Host Lucy Rivera invites her guest, Ambassador Robert A. Sherman, to discuss his work as a Lawyer and his lengthy career providing legal support to those in need.
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Discovering The Law
[ Music ] Welcome to Discovering the Law. My name is Lucie Rivera, and today we have a very special program. We're going to discuss the embassy of Portugal, and with us to flesh out this issues is Ambassador Robert Sherman. Ambassador Robert Sherman is also an attorney, and he is the founder of the Boston office of Grimberg and Turig, a big law firm in Boston, and great to have you with us. Lucie, it's a pleasure to be here. I'm delighted to be able to talk to you tonight. Ambassador Sherman, it's our privilege, knowing that recently you received a great honor among the legal community in Boston, specifically from Boston Lawyers Weekly, in which you were inducted to the Hall of Fame of attorneys. We would love to hear about your remarks of this amazing honor. Obviously, it was a great honor to be selected. I was selected with Supreme Court justices, appeals court justices, former attorney general, former U.S. attorneys. I was in a rarer-fied crowd, but I will say that I think that what was really meaningful to me is, as I thought back on my career, I've had many great experiences. I've advocated for people with developmental disabilities in which I sued the governor of Massachusetts, so they would receive funding. I was chief of consumer protection for the attorney general's office. I represented the victims in the Boston Archdiocese Clergy Abuse case, and when I was ambassador, I started a program for women entrepreneurs, and I think the common thread or through line of all of that was a career devoted to lifting up people and helping people, and that's what I'm proud of. Ambassador Sherman, with all this experience, what qualified you or what qualities do you need to have to become an ambassador? Well, the first thing you need to have is the confidence of the President of the United States. I was fortunate to be appointed by President Obama, and like any ambassador, he doesn't just look in the phone book and pick a name at random. So obviously, he saw something in me that he felt comfortable making that appointment. I think beyond that, though, in the specific qualities, you need to have good judgment. You need to have empathy because you're dealing with another country and another people who have their own problems and have their own issues. You also have to know what you don't know. Fortunately, there's a lot of support that an ambassador has with their colleagues in other countries, with the staff at the embassy and with the experts in the State Department. So you have a lot of resources you can draw on, and I think it's important to realize that they're there and to utilize them to do the best job you can. But what prepared you to face all those varied situations and qualities that you're mentioning? Without a doubt, law school and being a lawyer. The role of an ambassador is not different than the role of a lawyer. Many people think that diplomacy is a special skill set. Really, what diplomacy is, is analyzing a problem, understanding what the interests are, listening a lot more than talking. Those are all the skills that you need when you're a lawyer as well in order to develop a strategy to solve a problem. As opposed to doing it just for a client or doing it for a case, in this case, you're doing it for a country and doing it on a different stage as a result. But the skill set is the same. Drawing on my experience as a lawyer is what made me qualified to be an ambassador. Thank you, Ambassador Sherman. Exactly what is an ambassador? So many people think that an ambassador is a social job. There's a social component. You're building up relationships with other countries and diplomats from other countries. But in fact, within the world of the State Department, your title is "Chief of Mission." And what that means is, first of all, you're the president's personal representative in a country. You represent not the United States government as a whole. You represent the president of the United States. And as a result of being the chief of mission, you also oversee and have authority over the mission of the United States government in a country regardless of the agencies that are participating in that mission. And what would you define that the mission of the United States was in your particular situation? Well, oftentimes there are varied missions because an embassy is a collection of the agencies working in a particular country. We had State Department people. They were economic people, political people. Most people were assessing the economic situation, in my case in Portugal, or what was happening in the world of politics, not only in Portugal, but Portugal as a member of the European Union throughout the EU. We had people from the Commerce Department working on bolstering up the commercial relationship with Portugal. People from agriculture, people from the EPA. We had the military there. We had law enforcement agencies, Homeland Security, DEA, Secret Service, FBI. You know, on television it's often shown that the intelligence agencies work out of an embassy. Well, I will say to you, if you believed television, then you'd think that the intelligence agencies were also under my authority in Lisbon. And I can tell you they were. So, speaking about all these different agencies that were such a varied mix, I want to go into how you handle this varied mix of agencies, but I also want to hear about how you got, I mean, it sounds fascinating too. It's not something that happens to everyone. And it's a very special honor to be selected to be an ambassador. So, tell us about your particular experience when you were appointed. And what is, is there a ceremony and do you receive a letter from the President? Tell us about it. So, so the process really goes back to a combination of hard work and luck. You're selected by the President of the United States. That means if you get involved with a candidate, that person has to be successful and run for President. We have a system that's not unique, but it's unusual in the world, which is not all of our ambassadors. All of our ambassadors are career diplomats as exist in other countries. About two-thirds of our ambassadors are career diplomats. And those people work their whole life for the State Department and rise through the ranks in a handful of a handful become ambassadors. There's only 160 or so ambassadors at any one time. On the other hand, the President gets to pick directly people who he or she, hopefully someday there'll be a she. He or she believes has the qualities to serve as an ambassador. So, I was fortunate because I got involved early in then Senator Obama's campaign to be President. I was convinced that the election in 2008 was about change and President, I'm sorry, Senator Obama at that point was the face of change. And I did a lot of things for the campaign. I started, I raised money because you had to have resources to engage in the campaign. But I also did vetting for the national security positions and the cabinet as once he was the nominee. I was in the war room in Chicago on election night and that's how it came to be. He got to see me up close and personal and believed I had the skills to serve him as his personal representative. No doubt. And when you were selected, what was the process? So, you go through a series of interviews, they make cuts to see who progresses in the process. They would tell me that I was moving on to the next step. And then one day I was sitting on the couch at home with my wife and I got a call from the White House. And it was one of the senior aides to the President who said the President would like to appoint you as Ambassador to Portugal. What will you say? The reason they do that is they don't want somebody saying no to the President of the United States. And I said I would be honored and they said the next call you're going to receive is from the President of the United States. And that's when President Obama called me and offered me the job. That sounds like a staggering distinction. Incredible honor. It was. It was. I'd like to please follow up on what you mentioned about all the various incredible mixed chair of agencies that reported to you. Some extremely interesting. For example, the intelligence agencies. I know you mentioned some of them. But also the work that you did with women. Would you like to share with us some of your anecdotes in dealing with so varied? I think that the important thing to realize is that when you're the Ambassador, you're the Chief of Mission. That means nobody can do anything without your authority. And that meant if it was a undercover operation by the DEA. And our DEA, by the way, was focused on narco terrorism. The shipment of cocaine coming out of South America into Europe with the proceeds being used to fund Hezbollah, which is in the news these days. And Hamas also in the news. So we were trying to wipe out the financial support for those organizations. Oftentimes that was undercover, which means people were putting themselves at risk. And what would happen is the people in the DEA would come into my office. They would set forth the plan. And it was up to me to ask the hard questions. The questions that you learned from your legal training about how we're assessing the risk. What are we doing in terms of backup? What are we doing in terms of thinking about what could go wrong? And ultimately approving that or not approving it. And what I found is those agencies were most willing to be put to their paces. They were trying to get it right. And they appreciated somebody asking the hard questions. And I was the guy staying up into four or five o'clock in the morning to make sure people returned safely. That sounds extremely serious and life-threatening. But however, there must have been some fun. Or some other... For example, tell us about your experience in maintaining relations, public relations in Portugal. In another country, for example, when you had to take maybe a trip over in the motorcycle. So I was known for riding a Harley around Portugal and not just in Lisbon all around the country. I had a security detail and they loved it. So instead of showing up in a suit in an armored Cadillac with a bunch of other guys with guns and suits, they were wearing jeans and leather jackets. And I was wearing jeans and a leather jacket. But that came about not just for fun. It came about because as an ambassador to a European country, I was charged by President Obama with promoting a trade deal called TTIP. And when I first got to Lisbon and I talked to my staff and asked them what are other ambassadors doing to promote the deal, they said they're holding conferences. And my response is I'd kill myself if I had to hold a conference. And I was being a little bit dramatic, but the point was how can we be effective? And it turned out that after talking a lot more that Harley Davidson had been recently in the embassy looking to increase its market share in the Iberian Peninsula, Portugal and Spain. And somebody suggested, "Well, why don't you get on a Harley and we can build a program?" So I thought I was going to do that just once, but I turned out I fell in love with riding a Harley and that became something that not only did I do throughout my time in Portugal, I returned to Portugal and once or twice a year I'll still hop on a Harley there and ride with my old group. Somehow I don't know that we picture you in a Harley Davidson. Believe me, I didn't either. I had never ridden a motorcycle in my life. I had ridden dirt bikes growing up in Brockton, but not a motorcycle. But the interesting thing was that, you know, the website, the embassy website, the State Department information can be incredibly dry and uninteresting. When I first decided to do this, I decided to take motorcycle riding lessons in Portugal and so I would post what I was doing. I'd get on a Honda and I would be shaky trying to drive a Honda and then I would post it and say and talk about the benefits of the trade deal in conjunction with that. And that went on. Well, we found whenever I was on a motorcycle, the followers on our embassy website went way up. So we realized you've got to meet people where they are and you've got to meet them in a way where they can enjoy seeing what it is. Too often, government information is just plain as dry as the desert. And if you put some life into it, you'll find that people will enjoy it and people will respond to it. I believe you might have been the only one that connected with the Portuguese population in such a personal way that this trade, would you think it was a progressed and it succeeded with your efforts? Well, I can say this much that Portugal became the leading proponent of TTIP within the EU. What does TTIP stand for? TTIP is, sorry, is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Act. It was a trade deal designed to help small and medium-sized businesses on both sides of the Atlantic compete and get their products to the other. Large companies can always get into a market, but if you have high tariffs or you have difficult regulation, it serves as a barrier, particularly to companies that don't have the resources of big companies to export their products. And the desire was to lower those barriers and have a lot of goods and services being traded back and forth, which was to the benefit of U.S. small and medium-sized businesses. I think your efforts in Portugal just seemed monumental and exhausting. What were some of the challenges that you faced? Well, I think there were a couple of major challenges that we faced. When we first came to Portugal, and I say we because my wife was a partner in this, I had the title, but she did an incredible job herself, we realized that women in Portugal didn't have the same opportunities as men. Portugal underwent its revolution in 1974 overthrowing a dictatorship. At that time, 1974, not that long ago, women could not only not vote, but women couldn't even travel without the permission of their husbands. Now, when we got there, you had more women getting PhDs than men, more women getting MBAs than men, and women wanted to go into the business world, but they didn't have the role models that the men did. So, we started a program which was based on something my wife had done as an entrepreneur in the United States called Connected Success, which eventually we trained 1,100 women to be entrepreneurs in Portugal and created a network among those women so they could share good ideas. That's something I'm incredibly proud of. As a matter of fact, she right now is in Northern Ireland doing the same thing there with Special Envoy Joe Kennedy for the women in Northern Ireland. But we had some serious issues. The United States had decided to downsize an air base in the Azores. The Azores are in Ireland. You had not just the notion of less servicemen, but you had restaurants, you had dry cleaners, you had hairdressers, you had all the ancillary businesses that depended on the servicemen and women supporting them. If you were going to downsize and reduce the people there, it was going to have a crushing effect on the economy in the Azores. Most of the Portuguese in the United States come from the Azores, so they can relate to that. So we had to find a solution where people had really dug in their heels and we were fortunate that we did. I'm curious to know a little bit about the solution. That seems like an incredible challenge to overcome. Again, the solution came from things I learned as a lawyer. What we did at the time is we got all the stakeholders together in a room so that we could talk about the problem. The decision was made by the United States Air Force in Ramstein Air Base in Germany. It's very easy to be sitting in Germany making a decision when you bring those people to Portugal and you can talk person to person and understand what the real ramifications are. The interesting part of the solution was the ultimate solution didn't come from me or come from the generals. It came from a local official who was a mayor of a tiny town sitting in the room and figuring out a way that we could save those jobs. Those are incredible challenges. I understand that in recognition to this incredible tough work team effort the country was well served with one for the price of one. The current president Marcello Ruelo awarded you with a certain honor. It's interesting. It goes back to the first question that you asked me about the Hall of Fame award. When I was introduced for the Hall of Fame award they said that many lawyers can talk about their most interesting cases. Very few can talk about having received a knighthood from the president of a country which I did. I think in all seriousness what that was about was a recognition that I was very focused on getting out among the people, getting to know the people, to trying to do things as I talked about whether it was lifting up the women of Portugal or helping the economy of Portugal. I think that in a short time three and a half years which is what you have to serve as an ambassador, we made a great impact and that's something I'm very proud of. Ambassador Sherman, we only have less than a minute but we are grateful that you were able to share your many achievements that throughout your life and your career that most people could probably not count on even just half of that or one or some. How does a boy from Brockton grow up to achieve your merits and the career you had? Well, I think it's a combination of a lot of hard work, a lot of luck and being open to opportunities not being afraid to take a chance and that doesn't come from being from Brockton, that could come from being from Roxbury or Cape Cod or anywhere around the country. Ambassador Sherman, thank you so much for joining us today. It was our honor that you could come today. Lucy, the honor is mine. Thank you so much. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]