Who really was Roy Cohn, the co-lead in the film The Apprentice by Ali Abbasi and a second father to Donald Trump? "A perverted role model, teaching [Trump] contempt for the law, unscrupulousness, greed, and the religion of the force and victory," wrote Jacques Mandelbaum on October 8, 2024, on the eve of the film's release in France.

The name of this inflammatory lawyer, who died almost 40 years ago, first appeared in Le Monde on January 1, 1953. He was then a 26-year-old man, a zealous assistant to attorney general James McGranery and close to senator Joseph McCarthy. Deeply involved in the witch-hunt, anti-communist and homophobic, he was instrumental in the death sentence handed down to the Rosenbergs, who were accused of espionage.

In the winter of 1953, he was on a crusade against the "director of stabilization and economic development at the UN," whose profile he found "absolutely deplorable because he admitted to hiring not just one, but three, four, five or more people" suspected of being members of the Communist Party.

On April 21, 1953, Le Monde reported on Roy Cohn's activities, this time highlighting his European tour with David Schine. The pair aimed to purify the libraries of American information services. Claude Julien wrote on this European trip on July 27, 1953, summed up by a Democratic senator as "the antics of two brash kids."

Less than a year later, on March 15, 1954, Henri Pierre recounted how Cohn got his mentor McCarthy in trouble. Cohn had attempted to exempt Schine from his military obligations and accused the army of harboring communists. Pierre noted: "The fact that Cohn fought like a lion on Schine's behalf (...) helped reinforce rumors about the special relationship between the two young ephebes..."

The case was so gripping that for "several hours, America worked in slow motion as millions of citizens crowded around television sets," to follow the commission of inquiry charged with arbitrating this dispute between the army and McCarthy. "Next to the imposing black mass of Mr. McCarthy, Mr. Roy Cohn, his assistant, looks very frail and collegiate in his light suit. His hair well shined, his mouth greedy, his eyes languid in the oriental way under feminine eyebrows," Pierre wrote on April 24, 1954. "But you have to see the assurance with which he intervenes in the debate, the arrogance and impertinence with which he answers or asks questions."

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