About the Author
James D. Robenalt, City Club of Cleveland, July 20, 2018
It all started when…
I wrote my first book in 2004 about my great-grandfather, William W. Durbin, pictured here in 1933 being sworn-in as Register of the United States Treasury. Future Secretary of State Dean Acheson, stands to the far left as witness to the ceremony.
Here is the book...
Oh, yes, I forgot to say that when he was sworn-in as the official in charge of the national debt, he was also the president of the International Brotherhood of Magicians. This cartoon from the Washington Post in 1933.
Then I met this guy, John W. Dean. He came to Cleveland in 2004 to help me with a seminar on Ohio presidents. Dean wrote a biography of Warren Harding for Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
While John Dean was in Cleveland, we were shown a bootleg copy of a microfilm that contained 900 pages of love letters from Harding to Carrie Phillips, pictured lower left.
Here is the book that followed. Published by Palgrave/Macmillan in 2009.
And I suppose I should mention that my FOIA request produced a Bureau of Investigation file that showed that Carrie Phillips was suspected of being a German spy during the First World War. Harding was then in the Senate, facing the decision of whether to enter the war against Germany and her allies.
Then John Dean and I started lecturing nationally about Watergate and legal ethics, starting in 2011. We have done over 150 programs across the U.S. to talk about his role as White House Counsel to a very difficult client. See Watergate CLE website here
Which led to this book in 2015. Here is the website for January 1973
Which brings me to July 2018 and publication of Ballots and Bullets, Black Power Politics and Urban Guerrilla Warfare in 1968 Cleveland. Above a photo of Fred "Ahmed" Evans on death row (tall, middle of photo, sunglasses). The Imam who performed Islamic services for prisoners, Mutawaf Shaheed, in white turtleneck next to Evans, became one of my main sources for information on the black nationalist movement in Cleveland in 1968.
