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

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/a65d90cc9eb4ba9c

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and the New Yorker.
Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
I Roy Cohen had never existed
It would have taken a
a novelist of real skill to have invented that life.
Cohn started out as a 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 twenties
As Joseph McCarthy's attack dog.
in the anti communist purges of the early fifties.
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 seventies, 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 Cone 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 Ky Bird.
the other day.
You're
probably best known for your collaboration with Marty Sherwin on
The biography of Oppenheimer.
What made you choose Roy Cohn as your
As your subject. You you knew you'd have to spend
years of your life with a man who is in many ways
Miserable.
Yes.
No, it was an improbable choice for me because, you know, for forty years I've been a biographer of the establishment.
And then after I finish 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
Uh
Awful figure who was disruptive and divisive and unethical.
And I suddenly realized that, you know, the establishment that I've been writing about for forty years is gone. There are values and culture.
The politics
the bipartisanship of someone like John McCloy, a Rockefeller Republican
Uh that's all gone and it's been replaced by Roy Cohn, who's sort of haunting us from his grave.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 Cone explains
Something about the dark side of America that I just didn't understand. 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.
Uh yes, absolutely.
Um
But ironically, you know, I I had four
Telephone interviews with Donald Trump.
I mean they are 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.
What was he especially eager to get across to you?
Well, the astonishing thing is how proud he was of Roy.
How admiring.


I you know.
Uh
He he really
Lovedon.
Uh I I
And
Appreciated him and and he really did in his first term
in the Oval Office at one point shout out Where's my Roy Call?
You know, in front of you. Where's my killer lawyer to get me off the hook? Yeah.
Exactly.
And
I I don't know. It's
In my last phone conversation
Yeah.
Trump was President Trump was trying to get off the phone.
And I was uh trying
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
Marlog all

The whole repertorial dance. Yeah. And he wasn't having any of it. He he he said at one he his response to me at that point was, No, I can't do it. You are you don't understand. I'm the president. I have Russia calling.
I have China calling.
So
Then at the end of the conversation I you know, he's clearly not inviting me to Marlogo.
So I say, Well, Mr President, I just want you to know that this
Biography of Roy Khan is coming out in the autumn.
Of twenty six. Mm-hmm.
And he 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 Kahn.
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 f where does he come from? What are his roots?
He 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
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, ten years old, his
Mother Dora.
An awful woman.
Not terrible, mother.
Who raised him with no guardrails.
Took him up to Sing Sing prison.
Every weekend to visit their beloved uncle Bernie.
Who is the only banker
From the nineteen twenty nine crash, who had been sent to prison for bank fraud.
And
Dora Roy's mother
Told her son, you know.
This was uh
Miscarriage of justice.
Uncle Bernie was a victim of conspiracies by communists, Jewish communists.
And
waspy powerful bankers who refuse to
Bail'em out.
And uh this
Inculcated in the young Roy, I think, a resentment of
Um
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.
Uh and
In the late forties
Early fifties, his politics suddenly veered to the right.
Roy sees an opportunity to sort of
prove his American loyalties by
Becoming a
Come 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 who never would come out of the closet.
By the time Cohen was twenty four.
He was part of the team that prosecuted the
marrone that's now known to history as the as the Rosenbergs, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
Tell me about that case and the role that
Cohen played in it.
Yeah.
hired as an assistant prosecutor on the Rosenberg case. The sort of
A real turning point the on a sensational atomic spy case.
In which most historians now agree that
Julius.
Rosenberg was
Guilty of
Actually quite l low level spine.
Inconsequential spine as such.
Uh 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 Irvine Kaufman.
Repeatedly.
Um
Passing information, um
Guiding the judge.
and uh lobbying him at the end to impose the death penalty not only on Julius but also on Ethel, which they regarded as sort of uh
An attempt to
Bring pressure on Juliaus to
To uh
perhaps name names and become cooperative, which they
Yeah.
Ethel called their bluff and refused to
Um played that game and so she she was sent to the electric chair as well as her husband.
When he then moved on to work for Senator Joe McCarthy.
uh the Republican from Wisconsin who was really the the
big red hunter in the Senate.
One of the people he encountered there was Robert F. Kennedy.
Who was that?
What h w 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.
uh as his chief counsel and
Higher
Robert.
Bobby Kennedy.
As the
Deputy.
And 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 f uh flipped to the other side of the
Bench as such and went to work for the
The Democrats on the
Senate committee.
But they repeatedly clash, and this was the origins of their
Um
bitter for rivalry that stretched into the period when Bobby Kennedy became attorney general.
And uh 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. Uh
Roy got off.
For New York jury trials.
One of the interesting things I I I didn't
quite fulciate and you make it very plain in 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 Cahn thought that
President Dwight Eisenhower, General Eisenhower
Was
Not really a 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 was and Joe McCarthy were going after Dwight Eisenhower precisely because they knew
That when he was a general during World War Two
He had approved the
A decision to give officer commissions.
To veterans of the Lincoln Brigade, members of the Communist Party.
Well
In nineteen fifty three, fifty four, 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 he was a sort of blundering alcoholic.
Senator who was looking at the
For publicity.
And in Roy Cohn he found a mastermind, someone who could
No, knew the gossip colonists, knew how to
Push buttons. So he wasn't just a mere aide. Roy Kahn was the doctor evil of the operation.
operation and he was going after Dwight Eisenhower
And they hope to bring Ike down.
And maybe have Joe run for president in fifty six.
So the Army McCarthy hearings was uh it was it it was a real turning point and my
recounting of the
McCarthy hearings.
Um
You understand suddenly that Eisenhower himself is unwilling to attack Joe McCarthy by name.
He thinks that we'll
He will be getting into the gutter.
If he names it.
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 Cone.
And they do so by uh
Essentially using the fact that he was gay a man in the closet.
And to highlight his
the favors he was trying to extend to
his good friend and another Joe McCarthy aide.
David Shine.
And so that becomes the focus of the whole Army McCarthy hearing. But how do they do tight shows? But how did they do that in the fi in the fifties? It's a very different media environment, a very different political environment. How did that play out?
Well it it
If you remember at one point Joe Welch for the
Democrats on the
investigation in the Army McCarthy hearings.
Joe Welsh suddenly starts
Quizzing Roy about
Pixies and fairies.
Question, did you think this came from a pixie?

