Tag: Roy Cohen

‘Roy Cohn’ filmmaker on her new HBO doc about Trump’s mentor — and the man who killed her grandparents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

AlterNet logoFilmmaker Ivy Meeropol has already made a documentary about her family connection to history. As anyone acquainted with 20th-century radical history will already recognize, she is the granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the supposed “atom spies” executed by the federal government in 1953. Meeropol’s 2004 HBO film “Heir to an Execution” provides a moving, intimate study of that event and its personal and political legacy — although it does not and could not settle the question of the Rosenbergs’ guilt or the fairness of their sentence, which remains contested to this day.

(Full disclosure, although I don’t think it’s relevant to this story: Both my mother and stepfather were American Communists, and my stepfather, Mel Fiske, knew Abel and Anne Meeropol, who adopted the Rosenbergs’ children, including Ivy Meeropol’s father, after their parents were electrocuted. So, yeah, if you want an entirely neutral account of these events, go elsewhere.)

Meeropol’s new film uses her grandparents’ execution as an inciting event, so to speak, but it’s only indirectly about them and about the combustible collision of Communism and anti-Communism in mid-century America. “Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn,” which premieres on HBO this week, is instead about one of the most notorious Americans of the last century — the man who sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair, who served as Sen. Joe McCarthy’s right-hand man, and who groomed and nurtured a young New York real estate developer named Donald Trump, seeing in the callow womanizer and tabloid celebrity the seeds of greater things. Continue reading.

Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn exposed in new documentary that contains ominous warning about the president’s downfall

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump has long looked at infamous attorney Roy Cohn as his political mentor, and at one point during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation demanded that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions act more like Cohn in assertively defending him.

A new documentary called “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” exposes the history of Trump’s hero, who first became famous during Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s hearings about purported communist infiltration of the United States government in the 1950s.

Politico senior staff writer Michael Kruse has written up a review of the documentary in which he explains why Trump obviously finds Cohn so appealing: For decades he got away with remorselessly breaking the law.

View the complete September 19 article by Brad Reed from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

Roy Cohn

NOTE:  There have been a lot of references to Roy Cohn recently, including Donald Trump wanting a Roy Cohn as Attorney General of the United States, not respecting the fact that the Attorney General should be the American people’s attorney rather than a partisan loyal to a person. Here’s information on Mr. Cohn’s background:

Roy Marcus Cohn (1927–1986) is best known for his work as the chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin Republican whose interrogations of alleged communists during the cold war “red scare” contributed to a chilling effect on freedom of speech and freedom of association in the 1950s.

Cohn became knows for prosecuting people with alleged ties to Communists

Cohn, the only child of a New York judge, earned his law degree from Columbia University at the age of 20. In his first job, working for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, he quickly made a name for himself prosecuting cases of people with alleged ties to the Communist Party. Continue reading “Roy Cohn”