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Cohn prepared the indictment of Owen Lattimore on charges of perjury, but his career in the Justice Department is best remembered for his testimony before a House subcommittee investigating the State and Justice Departments' foot-dragging in the investigation of U.S. Communists on the United Nations staff. Cohn blandly implied that most of his bosses had opposed him on making public the grand jury's findings. The subcommittee report exonerated Attorney General McGranery and his staff and noted, with an acuity remarkable in a public document: "Cohn left [the subcommittee] with the impression that he is an extremely bright young man, aggressive in the performance of his duties and probably not free from the pressures of personal ambition."
Cohn stayed in the Justice Department through the Truman Administration. Attorney General Herbert Brownell ignored his gambits for a better job there, so he turned to his many admirers on Capitol Hill. On January 14, 1953, Roy Cohn resigned from Justice to become chief counsel to McCarthy's subcommittee, at $11,700 a year.
Ingredient for Palship. Cohn's important Manhattan legal friends had been telling him for a long time that he should meet young David Schine, the son of J. Myer Schine, multimillionaire owner of a string of hotels and theaters. Cohn's old boss, Irving Saypol, got Dave and Roy together at a luncheon in a restaurant in downtown Manhattan in 1952. Dave Schine turned out to be a pleasant, articulate young man with the build and features of a junior-grade Greek god. The two 25-year-olds were soon cutting a wide swath through Manhattan's best restaurants and nightclubs. Dave had plenty of money (and, for that matter, Roy was drawing down $20,000 a year from a private law partnership, in addition to his salary). More important to their palship, Dave wanted to be a Communist investigator, and he regarded Roy as just about the smartest man he ever knew.
The Schine family had put Dave through the best of Eastern schools (Fessenden to Andover to Harvard), where he got good grades—even though he irritated his schoolmates by his Cadillac standard of living and his bandleader's mannerisms. His Harvard career was interrupted by a hitch in the seagoing Army Transport Service. Soon after graduation (class of '49), Dave was installed as president of Schine Hotels, Inc., although his father kept tight control of the operations. Dave distinguished himself by writing a remarkably succinct pamphlet, Definition of Communism, and father Schine saw to it that copies were as prominent in Schine hotel rooms as the Gideon Bible.
Junketeering Gumshoes. In February 1953, Dave went to work for Roy on the McCarthy committee staff as an unpaid consultant on psychological warfare. Two months later, the team of Cohn & Schine got top billing on two continents as they breezed through U.S. Information Service posts in Europe in 18 days, "to see if there's waste and mismanagement and to pin down responsibility," as Roy put it.