Having made calls and canvassed for Hillary Clinton over the weekend (and joked about her seeming a bit stiff –like cardboard–in the photo to the left),  I’m saddened, confused and a bit shocked by her loss to Donald Trump. I’ll be writing more about this in days to come, but for now, thought I’d share her concession speech, which I received in an email from her campaign, so that you could read it in its entirety. I found it eloquent and inspirational.

–Anita M. Harris

Thank you.

Last night, I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country. I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans.

This is not the outcome we wanted or we worked so hard for, and I’m sorry we did not win this election for the values we share and the vision we hold for our country.

But I feel pride and gratitude for this wonderful campaign that we built together –- this vast, diverse, creative, unruly, energized campaign. You represent the best of America, and being your candidate has been one of the greatest honors of my life.

I know how disappointed you feel, because I feel it too. And so do tens of millions of Americans who invested their hopes and dreams in this effort. This is painful, and it will be for a long time. But I want you to remember this: Our campaign was never about one person or even one election. It was about the country we love — and about building an America that’s hopeful, inclusive, and big-hearted.

We have seen that our nation is more deeply divided than we thought. But I still believe in America –- and I always will. And if you do, too, then we must accept this result -– and then look to the future.

Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.

Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power, and we don’t just respect that, we cherish it. It also enshrines other things –- the rule of law, the principle that we’re all equal in rights and dignity, and the freedom of worship and expression. We respect and cherish these things too — and we must defend them.

And let me add: Our constitutional democracy demands our participation, not just every four years, but all the time. So let’s do all we can to keep advancing the causes and values we all hold dear: making our economy work for everyone, not just those at the top; protecting our country and protecting our planet; and breaking down all the barriers that hold anyone back from achieving their dreams.

We’ve spent a year and a half bringing together millions of people from every corner of our country to say with one voice that we believe that the American Dream is big enough for everyone — for people of all races and religions, for men and women, for immigrants, for LGBT people, and people with disabilities.

Our responsibility as citizens is to keep doing our part to build that better, stronger, fairer America we seek. And I know you will.

I am so grateful to stand with all of you.

I want to thank Tim Kaine and Anne Holton for being our partners on this journey. It gives me great hope and comfort to know that Tim will remain on the front-lines of our democracy, representing Virginia in the Senate.

To Barack and Michelle Obama: Our country owes you an enormous debt of gratitude for your graceful, determined leadership, and so do I.

To Bill, Chelsea, Marc, Charlotte, Aidan, our brothers, and our entire family, my love for you means more than I can ever express.

You crisscrossed this country on my behalf and lifted me up when I needed it most –- even four-month old Aidan traveling with his mom.

I will always be grateful to the creative, talented, dedicated men and women at our headquarters in Brooklyn and across our country who poured their hearts into this campaign. For you veterans, this was a campaign after a campaign — for some of you, this was your first campaign ever. I want each of you to know that you were the best campaign anyone has had.

To all the volunteers, community leaders, activists, and union organizers who knocked on doors, talked to neighbors, posted on Facebook – even in secret or in private: Thank you.

To everyone who sent in contributions as small as $5 and kept us going, thank you.

And to all the young people in particular, I want you to hear this. I’ve spent my entire adult life fighting for what I believe in. I’ve had successes and I’ve had setbacks -– sometimes really painful ones. Many of you are at the beginning of your careers. You will have successes and setbacks, too.

This loss hurts. But please, please never stop believing that fighting for what’s right is worth it. It’s always worth it. And we need you keep up these fights now and for the rest of your lives.

To all the women, and especially the young women, who put their faith in this campaign and in me, I want you to know that nothing has made me prouder than to be your champion.

I know that we still have not shattered that highest glass ceiling. But some day someone will -– hopefully sooner than we might think right now.

And to all the little girls watching right now, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world.

Finally, I am grateful to our country for all it has given me.

I count my blessings every day that I am an American. And I still believe, as deeply as I ever have, that if we stand together and work together, with respect for our differences, strength in our convictions, and love for this nation -– our best days are still ahead of us.

You know I believe we are stronger together and will go forward together. And you should never be sorry that you fought for that.

Scripture tells us: “Let us not grow weary in doing good, for in due season, we shall reap, if we do not lose heart.”

My friends, let us have faith in each other. Let us not grow weary. Let us not lose heart. For there are more seasons to come and there is more work to do.

I am incredibly honored and grateful to have had this chance to represent all of you in this consequential election. May God bless you and god bless the United States of America.

Hillary

Anita M. Harris, a writer and communications consultant, is the author of Broken Patterns, Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity. Broken Patterns is about women of the baby-boom generation in relation to their mothers and grandmothers. It presents a spiral theory of change, which, Harris believes, goes far in explaining the current election results.

