'm slightly unprofessional. I just bit into some peanut butter. I'm so sorry. I'm very hungry. Are you just doing yo? This has been my favorite intro to an episode ever, you guys. Thank you. Joelle, what do you know about Roy Cone? Okay, so The Good Fight was one of my favorite TV shows of all time. Had like a very like strong leaning Roy Cone arc. I want to stay season two. There's a song called Roy.

Was it set in the past? No, no, no. It basically was an opportunity to educate people about how Trump could get away with some of the things he could get away with. Okay. Okay. Cool. Cool. Cool. Yes. Roy Cone is that guy. Yeah. Yeah. So in there they made this song, which I think you'll really appreciate. It's called Roy Cone Lives to Party. There's an animated segment that goes along with it.

It's peak excellence. So I know like a two minute real quick history of Roy Cone. I know he's an awful human. A monster. Yeah. A real terrible, terrible guy. So I'm excited to find out how terrible today. What's funny about Roy Cone 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. Like he's a bad person,

but he's not like Stalin or Hitler. He wasn't murdering. He was such an unpleasant, well, he may have. He was such an unpleasant human being that his name has become kind of like a byword for a monster. Like he's up there just because of what a piece of shit he was to everyone around him. And it's kind of amazing. If you watch documentaries, there's a great documentary called Where's My Roy Cone that interviews people who knew him. And like at least two of, like there are multiple people in that documentary

who are friends of his who describe him as evil. Like just because. Oh my God. It's like, oh yeah, I hung out with Roy, but he was evil. Like he was, he's absolutely was the embodiment of human evil. Wow. How could you, I wonder, what was he bringing to that friendship that they were like, I skipped over the evil part. He was kind of a great friend. Oh, that kind of friend.

No, it's all like when you have like a super bitch of a friend, but she's good to you. She's good to you and a monster. Yes, I kind of get it. Yeah, 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. My personal monster. Yeah, that's, that's who Roy Cone was. And it's one of the, we'll talk about his relationship with Trump later.

It's what Trump learned a lot from Roy Cone. The thing he never learned from Roy Cone was how to be loyal because that is something Cone was good at to his actual friends. He was very loyal 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. It's fun. It's a fun story.

That documentary, Where's My Roy Cone? I do recommend watching. It gets its name from something Donald Trump said when Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself during the Mueller probe. President Donald Trump reportedly cried out, Where's my Roy Cone in a moment of panic and fear? Yeah, so we're going to talk all about that today. Roy Cone was a lawyer.

It's accurate to say that, but just saying like that's describing Roy Cone as a lawyer is such an incomplete explanation of who he was as to be totally inaccurate. Roy Cone 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 US history. He's a hoot of a dude. He created the shortcuts to help us get where we got today.

Yeah, he's the man who built both Roger Stone and Donald Trump. Like, he's... What a legacy. He's a remarkable piece of shit. You love to see it. Yeah, so Roy Marcus Cone was born on February 20th, 1927 in the Bronx, New York City. He was the only child of a wealthy Jewish couple, Dora and Albert.

His father Albert was a judge and a major figure in the local Democratic Party. As a result, Roy grew up with politicians of all stripes dropping by his home for dinners and cocktail parties. So he's born into the political upper crust, you know, from childhood. I'm seeing the snobby, rich kid evolving like... Oh, yes. He was one of those kids who spoke like an adult way too early.

You were like, how do you know these things? Yes, yes, absolutely. Like his parents let him drink at the cocktail parties and he thought he was an adult when he was really just an obnoxious trash child. Yeah, he was definitely drinking at the adult table from a young age. There was no tiny table for him. No, no, no. And obviously like he came from money and not just like judge money,

but his family has like wealth on all sides of it. 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. Roy's maternal uncle, Bernard Marcus, was the president of the Bank of the United States. So again, ton of money in this family. 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. Now, Roy was too young to remember much of what happened at the time, the stress and the panic. 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.

This wasn't entirely fair because a lot of people in a lot of banks were to blame for the Great Depression, but Bernard Marcus was the head of the bank that was most implicated and he was also a Jew. So he got blamed. He became like the scapegoat of the financial crash. America loves a scapegoat. We can't hold everyone responsible,

but we can't point to you and say you did it. Yeah, so Bernard Marcus is Jewish. The Bank of the US is heavily frequented by Jewish immigrants and everybody's angry at Jewish people when the economy collapses because racism. So yeah, Bernard Marcus actually becomes the only banker to go to prison for the financial crisis for the Great Depression. Like they pick one and it's the Jewish guy.

Lord Jesus, that's awful. 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. He didn't row that boat alone. He didn't single-handedly tank our economy. Come on now. Yeah, so this is like a huge fact of shame for the Cone family.

And to this day, Roy Cone's surviving relatives consider the case to have been a matter of scapegoating because again, he was the only banker to go to jail. And this really left an impact on Roy because he visited his uncle in prison when he was a small child. So Roy's earliest memories were seeing his uncle Bernard in Sing Sing. One of his cousins later wrote, quote, that left Cone determined to beat the establishment.

So from an early age, you got to think about it this way. He grows up thinking like, yeah, we're Jewish, but like we're part of the ruling class, the wealthy class, 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. 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?

Like, that's the way it goes. 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? A fragment of empathy for baby Roy Cone before he becomes the evil we know him to be today. Yeah, this has an impact on the evil because he realizes like, oh, money won't protect me.

Like, the fact that I'm different actually does matter. We're not all the same even though we're rich. And so I just, like, I am now, I'm not a part of the establishment, so I must be at war with it. That's the idea that Roy Cone, baby Roy Cone, grows up with. All the way. All the way to my own conclusion, Lord.

