"If we are going to achieve freedom we’ve got to engage in action programs to make that freedom possible. Let nobody fool you about this. Freedom is never voluntarily given to the oppressed by the oppressor." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
Jim Robenalt is an author, historian, and attorney. He's a partner in Thompson Hine's Business Litigation practice group and has been named as one of America's Leading Lawyers in the Chambers USA Guide to America's Leading Business Lawyers. Jim has consistently been listed in The Best Lawyers in America® and has been selected for inclusion in Ohio Super Lawyers® through a process that includes independent research, peer nominations and peer evaluations. Jim has partnered with John Dean, Nixon's White House Counsel, to create a national continuing education program entitled "The Watergate CLE."
Select Publications by Jim Robenalt
Resources Mentioned In This Episode
A Quote to Ponder
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Connect with Scott Allen
"If we are going to achieve freedom we’ve got to engage in action programs to make that freedom possible. Let nobody fool you about this. Freedom is never voluntarily given to the oppressed by the oppressor." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
Jim Robenalt is an author, historian, and attorney. He's a partner in Thompson Hine's Business Litigation practice group and has been named as one of America's Leading Lawyers in the Chambers USA Guide to America's Leading Business Lawyers. Jim has consistently been listed in The Best Lawyers in America® and has been selected for inclusion in Ohio Super Lawyers® through a process that includes independent research, peer nominations and peer evaluations. Jim has partnered with John Dean, Nixon's White House Counsel, to create a national continuing education program entitled "The Watergate CLE."
Select Publications by Jim Robenalt
Resources Mentioned In This Episode
A Quote to Ponder
Did You Enjoy Phronesis?
Connect with Scott Allen
Note: Voice to text transcriptions are about 90% accurate.
Scott Allen 0:00
My guest today is Jim Robenalt. And Jim is an attorney. He is in the city of Cleveland, here on the north coast. I think I think that's what we'll call ourselves the north coast, right of Ohio, in in Cleveland. And Jim has done some really pretty incredible work. And we're going to explore that work today. And I'm looking forward to this conversation. Because the topic of this podcast, practical wisdom for leaders, I think, Jim is going to share some really important practical wisdom for all of us to consider. And I said to him, just before we started, I want to, I want you to tease our listeners enough so that they're interested in this topic, they want to learn more, and not give it all away, but mine some of the key learnings that he's had as he's done this research. So Jim is the author of a book called ballots and bullets. And the setting is Cleveland, Ohio in a very specific way. But the setting is also the late 1960s. United States of America, and what we were experiencing as a nation, not unlike some of what we have experienced in recent times. Jim, would you introduce yourself a little bit, and then maybe we can jump in?
Jim Robenalt 1:20
Yeah, Scott, thanks. Well, I'm a lawyer in Cleveland, I live in Shaker Heights. And I have written four books. I started writing books about 20 years ago, what kind of things just came to me and, and I can talk about how ballots and bullets came to me, but my books have principally been on the presidency and in US history. So writing is an application of my my profession as being a lawyer. And I've had a nice career as a lawyer, but I enjoy writing. And I enjoy doing op eds for The Washington Post and elsewhere. And the other thing I do love significance is that I lecture with john Dean, who is Richard Nixon's, former White House Counsel. And we we've gone around the country, before the pandemic, we went to probably 150 different places to do programs for lawyers on ethics, which became very important in the last year on when we got to impeachment and that sort of thing. So it's been a, it's been a varied career, a lot of different things. But I'm principally an author, a lawyer and a lecturer. Well,
Scott Allen 2:35
let's talk about this book ballots and bullets, tell me about the Tell me about the title. And then maybe you can share some stories that will help us better understand what's happening.
