What About Bob?

Bob MorrisAuthorPublic Speaker

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Bob Morris

Bob Morris has had a lifelong interest in history. He grew up in the Detroit area and has lived in Michigan his entire life. His father was a respected labor leader who took him and his brother to labor and political meetings throughout the late 1950s and 1960s.

Like many, Bob has always had an affinity for John F. Kennedy and the late president’s brothers. In 1960, Bob watched Kennedy’s rise from a cluttered group of candidates to being nominated and then elected president of the United States. As an 8-year-old, Bob had the chance to meet JFK, the candidate, in 1960. Three years later, while in a seventh-grade classroom, Bob listened in horror as the school piped in the news of President Kennedy’s shooting in Dallas, and then
the painful news of his hero’s death. These, and so many other feelings, led to Bob’s first novel, Secret Service Journals: Assassination and Redemption in 1960s Detroit.

His love of the UAW and labor movement led him to write his first nonfiction book, Built in
Detroit: A story of the UAW, a Company, and a Gangster.

This book captures the exciting and unexpected rise of the UAW in the 1930s and documents the effort of gangsters to assassinate UAW leaders, beat-up UAW leadership, and otherwise intimidate honest union leaders. This book has been called by a former Michigan attorney general as, “The best written history of the UAW I’ve ever read.”

Bob’s professional career began as a middle school teacher in Detroit in the early 1970s. In the late 1970s, he moved to Michigan’s state capital, Lansing, where he worked for the Michigan legislature focusing on policy and political issues. In the 1980s, he was part of Governor James Blanchard’s staff and became a top official in the state’s Department of Transportation. In the 1990s, he became an appointee of Wayne County Executive Edward McNamara, rising to the position of Assistant County Executive. The 2000’s took him back to Lansing to be part of Governor Jennifer Granholm’s administration at the Department of Education. Bob finished his professional career with the Southeast Council of Governments. While in all these various positions, Bob worked to develop good public policy laws, including needed transportation funding, passage of the Detroit Metropolitan Airport Authority Act, and reform of antiquated high school graduation requirements.

Bob resides in Farmington Hills, Michigan with his wife, Terry, and their irrepressible dog, JV.