Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  Columbia would accept up to sixty transfer credits from Oxy toward the 124 needed to graduate, and Phil and Barack each met with assistant dean Frank Ayala to determine which of their Oxy courses satisfied Columbia’s many requirements. Tuition was $3,350 per semester, and with other fees, the cost of a full year was $8,620, independent of food, lodging, and books. Obama may have received some financial aid in the form of federal Pell Grant assistance, and he may have taken out a modest amount of student loans.

  A series of headlines in the Columbia Spectator, the excellent student newspaper, told the story of life for the Columbia undergraduate: “Alienation Is Common for Minority Students,” “Students Label CU Life Depressing,” “Striking Tenants Demand Front-Door Locks.” The second of those stories described “the crime and poverty surrounding the school and the immensity of the university bureaucracy.” One classmate later said, “Columbia was a very isolating place,” and another rued “a culture at the college and in the city that wasn’t exactly nurturing.” Several years later Obama wrote to Boerner, “I am still amazed when I think of what we put up with there” on 109th Street. Living in Manhattan and going to Columbia was nothing at all like that glowing account the Oxy student newspaper had offered up eight months earlier.24

  Luckily there were interesting events to attend. One flyer advertised “A Forum on South Africa—Including the Film The Rising Tide,” with speakers such as David Ndaba, the nom de guerre for Dr. Sam Gulabe, the African National Congress’s representative to the United Nations. Boerner said he and Barack attended that forum, but not a mid-November speech by black Georgia state legislator Julian Bond. The two apartment mates often ate breakfast at Tom’s Restaurant on Broadway at 112th Street, and they sometimes had dinner at nearby Empire Szechuan. Drugs were no part of the depressing scene at 142 W. 109th, but they would go drink beer at the venerable West End bar on Broadway or with Phil’s cousin Peregrine “Pern” Beckman, a Columbia sophomore, at his nearby apartment. To Pern, Phil’s friend seemed “diffident,” a “shy kid who spoke when spoken to” while “nursing a beer.”

  Looming over their daily lives was how unlivable their dire apartment was, especially as winter closed in. They could let their sublease expire on December 7 and simply remain until fall exams concluded on December 23; given New York’s arcane housing code, they could receive no punishment for that brief time. They began searching without success for a place to live in January. Phil had family friends in Brooklyn Heights where he could stay, but they still had no solution for both of them when Phil left to spend Christmas with his parents at their home in London.

  Columbia’s winter break extended from Christmas Eve until spring registration on January 20. Obama spent most of that time in Los Angeles, seeing Wahid Hamid and Paul Carpenter and encountering old friends like Alex McNear when he visited Occidental, whose winter term started two weeks before Columbia’s spring semester. Obama returned to New York on January 15 and slept on the floor of a friend named Ron on the Upper East Side while he again searched for an apartment. At registration, Barack ran into Pern, who gave him Phil’s number in Brooklyn, and when Barack called two nights later, he told Phil he had found only a $250-per-month one-person studio just south of 106th Street that he could soon move into as a sublet.

  On Sunday afternoon, January 24, the day before Columbia’s spring classes began, Barack and Ron went to visit Phil where he was staying, at 11 Cranberry Street in Brooklyn Heights. They drank beer and ate bagels while watching the San Francisco 49ers defeat the Cincinnati Bengals 26–21 in Super Bowl XVI. On Monday Barack was again saddled with Columbia’s core courses and another semester of Spanish. That Friday night, Phil met up with Barack at Columbia; the two then headed downtown on the subway to rendezvous with Ron and his girlfriend at a Lower East Side bar before having dinner at the well-known Odessa restaurant on Avenue A, just across from Tompkins Square Park. Then Barack and Phil headed back to Morningside Heights, and Boerner spent the night on Obama’s floor rather than take the subway back to Brooklyn after midnight. The next Friday Barack and Phil ate an early Chinese dinner before taking the subway to Phil’s place and polishing off a bottle of wine while watching the New Jersey Nets play the Philadelphia 76ers. Barack still occasionally played pickup basketball in Columbia’s Dodge gym; a female graduate student years later remembered him playing pickup soccer on the lawn in front of Columbia’s imposing Butler Library.25

