PECKERWOOD'S WEEKLY LUNOCRACY POST! Skeletons In The Closet for the Week of 10/13

The hour was indecent again—the kind that makes the world sound hollow.

Same lobby, same hum. I’d promised myself I’d never meet him twice, but ghosts don’t honor boundaries; they find a crack in your resolve and call it a doorway.

Roy Cohn was already sitting there. No announcement, no chill, just presence.

He looked freshly dead, which was impressive after forty years.

“Don’t act surprised,” he said. “You people keep invoking me. Every time someone shouts down a fact or sneers at empathy, I get the call.”

He smiled the way a courtroom smiles after a conviction.

“I told you,” he said, “I don’t haunt places. I haunt behavior.”

Cohn and Joseph McCarthy

He began as a prodigy of menace. At twenty-three, Cohn helped prosecute Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage. Evidence was thin, but spectacle was thick, and he made sure the execution went forward. Two dead parents were résumé material in 1950s Washington.

The Justice Department noticed his appetite for intimidation, and Senator Joseph McCarthy noticed his usefulness. As McCarthy’s chief counsel during the Red Scare, Cohn perfected the blend of legalism and sadism that made the hearings so intoxicating. He knew accusation was more efficient than proof, that shame televised better than justice.

He and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover were kindred creatures—two closeted men policing a nation’s secrets to protect their own. Hoover kept files; Cohn kept enemies. Together they turned secrecy into ideology. The message was simple: only the impure protest surveillance.

During the Lavender Scare—the purge of gay men and women from federal jobs—Cohn led inquisitions against the very people he resembled. He wasn’t tormented by contradiction; he was energized by it. Psychopaths don’t suffer cognitive dissonance; they weaponize it.

To watch Cohn at work was to see a man discovering that cruelty is a form of charisma. He learned that intimidation, if performed with wit, reads as authority.

When McCarthy imploded and Hoover’s favor cooled, Cohn reinvented himself in New York, where ethics were provincial and money eternal.

He became the city’s premier fixer—a lawyer who didn’t write contracts so much as broker impunity. Mobsters, developers, politicians, socialites: everyone wanted Roy’s number, no one wanted it in writing.

Studio 54 adored him. He stood among the sequined faithful, a federal ghost turned celebrity. The same man who’d once purged “deviants” now toasted them, though never as equals. Power, not pleasure, was the addiction.

By the 1980s he was disbarred for perjury, tax evasion, and theft from clients. He called it politics. When AIDS began killing his circle, he denied having it—claimed liver cancer, denied weakness to the end. His body failed long before his certainty did.

The Doctrine

By then Cohn had refined his worldview into rules simple enough to teach:

1. Never apologize. Contrition is confession.

2. Attack the accuser. Loudness is truth.

3. Deny the evidence, destroy the witness.

4. Turn scandal into theater; audiences forget the plot.

He called it survival. It was, in fact, a blueprint.

Roger Stone adopted the style—expensive suits, gleeful contempt, political warfare as cabaret.

45/47 absorbed the psychology. Cohn taught him that aggression is a costume for emptiness, that volume erases substance, that shame is a hobby of the weak. You need to be a killer, he told him. 45/47 listened.

Through them, Cohn’s ethic metastasized into the Republican bloodstream:

• Never retreat.

• Victimize the press.

• Equate cruelty with authenticity.

• Treat empathy as subversion.

It was the opposite of conservatism; it was performance nihilism wrapped in a flag.

45/47 and Roy Cohn

Cohn didn’t just mentor men; he mentored a method.

He proved that if you keep the fight louder than the facts, facts become optional.

Every televised outrage since—the denialism, the moral inversion, the carnival of grievance—runs on his current.

He leaned back in the lobby chair, pleased with himself.

“I told you,” he said, “I’m not history. I’m infrastructure.”

He looked toward the glass doors, where dawn was trying too hard.

“You’ll see me again,” he said, “every time you mistake noise for strength.”

Then he was gone—leaving the faint smell of cologne and contempt, the lobby humming its patriotic dirge: attack, deny, win.

Roy Cohn died in 1986, disbarred and terminal, insisting he was fine.

He left behind no apology, only a method.

His creed endures wherever power mistakes cruelty for competence.

The Republic still does business with his ghost.

photos:Getty, Mariette Pathy Allen/Altimeter Films, Everett/Rex/Shutterstock