Kai Bird on Roy Cohn, a Founding Father of Donald Trump’s America

0:00The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported by Dell. Back to school starts now. Get long-lasting battery life on the Dell XPS laptop powered by Series 3 Intel Core so you can work from anywhere. Now starting at$6.99 with exclusive student pricing starting at$5.99. Complete your setup with savings on select monitors and must-have electronics and accessories. Limited-time deals and free shipping on PCs and more await you at dell.com slash deals. That's dell.com slash deals.

0:30The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported by Amazon Music. With Amazon Music Unlimited, you can listen to music, podcasts, and now audiobooks, all in one app. This includes popular titles like Project Hail Mary, one of the most beloved adventure stories by Andy Weir. I have been listening to this audiobook and constantly looking for any pockets of time during the day to turn it on and find out what will happen next in the story. So whether you're catching up on a podcast, listening to your favorite playlist, or, like me, getting lost and a great audiobook, it's all right there within the Amazon Music app.

1:02Amazon Music. Music, podcasts, audiobooks, all in one app. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported by Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort. Offering destination-focused small ship experiences on all seven continents, with a shore excursion included in every port and programs designed for cultural enrichment. And every Viking voyage is all-inclusive, with no children and no casinos. Learn more at viking.com.

1:33The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker.

1:42Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. If Roy Cohn had never existed, it would have taken a novelist of real skill to have invented that life. Cone started out as an ambitious prosecutor, and then he rose to the top of Washington's food chain at a very young age. He was already famous in his early 20s as Joseph McCarthy's attack dog in the anti-communist purges of the early 50s. And later, as a lawyer for hire, Cone was friends with presidents and celebrities while working for mob families in New York City. He reveled in his reputation as a ruthless operator. And he was, all around, a nasty piece of work.

2:23In the 70s, Roy Cohn acquired a young protege, a real estate heir named, you guessed it, Donald J. Trump. And through that formative relationship, it may be that Cohn is now more influential in Washington than he ever was during his own lifetime. But we now know a great deal more about the links between Trump and his mentor, thanks to a biography of Cohn called American Scoundrel. Its author is the historian Kai Bird. Bird also co-wrote the definitive biography of nuclear scientist Robert Oppenheimer, which was the basis for Christopher Nolan's Oscar-winning film. I sat down to talk with Kai Bird the other day.

3:05You're probably best known for your collaboration with Marty Sherwin on the biography of Oppenheimer. What made you choose Roy Cohn as your subject? You knew you'd have to spend years of your life with a man who was in many ways miserable. Yes. No, it was an improbable choice for me because, you know, for 40 years I've been a biographer of the establishment. And then after I finished Jimmy Carter, I was casting around for a new topic. and I realized that in all of these books I had written about Roy Cohn in a paragraph a couple of pages as this nefarious, minor, awful figure who was disruptive and divisive and unethical and I suddenly realized that, you know the establishment that I'd been writing about for 40 years is gone there are values and culture the politics the bipartisanship of someone like John McCloy a Rockefeller Republican that's all gone and it's been replaced by Roy Cohn who's sort of haunting us from his grave and so I was quite upset with this realization and I decided I needed to dig into maybe Roy Cohn explains something about the dark side of America that I just didn't understand To push that point a little bit, I think what you're saying is that in the Trump era, which has now been with us for at least a decade, that the key to the crypt here is Roy Cohn's influence on Donald Trump.

4:52Yes, absolutely. But ironically, you know, I had four telephone interviews with Donald Trump. I mean, they were all bizarre phone interviews. Crazy. How were they bizarre? Well, they were cold calls. I got his cell phone number. I called him up. Like half of Washington. Yeah. Yeah. But I was the biographer. He had no idea who he was talking to. He had no idea who I was. He just takes your call. You just said, I'm Kybird, and off to the races you go? Right. It was crazy. What was he especially eager to get across to you? Well, the astonishing thing is how proud he was of Roy. How admiring.

