The last dated communication from Reagan to Cohn in the files was a "Get-Well message" on Nov. 22, 1985, saying: "I just learned that you are being sent home from the hospital tomorrow. Nancy and I are keeping you in our thoughts and prayers. May our Lord bless you with courage and strength. Take care and know that you have our concern."
At the time, Cohn was suffering from AIDS, though he claimed that his illness was liver cancer. He died on Aug. 2, 1986, due to complications from AIDS, the disease that was then ravaging the gay community in the United States and other countries. He was 59.
Among the ironies of his death was Cohn's history of purging gays and Lesbians from the U.S. government as security risks, a policy put in place by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953 in response to the Lavender Scare generated by Cohn and McCarthy -- and not rescinded until 1995 by President Bill Clinton. Another irony was that President Reagan, when faced with the devastating AIDS epidemic, failed to respond aggressively to the crisis because many religious conservatives considered the disease God's punishment of homosexuals.
Murdoch's Rise
Meanwhile, with the close ties to the Reagan White House that Cohn helped nurture, Murdoch's media empire continued to grow. To meet a regulatory requirement that U.S. TV stations must be owned by Americans, Murdoch became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1985.
Murdoch benefited from the Reagan administration's relaxation of media ownership rules which enabled him to buy more TV stations, which he then molded into the Fox Broadcasting Company, which was founded on Oct. 9, 1986.
In 1987, the "Fairness Doctrine," which required political balance in broadcasting, was eliminated, which let Murdoch pioneer a more aggressive conservatism on his TV network. In the mid-1990s, Murdoch expanded his political reach by founding the neoconservative Weekly Standard in 1995 and Fox News on cable in 1996. At Fox News, Murdoch hired scores of prominent politicians, mostly Republicans, putting them on his payroll as commentators.
Last decade, Murdoch continued to expand his reach into U.S. mass media, acquiring DirecTV and the financial news giant Dow Jones, including The Wall Street Journal, America's leading business news journal.
Murdoch parlayed his extraordinary media power into the ability to make or break political leaders, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom. In December 2014, the UK's Independent reported that Ed Richards, the retiring head of the British media regulatory agency Ofcom, accused British government representatives of showing favoritism to Murdoch's companies.
Richards said he was "surprised" by the informality, closeness and frequency of contact between executives and ministers during the failed bid by Murdoch's News Corp. for the satellite network BSkyB in 2011. The deal was abandoned when it was discovered that journalists at Murdoch's News of the World tabloid had hacked the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler and others.
"What surprised everyone about it -- not just me -- was quite how close it was and the informality of it," Richards said, confirming what had been widely reported regarding Murdoch's access to powerful British politicians dating back at least to the reign of Prime Minister Thatcher in the 1980s. The Reagan documents suggest that Murdoch built similarly close ties to leading U.S. politicians in the same era.
On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that Murdoch, now 83, was using his extraordinary media power among conservatives to block Mitt Romney from gaining the Republican presidential nomination for a second time -- and instead was favoring Jeb Bush.
"In the delicate and unseen campaign underway for Mr. Murdoch's affections in the next presidential campaign, this much is clear: Mr. Romney is out of the running, a reality that has pained and angered his allies," the Times reported.
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