Jim Robenalt 2:52
bouncing balls is named after a Malcolm X speech that he gave in Cleveland in 1964. And it was really Malcolm X, leaving the Nation of Islam movie out on his own. There's a movie done right now about Malcolm X and Cassius Clay, soon to become Mohammed Ali, and others went, and that's this period of time, in 64, when Malcolm X was leaving the Nation of Islam, moving out on his own and becoming more interested in getting involved in politics. When he was with the Nation of Islam, they, their idea was that dealing with whites was like dealing with devil, so you didn't deal with them. So you did not vote, you did not get involved in politics. And so now he wants to, that's why he named this speech, the ballot or the bullet after, you know, vote, or revolution. And, you know, for him, it just was a phrase that kept occurring to him as he was thinking about what he was doing in his transition. And it's really a liberty or death, you know, we're either going to get this right through the ballot, or it's going to be revolution and black revolution in particular. He gave that speech for the first time at a church here in Cleveland in 1964, the same church where a year earlier, Martin Luther King, Dr. King came to Cleveland, from Birmingham, Alabama, during that great time when he was protesting down there and was put in jail and wrote his very famous letter from Birmingham Jail, he came to Cleveland to raise bail money, and spoke at this exact same church, on the east side of Cleveland. So it's a very historic church, but the boundary of the boat is really about the black freedom movement and how its trajectory came through Cleveland in particular, and what happened to it and you know, how it all worked out and what what influence it had on our history and
Scott Allen 4:49
How is Cleveland a central character in this whole narrative?
Jim Robenalt 4:52
Cleveland is kind of emblematic for the country in general and what happened in Cleveland, in microcosm happened in the country at the same time. So during this time in Cleveland, like many northern cities had experienced a great series of great migrations from the south, where African Americans left the South in large numbers principally during and after the two wars. And they moved north to get away from Jim Crow, but also because of jobs and war industries and that sort of thing. So Cleveland was very much like that, and what the problem was, that so many African Americans came to town, that they were essentially crowded into ghettos on the east side of Cleveland, as in Chicago, as in Detroit, as in Newark, as in watts. And the reason was that African Americans coming to a northern city, although they thought it would be a better life, actually found out they couldn't move into white neighborhoods, because of redlining, because of mortgage stuff and other things. And that, you know, instead, they were limited to small areas that quickly became very overcrowded, bad schools, bad housing, very poor jobs, or low paying jobs. And eventually, these these neighborhoods became flashpoints for violence, and for drugs, and prostitution, and all the things that go along with poverty. And the police were used by the city to try to control things. And so the police became very repressive, and a lot of police violence against African Americans. And eventually, it all broke out into riding rebellions and so forth in the late 60s. That's exactly what happened here.
Scott Allen 6:46
Well, and I know through the process, you interviewed and worked with some of the individuals who were involved in this era, correct?
Jim Robenalt 6:54
Yeah, there were, there are a number of older African American men who were young black nationalists back in 1968, who I've become good friends with, and have shared a lot with them. And one guy in particular, who became an Imam. And by the way, that was a very common thing for African Americans at the time to leave the Christian church and move and become and move to Islam, because they felt the Christian church had to let them down, and what's the church of slavery and so forth. And so to them, the freedom of religion was to become Muslim. Exactly what Malcolm X. But you know, they all have names like mu tawaf, Shaheed, who's this Imam that I know very well. And these guys, to my surprise, a welcome me when I was researching this book, had me to their mosque, and sat down with me and then shared an enormous amount of information about what had happened, how it happened, who the characters were, and so forth. So I was really helped by them in the process of writing this book.
Scott Allen 8:03
Are there are there stories that you could share that stood out?
Jim Robenalt 8:05
Yeah, I think the main story that comes out in this book is the the guy who became the mayor of Cleveland in 1967. His name was Carl Stokes, it's a name if you're in Cleveland, you know very well, there are a dozen buildings named after the Stokes brothers, Carl was the mayor and his brother Lou was the 15th term Congress, Congress person from from this area, and caught the story of the election in 1967. Carl Stokes is really critical to this, this whole thing, because he was the Barack Obama of his day, he was young, charismatic, he was a lawyer by training. Very good speaker. And he rose during the time that this trouble was happening in the in the urban areas, principally because the the white leadership, the business leadership in Cleveland, wanted to find a way to get away from the violence and they thought if they helped elect an African American mayor, that things would change. And so he's that guy, he is the Barack Obama, he breaks the ceiling. And he's the first African American mayor of a major US city. And this is what blacks including Dr. King saw at the time, which was they were going to convert the civil rights movement and getting the right to vote, you know, john lewis, and so forth, to now black power and use political power to change things. And what we found out back then, is the same lesson we're learning today, which is a change like that, which is revolutionary and provokes a huge backlash. And it happened back then. And so that became began the backlash that becomes the Nixon counter revolution, you know, cycle through to the Trump revolt today. It's all based on race. But the point for leadership is that it takes enormous courage to make these changes, and then you suffer a series of setbacks. And the only thing you can do is keep moving and keep pushing, knowing that you're going to fight these forces, even though at the time of your victory, brock obama becoming president, we've gotten beyond race. Here, we are more deeply involved in racial prejudice and problems than ever before. You have to understand as a leader, that when you are that courageous, and you lead like that, you're going to face enormous counterpressure. And the point of leadership is, keep going, keep pushing in, we're kind of seeing that today, even with you know, Biden's election, and hopefully the change in the senate here, too.