No, my brother.
If I'm I think he might be an expert on that. Yeah. Yeah. I should say
I should say, Mr. Spanager, that uh a pixie is a close relative of a ferry.
So it was all surface.

Innuendo.
Well because what we 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. Yes.
Of the McCarthy era, it was the turning point for Joe McCarthy and probably the end of him.
Exactly.
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.
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.
It's 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 ruins so many lives and careers.
Eventually Senator McCarthy was repudiated.
And the purges subsided.
But Cohn was just getting started.
I'll continue my conversation with Ky Bird.
Now Joe McCarthy after inflicting so much damage
falls apart. He lets go of Roy Cohen, 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 it later becomes important to the rise of Donald Trump and the building of Trump Tower.
He he likes these guys and you know
Roy talks like them. He has the language of the mafia, and if you listen to Donald Trump today
He has the same same language. It's 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
twenty
Witnesses in the bar, he and his accomplices two thugs shot dead an Irish
Thug.
And
Roy got'em 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 Roycon.
It was in Octob Nineteen Seventy three.
in Manhattan at a private
Dinner club club.
Uh which was one of the
Roy's favorite hangouts.
And
Donald had joined the club.
He was twenty seven.
He had joined it because he wanted
To get to know Manhattan movers and shakers.
And uh
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
Uh Roy Cohn had recognized him.
as a famous up and coming twenty seven 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 uh
Went over to Roy Cone, recognized this powerful
Shady lawyer and told him that he was involved in a anti you know a discrimination case. He was being sued by the feds.
for uh discriminating against black renters in his queen's apartments.
And uh Roy told him, You know, don't settle.
Um
You should
Sue the Feds.
And indeed
Roy got him to sue the feds for a hundred million dollars and it was dismissed a monthly. Rat, 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.
Um etched in
Um
Tablets
really stayed with Trump. How did he imbibe them? What was the re early relationship like?
Well, you you'd have to
Conceed that Trump was
This is who he was. He he he's a huckster, a con artist, uh a shady businessman um from the get-go.
But the when he met Roy Cohn, he was really impressed that here was this
this lawyer who had been indicted by the Feds three times for outrageous crimes and and the there's 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 you defend yourself in this cruel world.
The establishment is out to get you.
And so he he said
Trump's sort of victimhood
uh psychosis. I'm always the victim. Well Roy felt that too. I'm always the victim.
Bobby Kennedy is always out to get me.
Uh
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 your your
Defense in the public arena.
in the press and 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

Never really
Hid it.
And at the same time he helped to persecute gay men during the 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 nineteen fifties. Here was Roy Cohn who as a
Very
Precocious, bright
Manipulative
Young man.
a f fabulous, you know, a lawyer with a photographic memory.
Uh famous nationwide at the age of twenty seven.
He knew he could never come out.
Yeah, that was that would be the end of his public career as a lawyer.
Um 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 Cone. On the other hand
There are plenty of gay men in the
nineteen fifties who did not become Roy Coats.
Right.
For certain.
For sure. Uh so it it's not a sufficient explanation.
So let's listen let's listen to a clip of Roy Cone
Speaking with Mike Wallace on sixty minutes about
This very thing.
The doctors tell me.
I've
Strength in doctors now.
Uh 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? He certainly knew Ronald Reagan.

Get Ronald Reagan elected president.
Uh
in sort of some dirty tricks areas, but he also was very close to Nancy Reagan. And yes, he was getting experimental A Z T treatments.
Precisely because I would argue it
Nancy Reagan got him ahead of the line.
Yeah.
uh the National Institute of Health.
He knew he had AIDS, and
And he was still
Hiring hustlers.
Teenage hustlers to have sex with, so he was infecting them.
It's now you interviewed a man named Richard G
Cur.
Who told you that he had been trafficked as a teenager to Roy Cone.
I I think this is new information and
How did you find
Current
And what made you believe
That this was a story that you could
use in your book'cause 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 in New York City in those years and
Uh she was relentless and
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. Mm-hmm.
And she got wind of uh uh
A scandal in N Northern Ireland with an uh boys 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.

