The new Hulu documentary “Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything” portrays the Boston native and trailblazing TV journalist as a thoughtful, admirably blunt interviewer who had to take a lot of abuse from male colleagues not willing to accept a woman as a peer. It also digs — a little, anyway — into one of the strangest details of Walters’s life: She almost married Roy Cohn. Who was gay. And, by most accounts, a brutal, bullying human being.
Cohn, a hatchet man for Joseph McCarthy and later Svengali to one Donald J. Trump, has long been a subject of cultural fascination. Tony Kushner made him a character in his 1993 Pulitzer-winning play, “Angels in America,” accurately portraying him as a closeted gay man who refused to admit he had AIDS even as he was dying of the disease. He pops into the Red Scare dramatic series “Fellow Travelers,” about the price of being publicly gay in Washington, D.C., during McCarthy’s reign of terror. And, of course, Jeremy Strong earned an Oscar nomination for playing him in “The Apprentice,” opposite Sebastian Stan’s Trump.
As Walters explains in the doc (in an archival interview), Cohn, at one time a high-powered lawyer and fixer, helped get her father out of trouble with the IRS. “I don’t know what judge he talked to,” she says. “I forgot about ethics. I have been severely criticized by my friends, and I understand, because Roy did some terrible things.”
Peter Gethers, who edited Walters’s autobiography, puts it this way in the doc: “She did not have the strongest moral compass. She was a pretty transactional person.”
Cohn mastered the dark arts of the big lie (repeating the same falsehood over and over until it is perceived as the truth) and indignant denial. For all his brutality, he was also seductive, and very influential. A cursory glance at the current political landscape should provide ample evidence of that.
Chris Vognar, a freelance culture writer, was the 2009 Nieman Arts and Culture Fellow at Harvard University.