Scott Allen 10:47
You just said something really beautiful, Jim, the point of leadership is keep going to the point of leader. So tell me some stories about and I know this might not be the focus of the book, but what was some of the backlash that Stokes experienced in his first term?
Jim Robenalt 11:04
Well, it's interesting that that whole concept of keep going, if you are the people listening to this podcast, want to listen to one of Martin Luther King's greatest speeches, I think, you know, obviously, I noticed I Have a Dream speech from the March on Washington. The speech that he gave here in Cleveland, when he came here to support Stokes running for mayor was given in April, it's like April 26 1967. So it's a year before he's killed. And he goes to see the students at Glendale High School. And that speech, fortunately for us, was recorded, and it was only discovered like five or six years ago, and the recording is beautiful. It's online, you go to YouTube, just put in Martin Luther King and glennville. But that speech, he's giving to these young students, many of whom were in the huff rebellion two years earlier. And he is essentially saying, look, you that this, this struggle has been long and hard. We were here before the pilgrims were here. We were here before thomas jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. We were here before, you know, the Civil War. And his point is keep going. And the way he wrapped it up is quite beautiful. Because he quotes a poet who is a very famous African American poet, Langston Hughes, who incidentally, went to high school in Cleveland. And then he went to Harlem became a very well known Harlem Renaissance poet. He's got a poem called mother to son. And at the end of this speech, Dr. King is saying that these young students, get involved in politics help like this mayor. And you know, if you can, if you can't fly, run, if you can't run, walk, you can't walk, crawl, but whatever you do, keep going. And he quotes the mother to son poem to wrap it up, which is equally beautiful. Probably one of Langston Hughes, his most well known mother to son, it's the mother speaking to the son saying, son, you know, life for me ain't been no crystal staircase. I've gone up this stair, it's got tax in it boards, I go into the dark, you know, where nobody's even been in. But I kept going, and I kept going, and Son, you know, you got to keep going to so that that was King's message. He, again, he also suffers the slings, the arrows, and eventually, you know, the bullet that that takes his life for his for his courage and leadership. But what he understood was this concept that you are going to face enormous challenges. If you're a courageous leader in you got to keep going. And you know, this, this, this came to fruition in Cleveland. And I can tell that story in a minute, but about why how that happened. But Stokes gets elected in 67. It's a day of jubilation. Martin Luther King Is Here in Cleveland Stokes doesn't haven't come down for the celebration because he's trying to consolidate his his base. And that base includes a small amount of sliver of white voters and he doesn't want to alienate people. King is seen as a very troublesome figure at the time, although Stokes liked him and admired him and appreciate it, what are you done? You go back and look at the film, Kings here in Cleveland, and he's not standing next to him at that victory party. So King is not happy about it, but understands leaves town, and five months later, he's assassinated in Memphis. And that begins a spiral of problems. In this story, like the American story, violence begets violence, and it's a cycle and it's a vicious cycle, and it's race based violence. So King is assassinated and all of a sudden, the black nationalists here in Cleveland become more radicalized by the By what had happened, and they begin to arm themselves. At the same time, Stokes is trying to address the issues, the underlying issues that caused the violence, which is poverty, joblessness, you know, poor housing, poor education. And he creates a fund. The Treasury is kind of a small fund idea, but it's to get money to Glenville and have those two neighborhoods and Cleveland impacted all of these things, housing, healthcare, etc. And he calls it Cleveland. Now, the reason he calls it Cleveland now is that it's an honor of Dr. King, Dr. King in the south had a slogan when needed Selma and Birmingham freedom now. So this is Cleveland now. And what Stokes does is it creates this idea, and then the federal government picks up on it as a part of LBJ his war on poverty in the Great Society. Within a month, that's a billion dollar program over 10 years to spend all these things in Cleveland, a billion dollars with a B in 1968.
