SOURCE: "Roy Cohn in America," in Raritan, Vol. 13, No. 3, Winter 1994, pp. 64-76.

In this essay, Posnock compares the historical Roy Cohn to Kushner's depiction of him in Angels in America.

"I'm immortal Ethel," the dying Roy Cohn tells the visiting specter of Ethel Rosenberg in his final words in Tony Kushner's Angels In America: Millenium Approaches. "I have forced my way into history. I ain't never gonna die." The prospect of cheating death might have struck Cohn in real life as the ultimate coup in the art of the deal. So what if bodily extinction is the price, Cohn might have reasoned; that's what entering history costs these days. Legendary at working all the angles, Cohn possessed an insatiable appetite for the pleasures and perils of wheedling, welshing, cajoling, extorting. His was a life of sheer performativity, free of legal or moral qualms. Laws existed to transgress, boundaries...