Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump by Kai Bird with Susan Goldmar
Review by Steve Desroches
Does anyone really want to read a book about Roy Cohn? The despicable New York lawyer weaseled, connived, and slithered his way into the halls of American power, leaving destroyed lives in his wake while propelling equally disgusting people into positions of great influence and authority. It’s the kind of story best read with a glass of wine or two and a Tums chaser. As grotesque as the subject is, the new book American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump by husband and wife writers Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark, is important as since Donald Trump entered American politics in earnest in 2015 and transformed the country in destructive ways, it’s vital to understand that though he’s been dead since 1986, Roy Cohn continues to have an enormous influence.
American Scoundrel is certainly no pleasure read. And Cohn himself may have continued his slide to being remembered as he would. With the exception of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, in which Cohn is a central character, he did not attract much significant scholarship, research, or attention. Bird notes that he felt compelled to write the book as he discovered the only other extensive biography of Cohn was Nicholas von Hoffman’s 1988 Citizen Cohn: The Life and Times of Roy Cohn. It was time to take another look.
American Scoundrel is a cradle-to-beyond-the-grave account of Cohn’s life, which recounts what is widely known, his work with hysteric Senator Joe McCarthy and his anti-Communist witch hunts, the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Studio 54, and his not-so-secret life as a gay man and his death from AIDS. But with precision, American Scoundrel gives the story of Cohn an immediacy that makes the heart race as it also in great detail recounts how Donald Trump became associated with Cohn, eventually seeing him as the future president’s most influential mentor. In an era where nothing seems to matter and chaos and cruelty are the point, understanding that Cohn is the Rosetta Stone of modern American corruption, deceit, bigotry, and grift is critical to addressing the country’s current crisis. American Scoundrel is also profoundly crucial for history’s sake.
All that being said, American Scoundrel is also, sadly, a Provincetown tale, at least in part. With the exception of Ivy Meeropol’s 2019 appropriately searing documentary Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn, no work has delved deeper into Cohn’s many years in Provincetown. It’s a swirling story of cocaine, hustlers, and orgies that takes up an entire chapter and then some. The 1970s in Provincetown were really the last gasp of lawlessness for the town. In those days you could get away with a lot as the culture was much more of a mix of libertarian and libertine ways. As noted in the book most of Provincetown hated him, both in general and intensely so in the gay community. The town largely ignored Cohn, but as American Scoundrel shows it didn’t forget him or his true legacy.
American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump by Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark is published by Scribner and available wherever books are sold. Please support your local bookseller.
