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Roy Cohn was a New York lawyer who became a mentor to Donald Trump in the 1970s and ’80s. Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark’s new biography of him, American Scoundrel, reminds everyone how persistent Cohn was in U.S. politics from the 1950s through the ’80s, when he died.
We talk about Roy’s prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the 1950s, his relationship to J. Edgar Hoover, his famous parties, his closeted homsexuality, and his tactics of blackmail — some of which he taught to Donald Trump.
Susan Goldmark is Kai’s wife and co-author; she did a lot of the research for this book but couldn’t be with us for the episode. Kai is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of several other biographies, including American Prometheus, which Christopher Nolan leaned on for his film Oppenheimer.
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Resources:
American Scoundrel, by Kai Bird
An excerpt from the New Yorker, featuring the Woody Guthrie song, “Old Man Trump”
Kai Bird’s website
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