by RDR » Tue May 17, 2005 2:32 pm
"...although Roy was conservative in his political opinions, he had little to do with the Conservative movement. Roy could be so right-wing in his language that he sometimes struck people in his own circle as a trifle outlandish. "Roy's idea of cutting down on welfare is to kill a beggar", his friend Joey Adams said, and yet Roy took no part in building the Conservative Party in the state or the East Side Conservative Club, which was Tom Bolan's work. William F. Buckley, who liked Roy and testified at his disbarment hearing as a character witness, could not put Roy among those who did the labor for the conservative cause. "Sometimes Roy would make speeches for conservative groups, but it was a scatter-gun thing."<br><br>Framed on the wall of the stone cottage in Greenwich was the front page of the <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>New York Post</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> for October 17, 1980, with a headline reading "The <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>Post</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> Endorses- RONALD REAGAN FOR PRESIDENT[/i]" and written on the mat were the words: "To Roy Cohn with deepest appreciation and gratitude for all you've done, your protege and friend, Roger Stone." <!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://home.earthlink.net/~zkkatz/page106.html">home.earthlink.net/~zkkatz/page106.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>What he had done was perhaps best summoned up by another picture in the room, one of Roy playing go-between with Rupert Murdoch, the <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>Post</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->'s majority stockholder, and President Reagan in the Oval Office. Roy was not one of the technicians, the time-buyers, schedulers, and media coordinators who dominate modern political campaigns. As Roy had no constituency, so Roy did not have experience in the ordinary conduct of political campaigns, but he did know how to put this person with that one, how to matchmake, to do swaps, favors, and deals. In politics Roy might set up shop anywhere as exemplifed by this reminiscence of Robert Bleeker's: "His connection with Sy Newhouse was a very important connection, not in terms of attracting clients but in terms of if somebody owns that many newspapers, Roy once told me that...in those towns where there was a Newhouse newspaper, it was the only newspaper in town, which means the editor of that newspaperis quite an influential person. So if anyone ever got into trouble in any city in which there was a Newhouse newspaper, Roy could go to Si and Si could go to the editor and there you have a leading member in town who could do a favor. Roy was a favor broker, that's what he did. There was always someone looking to buy what someone else was willing to sell." The Newhouse connection was of inestimable value to Roy. The House of Newhouse owned twenty-two newspapers from Newark, New Jersey to Portland, Oregon; it owned cable television companies; it owned <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, GQ</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->; it owned <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>Vogue</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> and Random House publishers. The Newhouses themselves seemed to have been a race of shy men who stayed away with all things political. The result, given the long, public association of Roy with the Newhouse name, was to turn over to Roy the political power which such waelth and the ownership of such media properties bring. When Jesse Helms, the conservative Republican senator from North Carolina, found himself in a close and expensive race for reelection, he approached Roy about switching the flow of Jewish campaign contribution money from his opponent to himself. Roy said he would set up a meeting with Sy Newhouse. <br><br>Roy's ability to use media power as a political fulcrum appears to have been limited to privately owned media conglomerates: the Hearts, the Newhouses, Murdoch's; is he had similarly held ties to publicly owned media corporations it is not recorded. What Roy got out of these arrangements is discernible; what the owner-proprietors got is less clear. The Hearsts were apparently satisfied to see their right-wing political beliefs advanced; Murdoch, who did not use Roy as his attorney, may have used him as his Wshington facilitator. As the picture on the wall indicates, Roy was this Australian billionaire's <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>carte d'entre</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> to Washington. Whather Roy also helped him to get his broadcasting licenses is not known, nor is it known if Roy helped the Newhouses with their tax problem. The government claimed the family owed the Treasury nearly a billion dollars in unpaid inheritance taxes, but after the Reagan administration entered office, the Newhouses' tax difficulties became less threatening and less onerous. Roy did make himself useful in serving some of the less important needs of the family business such as getting Norman Mailer signed up for various writing ventures.<br><br>Occasionally Roy's enthusiasm for the rich and useful would slip a little. At one point he was seeking to arrange the purchase of his friend Generoso Pope's <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>National Enquirer</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> by his friend Rupert Murdoch, but the always cash-deficient Roy was pessimistic about what his good offices would earn him: "These people are all my friends for years, and that's all well and good, but I don't want to see this thing go through and I'm staring at a basket of fruit they send me. What am I supposed to do?" Later Roy said that at a meeting of the two tycoons, "I was going to bring it up", but they stopped the uncharacteristically timid Cohn and told him, "We know what you're going to say, we've already discussed it, and if the deal goes through, you get a million dollars.".... from <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>Citizen Cohn</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->, by Nicholas Von Hoffman, Doubleday New York, 1988, p.419-421 <p></p><i></i>
