[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 to violate; even dining with others became the occasion for going too far. As a startled Winston Churchill and many lesser luminaries discovered, Cohn would soon be using his fingers to eat off one's plate without ceremony or shame. As in most matters, he was indulged, a response that began with his worshipful mother. Her son from the start was a fluent liar and hypocrite (the zealous guardian against the red menace successfully pulled every string to avoid the draft) who never apologized and never explained. Defiance was the apt name of his ninety-nine-foot yacht, which Cohn was rumored to have scuttled for the insurance money. He prided himself on not being nice; "fuck nice," Kushner's Cohn snarls, and it could serve as an epitaph.

Cohn was a monstrous brat whose pugnacity was as histrionic as everything else about him; all this makes him a natural for theatrical representation. And, lucky as always, Cohn has found, in Kushner and the actor Ron Leibman, two sympathetic interpreters. (At this writing, Perestroika, part 2 of Angels, has yet to open in New York, and my discussion is confined to part 1.) "This Roy is a work of dramatic fiction," Kushner says in a note to the play; yet his fiction derives its pungency from being steeped in the details of Cohn's biography. Kushner's Cohn is a satanic figure so seductive that he threatens to explode the play's central Christian conceit of millenarian redemption. Kushner both honors and attempts to contain Cohn's disarming power. He contains it most obviously by reducing the play to a struggle between demon and angel. But before discussing Angels in more detail I want to describe Cohn as he has otherwise become known to us, and then set him in a larger cultural context, one that can illuminate a subject that also concerns Kushner—the status of postmodern heroism.

As more than one of his friends remarked, from an early age Cohn set his own rules. Power brokering was his consuming passion, and young Roy was precocious in leveraging his father's stature as a Bronx judge: at age thirteen he was gossip columnist for the Bronx Home-News; by sixteen he had fixed his first parking ticket as a favor for one of his teachers at Horace Mann; at twenty he graduated from Columbia's law school; and at twenty-three he was Assistant United States Attorney for the trial of the Rosenbergs. Here the allergy to constraint that would mark his career fully emerged, as he sought, in secret illegal communications to Judge Kaufman, death for the Rosenbergs. Soon Joe McCarthy was proudly calling him "my strong right arm." Cohn rose to national renown as the Senator's vicious boy-henchman, expert in publicly humiliating and smearing alleged communists and homosexuals (nearly all of them Jewish), and threatening to "wreck the army" when they balked at his incessant demands that his handsome and wealthy friend G. David Schine be given an easy ride. It is still startling to recall how much of the Army-McCarthy hearings revolved around Cohn's "power whim," in the words of one fellow lawyer, his determination to bend the United States Army to his will.

Cohn's reputation, if not his boss's, survived the televised ordeal, and before too long he was thriving as the ultimate inside operator, an immensely successful Park Avenue "legal executioner" on behalf of New York City's political, social, and criminal elite. Always contemptuous of the genteel legal establishment, "owning" more judges than anyone, he relished his outlaw status. He did business with Democrats and Republicans alike, since, as he liked to say, not party but power is what counts. The parties that counted were often those he gave; recently come to light is a private one he hosted at the Plaza Hotel in 1958 for his mentor Edgar Hoover, who appeared, it is alleged, as "Mary," elegant in a fluffy black dress.

That Cohn, this American Torquemada, was himself a Jew and a homosexual (he always called them "fags") as well as a self-described "momma's boy" who lived forty of his fifty-nine years with his mother, tempts one to regard him not only as not nice but pathologically conflicted and self-loathing. His life seems a virtual hothouse of fifties neuroses, with momism and the closet under particular cultivation. Yet it would be misleading to confine Cohn to the Eisenhower era. He was never one to let history pass him by. By the time of his death in 1986, the suffocating fifties were just a memory, mom was gone, and while he never came out of the closet, his homosexual practices had long been conspicuous to those in the know. His mother's death in 1967 had left Cohn free unabashedly to enjoy his increasingly lavish sexual tastes, which included maintaining a stable of beautiful young men (always introduced as Roy's "nephews") and making frequent forays into the orgiastic nightlife of Studio 54, where his annual birthday bashes were held. For years Cohn had been the most famous New York homosexual not in show business. Yet even as he was dying of AIDS, and even though he had been outed by an enemy in the early eighties, he fiercely denied his sexual preference on "Sixty Minutes."