Yeah, it's super fun. So a family friend who was around at the time claimed, quote, the family had been absolutely shamed when Bernard Marcus went to prison. And he had a little boy in his book, a little boy of all the pictures of his uncle Bernie Marcus, he would show them to his babysitters. Once his mother saw him doing this

and she yelled and took the scrapbook away because he loved his uncle. He was proud of his uncle. He had like a scrapbook of his uncle who was like a big figure in his life. And his mom wanted to like pretend he didn't exist after this. I wish there was a child psychologist here to like break down so a child purposefully uncovering what the family has tried

to hide and shame to be like, no, this guy is good. And they're just like, no, hide that. And what does that do to your psyche? That says, if you make a mistake also, we will just remove you from our family. Yeah. The scrapbook thing is like, I like my, I don't have a scrapbook in one of my relatives.

It's just so weird. Yeah. It's, I mean, I, you know, it's sweet. He clearly cared about his uncle and his mom is telling him, no, no, no, he made a mistake so we don't celebrate his existence anymore. Which, yeah, you're right, Joel, that has to, that transmits a message to a growing little boy.

Yeah. And it's not a good one. Don't fuck up. Okay. You can be disappeared. Is his mother actually Queen Elizabeth? That's my question. I mean, emotionally, yes.

Fair enough. Despite the family shame, Roy's father remained a judge and a connected person in Democratic Party politics. When Roy was 10, his father introduced him to his first president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. So again, age 10 is when this kid starts hobnobbing with the president, not just the president, a president of the United States,

but like the president of the United States, because no president's ever had more power than fucking FDR. Fair enough. So yeah, that's who Roy's hanging out with at age 10. 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. 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, you know? Yeah. That's where his head is.

So the Cone family, as you might have guessed, was not what we would call healthy. In fact, Roy's parents' marriage is generally described as loveless. I found a... Yeah. Yeah, well, what did you expect? There was a lot of love in that relationship. I was always shocked when I hear about loveless marriages.

I'm like, how did you survive? 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, so... Yeah, this is a political marriage. Yeah. So, yeah, I found a fun article in The Wrap

by David Marcus, who is the son of Roy's first cousin, and by the way, his dad, David's dad, refused to talk to Roy Cone for decades. Now, David grew up to be a journalist, and obviously, as a journalist with Roy Cone as an uncle, you're going to interview him, and he did interview Roy several times. In 2019, he wrote an article titled,

Five Things You May Not Know About My Vile, Malicious Cousin Roy Cone. It's just quite a listicle. Can we talk about the 360 of Roy trying to show photos of his life, imprisoned uncle, to then his nephew sharing with the world via a paper the horribleness of his uncle?

There's something very balanced about his life, uncle-nephew relationship. It's a fun family. So, yeah, he wrote... he writes this about Roy Cone's mother, quote, My relatives couldn't stand Roy's overbearing mother, Dora Marcus Cone. She was the original helicopter parent,

long before anybody knew that term, her son's grades, appearance, and relationships. When Roy went to sleep-away camp, Dora rented a room down the road. He lived with his mother until she died when he was 40. So, some Norman Bates vibes coming off this boy.

Oh, no. Oh, man. Listen, kids, we're not talking about you. We understand financial straits and everything, but if you could afford to not live with your mother... If you are a wealthy lawyer... Especially at an era where people used

to clown on people so hard for still living with their parents, you know? That's what we call an unhealthy relationship. Yeah, he's not like living with his mom. A co-dependent one, perhaps? Because he's got to take care of her, or because he's living with his mom

because he can't imagine what to do without her until he's 40. Yikes. Yeah, you get the feeling it wasn't... There was absolutely some weird shit going on there. In the 1940s, the family fortunes had recovered and the cones were again at the center of a deeply influential network

of New York socialites and politicos. As soon as Roy was a teenager, his parents pushed him to attend their parties. According to one of those guests, Roy took naturally to politics, socializing and schmoozing like an old veteran. One attendee later recalled, it was extraordinary to see 10 grown-up couples

and then sit next to a 15-year-old. Roy was always on the scene. He fit right in. His friends later told an interviewer, when he was 16, he was 40. Yeah, those kids are not okay. They're not. We hear about, like,

when we see very, very young girls with older and they're like, oh, well, they seem so mature. That person needs help. But she's 17. It's not okay. 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.

And it's a bit different in Roy's case because he's not in a relationship with these people, but they're the ones he's socializing with and they lead him to... I don't think Roy ever had a childhood. That's what I'm saying, though. Yeah, exactly. It was stolen from him

because he never had the opportunity to be treated like a child. Yeah. And then you don't know the joys of childhood, which makes you a very weird, bitter, old adult. Yeah, which he absolutely is a weird, bitter, old adult. So as a rich kid, Roy's peers were from similarly august backgrounds. His buddy, Generoso Pope Jr.

grew up to be the owner of the National Enquirer. You wonder why that magazine is so close to Donald Trump. His friend, Psy Newhouse Jr. became the publisher of the National Enquirer. Wait, wait, wait. That was really quick to go over. Yeah. Just let that sink in.

Yeah, Roy's best buddy grew up to be owned the National Enquirer. His other best friend became the publisher. And then Roy became Donald Trump's good friend and Donald Trump has had a lifelong positive relationship with the National Enquirer. Yes, I just wanted to say it one more time. Yeah. Just so much in one little sentence.

Wow. Roy Cohn's friend, Richard Berlin, became the chairman of Condi Nast. And his friend, Bill Fugezi, grew up to be the owner of a massive travel and limousine company. So these are Roy Cohn's childhood buddies, like the only kids he spends his time around grow up to be those people.