Huge And so again, everything's going in the right direction. But guess what those nationalists who are now totally alienated because of King's assassination, use money from Cleveland now that they were getting for a summer program to buy weapons, and to buy stuff to start a war with the police. And they This is a political war. They are not it's that turf. And it's not anything else, or the political war, a statement that they're going to take on the police in, they buy guns and rifles. And after the shootout, which happens in July of 1968. They find out very quickly that Cleveland now funds have been used, unbeknownst to anybody in Cleveland now, to do this, and that's the end of Cleveland now. So the violence ends the very program that's trying to address the violence nationally, and these riots across the nation in various cities and really ends LBJ is war on poverty in the Great Society and brings in the next encounter revolution. And that is where we go from the war on poverty, to mass incarceration and the war on drugs. And we've been in that cycle for the last 50 years,
Scott Allen 17:22
I read a very powerful, you may have seen at Harvard Business Review case, that that speaks to the African American experience in the United States. Very powerful document. And then the summer watched for the first time I had not seen it the film 13th, which explores a lot of the the history that I was, I was unaware of, in many, many ways. And how do we get out of that of this phase? You said 50, you said 50 years? Maybe the answer is just keep going?
Jim Robenalt 18:00
what the answer is keep going. But you do have to finally tee it up and do some of the right things that people were trying to do 50 years ago. So there's a real interesting connect between then and now. And what do we really go I wrote a piece for The Daily Beast two weeks ago on this in 1968, as a part of what was going on, you know, Martin Luther King was killed Bobby Kennedy then is killed. In Hubert Humphrey, the Vice President, becomes the guy who's going to get the nomination in August in that wild convention, where the you know, Mayor Daley beats up all the protesters. But prior to that, in July, he, Hubert Humphrey comes to Cleveland, so he's the Vice President, and he's known for civil rights. He was former Minneapolis mayor, and then Minnesota senator. He comes to Cleveland, because he likes Carl Stokes, he likes what he's doing with Cleveland. Now. He comes to Cleveland, he says, Look, if I'm elected president, this is what I'm going to do to address these urban problems that we have right now. I think we need a Marshall Plan for our cities. So the Marshall Plan was very much in everybody's mind, then. It was the effort by Truman after the Second World War to rebuild Europe that had been just destroyed by the war. And the United States put a bunch of money in. He was named after George Marshall, who was the secretary of state in a former general for Truman. And you know, so that really got Europe back up on its feet again, and Humphrey said, I want to do a Marshall Plan, and I want it to be like Cleveland now. He literally says, This is the model. You know, we need to get better housing, better education. We need to do a lot of different things, but it's really about investing money in defeating poverty. Because to defeat racism, you have to defend Poverty. I mean, it's just the two sides of one coin. And, and so he calls for that. And then the shootout happens literally 20 days later in Cleveland, where he had just done that. And Nixon goes to the convention to accept the nomination in Miami Beach two weeks after that. And he says, We live in a dark time police are being killed. And we hear sirens in the streets, I have a lot in order to candidates. It is the exact duplicate of what Donald Trump did here in Cleveland in 2016. And Donald Trump said he was his campaign manager said he was mimicking Nixon. But the whole point was, you have to spend a lot of money to address these issues of poverty and racism all at the same time. So Nixon comes in, and he takes the Office of Economic Opportunity, which was the engine of the break society's war on poverty. And he puts Donald Rumsfeld in charge of it, literally. And he kills it. And he puts him in charge to kill it. So you go from Sergeant Shriver, a Kennedy person is the head of that to Donald Rumsfeld. Do you know what's going to happen? It ends. And that ends the commitment to the war on poverty in this, you know, this, this great investment that's needed. Okay, so fast forward 50 years, the person who was just nominated by Joe Biden to become the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, is our Congresswoman Marcia Fudge from here. And by the way, she stands on the shoulders of the Stokes, she's in the seat that was that Lou Stokes held for 15 terms. So Marsha has been named this critical position of Housing and Urban Development. And guess what? It's time for another