The photograph of Roy Cohn that graces the cover of Kai Bird’s new biography, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, was actually the author’s second choice. As Bird describes in the book’s acknowledgements, he was denied the right to use his preferred option, Robert Mapplethorpe’s stark portrait of Cohn’s cold-eyed visage that calls to mind a Halloween mask. In Bird’s accounting, the Mapplethorpe Foundation feared losing its nonprofit status if it licensed the photograph to appear on the cover of a book critical of the current president, Cohn’s most famous acolyte. This anecdote underscores two truths of living under our current regime. First, acts of self-censorship are likely outnumbering—and may prove as distorting as—restrictions that are officially imposed. Second, purportedly independent and robust institutions are facing unprecedented pressure to yield under the weight of competitive authoritarianism.
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.
American Scoundrel assiduously charts Cohn’s path to fame and infamy, tracing his roles as federal prosecutor (supporting cases against Alger Hiss, William Remington, and the Rosenbergs), attack dog for Senator Joseph McCarthy, mob lawyer (with clients drawn from all of the New York underworld’s “Five Families”), celebrity divorce specialist (Si Newhouse, Gene Pope, Bianca Jagger), nefarious businessman, serial tax dodger, and conservative political operative (for, among others, Richard Nixon in 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984).
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.)
These discoveries allow Bird to give the most complete accounting of Cohn to date. Though his conclusions are not markedly different from those of other biographers and scholars, they are founded on a richness of evidence that makes them more profound. The resulting portrait details a life of impunity. Seen from this angle, American Scoundrel is as much an indictment of the people and systems who failed to rein in Cohn’s criminality and corruption as it is a judgement of the man himself.
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.
Cohn soon became McCarthy’s right-hand man, running investigations, leading the questioning of witnesses, serving as the senator’s liaison to other government branches, and—perhaps most importantly—directing the public relations operation that kept McCarthy and his subcommittee at the forefront of the national consciousness. It was a role that threw him into the spotlight, with journalists blurring the line between news and gossip as they tracked his every move. Much has been written on the irony of Cohn fueling the Lavender Scare, the Cold War-era persecution of homosexuals, at the same time he was having sex with men. The infamous Army-McCarthy Hearings, broadcast to a national TV audience in the spring of 1954, exposed McCarthy and Cohn as bullies and severely damaged their political reputations. Cohn resigned from McCarthy’s staff and returned to Manhattan, where he crafted a second act as a pugnacious, well-connected, and unscrupulous attorney. Those successes would ultimately lead him back to the world of politics, and he held significant sway as a conservative fixer in the 1970s and 80s.
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 powerful politicians, businessmen, entertainers, and journalists with whom Cohn surrounded himself were wise to his misconduct but looked the other way because he had connections, was good for a favor, and demonstrated personal loyalty to them. Cohn was, by many accounts, an entertaining friend: witty, mischievous, generous, and a fantastic source of gossip. In the words of syndicated columnist Liz Smith, “I got a big kick out of watching him operate.” During Cohn’s disbarment proceedings Barbara Walters testified in his defense, highlighting her friend’s “integrity” even though she had extensive knowledge of his transgressions. Other New Yorkers who supported Cohn through during that investigation included William Saffire, Congressman Mario Biaggi, comedian Joe Adams, New York Post editor Steven Dunleavy, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Donald Trump. Even the use of the word “scoundrel” in this biography’s title seems winking, as if Cohn was a Victorian rogue or a kid who got his hand caught in the cookie jar, rather than a lifelong criminal.
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.At points, the biography frustrates by failing to trawl the depths of Cohn’s character to craft a more complete psychological and intellectual portrait. He was a man of numerous, fascinating contradictions—a homophobic homosexual, an antisemitic Jew, a wealthy man who paid no taxes, a right-wing operative whose father was a key player in New York City’s Democratic machine, a lawyer who thumbed his nose at the law—and one could imagine a more robust excavation of the roots of his complexities. Many of those who knew Cohn did undertake such a quest, with Liz Smith remarking that, “To the end of his life [Cohn] remained this very strange Jewish son who was still trying to please his mother and father’s portrait over his piano.”
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.”
However multifariously malevolent Cohn was, he may have become a historical footnote were it not for his association with his most famous client. Cohn met Donald Trump in 1973 at Le Club, a members-only restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Trump and his father, Fred, were in search of an attorney to defend them from Justice Department charges that the Trumps had discriminated against Black renters. Cohn’s solution was to countersue for $100 million, charging the federal government with defaming his clients. The countersuit was promptly dismissed, and the Trumps eventually signed a settlement, promising to adhere to a consent decree designed to combat housing discrimination. Those inconvenient facts did not preclude Cohn and the younger Trump from calling a press conference and declaring victory against government overreach. (The Trumps breached the consent decree and were again charged with violating the Fair Housing Act in 1978.)
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:
Ignore the rules, do what you want to do, don’t leave a paper trail, don’t keep a calendar, never do things in writing, and if somebody gets onto you, rat out other people to save yourself. Delay, delay, delay, [be]cause grand juries have limited time, and you can run out the clock. And call in the news media. Make up a fantastic story. We’re just honest businessmen who are being attacked by these corrupt New York City police, or FBI agents, or especially the corrupt and heartless IRS agents. And that’ll be the news story. It’ll put the government on the defensive.
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.”
Four months before his death in 1986, Cohn posed for a series of portraits by the celebrated photographer Mary Ellen Mark. Though haggard and ravaged by disease, he was incapable of refusing the opportunity for publicity; the shots were later used to illustrate posthumous articles in Vanity Fair and Life, the latter titled “the Snarling Death of Roy Cohn.” In perhaps the best-known image from the sitting, Cohn broods in a Queen Anne-style wingback chair, his legs crossed casually, staring at the camera as he clutches a small American flag, the kind waved by spectators on Inauguration Day and at 4th of July parades.
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.And yet, for the first half of Donald Trump’s second term, Cohn and his actions appeared less antithetical to American identity and more like elemental expressions of it. His strategy of going on the offensive has proven remarkably destructive in the hands of a president who has attempted to bend and break cherished institutions, from the Supreme Court and the legislative branch to freedom of speech, an independent press, and the sanctity of the vote. In the midterms, voters rejected the particular brand of authoritarianism Trump represents. But the damage is hard to undo. Like Cohn, Trump has shown how vulnerable the American system of government can be, and how easily it can be undermined by somebody with the motivation to do so.
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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