Jeremy Strong, who played Roy Cohn in the 2024 movie The Apprentice, has called Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark's monumental biography American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn's Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump (Scribner, Simon and Schuster) "essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand Donald Trump's America." Indeed, as his biographer summarizes him, Roy Cohn (1927-1986) "used his entire career to subvert the establishment, breaking all the rules and creating a divisive, highly partisan political culture ... a man whose personal immorality planted the seeds of America's descent into the political folly of the twenty-first century."
That's probably pinning a lot on just one historical figure. It defies plausibility to place all the blame for our past and present political disasters on one person, however reprehensible, On the other hand, there probably is no other single individual who more closely personifies the process by which we got to where we are as a nation. It was from Cohn that Trump famously learned the all-important lesson he has practiced so effectively as politician and as president, "that the facts in any case could be drowned out by strident counterclaims" and "that the pyrotechnics of publicity were more important than the law."
But, before Trump, Bird's book takes us back to another, earlier era - post-war New York, the insider-outsider world of mid-20th-century New York's Jewish elites experiencing both great accomplishment and great resentment. That was also the era of Cold War worries about communism (both the real thing in the form of the Soviet Union and the imagined internal threats exploited by McCarty, Cohn, et al.), of the resentful remnants of pre-war populism and isolationism that empowered McCarthyism and have now been revived with great vengeance, of a half-hidden, but constantly gossiped-about closeted gay subculture, of seemingly omnipresent organized crime, and finally of a widespread network of elite and celebrity gossip. There is a lot of such gossip reported in this book, and a reader really can't quite be sure how much of it should ultimately be credited as true. (On page 252, for example, Cohn is reported discussing judicial appointments with Cardinal Spellman - in the year after the Cardinal's death.) It was an era of innuendo, both sexual and political, that negatively counterbalanced what was actually positive about that period, particularly the unprecedented and widespread prosperity that makes many still remember that post-war era more fondly than it probably deserves!
Roy Cohn never acknowledged the true nature of his final illness and died of AIDS in 1986. He has a square in the AIDS Quit which says "Bully, Coward, Victim," - a fair enough epitaph, which this biography effectively explains and illustrates!
By the standards of his time - or almost any time - Cohn was born and raised in comfortable, even privileged circumstances, the son of a Judge and his wealthy wife, who was also an extremely domineering and doting mother, who apparently seriously spoiled her only son. He attended Horace Mann School and so "traveled in the company of all sorts of well-connected adolescent boys" - predominantly "the sons of Jewish lawyers, doctors, and bankers." As if predestined, he became a lawyer.
The author highlights one particular aspect of Cohn's family history which, he suggests, would be reflected in his life-long patterns of resentment. As a boy, he regularly accompanied his mother to visit her brother, Roy's "Uncle Bernie," in prison. Bernard Marcus was criminally convicted in connection with the failure of his family's Bank. The bank's failure might possibly have been averted if other bankers had been willing to participate in a rescue plan. Roy's mother taught him that Bernie and his Jewish bank were scapegoats, victims of establishment anti-Semitism. Bird quotes one banker saying that few wanted to bail out a bank that "catered to immigrants" and was run by "those Jews." Cohn also came to believe that Jewish communists had agitated against and helped precipitate the run on the bank. Thus, he grew up resenting both the anti-semitic establishment and communists.
Cohn completely embraced the "politics of resentment and distrust of the intellectual class and the establishment" associated then with Senator Joseph McCarthy and associated now with right-wing populism. (Where left-wing populism's culture of resentment fits in is also a discussion worth having, but it is beyond the scope of this biography.) Cohn famously played an eager part in the controversial prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, "which spoke to Jewish insecurities that manifested along class lines. [Judge Irving] Kaufman and Cohn were Park Avenue Jews pitted against Lower East Side Jews like the Rosenbergs." Then he went to work for McCarthy - "in a sense burning my bridges behind me," closing the door on "a comfortable, New York Jewish Democratic life." He called himself McCarthy's "brains." The biography calls him "McCarthy's Rasputin." (The New Republic's Michael Straight had labeled Cohn the "Boy Rasputin" of the Army-McCarthy hearings.)
Bird's biography devotes considerable attention to Cohn's association with McCarthy and to his intense infatuation with David Schine, a bizarre friendship which in the end paradoxically helped to bring down McCarthy. Bird's account of the important national trauma of McCarthyism (and Cohn's part in it) is well worth reading for its own sake. The author's criticism of Eisenhower's slow and apparently passive response to McCarthy strikes me as somewhat excessive, given the complexity of the situation the president found himself in. (Consider, for example, the contrasting interpretation of Eisenhower by Princeton political scientist Fred Greenstein.) But it is a plausible interpretation. Bird is certainly correct in interpreting the battle between McCarthy and Eisenhower as "part of a larger culture war, a perennial conflict in American society between urban liberal pluralists and resentful agrarian populists." After the televised Army-McCarthy hearings, the senator was censured in late 1954. Instead of confronting McCarthy's anti-communist crusade directly, however, "the Republican and Democratic establishments destroyed McCarthy via sexual innuendo." McCarthy himself died not much later, in 1957. But Bird casts Cohn as the great continuation of McCarthyism, which "would poison the American political landscape for decades to come, dividing liberals and sowing distrust inside the left. Cold War liberals ostracized civil libertarian liberals, creating further bitterness. And McCarthy's nativist, isolationist, and racist supporters never went away."
