TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Back when Donald Trump was getting his start as a real estate developer in his father's business, wanting to branch out from apartments in the burrows to more ambitious buildings in Manhattan, and trying to find a place for himself among wealthy New Yorkers, celebrities and power brokers, his lawyer and mentor was the infamous, unethical Roy Cohn. Cohn's rules became Trump's rules, writes my guest, Kai Bird, in his new biography of Cohn called "American Scoundrel." Kai Bird also cowrote the definitive biography of Robert Oppenheimer, called "American Prometheus," which was the basis of Christopher Nolan's Oscar-winning film "Oppenheimer."

Early in Roy Cohn's career, he prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on charges of espionage. They were sent to the electric chair. In the 1950s, when Senator Joe McCarthy led the subcommittee that investigated and smeared alleged communists and gay people, ruining their careers and sometimes their lives, Cohn was the subcommittee's legal counsel. This in spite of Cohn being a closeted gay man himself. Cohn moved onto a more lucrative career as the lawyer for leaders of New York's crime families. He was connected to several prominent New York politicians and helped Ronald Reagan get elected president.

Cohn was indicted by the Justice Department on three occasions of bribery, perjury and extortion, and other white-collar crimes, and was always acquitted. But in 1986, after being accused of bribery and fraud, he was disbarred. This is just a few weeks before he died of AIDS, which he always denied having, claiming it was liver cancer. Bird says Cohn's story is important because of what it teaches us about the fragile character of American democracy.

Kai Bird, welcome to FRESH AIR. And congratulations on the biography. You say that Roy Cohn's rules became Trump rules. Now, there were a couple of Cohn rules that became Trump rules that I was familiar with, like never admit you were wrong. Deny, deny, deny. And then when there are charges against you, delay, delay, delay. Can you think of an example where all three were used by Roy Cohn?

KAI BIRD: (Laughter) Yeah, during the time in the '60s when he was indicted three times. Roy Cohn delayed the courtroom proceedings as often as he could. He denied the allegations. He attacked the judge in particular by name. You know, he followed these rules throughout his life. And he was a routine rule breaker. You know, the rules were for the little guy, not for him.

GROSS: So did all of that help him get off on those charges?

BIRD: Well, the evidence was really quite overwhelming. I argue in the book, along with my coauthor, my wife, Susan Goldmark, that he was partly just damn lucky. You know, on one trial, a juror's father suddenly fell dead, and the judge felt compelled to declare a mistrial. On another occasion, Roy's own lawyer suffered a heart attack in the courtroom, just as he was about to give the summation.

And the trial judge was going to declare a recess, and Roy steps forward and says, judge, I'll do my own summation. And he did. And this was to his advantage, of course, because he had not chosen to take the witness stand, so he hadn't been subjected to cross-examination. But he was allowed, over two days, to spend seven hours defending himself. And he did so brilliantly and apparently got some of the jurors weeping. And they acquitted him 12 to 0.

GROSS: OK. Other rules like sue, countersue or threaten to. And basically, send the message that whether you win or lose, it's going to be a headache if you don't give in. So...

BIRD: Yeah, this was routine. You know, he left unpaid debts all over Manhattan for little things like dry cleaners, his liquor bills, limousine bills. And when sued in small claims court, you know, he would delay, delay. And eventually the people he owed money to would give up or settle for a dime on the dollar. And he was shameless.

GROSS: So what lessons do you think President Trump learned from Roy Cohn about paying bills and paying taxes?

BIRD: He copied this behavior. He, too, was notorious for not paying his bills and sort of using the negotiating tactic of delay, delay in order to bargain down the bill in question. And famously, you know, Donald Trump, we don't know what taxes he's paid. And the little that we do know indicate that he has somehow managed to find tax shelters and pays very little, comparatively speaking.

GROSS: Another Roy Cohn rule, don't tell me the law, tell me the judge, because he knew how to - like, which judge would be favorable to him, or which judge he could manipulate. I assume that's what he meant.

