American Scoundrel- Roy Cohn's Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump by Kai Bird & Susan Goldmark.jpg
American Scoundrel- Roy Cohn's Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump by Kai Bird & Susan Goldmark1.jpg
American Scoundrel- Roy Cohn's Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump by Kai Bird & Susan Goldmark.jpg
American Scoundrel- Roy Cohn's Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump by Kai Bird & Susan Goldmark1.jpg

American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn's Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump by Kai Bird & Susan Goldmark

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Hardcover:

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

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning coauthor of American Prometheus, 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.

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

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning coauthor of American Prometheus, 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.

  • Publisher: Scribner

    Title: American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn's Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump

    Author: Kai Bird & Susan Goldmark

    On Sale Date: September 1, 2026

    ISBN 13: 978-1-6680-3157-5

    ISBN 10: 1-6680-3157-4

    Format: Hardcover

    Retail Price: $32.00

    BISAC: HISTORY / United States / 20th Century; POLITICAL SCIENCE / General; BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Political

    Page Count: 528

    Dimensions: 9.0 x 6.0 x 1.4 in

    Weight: 1.6 lb

  • Kai Bird has spent a career finding the one biography subject who explains an entire era. With Martin J. Sherwin, he won the Pulitzer Prize for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the book behind Christopher Nolan's Academy Award–winning film. He's also won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Duff Cooper Prize for History, and he directs the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center. In American Scoundrel, written with his wife and longtime research partner Susan Goldmark—whose own career spans international consulting, nonprofit work, and posts at the World Bank in Nepal and Latin America—Bird turns to Roy Cohn, the McCarthy-era fixer whose fingerprints, the book argues, are all over the modern political era he helped invent.

  • Critics are calling it elegant, chilling, and definitive:

    • "An elegant retelling...Bird makes ample use of F.B.I. materials...Cohn lied when it suited him—which was often." — Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

    • "A dishy, deeply sourced biography which goes the distance…If Lucifer had practiced law, his career might have resembled Cohn's." — Jack Shafer, Bloomberg

    • "Chilling…the nihilistic, amoral, duplicitous, power-seeking Roy Marcus Cohn makes Niccolò Machiavelli seem like a rank amateur." — Martin Filler, The New York Review of Books

    • "I gobbled up every page…This is a dirty story but...one that has turned out to be seminal in American politics." — Laura Miller, Slate

This book is for you if

  • You want to understand the one lawyer-fixer who links the Rosenberg execution, Joe McCarthy, the Mafia, Studio 54, and Donald Trump's rise into a single life story.

  • You're fascinated by how a mentor's mannerisms and philosophy can echo decades later from a very different Oval Office.

  • You loved American Prometheus—or the Oppenheimer film it inspired—and want Kai Bird's next deeply reported biography.

  • You want a portrait that doesn't flinch from Cohn's closeted sexuality, his AIDS-related death, and the insecurities behind the bravado.

  • You're drawn to political history written with novelistic pacing, built on FBI files and insider access.

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