All the president’s friends: A history of close presidential allies, from Lincoln to Nixon to Trump

Jonathan Mahler and Matt Flegenheimer in their New York Times article posted online Monday, June 20, reminded us of Donald Trump’s close friendship with Roy Cohn. Long reviled on the left, Cohn was Senator Joe McCarthy’s “Red-baiting consigliere” in the 1950s, was instrumental in sending the Rosenbergs to the electric chair, and helped get Richard Nixon elected. He later served Trump in many legal and personal capacities. Cohn liked to boast that he made Trump successful. There is probably no more despicable figure in American life from the 1950s to the 1980s.  Cohn was justly disbarred shortly before his death in 1986 for “unethical,” “unprofessional,” and “particularly reprehensible” conduct.

Cohn was also Donald Trump’s lawyer and probably his best male friend. For many years Trump kept an enlarged picture of Cohn on his desk.  Cohn, who could be equal parts fearsome and outrageous, handled Trump’s difficult legal issues by scaring off potential plaintiffs.  The two men went to baseball games, had lunch at “21,” and partied often.

It is a mark of the difference between the primaries and the general election that this kind of good investigative journalism by Mahler and Flegenheimer is now appearing.  Why wasn’t Marco Rubio, or Ted Cruz, or any of the other weak and intimidated Trump opponents looking into such things?

Most presidents need someone they can trust with whom to relax and share their real feelings about the extraordinary happenings in their lives.  Many, like George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, or Woodrow Wilson turn inward to their wives to play this role.  Who else, they seem to feel, can you really trust?  Richard Nixon’s special friendship with Bebe Rebozo, who was also corrupt, stands out as the exception, though Franklin Delano Roosevelt surrounded himself with male and female friends in a social world in which no one, except perhaps his mistress, Lucy Mercer, got close.

Then there is Abraham Lincoln.  Always somewhat aloof from his troubled wife, Mary, Lincoln turned for close friendship to a series of men who played a vital role in his life.  During the Presidency, no one was more important in this regard than Secretary of State, William Seward. But for many years before that Lincoln had a way of making his male friends all feel they were uniquely significant in his life, from men like Bowling Green or the Clary Grove boys in New Salem; to Orville H. Browning and William Herndon in his Springfield days; and to the shrewd, rotund judge, David Davis, on the 8th Judicial Circuit. ...