American Scoundrel

Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Kai Bird traces the life of Roy Cohn (1927–1986), a New York lawyer and political operative whose career spanned from the McCarthy era to the rise of Donald Trump. Bird argues that Cohn's anti-establishment tactics, personal immorality, and divisive political instincts planted the seeds of 21st-century American populism and directly shaped the man who would become the 45th president.

Cohn grew up as the only child of Albert Cohn, a New York judge who married into wealth, and Dora Marcus, a domineering woman whose father founded the Bank of United States. The marriage was loveless and transactional: Albert received a judgeship funded by Dora's family, and Dora gained respectability. Roy was pampered without limits and raised to function among adults from an early age, learning transactional politics at his father's dinner table, where Bronx Democratic bosses socialized. A formative trauma occurred when Dora's brother Bernard Marcus was convicted of bank fraud after the Bank of United States collapsed in 1930, the largest commercial bank failure in the country's history at that time. The family insisted Bernie had been scapegoated by anti-Semites and Jewish communists, and Roy carried this grudge into adulthood, fueling his lifelong anti-communism and resentment of the establishment.

At the Horace Mann School, an elite all-boys prep school, Roy befriended future media mogul Si Newhouse and tabloid publisher Generoso Pope Jr. At 15, he brokered his first business deal, helping media tycoon Generoso Pope Sr. acquire a radio station and earning a $10,000 commission. Pope Sr.'s connections to mob boss Frank Costello introduced Roy to a world where corruption was the norm. Roy accelerated through Columbia University, earning both a bachelor's and a law degree by age 20. In 1948, at 21, he joined the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, where he assisted in prosecuting Communist Party leaders under the Smith Act, a law that criminalized advocacy of overthrowing the government. He cultivated relationships with gossip columnists Walter Winchell and George Sokolsky and developed a close connection to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover through Hoover's deputy Louis B. Nichols.

The Rosenberg espionage trial of 1951 became the defining case of Cohn's early career. Roy played a key role in getting his preferred judge, Irving Kaufman, assigned to the case and maintained improper private communications with Kaufman throughout the trial. He pressured David Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg's brother, to testify that Ethel typed up espionage notes, testimony that proved central to her conviction. Judge Kaufman sentenced both Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death. Decades later, Greenglass admitted his wife likely did the typing, and declassified evidence indicated the U.S. government knew Ethel was not an active participant in espionage. Cohn remained unapologetic, stating he would have pulled the switch himself.

In early 1953, at 25, Roy became chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy's Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. McCarthy hired Roy partly because his Jewish identity could deflect accusations of anti-Semitism. Robert F. Kennedy, hired as assistant counsel, resented Cohn's superior position, beginning a lifelong enmity. Cohn brought along his new friend G. David Schine as an unpaid consultant. The pair conducted brutal closed-door interrogations, destroying careers and contributing to the firing of hundreds of federal employees suspected of leftist sympathies or homosexuality, even as Cohn himself privately had sexual relationships with men. On an 18-day inspection tour of U.S. embassy libraries in Europe, they precipitated the purging and burning of books abroad.

When Schine was drafted, Cohn waged an obsessive campaign for his preferential treatment, threatening to "wreck the Army." Army Counsel John Adams documented Cohn's demands in a chronology that became a devastating weapon. Cohn responded by fabricating 11 backdated memoranda alleging the army had attempted to blackmail McCarthy's committee. The ensuing Army-McCarthy hearings were televised for 36 days in 1954, watched by 20 million Americans. The climax occurred when McCarthy attacked a young lawyer in the opposing firm, prompting Army counsel Joseph Welch's famous rebuke: "You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" (122). Senator Charles Potter privately concluded there was "perjury by the basketful" (125), but the Eisenhower administration declined to pursue charges. Cohn resigned in July 1954; the Senate voted to condemn McCarthy that December. McCarthy descended into alcoholism and died in May 1957 at 47.

