Roy Cohn died in 1986, but “American Scoundrel” makes a persuasive case that his fingerprints are still all over American politics nearly four decades later.
Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kai Bird, teaming up with co-author Susan Goldmark, traces Cohn’s arc from the young prosecutor who helped send Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair, through his years as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel during the Red Scare, his later work defending mob figures and murky real-estate deals, his back-channel advising of Richard Nixon, and finally his tutoring of a young Donald Trump in the take-no-prisoners style of combat Cohn perfected and his most famous client would go on to make his own. The book reads less like a cradle-to-grave biography and more like an argument: that Cohn’s playbook of attack, deny, and never apologize became a template that outlived him by generations.
Bird’s research pedigree, he won the Pulitzer for “American Prometheus,” the Oppenheimer biography that inspired the recent film, is on full display in the sheer volume of primary-source material the authors marshal: court records, FBI files, and personal correspondence, all put to work reconstructing Cohn’s deals and betrayals in granular detail. The book doesn’t flinch from the contradictions at its subject’s core, a closeted gay man who helped fuel the era’s Lavender Scare, a lawyer who faced repeated disbarment proceedings yet somehow kept working, a mentor whose most famous pupil eventually became far more powerful than he ever was. Tracing that throughline all the way to the present day is where the book does its most interesting and unsettling work.
Reviewers have been close to unanimous in praising the depth of reporting behind this book. Several outlets have singled it out as one of the year’s essential political biographies, calling the sourcing exhaustive, and have appreciated that Bird and Goldmark largely let the historical record make their argument rather than editorializing over it. A handful of critics noted that the book’s length and density of names and dates can make for slow going through its middle chapters, though most agreed the payoff, a clearer understanding of how the Cohn era metastasized into today’s politics, justifies the effort required to get there.
Fans of thorough, shoe-leather political biography will find “American Scoundrel” a rich and genuinely unsettling read. Even readers who think they already know the Roy Cohn story are likely to come away with a fuller, darker picture of just how far his influence traveled, and how much of the present moment it still explains.
As an Amazon Associate, VIRA Broadcasting earns from qualifying purchases.