If you could be guaranteed full access to all the research or materials needed who would you write a biography about?
It would not be an American President. If I had the source material and all the access I needed, I would write a biography of Muammar Qaddafi. There's never been a really great biography about Qaddafi covering his life from birth to death, and he was one of the most fascinating figures of the past 100 years. Most of the books I've read about Qaddafi were not only written while he was still alive and in power, but were written around the time President Reagan called him the "Mad Dog of the Middle East". The majority were published even before Qaddafi tried to make amends with the West (and started to be accepted in many Western capitals) and definitely don't include the civil war that exploded in Libya following the 2011 Arab Spring which led to his overthrow and brutal death at the hands of the Libyan opposition (and with the help of NATO). Qaddafi's story is pretty incredible -- from being born in the Libyan desert to a Bedouin tribe that was so unsophisticated that nobody even knew or recorded exactly when he was born to helping lead the revolution that overthrow Libya's king when Qaddafi was believed to be about 27 years old. And then he held on to power for over 40 years with a cult of personality that makes Donald Trump jealous as Qaddafi become more-and-more bizarre and openly sponsored terrorism.
By the 1980s, Qaddafi had basically become a real-life James Bond villain with his crazy clothes, his Amazonian guard of female bodyguards (officially called "Revolutionary Nuns"), and his preference for bringing desert tents with him on overseas trips so he could sleep in them instead of hotels or guest houses. Throughout his rule, Qaddafi antagonized scores of countries and their leaders through his sponsorship of terrorism, his flat-out weird ideas (here's a gift link to Qaddafi's 2009 New York Times opinion piece "solving" the Israel/Palestine issue with one country called "Israstine"), his outlandish uniforms, and the extraordinarily weird things he'd say. At one Arab League summit, he openly feuded with Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, who had enough and snapped at him publicly. Qaddafi idolized Gamal Abdel Nasser and wanted to unify all Arab nations and become the "King of Kings". When that failed because most Arab leaders thought he was nuts and couldn't stand him, Qaddafi turned to Africa with the hopes of becoming the leader of a "United States of Africa". Just imagine all of these stories (and more craziness) being told in-depth and you can see why we need a definitive Qaddafi biography. It would be like reading a book about a real-life Dr. Evil mixed with Sacha Baron Cohen's lead character from "The Dictator" (whose clothes in the film were almost as eccentric as Qaddafi's actual clothing).
I also would really like to see an up-to-date, definitive biography of Fidel Castro, who I would actually list among the Top 5 most interesting people since World War II. There are plenty of books about Castro -- especially books published in the 1980s and 1990s -- but there hasn't really been a complete biography featuring updated research since his death in 2016. I'm surprised that we haven't seen many in-depth, cradle-to-grave biographies of Fidel because he was clearly one of the most important and remarkable leaders of the 20th Century. I think the Cuban Revolution is one of the more overlooked historical events of the past few centuries. It's pretty astonishing what a ragtag group of rebels led by Castro and hiding in the Sierra Maestra were able to accomplish. I've always been hopeful that Jon Lee Anderson, who published his incredible biography Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) in 1998, would take on the challenge of writing a definitive biography on Fidel because of his knowledge of and connections with Cuba. There's undoubtedly a need for updated, in-depth biographies about both Qaddafi and Fidel and probably a lot more sources of research available since the deaths of both men.
