The Green Frogs of Roy Cohn
Dualities, Paradoxes and Ruthlessness in Issue #5 of our ongoing review series.
The Green Frogs of Roy Cohn
OVER THE PAST few weeks, we’ve been asked many times why we chose consilience as our central motto1. What follows is a quick exploration of that answer.
When E.O. Wilson first introduced the term, he described consilience as a unification of the varied strands of human knowledge. Sciences coming together with the humanities. Arts interlocking with economics. Politics with religion. He could have used the term synthesis, or coherence to describe his mission — but he chose consilience because it was a rare word, and “its rarity has preserved its precision”2.
We agree with Mr. Wilson, but there’s another layer to it.
For us, consilience is a perfect word because the word itself is like a tesseract — it is more than meets the eye. A higher dimensional object encased in a lower dimensional thing. It contains multitudes.
But what does this mean in practice? What does a consilient player look like?
It means engaging with the world through a lens that sees potential in paradox, mixing extreme perspectives into a singular whole. F. Scott Fitzgerald explained this dance perfectly:
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
So today we’d like to explore this notion of dualities, and why being a consilient player requires us to make peace with two opposing forces.
The necessary dualities are legion. Discipline and adaptability. Arrogance and humility. Frugality and greed. Fear and aggression. Kindness and ruthlessness. The people who have the ability to inhabit those dualities as states are insanely rare. But the people who can maintain them as TRAITS? One in a billion. The ultimate challenge is that you must tackle everything you mention in your memo, while also being at war with yourself.
— Advice given to Alix Pasquet (“Barriers to Scale Memo p. 5”)
ROY COHN REMAINS A FASCINATING FIGURE.
Many in America once knew him as the poster boy of the McCarthy hearings. Roy was a lawyer by training, and in the 50s he served as chief counsel to Joseph R. McCarthy in his Senate investigations into Communist influence in American life. This was a toxic period in history, and Cohn was at the centre of it all.
Somehow he escaped this turbulence, even though his detractors grew—and settled in New York to begin private practice. Here he’d begin playing the grand game of power, applying cut-throat D.C tactics to corporate America, and accruing favor amongst the elite as he played hardball. Ken Auletta describes his cynical nature on and off the courtroom as he represented deplorable clients (and won):
“In fact, [personal] convictions can get in the way. You're an advocate, not a judge. Your interest is form, not content—the process. Surprising the prosecution, entertaining the jury, flattering the judge, leaking information to the press, figuring out angles, coaching testimony, unearthing sympathetic witnesses, feigning anger or sorrow—they're all part of the game. Roy just plays the game harder, tougher, makes up his own rules.”
— Don’t Mess with Roy Cohn (Esquire, 1978)
Cohn had a devil’s roster of clients: several organized-crime bosses, New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. He also served as a lawyer for the New York City nightclub Studio 54, which catered to an exclusive clientele. Around the 70s he also entangled himself with the Trumps: defending Donald Trump and his father against charges of racial discrimination in their apartment rental units. This entanglement is part of Ali Abbasi’s new film ‘The Apprentice’ where Roy is played by Jeremy Strong.
For those that try and describe him, they struggle with words, often overwhelmed by the conflicting qualities he inhabits. He was both ‘ugly’ and ‘charismatic’. Extremely adversarial to opponents and loyal to his friends. In old clips he has the slick charm of a goblin, who knows how to craft the perfect moment on television. He was known to cultivate press relationships and feed them stories on major trials, with some reporters complementing his ability to spin: “He always made very good copy”.
In a review of some of the tales from his biographies, the New York Times once wrote:
“But then there are all the other tales, illustrating the bizarre juxtaposition of patriotism and perversity, of selflessness and self-indulgence. The man remains too complex to be contained by anecdotes or theories. A fascination remains, but the mind grows dizzy staring into the moral void.”
— 2 Works Trace the Turbulent Life of Roy Cohn (NYT, 1988)
Who really was Roy?
He was a man of dualities.
In the 1970s, he was once asked to represent someone who was fired for being gay. He refused, saying, “I believe homosexuals are a grave threat to our children and have no business polluting the schools of America.” All the while he himself led a closeted life, often seen with a cadre of young men around him in his office.
The most surprising part was a dash of ‘whimsy’ that he cultivated in his private life. His bedroom door had a Disneyland sign that said “Roy’s Room”, and inside you’d find rows upon rows of tiny green toy frogs, in plastic and plush.
