Massie, Robert K(inloch) 1956-

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MASSIE, Robert K(inloch) 1956-

PERSONAL:

Born 1956. Education: Princeton University, A. B., 1978; Yale Divinity School, M.A., 1982; Harvard Business School, Ph.D., 1989. Religion: Episcopal.

ADDRESSES:

Office—CERES, 99 Chauncy St., 6th Floor, Boston, MA 02111. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Minister, activist, and political consultant. Grace Episcopal Church, New York, NY, assistant and chaplain, 1982-84; Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, MA, lecturer, director for the Project on Business Values and the Economy, 1989-96; Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies (CERES), Boston, MA, executive director, 1996—. World Economic Forum, chair of steering committee, 1998-.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Fulbright scholar, 1993; Lionel Gelber Prize for Best Book on International Relations, 1998, for Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South African in the Apartheid Years.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Mark Green) The Big Business Reader, Pilgrim Press (New York, NY), 1980, new edition (with Michael Waldman) published as The Big Business Reader: On Corporate America, Pilgrim Press (New York, NY), 1983.

The Hidden Moral Language of Organizations: Public Lecture, the University of Tulsa, October 15, 1995, University of Tulsa (Tulsa, OK), 1995.

Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1997.

SIDELIGHTS:

Author Robert K. Massie brought his training as an Episcopal minister and his background in business and political activism to bear on his prizewinning history of race relations in South Africa. Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years, published in 1997, also includes extensive consideration of the relationship between the United States and South Africa and the influence of the U.S. civil rights movement, the drive for divestment, and other official and unofficial policies on the movement toward apartheid. Massie also stresses the United States' own struggles with race relations and its indirect support of apartheid. He recounts how the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was responsible for the eventual arrest and imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, and observes that, as president, Ronald Reagan sold arms to South Africa knowing that they would be used to maintain policies of racial separatism.

Loosing the Bonds attempts to bring the story of race relations and the anti-apartheid movement into the personal dimension, focusing on the individuals involved—including Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Desmond Tutu—and the impact on individual lives. Massie told Beatrice Grabish in U.N. Chronicle that he hoped Loosing the Bonds would not be a book "only a foreign-policy expert could read." Writing for Library Journal, Thomas Davis said that Massie's book demonstrates "that the individual makes a difference in shaping history." Though some reviewers suggested that Massie's approach is too thorough—Geoffrey Wheat-croft said in the New York Times that the book is among those "simply too long for their subject"—many nevertheless found it a significant contribution to the topic. Wheatcroft called Loosing the Bonds "indispensable for anyone interested in South Africa," and in Foreign Affairs Gail M. Gerhart wrote that "no work has so engagingly and authoritatively chronicled the movement" for corporate divestment in America. Hazel Rochman, a reviewer for Booklist, called Loosing the Bonds "a triumphant story" and a "compelling history."

Massie's interest in human-rights issues also extends to his work with the Global Reporting Initiative for the World Economic Forum and with the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies (CERES), of which he is executive director.