Vidal: I know it’s aroused by the obvious. Vidal: Well, I’m getting to you in a minute, but what about Senator McCarthy?Ĭohn: Oh, sure, that’s your favorite topic of conversation. Is this true?Ĭohn: No, I’m sure you’d think that merited a badge of honor, but it is not true. The nicest thing that I have ever heard about Joe McCarthy was told me by Senator Flanders of Vermont: that he was a full-time homosexual. Vidal: To me, the nicest thing-let’s be affirmative. The real fun starts when Vidal brings up the topic of personal sexual habits, which is right in the wheelhouse of Jack Kerouac’s seducer, and a subject Cohn would rather avoid: In the same breath, he casts doubt on the validity of the concept (the word first appeared in The Daily Worker!) and tries to use it like a curse (the real exponent of McCarthyism is… Gore Vidal!). Most instructive is his fluid interpretation of the word “McCarthyism.” Vidal defines the term early in the broadcast and uses it consistently throughout for Cohn, it means anything that confers a momentary rhetorical advantage. don’t like what McCarthy stands for, it’s because they’ve lost touch with the decent, vital, God-fearing people of the heartland, who understand the stakes in the fight against Communism. If elites in New York and Washington, D.C. McCarthy is the victim of a vicious smear campaign. ( He lost.)Ĭohn’s performance is a master class in demagoguery.

He published his book-length screed a month after NBC aired the movie, and he sued the network for libel, and fought all the way to the Supreme Court. Cohn was promoting his new book, which sported a cover blurb by, uh, Roy Cohn: an “answer to” the recent TV movie Tail Gunner Joe, in which Peter Boyle portrayed Joe McCarthy as a crapulous commie-baiter who lied about his military service. In 1977, Gore Vidal went head-to-head with Roy Cohn, onetime mentor of the president*, on the NYC talk show Midday Live.

Day of infamy gore