The controversial New York attorney, former counsel for Senator Joseph McCarthy and an assistant prosecutor in the case that sent Ethel and Julius Rosenberg to the electric chair in 1953, was asked on Sixty Minutes about rumors that he was gay and dying of AIDS. "It's a lie as far as I'm concerned," Cohn replied. Cohn said he was suffering from liver cancer. Later, on the Larry King Live show, a phone caller asked Cohn if he was gay. "No," Cohn flatly replied. After Cohn's death in July 1986, it was revealed that Cohn had, in fact, been gay, and had been suffering from "underlying HTLV-111 infections." "He denied his homosexuality," wrote one of his friends, conservative columnist William Safire, "because he could never reconcile it with his self-image of political masculinity."