  But Barack’s life during those early months of 1982 was radically different from his daily routine one year earlier. At Oxy, living with Hasan was an almost nonstop party with a band of close friends. Rallies, protests, and political events occurred almost weekly, and the days were filled with energetic debates and conversations in the Cooler. Now, in dreary Morningside Heights, Obama faced a daily schedule of core classes and perhaps a once-a-week meet-up with Phil to have dinner, drink beer, or watch a game. A quarter century later, Obama remembered that time as just “an intense period of study. . . . I spent a lot of time in the library. I didn’t socialize that much. I was like a monk.” He started keeping a journal, less a diary than a descriptive collection of city scenes and characters that caught his eye. In retrospect, he believed it was an “extremely important” period “when I grew as much as I have ever grown intellectually. But it was a very internal growth,” one that left him “painfully alone and really not focused on anything, except maybe thinking a lot.” He had been “comfortable in my solitude, the safest place I knew.”

  “It was a pretty grim and humorless time that I went through,” Obama remembered, an “ascetic” and “hermetic existence . . . I literally went to class, came home, read books, took long walks,” and wrote in his journal. “It’s hard to say what exactly prompted” such a stark change from his attitude toward life both at Oxy and back in Hawaii, Obama told the journalist David Remnick. Yet he gained “a seriousness of purpose that I had lacked before.”

  Spring exams ended by the middle of May, and sometime soon after that, Obama lost both his studio apartment and his security deposit when the actual leaseholder informed him that his sublet was invalid. Thus sometime in early or mid-summer 1982, Barack moved in with Sohale Siddiqi in a two-bedroom apartment at 339 East 94th Street, just west of First Avenue. Siddiqi managed to score the lease on the $450-a-month sixth-floor walk-up by exaggerating his own income, and though Barack was now living on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, their immediate neighborhood was anything but fashionable. Sohale recalled that it was “a scary street,” with a corner gas station “patrolled by this Doberman Pinscher with a beer bottle in his mouth.” Their own building was “a hovel . . . the hallways were dingy. Everything was beat up and gray and dimly lit. The front door didn’t lock completely.” Up in 6A, “you would enter through a kitchen, which would lead into a living room on one side and a bathroom on the other.” The wooden floors “were all warped . . . with big gaps between the planks.” One bedroom “was really a closet with a window.” A friendly footrace was used to determine who got the decent bedroom, and Obama, now a regular runner, won. As on 109th Street, “there was never hot water when you wanted it,” but in contrast the heat was always on, “so we used to have our windows wide open, just to cool down.” Outside Barack’s bedroom window was a fire escape, which Sohale said served as “our balcony.” All in all, it was just “a horrid place.”

  Siddiqi also witnessed a “transformation” from the “fun-loving . . . easygoing” Obama he had met eighteen months earlier in South Pasadena to someone who was now “very serious and less lighthearted.” Yet Barack had a stereo and “a huge record collection. Bob Marley was big, Stevie Wonder . . . also plenty of Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Talking Heads, and this group who I had never heard of before . . . he had at least twelve of their albums,” the Ohio Players. But once Barack arrived on East 94th Street, “I don’t think he bought any more albums . . . or even played the stereo much.” He did have “to remind me a few times to call him Barack” rather than Barry.

