How One Notorious Figure Created the Likes of Donald Trump

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I gobbled up every page of Kai Bird’s American Scoundrel : Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. Bird, as he explains in the book’s acknowledgements, has considered himself “a biographer of the American establishment,” writing about such dimly remembered figures as John J. McCloy and McGeorge Bundy, as well as winning a Pulitzer for co-authoring, with Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus , the book on which Christopher Nolan’s 2023 film Oppenheimer was based. Roy Cohn, by contrast, was a mobbed-up and multiply-indicted lawyer in 20 th -century Washington and New York City, a henchman of Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover, a frequenter of orgies (alleged, but convincingly) and a massive closet case hated by the city’s gay community for his active public homophobia. He was also the mentor and arguably the creator of Donald Trump .

This is a dirty story, but as Bird acknowledges, one that has turned out to be seminal in American politics. “Americans love their gangsters,” Bird writes. We also love our conmen and rule-breakers, the bolder and more shameless, the better. Furthermore, we love our celebrities, and American Scoundrel is full of those, as well, although most of them are the long-gone stars of previous generations, the likes of Barbara Walters (a lifelong friend of Cohn’s), Andy Warhol, Norman Mailer, and Elizabeth Taylor. Even the acknowledgements section of American Scoundrel has its share of boldfaced names and remarkable anecdotes. The book—written by Bird but co-authored with his wife, Susan Goldmark, whom he credits with doing a sizable amount of the research—is a bounteous cornucopia of midcentury sleaze and uneasily addictive for just that reason. It’s got Mafia hits and frame jobs and blackmail and bribery and election tampering. It’s got forgery and insurance scams and perjury and espionage and sex trafficking and a lot of tax evasion. It makes James Ellroy novels look like Theo of Golden by comparison , and it makes for mesmerizing reading.

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The son of an affluent appellate judge, Cohn grew up in the Bronx, hovered over by his doting mother, with whom he lived until her death in 1967, when Cohn was 40. His cousin, the writer Anne Roiphe (mother of the writer Katie Roiphe ), described Dora Cohn as “small, hunched, grouchy, green,” adding that “she looked like a gnome from some German cutout.” Another cousin told Bird that Dora was “mean, vicious, ugly, and foul-mouthed.” No beauty himself and disfigured by a botched childhood surgery that left a prominent scar down the bridge of his nose, the diminutive Cohn was obsessed with tall, blond, muscular men, and one of his early forays into notoriety involved just such a figure, David Schine, heir to a hotel-chain fortune.

By that point, Cohn, an assistant U.S.