‘Roy Cohn’ filmmaker on her new HBO doc about Trump’s mentor — and the man who killed her grandparents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

Filmmaker Ivy Meeropol has already made a documentary about her family connection to history. As anyone acquainted with 20th-century radical history will already recognize, she is the granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the supposed “atom spies” executed by the federal government in 1953. Meeropol’s 2004 HBO film “Heir to an Execution” provides a moving, intimate study of that event and its personal and political legacy — although it does not and could not settle the question of the Rosenbergs’ guilt or the fairness of their sentence, which remains contested to this day.

(Full disclosure, although I don’t think it’s relevant to this story: Both my mother and stepfather were American Communists, and my stepfather, Mel Fiske, knew Abel and Anne Meeropol, who adopted the Rosenbergs’ children, including Ivy Meeropol’s father, after their parents were electrocuted. So, yeah, if you want an entirely neutral account of these events, go elsewhere.)

Meeropol’s new film uses her grandparents’ execution as an inciting event, so to speak, but it’s only indirectly about them and about the combustible collision of Communism and anti-Communism in mid-century America. “Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn,” which premieres on HBO this week, is instead about one of the most notorious Americans of the last century — the man who sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair, who served as Sen. Joe McCarthy’s right-hand man, and who groomed and nurtured a young New York real estate developer named Donald Trump, seeing in the callow womanizer and tabloid celebrity the seeds of greater things. Continue reading.