And they're inheriting a lot of what they get, right? Like, they're not founding that shit, you know? Yeah. And if they are, they're inheriting a bunch of money to found that shit. So from an early age, Cohn showed a strong inclination towards what would become his life's work. He ran what his biographer calls the

Roy Cohn barter and swap exchange while he was in junior high school. This was an influence and information peddling racket. 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.

What? What? What? How? Okay. I just... So many things have just happened in my head. Yeah, there's a lot going on there. I had no idea Roy Cohn was actually Dan Humphrey from Gossip Club,

which actually makes so much sense. 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.

Like, I'll lie for you. Spread that lie and, you know, you can kick me back some favors. Do we know what kind of favors he was getting in exchange? 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. Like, it was, you know,

it was not the kind of favors he would be getting later, but he's experiment... because later his favors would be stuff for people in or out of prison. 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. Like, that's... he's trading gossip for favors. And he's learning how to do that, again, as a teenager. 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 and putting this stuff together. Like, he knows what he's going to be. Roy Kohn knew what he wanted to be from a very young age, and it was always a shady political fixer. You look at what Rudy Giuliani is doing these days, and he's bad at it.

Rudy Giuliani is terrible. You can't even file a lawsuit correctly, sir. Please look out the door. Roy Kohn is the good version of that. And not good in a moral sense, but good in... Roy was good at this. He knew how to do it. The reason Donald Trump keeps having Giuliani

do all this shit is because he's desperately wants to have a Roy Kohn. But he doesn't... I don't pay for it, Trump, but I really feel like he's got to be somebody more capable than Giuliani. You know, not who's also capable of the same kind of loyalty.

That's the thing. Giuliani's loyal to the president, at least so far, but incompetent. Roy was loyal and competent, and that's what Trump wants. Sadly, we'll talk about why Roy Kohn ain't around no more. 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. He went to Columbia Law School, and he graduated at age 20 with both a bachelor's degree and a law degree. So, like, very, very smart kid. Yeah, so age 20,

he's out of college, and admitted to the bar lawyer, and he is ready to make his mark on the world. Using his father's connections, he gets a job at the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District, and he got the gig the same day that he was formally admitted to the bar,

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. That's very convenient. Yeah, it helps. 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. And so, he grew him in 1951 to the job of prosecuting Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage. Now, do you know much about the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case? I feel pretty educated on it. Yes.

But I definitely need to hear more. Yeah, the Rosenbergs were committed communists, and Julius was an electrical engineer with connections to all manner of science he folks. He spent years in the Army Signal Corps, and he fed the USSR information to the U.S. weapons technologies

at one point even smuggling his handler a complete proximity fuse. So Julius is absolutely a spy for the Soviet Union, and giving them a lot of stuff. 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 sciencey folks who were involved in the Defense Department. And one of the folks that he met after getting fired from the Army was working on the Manhattan Project. Now, there's a lot of debate about how helpful the nuclear secrets that he stole were, and I think the consensus is that

the USSR would have developed a bomb in more or less the same timeframe without Julius Rosenberg, but he did give them information on the A-bomb. And the Pentagon was, the Soviet Union in the late 40s comes out with an A-bomb of their own, and the Pentagon is really surprised

because they had thought it would take the Soviets a lot longer to make an A-bomb. And they assumed that the only way was to give them all of the information. 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.

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. 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? That the Soviets have a bomb and they blame Julius Rosenberg. They also blame his wife, Ethel Rosenberg. Now, Ethel had been an actress and there remains debate as to the exact extent of her involvement. She was charged with being a full party

to her husband's espionage. So she is charged with being just as much of a spy as her husband. Now, a lot of information has come out since the fall of the Soviet Union and it suggests that while she was aware of her husband's activity, she was probably not

playing an active role in spreading atomic secrets and there was evidence at the time that she was not playing an active role in spreading atomic secrets. They didn't have any evidence that she was. But Roy Cohn wanted both Rosenbergs convicted and executed. He didn't just want Julius executed.

He wanted Ethel executed as well. And, yeah, I'm going to quote from a write-up in the magazine Forward. 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.

Cohn saw the case as an opportunity to make his name as a ruthless prosecutor and recouped the status his family had lost. He had a score to settle, said one person. 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 his name. He was responding, his relatives suggest, not just to anti-communist animus, but to its inevitable link to Jews like him. He was the definition of a self-hating Jew.

Cohn's cousin, David Marcus says in the film, he wanted to show the world that he wasn't Jewish. So, Cohn's family are Jewish people scapegoated for the Great Depression. 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. Like, this Jewish family are traitors, but the people prosecuting him and the judge, we're loyal Jews.

That's kind of the thing that's going on in Cohn's head. This is some real-house slave shit. Yeah. Just to be honest about it, this idea that you could cleanse your family by destroying another is, I mean, it explains a lot about him

and his ideology as a whole. It's pretty dark. Now, Roy's defining moment in the trial came during his cross-examination of David Greengrass, Ethel Rosenberg's brother. The prosecution had initially relied upon getting Ethel to testify against her husband in exchange for clemency.

But she refused to talk. 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. 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. Greengrass later admitted to lying on the stand at Cohn's direction. But it didn't matter. Ethel was convicted. So, Cohn goes to this guy and says, I'll make sure you and your wife don't get you get lesser sentences if you say

that Ethel was a part of the espionage. And David gets up in court and he lies about Ethel Rosenberg's complicity in the espionage. And so, she gets convicted along with Julius who, you know, for whatever you want to say about how unfair the penalty was, Julius was guilty of espionage.

