[3] After graduating from Carleton, Bird received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, which enables students to do a year of independent study outside the United States.

Two years later, his wife Goldmark was also awarded a Watson Fellowship, and the two of them spent 15 months as freelance journalists traveling through Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan.

"We filed weekly stories with papers like the Christian Science Monitor and Hong Kong's Far Eastern Economic Review," Bird said.

Bird's biographical works include The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms (Touchstone, 1998); The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment (Random House, 1992); and Hiroshima's Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy (1998), which he co-edited with Lawrence Lifschultz.

It is a meld of memoir and history, fusing his early life in the Arab world with an account of the American experience in the Middle East.

Bird and co-author Martin J. Sherwin won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Knopf, 2005).