American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, by Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark. Scribner. 528 pages
“Leave Donald alone,” Roy Cohn warned a federal prosecutor. “He’s going to be big one day.”
The author Kai Bird takes us back to the mid-1970s, when Roy Marcus Cohn, the erstwhile McCarthyite witchhunter-turned–lawyer-fixer for notorious New York City mobsters, was defending Donald Trump, then 27 and on the make, in a racial discrimination lawsuit. The feds charged Trump and his mobbed-up father Fred with barring blacks from renting in dozens of the family’s outer-borough apartment buildings.
Using plainly dishonest tactics, Cohn dragged out the lawsuit for nearly two years. He and Trump countersued for defamation, seeking a bonkers $100 million in damages. He made a show out of it, too, by calling a news conference at the New York Hilton to attack the government’s case. Cohn lied in open court about an assistant prosecutor, accusing her of threatening witnesses in 4 a.m. phone calls. It was a complete fabrication, but it delayed the case by several weeks.
None of it worked. A judge threw out the defamation suit, and Trump ultimately settled by agreeing to advertise his apartments in black-owned newspapers—without having to admit that he had violated federal housing law.
And the (im)moral of this story? Trump and Cohn declared victory.
In the 11 years since Donald John Trump crashed American politics at the end of a golden escalator ride, oceans of ink have been spilled attempting to explain his and his movement’s political origins. Some have rummaged around interwar Europe searching for fascist lineages. Others have dipped into more recent American history: George Wallace, Pat Buchanan, or whoever else might be the current villain of choice.
In American Scoundrel, the master biographer Kai Bird points us in a different direction, to a universe where ideology matters less than crass opportunism in the pursuit of money, sex, and power—where extreme narcissists will shatter everything around them to get their way. This was Roy Cohn’s world; Donald Trump is his inheritor.
Bird has written or cowritten the life stories of Robert Oppenheimer, Jimmy Carter, John McCloy, William and McGeorge Bundy, and the CIA spy Bob Ames. So how did a self-described “biographer of the American establishment” choose an embodiment of its antithesis? Bird admits that a few years ago he had “an epiphany and realized that with the political rise of Donald Trump I had somehow underestimated the significance of Roy Cohn.”
Readers of this page-turning, sometimes cringe-inducing book may agree that Cohn’s stamp on history has heretofore been underappreciated. They may also feel the need to take a shower after spending so much time with such a despicable man. Yet Bird is too good a biographer to paint a monochrome portrait of a villain. He makes clear that Cohn could be charming and generous, befriending those who initially loathed him, such as Barbara Walters.
Whatever one thought of his methods, there was no denying Roy Cohn was an effective operator. Many Americans hated the obnoxious attorney for helping prosecute the Rosenbergs and for working with Joseph McCarthy, but these early experiences made Cohn a sort of celebrity before his 30th birthday. His well-earned reputation for utter ruthlessness helped him maintain the backing of indispensable allies in his anti-establishment career: the elites in politics, the law (not least J. Edgar Hoover), real estate, media (including the most influential gossip columnists), and organized crime.
American Scoundrel will remind anyone outraged by our current culture that “elite impunity” is nothing new. Then, as now, power and celebrity attracted allies.
Cohn was lucky, too, when luck may have been the only thing that could save him from his criminality. On the verge of being convicted for perjury in a now long-forgotten bribery case in 1964, Cohn was delighted to learn the judge would dismiss the jury on the fourth day of deliberations. The father of a juror had died.
This scoundrel is a mountain of contradictions and hypocrisy. Cohn was Jewish but quick to denounce liberal Jews as disloyal communists. He was a closeted gay man who spewed vitriol at homosexuals and opposed all gay rights causes. Cohn never admitted to being gay, even as he was dying from AIDS in 1986, not long after he was finally disbarred for unethical conduct. He was only 59. His sexual appetite was apparently insatiable and occasionally extended to teenagers. One chapter is titled “Predator.”