Just this sketch of his career suggests that Cohn provides the psychocultural critic a remarkable window to observe the sort of intricate psychic mirroring and exchanges between subversive and countersubversive that Michael Rogin has found in his important studies of American political demonology in the cold war. But the case of Roy Cohn is especially fascinating at least in part because it disarms or renders irrelevant psychoanalytic explanations as well as conventional moral judgments; they become something like the intellectual equivalent of the handwringing of a feckless liberalism—well meaning but beside the point. The effort to psychologize or moralize Cohn looks under or above him, thereby missing a fabled weapon of his own power—the gaze. Cohn's gaze emanated from a remarkable face: even in snapshots his intimidating and compelling physical ugliness assaults the eye. Photographed with a Donald Trump, a George Steinbrenner, a Barbara Walters (his perennial beard), Cohn's priapic head, thick scarred nose, hooded reptilian eyes and deadly frozen stare are baleful. "I early learned," Murray Kempton has said, "that Roy had no interior to speak of." Armed with a photographic memory, he was known to speak in court for hours without stopping, without notes and seemingly without breathing. A "depth" reading fails to enter Cohn's uncanny aura that projected both menace and charm but also a sense of belonging to a race other than the strictly human.

In retrospect, his species seems that of pop American Ü bermensch, a lineage of amoral, lethal prodigies that begins in the twenties with Leopold and Loeb, who were devout readers of Nietzsche and, as is likely, Crime and Punishment. Unlike these two real life Raskolnikovs, contemporary supermen have a passion for executing not the perfect murder but the hostile takeover, and reaping tens of millions from insider trading. The Milkens and Boeskys and their progeny were, in the mid-eighties, the "masters of the Universe" in Tom Wolfe's phrase, and the "big swinging dicks" made famous in Liar's Poker. While he may share their indifference to limits and their love of putting in the fix, Conn is without the asceticism that conditions the eighties money culture of excess in which a regime of the hundred-hour work week forced a Milken to gobble lunch at his desk.

Cohn may be closer to that "most revolutionary—and deeply serious—of post-war Nietzscheans," Michel Foucault, or, rather, the Foucault whom James Miller depicts in his much discussed recent biography. Miller presents this central hero of contemporary sensibility in his last decade of life as a quester in search of "limit experience," that boundary where death and pleasure bleed into each other. Foucault's search took him to San Francisco's leather underground where, enraptured, he experimented in consensual S/M. While admittedly an odd couple, Cohn and Foucault share more than death from AIDS. Their common ground could be described as a hedonistic antihumanism, if we accept Foucault's definition of humanism as "everything in Western civilization that restricts the desire for power." In passing beyond restriction, both enjoyed male orgies of "bodies and pleasures."

Foucault's passion for living dangerously prompts Miller to ask what it might mean to live a life beyond good and evil. In a wholly different key, Cohn's life poses similar questions and answers. Living "beyond" entails, among other things, acts of self-making constrained neither by the imperative to tell the truth nor by the inside/outside dichotomy that structures liberal individualism. The exemplary individual, Miller quotes Foucault, "is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets, his hidden self; he is the man who tries to invent himself." Indifferent to the American therapeutic ethos, with its mantras of "personal growth" and "finding oneself," Cohn made the will to power the keystone of his self-creation. And as adamantly as any postmodernist, he insisted that the personal and political are one. Politics, the game of power, "the game of being alive," as Kushner's Cohn says, defined his sexuality as surely as it defined every other aspect of his life.

