American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump

Pulitzer Prize winner Bird (American Prometheus) and researcher Goldmark present an astonishing biography of lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn. Born in the Bronx to a banking heiress and a judge, Cohn (1927–1986) came by his infamous knack for dealmaking honestly—his parents’ marriage was “a calculated transaction” between his father and maternal grandfather, who traded his daughter for a judgeship. With his father eventually appointed to the state supreme court, Cohn benefited from his family’s prominence, as with his admission to Columbia Law School after an initial rejection, which taught him to “bend the rules, so long as he had the right connections.” The authors follow Cohn in his most notorious roles, including as prime mover of the Rosenberg executions, for which he remained unrepentant; as the book-burning “baby-faced symbol of McCarthyism”; and as a lawyer for clients as diverse as mafia dons, Studio 54, and Donald Trump, who took from Cohn his defiance of rules and tabloid manipulation. The book excels as a masterful dissection of Cohn’s strange, contradictory, and immoral character as “a lawyer dismissive of the law,” as well as a keen interrogation of Cohn’s ceaseless popularity among New York City and Beltway high society, where many expressed repulsion at Cohn’s politics and corruption, yet were drawn to his charisma, aptitude for gossip, and transactional loyalty. It adds up to an extraordinary portrait of a singular American figure whose callousness and brazenness continue to mar the country 40 years after his death. (Sept.)