Jim Robenalt

Jim Robenalt is the author of three books and lectures nationally with John W. Dean on legal ethics and Watergate. www.watergatecle.com. He practices law in Cleveland and lives in Shaker Heights, Ohio. In June 2004, Robenalt, with the Kent State University Press, published Linking Rings, William W. Durbin, the Magic and Mystery of America. The book is a biography of Robenalt’s great-grandfather, W. W. Durbin, head of the Ohio Democratic Party during the era of William Jennings Bryan’s campaign in 1896 until the second term of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Durbin was also the first president of the International Brotherhood of Magicians. Robenalt published The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage During the Great War in 2009 under the Palgrave Macmillan Trade publishing company. Robenalt wrote the book using bootleg microfilm copies of letters written by President Harding to his long-time mistress, Carrie Fulton Phillips. The thesis of the book is the possibility that Phillips may have been a German spy. Robenalt's third book, January 1973, Watergate, Roe v. Wade, Vietnam, and the Month that Changed America Forever was published by the Chicago Review Press in May 2015. The book explores the roots of the Nixon counterrevolution and the interaction of the major events of one month in American history. Robenalt is also a contributor to The Presidents and the Constitution, A Living History (New York University Press, Gormley, ed. 2016). Bob Woodward wrote of the book: "Ken Gormley and 44 writers on all our presidents have connected the Constitutional dots brilliantly, demonstrating the immense concentration of power in the chief executive and the different, often contradictory, ways it has been used or misused. The book is a class in Constitutional Law all by itself. In several crucial ways this is what the 2016 race for the White House is about—who has precisely what power, who shares it, how is it going to be exercised, and what, if any, are its limits."