George W. Bush Charlton Heston Rudolph Giuliani John McCain Alan Keyes Pat Buchanan Ronald Reagan George Bush Dan Quayle Richard Nixon Bob Dole Elizabeth Dole Jerry Falwell Pat Robertson Sun Myung Moon Jesse Helms Strom Thur

Roy Cohn

What a stinker this little punk was! First he sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair. Then he became chief counsel for Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, helping him run his little witch hunt against alleged Communist sympathizers in the Government during the early 1950s.

In his later years, Roy was superlawyer for the rich and powerful. He had important connections and always seemed to elude the law. The IRS audited him twenty years in a row, but they could never get him.

It was not until weeks before his death in 1986 that he was finally prohibited from practicing law in New York State. He was disbarred for unethical, unprofessional and reprehensible conduct. In one case, he had gone to the hospital room of a dying multimillionaire and tricked him into signing a codicil that made Roy the executor of his will.

Many have said it was Roy's misbehavior that helped bring McCarthy's downfall. Roy was obsessed with an attractive young male associate with whom he was rumored to be sleeping. The two young guys partied hard, hitting the nightclub circuit in New York and Paris. But then his friend got drafted into the Army, so Roy, with McCarthy's help, tried to get him a commission.

When it was denied, Roy declared war on the Army. He did acquire a few privileges for his friend, including nightly passes while he was in basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey. But he and McCarthy were later exposed for their abuse of power in the televised Army-McCarthy hearings. Four months later, the Senate censured McCarthy.

Roy clearly had a thing for the boys, although he denied it and often made nasty anti-gay remarks in public.

But in the 1970s and 1980s, he was seen frolicking in the gay nightclubs of New York. He surrounded himself with kept boys and male prostitutes. But some who knew him said that although he had sex with men, he didn't think that made him gay. He thought you couldn't be tough and courageous and gay at the same time. Even when dying of AIDS in 1986, he remained in total denial.

Since his death, Roy has been the subject of an HBO movie, Citizen Cohn, starring James Woods, and a principal character in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America.

Needless to say, Roy wasn't one of the angels.