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Table of Contents
About The Book
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of American Prometheus, inspiration for the Oscar-winning sensation Oppenheimer, a biography of Roy Cohn – arguably the mastermind behind the current arc of American political life, including the ascent of Donald Trump.
From the 1950s to the 1980s, the many dramas of American political life had one common denominator: Roy Cohn. In his twenties, the infamous young prosecutor sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair and burned 30,000 books by ‘communist’ authors, becoming the baby-faced symbol of McCarthyism. By his thirties, Cohn, with a red scar that ran down his nose from a botched childhood operation, was known in New York City as the Mafia’s hired legal gun. In his forties, he partied with the glitterati at Studio 54 and became friends with Richard Nixon. In his fifties, Cohn was invited to Reagan’s Oval Office. Nancy Reagan called Cohn often for advice and gossip – indeed, Cohn had an almost insatiable interest in gossip, and much of his influence over the years derived from his transactional relationship with gossip columnists. Perhaps most significantly, he mentored the young Donald Trump. The real estate developer, whom Cohn called his ‘best friend’, phoned him a dozen times a day.
Cohn considered himself the one lawyer in town who could always escape the consequences. Indicted by the Feds on three occasions for bribery, perjury, extortion and other white-collar crimes, he was acquitted every time. To achieve his ends, he did whatever it took. ‘If you need somebody to get vicious’, Trump once said, ‘hire Roy Cohn.’
Years after his death of AIDS in 1986, Cohn emerged as a central figure in Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1992 play, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Cohn’s feistiness, his surly defiance – and, yes, his charm – were frequently flourished to conceal vast insecurities, particularly regarding his sexuality. As his friend Sidney Zion once wrote, ‘Roy lived in a closet that was the oddest in history – a closet with neon lights – but he maintained it fiercely.’
A streetfighter, self-promoting hustler, and scheming conman, Cohn was a nefarious actor in one unscrupulous tale after another. He was a true Zelig of the dark side.
From the 1950s to the 1980s, the many dramas of American political life had one common denominator: Roy Cohn. In his twenties, the infamous young prosecutor sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair and burned 30,000 books by ‘communist’ authors, becoming the baby-faced symbol of McCarthyism. By his thirties, Cohn, with a red scar that ran down his nose from a botched childhood operation, was known in New York City as the Mafia’s hired legal gun. In his forties, he partied with the glitterati at Studio 54 and became friends with Richard Nixon. In his fifties, Cohn was invited to Reagan’s Oval Office. Nancy Reagan called Cohn often for advice and gossip – indeed, Cohn had an almost insatiable interest in gossip, and much of his influence over the years derived from his transactional relationship with gossip columnists. Perhaps most significantly, he mentored the young Donald Trump. The real estate developer, whom Cohn called his ‘best friend’, phoned him a dozen times a day.
Cohn considered himself the one lawyer in town who could always escape the consequences. Indicted by the Feds on three occasions for bribery, perjury, extortion and other white-collar crimes, he was acquitted every time. To achieve his ends, he did whatever it took. ‘If you need somebody to get vicious’, Trump once said, ‘hire Roy Cohn.’
Years after his death of AIDS in 1986, Cohn emerged as a central figure in Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1992 play, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Cohn’s feistiness, his surly defiance – and, yes, his charm – were frequently flourished to conceal vast insecurities, particularly regarding his sexuality. As his friend Sidney Zion once wrote, ‘Roy lived in a closet that was the oddest in history – a closet with neon lights – but he maintained it fiercely.’
A streetfighter, self-promoting hustler, and scheming conman, Cohn was a nefarious actor in one unscrupulous tale after another. He was a true Zelig of the dark side.
About The Authors
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Kai Bird is an acclaimed biographer and journalist. With Martin J. Sherwin, he won the Pulitzer Prize for biography for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which was the inspiration for Christopher Nolan’s Academy Award–winning Best Picture, Oppenheimer. Bird is Executive Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. He has won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Duff Cooper Prize for History and is the recipient of numerous fellowships. His work includes critical writings on the Vietnam War, Hiroshima, nuclear weapons, the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the CIA. He is an elected member of the prestigious Society of American Historians.
Susan Goldmark, Kai Bird’s wife and chief researcher, has worked in over seventy-five countries—in consulting, for nonprofits, and at the World Bank. She was a World Bank Country Director in Nepal and later in Latin America. She holds a BA from Carleton College and a graduate degree in development economics from Princeton University. Susan has been Kai’s muse for decades and led the research for American Scoundrel.
Product Details
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK (September 1, 2026)
- Length: 464 pages
- ISBN13: 9781398566927
Raves and Reviews
'A propulsive, mind-boggling read . . . Kai Bird pins this alternate moral universe to the page brilliantly and even-handedly'
-- Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Cleopatra: A Life and The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
'Powerful and illuminating . . . Roy Cohn is emblematic of dark and perennial forces in our national life . . . Bird has delivered a vital volume'
-- Jon Meacham, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels
'The definitive book on Roy Cohn . . . Cohn’s influence on our time is incalculable and we are living in the long shadow of his legacy . . . American Scoundrel is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand Donald Trump’s America'
-- Jeremy Strong, Emmy, Golden Globe and Tony-winning actor, and Academy Award nominee for his portrayal of Roy Cohn in The Apprentice
'An extraordinary, up-close view of Cohn's internal wiring . . . A brilliantly reported and vividly written biography that will mesmerize readers from its opening pages'
-- Ken Auletta, longtime contributor to The New Yorker and bestselling author of Googled: The End of the World as We Know It
'A must-read for these dark days. To understand the president who has hurled this country into chaos, we must tap the root – get to the source. American Scoundrel does just that by detailing the life of Roy Cohn. It is, in the end, a thorough and poignant account of a moral monster'
-- Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries
'A narrative masterwork. With a scholar’s rigor and a novelist’s sense of drama, Bird vividly creates the sinister web of charm and deceit that Cohn was able to spin through his decades at the very center of power'
-- Marie Brenner, award-winning writer-at-large for Vanity Fair, author of The Desperate Hours and coproducer of the documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn?
'Kai Bird does the impossible. He tells the story of one of America's arch villains, with new evidence of his mendacity, contempt for the law, megalomania and cruelty, but does so without descending into caricature'
-- David Nasaw, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of The Patriarch
'A must-read for anyone who wants to understand not just the dark role played by Roy Cohn in twentieth-century American politics, but the man's lasting influence into this century . . . There is, it turns out, a direct line from the malign influence of McCarthyism to that of Trumpism, and Roy Cohn is it'
-- Susan Glasser, staff writer for The New Yorker and bestselling coauthor of The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021
'Gripping . . . If you want to understand America today, you (sadly!) need to understand Donald Trump. And if you want to understand Trump, you need to understand Roy Cohn. This book is invaluable for that task'
-- William Kristol, formerly Chief of Staff to the Vice President of the United States and founder of The Weekly Standard; currently, editor-at-large of The Bulwark
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