Everybody, it seems, knew Roy Cohn: Barbara Walters, Aristotle Onassis, George Steinbrenner, Andy Warhol, William F. Buckley Jr., mayors and governors and presidents and white-shoe lawyers and mob bosses. As long as he had his money and his health, he could move freely about Manhattan society—showing off beautiful women he had no interest in, sexual or otherwise, as decorations; hosting clients in his home office clad in his bathrobe, in front of his collection of stuffed frogs; readily supplying eager journalists with quotes embracing his Machiavellian reputation; sabotaging politicians with salacious rumors and gleefully taking credit for the results.
Everyone, including Tyrnauer’s interviewees, knew he was a monster, but this doesn’t seem to have prevented them from socializing with him. They call Cohn evil, immoral, a self-hating Jew, a hypocrite, and worse, and they want to make sure history records him as such, but it’s pretty clear they also found him mesmerizing company. And this is the problem when Everybody Knows. Why did it take 30 years to disbar Cohn over ethics violations happening in plain sight the whole time? Why did journalists keep putting this shameless crook on TV? Why didn’t mob ties disqualify him from high society?
Most likely, because our entire culture is obsessed with charismatic sociopaths. We invite them to our parties, we root for them on prestige dramas and reality TV shows, and we’ve (sort of) elected one of them to be the leader of the free world, and by extension the protagonist of our national story. It’s all well and good to call Roy Cohn evil, but the movie is still about him, isn’t it? It’s still his face we see in frame after frame, his voice we hear taunting us again and again, his crimes and his legacy that obsess us, his parents and troubled childhood that invite speculation. In one interview, Cohn says every bad thing anyone said about him was good for bringing in business, and it’s hard to see why this documentary would have struck him any different.
Performing evil works because our institutions are designed to reward it. Cohn’s evil was extremely lucrative, and even though it eventually caught up with him, the presence of a Cohn disciple in the Oval Office is one hell of a last laugh. Tyrnauer wants to indict Cohn and the politicians and media elites who follow his example, and he has all the material he needs to succeed, but he stops short of fully indicting the environment that produced Cohn. Structural evil is a lot harder to capture on film; it’s rarely so flamboyant.