BIRD: Yes, exactly. And Roy grew up, you know, the son of a judge, a respected judge, Albert Cohn from the Bronx, appointed during the Roosevelt administration, a liberal Democrat. But he grew up being introduced by his father to all sorts of lawyers and judges. And when he became a lawyer himself at the age of 20, he, you know, cultivated other judges as friends. And again, he was very transactional, even as a young man. He would do favors for these people and then, you know, knock on their door to ask for a favor in return.

GROSS: Well, Trump kind of did him one better on, don't tell me the law, tell me the judge, because as president, he's appointed judges. He's appointed Supreme Court justices. And some of those people, I mean, they've ruled on things that Trump has done. Can you talk about that a little bit.

BIRD: Yes.

GROSS: Oh, the head of the Justice Department was Trump's personal lawyer?

BIRD: Yes. Yeah. Well, Roy would've approved.

(LAUGHTER)

BIRD: And this is sort of the most insidious and long-lasting legacy of Roy's. You know, he was a lawyer. But he really didn't care about the law. He practiced his law over the phone. He tried to avoid taking any notes or records. And he taught this, too, to Donald Trump.

GROSS: Yeah, don't leave a paper trail.

BIRD: Don't leave a paper trail. It's evidence. And so, you see, even to this day, Trump gets annoyed when people start taking notes. He just likes to do everything verbally and over the phone and to wing it.

GROSS: So Trump got a lot from Roy Cohn, favors, opening doors, legal representation. What did Roy Cohn see in Donald Trump? Because Donald Trump was not a name yet. He was not known yet when Roy Cohn started representing him.

BIRD: Well, you know, Roy loved just doing favors for influential people. And he told his good friend, the gossip columnist Cindy Adams, that this young Donald Trump was going to go someplace and maybe even to the White House someday. And, you know, I had four telephone interviews with Trump about Roy Cohn. Very strange interviews, maybe 10 minutes each. And in my first phone conversation, you know, it's a cold call. I just - I was given a number, and Donald Trump picked up. Hello (laughter)? And he had no idea who I was.

I said I was doing a biography of Roy Cohn. And he says, oh, that's terrific, that's terrific. He was such a wonderful man. He was a great lawyer. We won a lot of cases together. He went on and on effusively about Roy. He misses him genuinely, and I think they really were friends.

GROSS: Do you think that he thought it was going to be a very positive portrayal?

BIRD: (Laughter) I don't know what he was thinking. But obviously, he has a very positive view of Roy Cohn. He's not ashamed to be associated with him. And this is sort of a mystery to me because I can't understand how anyone could read this book and read the stories about what Roy did and some of the despicable things he did and see, you know, that it's backed up with 1,300 footnotes and not be sort of ashamed.

GROSS: When Senator Joe McCarthy, in the 1950s, headed the subcommittee that was investigating alleged communists and gay people and ruining many careers and ruining many lives along the way, Roy Cohn was the subcommittee's legal counsel. How did he get that position?

BIRD: His friends Walter Winchell and George Sokolsky, two prominent journalists at the time who were friends of Roy promoted him to get this connection. But by that time, of course, you know, Roy, even though he was very young - he was only 26 at the time - he'd already prosecuted the Rosenberg case. He'd already prosecuted another famous alleged communist spy case called the William Remington case. He had taken on prosecution of alleged communists at the United Nations. He was an expert in this field.

And his only rival for the job was, ironically enough, Robert F. Kennedy, the young future attorney general. And Joe McCarthy, for one reason or another, chose Roy Cohn, I think, because he had more experience. And yet, Bobby Kennedy was selected as a deputy counsel. And it's important to note that they immediately took a strong disliking to each other. At one point, they almost got into a fist fight.

And Roy later explained that, you know, he believed - ardently believed that the prosecutions that he suffered through the three indictments in the 1960s were brought against him by Robert Morgenthau on the instructions of Attorney General then Bobby Kennedy, and that it was a political vendetta.

GROSS: What were Cohn's main contributions to the McCarthy subcommittee, which, like, really smeared a lot of people?

