Doing Business with the Devil

Aside from being a modern morality tale, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, by Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark,1 might be seen as a veritable inversion of Bird’s earlier work American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which he wrote with Martin J. Sherwin. That book, which served as a major source for Christopher Nolan’s 2023 blockbuster biopic, Oppenheimer, presented a nuanced portrait of the idealistic, mystically inclined, yet duplicitous and power-seeking nuclear physicist. The subject of this chilling new biography was an entirely different creature, even though like Oppenheimer he was born to a wealthy New York Jewish family (albeit a much less cultivated one), attended the progressive Ethical Culture Fieldston School (although the “ethics” part evidently eluded him), and ranked among the most polarizing American personalities of the early postwar period.In Bird and Goldmark’s account (these collaborators are also married), 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 fa...