National Affairs: The Self-Inflated Target

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"A Great Treat." "Roy has deserved a spanking since he was a child," says an old friend of the Cohn family, "but I doubt if he ever got one in his whole life." Roy's father, Albert Cohn, is a judge in the appellate division of the New York State Supreme Court, a onetime protege of the late Boss Ed Flynn, and a power in the Democratic Party. In his teens, Roy would amaze his friends by putting in a spur-of-the-moment telephone call to the mayor's office and talking briefly to "Bill" (O'Dwyer). Once, when Roy was invited to go along on an excursion supervised by the father of one of his chums, the father got a telephone call from Roy's mother. "You're in for a great treat," she said. "Roy's going with you. He's such a smart boy and knows so much about so many things. I'm sure you'll get a lot of pleasure out of him and probably learn a lot from him, too."

Roy was smart enough to get his degree at Columbia Law School at 20; his political connections got him a job as clerktypist ($1,765 a year) in the office of the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York while he champed around waiting to turn 21 so he could be admitted to the bar. On the day he was admitted—May 27, 1948—he was sworn in as an assistant U.S. attorney ($3,397 a year), He soon became a specialist in subversive activities, performing ably and energetically as a staff lawyer on such cases as the William Remington perjury trial, the Rosenberg trial and the big New York trial of top Communist leaders. He had also given auspicious evidence of a trait that still rankles his associates: contempt of all but the top boss. In 1950 his boss, U.S. Attorney Irving Saypol, made 23year-old Roy Cohn his confidential as sistant.

The Pressures of Ambition. In New York Roy learned the uses of publicity and began to build a personal claque of Hearst reporters and syndicated columnists (among them: George Sokolsky, Walter Winchell). Fittingly, the newspapers were tipped in advance that he was being transferred to Washington as a special assistant to Attorney General James McGranery in September 1952.

His first day on the job was memorable because: 1) he was ceremoniously sworn in right in the Attorney General's private office (actually no new oath was necessary ); 2) after one departmental press release announced his coming but neglected to mention his title, a second was issued to correct the oversight; 3) three Department of Justice juniors were evicted from their office so it could become Roy's private office; 4) he demanded a private cable address (denied) and a private telephone line to his old office in New York (also denied).