The Seven Angels In America

The 1980 Republican presidential primary became known as Reagan and the seven dwarves. With the most exciting Republican primary in the twentieth century afoot, Roy Cohn found himself blackballed. He went down the list, first Reagan, then Bush, and then Dole, none of them would take his calls. Eventually he made his way down all seven candidates with the same result.

A teenager in a very politically active family, we ate this stuff for breakfast. Daddy had broken with Carter over some chamber business, so we were eying the Republican field like fat boys at Golden Corral.

William F Buckley hated homosexuals, of whom Cohn was allegedly one, so he relished seeing his former same-team adversary squirm. Gore Vidal was out himself, but walked a very fine line with regards to outing other gay men. He taunted Cohn with the knowledge that he knew, though, with an absolutely evil grin. Vidal drank too much and got far too much pleasure out of taunting his political adversaries. I learned a lot from him.

Cohn had been a strong supporter of Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon. Nobody in the Republican party wanted anything to do with either. Reagan famously said, "There's a new sheriff in town.". Cohn found himself in the second half of the seventies and the first half of the eighties, back in New York, trying to build a new coalition and a new career.

Besides the mob guys and other outcasts, Cohn befriended two new players: Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump. Murdoch wanted an audience with Ronald Reagan. Cohn couldn't provide, but Pat Buchanan could. That meeting changed both American Journalism and American politics, and not for the better.

I can't tell you what attracted Cohn to Trump. There is a lot of speculation. Cohn had a reputation for seducing his proteges, or making that a condition of their advancement. No one has yet made a credible claim about that with Trump and Cohn. Would either of them have done it? I dunno, man, both have ideas about sexuality very different from my own.

Trump was from Queens, Cohn was from the Bronx. They were both trying to make waves in Manhattan where it's difficult to make waves. Maybe Cohn saw something of himself in Trump. That can be enough to take a guy on as protege.

Trump's father was a slumlord. There's no polite way to put that. On the verge of bankruptcy, Cohn agreed to represent the senior Trump in court as a favor to Donald. Trump's next move was to buy a hotel on Times Square in the days when Times Square was mainly known for porn theatres and peep shows. The only way to make the deal was if Trump got a tax deferment, which nobody wanted to give him, until one day, they did. Accusations that Cohn pulled one of his patented blackmails to make it happen were rampant.

Cohn learned how to Blackmail from J Edgar Hoover. We've had some pretty good heads of the FBI and some pretty bad ones. The current one might be nuts. The last one might get arrested for arranging seashells dangerously.

Whatever could have happened with Roy Cohn didn't happen because he contracted AIDS before there was a reliable treatment for it.

One of my favorite plays, maybe my most favorite play, is Angels In America. Like The Ring opera, it comes in parts. Part of what I love about it is that it's about the years when I was coming of age. The protagonist would be just a few years older than me. The antagonist actually isn't Cohn, it's the disease, but more than the disease, human mortality itself.

Angels is an expensive and complicated play to put on. I used to drop really big hints that I wanted to see Larry Wells play Cohn. He was kind of into it, but nobody else was. Putting on regional theater in a place like Jackson makes it tricky when choosing a season. Maybe Ole Mississippi or Southern will pick it up, but under the current climate, they may be keeping their head down.

I don't hate Roy Cohn or Donald Trump. I feel like I understand them. That's kind of the problem, I understand them.

In a world full of Roy Cohens, be a Gore Vidal. You don't have to drink so much, but you might like it. There are a lot of days when I wish I still got drunk every night.

America can be so much greater than it is right now, which is ironic if you consider their made in China hats. This isn't the worst it's ever been. 1860 still holds that distinction. The world seemed so optimistic in 1980. I'd like to recapture some of that.