(Bird, Kai) Kai Bird is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist. His work includes critical writings on the Vietnam War, Hiroshima, Nuclear weapons, the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the CIA. Bird is the acclaimed author of biographies of John J. McCloy, McGeorge Bundy, and William Bundy. He won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2006 for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (co-authored with Martin J. Sherwin). His most recent book, The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, was a New York Times best-seller. He chronicled his childhood in the Middle East in his memoir, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis—which was a Finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In January 2017, he was appointed Executive Director and Distinguished Lecturer of CUNY Graduate Center’s Leon Levy Center for Biography. He is currently writing a biography of President Jimmy Carter’s White House years, under contract to Crown books (Random House).