call for a Marshall Plan for our urban areas. And guess what? I'm not the one who did it. Eight mayor's a month ago, wrote an op ed in the Washington Post saying, we need to have a Marshall Plan for our cities. I don't they didn't mention it. I don't think they knew that. Have we done that in Cleveland 50 years ago, but that's the point. The point is, spend that money, create opportunities, create jobs, create, you know, good health, you know, all the things that are needed. Because, man, if you go down and walk the streets of toughen up Lambo, which I've done, you know, it's like a third world in some places there. And we are the poorest city in America. And then we were on the verge 50 years ago. Imagine if a billion dollars have been spent on the east side of Cleveland. Imagine. So I think that there is a direct connect between then and now. And I wrote about that when I wrote about the article that was in the Daily Beast, that, you know, it's gonna be interesting to see how Marcia Fudge handles her job. But she's got a real opportunity, given that she comes from Cleveland, and you know, it can be a model, again, to try to work some of these issues out.
Scott Allen 23:05
Well, and what's interesting, Jim, is we talked a little bit about this before we got we got on before we started recording. But you had mentioned you know, poverty, joblessness, education, these all lead to violence, and a larger percentage that that middle class, I've said this before in this podcast, I'm not sure how America works without a strong middle class.
Jim Robenalt 23:32
Well, I think I think it's a matter of priorities, you got to change your priorities. It matters where you spend your money, and it matters what your priorities are. If your priorities are that you're going to lower the tax rates on the super wealthy who do not need it. And and they're thereby deprive cities and other areas of the benefits that they need and deserve. So you start with the tax, you know, what you're doing, you should be taxing the very high level very wealthy people at a rate commensurate, actually with what, you know, the middle class is being taxed. You know, you think about these companies like Amazon paying no taxes, it's absurd. And so, you start with that, I mean, you've got to get the revenue corrected, but where it's coming from and you know, get the revenue, and not just give it away to people who make, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars, while other people have to have two jobs to make a living wage even, not even then they're still on food stamps. So get that right. Then, straight now your priorities. You've got a lot of money to spend at the federal level. And as I as I was saying to you, we spend just gobs of money on defense for high You know, level, things like submarines, and bunker bought billion dollar bombs, and we just spend and waste a lot of money on defense. Frankly, back in the 60s, that was one of the things Bobby Kennedy talked about, you know, stop spending all this money, we've got nuclear weapons, who's going to screw with us, you don't really do. And when you have those armies, and you have those weapons, you get, you get stupid about what you do, and you go around and start starting wars that are ridiculous, which we've seen in the last two decades. So you know, stop spending the money, so much on defense, you still need to spend money on defense, but it really can be slashed considerably and start spending money on things like, think about, like the New Deal. When FDR came in, he created a conservation corps he created, you know, agriculture groups, he created stuff, Public Works, you know, some of the public works in Cleveland are from that era. But create these things. And today we have those needs, we have the need for a national health service. I mean, it's a critical need. And it's probably going to be an ongoing need to help us combat you know, any future pandemic problems. But just even to get through this one, we need to spend a lot of money, there's a lot of good jobs, you could create, doing that. We also, you know, we need to spend the money, as we've said, on the urban areas, and we need to spend money on infrastructure. And we really need to spend money on creating a green world and a green economy, we really need to spend that money that creates jobs, those are, that's how you create good jobs for people in the middle. If you're just sensible about what you're doing, and not wasteful, and don't give all the money to the people at the very top and, and, you know, leave everybody at the bottom to fend for themselves. There's just a lot we can do. But it's all about priorities and figuring out what you're going to spend where you're going to spend it. And, you know, this economy is already booming in a lot of ways. And we I think this would be the way to help bolster that middle class that you're talking about?
Scott Allen
A lot of opportunity, a lot of opportunity.
