Roy Cohn's Last Lesson

How a thirteen-year apprenticeship under McCarthy's chief counsel became the blueprint for a word doing very different work seventy years later.

One of the things I love most about research is that it rarely takes you exactly where you expect to go. I went looking for a rhetorical pattern and found a biography instead.

I had been tracking something simple at first: how often, and how casually, Donald Trump has started reaching for the word “communist” again.

Not “socialist.” Not “radical left.” Communist, specifically, applied to open borders, bail reform, transgender healthcare, opposition to voter identification, health-insurance policy, a sitting Minnesota governor and, in the same breath, to the very Democratic Party he also claims is secretly in the pocket of private insurers.

I wanted to know whether this was new. I wanted to determine whether it was strategic.

I did not expect to end up reading about a disbarred lawyer who died in 1986.

But that is where the thread led.

Before following it, it helps to establish what communism actually is.