Cohn returned to New York, rebranding defeat as victory. He rebuilt his career through connections to Tammany Hall, New York City's Democratic political machine, as well as gossip columnists and mob figures. His closest friend was Si Newhouse, now a major media baron; Si's father Sam advanced Roy a $500,000 loan. Cohn cultivated a public image as a tough, well-connected lawyer through relationships with women like journalist Barbara Walters, who served as social companions masking his closeted homosexuality. His connections to the Mafia extended across all five New York crime families: He defended John Gotti on a murder charge, negotiating it down to attempted manslaughter, and represented "Fat Tony" Salerno of the Genovese family. When a client named Salvatore Granello considered becoming an FBI informant, Granello was found shot dead two days later. U.S. Attorney Robert Morgenthau indicted Cohn three times between 1963 and 1969 on charges including perjury, bribery, and conspiracy, but Cohn was acquitted each time, establishing a sense of legal invincibility.

In late 1973, Cohn met 27-year-old Donald Trump at Le Club, an exclusive Manhattan dinner venue. Trump sought advice on a federal housing discrimination lawsuit; Cohn filed a frivolous $100 million defamation counterclaim that grabbed headlines before being dismissed. Cohn orchestrated Trump's Commodore Hotel deal, securing a 40-year tax abatement through political connections, and introduced Trump to Fat Tony Salerno, who controlled cement-pouring in Manhattan. For Trump Tower, Cohn connected Trump to the Concrete Club, a cartel that controlled Manhattan's concrete industry, and won a critical tax abatement through the courts. Cohn taught Trump his core principles: never settle, counterattack immediately, claim victory regardless of outcome, avoid paper trails, and cultivate the media. Trump later acknowledged that Cohn "started introducing me to a lot of people. I got to know everybody" (277).

Studio 54, the legendary disco that opened in 1977, provided the backdrop for Cohn's most flamboyant period. He hosted lavish birthday parties attended by politicians, judges, and mob associates. For the 1980 presidential election, Cohn helped political operative Roger Stone secure Trump as a financial backer for Ronald Reagan's campaign. During the Reagan years, Cohn gained White House access, cultivated Nancy Reagan, and facilitated meetings between media mogul Rupert Murdoch and the president.

Cohn's predatory sexual behavior extended to the trafficking of minors. Richard Kerr, a Northern Irish teenager trafficked from the Kincora Boys' Home in Belfast, described being introduced to Cohn in 1977 and a subsequent sexual encounter at a hotel in Venice when Kerr was about to turn 16. In Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Cohn summered in the early 1980s, neighbors witnessed encounters with underage hustlers. There Cohn befriended novelist Norman Mailer, who found him fascinating despite his reputation. Si Newhouse's interest in Trump led to the commissioning of The Art of the Deal, ghostwritten by Tony Schwartz and published in 1987, a book that transformed Trump into a national figure.

In 1983, Cohn met Peter Fraser, a young New Zealander who became his last partner and caretaker. Cohn received an AIDS-related diagnosis in November 1984 but told everyone he had liver cancer, maintaining his denial of homosexuality to the end. On June 23, 1986, the New York State Appellate Court unanimously disbarred Cohn for unethical conduct, citing his fraudulent manipulation of client Lewis Rosenstiel's will, misappropriation of client funds, and lying on a bar application. He died on August 2, 1986, at the National Institutes of Health, with Fraser holding his hand. The immediate cause of death was cardiopulmonary arrest, with AIDS listed among the contributing factors.

In the epilogue, Bird argues that Cohn's influence only grew after his death. Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize–winning play Angels in America (1991–92) makes Cohn a central character, and the AIDS Memorial Quilt panel for Cohn reads "Bully. Coward. Victim." (376). The IRS seized Cohn's properties to settle $7 million in back taxes. Bird contends that Cohn's McCarthyism morphed into a nativist, America First politics that transformed the modern Republican Party, and that Cohn directly taught Trump the tactics of attack, denial, delay, and media manipulation that carried Trump to the presidency. Bird concludes that Cohn was fundamentally a narcissistic con artist whose personal immorality planted the seeds of America's descent into divisive, partisan politics.