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, based in Cambridge, MA.

In an interview with Lisa Mullins on “Here and Now” a daily program of National Public Radio,  author Anita Harris reflected on how her college years shaped her career path.  The interview, which aired June 11, focused on Harris’s book, Ithaca Diaries, a memoir and social history of her years at Cornell University in the 1960s.

Those years “gave me courage to start a newspaper and become a journalist,” said Harris about her time at Cornell.  “They gave me the courage to fight for social change through my work and my writing.  They have me the courage to work with students and help them understand better their own place in the world.”

Harris attended Cornell University during a time of racism and world turmoil.  In Ithaca Diaries, she writes about heavy topics such as the tearing up and burning of draft cards by students opposed to the Vietnam war and demonstrations for civil rights.

“There were all kinds of demonstrations and eventually all hell broke loose,”said Harris.  “At the university, nationally, and internationally students were demonstrating and even rioting all over the world.”

While Harris tried to focus on her studies and stay “sane,”  she also explored and wrote about Cornell’s dating scene, which was filled with “boys, and frats and football games,” she told Mullins.

Harris used her journals, letters to her parents, and Cornell’s independent student newspaper, the Daily Sun, to help tell her story, which takes readers on a coming-of-age journey from Harris’ arrival on campus  in 1966 with her pink suitcase to her graduation day, when she led a demonstration against the military.

“One reason I wanted to write the book was to understand what had happened and how it still affects me today,” said Harris.  “To this day, I think back to the events of that time.”

“Ithaca Diaries” can be purchased on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Ithaca-Diaries-Coming-Age-1960s/dp/0692294988.

Harris’ “Here and Now” interview  is available at http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2015/06/11/ithaca-diaries-anita-harris.

— Morgan Brittney Austin
Morgan Brittney Austin is a 2015 graduate of LaSalle College, near Boston.

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning PR and marketing firm based in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA.

Ithaca Diaries Cover

I’m ecstatic to have finally launched a kickstarter campaign to bring Ithaca Diaries to life! And that the campaign is now already featured as a staff pick! Here’s the link…https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1639099206/ithaca-diaries-coming-of-age-in-the-1960s?ref=category_recommended .

In case you can’t quite see the writing on the cover, left:

Ithaca Diaries is  coming of age memoir set at Cornell University in the tumultuous 1960s. The story is told in first person from the point of view of a smart, sassy, funny, scared, sophisticated yet naïve college student (moi) who can laugh at herself while she and the world around her are having a nervous breakdown. Based on diaries, letters, interviews and other primary and secondary accounts of the time, Ithaca Diariesdescribes collegiate life as protests, politics, and violence increasingly engulf the student, the campus, and the nation.  I hope my irreverent observations will serve as a prism for understanding what it was like to live through those precarious times. While often laugh-out-loud funny, I believe they provide meaningful insight into the process of political and social change from which we are reaping the benefits, today.

It would be great if you’d share this blog with anyone who might be interested….and contribute to the kickstarter campaign!
Many thanks, Anita

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning PR and Marketing firm based in Cambridge, MA.
Anita Harris is it’s Managing Director. She is also the author of Broken Patterns, Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity. 

I’m very pleased to report  the launch of Virtual Book Group–which has chosen my book, Broken Patterns, Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity as its featured summer read.

Virtual Book Group is an exciting new venture of digital marketing guru (and chief operating bookworm) Christina Inge.  Readers from all over the world can  to join for free to share their thoughts about selected books and related topics with one another and with authors, over time.

Inge said: “We created Virtual Book Group for people who love books, and love talking about them–whenever and wherever they are. 

“This summer, we’ll be reading Broken Patterns: Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity.  Based on interviews with women who entered male-dominated careers in the 1970s and 1980s, Boston author and reporter Anita M. Harris looks at the intergenerational patterns of women’s lives. She shows how the experiences of mothers and grandmothers influence career decisions, and traces the impact of rapid technological and social change on family structures, psyches, and gender roles. 

“As with all summer books, ours is full of great stories, riveting drama, and lessons learned. But it’s not a potboiler. It’s an eye-opening look at generations of women in the workforce that picks up where Lean In leaves off.” 

As the author, I’ll be chiming in for online and video chats through August–and, possibly, beyond.

It’s free to join–but you do need to REGISTER.
If you’d like to buy Broken Patterns,  It’s available at the Harvard Bookstore, on Amazon and Kindle...as well as  Kobo, Apple, Inktera,  Nook, Page Foundry and Scribd.   You can find more information, photos, readers’ comments and tell your own story at Brokenpatternsbook.com.

