Brian Kannard

There are times when everyone experiences a slight hesitation between approaching a doorway and actually knocking on the door. No matter what is behind that door, the reason one raps is to have a question answered. Are you giving me the job I’m interviewing for? Could she be “the one”? Doctor, what were the test results? The hesitation between intent and action is fobbed off on checking to make sure a fly is zipped or lunch’s garlic-laden falafel has been purged from one’s breath. But the real reason for the pause is to allay any fears that crop up right around the time one first forms a fist. What if my boss finds out I’m interviewing? She must be going out with me as penance for some horrible sin. The tests are going to be positive. The doorway for this text came, in the parlance of my father, in an ass-backwards manner.

Not to bury the lede, but the conclusion of this book is that John Steinbeck was a CIA asset during the 1950s and ’60s. This text supports that hypothesis, but there are some elements of the tale where the story of how I performed my research crosses over with my findings. First and foremost is the interaction I had with John’s son, Thomas. One might have thought that in starting out with the insane-sounding premise that John Steinbeck was a CIA spy would begin with the world’s one true Steinbeck expert. While there are men and women who have spent their professional lives examining John’s life and works, they are experts in Steinbeck’s wake. Thomas represents the single person alive who truly knew the Nobel Prize–winning author.

It was because of his intimate knowledge that Thomas was the last person I spoke with about this project. One does not call up someone’s son to say, “I’ve got this wild theory that your dad was a spy. What do you say about that?” At least, not without proof. Before contacting Thomas, I had to have enough evidence to convince a best-selling author of my interpretation of the “truth” about an area of his father’s life Thomas likely knew nothing about. So after receiving a pair of letters from the CIA in August of 2012, I set out to compile my prior research and write this book’s manuscript. What better way in forming an argument to present to Thomas than putting everything down on paper?

In late February of 2013, my manuscript made enough sense to a select group of readers that I felt it was time to contact Thomas about my suspicions. I had spoken with Thomas in autumn of 2008 about John’s fascination with Arthurian lore and the works of Sir Thomas Malory. At that time, I had become convinced that there was an untold story in the work of John’s research assistant, Chase Horton. The enigmatic co-owner of Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Bookstore had been an integral part of the research for what would become Steinbeck’s posthumously published The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights. On that occasion, Thomas and I spoke for over an hour about his father, Horton, and the quest for the Holy Grail. From that conversation, I came away thinking that there was something in Steinbeck’s life overlooked by the literary critics, biographers, and scholars. So for the next few years, I picked at the problem as one might fiddle with a loose tooth. Somewhere between November of 2008 and sometime a few years later, that notion became the untold story of Steinbeck and the CIA.

So standing at my own metaphorical doorway on a February morning, I sent Thomas a purposely obfuscated email. There was no mention of spies or the CIA; I simply reminded him that we had spoken a few years back and that I had obtained documents via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) about his father that were not public knowledge. The next day I received a response from Thomas’s wife and gatekeeper Gail, saying she would be interested in speaking with me. I called her the next day and explained the documentation I had and other supporting evidence for my theory. Throughout the conversation, Gail would interject questions and at no time dismissed me out of hand. At the end of my spiel, I asked Gail rather bluntly if she thought I was a nutter.

“No. There’s something to this and you’ve done your research. You really need to talk to Thom, but why are you not just publishing what you have now?” I explained to Gail that besides some legal concerns I had about elements of the book, I couldn’t just let Thomas find out about this by picking up a newspaper. If you had found out that your father was a spy, wouldn’t you want a heads-up before it became public knowledge? Going about this without speaking with Thomas simply wasn’t the right thing to do. Gail agreed and after another thirty minutes of chatting, she told me that Thomas would be calling me in the next few days. Indeed a couple of days later, I faced the only critic of this work that truly mattered.

The murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was a pivotal moment in the United States’ history. After seeing Officer Derek Chauvin kneel on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes, Americans had an innate feeling nothing would be the same from that point forward. How or what America would look like after George Floyd’s death was still to be seen, but we all knew something had to happen.