In America "there's only the political and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics," says the Jewish intellectual Louis Ironson in Kushner's play. Louis goes on to explain that "there are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past." This list of absences echoes Henry James's famous lament in 1879 about the thinness of American culture, and also Tocqueville's thesis (Democracy In America is explicitly referred to). More important, it provides Kushner with an intellectual context for suggesting how individualism so easily blossoms into demonic luxuriance amid the great vacant secular spaces of America, land of Amnesia. Thus Cohn, a man without interior, is also a representative American in the weightless age of Reagan. As unbounded as America, Cohn contrasts with the burdened Louis, still feeling ancestral ties to the old world, though in the very process of burying those ties. Early on he attends his grandmother's funeral, fears he has abandoned her, and seeks solace from the rabbi who, in the play's opening scene, has conducted the service. Made uneasy by Louis's urgent need to confess, the rabbi tells him "better you should find a priest.… Catholics believe in forgiveness. Jews believe in guilt," a distinction that will prove pivotal at the angelic denouement.

Ironson and Cohn never meet in part 1. But as the two dominant Jews in the play, a comparison is inevitable. Cohn's emotional antithesis, Ironson (the name suggesting his weighty concerns, which are leavened by his caustic wit) is consumed by introspection and abstraction, with questions of moral justice, guilt, and self-condemnation as he contemplates leaving his lover dying of AIDS. Louis's self-loathing serves to set off in bold relief what may be the most scandalous thing about Cohn's scandalous life—his unembarrassed pleasure in the sheer wielding of clout, in being Roy Cohn. A warrior joy is at the center of both Kushner's dramatic fiction of Cohn and of Ron Leibman's exultant, volcanic portrayal.

"I wish I was an octopus, a fucking octopus. Eight loving arms and all those suckers." These are Cohn's opening lines, spoken at his desk while working with delight an immense array of flashing phones, improvising with a half dozen different callers just the right mix of obscenity, charm, viciousness, apology, and deal making, all the while sharing bites of a sandwich with his young protégé, a Mormon lawyer named Joe Pitt, who patiently waits for his undivided attention. The scene stages and is about virtuoso performance, as Cohn's octopus-wish concisely frames what the rest of the scene enacts—his delirious, near-animal excess, greed, orality, and invasiveness. "God bless chaos," he mutters at one point.

Captivating from the start, Kushner's Cohn hopes to inspire Joe Pitt, "my pretty young punk friend" as he calls him, to be a "Royboy" and act as his "eyes" in the Justice Department where disbarment proceedings against Cohn are beginning. On the verge of acknowledging his desires for men and leaving his wife, Joe draws out Roy's paternal side. As if declaring his own version of the Greek ideal of philia (friendship), Cohn says: "the most precious asset in life, I think, is the ability to be a good son.… I've had many fathers, I owe my life to them, powerful, powerful men. Walter Winchell, Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy most of all.… I brought out something tender in him. He would have died for me. And me for him." Roy's tone darkens as he concludes with a paean to the chill rigor of the Ü bermensch ethos: "Like a father to a son I tell you this: Life is full of horror; nobody escapes, nobody; save yourself.… Don't be afraid; people are so afraid; don't be afraid to live in the raw wind, naked, alone.… Learn at least this: What you are capable of. Let nothing stand in your way."

Both satanic tempter—"Transgress a little Joseph. There are so many laws; find one you can break"—and Nietzschean overreacher—"Make the law, or [be] subject to it. Choose"—Cohn casts a seductive spell on Joe and the audience. And, clearly, on Kushner himself. After all, how does Roy Cohn, one of the most despised figures in gay political culture, whose lifelong gay-hating and sexual denials earned the words "Coward. Bully. Victim." on the ATOS quilt, manage to emerge, swaggering, at the center of one of the first works of gay theater to succeed with a mainstream Broadway audience?

Kushner's audacity in giving Cohn center stage deserves the praise it has received. Yet the meaning of Cohn's presence in the larger thematics of Angels raises the issue of the play's coherence. The muddle of the work derives from the fact that Kushner's ultimate ambitions are at cross purposes: he aims somehow to assimilate the Nietzschean figure of Cohn to the play's explicitly redemptive and Christian project. In his final scene, Cohn receives a visit from a heavenly emissary—Ethel Rosenberg—whose execution, he earlier told Joe, was his "greatest accomplishment." When a defiant Roy declares that he has "forced" his way into history, Ethel one-ups him by announcing: "History is about to crack wide open. Millenium approaches." Since she is on the side of the Angels, Ethel's prediction of history's imminent end is soon ratified by Kushner: amidst the heavy beating of wings, falling plaster, and white light, the play concludes with the descent of an angel to the bedside of the AlDS-stricken hero. "The great work begins: The Messenger has arrived," the Angel intones; surely the second coming is at hand. The play's hunger for a salvation of soulless America seems satisfied: there are Angels in America after all!