–Anita M. Harris

Anita M. Harris is an author and communications consultant based in Cambridge, MA.
New Cambridge Observer is a publication the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning marketing and PR firm located in kendall Square, Cambridge.

On Friday, July 11, my friend Andrew Kreig spoke at the National Press Club in Washington about his new book Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters, which tackles intelligence agency influence on politics and the media.

Presidential Puppetry, is “a non-partisan exposé of the intelligence sector influence in the Obama administration’s second term,” he said.  Drawing from a century of history that includes the Romney and Bush family dynasties, it  argues that failures in news reporting will continue because both traditional and social media are heavily influenced by revenue sources little understood by the public, including most journalists and academics. Link to book preview video

In his talk, Kreig noted  that before the Washington Post was sold to Amazon CEO Jeffery Bezos last summer, the paper had, for many years, received just 4 percent of its revenue from circulation and 14-15 percent from advertising. Approximately 60 percent of Post revenue has come from an education subsidiary, Kaplan, which profits from lucrative but little-reported government relationships.

Similarly, Amazon.com, Bezos’ source of wealth, last fall obtained a $600 million contract to handle advanced computing needs for the CIA, Kreig said. The contract dwarfed the $250 million Bezos purchase price for the Post and further illustrates certain seldom-reported institutional ties between news-making agencies and news organizations.

In another example of close ties between government and the news media, Kreig noted that the president of CBS News is Andrew Rhodes. Rhodes brother, Ben, is Obama’s speechwriter, deputy national intelligence director and, as described by insider columnist David Ignatius in the July 11 Washington’s Post, “the closest thing he [Obama] has to a chief strategist.”

Earlier this month, Kreig pointed out, Ray McGovern, a CIA-analyst-turned peace activist, warned a separate audience at the Press Club that the mainstream media are suppressing vital news stories. According to McGovern, who spent 27 years as a CIA analyst with responsibility for daily briefings of two presidents, “Never has it been so bad in the 50 years I’ve been in this town” and “there’s one change that dwarfs all the others.”  What is that change? “We no longer have a free media,” McGovern said. “That’s big. It does not get any bigger than that.”

McGovern was first quoted in report published by the Justice Integrity Project, an organization Kreig founded in 2010 to probe courts, politics and media coverage (http://wwwow.ly/yT2Rw)

In Presidential Puppetry  Kreig documents how deep-pocketed corporations and other institutions have, for more than a century, shaped the public agenda with increasingly little scrutiny from watchdogs. The book draws on Kreig’s  two decades as an investigative reporter, lawyer and high-tech advocate based in Washington, DC.

In the book, Kreig alleges that what he calls “puppet masters” wield enormous influence over intelligence agencies, elected officials, and both traditional and social media. For example, he describes a pattern whereby many prominent elected leaders secretly served as CIA or FBI informants before they entered politics, thereby establishing relationships unknown to the public.

Such allegations are endorsed by an array of experts (www.presidentialpuppetry.com), including McGovern and former CIA analyst and retired journalist John Kelly, who is a board member of the Justice Integrity Project (http://www.justice-integrity.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=188&Itemid=153. Kelly is the last surviving reporter to have covered the 1960 JFK election victory party in Hyannis Port. He went on to work for CBS and NBC before becoming a CIA officer in Indochina during the Vietnam War era. In organizing and introducing last week’s dinner lecture, Kelly said the news media have become far too timid and institutionally compromised.

The “Puppetry” message is documented with 1,100 endnotes to help other researchers and reformers, Kreig said.  Its conclusion is that any reform must begin with an understanding of our hidden history. That is the theme of a 50-second preview video, entitled “Knowledge Empowers You.” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KV8Mt2nV_A)

I knew Kreig when he reported  for the Cornell Daily Sun in the late 1960s.  He’s since worked in journalism, technology, and  law. His Boston background iincludes coverage of the Celtics in the 1980s and a clerkship with Boston-based federal judge Mark Wolf, who is best known for presiding over the Patriarca mob case and exposing the Whitey Bulger scandal(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_L._Wolf). Kreig holds law degrees from both Yale and the University of Chicago. From 2009 to 2011, he researched controversial Bush administration federal prosecutions as a Washington-based senior fellow for the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.

–Anita M. Harris

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning PR and marketing firm based in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA.

Authors Susan Coppack, Rick Wiggin, and Anita Harris; moderator Neil O’Hara. Photo by Katherine O’Hara. :

I was pleased to join Susan Coppack and Rick Wiggin on a panel about independent book publishing held at the Lincoln, MA Library on Wednesday, May 14, 2014.  All members of the Write Stuff, the Library’s writers group,  we’d each published a book in the past year–and had experienced both the excitement of having a book come out and the challenges of production and marketing. Link to video.

