AMERICAN SCOUNDREL

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.