Description: INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - "A narrative masterwork. 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 and coproducer of the documentary Where's My Roy Cohn?
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning coauthor of American Prometheus, inspiration for the box-office sensation Oppenheimer, a penetrating biography of super-lawyer and political fixer Roy Cohn, whose shocking exploits over four decades have shaped the modern political era, most prominently 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 as the chief aide to Senator Joe McCarthy became the baby-faced symbol of ruthless communist-hunting. By his thirties, Cohn had begun working as the Mafia's hired legal gun. In his forties, he was an informal adviser to Richard Nixon. In his fifties, he partied with the glitterati at Studio 54 and visited the Reagan White House where he traded gossip with the first lady. Perhaps most significant, Cohn mentored the young Donald Trump, who telephoned the older man daily and studiously emulated not only his mannerisms but core philosophies. Years after his death in 1986 from AIDS-related complications, Cohn emerged as a central figure in Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America. Cohn's feistiness, his surly defiance--and, yes, his charm--were frequently flourished to conceal vast insecurities, particularly regarding his closeted sexuality. A street fighter, self-promoting hustler, and a true Zelig of the dark side, Cohn was a nefarious actor in a startling number of history-shaping events whose influence resonates to the present day.Brief description: 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.
Review Quotes: "An elegant retelling of the lurid Cohn story, but it's also something more. Bird makes ample use of F.B.I. materials [which] help him catch Cohn in numerous lies...Cohn lied when it suited him--which was often, given that lying turned out to be an effective way to bend others to his preferred reality. Bird calls Cohn 'the ghoul of our nightmares, a man whose personal immorality planted the seeds of America's descent into the political folly of the 21st century.' A Prometheus steals fire for humanity; a scoundrel takes everyone for a ride."
--Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
--The Times (UK) "A dishy, deeply sourced biography which goes the distance....Trump may be Cohn's most consequential legacy, but his life had everything storytellers crave: power, villainy, transgression and, ultimately, comeuppance.....If Lucifer had practiced law, his career might have resembled Cohn's."
--Jack Shafer, Bloomberg "Chilling...In Bird and Goldmark's account the nihilistic, amoral, duplicitous, power-seeking Roy Marcus Cohn makes Niccolò Machiavelli seem like a rank amateur. Yet far from coming across as distant history, American Scoundrel fairly vibrates with contemporary relevance thanks to its subject's crucial part in the creation of Donald Trump."
--Martin Filler, The New York Review of Books "At once not quite real and all too real, Cohn has the uncanny presence of a ghoul or a fiend. He is a creature from the depths of the American political imagination, too pure in his utter malignity to be entirely credible, too potent in his continuing consequence to be safely interred in the past....Though the influence of his lawyer and fixer on the young Trump is common knowledge, not the least of the virtues of Bird's punchy, racy, and appropriately nauseating new biography is the renewed force it gives to this cliché. There is something eerie about the thoroughness of Trump's mimicry of Cohn's way of dealing with the world."
--Fintan O'Toole, The New York Review of Books "A book Trumpworld doesn't want you to read...a propulsive, horrifying biography."
--Martin Pengelly, Guardian "A gripping and revelatory new biography."
--Christopher Grimes, Financial Times "Notorious is the word most often used to describe Cohn, so much so that an image of his face ought to sit adjacent to it in the dictionary....Reading American Scoundrel, we discover many things, large and small, that Trump learned from his mentor....It's hard to think of another figure who has had such a profound and lasting impact on Trump as Cohn, whose aggressive style and amoral bearing continue to impact our world."
--James Kirchik, The Free Press "In American Scoundrel, the master biographer Kai Bird points us to a universe where ideology matters less than crass opportunism in the pursuit of money, sex, and power--where extreme narcissists will shatter everything around them to get their way. This was Roy Cohn's world; Donald Trump is his inheritor....American Scoundrel will remind anyone outraged by our current culture that 'elite impunity' is nothing new. Then, as now, power and celebrity attracted allies."
