National Affairs: The Defendant

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When Roy Cohn took the witness stand, Committee Counsel Ray Jenkins asked: "You are not a defendant lawyer, I take it. You are a prosecutor, is that right?" The question enabled Cohn to set the tone of his testimony. "I have been, up until this proceeding, sir," he said. Thereafter, he worked hard to keep his famous temper in check, to play the part of injured innocence. "We did not make charges," he insisted. "We told what the facts were as we saw them."

The witness said that he had no animosity for Secretary Stevens, "a fine, gentlemanly, courteous person." He took quite a different attitude toward John Adams, implying contemptuously that Adams had made the great mistake of trying to outwit Cohn.

Yes, said Cohn, Adams had "made the suggestion that if we could sort of spread around the investigation to include other parts of the military ... it would not look so bad for the people in the Army . . . There was no great dramatic thing about saying, 'Stop the investigation about us and go ahead and blow up the Navy and the Air Force.' "

Jenkins asked if Adams was being facetious or dead serious. Replied Cohn, "Sir, it is very difficult for me to try to read Mr. Adams' mind or chart his emotional position at that particular moment."

Three times, Adams had tried to shift the probe from the Army to other services, Cohn testified, and had threatened to get Private G. David Schine sent overseas. "Mr. Adams said we had not been cooperating with him and that he was going to show some examples of noncooperation, too, and how would we like it if Schine were ordered overseas."

Cohn drove his sharpest verbal barb at Adams when telling about Adams' telephone call to ask why Cohn had been ducking him. "I told Mr. Adams," Cohn calmly related, "I believed that he had been thoroughly dishonest. He asked me what I meant ... I told him that he had directly or indirectly made a blackmail threat."

Cohn admitted being angry during the incident at Fort Monmouth when Stevens refused him admission to the radar laboratory. He was asked if he had said: "This is it. This is war with the Army. We will investigate the heck out of you." Cohn could not recall saying that. He said: "I come pretty close to denying [having made the remark, but] I don't have the remotest idea of all I said."