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Who Is That With Roy Cohn?

Mon, 11/24/2025 - 13:02
At the Sea Spray Inn in 1959, Roy Cohn is unmistakably at right, but a biographer needs to know who the other men are.
Marcus Family Photo

Kai Bird, co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “American Prometheus,” a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, is now at work on a biography of Roy Cohn, the legendarily hard-knuckled, Bronx-born attorney who counseled Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare and later befriended and mentored Donald Trump.

And he needs photo help.

Word has reached The Star that this book, to be published by Scribner next year, is set partly in East Hampton. In the photo above, taken in July of 1959 on the dining porch of the old Sea Spray Inn, Roy Cohn, second from right, is seated with his mother, Dora Cohn, far left, and, next to him, Libby Marcus, his aunt, who spent summers in East Hampton.

But who are the two men? Anyone who can identify one or both of them has been asked to email Susan Goldmark, Mr. Bird’s wife, at [email protected].

Mr. Bird is executive director and distinguished lecturer at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

 

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