Has Roy Cohn, then, been brought to such intense dramatic life only for the purpose of receiving absolution? This seems to have been Kushner's stated intention. In an interview he has declared his need to "forgive" mis man whom he hated. "Forgiveness may be the hardest political question people face. If there isn't something called forgiveness, if there isn't a statute of limitations on crime … there will never be peace and progress. But forgiveness, if it means anything, has to be incredibly hard to come by.… Forgiveness can never be unambivalent. But how else do we set ourselves free from the nightmare of history?" Yet Cohn in life, and certainly on stage, never sought forgiveness. No Nietzschean does, since forgiveness is too close to pity, the emotion of ressentiment. Forgiveness likely seemed to Cohn as meaningless as believing one can escape the nightmare of politics and history. What is more, Cohn makes clear in Angels in America mat history and politics are not things from which one can choose to be free. For Kushner's Cohn, politics are bodily, inseparable from breathing, a conception that literalizes and thus tropes upon some of the most prestigious Left shibboleths of the day.

Given the disparity between Kushner's intentions and what the play achieves, it is hard to resist the Blakean conclusion mat he is of the devil's party without knowing it. The play, in short, is sharply at odds with itself. Blake meant to praise Milton, and to suggest art's openness to moral complication, its willingness to explore, indeed embrace, the corrupt, even as it wreaks havoc on one's cherished beliefs. In creating his Cohn, Kushner, perhaps unknowingly, affirms such openness. Cohn/Leibman commandeers the play, inspiring its most powerful writing and dwarfing the absorbing but largely familiar domestic subplots unfolding around him. Nothing, not even the arrival of an angel, is strong enough to topple him. Unwittingly on the side of Satan, Kushner's undeniable achievement is his nonredemptive portrayal of Cohn, a characterization whose telos is not to forgive but to witness unflinchingly Cohn's self-affirming moral indifference. To appreciate Conn's will to power requires first elaborating the ramifications of the play's dominant metaphor of the end of history.

The literal and figurative deus ex machina that concludes part 1 of Angels expresses a fantasy of ending history that seems more escapist than sublime. Earlier the play had in-directly invoked another context for history's end, namely Hegel's. Louis Ironson alludes to his "neo-Hegelian positivist sense of constant historical progress toward happiness or perfection or something" as he explains to the rabbi why he is having trouble accepting his lover's illness. Maybe a person imbued with this Hegelian sense of progress, Louis avers, finds it hard to "incorporate sickness into his sense of how things are supposed to go. Maybe … he isn't so good with death." Louis's remarks, never clarified or enlarged upon, recall the argument of Hegel's most influential modern interpreter, Alexandre Kojeve, who said that history has ended with the achievement of a "universal homogenous state"—liberal democracy—where master/slave rivalries are at last reconciled by the advent of universal recognition of equality. Thus every man is "completely satisfied," free of the threat of war, free to enjoy prosperity and animal-like contentment.

Kojève's Hegelian diesis has recently been injected into the Zeitgeist. Francis Fukuyama's best-selling The End of History and the Last Man recontextualizes and reinterprets Kojève to explain the sudden collapse of communism and the end of the cold war. Yet Fukuyama is indebted to Nietzsche (by way of Leo Strauss) rather than to Hegel or Kojève for his particular emphasis—that the end of history is a decidedly mixed blessing, for "we risk becoming secure and self-absorbed last men, devoid of … striving for higher goals in our pursuit of private comforts.""Last men" is Nietzsche's scornful phrase for those who emerge at the end of history and thrive amid the spiritual hollowness of technocratic modernity. The appearance of the last men announces the triumph of the slave morality bred by liberal democracy, which produces selfish citizens absorbed in feathering their own nests. Acknowledging neither masters nor gods, last men seek only comfortable self-preservation as their bulwark against their greatest fear, which is mortality. So Louis is quite right: believers in the Hegelian sense of progress aren't "so good with death." In the Age of Reagan, implies Kushner, all of us are last men, for, as Louis puts it, "we all know" what it is like to be "Reagan's kids," to be part of a family that isn't "really a family … there aren't any connections there, no love," and children and parents "don't even speak to each other except through their agents."

