American biographer and columnist Kai Bird is well-known for co-authoring American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer that formed the basis of Oppenheimer, the 2023 film that got 13 Oscar nominations and won five Golden Globe Awards. His other works include The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment (1992), The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms (1998) and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (2014). On the sidelines of the 2024 Jaipur Literature Festival, Kai Bird shares with Sucheta Dasgupta his opinions on writing biographies and the state of journalism.
What was your first thought after you won the Pulitzer?
It’s a terrific thing to win the Pulitzer and it is the only award in America that actually helps to sell books. The funny thing about this is, a few months before the award was announced in 2006, I told my late co-author, Martin J. Sherwin that we might win it. I said, you know, Marty, we have written a very good book, it has got some terrific reviews and I think we might be a candidate for the Pulitzer. And he scoffed at this and was very sceptical. Oh, you are such an optimist, he said to me. Well, many of these awards are very subjective. There are many good biographies every year and the judges are always making their personal choices. So we were ecstatic, very pleased, when the book was awarded. Actually, after I got the phone call, I was a little stunned but I immediately knew that I had to call my wife and tell her, but when I did she thought I was joking. So she hung up the phone and went on the Internet to see if it was true, whether I had indeed won the prize.
How did journalism happen to you?
When I finished high school and went off to college, I thought I might want to be a lawyer. This was in Minnesota. One year I had a chance to come back to India where I had gone to high school. I went to high school in Kodaikanal in Tamil Nadu. This was late 1971 and war had just started between Pakistan and India over Bangladesh. So I arrived on the last day of the war and I had got permission from my college to do an independent study about the Bangladesh war. I tagged along with a CBS TV group that was going into Bangladesh from Calcutta. It was very exciting. I was in Calcutta the day Mujibur Rahman got up on the stage and in front of a million people gave his first speech after getting out of prison in Pakistan. And then we went to Dacca and I was actually hired for one week to replace the bureau chief of United Press International to cover Dacca, and I wrote my first story and put it across the wire with a byline. I was 20 years old. That seduced me into journalism.
What was the trigger behind writing American Prometheus?
Well, you know Oppenheimer is a big subject and an obvious figure for a biography. He had died in 1967. There had been a few small books that had come out earlier but nothing substantial. My friend, Martin Sherwin, signed a contract in 1980 to do a biography on J. Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atomic bomb”. He spent the next 20 years researching but he didn’t start to write. In 2000, he came to me. By then I had written two biographies and was looking around for a new project. It turned into a great collaboration. Martin had gathered 50,000 pages of documents and interviewed 150 people. I didn’t have to do very much. I started writing the first chapter on the childhood and we wrote back and forth. We both were obsessed with doing the story.
Between writing a biography and writing a memoir — and you have written Crossing Mandelbaum Gate which is your own memoir about your childhood and growing up in the Middle East — what are the differences you encounter as a writer?
A memoir is often based on memory while a biography is based on documents, diaries, letters and newspaper articles. That is a critical difference. A good memoir, I would argue as a biographer, should also access letters and documents, and in my memoir I was able to access the letters written by my mother. She wrote home typed letters every week and kept the carbon copies filed away in folders year by year. In those letters, she describes her life in Jerusalem, Beirut and Saudi Arabia, and I could quote from those to give my writing more authenticity. A good memoir is useful for future biographers.
What are the discoveries that you and your co-author made in the course of writing American Prometheus?
We discovered that Oppenheimer was a very complicated, elusive figure, filled with many mysteries in his life. There is a mystery about his politics, whether he was just close to the Communist Party or whether he was a member of the party. Was he just pink or was he actually red? And we just show the reader the evidence. Most of the evidence suggests that he was just pink.
What are your comments on the state of journalism today?
Well, it is in peril. It is a difficult business. It is very expensive. We are in the midst of a new technology where everything is going digital, but how do you get the readers to pay? Now newspapers, particularly in America, are dying off. Of those surviving, the business model is shaky. The Wall Street Journal, the other day, dismissed 30 veteran reporters. But newspapers are important because the voter needs information and he cannot depend on Facebook for it. In Facebook, there are no footnotes. There is no editor.
What is going to be your next project?
For about a year, I have been working on the biography of a man named Roy Cohn. Roy Cohn lived from 1927 to 1986 and he was the chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy. I write about him a little bit in the Oppenheimer book because he was trying to force Oppenheimer to testify before McCarthy’s committee. He was responsible for much of the witchhunt McCarthy is infamous for, and then he became lawyer to all five mob families in New York City. In 1973, he met a young real estate developer named Donald Trump. He became his lawyer and taught Trump how to always countersue, how not to pay your bills and taxes, how to manipulate the press — he made Donald Trump. Therein is my motivation.