BIRD: Yeah. You know, Joe McCarthy, I think, was largely, politically speaking, an empty vessel. He wasn't really an ideologue. He stumbled into this anticommunist witch hunt and investigation sort of on a whim. But Roy came to it with a passion and an expertise, and he really became Joe McCarthy's brains. You know, McCarthy was - well, he was a functioning alcoholic at that point, and Roy really guided him. And they were very successful in launching sort of what was really a political campaign against the newly inaugurated Eisenhower administration. You know, Roy was hired in early 1953, and he was beginning to go after Dwight Eisenhower himself, the former general, the current president...

GROSS: And a Republican.

BIRD: ...And a Republican for not being Republican enough and for not being anticommunist enough.

GROSS: During the McCarthy era, Roy Cohn interrogated witnesses. And what was his technique?

BIRD: Well, he was brutal. He was relentless. He openly asked male government civil servants about their sexual orientation and their - you know, have they ever had relations with a man? And, you know, some of these civil servants testified openly and then were fired. Some tried to take the Fifth Amendment. You know, he destroyed the lives of hundreds if not thousands of people.

GROSS: And meanwhile, you know, Roy Cohn was totally in the closet, leading this real double life, yet having people fired because they were gay...

BIRD: Yes.

GROSS: ...Whether they were, you know, out or in the closet. I guess that didn't bother him.

BIRD: It did not bother him. For all of his life, he was in the closet. And he was particularly in the closet in the 1950s. You know, as a public figure, you know, someone who at the age of 27, during the Army-McCarthy hearings, his image was on the cover of Time magazine. He knew that as a public figure, he could never admit to this. That would be the end of his career. But it was certainly a factor in his life. And he managed to sort of lead a double life. You know, back in New York, he, during the day, was a straight, heterosexual, powerful lawyer to the mafioso. And at night, he was cruising gay bars, two of which he himself owned.

GROSS: So in terms of, you know, trying to out men who were gay or smearing them because they were gay, for people working in the government, the argument that McCarthy and Roy Cohn used was that they were security risks because gay people in the closet could be easily blackmailed. Do you know if he thought that he could be blackmailed?

BIRD: (Laughter) I think he was supremely confident in his ability to lead a double life. So no, he had no fear. He was brazen in the 50s. But also, you know, later in the 70s, he - public result, of course, the gay community in the 1970s and 80s just despised Roy Cohn. They knew exactly who he was. They knew he was gay. They saw him in their venues, in gay bars in New York. And, you know, they heard the rumors, too, about the sex parties that he organized. It was - like, he was so brazen in his hypocrisy, it's astonishing.

GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Kai Bird, author of the new book "American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn's Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy To Donald Trump." We'll be right back after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF BIG LAZY'S "CURB URCHIN")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Kai Bird, author of the new book "American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn's Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy To Donald Trump." He also wrote the book "American Prometheus," about Robert Oppenheimer, which was adapted into the film "Oppenheimer."

Did Trump know that Roy Cohn was gay?

BIRD: Oh, Trump definitely knew that he was gay. You know, in the '70s, you know, when Studio 54 opened up in '77, Roy took Donald Trump to Studio 54 frequently. And in the '80s, Roy was sort of more out. He was never publicly out, but, you know, he was surrounded in his law firm by young gay men. And - anyway, so Donald Trump knew. And at one point, Roy called up Trump to ask for a favor for one of his boyfriends, who was dying of AIDS, in fact, and asked if he could be housed in one of Donald Trump's hotels. And Trump arranged for it. And the young man stayed there for three or four months, and when he died, Trump sent a bill to Roy.

GROSS: Do you see any connection between Roy Cohn being closeted and going after gay people during the McCarthy era and Trump's anti-DEI, anti-LGBTQ approach?

BIRD: Yes. When they first met, it was when Trump was being sued by the feds for racial discrimination in housing...

GROSS: Yeah.

BIRD: ...In Queens in their apartments owned by the Trump organization. And it was very blatant. It was an open and shut case. And, of course, Roy famously said, oh, you should fight it. You know, you should sue the feds. Let's hold a press conference and announce $100 million defamation suit against the federal government. You know, it was a nonsense suit, and it was dismissed within two months. But Trump loved this.

