Devils in America

Toward the end of his biography of Roy Cohn, written with his wife, Susan Goldmark, Kai Bird quotes the editor and publisher Jason Epstein: “In a way, he’s not real, he has no substance.” On the other hand, a note to the list of characters for Tony Kushner’s landmark drama Angels in America (1991), written in the immediate aftermath of Cohn’s death, reads: “The character Roy M. Cohn is based on the late Roy M. Cohn (1927–1986), who was all too real.” At once not quite real and all too real, Cohn has the uncanny presence of a ghoul or a fiend. He is a creature from the depths of the American political imagination, too pure in his utter malignity to be entirely credible, too potent in his continuing consequence to be safely interred in the past.Just after the opening credits of the 1992 film Citizen Cohn, based on Nicholas von Hoffman’s biography of the same name, a figure whose face we do not see is gasping for breath on a hospital bed. The nurse asks, “Who is this guy? The White House called again last night.” A young doctor chips in, “The president wanted to know what they can do for him.” The cynical senior doctor responds, “Wanted to make sure he was dead.” James Woods’s cadaver...