Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark arrive at the premiere of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in New York in July. Nolan’s Oscar-winning film Oppenheimer was based on Bird’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, 'American Prometheus.' The D.C. couple collaborated on a new biography published this month, 'American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump.' © Laurence Agron | Dreamstime.com

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Sometimes great partnerships start in unlikely places.

For Kai Bird and his wife, Susan Goldmark, it was their college cafeteria. Married three years later, the two traveled overseas, filing weekly stories from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan as a team.

In their ensuing 50-year marriage, their careers rarely aligned. Bird published eight books, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography about J. Robert Oppenheimer, while Goldmark worked in 75 countries for the World Bank.

Four years ago, however, they began collaborating on a new project. This month Bird and Goldmark published American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump. Bird wrote the book, while Goldmark was a “relentless” researcher and editor, as he puts it.

Last month, the couple, who have lived in Adams Morgan for decades, appeared on a panel together at the National Book Festival to talk about their new and potentially controversial book.

Citizens of the world

When they met as students at Carleton College in Minnesota in 1972, Bird thought Goldmark, in a tomato-stained apron, was adorable and witty, and she admired the worldly, “exotic” young Bird.

Bird was indeed cosmopolitan. His parents, despite their small-town Oregon upbringings, raised Bird and his three sisters in the Middle East. They named him after a charming Chinese refugee they met at the University of Oregon. (Kai-Yu Hsu became a biographer, as Bird did.)

Thanks to his father’s job at the U.S. State Department, Bird moved to Jerusalem when he was four years old. The family bounced from there to Cairo, Beirut and Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Bird graduated from a high school in India.

Consequently, college in America was a bit of a “shock,” he said. Bird didn’t know how to drive or use a payphone.

“I suddenly realized I was sort of a foreigner in my own country. I think that’s what motivated both my journalism and my career as a biographer,” he said.

At Carleton, Bird soon befriended anti-Vietnam War protesters and was arrested, along with 85 other students, for blocking the doors of a draft induction center in Minneapolis. He spent a day in prison and went to trial but graduated without a hitch with a degree in history. Goldmark majored in South Asian studies.

After college and the stint overseas, the couple settled in Washington, D.C. Bird landed an associate editor position at The Nation when he was just 27.

That’s where Bird met Martin J. Sherwin, his future co-author. Bird edited his 1981 cover story on Hiroshima. Years later, the two became friends when they penned an op-ed together criticizing the Smithsonian’s glossed-over exhibit of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb.

Fourteen years older than Bird, Sherwin was a charismatic history professor. The two writers kept in touch as Bird began publishing books, first on Wall Street lawyer John McCloy, then on McGeorge “Mac” Bundy, Vietnam War proponent.

“I was apparently good for nothing but biographies,” Bird once joked in an interview with his alma mater.

A modest proposal

Around the year 2000, Sherwin confessed to his younger friend that he had a dilemma: He had secured a book contract for a biography of Oppenheimer, but his manuscript was 20 years overdue. Drowning in research, he asked Bird to help him write the book.

At first, Bird turned him down, saying, “I like you too much” (Bird had lost a friend after a litigious book project). But after a few persuasive dinners, he agreed.

When their 784-page book, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, was published in 2005, reviewers praised its scholarship. The following year, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

Pulitzers don’t pay the bills, though. As Goldmark labored as country director at the World Bank, Bird wrote three more books: his 2010 memoir of his childhood in the Middle East, a 2014 biography of CIA officer Robert Ames, then a 2021 biography of Jimmy Carter.

They had a four-year assignment in Kathmandu for Goldmark’s job, where Bird wrote the memoir (at his wife’s urging), and their son attended high school.

“I got a chance to inflict on my teenage son what my parents had inflicted on me,” Bird said with a laugh.

Sudden fame

Their lives swerved in September 2021, when movie director Christopher Nolan called. He had read American Prometheus, feverishly wrote a screenplay, and wanted to turn it into a film.

Bird and Sherwin were thrilled. Sadly, Sherwin, 84, died just two weeks later, from nonsmokers’ lung cancer.

In the spring, Bird flew to the New Mexico movie set to watch the filming. When he met Cillian Murphy, the actor who played “Oppie,” Bird blurted out, “Dr. Oppenheimer, I’ve been waiting decades to meet you.”

Nolan arranged a private screening of the movie with just the two of them, and Bird was impressed.

“It was a Hollywood miracle. [Nolan] was very faithful to the story in the book, and when I saw the film for the first time, I could recognize paragraphs of dialogue that were straight out of the book,” Bird said.

The movie went on to win seven Academy Awards, including one for Best Picture and Best Actor. From the stage, Nolan said, “Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, thank you for the 25 years you put into the book that this film is based on.”

That’s when the book suddenly became a New York Times bestseller, remaining on the list for eight months.

“All this happened 18 years later. It was very delayed gratification, but it was fun,” Bird said.

The allure of a villain

Bird soon turned his eye to Roy Cohn, the lawyer who advised Donald Trump from 1973 until his AIDS-related death in 1986. Cohn, like a nefarious Forrest Gump, had made an appearance in nearly all Bird’s books, and Bird wanted to know more about the ruthless New York prosecutor who was chief counsel for Sen. Joseph McCarthy and worked for several Mafia families and Trump.

“His life story is colorful and emblematic and will explain our current political situation,” Bird said, adding,“The seeds of McCarthyism are still sprouting.”

Goldmark, by then retired, dug into the research. She pored through 10,000 pages of FBI files and unearthed articles from the New York Post, which she had often read during her childhood in Manhattan. The daughter of two Holocaust survivors from Austria, Goldmark admits to being naïve about how the city functioned behind the scenes.

“I was the child of immigrants, and they really thought America was an honest place in comparison to where they came from,” she said. “I had no idea that any of this was going on, so it was a big revelation to me that a lot of [New York officials] were connected to the Mob or involved in things that were not entirely proper … these stories were unbelievable.”

Goldmark also tracked down a man who said Cohn abused him when he was 16 years old.

“Sue managed to find him and get him to talk on the record,” Bird said.

Goldmark leaned into the research with a sense of deep curiosity, she said. “I am relentless. I would dig and dig and dig until I found the source.”

With Goldmark’s help, Bird finished the book in record time.

“She really helped to speed up the process. This is actually the fastest biography I’ve written — done in less than four years,” he said.

Bird and Goldmark spend their time in D.C. as well as their apartments in Miami Beach and New York City. At the City University of New York Bird is executive director of the singular Leon Levy Center for Biography, the genre he considers “the best form of history.”

Bird focuses on biography because he wants to make sense of the world, he said.

“I’ve used my biographies as a vehicle to try to explain, to myself, America and its journey through the 20th century.”
With previously unknown information, the new book is bound to generate controversy. But the couple, who share a sense of curiosity and adventure, will face it together.

Goldmark “always liked adventure,” she said, and as a child aspired to be a flight attendant just so she could travel.

“Luckily, by the time I was older, other opportunities opened up. I really wanted to experience the world and see the way other people lived. I was lucky that I was able to make that a reality.”

Kai Bird will appear at Politics & Prose, 5105 Connecticut Ave. NW, on Thurs., Sept. 10 at 7 p.m. to discuss the book.