5:38So, you know, he really loved him and appreciated him. And he really did, in his first term in the Oval Office at one point, shout out, where's my Roy Kong? You know, in frustration. Where's my killer lawyer to get me off the hook? Yeah, exactly. And I don't know, it's, in my last phone conversation,

6:08Trump was, President Trump was trying to get off the phone. And I was trying to persuade him that he should really sit down and talk with me in person. And I said, you know, I'm in Florida often. I could come to Mar-a-Lago. The whole repertorial dance, yeah. And he wasn't having any of it. He said, his response to me at that point was, no, I can't do it. You don't understand. I'm the president. I have Russia calling. I have China calling. So then at the end of the conversation, you know, he's clearly not inviting me to Mar-a-Lago. So I say, well, Mr. President, I just want you to know that this biography of Roy Cohn is coming out in the autumn of 26.

6:54and he interrupts me and he says, oh, terrific. Maybe I can promote it. He says, anything I promote goes to number one. Oh, my God. And then there's a pause and he says, well, of course, it'd have to be fair. Well, Kite, let's go back in time. I first encountered any knowledge of Roy Cohn when as a kid I was interested in the McCarthy period and there was this very, very young aide sitting at the elbow of Joe McCarthy. But where does he come from? What are his roots? He's from the Bronx. He's very much a creature of New York. His father was a Bronx, New York State judge. His family was Jewish, democratic, liberal.

7:41And yet, young Roy grew up with a resentment of the New York establishment. I try not to psychobabble in biography, but you do have to understand his childhood. And one of his formative experiences was when he was eight, nine, ten years old, his mother, Dora, an awful woman, a terrible mother, who raised him with no guardrails, took him up to Sing Sing Prison every weekend to visit their beloved Uncle Bernie, who was the only banker from the 1929 crash who had been sent to prison for bank fraud. And Dora, Roy's mother, told her son, you know, this was a miscarriage of justice. Uncle Bernie was a victim of conspiracies by communists, Jewish communists, and waspy, powerful bankers who refused to bail him out.

8:46and this inculcated in the young Roy I think a resentment of the powers that be and then he you know he becomes a lawyer he goes to Columbia University he's very much a creature of New York but he's resentful of the white shoe law firms that will not hire him as a lawyer because he's Jewish and in the late 40s early 50s his politics suddenly veer to the right. Roy sees an opportunity to sort of prove his American loyalties by becoming a commie hunter and going after Jewish communists to prove his loyalty, but also gays in the State Department. And of course, we realize now he was himself a closeted gay man, never would come out of the closet.

9:43By the time Cohen was 24, he was part of the team that prosecuted the married couple that's now known to history as the Rosenbergs, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Tell me about that case and the role that Cohen played in it. Yeah, he got himself hired as an assistant prosecutor on the Rosenberg case, the sort of a real turning point on a sensational atomic spy case, in which most historians now agree that Julius Rosenberg was guilty of actually quite low-level spying, inconsequential spying as such. And his wife, Ethel, was implicated. She probably knew what was going on, but she had no real involvement, hands-on in the spine, Roy engaged in ex parte communications with the judge, Judge Irving Kaufman, repeatedly passing information, guiding the judge, and lobbying him at the end to impose the death penalty, not only on Julius, but also on Ethel, which they regarded as sort of an attempt to bring pressure on Julius to perhaps name names and become cooperative, which they, you know, Ethel called their bluff and refused to play that game.

11:14And so she was sent to the electorate chair as well as her husband. One of the people he encountered when he then moved on to work for Senator Joe McCarthy, the Republican from Wisconsin, who was really the big red hunter in the Senate, one of the people he encountered there was Robert F. Kennedy. What was that? What happened there? Robert F. Kennedy, as a young man right out of law school, wanted a job with Joe McCarthy. And his father, Joe Kennedy, lobbied to get him in the door. But as it turned out, Joe McCarthy selected Roy Cohn as his chief counsel and hired Robert Bobby Kennedy as the deputy.

11:59And they took an instant disliking to each other. It was just really bad chemistry. And Bobby Kennedy didn't last long in the position and eventually flipped to the other side of the bench as such and went to work for the Democrats on the Senate committee. but they repeatedly clash and this was the origins of their bitter sort of rivalry that stretched into the period when bobby kennedy became attorney general and when the kennedy justice department indicted roy cone not once but three times and put him on trial for bribery and fraud, stock fraud, attempted bribery. And on all three occasions, to the frustration of Bobby Kennedy and his prosecutor, Robert Margenthau, the illustrious New York prosecutor, Roy got off from New York jury trials.

