Born in Cincinnati, OH, into a wealthy family (his father was a furniture manufacturer). While studying agriculture in college in 1943, Guggenheim was drafted into the Army. Upon discharge from the service, he decided against an agricultural career and moved to New York to pursue a career in broadcasting. He founded Charles Guggenheim and Associates, a film production company, he became interested in politics, and soon moved the company from New York to Washington, D.C., where he became a media adviser to many Democratic political figures. After Robert Kennedy's assassination, Guggenheim put together a tribute to him culled from the thousands of feet of film he had shot of Kennedy over the years. The resulting film, ROBERT KENNEDY REMEMBERED (1968), won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short. Although Guggenheim occasionally ventured into feature film production, he stayed mostly with documentaries, where he received his first Academy Award for 1964's NINE FROM LITTLE ROCK (1964), about the desegregation effort in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. He won two more Oscars® for documentary filmmaking, in 1989 and 1994. His last documentary, "Berga: Soldiers of Another War" (2003, TV), was about a group of 350 American soldiers captured by the Nazis during the Battle of the Bulge who, because they were Jewish or the Nazis thought they "looked Jewish", were sent to concentration camps instead of POW camps. (Guggenheim had been a member of the unit that was captured, but a severe illness caused him to be left behind when the unit was posted to the front lines so he was not with them when they were captured.) He finished the film just a few months before his death from pancreatic cancer in October of 2002. Father of producer-director Davis Guggenheim.  Nominated for Documentary (Short Subjects) 1956: A CITY DECIDES - Producer  Best Achievement in Documentary Short Subjects 1964: NINE FROM LITTLE ROCK - Producer  Nominated for Documentary (Short Subjects) 1967: MONUMENT TO THE DREAM - Producer  Documentary (Short Subjects) 1968: ROBERT KENNEDY REMEMBERED - Producer  Nominated for Documentary (Short Subjects) 1982: THE KLAN: A LEGACY OF HATE IN AMERICA - Producer (w. Werner Schumann)  Nominated for Documentary (Features) 1984: HIGH SCHOOLS - Producer (w. Nancy Sloss)  Best Achievement in Documentary Short Subjects 1989: THE JOHNSTOWN FLOOD - Producer  Nominated for Achievement in Documentary Features 1994: D-DAY REMEMBERED - Producer  Best Achievement in Documentary Short Subjects 1994: A TIME FOR JUSTICE - Producer  Nominated for Achievement in Documentary Short Subjects 1995: THE SHADOW OF HATE - Producer  Nominated for Achievement in Documentary Short Subjects 1998: A PLACE IN THE LAND - Producer 11 nominations, 4 Awards