Who Let Roy Cohn Off the Hook?

The photograph of Roy Cohn that graces the cover of Kai Bird’s new biography, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, was actually…

The photograph of Roy Cohn that graces the cover of Kai Bird’s new biography, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, was actually the author’s second choice. As Bird describes in the book’s acknowledgements, he was denied the right to use his preferred option, Robert Mapplethorpe’s stark portrait of Cohn’s cold-eyed visage that calls to mind a Halloween mask.

In Bird’s accounting, the Mapplethorpe Foundation feared losing its nonprofit status if it licensed the photograph to appear on the cover of a book critical of the current president, Cohn’s most famous acolyte. This anecdote underscores two truths of living under our current regime. First, acts of self-censorship are likely outnumbering—and may prove as distorting as—restrictions that are officially imposed. Second, purportedly independent and robust institutions are facing unprecedented pressure to yield under the weight of competitive authoritarianism.

Those lessons are repeated numerous times throughout Bird’s energetic, readable, and meticulously-researched examination of Cohn, written with his wife and “Director of Research” Susan Goldmark. Bird is best-known for American Prometheus, a Pulitzer-winning biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer that inspired Christopher Nolan’s 2023 film. But his strongest work might be The Color of Truth, an analysis of the lives of McGeorge and William Bundy, bureaucrats essential to the Cold War liberal order who helped mislead the country into an unwinnable war in Vietnam.

By his own accounting, Bird is a “biographer of the American establishment,” driven to understand the men (because it’s almost always been men) and systems that facilitated American global dominance following World War II. In taking on Cohn as a subject, Bird explores the other half of the story: in his telling, Cohn is the quintessential anti-establishment figure who has indelibly shaped the political culture of postwar America.

American Scoundrel assiduously charts Cohn’s path to fame and infamy, tracing his roles as federal prosecutor (supporting cases against Alger Hiss, William Remington, and the Rosenbergs), attack dog for Senator Joseph McCarthy, mob lawyer (with clients drawn from all of the New York underworld’s “Five Families”), celebrity divorce specialist (Si Newhouse, Gene Pope, Bianca Jagger), nefarious businessman, serial tax dodger, and conservative political operative (for, among others, Richard Nixon in 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984).