Jim Robenalt
Yeah, it's just a matter of priorities, which is why this question whether the Senate is going to, you know, turn democratic is really important. Because there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done very quickly. Mainly, we need to defeat this pandemic. And you know, that just needs to be done. We've been screwing around with it for a year, and it's gotten out of control, we really need to go to war against that virus and get people vaccinated. But then the other stuff needs to come online, too. You need to get money to people, you need to start supporting, you know, these great infrastructure bills, and, you know, creating incentives for people to to go into wind, solar, and all sorts of other power. There's just there's a lot to be done. But you can't do it if you've got this divided government that we've had for the past, since 2010. And ever since mitch mcconnell became the majority leader. You know, we've just had this divided government, which is done very little.
Scott Allen 28:14
We are stuck with other other countries in the world. You know, China just started in their high schools courses on artificial intelligence, which will be the nuclear weapons of the coming decades is the technology.
Jim Robenalt 28:30
Yeah. Right.
Scott Allen 28:32
Anything else, Jim, that stands out for you a lesson from the past that we need to be very present with. I mean, this is just fascinating. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. Anything else stand up for you?
Jim Robenalt 28:45
Yeah. Well, I think that, you know, I think that leadership is an interesting thing, because it's a combination of charisma and, you know, leader having a charismatic quality to them. We've never had any great leaders that weren't charismatic. And nuts and bolts, you know, practical stuff, being able to understand how you get things done. Joe Biden is is less on the charismatic, more on the nuts and bolts with which, frankly, we're going to need a lot of right now. But I think as people look over the horizon, they need to look to see, you know, where's that next charismatic leader from? Who is not, you know, an evil, charismatic leader. And I think that, you know, that's if you look back over the history that I've written, FDR, clearly was a charismatic leader who understood and had vision and understood how government worked and you know, got us through not only the Great Depression, but the great, greatest war in America, in world history. But it took the nuts and bolts people to get him elected. And so I think leadership is about conquering both of those things. finding somebody who fits both of those categories of visionary, charismatic leadership. But you got to be careful because Donald Trump is extremely charismatic. And whatever you say about him, he's got his vision about what he thinks things should be. And that's what people are drawn to. And you gotta be careful about, you know, charismatic leaders, but you still need to have them eventually, Joe Biden has a bit of that, in part because of his own personal struggles. And now he's so super empathetic. But he doesn't have as much of it, for example, as Trump did, I mean, Trump just was off the charts and charisma, like, john F. Kennedy was off the charts charisma brought around Reagan, it's important to look for those qualities in the leader, but you got to make sure they're not demagogues, and that's the, that's the line that needs to be drawn by people who understand and are educated and think about it and read history and understand history now, where the great leaders came from and where the dangers were.
Scott Allen 30:59
Well, it's that that charisma rooted in character, right? I mean, no human is perfect. But the the podcast I just released this week, it was with a gentleman named Ron ratio, and he wrote a book called daily leadership development. And really one of the first lines in the book, it basically says leadership is about character, that if that core isn't there, it's it can go to some pretty fascinating places. And again, we can look to world history to to kind of observe people who may have been effective. But were they good? and what wasn't rooted in character? Or was it narcissistic? was it? Was it self serving? Or was it in service to? Right?
