[On June 9th, 1954 laywer
Joseph Welch famously asked Senator Joseph McCarthy, “Have
you no sense of decency?” So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of
contexts for McCarthyism, leading up to a weekend post on that moment and
historical turning points!]
On the figure
who embodies American hypocrisies—and perhaps something more.
Great American Hypocrites is the title of one of Glenn
Greenwald’s books, a work that focused explicitly on hypocrisies at the
core of the 21st century Republican Party. While I certainly
agree with Greenwald’s premise and his specific examples, and similarly feel
that hypocrisy has become a core ingredient of a party’s entire political
platform in a way that it has perhaps never before been, I would also emphasize
just how strong a role hypocrisy has played in American narratives throughout
our existence. That argument could go back, for example, to the official seal of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony, which depicted a Native American begging
prospective arrivals to “Come over and help us”: the seal reveals not only a
core hypocrisy in the Puritans’ perspectives, since (as William
Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation
and many others documents demonstrate) the local Native tribes quickly (well
before this seal’s creation) and thoroughly became the Puritans’ greatest
perceived obstacle to overcome on the path to building their city on a hill;
but also another and more subtle hypocrisy in their experiences, since without
the early aid of local Native
Americans such as Squanto (as Bradford does admit, to his credit) the
Plymouth colony (and thus likely the Puritan settlements that followed it)
would almost certainly have failed.
I could probably maintain a daily
blog on such American hypocrisies and not run out of examples any time soon,
but for this week’s series I wanted to focus on a figure whose public and
personal lives and identities perhaps most fully embody (in every sense) these
national hypocrisies: Roy
Cohn (1927-1986). Cohn rose to prominence in political and public life as
one of Senator
Joseph McCarthy’s nastiest attack dogs, a lawyer who seemingly thrived on
ferreting out hidden and secret (and, as ever in the McCarthy era, dubious at
best) details of the lives of government employees and other McCarthy targets
and helping expose them for a paranoid and fearful nation. As was generally the
case in the anti-Communist witch hunts, Cohn was never averse to directly
linking homosexuality
and other forms of “deviant” behavior to Communist leanings, since, in this
perspective, one kind of secret life was likely to echo and reveal others. It
was only decades later, when Cohn
was publicly diagnosed in the 1980s with the decade’s newest and most
threatening disease, AIDS, that the truth of Cohn’s own very secret (he had
been famously linked to various famous women over the years) gay identity was
similarly revealed. While it is of course both unfair and ultimately impossible
to speak with any authority about any other individual’s sexual and intimate
experiences and life, it’s perhaps least unfair to do so when that individual
has made identifying and attacking the sexual preferences of others part and
parcel of his career and legacy—after all, if Cohn believed, as both he and
McCarthy stated explicitly on numerous occasions, that being homosexual should
disqualify someone from taking part in political life in America, then his own
identity as a closeted gay political figure was ideologically as well as
personally hypocritical.
The truths of both individual
identity and communal existence, however, are really more complicated than that,
and while it’s tempting simply to point out Cohn’s hypocrisy, and more
saliently to use it to critique the profoundly destructive and illegitimate
roots of McCarthyism more broadly, there’s significant value in trying to
imagine and analyze this very complex and certainly very representative
American’s life and perspective. By far the best such imagined version of Cohn
produced to date, at least to my knowledge, would have to be that created by
playwright Tony Kushner in his two-part, Pulitzer-winning, innovative and
brilliant play Angels
in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1991-1993). Kushner’s
play has a lot to recommend it, including some of the most raw and powerful
depictions of AIDS yet produced in any genre or medium, but without question
one of its strongest elements is the characterization of Cohn, a vulgar,
violent, petty, power-hungry aging lawyer and Washington player who also
manages to be funny, charismatic, likeable, and ultimately even sympathetic as
he struggles with both the disease that he refuses to admit he has and the
ghosts of those (especially Ethel Rosenberg) to whose destruction he
contributed so centrally. In a play full of interesting characters and
show-stopping moments, Cohn is perhaps the linchpin and certainly the anti-hero
and villain and star, and I can’t think of a better description of national
hypocrisies more generally.
While I
earnestly hope we can find our way back to a politics that isn’t quite so
dominated by hypocritical positions and narratives, it’s hard to imagine an
America devoid entirely of Roy Cohns. And perhaps, Kushner’s play
intimates—despite the destructiveness that comes with such figures—we wouldn’t
want to. Next context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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