Those lessons are repeated numerous times throughout Bird’s energetic, readable, and meticulously-researched examination of Cohn, written with his wife and “Director of Research” Susan Goldmark. Bird is best-known for American Prometheus, a Pulitzer-winning biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer that inspired Christopher Nolan’s 2023 film. But his strongest work might be The Color of Truth, an analysis of the lives of McGeorge and William Bundy, bureaucrats essential to the Cold War liberal order who helped mislead the country into an unwinnable war in Vietnam. By his own accounting, Bird is a “biographer of the American establishment,” driven to understand the men (because it’s almost always been men) and systems that facilitated American global dominance following World War II. In taking on Cohn as a subject, Bird explores the other half of the story: in his telling, Cohn is the quintessential anti-establishment figure who has indelibly shaped the political culture of postwar America.
Many of the anecdotes that drive the narrative have previously appeared on page and screen, including in Nicholas von Hoffman’s 1988 biography Citizen Cohn, the 2019 documentaries Where’s My Roy Cohn? and Bully. Coward. Victim., as well as Cohn’s own posthumously published 1988 autobiography (written with the journalist Sidney Zion). In their efforts to contribute to what could be seen as a picked-over subject, Bird and Goldmark have worked through a remarkable amount of new material, declassifying Cohn’s FBI file through a FOIA request, uncovering insightful archival materials (including a number of unpublished memoirs), and conducting dozens of interviews with key players. This research is all the more impressive because Cohn left behind no central archive; many of his personal papers were reportedly burned at the time of his death and his personal effects distributed to friends or sold at auction. (Two boxes of ephemera were purchased by R.E.M. lead singer Michael Stipe, who gave Bird and Goldmark access to them.)
Roy Cohn was born in 1927, the only child of Albert Cohn, a Democratic district attorney (and later judge) aligned with FDR’s political machine, and Dora Marcus, a wealthy socialite whose family had made their money in banking. By all accounts, Cohn’s parents hated each other and often enlisted Roy in their various battles. But they both seemed to believe that their son was destined for great things. He sped his way through New York City’s most elite educational institutions (Horace Mann, Columbia College, Columbia Law School) and used his father’s connections to be named an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York in 1948. Bird deftly traces the key cases that made Cohn’s name as an anticommunist crusader, including the successful prosecutions of William Remington and the Rosenbergs. These successes attracted the attention of the greatest red-hunter of them all, Joseph McCarthy, and in January, 1953, Cohn began an eventful 19-month stint as the lead investigator for the Wisconsin senator’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
Throughout Bird’s narrative we see the constant failure of institutional leaders to punish Cohn for his illegal and immoral activities. President Dwight Eisenhower allowed McCarthy and Cohn’s investigations of supposed communists to continue apace, fearful that the then-powerful McCarthy would fracture the Republican Party. When the Army-McCarthy Hearings revealed that Cohn had fabricated evidence against enemies in the Department of Defense, the Eisenhower Administration declined to pursue charges of perjury against him, again for fear of alienating the right wing of their coalition. When, in 1973, a suspicious fire on Cohn’s yacht scuttled the vessel and killed one crew member, no charges were filed, in spite of the local sheriff’s “strong suspicion that foul play was involved.” The IRS moved glacially in investigating Cohn’s lifelong tax evasion. The City of New York took no legal action against Cohn and his business partner Paul Dano for their corrupt management of parking lots and subway newsstands from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, quietly canceling the contracts instead of pursuing charges. The New York State Bar Association could have—and should have—sought to disbar Cohn far sooner than the early 1980s (Cohn ultimately lost his law license two months before his death from AIDS-related complications in August, 1986).
The biography’s most troubling chapter recounts the story of Richard Kerr, an orphan from Northern Ireland who was pressed into sexual slavery by the leaders of Belfast’s Kincora Boys’ Home. In an interview with Bird and Goldmark, Kerr states that he was raped by Cohn in a Venice hotel in 1977, a few weeks shy of his 16th birthday. Kerr did not report the assault to authorities at the time, and this story has not been previously published. Its inclusion serves as a horrifying reminder of the long trail of trauma that followed in the wake of Cohn’s many misdeeds. “Roy was a party to this sordid business,” Bird concludes, his language oddly mild for behavior so evil.
In his Bird’s accounting, the key to unlocking Cohn is deceptively, damningly simple: he was a man driven purely by self-interest and greed.Bird’s conclusions are less Freudian. In his—accurate, I believe—accounting, the key to unlocking Cohn is deceptively, damningly simple: he was a man driven purely by self-interest and greed. “Fundamentally,” Bird writes, “he was an empty vessel. He had no coherent personal philosophy unless you count his shallow mirroring of Ayn Rand’s unadulterated selfishness.” His entire life was transactional, every action calculated with future payout in mind. In the words of journalist and friend Murray Kempton, “I early learned that Roy had no interior to speak of.”
It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. For the last 13 years of his life, Cohn took Trump under his wing, mentoring him in the ways of his world. Their alliance was the stuff of legend, and Cohn proudly displayed a photograph of Trump in his office. It was signed, “To Roy, My greatest friend. Donald.” In the words of investigative journalist David Cay Johnston, Cohn taught Trump a bevy of lessons that the 45th and 47th President of the United States has put into action:
It may have even been Cohn who suggested that Trump apply these tactics to the realm of politics. In a telephone interview with Bird and Goldmark, Trump recalled of Cohn, “He had a lot of respect for me. He said, ‘You’re going to be President someday. If you want to.’ He said that many times.”
The photo hinges on the juxtaposition of Cohn and the flag: his wan, scarred visage next to a symbol that is often used to evoke freedom, liberty, and hope. Mark’s photograph seems to suggest an essential dissonance between her subject and Americanness. This disparity is emphasized by those who have portrayed Cohn as a cancer on the American body politic, as a man who became powerful by flouting and ignoring the principles that define what it is to be American.
Cohn was an unheeded warning about the fragility of American institutions when confronted with unfettered greed and limitless egotism.Cohn was an unheeded warning about the fragility of American institutions when confronted with unfettered greed and limitless egotism. His most momentous act was to demonstrate continuously the fundamental impotence of the establishment. Cohn’s ethical and moral failings are clear. But the most troubling thing about his life—and the life of his most famous protégé—is the ease with which he was able to subvert the systems that should have held him in check.
In this light, Cohn’s failings are not merely his own. They belong to all of us. And it’s up to all of us—regardless of political persuasion—to deal with their fallout.
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