Background

Bob Massie was born on August 17, 1956. He is the son of Robert and Suzanne Massie.

Education

Bob Massie attended Princeton University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1978. He also received a Master of Divinity at Yale Divinity School in 1982 and a Doctor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School in 1989.

Career

After education, Bob Massie became ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1983 and served as an assistant and chaplain at the Grace Episcopal Church in 1982-1984. There he also founded a homeless shelter. In 1989 he became a lecturer and director for the Project on Business Values and the Economy at the Harvard Divinity School, where he worked until 1996. In 1998 Massie co-founded the Global Reporting Initiative with Allen White. They worked with the World Economic Forum, where Massie is a chair of the steering committee since also 1998, and with the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies, of which he was the executive director from 1996 to 2003. Massie also founded and co-chaired the Massachusetts Energy Efficiency Coalition, and in 2010 led a campaign against slot machine and casino gambling in Massachusetts. In 2012-2014, he was the president of the New Economy Coalition, and in 2015 he became the executive director of the Sustainable Solutions Lab at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

In 1975 Bob Massie started his political career. He worked in the office of United States, Senator Henry Jackson. In 1994 he won the statewide primary election and became the Democratic candidate for Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts. IIn 2011, Massie declared his candidacy for the United States Senate election in Massachusetts but ended his campaign because of the entrance of Elizabeth Warren into the race. In 2018, he was a candidate for the Democratic nomination to be governor of Massachusetts but lost. In 2020, Massie announced that he was running for election to a four-year term as chair of the Massachusetts Democratic Party.

As a writer, Bob 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. His book, Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years, includes extensive consideration of the relationship between the United States and South Africa and the influence of the United States civil rights movement, the drive for divestment, and other official and unofficial policies on the motion 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 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. Massie's other book, 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.

Achievements

• Bob Massie is well known as a writer, politician, and activist. In 1993 he became a Fulbright scholar, and as a writer, received the Lionel Gelber Prize for Best Book on International Relations for the book, Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South African in the Apartheid Years, in 1998. In 2002 Massie became one of the 100 most influential people in the field of finance by CFO Magazine. In 2009 he earned the Joan Bavaria Innovation and Impact Awards for Building Sustainability in Capital Markets, and in 2010 he became the holder of the Damyanova Prize for Corporate Social Responsibility from the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Loosing the Bonds

    (Loosing the Bonds is popular, narrative history at its be...)

    1997
  • The Big Business Reader 1980
  • The Hidden Moral Language of Organizations 1995

Politics

In 2011, when Bob Massie announced his candidacy for the United States Senate election in Massachusetts, he said that his whole career has dedicated to different forms of public service, pursuing the spiritual and practical goals that American values instilled in him. He thought that people had many problems that require careful consideration - how to reinvigorate the economy, revive education, and provide for citizens who have been struck down by misfortune. In 2017, during the Massachusetts gubernatorial election 2018, Massie's platform focused on climate change initiatives, workers' rights, and economic equality.

Views

Massie always had a sense of how beautiful the world is or could be, and he was filled with dismay when he discovered that the world was not, in some cases, headed in the right direction or that people were mistreating each other. He had a dream, an aspiration, for what the world would be like if people truly cared for each other and cared for the planet. Massie thinks people are longing to feel hopeful about the future, and he believes that by having hope himself, he has been able to communicate that to others. As a social justice activist, during his education at Princeton, Massie was active in the student movement for Princeton's divestiture from South Africa. He campaigned for equal access to University dining clubs, many of which did not admit women as members.

Quotations: "When you have time in this world taken away and then given back, you want to use it in the very best way you can."

"Hope is the sense that even though we can't see it yet, there are positive changes that can take place and lead to unexpected and wonderful outcomes."

Personality

Physical Characteristics: Bob Massie was born with classical hemophilia, a painful disorder that causes repeating bleeding in the joints. He spent most of his childhood bound to leg braces and in wheelchairs. At age 12, after years of physical therapy combined with advances in medication, Massie walked away from his wheelchair and cumbersome leg braces. However, to this day, he must cope with pain and self-inject medication almost daily to control his condition. In 1984 Massie was diagnosed with human immunodeficiency viruses. In 1996 and 2002, he had surgeries to replace his knee joints, damaged from the repetitive joint bleeds, and in 2009 he received a liver transplant, which cured not only his hepatitis C but also his hemophilia.

Connections

Bob Massie's first wife was Dana Robert. They divorced in 1995 and had two sons, Sam and John. In 1996 Massie married Anne Tate, with whom he has a daughter, Katherine.

Father:

Robert Kinloch Massie III

Robert Kinloch Massie III was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian and journalist.

Mother:

Suzanne Massie

Suzanne Massie has been involved in many aspects of the study and work in the Soviet Union/Russia for 38 years and continues to be an active participant in the cultural and social concerns of the city of Saint Petersburg.

ex-wife:

Dana Lee Robert

Dana Robert is Bob Massie's first wife. They divorced in 1995. Se is a Truman Collins Professor of World Christianity and History of Mission and Director of the Center for Global Christianity and Mission at the Boston University School of Theology.

Son:

Sam Massie

Son:

John Massie

Wife:

Anne Tat

Anne Tat is Bob Massie's second wife. She is an architect and professor at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Daughter:

Katherine Massie

colleague:

Henry Martin Jackson

Henry Jackson was a United States Democratic senator known for his anti-communist views and as an advocate of high defense spending during the Cold War.

colleague:

Elizabeth Ann Warren

Elizabeth Warren is an American legal scholar and politician who was elected as a Democrat to the United States Senate in 2012 and began representing Massachusetts in that body the following year.

colleague:

Allen White

Allen White is Vice President and Senior Fellow at the Tellus Institute and directs the Institute's Program on Corporate Redesign.

References

• @bobmass - Twitter