13:02One of the interesting things I didn't quite fully appreciate, and you make it very plain in American Scoundrel, Cohn's battle was not only against communists or communism, it's also the liberal establishment, which in his mind was embodied by a Republican president, President Dwight Eisenhower. Oh, absolutely. Roy Cohn thought that President Dwight Eisenhower, General Eisenhower, was not really a Republican and not sufficiently anti-communist. Indeed, One of the things that I've really learned that I think historians have underplayed or misunderstood about the McCarthy era is that Roy and Joe McCarthy were going after Dwight Eisenhower precisely because they knew that when he was a general during World War II, he had approved a decision to give officer commissions to veterans of the Lincoln Brigade, members of the Communist Party.

14:07Well, in 1953, 54, that fact could have been political dynamite. And they were beginning to go after, you know, with Roy edging Joe on. You know, Joe McCarthy was sort of an empty vessel in my view. He was a sort of blundering alcoholic senator who was looking for publicity. And in Roy Cohn, he found a mastermind, someone who knew the gossip columnists, knew how to push buttons. So he wasn't just a mere aide. Roy Cohn was the Dr. Evil of the operation. Oh, he was the Svengali of the whole operation. And he was going after Dwight Eisenhower. And they hoped to bring Ike down and maybe have Joe run for president in 56.

14:59So the Army McCarthy hearings was, it was a real turning point. In my recounting of the McCarthy hearings, you understand suddenly that Eisenhower himself is unwilling to attack Joe McCarthy by name. He thinks that he will be getting into the gutter if he names him. And he doesn't want to dignify Joe McCarthy's rantings. Eisenhower's aides understand that this is a really serious personal attack. And so they come up with a strategy to defang Roy Cohn. And they do so by essentially using the fact that he was gay, a man in the closet, and to highlight the favors he was trying to extend to his good friend and another Joe McCarthy aide, David Shine.

15:56And so that becomes the focus of the whole Army McCarthy hearings. But it's actually a sideshow. But how did they do that in the 50s? It's a very different media environment and a very different political environment. How did that play out? Well, remember at one point Joe Welch for the Democrats on the investigation in the Army McCarthy hearings. And Joe Welch suddenly starts quizzing Roy about pixies and fairies. Question, did you think this came from a pixie? The counsel, the counsel for my benefits defined, I think he might be an expert on that, on a pixie. Yes, I should say, I should say, Mr.

16:40Senator, that a pixie is a close relative of a fairy. So it was all, sir, innuendo. Wow, because what we remember of Joe Welsh is one soundbite. We remember of Joe Welsh saying, have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? That was the soundbite of the McCarthy era. It was the turning point for Joe McCarthy and probably the end of him. Exactly.

17:10I'm speaking with Kai Bird. His new book is American Scoundrel, Roy Cohn's dark journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump. It was excerpted in The New Yorker, and we'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour.

17:40the new yorker radio hour is supported by mint mobile there are things in life that you don't want to be transparent like your swimsuit or your search history but when it comes to your wireless bill, transparency is everything. That's why Mint Mobile's wireless plans have no gimmicks and no gotchas, just high-speed data and reliable coverage on the T-Mobile 5G network. And right now, all plans are$15 per month, even unlimited. Choose from three, six, or 12-month plans and say goodbye to a monthly bill. You can even bring your current phone and your number. To get your new wireless plan for just$15 a month, go to mintmobile.com slash nyradiohour.

18:20That's mintmobile.com slash nyradiohour. Cut your wireless bill to$15 a month at mintmobile.com slash nyradiohour. That's it. There's no catch. Upfront payment of$45 for 3 months,$90 for 6 months, or$180 for 12 months. Plan required,$15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50 GB may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20 GB hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed, and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com. I'm Emily Flake, cartoonist at The New Yorker. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported by Bombas. Summer's here and we are living for all things outdoors.

19:08Whether your thing is jogging, heading to the beach, or grilling in front of your stoop, Bombas makes your comfiest summer staples so you can make the most out of all your summer plans. They've got a whole line of pro-level, sports-specific socks for golf, yoga, the gym, and socks for every kind of runner. I personally do not run if I can help it, but I walk everywhere. And if I don't get my 10 ,000 steps in, my phone will yell at me. These socks are so soft and cushioned right where I need it, whether I'm doing a power saunter in the park or just running a million errands. Plus, they're airy, sweat-wicking.