Jim Robenalt 31:49
Yep, yeah, there's another there's another piece that I wrote for a place called history News Network, which I've written a lot for. And I wrote this before Biden, when Biden was struggling, actually, there was an article that came about how he was a stutter, which I didn't know I had never heard about it was in the Atlantic, I don't know if you read it or not, is a great article, you know, what Joe Biden can't bring himself to say, I think was the name of it. But he always downplayed it. That's why you never knew about it, but you see it now that you know that he was, you know, quite a stutter. So I started thinking about nice, again, went back to my, the person I looked at most to FDR, and I started thinking, Well, what is it that makes these guys you know, great leaders. And I say, you know, FDR was very much like Donald Trump. Both of them are from New York, both of them from families have well, in their the comparison ends, because FDR ends up becoming FDR and Donald Trump becomes Donald Trump. Why? So the question was why, and then I was thinking about how does that fit in with this Biden's struggle when he was a kid. And what I figured out is something that I think is really interesting, when Bobby Kennedy announced that Martin Luther King have been killed in Indianapolis, that very famous clip, to an African American crowd, he quotes the Greek poet escalus, I think is how you say that name. To EP that was one of the things Bobby did is he memorized some of his poetry, but there's a piece that he writes about, in which he says, essentially, the pain that that we can't get away from, you know, drips on us. And against our will. We, we, we become we get wisdom, can we, you know, it's that pain, that, that, that brings us through, and not only brings us through, but creates the wisdom through against our will, through the awful grace of God, I think is the the piece that he quotes that at the very end after talking to people essentially saying, you know, this pain, and he had just been through the pain with his brother being brutally assassinated. So I started thinking about that. And I think, well, FDR, the reason FDR became FDR is he went through a period of extreme excruciating pain and struggle. He ran for vice president with an Ohio Governor James Cox against Warren Harding, and was a senator in 1920 100 years ago, and could walk and he was a privilege boy from Hyde Park, and a little bit on the arrogant side, but you know, old name Roosevelt. And then a year later, after going to a Boy Scout camp and swimming with the Boy Scouts, and he comes down with, you know, chills and aches and pains. And he can't get out of bed The next day, and so he's suddenly unable to walk and he spends the next eight years trying to teach himself to walk down in Warm Springs, Georgia and he can't do it for the rest of his life, he wears braces, people don't understand, he literally could not use his legs, he could only have them put in braces and he could get onto people and pull himself with his arms. But it was that struggle that transformed his character, as you've talked about. And Eleanor Roosevelt wrote about this, that, you know, this was the thing that changed him to a very empathetic, sympathetic person so that when he gets to the Great Depression, he loses that empathy for people and understands it intrinsically. And that's exactly what Biden went through as a young kid get teased about his stuttering. And he's, he's super empathetic. And then he goes through incredible pain, you know, with his wife being killed in his and his daughter, and literally within days of him being elected as a senator. So it's, that character is extremely important. And I think, you know, to look to charismatic people, I think if you're looking for character, you got to look for people who struggled and overcome their struggle, as opposed to people who it's been just given to them as a princeling. And they have no reason to really develop their character. In fact, just the opposite happens, they do become a narcissist, just, you know, big time and thinking they can do no wrong. And that's, I think, the distinction.
Scott Allen 36:17
It's gonna be very, very interesting to watch the story continue to unfold over the next four years. And I think I think there's an opportunity here, there's a, there's a wonderful opportunity. I keep, I keep asking podcast guests, and this isn't anything I'm asking you to answer right now. But what type of leadership kind of works above this partisanship works above the media narratives? What what type of leadership works above so that we as a, as a country, can become unstuck, and and move forward? And keep going, as you said?
Jim Robenalt 37:00
Yeah, just keep going? Well, I think I think that's the biggest part of it is that, to have really, truly great leadership, you just have to have someone who understands that they gotta be a fighter, you know, and doesn't mean that you fight.
Scott Allen 37:15
That's an individual, whether they're leading Sherwin Williams, or the Cleveland Clinic or the United States. That's it. That's a challenging role. That's chronic stress for years on end. Right.
Jim Robenalt 37:28
Right, right. That's exactly right. And, you know, they're only human. So they don't know that yet. They're doing is exactly right. But they have an innate feeling that they understand things. They also if they're really good leaders, are really good listeners are enabled to be self critical at times and understand and accept their mistakes, and move on. But again, I keep coming back to this, it's understanding, you just got to keep fighting through it. And understanding that you're gonna have to fight through it that it's not even though at times, it feels like everything's falling into place. Isn't this great? You know, a week later, something happens that throws the whole thing into chaos. And you got to just keep going through the storm, you know, keep guiding, guiding people based on your best instincts, and you know, what you're hearing from your best advisors.
Scott Allen 38:17
I always ask guests, what they're consuming right now. Are there any podcasts or I will I will place I mean, this, this has been a wonderful episode, rich with resources. So I'm going to post links to your books to your website to the podcast that's on your website that really will take listeners more in depth into into the story that we started with today. But what are you listening to? What are you streaming? What are you consuming, that you think listeners might be interested in?