Like many Black Americans, Floyd’s murder was a pivotal moment for me as well. Floyd’s murder was challenging for the entire nation. Everyone who saw this horrible act had their own interpretation of and trauma from what they had seen. For members of the Black community, Floyd’s murder reopened wounds and reminded us of the challenges that come with being Black in America. It reminded us of the struggles we face when it comes to fairness, safety, equity, and especially, criminal justice.

People were outraged at Floyd’s death and demanded social change. One of the first positive steps forward came from the business community. For the first time in America’s history, we saw a new industry standard. Fortune 500 and multinational-level companies were taking a public stance on the issue and acknowledging the Black Lives Matter movement.

It felt like everybody was talking about it, except me.

This might seem strange—a Black man not wanting to engage with this topic, but you must understand my background.

Before I started my own business law practice, the American Negotiation Institute, and mediated hundreds of cases, I did civil rights legal work. Specifically, I focused on matters concerning health equity and criminal justice. I also was asked to lecture on the psychological factors that play into present-day injustices. This led me to teach implicit bias training classes for lawyers and police officers. The goal of these sessions was to help those in the legal system understand the role that they play in both creating and fighting injustice. My problem was that, after years of leading implicit bias training, I began to struggle. I was constantly exposed to the worst parts of American society. I was exhausted emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually. I was in desperate need of a change. It was so bad that, for over a year, I stopped watching the news. If I saw a social media post with a political, inequality, or injustice message, I would unfollow the poster. I even went as far as blocking my wife, Whitney, on social media from time to time. She is incredibly involved with matters of social justice and is not afraid to share her feelings. These were the same situations that I did not want to hear anything about. I maintained my neutrality about publicly speaking about race relations with the same sanctity as Switzerland does with politics.

Mental health-wise, shutting down my social media exposure was incredible. I noticed the results almost immediately. I felt much better when I disconnected from everything that was wrong with the world. Instead of focusing on negativity, I turned my attention toward things that I enjoyed and was passionate about. But the world was different now after the death of George Floyd. There were discussions of racism, and support for Black Lives Matter was at an all-time high. Racial inequity was now at the top of our collective consciousness in a way not seen since the 1960s civil rights movement. Now, everyone was talking about something that, as a lawyer, mediator, and negotiation professor, I had spent my career working on. And yet, I still was not talking about it. In fact, I was doing the opposite. I continued to actively avoid it.

The First Difficult Conversation

On May 31st, 2020, my wife, Whitney, decided to have a difficult conversation with me. She said, “I know that you want to avoid this situation. I know that you hate talking about this. But here’s the thing—you always talk about how important it is for other people to engage in difficult conversations. How does it look to them if you are intentionally avoiding having these difficult conversations?”

Her question hit me hard.

I realized that avoiding the situation was not the same as choosing neutrality. My lack of engagement was causing harm. There are people who look to me for guidance on how to have difficult conversations, and I was silent. I realized that I left them when they needed me the most.

That’s when I decided to get involved.

I thought I’d make it easy on myself by checking a few boxes in the form of a “little” online presentation. In three days, I would hold a virtual town hall-style meeting to discuss how to have conversations about what was going on in our country. My hope was that thirty or forty people would attend the virtual town hall. I would give a few pointers and then I could say I did my part. I posted about the session on LinkedIn, got hundreds of likes, and the post was shared almost twenty times. I posted it again the next day and got similar results. As a final effort to get the word out, I sent a notice to everyone on my email list. From the email blast, hundreds of people responded in gratitude and with questions. With limited promotion in only three days’ time, 1,000 people attended my online presentation, “How to Have Difficult Conversations about Race.” I was shocked. I discussed how the fundamentals of negotiation, conflict resolution, and persuasion all apply in the same or similar way regardless of the context. Those exact same tools provide people with simple conversational solutions.

