From the Pulitzer Prize–winning coauthor of American Prometheus, inspiration for the Oscar-winning sensation Oppenheimer, a biography of Roy Cohn—arguably the mastermind behind the current arc of American political life, including 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 burned 30,000 books by “communist” authors, becoming the baby-faced symbol of McCarthyism. By his thirties, Cohn, with a red scar that ran down his nose from a botched childhood operation, was known in New York City as the Mafia’s hired legal gun. In his forties, he partied with the glitterati at Studio 54 and became friends with Richard Nixon. In his fifties, Cohn was invited to Reagan’s Oval Office. Nancy Reagan called Cohn often for advice and gossip—indeed, Cohn had an almost insatiable interest in gossip, and much of his influence over the years derived from his transactional relationship with gossip columnists. Perhaps most significantly, he mentored the young Donald Trump. The real estate developer, whom Cohn called his “best friend,” phoned him a dozen times a day.
Cohn considered himself the one lawyer in town who could always escape the consequences. Indicted by the Feds on three occasions for bribery, perjury, extortion, and other white-collar crimes, he was acquitted every time. To achieve his ends, he did whatever it took. “If you need somebody to get vicious,” Trump once said, “hire Roy Cohn.”
Years after his death of AIDS in 1986, Cohn emerged as a central figure in Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1992 play, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Cohn’s feistiness, his surly defiance—and, yes, his charm—were frequently flourished to conceal vast insecurities, particularly regarding his sexuality. As his friend Sidney Zion once wrote, “Roy lived in a closet that was the oddest in history—a closet with neon lights—but he maintained it fiercely.”
A streetfighter, self-promoting hustler, and scheming conman, Cohn was a nefarious actor in one unscrupulous tale after another. He was a true Zelig of the dark side.
Kai Bird is an acclaimed biographer and journalist. With Martin J. Sherwin, he won the Pulitzer Prize for biography for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which was the inspiration for Christopher Nolan’s Academy Award–winning Best Picture, Oppenheimer. Bird is the executive director at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. He has won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Duff Cooper Prize for History and is the recipient of numerous fellowships. His work includes critical writings on the Vietnam War, Hiroshima, nuclear weapons, the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the CIA. He is an elected member of the prestigious Society of American Historians.
Bird will be in conversation with Congressman Jamie Raskin, who proudly represents Maryland’s 8th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. The district includes most of Montgomery County and a small part of Prince George’s County. Congressman Raskin was sworn into his fifth Term at the start of the 119th Congress on January 6, 2025. Rep. Raskin was chosen by the Democratic Caucus to be the Ranking Member of the House Committee on the Judiciary in the 119th Congress. Prior to his time in Congress, Raskin was a three-term State Senator in Maryland, where he also served as the Senate Majority Whip. He was also a professor of constitutional law at American University’s Washington College of Law for more than 25 years. He has authored several books, including the Washington Post best-seller Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court versus the American People, the highly-acclaimed We the Students: Supreme Court Cases For and About America’s Students, and the New York Times #1 best-seller Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth and the Trials of American Democracy. Congressman Raskin is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School and is a former editor of the Harvard Law Review.