And Roy was sort of a social racist. Roy used all sorts of terrible slurs. One he picked up from his mother, Dora, who used the Yiddish slur for Black. And he himself, though he was Jewish, he used similar slurs about Jews. I mean, Roy's sort of politics on these kinds of issues - affirmative action he opposed. He felt this was inappropriate and wrong, and that it was discrimination against whites. His politics are very similar to what we see in Donald Trump today.

You know, the politics is really interesting in that you see Roy Cohn in the '60s and '70s. He's very resentful of intellectuals. He's a graduate of Columbia University, but he hates the Ivy League schools. He favored hiring young law associates who are not Ivy Leaguers. He was suspicious of immigrants. He was anti-Black. He was an isolationist. He wanted America to be America first. You know, well, this is all the politics that we see today in the Trump administration. It's the same politics of resentment.

GROSS: And Trump, too, went to an Ivy League school and, like Roy Cohn, was born into a high-profile family with money.

BIRD: Yeah, absolutely. So there are a lot of parallels.

GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you again, 'cause we need to take another break. My guest is Kai Bird, author of the new book "American Scoundrel." It's a biography of Roy Cohn. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF ZONY MASH'S "MEL")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Kai Bird, author of the new book "American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn's Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy To Donald Trump." In the '50s, when Senator Joe McCarthy led the subcommittee that investigated and smeared alleged communists and gay people, Cohn was the subcommittee's legal counsel. He went on to become the lawyer for leaders of New York's crime families. He was connected to wealthy New Yorkers and power brokers and used those connections to get favors, including favors for Donald Trump. He did his best to avoid paying bills and taxes and found ways to hide his money from the feds. Cohn was indicted by the Justice Department on three occasions of bribery, perjury and extortion and other white-collar crimes, and was always acquitted. But in 1986, after being accused of bribery and fraud, he was disbarred. Just a few weeks later, he died of AIDS, which he always denied having, saying it was liver cancer.

So after Joe McCarthy was pressured to fire Roy Cohn when Roy Cohn was the legal counsel for McCarthy's subcommittee that was really active in the witch hunt against alleged communists, Roy Cohn then went on to do other things. He became a divorce lawyer for very wealthy people, and he represented leaders of the five Mafia families of New York. What kind of cases did he take?

BIRD: Well, he represented, for instance, John Gotti, Teflon Don. A Mafia don, who, one day in the early '70s, walked into a bar in Staten Island with two of his associates, walked up to an Irish mafioso from a different clan, obviously, and confronted this man and held him down, and one of his associates pulled a gun and point-blank fired into his head and killed him. This was done in front of 20 witnesses in a bar. John Gotti fled. He was eventually arrested, and Roy Cohn became his lawyer. And in the end, Roy got John Gotti off on manslaughter charges, not murder. He pleaded it down, and he got him a four-year sentence. John Gotti served only 2 1/2 years and got out and then proceeded to go on to worse crimes. He killed another mafioso in order to sort of climb up the ladder himself. And this was due to Roy.

GROSS: How did the relationship between Donald Trump and Roy Cohn change as Trump became more famous and more powerful?

BIRD: Yeah, no, in the beginning, the power imbalance was quite evident. Roy was the older man and the more powerful. But as the years rolled by, the relationship sort of evolved, and Roy became more obsequious to Donald Trump, and, you know, he paid more attention to Donald's needs than the reverse. But there was a genuine friendship there. And one thing that Roy did for Donald Trump that I think is overlooked is before he died, he went to his old buddy from Horace Mann School, Cy Newhouse, the publisher of Conde Nast magazines and the owner of Randomhouse. And Roy suggested to Cy Newhouse that he should get one of his editors at Randomhouse to sign up Donald Trump to do a memoir. This is how "The Art Of The Deal" came about. And that book was published after Roy died, but it became a national bestseller. And it virtually turned this very parochial New York celebrity developer into a national figure, prominent businessman, as such. And, of course, that, as we know, led to the TV show "The Apprentice," and that led to Donald Trump launching a political campaign for the presidency. So there's a direct connection between all of that, and then it starts with Roy Cohn's relationship with Cy Newhouse.