The last man, in Nietzsche's view, is at one extreme, and the Superman is at the other. The pivot of their differences is recognition, which Kojève defines as the desire to control the desire of other men. "To be really, truly man, and to know that he is such," a human being needs to impose himself "on the other as the supreme value," says Kojève, an action that "necessarily takes the form of a fight," a battle to the death "for pure prestige carried on for the sake of recognition." To Hegel, the demand for equal recognition, driven forward by the reality of slavery, constitutes the motor both of the human psyche and of history. Yet the universalized recognition that makes possible both democracy and the last man is precisely what the Superman deems undiscriminating, hence worthless, what only a slave could desire. This is Nietzsche's aristocratic revision of Hegel's more democratic historicism. The only valuable recognition, says Nietzsche, is the desire to be recognized as better than others. While all vital democratic societies nurture the desire for recognition of equality, the quest for superiority must also be kept alive as the animating force of all creativity and genuine freedom. In contemporary multicultural, relativist America, where the prestige of victimhood is high, the drive to superiority, as Fukuyama points out, is stigmatized and thus is sublimated into such domains as entrepreneurship, foreign policy (short decisive wars in distant countries), and sports.

In some humans the craving for superiority is less sublimated, the battles for prestige and recognition less mediated. Those too obviously hungry we call vulgar. But Roy Cohn's vulgarity may be unmatched. So inflamed was his desire to be recognized that it burned through layers of civilizing insulation, exposing to view the raw literalness, the naked avidity, of his need. Nietzsche's Ü bermensch, who is indifferent to others as he creates his own values, might in fact scorn Cohn as being enslaved to recognition. For each time he picked up the phone he was testing the reach of his clout; every time he floated a deal, sought a favor, bought a judge, the outcome of the battle for pure prestige was on the line. Enslaved or not, however, those who refuse to sublimate their passions often startle and compel us by awakening our repressed envy.

Casting off the mediations that condition the rest of us, Cohn's relation to the political was so visceral that it obliterated any outside from which it might be judged. Kushner acutely grasps this and in a remarkable speech has Cohn reveal his embodied politics. When Joe Pitt calls Roy "unethical," Cohn replies:

What the fuck do you think this is, Sunday School? … This is gastric juices churning, this is enzymes and acids, this is intestinal is what this is, bowel movement and blood-red meat—this stinks, this is politics, Joe, the game of being alive. And you think you're … What? Above that? Above alive is what? Dead! In the clouds. You're on earth, goddammit! Plant a foot, stay a while.

A body politic indeed; for Cohn, politics is the condition of being alive and thus not something about which one can have a judgment. Thus Joe's verdict of "unethical," however justified, is uttered from an illusory perch outside life and shrivels in the void of Cohn's moral nihilism. A similar fate awaits Kushner's attempted forgiveness of Cohn.

What makes the fusion of body and politics in Kushner's Cohn particularly unsettling is that it eerily echoes that liberating slogan: the personal is the political, a phrase meant to dissolve the allegedly pernicious bourgeois separation of private from public. That Cohn's embodied politics in the play also collapses both realms into each other cautions against assuming that the imperative of our current critical age—death to all binary oppositions—is inevitably the first signpost on the road to social justice.

In merging the personal and political, the homophobic Cohn, as Kushner presents him, empties the category of homosexuality of positive content. This is dramatized in an already well-known scene in Angels. As his doctor tells him he has AIDS, Cohn taunts him, daring him to say "Roy Marcus Cohn you are a homosexual" on pain of having him [Cohn] destroy his career. Roy rejects the label homosexual to describe himself not out of shame, since he is incapable of feeling that, but because "what a label refers to … [is] clout. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will pick up the phone when I call, who owes me favors." Homosexuals, Cohn goes on to say, "are not men who sleep with other men.… Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout.… Roy Cohn is not a homosexual. Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man … who fucks around with guys."

