The Autobiography of Roy Cohn

Candidly reveals Cohn's career as a lawyer--including his part in the conviction of the Rosenbergs, his links to crime figures and battles with prominent politicos, and the secret life-long contradiction between his public policy and his private life

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.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From a 20-year acquaintanceship and a series of interviews shortly before Cohn's death in 1986, New York journalist Zion has fashioned a boffo "autobiography." Although the final portions are Zion on Cohn, most of the book is told in Cohn's own voice. From his youth in the Bronx, his prosecution of the Rosenbergs, his role in the McCarthy-Army hearings, his multiple indictments in the 1960s, to his later years as legal gunslinger extraordinaire, Cohn tells all in his characteristic slam-bang style. Zion, while clearly in awe of Cohn's power, pulls no punches in discussing his subject's gay lifestyle and death from AIDSboth of which Cohn denied to the end. Fascinating. Jack Ray, Loyola/Notre Dame Lib., Baltimore
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.