A revelatory biography of Roy Cohn, by Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark, is set to be one of the most explosive books of the year
Award-winning biographer Bird and researcher Goldmark’s account of the life of notorious prosecutor Roy Cohn spans his journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump.
How will the White House convenor of chaos and cage fights react? Will Donald Trump even notice? Those are but two of the thoughts running through my head one late afternoon, sitting in the 19th-century splendor of the Century Association – New York’s answer to the Garrick Club – as I take tea with Kai Bird, except he is drinking bourbon. We two journalists-turned-biographers are discussing Bird’s eighth book and sixth biography, which he wrote, while his wife, Susan Goldmark, was primary researcher. It focuses on the notorious, very dead (but also undead) New Yorker whom the current US president acknowledges as having been his mentor. American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump hits shelves in September. In all likelihood, it will do so explosively.
Until now, Bird has been best known for his third biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer, co-authored with the late professor Martin J Sherwin. It won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and inspired Christopher Nolan’s 2023 cinematic blockbuster. “That book changed my life,” Bird declares. But the attention American Scoundrel’s revelations will generate may well eclipse the earlier book’s fame. Here, Prometheus gives way to Mephistopheles; pages turn wickedly fast.
Let us stay with Prometheus a moment longer, for Bird suddenly admits he almost did not take it on. When his good friend Sherwin, already under contract, found himself frozen in writer’s-block hell after 20 years of research, he asked Bird to become co-author. Bird refused. His first biography, The Chairman, had begun as a co-authored work with Bird’s then best friend. It took 10 long years, “destroyed” the friendship, and Bird eventually published the book solo. Luckily, with American Prometheus, Sherwin proved persuasive, and everything worked out. Bird initiated the writing, producing “50 to 75 percent of the first draft of each chapter”. Sherwin, a “graceful writer,” unfroze; together they wrote the rest.
Indeed, it was such a happy pairing that Bird collaborated on this latest book, too, but this time with his wife, a former World Bank country director; their marriage of 50 years more than survived and Bird says it was her participation that enabled American Scoundrel to be written in three years, rather than five, “the fastest biography” he has ever done. They got through 10,000 pages of FBI files, and the four months Goldmark spent reading old New York Post gossip columns digitally proved rather fruitful. She grew up in New York City, “and became obsessed” with all the New York elements in the book.
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Today, two years into Trump’s second presidency and approaching midterm elections, the book seems perfectly timed, but in 2022, he was out of office and it was a hard sell. “The pandemic was winding down, and I got the sense no-one was excited,” Bird recalls. “Roy was thought of as largely forgotten.” In the end, Rick Horgan, who had edited Bird’s The Good Spy at Crown, was now at Scribner in the US and eager.
As his memoir, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate, attests, Bird grew up all over the Middle East amid the ongoing history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the son of a US foreign service family. Having begun as a journalist, his childhood abroad “factored into becoming a biographer. I was a foreigner in my own country, and it was an attempt to understand this place as a foreign correspondent would”. He concentrated on “establishment figures” – diplomats, spies, policy wonks, a scientist, a president (Jimmy Carter). His eureka moment came when he realised that “Cohn had made a brief appearance in all of them”, and suddenly saw “he was historically much more important and biography-worthy in his own right, not just because of Trump”.
The story of this “fixer” encompasses Joseph McCarthy, the mob, New York politics, the FBI, child-trafficking and figures as disparate as a less-than-courageous Dwight D Eisenhower, Cohn’s old friend and beard Barbara Walters, and J Edgar Hoover in drag at an orgy, as well as culture – including the wild scene at Studio 54 and Tony Kushner’s lauded play, Angels in America, in which Cohn, a sex addict and closeted gay, who victimises other gay men and is dying of AIDS, is a major character.
You have to concede that the McCarthy era has deep roots in American politics and society. It wasn’t defeated, and today is much worse than then
Cohn was 27 when he acted as McCarthy’s counsel at the Senate hearings. “I had misunderstood what had happened during that time,” Bird confesses. He had thought of the witch hunts “as a blip, but instead we’ve got Project 2025 [the Heritage Foundation’s political playbook adopted by Trump to concentrate power in the executive branch and pursue a right-wing agenda]. You have to concede that the McCarthy era has deep roots in American politics and society. It wasn’t defeated, and today is much worse than then”.
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. Asked how he could tolerate such a man lodged in his brain, Bird counters: “It was fun living with a dastardly villain. I’ve learned that biography is storytelling anecdote-by-anecdote, driven by quotes from the source material. I’d fall asleep thinking about what anecdote to start off with the next morning, and slept very well.”
Later, he paradoxically admits: “To have spent 30 years writing about the American establishment and realise we’re now living in an era when it is no longer there, and in its place are the politics, ethics, values of Roy Cohn, is pretty devastating.” Cohn “moulded, empowered and enabled Trump to be what he wanted to be”.
“Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Trump called out during his first term, missing the mentor he always counted on. In his preface, Bird provides an answer: “[Cohn] is right here beside us, 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.”
During the last of Bird’s four 10-minute cell phone interviews with Trump, he informed the president of the book’s autumn publication. “Good,” Trump replied. “Maybe I can promote it. Anything I promote goes to number one.” He added, “Well, of course it would have to be fair.”
This president does not read books, but that does not interfere with his penchant for lawsuits about them. As Bird says, “Trump loves to file suit – he learned that from Roy. If he were to sue us for a billion dollars, we’ll countersue for two billion for defamation, and he will understand. It’s crazy times, who knows?”
If you want to understand Donald Trump, read this book.
Metadata
Imprint Simon & Schuster
Publication 1st September 2026
Formats HB (£30, 9781398566903); EB (£15.99, 9781398566927)
Rights sold Two territories including US (S&S)
Editor Kris Doyle
Agent Gail Ross, WME