--Martin Di Caro, The American Conservative "I gobbled up every page of Kai Bird's American Scoundrel...This is a dirty story but, as Bird notes, one that has turned out to be seminal in American politics...The book is a bounteous cornucopia of midcentury sleaze and uneasily addictive for just that reason. It's got Mafia hits and frame jobs and blackmail and bribery and election tampering. It's got forgery and insurance scams and perjury and espionage and sex trafficking and a lot of tax evasion. It makes James Ellroy novels look like Theo of Golden by comparison, and it makes for mesmerizing reading."
--Laura Miller, Slate "A how-we-got-here book, showing how Cohn's guile, paranoia and shamelessness guided McCarthy, rubbed off on Trump and stuck fast to America....The Cohn-Trump parallels are evident on nearly every page...Reading American Scoundrel, I sometimes wondered why the title wasn't plural."
--Carlos Lozada, New York Times "Roy Marcus Cohn was the kingmaker from hell...Cohn's brutish course through the corridors of power was, to a large extent, a template for Trump's later on. In their new book American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn's Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, biographer Kai Bird and his wife and chief researcher, Susan Goldmark, tell the long, sordid tale of how one 'narcissistic con artist'--as they characterize Cohn --did so much to create another, the man who now occupies the most powerful office in the world."
--Foreign Affairs "Effective...Bird gives us a new way to think about Cohn, Trump, and the legacy of McCarthyism...Looking at the long arc of Cohn's career shows how much of McCarthyism was about ambition and careerism, rather than ideology. Cohn's friends and clients were obsequious to him because they thought he could get them things no one else could."
--The Atlantic "A magisterial biography of the notorious lawyer and Trump whisperer that is indispensable reading for anyone who wants to understand the current political moment."
--The Forward "A classic Kai Bird deep dive into the wild ride that was Roy Cohn's life....Bird is great at doing these very involved portraits...It's so amazing, just what a character Cohn was. I was just constantly going through thinking, regular people, normal people are not equipped to deal with someone like this -- just the kind of force of nature coming through, totally shameless...through sheer force of will dominating the world around them."
--Michelle Cottle, Opinion political writer, New York Times "There's this moment early on, when Cohn is like 10, and he goes to Washington, D.C., and he and his dad hang out with Justice Benjamin Cardozo, and then he goes into the Oval Office and he meets Franklin D. Roosevelt. And actually, every chapter of the book is like this, where some famous person suddenly emerges, and Cohn is somehow connected to them as friends. It's Barbara Walters, it's Andy Warhol. It's somebody in just about every single chapter, to the point where you're [thinking] this guy is like the evil Forrest Gump of the 20th century."
--Nicole Hemmer, Professor of History, Vanderbilt University, commenting in the New York Times "Masterful...a gripping, frightening book, meticulously researched, about a terrible person--one whom I'd not even want to dignify as a sort of Richard III or Tony Soprano."
--Roger Lewis, Daily Telegraph "A riveting, authoritative, and page-turning account of a public figure as consequential as he was wicked . . . intrinsically fascinating because of its subject, also establishes beyond doubt the indispensable role that Cohn played in the formation and rise of the 45th and 47th president."
--Matthew d'Ancona, The New World "An astonishing biography...The book excels as a masterful dissection of Cohn's strange, contradictory, and immoral character...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."
--Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) "The venality and corruption, blackmail and sheer brazenness of the public lying Bird portrays is eye-popping, infuriating, disgusting--yet also, at times, darkly comic....If you want to understand Donald Trump, read this book."
--The Bookseller "A comprehensive portrait of a truculent lawyer who shot to infamy in the 1950s and remained a scandalous figure until his death...A thorough, deeply reported life story of the gleefully villainous lawyer who molded a U.S. president."
--Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review) "This deeply researched, admirably balanced, and propulsively paced biography is key to understanding the current political culture."
--Booklist (Starred Review) "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