American Scoundrel
Roy Cohn was never elected to anything, and that was always the point. He did not need a title, a constituency, or a committee chairmanship when he had a telephone, a dry martini, and an absolute indifference to the rules that governed everybody else.
For four decades, from the dark and frantic days of the McCarthy hearings to the neon-lit excess of Studio 54 and the quiet corridors of the Reagan White House, Cohn operated as the primary mechanic of American power. He was the young prosecutor who helped send Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair before he was old enough to rent a car. He was the consigliere to mobsters, the informal adviser to Richard Nixon, and the man who spent his final years whispering daily instructions into the ear of a young, ambitious real estate developer named Donald Trump. He was a street fighter, a self-promoting hustler, and a Zelig of the dark side who managed to leave a fingerprint on nearly every major tremor in twentieth-century politics.
Now, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kai Bird has turned his lens on the man behind the myth. In a new book that traces Cohn’s ascent from a ruthless, baby-faced communist hunter to a bloated figure of tragedy dying of AIDS-related complications in 1986, Bird maps out the sinister web of charm and deceit that kept Cohn at the center of the American experiment for forty years. It is a penetrating look at the architect of our current political reality—a reminder that the playbook being used in Washington and New York today was written a long time ago by a man who believed that loyalty was a one-way street and that winning was the only metric that mattered.