GROSS: Roy Cohn got AIDS early in the AIDS epidemic.

BIRD: Yes.

GROSS: So how did that change Donald Trump's relationship with Roy Cohn?

BIRD: Well, Trump, when he learned that Roy was probably dying of AIDS, he began by all accounts to sort of keep his distance. He began to take less - relied less on Roy Cohn's legal advice and went to other lawyers. But he never broke with him. And, in fact, to his credit, he invited him down to Mar-a-Lago soon after he acquired that new estate in Florida and hosted a fabulous dinner, and there were many toasts to Roy Cohn. And at the end of the dinner, when it was all over, Trump apparently told his staff to take the silverware and clean it in peroxide.

GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you again. If you're just joining us, my guest is Kai Bird, author of the new book, "American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn's Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy To Donald Trump." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF PAUL AUSTERLITZ'S "FINNISH WALTZ")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Kai Bird, author of the new book "American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn's Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy To Donald Trump." Cohn was Donald Trump's lawyer and mentor.

Because one of Roy Cohn's rules was, like, don't leave a paper trail, he didn't leave a paper trail. That's not good for a biographer like you (laughter). So you had to find...

BIRD: Yeah. It was tough.

GROSS: Yeah, you had to find, like, alternate means. You had the FBI files that you were able to get after suing. You had, like, some notes from other people's work. Jeremy Strong, who played Roy Cohn in the movie "The Apprentice," which is about the relationship between Trump and Roy Cohn, he turned over his research to you. But you also found that Michael Stipe from REM, had an archive of Roy Cohn stuff that he bought at auction. What was in that that was of use for you in your biography?

BIRD: Yeah, that was a surprise. We had no idea the extent of what Stipe had. And so we reached out to him and eventually met him at a studio in Lower Manhattan. And he took us inside and put three boxes on a desk of what he called Roy Cohn memorabilia that he had picked up at an auction house. And we open the boxes, and there are 150 family photographs, childhood pictures, two copies of his last will and testament, a 220-page unpublished manuscript of his - of a memoir that he was trying to write.

And, you know, little things like a silver cigarette box engraved to Roy Cohn from Jean and Joe McCarthy. Anyway, you know, biographers go on a treasure hunt. And occasionally they find treasure. And you just have to keep relentlessly knocking on doors and talking to people. And this was particularly difficult because Roy, you know, burned all his papers. He destroyed everything, partly because he was not paying his taxes for 20 years. So there's no private archive.

GROSS: So one of the photos - and I can't remember whether this was in Michael Stipe's collection or you found it someplace else. But Robert Mapplethorpe, who started off doing, like, celebrity photos and then ended up doing a lot of very controversial photos of gay men, often, like, engaged in a sexual act. And this was this huge controversy because he had some funding from the NEA, the National Endowment for the Arts.

BIRD: Yes.

GROSS: And that was part of the whole controversy about federal funding for the arts and what should be allowed to be funded. But anyhow, so the Mapplethorpe photo of Roy Cohn, Roy Cohn was looking just kind of, like, angry and threatening in it, right?

BIRD: Oh, yeah. It's a frightening photo. It's an image of Roy looking straight into the camera with just his face. And you see nothing else of his body, no hands, nothing. And his face is sort of floating in a sea of blackness. He looks like Satan or something. But it's a powerful photo, a piece of art. And when I first saw that photo, I said, man, that's the cover. And I reached out to the Mapplethorpe Foundation.

But they very quickly decided that they could not license this photo because of the political nature of our book, and the fact that it might jeopardize their nontax profit status. And, you know, I was outraged. I thought this was a terrible decision, terrible reflection of Mapplethorpe, of all people, who was himself a victim of First Amendment controversies. And so I appealed and wrote a strong email suggesting this was like bending the knee in anticipation. Anyway, we lost. So we had to scramble and find another photographer who had taken a photo in 1981. And it's a fabulous photo, but it's not what I originally wanted.

GROSS: So because the Mapplethorpe photo showed an angry, mean expression on a close-up of Roy Cohn's face, it reminded me of a photo that Trump seems to really like of himself where he has a scowl on his face.