He did the crime. He did the crime. It's wild to me that it seems, especially in this era, not a lot of women prisons, not a lot of females behind bars, certainly not a lot being executed. It's kind of intense that

how much his own self-hate was. If that is in truth what stemmed a lot of these decision-making, the idea of like, no, we got to fry them all is just intense and horrifying. Yeah, now

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, no American had ever been executed for treason or espionage outside of war, outside of a war.

So that hasn't happened. 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, don't want them, a lot of people don't want them to be executed, because we don't do that as a country at this point, right? That's not what we are.

We don't kill people outside of a war for engaging in this. And we're coming hot off the Geneva Convention, right? Yeah, that's all pretty recent. So you can just establish all these laws and conduct yourself, wow, okay. But Roy Cohn wants them dead. And as it turned out, no, normally

the prosecutor's not supposed to have any say in the punishment, that's, you know, the judges in this sort of a case, that's the judges' purview. But Cohn would wind up having a strong say in her punishment. He later claimed, number one, that he had pulled strings to make sure that Kaufman was the judge

who got the case. There's no evidence that this was true, except for the fact that Kaufman called Roy Cohn repeatedly when he had questions about the case, which kind of suggests that Kaufman was indebted to Roy Cohn. And again, he's in his 20s at this point. So the judge was calling Roy

and being like, you know, I have some questions about this case. Yeah. Most particularly, the judge is calling Roy Cohn and saying, hey, should I execute, should I have these people executed? Is that fair? Like, that's the kind of shit

that like, he's coming up to them with. Wow. Yeah. So, which is pretty dark. Yeah. And of course, Roy Cohn is like, yeah, absolutely, you should kill these people. I can win my case.

Yeah. What? Yeah, again, like, yeah. So the judge calls Roy on the phone and is like, I don't know, I feel like weird about executing these people. We've never done that before in this kind of context. What do you think I should do?

And like, should I execute Ethel as well? And Roy is like, yes, you should execute them both. And he tells the judge, the way I see it, she being Ethel is worse than Julius. So he's, he's whole hog, like, yes, you need to have these people hung or like,

electrocuted. They were electrocuted. But yeah. I wonder if the silence, well, listen, I'm not a psychologist listeners, but I'm going to play one for a second here. 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 they're like, hiding and then being part of the downfall of America during the Great Depression. I wonder if there are links in his brain to those things.

Yeah. You get the feeling. Yeah, probably. Probably. Yeah. What a fucked up guy. Robert, do you know what time it is? Oh, is it time for products and services? Perhaps.

You know who won't order the executions of a probably innocent woman and her husband during peacetime for espionage? I really hope it's our our sponsors and the product and service that we provide. That's the only standard we have for our our products

is the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case. We ask all of them about it and all of them say that happened decades before you were born. Why are you asking us about this? None of these companies existed at that point in time and we demand a response and that's why we have so very few advertisers. They think it's weird.

A lot of people think it's weird. Here's ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns.

He's a shark. And not in the good badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there,

as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991

and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the

crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you

that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on

trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all

made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! So, Judge Kaufman having consulted with Roy Cohn

sentences both Rosenbergs to die telling them in court, I consider your crime worse than murder. 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 my opinion, the communist aggression in Korea with the resultant casualties exceeding

50,000 and who knows but millions more of innocent people may pay the price for your treason. Indeed, by your betrayal you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country. No one can say that we do not live in a constant state of tension. 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. 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. 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, you know, there's a lot going on there. Anyway, internationally the cause of the Rosenbergs became one of the first major anti-American movements of the

post-war era and remember fucking post-World War II, basically everybody likes the United States, like very popular country worldwide because, you know, the Nazis and we're not the Nazis and a lot of refugees had come here 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. Those were our golden days. For sure. Industry booming. People happy. Yeah, people are pretty happy with us. The fact that we

condemned the Rosenbergs to execution pisses off a lot of people and again starts like one of the first international anti-American movements. A lot of people thought they were innocent and those who didn't feel they were innocent at least felt that the punishment did not fit the crime. Marxist John Paul Sartre described the whole

conviction as a legal lynching which smears with blood a whole nation. By killing the Rosenbergs, you have quite simply tried to halt the progress of science by human sacrifice. Magic, witch hunts, autos defy, sacrifices. We are here getting to the point. Your country is sick

with fear. You are afraid of the shadow of your own bomb. Which is very much what's happening. We assume we will be the only ones to ever have it. When we have to fear it, we are like, oh god. This is what we were doing to the rest of the world.

Everybody else is evil. We have never done anything like and it continues today. So much fun. Our country is really stupid. The United States and President Eisenhower did not listen to international outrage.

There is huge protests in the United States too by the way. Thousands and thousands of people taking the streets. Nobody in the government listened. The Rosenbergs were executed on June 19, 1953. Julius's execution went smoothly enough, but the first several shocks failed to kill Ethel. The

executioner was forced to repeat the process so many times he nearly lit her on fire. Smoke was pouring out from her head. It was and remains a profoundly gross story and a lot of people at the time knew it was disgusting. Many of Roy Cohn's family were horrified about his actions. 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. Yikes. Yeah. So he knows what he's doing. Yeah, it's really great to shit on your

entire family and everything they stood for. Cool. Yeah. So there were of course people who deeply appreciated Cohn's tactics and motivations. One of them was J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI. The two struck up a fast friendship and would actually exchange Christmas gifts for more than 20

years. If you're looking at the kind of guy who Roy genuinely appreciates and vice versa. One reporter described the two as ideological soulmates. Cohn became the FBI. You don't want to be. You don't want to be J. Edgar Hoover's soulmate.