I had held the town hall meeting begrudgingly. I was concerned that I would get sucked into the same partisan quagmire that prompted my exodus from social media. The more I spoke, the more I got into a groove. I was getting the same satisfaction from speaking in the town hall that I would conducting a regular workshop. I was not finding solutions for America’s ills; I was presenting the attendees with a way to communicate. I was providing people with what they need to make these difficult conversations a little bit easier—no matter what they thought or where their political affiliations lay.

I was, however, curious about why people were attending the online session. Before the presentation, I read through the questions people sent to me. Their concerns formed a background for my presentation. After the webinar, I was getting even more questions emailed to me. As I synthesized the information collected from the pre- and post-webinar questions, I started to see patterns.

Broadly speaking, the people who are concerned about this topic fall into two large camps. There are those who are actively engaged in these difficult conversations and are trying to figure out how to turn their passion into persuasion. This group is formed largely by people of color and their allies. The other group I received questions from was those sitting on the sidelines. This group wanted to get involved but they didn’t know what to say or do. If they wanted to be an ally, they didn’t know how to offer assistance. They were afraid of being offensive or saying something the wrong way. Since race is such a sensitive subject, this group usually ends up staying quiet and trying to do the right thing when it was comfortable to do so.

I looked back on what I had learned from the town hall and where I thought America was in terms of race relations. First, our country has come a long way, but we still have significant problems with racial equity. Second, to solve those problems, we need to be able to talk about those difficulties. Third, before any of this is going to happen, it is going to take a collective effort. None of those things change without first having some difficult conversations.

The Goals and Challenges of this Book

This book is not meant to tell you how to solve race relations problems. For use in a professional setting, this book will not give advice on how to create an inclusive culture in your workplace. There is no appendix on ironclad office policies to address racial inequities. You will also not learn how to win a debate about race relations after reading this book. Those solutions are incredibly complex and are beyond my scope of expertise. What I can do is help you have these difficult conversations, which you can use as a starting point to broach more intricate topics.

If you feel like discussing race is as difficult as rocket science, you’re not alone. I want you to take solace in the fact that if these conversations are difficult for me, as somebody who specializes in having difficult conversations, it is understandable that they will be tough for you too. My goal in this book is simple—to give you practical and actionable tools to use in your own difficult conversations about race. I want to help you overcome the barriers that you are facing so you can advocate effectively and feel more confident discussing racial matters in any setting.

You will learn how to use the same techniques I presented in my online town hall meeting—negotiation, conflict resolution, and persuasion. Negotiations in the context of this book aren’t like hammering out a union contract. If that were the case, you might view this type of negotiation as, “If you are a little bit less racist, I’ll feel a little less oppressed.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The negotiation we are discussing is the meaningful exchange of interpersonal information. Once we understand the footing both parties are on, everyone can develop a respectful rapport. Once that relationship is established, difficult conversations become more normalized and productive. After reading this book, you will have the capacity to have these difficult conversations so you can be the leader in your family, community, and workplace. Armed with how to have an open and frank conversation, you will be on the road to solving the larger problems yourself. Then we can talk about using these difficult conversations as a unique opportunity to deepen our collective societal understanding. All too often, conversations about race are fragmented because people see things from different perspectives.

The reality is, there is no one-size-fits-all solution or technique that fits every situation. Discussions about race will be different from community to community. The conversations that happen in Mississippi are going to be different from the discussions happening in Los Angeles, New York, or any other place in the country. The context and history of those involved in the discussion will also present unique circumstances. Even with individual subtleties, the psychology and conversational tools presented in this book can be used in any locale or context.

Possibly most importantly, this book will address an often-overlooked component of difficult conversations—yourself. We often focus on external forces that throw up obstacles for having fruitful conversations. The first conversation you must have is with yourself. There can be invisible forces that live just beneath the surface of your psyche and make it difficult for you to engage in these conversations. You must be able to identify and understand the challenges you face before having a difficult conversation with someone else.

My motto is the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations. These are some of the most difficult conversations you’re going to have in your entire life. However, if you do it well, the impact could be life-changing, relationship-changing, and world-changing. We don’t have these difficult conversations because they’re easy. We have them because they’re worth it.