AMERICAN SCOUNDREL: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, by Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark
Kai Bird was apparently as surprised as anyone to find himself writing a book about the notorious lawyer Roy Cohn.
A self-described “biographer of the American establishment,” Bird would regularly come across the virulently anti-establishment Cohn in the archives. In “American Prometheus,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Robert Oppenheimer that Bird co-authored with Martin J. Sherwin, Cohn inevitably shows up as the aide to the red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy.
But Cohn’s presence in Bird’s books was always fleeting. Cohn, a radical right-winger with seamy mob connections and an underworld clientele, was the reckless id to the establishment’s superego. Bird had him figured for a colorful bit player — an “annoying and obstructive” ankle-biter ultimately kept in his place by the adults in the room.
“I had somehow underestimated the significance of Roy Cohn,” he admits in “American Scoundrel,” a new biography of Cohn that Bird wrote with his wife, Susan Goldmark (she commented on the manuscript and did much of the research). It was only after Cohn’s former client and protégé Donald Trump ascended to the highest office that Bird realized what was happening: Cohn’s brand of smash-mouth politics had triumphed, with the bit player effectively seizing center stage. Yet there was only one comprehensive biography in existence — “Citizen Cohn,” by the former Washington Post columnist Nicholas von Hoffman, published way back in 1988, just two years after Cohn died.
From the get-go, Bird provides a thorough and readable account of Cohn’s astonishing life and career. Born in 1927, the cosseted only child of a well-connected father (a judge) and a domineering mother, he grew up to have a distinctive look: heavy-lidded watery blue eyes and a bent nose with a scar running down the middle, the result of a botched blemish-removal surgery he had as a child, at his mother’s behest.
Despite the pitiful back story, the scar dovetails with Roy’s pugilist reputation. He came roaring onto the political scene as a 24-year-old assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage (and may have helped sway the judge in their case to sentence them to the electric chair). He went on to assist McCarthy’s efforts to purge the government of communists and homosexuals, mercilessly casting stones from his glass house as a closeted gay man.
Cohn was never keen on introspection, and kept barreling forward with his disparate selves. He went from prosecuting government cases to defending mobsters. He died a painful and lonely death in 1986, at the age of 59, publicly denying the truth to the very end — that it was AIDS, not liver cancer, that was killing him.
For decades, this cruel arc made Cohn the perfect pop-culture villain. The list of his posthumous roles is long. He was a major character in Tony Kushner’s play “Angels in America.” He was repeatedly parodied on “The Simpsons.” His life has been the subject of at least four films, including two documentaries.
“American Scoundrel” is an elegant retelling of the lurid Cohn story, but it’s also something more. Bird makes ample use of F.B.I. materials that he obtained only after the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press filed a lawsuit on his behalf. Cohn was three times indicted on charges of bribery, perjury and extortion, and in each instance was acquitted. Six weeks before his death, he was disbarred. The F.B.I. files help Bird catch Cohn in numerous lies. In sworn testimony from 1974 (acquired by the R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe, an unexpected collector of Cohn memorabilia), Cohn — who was “audacious about his tax insolence” — claimed he had lost millions of dollars in the stock market. An F.B.I. memo shows that was not true.
“That was not true” turns out to be an underlying theme in the book. Cohn lied when it suited him — which was often, given that lying turned out to be an effective way to bend others to his preferred reality. All that mattered was winning.
For decades, he lied with impunity. Bird provides an especially riveting play-by-play of Cohn’s deceitful conduct when he was McCarthy’s chief counsel during the Army-McCarthy hearings — hearings that were triggered by Cohn’s attempts to get preferential treatment for his friend (and crush), David Schine, who had been drafted into the Army. After lying under oath, Cohn almost got tried for perjury. But he “got lucky,” Bird writes.
It was during the hearings that the Army’s chief counsel beseeched McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” This was the beginning of McCarthy’s end — and perversely ensured that Cohn wouldn’t face any consequences: “The Eisenhower administration just wanted to shut down what had become a political embarrassment.”
The rest of the book recounts Cohn’s eventful life in well-chosen detail. Trump and Cohn were clearly made for each other. In the 1970s, when the Justice Department sued the Trump family’s real estate company for discriminatory practices, Cohn responded with a flood of counterclaims. Both men seemed to operate at only two speeds: belligerent or unctuous. When they weren’t on the attack they reveled in making deals and greasing wheels.
One of Bird’s later chapters is titled “Predator”; it includes details about Cohn’s pursuit of teenagers like Richard Kerr, an orphan from Belfast who tells Bird that he was trafficked to Cohn when he was 16.
But as much as “American Scoundrel” is a biography of Cohn, it’s shadowed by another, equally important, story: that of his parasitical relationship with the American establishment Bird has studied for so many years. Cohn would rail against it, positioning himself as its ultimate antagonist, while nevertheless feeding off its power brokers.
Even as he was dying, still complaining about big government and the I.R.S., he managed to finagle his way into secretly getting cutting-edge, experimental AIDS treatment through a taxpayer-funded clinical trial at the National Institutes of Health. Cohn would figure out what the rules were and then perform a ruthless arbitrage, cannily exploiting both the establishment’s bounty and its blind spots to his advantage.
Bird’s decision to mirror the title of “American Prometheus” with “American Scoundrel” is fitting. When Oppenheimer witnessed the first detonation of a nuclear bomb, he was reminded of a line from the Bhagavad-Gita: “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.” He was horrified by the new reality that he had helped bring into being.
Cohn, too, was a destructive force — one less awesome and more tawdry. Bird calls him “the ghoul of our nightmares, a man whose personal immorality planted the seeds of America’s descent into the political folly of the 21st century.” A Prometheus steals fire for humanity; a scoundrel takes everyone for a ride.
AMERICAN SCOUNDREL: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump | By Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark | Scribner | 509 pp. | $32
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