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 Jose...

He still lingers here. You can smell him before you hear him — that ghostly musk of flop sweat, Old Spice, and moral rot baked into the wallpaper of the West Wing. Richard Milhous Nixon, spectral and swollen with grievance, still pacing the Oval Office at 3 a.m., muttering about “the press” and “the Jews” and the long con of American virtue. The lights flicker when he’s near. The portraits turn their faces toward the wall. Even Andrew Jackson won’t look at him. Every administration since has pretended they buried him, but Nixon never went underground — he went systemic. His ghost isn’t haunting Washington; he is Washington. He’s the unkillable architecture of paranoia that powers the republic now — the data-mining, the black budgets, the men who believe the law is just a suggestion until someone leaks it. The only thing that’s changed since Watergate is that now, the bugs are in our pockets and we pay monthly for the privilege. He materialized to me last night, just after midnight, whe...