CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

High School Contemporaries Allard Lowenstein and Roy Cohn as Two Distinct Sides of America’s Character

Allard Lowenstein at congressional race fundraiser, August 29, 1976 – Public Domain

Few people would associate Allard Lowenstein with Roy Cohn. Lowenstein tried to influence politics while avoiding the problems of dirty hands. Cohn was the ultimate insider, one who gloried in all the underhanded tricks that soil politics, “the master of situational immorality,” and the man who taught Donald Trump how braggadocio and underhandedness were the secrets to success. And yet they both had something in common: they both attended the Horace Mann School in New York City, my alma mater.

I have often thought of them as two sides of the American coin. Lowenstein represented one tradition: public service and a belief that politics could be used in the service of a larger common good. Cohn represented self-interest, power, and the conviction that politics was ultimately a struggle in which winning mattered more than the rules by which one played.

Roy Cohn graduated from Horace Mann in 1944, Lowenstein in 1945. The Class of 1944 had only 78 students, about the same number as the Class of 1945. For at least a brief period, they were walking the same corridors, taught by many of the same teachers, and shaped by the same intellectual world.

That coincidence has always fascinated me. How could the two have emerged from the same milieu to represent such different visions of America?

Lowenstein and Cohn weren’t just two distinct personalities; they were products of different currents in postwar America. Lowenstein belonged to the world of civil rights, liberal internationalism, antiwar politics, and reform. Cohn belonged to the world of anti-Communism, McCarthyism, New York City power politics,........

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