After McCarthy, the biography continues with a long, somewhat sordid story of Cohn's multiple legal shenanigans (which earned him multiple indictments and eventual disbarment just before his death), his organized crime mob connections, and perhaps most pervasively his sexual adventures. Cohn was "a high-functioning sex addict." This is a book about politics, but it is also very much a tawdry tale about sex. It highlights what one might call Cohn's ideological interpretation of sexuality, equating homosexuality with weakness and heterosexuality with strength, aggressiveness, and toughness. Hence his easy ability to combine his homosexual lifestyle with his public "heterosexual" presentation. Cohn himself "used the homosexuality of others to smear and destroy them." Whatever else this sad story is, it certainly serves as an indictment of the human cost of the closet culture, a very vivid portrayal of how much harm has been occasioned by society's forcing so many to live twisted, inauthentic lives.
At the same time, this account also highlights how society's social and sexual mores changed radically during his lifetime. Commenting on the many politicians and celebrities who attended Cohn's 52nd birthday party at Studio 54 in 1979, the author observes: "Attending Roy's birthday party at such a den of libertine excess signaled that Manhattan's power brokers understood that celebrity now eclipsed indecency."
Cohn's connection with future President Donald Trump, which began in 1973, inevitably gets a lot of attention in this biography. Subsequent history has retrospectively imparted increasingly greater import to their relationship than it might otherwise have warranted. Indeed, the author acknowledges that he "realized that with the political rise of Donald Trump," he "had somehow underestimated. the significance of Roy Cohn." Cohn's cousin David Marcus thought that Cohn "really felt this pride of ownership in Trump. He'd created Trump. He had saved Trump from ruin after they met. And he felt this odd attraction to him until the end." Cohn "deeply resented New York's intellectuals, its intellectuals, and particularly its elite law firms." Trump shares that resentment. "I'll never have the goodwill of the establishment, the tastemakers of New York," Trump said in 1990.
Bird believes that "Cohn's influence and disrepute has only been magnified by the poisonous atmosphere he left behind. He cultivated a political culture marked by bitter, divisive discourse." However, he also admits that "these passions are deeply rooted in American history." In taking over the Republican party, Trump may have demolished what was left of the old Republican establishment. But Bird himself recognizes that the resented establishment "was disintegrating in the 1970s." Its collapse "eventually opened the door to divisive populist rages."
It does not, therefore, I think, diminish the significance of Cohn in his own context and at his own particular time to ask whether the long-term outcome would have been all that much different without Cohn. Clearly, Cohn was an asset to McCarthy and later to Trump. "As the years went by the relationship [with Trump] became less of the mentor molding the young man and more of the fixer having to dip into his favor bank to assuage Trump's needs." Maybe McCarthy might have done somewhat less damage without Cohn (at least in this or that particular case that Cohn was particularly involved in). Certainly, without Cohn, Trump's rise in New York might have been bumpier. But would history have been all that different, given that (as the author also acknowledges) McCarthy and Trump both reflected and exploited resentments and passions long present in American society? Those resentments and passions propelled Trump to the presidency. Without Trump's personal charisma, those resentments and passions would obviously have had to find some other vehicle, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they would likely have done so, sooner or later, in some form or other.
Finally, this book inadvertently raises an even darker question - quite contrary, I suspect, to the author's intention. Let us assume that much of the celebrity and political gossip that permeates parts of this biography may in fact be largely true. If so - if the depressing picture the author paints of politics and society, especially of what goes on in elite spaces, is even largely accurate - then doesn't that raise a deeper and more troubling question of what to make of this endemic corruption, which in this account seemingly spares no institution, whether political, judicial, civic, social, or religious? Really, no American institution effectively escapes the taint of corruption in this account. What does that mean for the viability of democratic and representative government and the social and civic institutions on which representative democracy depends? We naturally want to identify villains whom we can blame for all our woes. But Cohn clearly did not create the widespread culture of corruption from which he profited (even if one wants to credit him with worsening it). If, however, American politics and civic institutions, if elite culture and American social life are indeed so endemically corrupt, then perhaps the populist critique that once empowered McCarthy and more recently has empowered Trump, then maybe much of that populist critique may be an understandable response to actual reality and all that resentment may be somewhat justified. Does what this account purports to expose undermine the liberal alternative it aspires to uphold? What would it mean if the past and present populist indictment of our governing elites and their institutions might be truer than the author (or we) would want to admit.
And where would that leave us and our country's future?
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