Kai Bird

Kai Bird is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and biographer. His latest book is American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn's Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, co-authored with his wife, Susan Goldmark and published by Scribner/Simon & Schuster on September 1, 2026. Kai's last book was The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, published in 2021. He has also written a memoir about the Middle East entitled Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978 (Scribner, 2010). It was a 2011 Finalist in the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. He is the co-author with the late Martin J. Sherwin of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005), which also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and the Duff Cooper Prize for History in London. It was the inspiration for Christopher Nolan's 2023 Academy Award-winning feature, Oppenheimer. In 2014, he published The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (Crown/Random House). Bird's first biography was The Chairman: John J. McCloy, the Making of the American Establishment (1992), followed by The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy & William Bundy, Brothers in Arms (1998). He is also co-editor with Lawrence Lifschultz of Hiroshima's Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy (1998). He is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's writing fellowship, the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, the Rockefeller Foundation's Study Center, Bellagio, Italy and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC. He is a member of the Society of American Historians and a contributing editor of The Nation. Since 2017, he has been the Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at CUNY's Graduate Center in New York City.