No, you do not. Real bad person. So Cohn became the FBI's unofficial liaison to the press and I'm going to quote here from the L.A. Times. Anything Hoover wanted to plant about someone, friend or foe, he directed to Cohn. 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. 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.

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. No, that is Roy Cohn, absolutely. That is just it's too much power. It's way too much power to just be like

I don't like you. L.A. Times, print me something up bad about this guy. Who cares about facts? Yeah, and what's fun about this episode is you know that Billy Joel, we didn't start the fire song? There's like five different people who are named in that song that are in this episode, including Roy Cohn.

He's right before one poor on. Yeah, also Walter Wynchell and Joe McCarthy, who we're about to talk about is in the song. So yeah, this is really we're really burning through that song here. 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. Another jam of a person. Another real hero. In short order, Roy became the senator's right hand man as the red scare kicked up into high gear. 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. It was established in 1938 by a congress fuck named Martin D's and at first it wasn't entirely a bad thing. There were a ton of Nazi organizers

and spies in the United States doing their best to coxlap American democracy and the D's committee, which turned into HUAC, helped to identify and punish some of these guys. So not entirely a bad thing if there's Nazis in your country. Probably ought to deal with that. They should leave right into the fuck now.

Yeah, you should probably have a committee who's responsible for being like, we gotta get these Nazis out of here, huh? Unfortunately. It does make me happy when you read a paragraph that I can tell you felt good about when you wrote it. Now, as is always the case with the US government, the committee's attention

soon turned away from the dangerous right-wing activists to left-wing activists. HUAC was at the forefront of an unhinged and fundamentally irrational investigation into Hollywood communists. 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 healthcare and shit. Yeah, it's very funny. And the list of people in Hollywood that HUAC investigates is just fundamentally absurd. Humphrey Bogert made the list, as did Clark Gable

and ten-year-old Shirley Temple. That bitch. Ten-year-old Shirley Temple. She's dancing with the blacks, okay? But she's a commie bitch, didn't you know? Yeah, because she's dancing with black people. Yeah, can't have that shit.

She's hiding all the secrets in each one of her individual curls. I'm trying to imagine like J.F. Muir who's listening to Shirley Temple's phone calls at 10. Is she talking to her grandmother or what? She's like, animal crackers and she's like, what's that code for?

What is that code for? She's got to break him out of the zoos! Yeah, it's very funny, because when I was a kid, Shirley Temple was the symbol of American innocence in the 1950s. 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. Jesus, Lord. It's so good. You'd have to be like, this is unhinged. If you're like one of three sane people in that room and you're like, what is going on?

Yeah, there was briefly a tiny amount of rationality crept into things during World War II, and I'm going to quote from a write-up in the Minnesota playlist about that. World War II put a stop to these activities. But in 1947, the committee renewed their investigations. Joseph McCarthy,

a junior senator from Wisconsin, wanted to make a name for himself. And along with attorney Roy Cohn and senator, later president, Richard Nixon, the committee assured blacklisted individuals wouldn't work for years to come. Among those first listed, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Catherine Hepburn, Gail

Sondergaard, Melvin Douglas, and Frederick Marsh, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo was branded a communist but continued writing under different aliases and won Oscars. In 1956, when Robert Rich's name was called for the brave one, no one accepted the award, causing suspicions to rise. Trumbo, under the name

Sam Jackson, wrote the screenplay for Spartacus, which parallels the Huak hearings. Arthur Miller's play, The Crucibles, is an allegory of these witch hunts. 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.

Now, one particularly cowardly actor, Adolf Minjoo, cooperated with the committee, Huak and named names. The named people, yeah, yeah, and the named people were interrogated publicly, their careers were shattered, tin brave actors

and screenwriters protested this and refused to name names. They included Iva Bessie, Herman Bibberman, Lester Cole, Edward Demetrik, Ring Larder Jr., John Howard Larson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo. Huak punished these brave people by

subpoenaing the shit out of all of them and calling them before Congress. They were asked the now famous question, are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? All but one refused to answer the question. The House of Representatives held them in contempt. The Screen Actors Guild was forced to make its members swear

oaths of loyalty to the United States and members of the... What a crazy thing to do! Yeah, yeah. A union for workers have to... Yeah. Because unions are commie things. You gotta show that you're loyal to the United States if you're gonna be a union.

Yeah, it was great. Members of the Hollywood tin weren't allowed to resume their careers until they had sworn the oath and been cleared of any involvement in the Communist Party. Many of the Hollywood tin served one year prison sentences. It's not cool. It's a bad time that all this happens.

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. They brought us up a lot of really important talent and again

very unfairly targeted a lot of the Jewish population because that's what Hollywood is where the Jews hang out. Yeah, now Joe McCarthy was not a member of HUAC, although Richard Nixon was and he was a part of all of this, but the committee's tactics served as the blueprint

for what would come to be known to history as McCarthyism. By 1954 Senator McCarthy had launched his own crusade to ferret Communist agents and homosexuals out of the US government. Roy Cohn was his chief counsel. Now, does it seem weird to you that Cohn and McCarthy would use the power of the Senate

to hunt down both gays and Communists? Welcome to the Lavender Scare! Have you heard of the Lavender Scare? Oh, I know all about the Lavender Scare! Yeah, this is some good shit. And by good shit, I mean terrible shit. It's bad. 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. A few weeks later, the Deputy Undersecretary 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. This sparked mass panic within the government and a month later, congressional Republicans ordered an investigation into the homosexual problem and the infiltration of sexual perverts

in government. First of all, fuck you. Yeah, it's not great whenever large political parties start talking about Group X problem, you know? Not great. So, it just so happens that

Roy Cohn was super gay. Like, real, real, very much, very, very much gay. And Joe McCarthy also probably pretty gay. And, yeah. 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. Like, and at this point in time, he is gay. And so is probably McCarthy. 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. And Cohn and this guy travel around Europe looking for, like, in military bases 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. Yeah. Like, you know, they're partying and making love by night and banning books from, like, state department libraries

by day for being communists. Like, it's a very weird honeymoon that those two have. I really feel like this is a reaction of, like, if we don't get these other people, other people will come for us. Like, it's very much, like,

oh, we're not gay. Ha ha, them over there. And 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. Yeah. You know where to go, you know what to look for, you know the trade secrets, you know the lingo.