Jim Robenalt 38:49
Yeah, the thing that I actually have spent a lot of time during this summer and up till now, listening to what I think is one of the best podcasts of all time is called 13 minutes to the moon. Again, if it's 30 minutes, the moon and it's in reference to when they first fired the rockets to take them down to the moon, that's 13 minutes from that point, down to the moon. But it's about both bow 11 and getting Apollo 11 in the moon, and then Apollo 13. So there are two different episodes or two different seasons. But it's done by this guy who's it's a BBC production. And it's somebody this guy who's a doctor by training but has been fascinated by, you know, the, the, the whole NASA thing and but you talk about lessons in leadership. This thing is like, chock full of it, because it really is. It's masterful, it's absolutely masterful, it's dramatic. And these people who are Mission Control, a lot of them are 26 years old. I mean, the average age isn't incredibly young. And they're faced with these decisions of, you know, like, Neil Armstrong is getting down close to the moon. And suddenly they're about to hit a bunch of boulders, and he's got to keep it. Yeah, but he doesn't have enough fuel. And he's got to just guided himself, and they're faced with the no go, does it, you know, do we go no go, you know, in the 26 year olds, you know, who don't know much about anything, but you listen to them and guide themselves through this stuff. And you see how they work as a team, you see how they deal with enormous pressure and uncertainty. And yet they prepared and prepared and prepared. But ultimately, all that preparation pays off only because at critical points, somebody makes the right decision. And anyway, it is, it is truly good. If you start listening to it, you will not be able to stop it is, you know, one episode to the next, it's very well done, they have a lot of the because all that stuff was recorded, they have all of the audio of Mission Control, talking to the astronauts, and just the whole setup of Apollo, just the enormity of that, you know, from Kennedy saying we're going to go to the moon in this decade. And then making it happen. Even the old pile of one, you know, astronauts burn up in the capsule, you know, in the middle of all day, just as it is most remarkable thing man has ever done in this story gives it that feeling that you're listening to the most remarkable thing that may ever be done. Given the time and the technical. Yeah,
Scott Allen 41:31
They were doing this on like a Nokia phone, right?
Jim Robenalt 41:35
Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's a whole series on that. And by the way, this program, even you know, even though the whole thing was to get us to the moon and all that stuff, it really jumpstarted the whole computer age in a dramatic way we are, we are decades and decades ahead of where we should be because so much was done under that pressure cooker to get this you know, to create a computer to guide them. Once they started that 13 minutes, maybe supposed to be all totally by computer. It was only at the end that Neil Armstrong. Now the reason I am so attracted to you is that when I was a kid, I grew up in Lima, Ohio over the western part of the state and Lima is 16 miles from Wapakoneta, Ohio. Yeah. Neil Armstrong, Israel. And I've always thought 500 years from now people will know Neil Armstrong's name, they may not even know like Franklin Roosevelt's name, 500 years now think about James 500 years ago, they may not know about, you know, who went who, you know, who is involved truly in the Second World War, but they will know the first human who walked on the moon. And this guy grew up 16 miles from where I grew up, you know, in this farm country out there. We always knew Wapakoneta is walpack, you know, so I have kind of this internal connection to it that I that I have. And then when we're kids, my dad used to take us to Florida for spring break. And we went to what was called Cape Canaveral, originally, and then became cape Kennedy. And you know, I saw those Apollo rockets being assembled. Yeah, you know, in Cocoa Beach is right, where we would stay. It's right there. And, you know, so there's this wonderful memory of being inside and finally getting through the winter. But also this, you know, just really cool thing I've seen, you know, going over and getting a tour of the, of the putting together these rockets that, you know, change the world really fine, but it's, I'm telling you it is you will not be able to stop listening to him once you start.
Scott Allen 43:44
Jim, can we do this again, please, at some point.
Jim Robenalt 43:47
Sure.
Scott Allen 43:47
We'd love that. I would love that. Thank you so much for being with us today. fascinating conversation, everybody who's listening. There will be all kinds of resources to speeches, and writings and resources in the show notes. Jim, Happy New Year. Thank you for doing what you do and be well
Jim Robenalt 44:04
Thanks, Scott.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai