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

0:18David Remnick

0:29Kai Bird: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. In the 70s, Roy Cohn acquired a young protege, a real estate heir named, you guessed it, Donald J.

1:13Kai Bird: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. You're probably best known for your collaboration with Marty Sherwin on the biography of Oppenheimer.

1:55what 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culture the politics the bipartisanship of someone like John McCloy, a Rockefeller Republican that's all gone and it's been replaced by Roy Cohn who's sort of haunting us from his grave and so I became I was quite upset with this realization and I decided I needed to dig into maybe Roy Cohn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.

3:34Yes, absolutely. But ironically, you know, I had four telephone interviews with Donald Trump. 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.

4:08Kai Bird: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.

4:21So, 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?

4:36Kai Bird:You know, in frustration. Where's my killer lawyer to get me off the hook? Yeah, exactly. And I don't know, in my last phone conversation, 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.

5:29So 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. and 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.

6:11He's very much a creature of New York. His father was a Bronx, New York State judge. His family was Jewish, democratic, liberal. And 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, 10 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.

7:08And 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. and this inculcated in the young Roy I think a resentment of 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 veered 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.

8:17And of course, we realize now he was himself a closeted gay man who never would come out of the closet. By 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.

9:04and 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 them 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. And so she was sent to the electorate chair as well as her husband.

10:00One 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. And they took an instant disliking to each other. It was just really bad chemistry.

10:48And 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 rivalry that stretched into the period when Bobby Kennedy became Attorney General. And when the Kennedy Justice Department indicted Roy Cohn 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.

11:45One 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.

12:50Well, 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.

13:41So 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. is 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.

14:39And 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 council, the council for my benefits, they find, I think he might be an expert on that. Yeah, I should say, I should say, Mr. Senator, that a pixie is a close relative of a fairy.

15:28So 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.

15:48Kai Bird:Exactly.

15:52Kai Bird:I'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.

16:22Comprehensive. Witty. Speculative. Critical. Insightful. Profound. Wide-ranging. Hopefully doesn't take itself too, too seriously.

16:29Kai Bird:I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, my colleagues and I try to make sense of what's happening in this chaotic world. I hope you'll join us for the New Yorker Radio Hour wherever you listen to podcasts. Thoughtful. Exquisite. Just, you know, real.

16:54Kai Bird: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 earlier 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.

17:31Kai Bird:But 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.

18:22He 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.

19:28And 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.

20:28He 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.

21:22How 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.

22:08And 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 Cohen'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.

22:58And at the same time, he helped to persecute gay men during what we call the Lavender Scare and publicly opposed gay rights. How 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 Cohn, who as a very precocious, bright, manipulative young man, a fabulous lawyer with a photographic memory, 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?

23:54Yes. 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. On the other hand, there are plenty of gay men in the 1950s who did not become Roy Cohns. Right?

24:11Kai Bird:For certain. For certain. So it's not a sufficient explanation. So 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 Cohen have helped other people by speaking to Ronald Reagan, say, about AIDS? He certainly knew Ronald Reagan.

24:55He 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? And And what made you believe that this was a story that you could use in your book?

25:49Because 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, you know, the last few decades of his life, he had sex almost every night, two or three times with hustlers.

26:38and 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.

27:45They agreed that he had been trafficked. They didn't get into the Roy Cohn connection, but it was clear that the people who had trafficked and were connected were known to Roy. And yes, I'm quite confident that this story is all true. What were the transactions between Roy Cohn and Donald Trump, other than the fact that Roy Cohn was a kind of character mentor to Donald Trump? Well, concretely, he helped Trump build Trump Tower. He got the zoning variances. He got the tax abatements for the first big real estate deal, the Commodore Hotel. Over the opposition of Mayor Ed Koch, who thought this was an outrageous tax abatement for a wealthy developer, completely unjustified.

28:37But Roy prevailed, appealed, appealed, appealed through the New York courts. And Trump was forever grateful. But this was a relationship that was also transactional socially. I mean, Roy introduced Trump to New York society. Trump loved seeing his name in the gossip columnists. Well, Roy would do that. You know, he mimicked his language. He mimicked him in small things like the vanity license plates on his cars. He also mimicked Roy in other ways. You know, Roy famously hated to see people taking notes in his meetings, and he never took notes. He conducted his law practice over the phone. And you see Donald Trump today, even in the Oval Office, he's annoyed when he sees somebody taking notes.

29:35He doesn't want a record. And he learned this from Roy. You don't leave a record that can be picked apart. Well, Kai, tell me how that relationship resolved, because as Roy Cohn became ill, it's my understanding that Donald Trump drew away from him, betrayed him in a sense. Yes, you know, in the heyday of their friendship, they were on the phone with each other a dozen times a day. And in 19—you know, Roy was diagnosed with AIDS in October of 84, and he dies in August of 86. And those last two years, Trump sort of pulls back. And according to his switchboard operator and secretary, he began to rely on Roy less and less for legal advice.