Like, it is beyond immoral to, like, not just your own people, but then these people who are already scared and afraid for their lives, he's just set them on fire. We'll talk about this a bit, too. 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, 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, they make jokes

about it, like, but they're also not punishing them and punishing other people, like, it's all, it's very bad. Because these are the gays we can trust. Yeah, these are... They don't like themselves. Yeah. 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. Yeah. 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. And at the same time, a lot

of people knew that he was gay while he was prosecuting other gay people. It's a very strange situation. Who was going to cross him, though, if you're the king of gossip and you know all of the things. Also, Roy Cohn being gay and the king of gossip is just, sir, sir, I can see you. What a ridiculous man.

Okay, Perez Hilton, like, calm down. Yeah. And one of the things that I want to talk about is 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 Joe 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. 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. So, again, people will make that argument and you can make it. There's also people who say that, no, no, no, McCarthy while he was a drunk was as much a driver

of this as Roy Cohn. 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. Yeah. 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 tail gunner 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. And I'm going to quote from a paper

titled The Power of Masculinity by Leila Talley now. 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. This began what is now called the lavender scare according to McCarthy, homosexuals presented

a huge security risk because of the ease with which they could be blackmailed. Therefore they could not be trusted to hold government jobs during a time when the threat of communist infiltration was so high. Although McCarthy was the man responsible for making the initial allegations, he was not the party responsible for rounding up the sexual

deviance and questioning them. Clyde Hoey was recruited to lead the investigation and according to the transcripts from the hearings, Roy Cohn was responsible for the majority of the questioning. Now obviously a lot of this questioning happened under apps, but thankfully some of the victims of the lavender scare later discussed what they

experienced 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. This is so you get an idea of what these interrogations were like. Like all civil service

employees working during the Eisenhower administration, Madeleine Tress, a 24 year old business economist at the department of commerce in Washington DC, was required to pass a security investigation as a condition for employment. At her position for only a few months on that April day in 1958, Madeleine 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. Miss Tress, one of the interrogators, then retorted, the commission has information that they were an admitted homosexual. What comment do you wish to make regarding this matter?

Shocked, Madeleine froze and refused to answer the question. 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. One of the men then sneered, how do you like having sex with women? You've never had it

good until you've had it from a man. Tormented into silence following the interrogation, she refused to sign a document admitting her alleged crime, and she quit the next time. 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 would like, you never had a good dick. So they don't want your dick. They never wanted it. They're not interested. Please leave them alone. It is again, nothing that happens in America should

be shocking to me, 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. Yeah, and it's

I want to be clear here, actually that took place in 1958, and Cohn was out of the government at that point because of stuff that will talk about that happens later, but that's the kind of, like number one, he set that into motion. It continues for decades after he leaves government, and that's what the interrogations were likely. 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. So the lavender scare was a calamity for the gay community in the 1950s, which had enough problems on its hands as it was, like 1950s already not an easy time to be gay. You don't need this shit.

Absolutely. Yeah, and it was also a calamity for a bunch of random straight people who got falsely accused. Hundreds of people lost their jobs, unknown but significant numbers committed suicide due to the public shame. The long term fall out 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. The number swung from 5,000 to 50,000 depending on who did the calculations. What? I mean, yeah, they think gay people breathe fire at this point, so we shouldn't be surprised. I was saying,

international fear if I've ever heard one of the idea that, like, none of them can keep a secret. Y'all are wild. Yeah. Leila 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.

A vice squad was created to investigate a possible link between homosexuality and communism, but the government never agreed that the two were related. The individuals let go this time due to their sexuality were officially fired because they were uncommonly susceptible to blackmail. 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 10-4-50. So, again, because of this shit that Cohen and McCarthy start, 20%

of the entire U.S. workforce gets interrogated for their possible homosexuality. 20%? Yes. Of the nation's workforce. Yeah. I mean, yeah. If you were out in the 50s,

I am, I have to stand and applaud your ability to stand in the face of that kind of oppression. I've lived through Prop 8 and through Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and I thought all of that was harrowing. I knew about the lavender scare.

I had no idea that it extended that far and affected that much of the entire population of the United States. Harrowing stuff, man. And this is the thing, you talk about Roy Cohen. He affected millions of people's lives. Yeah.