While Bird (assisted by his researcher wife, Susan Goldmark) was obligated to delve into Cohn’s personal life, page after page describing what went on at raunchy sex parties or in Studio 54’s bathrooms may strike some readers as TMI. It’s hard to get the image out of your head, even if this old story has never been proven: J. Edgar Hoover wearing a red dress at a secret orgy at the Plaza Hotel, surrounded by male prostitutes in leather. Cohn was said to have brought the suitcase with the women’s clothing.
Young Roy Cohn developed his “guiding principles” in the hysteria of 1950s anti-communism. “I have absolutely no misgivings about the execution of the Rosenbergs…. I would have pulled the lever myself,” Cohn said decades later.
“Roy, of course, was right about Julius passing atomic secrets—and wrong about Ethel. But he made it a principle never to admit fault, and he certainly wasn’t going to do so about the Rosenberg case,” Bird concludes. Cohn learned to “never waste any time on regrets, never show any doubts, and never ever apologize.” Remind you of anyone?
Six months before the Rosenbergs’ execution in June 1953, Senator Joe McCarthy hired the rising yet immature 25-year-old as his chief counsel to hunt Commies. “Cohn’s interrogations were particularly brutal in the closed-door executive sessions. He had a sixth sense for finding the vulnerabilities of his adversaries,” writes Bird.
One of the first loyal Americans forced to swallow Cohn’s baseless bile was a harmless 29-year-old Foreign Service officer named Vladimir Toumanoff. For five days in January 1953, Cohn and his fellow “jackals” grilled him privately about his Russian family history. A public appearance in McCarthy’s Senate hearing room followed. Toumanoff successfully parried the inquisitors—he and his parents were, in fact, not closet Bolsheviks—but he was damaged goods.
“His boss in the State Department put him on paid leave and then transferred him to a ‘non-sensitive’ position in Iceland,” says Bird, who is unsparing in his assessment of President Dwight Eisenhower’s silence and timidity in the face of McCarthy’s assault on American democracy. “Eisenhower needed to be seen as taking tough steps against communist subversion in the federal government, even though the number of actual communists was minuscule.”
Going after small fry was one thing. McCarthy and Cohn’s fishing expedition eventually tried to catch Ike’s Army for “coddling communists.” The duo became so entangled in their own lies that they resorted to concocting phony documents to “prove” their baseless conspiracies. Cohn perjured himself during the Army–McCarthy hearings in spring 1954, but was never indicted in the first of many career-saving lucky breaks.
“He was not indicted, largely because the Eisenhower administration just wanted to shut down what had become a political embarrassment,” Bird says. Cohn was forced to resign from McCarthy’s committee, but he was hardly shunned. A week later, some 2,000 admirers celebrated him at a dinner sponsored by the American Jewish League Against Communism. Yet at the same time, “Some of his own relatives despised him.”
Cohn seemed to learn all the wrong lessons from these dark chapters in American history, except that he believed “Joe McCarthy was a martyr sacrificed on the altar of anti-communism.” Act fearlessly and strike fear in others—attack, attack, attack—were the lessons the Wisconsin senator taught his New York sidekick.
Bird’s treatments of the Rosenberg case and McCarthyism are the book’s strongest, but I suspect readers will reach for American Scoundrel because of the other name in the subtitle. Donald Trump may have learned the art of the deal from Roy Cohn, whom he met in October 1973, among more dubious skills.
McCarthyism was, among other things, an attack on free expression and association. Its enduring relevance is self-evident in the Age of Trump, where foreign-born students have been detained for criticizing Israel and universities are investigated for pro-Palestinian protests, to cite but two examples.
“Trump learned from Cohn that the court of public opinion is far more important than a court of law,” Bird says. Had he lived long enough, Cohn might have coined “fake news,” one of the current president’s favorite insults. Both men, of course, loved the media spotlight and privately sought favorable coverage to reinforce their strongman reputations.
Also like his mentor, Trump inspires hatred in his enemies. Indeed, he seems to feed off it. Readers who endure Cohn’s remorseless crime spree across four decades of American life will better understand how his kindred spirit and protege could eventually make it to the White House.
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