A thorough, deeply reported life story of the gleefully villainous lawyer who molded a U.S. president.
Chronicle of “a nefarious actor in one unseemly drama after another.”
Bird, the author of acclaimed biographies of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Jimmy Carter, and Goldmark, his wife and chief researcher, craft a comprehensive portrait of a truculent lawyer who shot to infamy in the 1950s and remained a scandalous figure until his death from AIDS in 1986. Roy Cohn was chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s reckless Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in the 1950s. Later, Cohn mentored Donald Trump and helped make him famous. The authors don’t equivocate: Cohn “was a narcissistic con artist” and an avatar of the politics of resentment and incivility. Coupled with transcripts and audio shared by journalists who covered Cohn, the authors’ interviews with Trump and others illustrate the long shadow of Cohn’s malign influence. In revealing opening chapters, Bird and Goldmark show their subject, then a well-to-do schoolboy, learning to wield vicious lies. Their research outlines how Cohn employed “highly irregular” tactics during his successful prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Americans convicted of being Soviet spies and executed in 1953. As McCarthy’s attack dog, Cohn weaponized Senate investigations, censored books, and “destroy[ed] numerous lives.” Meanwhile, he was at once an outspoken homophobe and a closeted gay man with an active sex life. The authors interview a man who says Cohn was among those who preyed on him when he was sexually trafficked as an underage teen. “Roy’s longstanding heterosexual friends all knew he was gay,” the authors write. “Trump knew it. Donald once called up [Manhattan borough president] Andy Stein to complain that he had given Roy his plane to fly to Acapulco: ‘Fucking Roy,’ said Trump, ‘I get him a plane and he fills it up with all these fags.’” Cohn, the authors say, taught his “ideal student” how to dodge creditors, attack perceived enemies, avoid leaving paper trails, and keep his name in the tabloids. Cohn’s style, Bird and Goldmark persuasively demonstrate, “became Trump’s.”
A thorough, deeply reported life story of the gleefully villainous lawyer who molded a U.S. president.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2026
ISBN: 9781668031575
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.
Jackie Kennedy's secret service agent Hill and co-author McCubbin team up for a follow-up to Mrs. Kennedy and Me (2012) in this well-illustrated narrative of those five days 50 years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Since Hill was part of the secret service detail assigned to protect the president and his wife, his firsthand account of those days is unique. The chronological approach, beginning before the presidential party even left the nation's capital on Nov. 21, shows Kennedy promoting his “New Frontier” policy and how he was received by Texans in San Antonio, Houston and Fort Worth before his arrival in Dallas. A crowd of more than 8,000 greeted him in Houston, and thousands more waited until 11 p.m. to greet the president at his stop in Fort Worth. Photographs highlight the enthusiasm of those who came to the airports and the routes the motorcades followed on that first day. At the Houston Coliseum, Kennedy addressed the leaders who were building NASA for the planned moon landing he had initiated. Hostile ads and flyers circulated in Dallas, but the president and his wife stopped their motorcade to respond to schoolchildren who held up a banner asking the president to stop and shake their hands. Hill recounts how, after Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots, he jumped onto the back of the presidential limousine. He was present at Parkland Hospital, where the president was declared dead, and on the plane when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Hill also reports the funeral procession and the ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery. “[Kennedy] would have not wanted his legacy, fifty years later, to be a debate about the details of his death,” writes the author. “Rather, he would want people to focus on the values and ideals in which he so passionately believed.”
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3149-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
An essential account of a chaotic administration that, Woodward makes painfully clear, is incapable of governing.
That thing in the air that is deadlier than even your “strenuous flus”? Trump knew—and did nothing about it.
The big news from veteran reporter Woodward’s follow-up to Fear has been widely reported: Trump was fully aware at the beginning of 2020 that a pandemic loomed and chose to downplay it, causing an untold number of deaths and crippling the economy. His excuse that he didn’t want to cause a panic doesn’t fly given that he trades in fear and division. The underlying news, however, is that Trump participated in this book, unlike in the first, convinced by Lindsey Graham that Woodward would give him a fair shake. Seventeen interviews with the sitting president inform this book, as well as extensive digging that yields not so much news as confirmation: Trump has survived his ineptitude because the majority of Congressional Republicans go along with the madness because they “had made a political survival decision” to do so—and surrendered their party to him. The narrative often requires reading between the lines. Graham, though a byword for toadyism, often reins Trump in; Jared Kushner emerges as the real power in the West Wing, “highly competent but often shockingly misguided in his assessments”; Trump admires tyrants, longs for their unbridled power, resents the law and those who enforce it, and is quick to betray even his closest advisers; and, of course, Trump is beholden to Putin. Trump occasionally emerges as modestly self-aware, but throughout the narrative, he is in a rage. Though he participated, he said that he suspected this to be “a lousy book.” It’s not—though readers may wish Woodward had aired some of this information earlier, when more could have been done to stem the pandemic. When promoting Fear, the author was asked for his assessment of Trump. His reply: “Let’s hope to God we don’t have a crisis.” Multiple crises later, Woodward concludes, as many observers have, “Trump is the wrong man for the job.”
An essential account of a chaotic administration that, Woodward makes painfully clear, is incapable of governing.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982131-73-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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