19:38My feet feel as good after a long day of pounding the pavement as they did when I left the apartment. Head over to bombas.com slash radio hour and use code radio hour for 20 % off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash radio hour. Code radio hour at checkout. WNYC Studios is supported by Wayfair.

20:25Wayfair can breathe new life into your home or office with furniture and decor that's built to last and prices that help you make a space you love without breaking the bank. They have a huge range of options for every budget, and Wayfair Rewards members get 5 % back every day. You can see real customer feedback and photos, so you get to shop with confidence and feel good about what you're buying. So whether you're beating back kitchen chaos or just looking for a rug to pull the room together, Wayfair is here to help. Join Wayfair Awards today to get 5 % back on every purchase and start saving on your next home upgrade.

20:56Head to Wayfair.com to shop all things home. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R dot com. Wayfair. Every style, every home. Wayfair. Every style, every home. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported by Amazon Music. With Amazon Music Unlimited, you can listen to music, podcasts, and now audiobooks, all in one app. This includes popular titles like Project Hail Mary, one of the most beloved adventure stories by Andy Weir. I have been listening to this audiobook and constantly looking for any pockets of time during the day to turn it on and find out what will happen next in the story. So whether you're catching up on a podcast, listening to your favorite playlist, or, like me, getting lost in a great audiobook, it's all right there within the Amazon Music app.

21:39Amazon Music. Music, podcasts, audiobooks, all in one app. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I've been speaking with Kai Bird, the historian whose remarkable new book is about the life of Roy Cohn. It's called American Scoundrel, and it's written with Susan Goldmark. As a young man, Roy Cohn worked for Joseph McCarthy. And early in our conversation, Kai Bird was telling me that in his view, Cohn was the mastermind behind McCarthy's anti-communist purges in Washington, behind all the lies and the smears and the subterfuge that ruined so many lives and careers. Eventually, Senator McCarthy was repudiated and the purges subsided.

22:22But Cohn was just getting started. I'll continue my conversation with Kybird. Now, Joe McCarthy, after inflicting so much damage, falls apart. He lets go of Roy Cohn, who sets up as a lawyer in New York. And you write that Roy Cohn represented not just one mafia family, but at different times along the way, he was involved with all five of the big New York mob families, including, of course, one of my favorites, the Teflon Don, John Gotti. What did Roy Cohn get out of these relationships, and what did the mafia chieftains get from him? Roy was known to them. His father was a judge. He becomes very close to fat Tony Salerno, who controls the concrete business in New York City, which later becomes important to the rise of Donald Trump and the building of Trump Tower.

23:14He likes these guys. And, you know, Roy talks like them. He has the language of the mafioso. And if you listen to Donald Trump today, he has the same language. It's just incredible. So, yes, John Gotti was one of his clients. He got John Gotti a four-year sentence for murder when Gotti walked into a bar in Staten Island. And in public, in front of 20 witnesses in the bar, he and his accomplices, two thugs, shot dead an Irish thug. And Roy got him off. He only spent two and a half years in prison for that. That does seem like a light sentence. Yeah. How and when did Donald Trump meet Roy Cohn? It was in October of 1973 in Manhattan at a private dinner club, Le Club, which was one of Roy's favorite hangouts.

24:19And Donald had joined the club. He was 27. He had joined it because he wanted to get to know Manhattan movers and shakers. and there are several accounts of the first meeting. Actually, in one of my phone call interviews with President Trump, he told me a story that was exactly opposite of all the stories that he had told decades earlier of the encounter. He claimed that Roy Cohn had recognized him as a famous up-and-coming 27-year-old real estate developer and had come to his table and introduced himself. And of course, I think the more accurate story is that young Donald went over to Roy Cohn, recognized this powerful, shady lawyer, and told him that he was involved in a discrimination case.

25:19He was being sued by the feds for discriminating against black renters in his queen's apartments. And Roy told him, you know, don't settle. you should sue the feds. And indeed, Roy got him to sue the feds for$100 million, and it was dismissed a month later. Well, it seems that right off the bat, Kai, right off the bat, Trump imbibes from Roy Cohn some very direct, if you want to call them principles or rules of the road, never settle, never apologize, never explain, attack, attack, attack, exploit the press, smear slander, never admit the truth of anything. And these kind of Ten Commandments, as it were, etched in tablets, really stayed with Trump.

