From the time, at 26, when he exploded into the nation's headlines as chief staff inquisitor for Senator Joe McCarthy, Lawyer Roy Marcus Cohn has looked like a young fellow who would certainly go places. He still does.
But last week, after a federal grand jury in Manhattan socked him with an eight-count indictment, it appeared that where Cohn, now 36, might go was into a federal penitentiary.
The son of a Democratic New York state judge, precocious Roy Cohn graduated from Columbia University's Law School at 20 (a year before he was eligible to enter the state bar), investigated Communists for the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan, became a special assistant to Harry Truman's U.S. Attorney General James McGranery, and in 1953 went over to the staff of Joe McCarthy's Senate Investigating Subcommittee.
Storm of Snarls. For the next 18 months, Cohn was at the center of one of the stormiest, shrillest periods of U.S. political history. Few who ever saw or heard him will forget the malevolent, heavy-lidded stare with which he pinioned witnesses; the adenoidal snarl as he closed in for the kill against a suspected Communist (the McCarthy Committee caught precious few, if any); the public obsequiousness to Senator Joe; the arrogant impatience toward Democratic committee members.
Cohn was the sort that many people love to loathe. Among the legion of enemies he made in those days was the counsel to the Democratic minority on the McCarthy Committee—another youngster, named Bobby Kennedy. After one committee hearing, Cohn and Kennedy almost came to blows right before television's eye; another time, Kennedy threatened to quit his job unless Cohn toned down his ways.
But unlikable as Cohn may have seemed, he was admired by many Americans as a relentless, even ruthless, anti-Communist investigator. He certainly had no stronger advocate than McCarthy, who called him "the most brilliant young fellow I've ever met."
It was, therefore, ironical that Cohn did so much to bring about McCarthy's eventual downfall. The way it came about was that Cohn had a bosom buddy, G. David Schine, the wealthy, not-too-smart son of a hotel-chain owner. Cohn sponsored Schine as an unpaid McCarthy staff investigator. Together, the two went to Europe on a Keystone Cops binge, searching for Communism and mismanagement in U.S. Information Service offices abroad. Soon after their return, Schine made the mistake of getting drafted as a buck private into the U.S. Army. Cohn tried to crowbar the Army into granting Schine special privileges, and out of that effort came the famed Army-McCarthy hearings. As an indirect result of those hearings, Cohn was forced to resign from his committee post and McCarthy was officially condemned by the Senate. After that, McCarthy never wielded much influence.