Just at this point, just because of this shit that he starts. Now, during this whole period, Roy was the government's main anti-gay attack dog. He was the guy Joe McCarthy sent in to carry out interrogations, possibly including a lot of interrogations. And Roy was not living the repressed life

of a self-hating gay man during this period. In fact, it was literally the opposite. He spent his nights out at a rotating carousel of gay bars. That made him the same as the gay men he spent his days. Not this fucker. Listen. Roy had sex with other men

every single day of his life, basically, and also never considered himself gay. Bro, first of all, everybody's a little gay. Everybody. Second of all, come on, my guy. Come on. 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. Sir, what is your definition of gay? What are you doing? He wouldn't even say that he was attracted to men. 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. Like, bro. He's into, he's into the whole like, I am positive he's the whole Roman idea of like, oh, it's more masculine to take a man. I know that he was a power top and it

was disturbing and disgusting. Yeah, it's not cool. I mean, it's not, it's fine to be a power top, but it's not cool to do what Roy's doing. And he would also tell anyone who asked that he was no pansy. He's a he's a terrible person. Like, again,

his friends said that he was the embodiment of human evil, but people who liked him like said that. So, yeah, quote, he'd tell anyone who asked that he was no pansy and by this quote, he meant that even though he engaged in sexual negotiations with men, he did not consider himself to be homosexual because he was

a better man than that. During the actual Senate hearings pertaining to the higher risk of employing homosexuals, Cohn was often condescendingly an accusatory in his line of questioning. McCarthy, who presided over most of the hearings, allowed this line of questioning with no objections. 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. Cohn also used the technique of frequently repeating Mr. Kohler's responses to him for emphasis and intimidation. By questioning Mr. Kohler in this manner, Cohn was able to easily confuse Kohler and made him appear to be

lying. He's a very abusive guy. He's a bitch-ass. Like fundamentally just an abusive bad person. 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. Yeah, you can. Sorry, there's two good documentaries. One is Where's My Roy Cohn? And one is Bully Coward Victim, I think is the name of it, which is another documentary about Roy Cohn.

We'll explain why it says that title. We'll explain why it says that title. There's actually a good reason behind why that title is what it is. But yeah, and they talk to at least one of those has an interview with one or two of his former sexual partners. I don't know if lovers is the right term

because I'm not sure that Roy Cohn is involved. 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 with the idea that if you're not falling in love with the people you're having sex with then that's not your... It's not gay. You're sexual.

I forget how we title these things. Then that makes you not gay. Which is, again, bananas. It's bananas. If you're attracted strictly to males and you do not want to have sex with females, that is just categorically you're gay. Yes. It's okay. It's fine. That's perfectly fine.

But if you are a man who exclusively has sex with other men every day of your life, you should... You're gay. It's fine, Roy. It would have been fine if you hadn't been such a piece of shit to everybody. The gay community, really, we love other gays, man. You could have been in here

getting in on this love fest. Well, not after the lavender scare. No, before that. You could have made a choice to be proud of who you were and been accepted and loved. And instead, you know, you made some choices. He made some choices. Now, obviously, the damage that Cone helped to do

during the lavender scare was incalculable. But you know what damage isn't incalculable? Uh-oh. Joelle. What kind? The damage done by our products and services to your wallet. Hey! A segue.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series,

Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI

spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way.

He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine,

I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev,

is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story

of 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you

that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science on a legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic

and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put

forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science that's why. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus.

It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. So, we're talking about Roy Cohn and the

horrible, horrible impact on his crimes on the world. 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.

They were spying not just to see who might be a red, but to see who might be gay. 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 the other in all of our communications with McCarthy, that they are the reasons

for everything that's snowed and uncovered about the NSA, that that ball got rolling because of McCarthy and Cohn. I don't know if that's a comprehensive case that you can make, but some people will argue it. Now, yeah, and again, it starts this avalanche

of paranoia with an American culture. 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, quote, a funny feeling, the fact that this one was single, and the fact that she had spent a lot of time in China.

So, yeah, 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. Like, that's the kind of shift that starts coming out at this point.

Thanks. Yeah, the whole of America goes kind of fucking bonkers. 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. It was usually Cohn's job

during, you know, interrogations in the committee to ask the question, are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? After the 1952 elections, the Republicans won control of both houses of Congress for the first time in a generation. McCarthy became the chairman of the Senate Committee

on Government Operations and its subcommittee for investigations. This allowed him to expand his search outside the State Department, to other government agencies, and to the broadcasting and defense industries. He started prowling around university faculties in the United Nations. Wherever McCarthy and Cohn went, their investigations

shattered careers and lives. What they didn't find were communist sleeper agents. The whole affair came to a disastrous conclusion in 1954, largely as a result of Roy Cohn's horniness. G. David Shine had been one of McCarthy's aides in Cohn's big time crush, and in fact,

probably both men had a big crush on David Shine, but he was definitely Cohn's boyfriend. This is the guy he was traveling around Europe with, David Shine. Now, unfortunately, Shine was drafted in 1953. 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. He first tried to convince them to commission his friend as an officer. The Army said no, because they didn't have any skills that would justify commissioning him. So Cohn demanded that Shine get extra leave so he could go home

and fuck Roy more often. Shockingly, the Army did not agree to do this either. Joe McCarthy was just as enraged as Cohn because, again, Joe was also kind of had the hots for this guy, 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 in the military. The investigation they carried out on the U.S. Army lasted two months, 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. Congressman joke about Roy Cohn being a fairy in, like, you can find video of this. Wow. Yeah, it's really something else. It's very gross.

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 you realize, like, oh, you persecuted thousands of gay men. Like, fuck you, Roy. I'm not going to feel bad for you. Did you? Well, and, like, you made it this sham.

Yeah. You're why this is happening. Exactly. Like, before, gays were just persecuted by the religious, and now they have to worry about their entire government coming down on their house. Fuck you forever, dude. Yeah. It's remarkable.

The Army spokesman referred to Cheyenne and Cohn snidely as warm personal friends, to which Roy responded, he is one of my many good friends, sir. Yes. The courtroom behind him laughed uneasily in response because they knew what was being discussed.