Susan told  the audience that she used a turnkey service from Book Baby to create and distribute her book, Fly Away Home: A Coming of Age Memoir, in electronic form. She said that had she realized how much time and effort it takes to market a book, she would have delayed publication by several months in order to reach her audience.  Fly Away Home describes her unusual childhood and adolescence as the daughter of disengaged parents, continuing through early adulthood until her mother’s death.  As described by moderator Neil O’Hara, who organized the panel: “At  25,000 words, the book is too long for a magazine but too short to interest traditional publishers, an example of how technology has opened up a new market for works of intermediate length, called “e-singles” in industry parlance. “Selling at “$1.99 on a multitude of electronic platforms, Coppack said she’s not in it for the money. Rather, she hopes to build an audience in order to engage in discussion with her readers.

Rick Wiggin is the author of Embattled Farmers: Campaigns and Profiles of Revolutionary Soldiers from Lincoln, Massachusetts, 1775-1783,a history of the revolutionary war focusing on the military service of Lincoln residents during the conflict, including profiles of the 256 documented combatants. The Lincoln Historical Society published Wiggin’s book in hardback and paperback. Wiggin described a painstaking editing process for which he is now grateful, a highly successful launch party that attracted some 300 people last July 4, and hundreds of sales there and at various historic sites on the East Coast. At some 1500 pages, the book sells for $30. Rick advised thinking carefully about whether to choose digital or offset printing. Digital  printing eliminates many of the mechanical steps required for offset printing such as making films and color proofs and thus offers quicker turnaround time and lower costs for very small print runs. Offset printing,  he suggests, can offer higher image and print quality and costs less as quantity increases.

Last but not least, I described the incredible number of steps involved in publishing Broken Patterns: Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity, which tells the stories of generations of American  professional women. Originally published by Wayne University Press, it had gone out of print.   I  purchased back the rights, updated the book and published the new edition in both e-book and paperback formats through Cambridge Common Press, my own publishing imprint. I used Amazon.com’s publishing arm “CreateSpace” and Kindle.  Broken Patterns is now available on Amazon.com and Kindle, and in the Harvard Book store, in Cambridge.

I’ll write more about the publishing and the marketing processes in future blogs. For now, suffice it to say that all of us feel a bit overwhelmed by the  time, energy, strategy and skill  it takes to write, publish and market a book.

If you want to know exactly what we said, here’s a link to a video of our presentation.

–Anita M. Harris

Anita M. Harris is the author of Broken Patterns: Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity and Managing Director of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning PR and marketing firm based in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA.

Featuring authors Susan Coppack, Anita Harris and Rick Wiggin 

Lincoln, MA–The Lincoln Public Library is pleased to present “Book Publishing On Your Own,” a panel discussion hosted by the library’s writer’s group, “The Write Stuff” and featuring three group members who have published books in the past year.

The discussion will be held on Wednesday, May 14, 2014 from 7-8:30 PM in the Tarbell Room at the Lincoln Public Library, 3 Bedford Road, Lincoln, MA.  

Authors Susan Coppock, Anita Harris and Rick Wiggin of the Write Stuff will describe their experiences in publishing and marketing their books, which will be available for purchase. Light refreshments will be served.

About the authors
Susan Coppock is the author of Fly Away Home: A Coming of Age Memoir, which describes her unusual childhood and adolescence as the daughter of disengaged parents, continuing through early adulthood until her mother’s death. Susan used a turnkey service from Book Baby to create and distribute her book in electronic form. At 25,000 words, the book is too long for a magazine but too short to interest traditional publishers, an example of how technology has opened up a new market for works of intermediate length called e-singles in industry parlance.

Anita Harris is the author of Broken Patterns: Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity, a book first published by Wayne University Press, about the changing role of women in society over time. The original book was out of print, so Anita purchased back the rights, updated the book and published the new edition in both e-book and paperback formats through Cambridge Common Press, her own publishing imprint.

Rick Wiggin is the author of Embattled Farmers: Campaigns and Profiles of Revolutionary Soldiers from Lincoln, Massachusetts, 1775-1783,a history of the revolutionary war focusing on the military service of Lincoln residents during the conflict, including profiles of the 256 documented combatants. The Lincoln Historical Society published Rick’s book in hardback and paperback; it is not available in e-book format.

Directions and parking: http://www.lincolnpl.org/index.php/how-do-i/get-to-library

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New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning PR and marketing firm based in Kendall Square, Cambridge.