Reconciling all these opposing forces in a single individual does not come easy. To others, Roy’s personality may have been in ‘disarray’ or in an anarchic state—but it worked for him. It allowed him to be the fixer that he was.
As analysts of the past, we have to understand and make peace with such dualities. Because figures like Roy Cohn’s are not gone, they are here, and they will emerge again. As A.O. Scott writes in his review of another Roy Cohn documentary, there is something to be said of ‘the moral compromise’ of the people who tolerated him:
“It’s not that any of the high-minded, good-doing, often professedly liberal people who invited him to parties and accepted his favors necessarily approved of him, any more than they approved of, say, Harvey Weinstein or Trump himself. But they kept him around, out of some combination of cynicism, self-interest and curiosity that remains an underexamined and toxic force in the history of our time.”
— ‘Where’s My Roy Cohn?’ Review: A Fixer’s Progress (NYT, 2019)
It’s not easy to say, but Roy Cohn was a consilient figure.
He was immoral—yes. But morality had nothing to do with how he wielded his craft of duality to make and break alliances, and move swiftly through the ranks of power. He knew the drivers behind human nature (cynicism, self-interest, curiosity) and leveraged them to full effect.
When asked about his portrayal of Roy Cohn and the issue of evil, Jeremy Strong quoted a passage from William Saroyan’s play: “The Time of Your Life”:
"Be the inferior of no man, or of any men be superior. Remember that every man is a variation of yourself. No man's guilt is not yours, nor is any man's innocence a thing apart. Despise evil and ungodliness, but not men of ungodliness or evil. These, understand. Have no shame in being kindly and gentle but if the time comes in the time of your life to kill, kill and have no regret."
It’s strange to say, but we can all learn from him.
Mortimus Recommends:
Blindspots in Western-world thinking (source): This is actually related to advertising. In a discussion between Ben Thompson and Eric Seufert, Eric brought this crucial point about how some analysts sometimes forget to go beyond their own borders:
“the next billion people onboarded to the Internet are not going to be wielding credit cards like Americans do, and they’re not going to be subscribing to 18 different Substacks. They want the ad-supported model, that’s free access to information and you can’t restrict that. Anyway, it’s just such a rich economy-centric mentality to say, “No, you just pay for the stuff that you want”. Well, no, ads allow you to get it for free.”
Ruthless and rational: the mantra of the predator businessman (source): We really enjoyed Malcolm Gladwell’s 2010 essay on Predator Businessmen who chase ‘The Sure Thing’. Malcolm highlights business anecdotes from Ted Turner (founder of CNN), John Paulson (hedge fund), Agnelli (of Fiat), and many others. He bases his exploration on the work of French scholars Villete and Vuillermot who describe this businessman archetype as follows:
“The businessman looks for partners to a transaction who do not have the same definition as he of the value of the goods exchanged, that is, who undervalue what they sell to him or overvalue what they buy from him in comparison to his own evaluation.” He moves decisively. He repeats the good deal over and over again, until the opportunity closes, and—most crucially—his focus throughout that sequence is on hedging his bets and minimizing his chances of failure. The truly successful businessman, is anything but a risk-taker. He is a predator, and predators seek to incur the least risk possible while hunting.”Nabeel Qureshi on Palantir + it’s culture (source): Nabeel is a wonderful generalist and comes highly recommended. His essay on his time at Palantir is very insightful, particularly his section on what makes Palantir’s ‘Forward Deployed Engineer’ role so effective. It’s interesting to note that all new employees were given the book Impro (among others) upon joining. Nabeel posits that it’s because a lot of the FDE role was about effective negotiation, which is why most ex-Palantir employees started companies:
“Good founders have an instinct for reading rooms, group dynamics, and power. This isn’t usually talked about, but it’s critical: founding a successful company is about taking part in negotiation after negotiation after negotiation, and winning (on net). Hiring, sales, fundraising are all negotiations at their core. It’s hard to be great at negotiating without having these instincts for human behavior. This is something Palantir teaches FDEs, and is hard to learn at other Valley companies.”
Pair this with the work of James K. Sebenius who talks about negotiations in his wonderful podcast ‘Dealcraft’ and his book on Kissinger. Pair that with our own snippet of Kissinger’s dealmaking:
That’s it for this week. Onwards to Consilience!
The question that preceded this one was always, What is consilience? to which we’d respond: The unity of knowledge — and then we’d send folks to one of our first exploration on the topic:
Plus, (on a more tactical note) rarity would also help us with SEO.