We have transcripts from the investigation, and I want to read from them now. It starts with one fellow, Mr. Adams, being questioned by the Army about a conversation he witnessed between Roy Cohn and Senator McCarthy. Mr. Adams. I said, let's talk about Cheyenne. That started a chain of events, an experience similar

to none which I have had in my life. Mr. Cohn became extremely agitated, became extremely abusive. He cursed me, and then Senator McCarthy. The abuse went in waves. He would be very abusive, and then it would kind of abate, and things would be friendly for a few moments. Everyone would eat a little bit more, and then it would start

in again. It just kept on. I was trying to catch a 130 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. So I stayed and missed my 130 train. I thought surely I would be able to get out of there by

230. The luncheon concluded, 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? Mr. Adams, what did he say? You said he was very abusive. Mr. Adams, he was extremely abusive. Mr. Jenkins asks, was or not

any obscene language used? Mr. Jenkins, just admit that and tell me what he did say which constituted abuse, in your opinion. Mr. Adams, I have stated before, sir, the tone of the voice has as much to do with abuse as the words. I do not remember the phrases. I do not remember the sentences, but I do remember

the violence. Mr. Jenkins, do you remember the subject, Mr. Adams? The subject was shine. 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. So his abuse was directed partly to me and partly to Senator McCarthy. As I say, it kind of came in waves. 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. And then about halfway through that, a little more

of the same. I missed the 230 train also. Does this violence continued? It was a remarkable thing. At first, Senator McCarthy seemed to be trying to conciliate. He seemed to be trying to conciliate Cohn and not to state anything contrary to what he had stated to me in the morning. But then he more or less lapsed into silence.

So I went down to Room 101. Mr. Cohn was there, and Mr. Carr was there. As I remember, we lunched together in the Senate cafeteria, and everything was peaceful. When we returned to Room 101, toward the later part of the conversation, I asked Cohn, I knew that 90% of all inductees ultimately faced overseas duty, and I knew that one day

we were going to face that problem with Mr. Cohn as to Shine. So I thought I would lay a little groundwork for future trouble, I guess. I asked him, what would happen if Shine got overseas duty? Mr. Jenkins, you mean you were breaking the news gently, Mr. Adams? Mr. Adams, yes, sir, that is right. I asked him, what would happen if Shine got

overseas duty? He responded with vigor and force. Stevens is through as secretary of the army. I said, oh, Roy, something to this effect. Oh, Roy, don't say that. Come on, really. What is going to happen if Shine receives overseas duty? Cohn responded with even more force.

We will wreck the army. Oh, okay. So there's a lot there. America said, skirt, what? You can't turn the same vigor you used on communists and throwing at the army, Roy. No. You've lost

sight of the goal here. You've lost sight of the goal and also have gone after the one thing that Americans actually consider sacred, which is our army. And like, yeah, that's not going to end well for you, Roy. You can go after a bunch of powerless gay people and accuse communists, if you attack the army, things are going to end

badly. 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? And that transcript makes me think that the people saying it was Roy have a point because that is textbook

abusive behavior. 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, and then he starts screaming. You get ice cream. Yeah, and you get ice cream. And, like, he's doing that thing that abusive people do, like abusive partners do. 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. 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. And then everything will be nice and normal, and we'll be friends again. And then if you say anything that's it, like... Yeah, and you see the chaos and confusion that caused for this poor guy, who's like, I couldn't even tell you what was being said, I just

know I was afraid. I was just struck by the violence, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, woof, woof. I can't feel bad for McCarthy because you allowed yourself to be the boy. No, no, no, fuck Joe McCarthy. What a way to hand your career over to.

What are 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. But that's a very nuanced and, like, complicated understanding of an abusive personality that he just laid out to Congress.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And to be able to, like, I feel like a lot of men would have been like, oh, well, he was just yelling and, you know, guys get sometimes. But for him to be like, nope, it was dangerous, and so I put myself in the line of danger to try to protect this other person.

I couldn't leave McCarthy alone with him. Oh, man, that's a really big thing to do, I think. The thing that Adams recognizes that I most impressed with is the understanding that, like, no, it doesn't matter what he said. It's the way he said it. It's the violence with

which he said it that was the disturbing thing. That's a really kind of an impressive recognition for a 50s dude, you know? Absolutely. Anyway, that's episode one of Roy Cohn. Wow.

Fun guy. No, bitch. 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. We'll be talking about trains. We'll be talking

about Reagan. It's going to be great. It's going to be terrible. We're going to be talking about trains. Like choo choo? Lots of trains. It's the toy trains. They're coming back. He comes from train money. Toy train money. Yeah. Joel, do you have anything you want to plug?

Not really. I'm Joel Monique. You can find me all over the internet at Joel Monique. That's J-O-E-L-L-E-M-O-N-I-Q-U-E. If you're not following her, what the fuck? Get into my Beyonce love. Beyonce? That's the end of the episode.

Joel, thank you for talking with me about Roy Cohn, a fun guy who's super fun. Robert, thank you for breaking it down. Please, please. I really feel like you're going to appreciate the animated musical cartoon they did over at

The Real Fight. Yes. And also, listeners, go watch it. It's on YouTube. 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. And that's always fun. Yeah. Robert, do you have anything you want to plug?

No, I've never done anything in my entire life. Other than this exact episode of this podcast, it's my only completed work. Oh, oh, Upright. Yeah, I also did one other thing. It's a podcast about the protests, the VLM movement,

and the fighting with right-wing fascist paramilitaries in Portland over the summer and in autumn of 2020. It's called Uprising a Guide from Portland. Check it out. It'll be out by the time this episode drops. Yeah. Absolutely vital listening.

Check it out. I can't wait. All right. That's episode one. Yep. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests.

It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the I Heart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price?

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know. Because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut

who found himself stuck in space and brought him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

wherever you get your podcasts.