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AEU All-Societies Platform with Kai Bird
The American Ethical Union All-Societies Platform
American Scoundrel
Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump
Sunday August 30, 2026 11 a.m.
The New York Society For Ethical Culture
2 West 64th Street, NY NY
The AEU All-Societies Platform is free to attend.
All virtual participants must register to receive the Zoom link.
Kai Bird, the Pulitzer Prize–winning coauthor of American Prometheus, inspiration for the Oscar-winning sensation Oppenheimer, will sit down with Society Leader Dr. Richard Koral to talk about his new book, American Scoundrel, a biography of Roy Cohn — one of the most corrosive influences on the arc of American political life, from his role as Chief Counsel to Joe McCarthy during the witch-hunts and blacklists of the Second Red Scare and Lavender Scare, to his close mentorship of Donald Trump in the 1970s and 1980s.
Praise for American Scoundrel
“POWERFUL AND ILLUMINATING…Roy Cohn is emblematic of dark and perennial forces in our national life…Bird has delivered a vital volume.”
—Jon Meacham, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels
“THE DEFINITIVE BOOK ON ROY COHN…Cohn’s influence on our time is incalculable and we are living in the long shadow of his legacy…American Scoundrel is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand Donald Trump’s America.”
—Jeremy Strong, Emmy, Golden Globe, and Tony-winning actor, and Academy Award nominee for his portrayal of Roy Cohn in The Apprentice
“A must-read for anyone who wants to understand not just the dark role played by Roy Cohn in twentieth-century American politics, but the man’s lasting influence into this century—as the mentor to and model for Donald Trump…There is, it turns out, a direct line from the malign influence of McCarthyism to that of Trumpism, and Roy Cohn is it.”
—Susan Glasser, staff writer for The New Yorker and bestselling coauthor of The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017–2021
About Kai Bird
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.
