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Cohn had an outsize influence on American history for more than 30 years.
He started as a prosecutor of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the early 1950s; he then became chief counsel to McCarthy, who led witch hunts against people suspected of being Communists; in 1973, Cohn met Donald Trump and began grooming him to become a national figure; President Reagan welcomed him to the White House in the 1980s after he became one of the first people on the East Coast to line up big donors for Reagan’s campaign.