26:14How did he imbibe them? What was the early relationship like? Well, you'd have to concede that Trump was, This is who he was. He's a huckster, a con artist, a shady businessman from the get-go. But when he met Roy Cohn, he was really impressed that here was this lawyer who had been indicted by the feds three times for outrageous crimes. And there was lots of evidence that he was guilty and he'd gotten off. The Donald was very impressed by the fact that he'd gotten off, that he'd gotten away with these things. And Roy told him, you know, this is how you defend yourself in this cruel world. The establishment is out to get you.

26:59And so he fed Trump's sort of victimhood psychosis. I'm always the victim. Well, Roy felt that too. I'm always the victim. Bobby Kennedy is always out to get me. and that's the source of the indictments and so you have to respond by attack, attack, attack attack the judge, attack the judge Who does that? Who does that? You know, play your defense in the public arena in the press, in the gossip columns Now, maybe nothing exemplifies Cohn's hypocrisy more than his sexuality and what he did or did not do about it. You paint a picture of an extremely promiscuous gay man who never really hid it. And at the same time, he helped to persecute gay men during what we call the Lavender Scare and publicly opposed gay rights.

28:01How do you come to understand this in your book? well you really have to go back to the atmosphere and the culture of the 1950s here was roy cone who is a very precocious bright manipulative young man a fabulous you know a lawyer with a photographic memory uh famous nationwide at the age of 27 he knew he could never come out. That would be the end of his public career as a lawyer. And so he was just a man of his times. He just always denied that he was gay. Do you have some sympathy for that? Yes. Oh, absolutely. I think, you know, he was a victim of his times in that way. It's a tragedy. It explains something about Roy Cohn.

28:55On the other hand, there are plenty of gay men in the 1950s who did not become Roy Cohns, right? For certain, for certain. So it's not a sufficient explanation. Let's listen to a clip of Roy Cohn speaking with Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes about this very thing. And the doctors tell me, I've strong faith in doctors now. You're in remission? I'm in total remission. When I talk to friends and tell them that I am doing a profile of Roy Cohn, they say, ask him this, please. And I'm sure you know what they tell me to ask you. Do you have AIDS? Oh, no. That's easy to answer. In another world, could Cohn have helped other people by speaking to Ronald Reagan, say, about AIDS?

29:46He certainly knew Ronald Reagan. He helped get Ronald Reagan elected president in sort of some dirty tricks areas. But he also was very close to Nancy Reagan. And yes, he was getting experimental AZT treatments precisely because I would argue Nancy Reagan got him ahead of the line at the National Institute of Health. He knew he had AIDS, and he was still hiring hustlers, teenage hustlers to have sex with. So he was infecting them. It's outrageous. Now, you interviewed a man named Richard Kerr, who told you that he had been trafficked as a teenager to Roy Cohn. I think this is new information. And how did you find Kerr?

30:34And what made you believe that this was a story that you could use in your book? Because you have a very high standard of evidence. Well, I'm glad you picked up on that. That's a short chapter at the end of the book. And I was very skeptical. But my wife, Susan Goldmark, who is my chief researcher and co-author on this project, she dug into, she was fascinated. She grew up in New York City. She was fascinated by the mob of New York City. and the sort of the gay underworld in New York City in those years. And she was relentless in tracking down evidence that Roy had, well, he was a sex addict. And by the last few decades of his life, he had sex almost every night, two or three times with hustlers.

31:29And she got wind of a scandal in Northern Ireland with a boy's orphanage. And she found Richard Kerr, and we interviewed him on the record, on tape. And he told his story. He had been in this orphanage from the time he was eight. He was trafficked as a very young boy. And then at the age of 16, he was sent on a train to Venice, where he had a sexual encounter in a fancy hotel in Venice with Roy Cohn. And he described him and described seeing him later in New York. It's just an incredibly sad story. Were you able to get any corroboration from another party? Well, actually, this spring, Richard Kerr succeeded in the Irish courts, and he was awarded a financial judgment.