that Kaufman imposed the death penalty based on his personal recommendation. Cohn denied, however, participation in any illegal ex parte discussions. There is now a consensus among historians that Julius Rosenberg was guilty of being a highly valued NKVD spymaster against the United States, but that his trial was marred by prosecutorial misconduct – mainly by Roy Cohn – and that the Rosenbergs should not have been executed. Distilling this consensus, Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz wrote that the Rosenbergs were "guilty – and framed." Work with Joseph McCarthy The Rosenberg trial brought the 24-year-old Cohn to the attention of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover. With support from Hoover and Cardinal Spellman, Hearst columnist George Sokolsky convinced Joseph McCarthy to hire Cohn as his chief counsel, choosing him over Robert F. Kennedy. Cohn assisted McCarthy's work for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, becoming known for his aggressive questioning of suspected Communists. Cohn preferred not to hold hearings in open forums, which went well with McCarthy's preference for holding "executive sessions" and "off-the-record" sessions away from the Capitol to minimize public scrutiny and to question witnesses with relative impunity. Cohn was given free rein in pursuit of many investigations, with McCarthy joining in only for the more publicized sessions. Cohn played a major role in McCarthy's anti-Communist hearings. During the Lavender Scare, Cohn and McCarthy attempted to amplify anti-Communist fervor in the country by claiming that Communists overseas had convinced several closeted homosexuals employed by the US federal government to pass on important government secrets in exchange for keeping their sexuality secret. Convinced that the employment of homosexuals was a threat to national security, President Dwight Eisenhower signed an executive order on April 29, 1953, to ban homosexuals from working in the federal government. According to David L. Marcus, Cohn's cousin, many people in Washington who were outed as gay by Cohn and McCarthy killed themselves. As time went on, it became well known that Cohn was himself gay, though he always denied it. Sokolsky introduced G. David Schine, an anti-Communist propagandist, to Cohn, who invited him to join McCarthy's staff as an unpaid consultant. When Schine was drafted into the US Army in 1953, Cohn made extensive efforts to procure special treatment for him, even threatening to "wreck the Army" if his demands were not met. That conflict, along with McCarthy's claims that there