He was trafficked as a very young boy and even and then at the age of sixteen he was traff he was sent on a
Train to Venice.
Where he had an a sexual encounter in a fancy hotel in Venice with
Uh Roy Cull. And he described him
And uh described seeing him later in New York.
Uh
It's just an incredibly sad story. Were you able to get any corroboration from a f uh another party?
Well,
Actually this spring
U
Richard Care
succeeded in
the Irish courts
And and he was awarded uh financial judgment. They agreed that he had been trafficked.
They didn't get into the Roy Cone connection, but it was clear that
The people who had trafficked
And we're connected, we're known to Roy.
And yes, I'm
quite confident that this story is
Um
All true.
What were the transactions between Roy Cohn
and Donald Trump. Other than the fact that Roy Cunn was a kind of character mentor to Donald Trump.
Well
Concretely he
He he helped Trump
Build Trump Tower. He got the zoning variances. He got the tax abatements for the pr first big real estate deal, the Commodore Hotel.
Um over the opposition of
Mayor Ed Kotch, who thought this was an outrageous
tax abatement for
A wealthy developer.
Completely unjustified, but Roy prevailed when
Appealed, appealed, appealed to the
New York.
And
Um
Trump was forever
Grateful.
But
Th y this was a relationship that was also
transactional
socially. I mean, Roy introduced Trump to New York society. He
Trump loved seeing his name in the gossip columnists. Well
Ryan would do that.
Uh you know, he mimicked his language.
He mimicked him in small things like the vanity license plates on his
His cars. He also mimicked Ro 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. He doesn't want a record.
And
He learned this from Roy. You don't leave a record of
That can be picked apart.
Well, K tell me how that relationship
resolve because
As 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 their the heyday of their friendship, they were on the phone with each other a dozen times a day.
Um
In ninety you know, Roy was diagnosed with AIDS in
October of eighty four.
And he dies in August of eighty six.
And those last two years.
Trump sort of pulls back.
And according to his uh
Switchboard operator and secretary, he
He began to rely on Roy less and less for legal advice.
Um so yes, he pulled back, but he didn't break with him. Did he did he stop taking his calls?
No?
No, he would take calls. He d there just wasn't as much of a relationship and then
When he was clearly evidently very getting sick in March of eighty six.
He invited him down to Mar-a-Lago for a fabulous
What turned out to be a farewell dinner.
Mm-hmm.
twenty plus people were there, old friends. So
It was a fabulous dinner, many toasts.
When Roy died, there was a memorial service several months later, and Trump turned up at it.
And according to Peter Menso, the late journalist,

Found his transcripts and that was
became a great source for us in this book. Anyway, according to Menso,
Trump
Did not give a eulogy or stand up or talk at all, but he sat in the back and Manso saw him weeping.
Hm.
So there was let's pause over that.
Yeah, isn't that astonishing?
I don't know if I've
Ever seen Trump
Laugh.
Like in a real way, other than at somebody?
And I've certainly never seen him.
Cry.
Yeah.
That is a that's an astonishing thing to conjure with.
And it it signifies
You know, a real friendship between the two men.
And an admiration. You you've described
personal characteristics that they shared.
Did they share a politics?
Oh, absolutely.
Both men
Represent this dark side of America that I
argue keeps popping up every once in a while. That is
Very suspicious of immigrants.
Is nativist.
And
They feel
Insecure and
Afraid.
Of
Multiculturalism and they're deeply racist.
You know, Roy used the Yiddish slur word for
Black.
Which he picked up from his mother Dora.
They shared a lot of deeply resentful
Divisive politics. Some other lessons that they seem to share.
Or characteristics.
Is that
It pays to be bad.
Somehow. One characteristic always struck me about
Trump.
The абсолют шамлесне.
Of his political behavior and his personal behavior, a kind of amorality.
And I
I can't help but think after reading this book
Superb book, by the way.
That
He had to have derived at least some of that.
From his mentor Roy Cohn.
Oh, yes.
He I think he sucked it in.
Roy was very open about his
His shamelessness, his brazen
Violation of the rules.
The rules are for the or are for small men, you would say.
And loyalty was to be prized, but loyalty in the sense of
Mafioso loyalty.
You do favors.
for your close
Circle.
Don't pretend to think that you have to abide by society's rules.
Roy had a schooner, a yacht.
At one time.
And he named it
The defiance.


And that's
That's Trump's whole strategy.
Defy everything, defy the powers that be, defy the establishment. He learned all of that from Roy and Roy's life.
Show him that he could get away with it.
Kai Bird, thank you so much.
Thank you, Dave.
You can read an excerpt from Kai Bird's American Scoundrel.
His biography of Roy Cohn at New Yorker.
Dot com
And of course you can subscribe to the New Yorker there as well.
NewYorker.com
I'm David Remnick.
That's our program for today. Thanks for listening.
And I'll see you next time.
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