Citizen Nick

SPOTLIGHT

No way Roy Cohn would have died in 1986 if he'd known that journalist Nicholas von Hoffman would serve as his biographer. A longtime leftist who never went to college and learned his politics as a social activist on the streets of Chicago, chronicler of the civil-rights movement and other left-wing conspiracies for the Chicago Daily News and The Washington Post, author of seven political books, all of them liberal: von Hoffman would seem nothing less than the late lawyer's ideological arch-enemy. Which is, of course, why the publishing world awaits with such glee the arrival this month of Citizen Cohn (not to be confused with a Cohn autobiography co-written with former New York T/mesman Sidney Zion). Von Hoffman promises Big Surprises, but also an objective book: "Clio has rights of her own. And when you become an acolyte in that temple, you have to put aside certain personal passions." Cohn, he found, played a largely unseen role in establishing the levers of national security in the modem American state. "He was also a lawyer at a time when the lawyers came to power. And a homosexual—the best-known outside the theater world—when views of homosexuality were changing." For all that, and the grim images of a young attorney prosecuting the Rosenbergs and counseling Senator Joe McCarthy at HUAC hearings, von Hoffman feels Roy Cohn is "one of those guys who'll stand or fall in time depending entirely on what happens to him between the pages of a book. If I have done a really good job, he'll now go into the roster of twentieth-century figures who count. Otherwise, he may just disappear." For Cohn, that might have meant an even greater indignity than having von Hoffman as his Boswell: being obliged to thank him for it.

MICHAEL SHNAYERSON