This self-invention is Kushner's Cohn at his most Nietzschean, as he transvalues sexuality by equating it with power rather than with identity. Cohn's views were formed in the closeted America of the fifties, the advent of his power brokering. Existing sub rosa, homosexuality was beneath the political, bereft of public life, adrift in a dead zone of "zero clout." And to men like Cohn or his mentor Hoover, for whom politics was not simply a domain of existence but instead the very "game of being alive," the notion of homosexuality as an identity was tantamount to a condition of living death—the absence of power and of self-mastery. Its political label—as un-American—was the sum of its negativity.

Kushner's Cohn forces us to be skeptical about assuming that a hidden reality of agonizing sexual self-hatred rages inside him. Such an assumption is derived from the modern therapeutic regime that constructs sexuality itself as a constitutive truth of identity. In short, Kushner's Cohn asks us to entertain the possibility that Cohn was neither out nor closeted. Rather, Cohn (and Hoover) found the negation called homosexuality irrelevant to himself and regarded his preference for men as the Greeks did—as a matter of taste, not something expressing his "very nature, the truth of his desire, or the natural legitimacy of his predilection." The words are Foucault's to describe our modern notion of sexuality, which sharply differs from male sexuality in ancient Greek "experience, forms of valuation, and systems of categorization." Perhaps we are closer to Rome since, like us, Rome came after, inflating self-regard to imperial dimensions of arrogance and becoming a decadent imitation of the Greek ideal of boy love. At one birthday bash Studio 54 served as Roy's Rome, where his Greek taste was both made explicit and parodied: his toga-clad "nephews," reports Sidney Zion, crowned their "Uncle" with golden laurel leaves, singing "Happy Birthday" to a Roy "looking every bit the modern Emperor Hadrian."

Emperor Cohn, like Kushner's Cohn, tells us something about the character of postmodern heroism. Here, again, a comparison with Foucault suggests itself. Yoking them together reminds us that embarrassing, even grotesque excess is less an impediment to than the condition of both men's attainment of a certain bizarre grandeur. Their Ü bermensch status is laced with comic incongruities: Cohn the icy "legal executioner" and sissy momma's boy; Foucault, the brooding philosopher of power and wide-eyed tourist on Folsom Street as if enacting a leather-jacketed update of The Blue Angel. This all-too-human parodic Nietzscheanism reflects a logic implicit in Foucault's insistence that his S/M experiments were not to be understood as repeating those of de Sade, his great predecessor in sexual anarchy. De Sade had valorized genital sex, whereas Foucault's "limit experience" sought what he called a "nondisciplinary eroticism" that invented "new possibilities of pleasure with strange parts" of the body. The nondisciplinary severs bodily from sexual pleasure, a "desexualization of pleasure" that Foucault jocularly summed up with the mock slogan "erections are out!"

This last phrase, a new take on the more familiar "small is beautiful," encapsulates the "second time as farce" quality that may be the signature of the postmodern. The heroic bid to topple Western sexuality from its dual identity as both genitally organized and the deepest truth of subjectivity ends as the quest for impotence. Granted, Foucault's is an achieved impotence attainable only to the sexual outlaw of "limit experience," one who risks going "Beyond Sex," as he puts it. But granting this does not deny that under such conditions the heroic uneasily contains its own incipient demolition, as Superman threatens to collapse into "last man."

Postmodern heroism's pervasive irony often is intended to function preemptively, as a healthy purgative, washing away any totalizing impulses that might cross the precarious boundary between the superhuman and the inhuman. As Nietzsche before him, Foucault discovered, in Miller's words, how "ruthless and unrelenting" must be the effort to "identify and uproot the inhuman—and to identify and tear out the fascism in us all." The project may be impossibly self-defeating—its very rigor reinforces the condition meant to be extirpated. But Foucault thought that the struggle against the attractions of totalitarian power—sexual and political—was important. As a lifelong addict of brutal power, Roy Cohn likely underwent no such ascetic struggle, endured no such tension. To have revealed the scandal of Cohn's unrepentant pleasure in power is Kushner's signal achievement, one that survives his proferring of forgiveness.