American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump by Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark — a penetrating biography from the Pulitzer Prize–winning coauthor of American Prometheus, the book that inspired Oppenheimer.
From the 1950s to the 1980s, one name kept appearing at the center of American political drama: Roy Cohn. In his twenties, the young prosecutor helped send Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair and became chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy. In later decades he worked as a feared New York fixer, an informal adviser in Republican circles, a fixture of Studio 54 nightlife, and — most consequentially — a mentor to a young Donald Trump.
Bird and Goldmark trace Cohn’s rise and methods across four decades: the Rosenberg case, the McCarthy years, his work for powerful and notorious clients, his proximity to presidents, and the daily counsel he gave Trump as the future president learned how to fight in court and in public.
Years after Cohn’s death in 1986 from AIDS-related complications, he became a central figure in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. This deeply reported biography argues that his imprint on American political style has been larger than many accounts have allowed.
A comprehensive, often unsettling portrait of a lawyer who treated notoriety as a weapon — and of the world he helped shape.
From the coauthor of American Prometheus
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