Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

ldquo;Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Donald Trump famously lamented in his first term as president, and no wonder. Early in Trump’s real-estate career, Cohn served as his business, legal, and social mentor, exerting a Svengali-like influence, imprinting his pugnacious attitude and callous behavior on the future president. A one-person repository for the extreme partisan rhetoric and hypocrisy that are hallmarks of the right wing today, lawyer and prosecutor Cohn was of this ilk long before Trump descended the golden escalator in 2015. He first gained fame as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s henchman, burnishing that reputation by performing consigliere-style favors for mob bosses, then moved on to exert crucial campaign influence for Ronald Reagan, all the while reveling in his reputation as a Manhattan gossip hound and disco-era social gadfly. In this capacious and probing biography, prize-winning biographer Bird and researcher Goldmark depict Cohn as a study in contrasts, an antisemitic Jew and a homophobic gay man who was charming to his friends and cruel to those he considered his enemies. To the extent that Cohn’s impact is still being felt 40 years after his death through the persona of his prized pupil and friend, Donald Trump, this deeply researched, admirably balanced, and propulsively paced biography is key to understanding the current political culture.

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Chronicle of “a nefarious actor in one unseemly drama after another.” Bird, the author of acclaimed biographies of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Jimmy Carter, and Goldmark, his wife and chief researcher, craft a comprehensive portrait of a truculent lawyer who shot to infamy in the 1950s and remained a scandalous figure until his death from AIDS in 1986. Roy Cohn was chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s reckless Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in the 1950s. Later, Cohn mentored Donald Trump and helped make him famous. The authors don’t equivocate: Cohn “was a narcissistic con artist” and an avatar of the politics of resentment and incivility. Coupled with transcripts and audio shared by journalists who covered Cohn, the authors’ interviews with Trump and others illustrate the long shadow of Cohn’s malign influence. In revealing opening chapters, Bird and Goldmark show their subject, then a well-to-do schoolboy, learning to wield vicious lies. Their research outlines how Cohn employed “highly irregular” tactics during his successful prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Americans convicted of being Soviet spies and executed in 1953. As McCarthy’s attack dog, Cohn weaponized Senate investigations, censored books, and “destroy[ed] numerous lives.” Meanwhile, he was at once an outspoken homophobe and a closeted gay man with an active sex life. The authors interview a man who says Cohn was among those who preyed on him when he was sexually trafficked as an underage teen. “Roy’s longstanding heterosexual friends all knew he was gay,” the authors write. “Trump knew it. Donald once called up [Manhattan borough president] Andy Stein to complain that he had given Roy his plane to fly to Acapulco: ‘Fucking Roy,’ said Trump, ‘I get him a plane and he fills it up with all these fags.’” Cohn, the authors say, taught his “ideal student” how to dodge creditors, attack perceived enemies, avoid leaving paper trails, and keep his name in the tabloids. Cohn’s style, Bird and Goldmark persuasively demonstrate, “became Trump’s.” A thorough, deeply reported life story of the gleefully villainous lawyer who molded a U.S. president. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Publishers Weekly
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Pulitzer Prize winner Bird (American Prometheus) and researcher Goldmark present an astonishing biography of lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn. Born in the Bronx to a banking heiress and a judge, Cohn (1927–1986) came by his infamous knack for dealmaking honestly—his parents’ marriage was “a calculated transaction” between his father and maternal grandfather, who traded his daughter for a judgeship. With his father eventually appointed to the state supreme court, Cohn benefited from his family’s prominence, as with his admission to Columbia Law School after an initial rejection, which taught him to “bend the rules, so long as he had the right connections.” The authors follow Cohn in his most notorious roles, including as prime mover of the Rosenberg executions, for which he remained unrepentant; as the book-burning “baby-faced symbol of McCarthyism”; and as a lawyer for clients as diverse as mafia dons, Studio 54, and Donald Trump, who took from Cohn his defiance of rules and tabloid manipulation. The book excels as a masterful dissection of Cohn’s strange, contradictory, and immoral character as “a lawyer dismissive of the law,” as well as a keen interrogation of Cohn’s ceaseless popularity among New York City and Beltway high society, where many expressed repulsion at Cohn’s politics and corruption, yet were drawn to his charisma, aptitude for gossip, and transactional loyalty. It adds up to an extraordinary portrait of a singular American figure whose callousness and brazenness continue to mar the country 40 years after his death. (Sept.)