BIRD: Yes, that's his official White House portrait, the scowling Trump. And he takes it directly from Roy. Roy loved to be depicted by artists and photographers as sort of tough, mean and ugly. You know, he actually had a sense of humor about himself. He could be self-deprecating. So he once said to someone that he, you know, had a problem with all these photographers taking these images of himself that were unflattering, but then he walked by a mirror and he understood.

(LAUGHTER)

BIRD: Yeah, but, you know, this is the image that he wanted to project. He wanted to be fearsome. And I think Trump himself, routinely in his office in Trump Tower, he would point to a photo on the wall of Roy Cohn and said, you know - would you rather deal with him? - if he was in a tough negotiation. And the image is, you know, a scowling Trump.

GROSS: Because Roy Cohn was such a hypocrite when it came to homosexuality - because he was closeted but attacked gay people during the McCarthy era and ruined the lives of a lot of gay people as a result. Are you surprised that nobody ever publicly outed him as a hypocrite?

BIRD: Well, we write in one chapter at the tail end of the book about Richard Dupont, a gay man who became a business partner of Roy's and was, at one point, one of his lovers. But Richard Dupont had a business venture in Manhattan that Roy became a partner of. And they had a falling out. Roy sort of sold the property out from under Richard. And Richard Dupont went on a campaign of revenge.

And he specifically tried to publicly out him, publishing a magazine devoted with articles devoted to Roy Cohn, describing his private life with cartoons depicting Roy in sex acts. It was, you know, an outrageous public outing. He went to the sidewalk outside Roy Cohn's townhouse, and all up and down the sidewalk used white chalk to say, Roy Cohn is a [expletive].

So eventually - I mean, he harassed him. Roy would appear at airports about to get on a plane and suddenly be told by the airline that someone had called up and canceled his reservation. Well, Richard Dupont was doing this. And eventually, Roy complained to, of all people, Robert Morgenthau, the New York district attorney. And got...

GROSS: Who had prosecuted him in the past.

BIRD: Who had prosecuted him three times in the '60s. But Morgenthau looked at this case and said, yeah, this is a verifiable case of harassment. And, you know, he indicted Richard Dupont. There was a trial, and Dupont eventually spent, I think, 18 months in prison.

GROSS: And the press wouldn't pick up on the publication that Dupont did.

BIRD: That's right. The New York Times didn't report on it (laughter).

GROSS: So Roy Cohn managed to escape outing, too.

BIRD: He did.

GROSS: But in the afterlife, there was "Angels In America," which depicts him as closeted. And, you know, on the AIDS quilt, he's identified as bully, victim, coward.

BIRD: Yes.

GROSS: So it caught up with him, but he was already dead when it did.

BIRD: Yeah. No, this was sort of one of the curiosities that we had to explain in the book. You know, how could Roy operate in such a hypocritical fashion - being a heterosexual, powerful lawyer in the daytime, and then having this sex life in the gay world, owning gay bars and such at night. And everyone knew about it.

GROSS: You write that Roy Cohn's story is important because of what it teaches us about the fragile character of American democracy. What is the lesson you think his story teaches?

BIRD: Well, the lesson of Roy Cohn is that McCarthyism was not defeated. It didn't die. It wasn't an aberration in the 1950s. And I suddenly realized as an historian, that, you know, we Americans are a country of immigrants, a multicultural country, a country of civil liberties and the First Amendment. But every few decades, we go through a period of paranoia. So we had a red scare in the 1920s. We had another red scare, the McCarthyite witch hunts in the early '50s. And we're now going through another such period. And, you know, in the 1950s, there were several thousand civil servants who lost their jobs as a result of what Roy Cohn and Joe McCarthy did.

And today, it's become much worse. It's a much more serious assault on our democracy, a much more serious politics of vendetta. We're hunting down illegal immigrants and deporting them in large numbers. It's a very divisive time. And I think that explains the importance of Roy Cohn.

GROSS: Well, Kai Bird, thank you so much for talking with us.

BIRD: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

GROSS: Kai Bird's new biography of Roy Cohn is called "American Scoundrel." This is FRESH AIR.

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