 
Sometime soon after Barack moved in with Sohale, his mother Ann and almost twelve-year-old sister Maya arrived in New York from Jakarta, where Ann still worked for the Ford Foundation. They too were struck by the change in the young man they called “Bar.” Maya later recalled that “he seemed more serious. He seemed more pensive. He was reading a great deal.” She believed “he had started taking himself very seriously” and often appeared to have “wrapped himself in his own solitude.” Obama later wrote that he took a summer job “clearing a construction site on the Upper West Side,” and he also described, in a patronizing manner, his mother’s insistence that they see Black Orpheus, a film she had loved as a high school senior twenty years earlier that was playing at a revival theater. Obama told a subsequent interviewer that during that visit “my mother used to tease me and call me Gandhi” because of his newly ascetic life, but Barack did not deny that he had become “deadly serious during those late college years . . . People would invite me to parties, and I’d say, ‘What are you talking about? We’ve got a revolution that has to take place.’”

  Andy Roth, who had lived in Oakland after leaving Eagle Rock, moved to Manhattan in the late spring of 1982 and got an apartment on East 95th Street, hardly two blocks from Barack and Sohale. Siddiqi was nowhere near as political as Chandoo, nor as intellectually curious as the new Obama, but when Andy went for dinner at their apartment with several other Pakistanis, he remembered seeing “a portrait of Bhutto on the wall.”

  The most significant new acquaintance that year was Mir Mahboob Mahmood, known to friends like Sohale, Wahid, and Hasan as “Beenu.” A 1981 graduate of Princeton University, Beenu was working as a paralegal in Manhattan while preparing to attend law school. At Princeton, Beenu had written a one-hundred-plus-page senior thesis on Mohandas Gandhi, and he was hugely influenced by the teaching of political theorist Sheldon Wolin. As Beenu remembered it, he and Barack began an on-and-off program of reading and discussing a half a dozen or so significant books, interrupted partly by Beenu’s one year of graduate study in political science at Johns Hopkins University. Beenu reconstructed their reading list as beginning with John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1690), then Albert O. Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (1977), followed by Barrington Moore Jr.’s famous The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966) and E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (1939).26

  At Oxy in 1980–81, Andy Roth had been one of the many men interested in Alex McNear. When Alex returned to her mother’s apartment at 21 East 90th Street in June 1982 to spend the summer taking a theater course at NYU and interning at a publishing company, they got in touch, and whether from Andy or another Oxy friend, Alex got Barack’s phone number and called him. Sometime in midsummer, they had dinner at an Italian restaurant on Lexington Avenue, and although that evening remained chaste, according to Alex, they “started to see a lot of each other” that summer, becoming “really very close.”

  Alex’s parents had divorced when she was four years old. Her father had remained in Chicago, and her mother, originally from Wisconsin, got a graduate degree from UW–Madison before moving to New York. Her comfortable apartment, with its library of “thousands of books” in a tall building just off Madison Avenue, was a world away from Barack and Sohale’s dismal quarters only eight blocks to the northeast. Alex remembers that apartment as “sparsely decorated” with “very little furniture” and recalls “opening the refrigerator and seeing like virtually nothing in there.”

  Understandably Alex and Barack “didn’t spend a lot of time there,” and apart from one visit with Phil and a party that also included Andy, they socialized only with each other. After going out to dinner, a museum, or a Broadway play like Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold” . . . and the Boys, about South African apartheid, “he’d come over, and we’d stay at my apartment.” Barack “did not seem like someone who was at all experienced” or indeed “terribly driven,” but his “shyness” and “lack of experience” matched the novelty of their intimacy for her too.27

  Barack’s senior-year classes at Columbia began on September 8. One entering freshman remembered Obama as a fellow student in his yearlong Contemporary Civilization core course, and a junior political science major recalled chatting with Barack a number of times in a hallway in the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) building before one or another political science class. Barack, Phil, and Phil’s cousin Pern all enrolled in C3207, Modern Fiction, taught by Edward Said, a Palestinian American literary scholar whom Columbia’s student newspaper months earlier had called a “bitter” critic of Israel at “a largely Jewish university.” Said would “come in and ramble on for an hour about who knows what,” Pern remembered. The reading list for the twice-a-week, one-hundred-student class included Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, and William Faulkner. Pern thought Said could be “brilliant,” and “when he was focused, he was incredible.” But preparing for class was clearly not one of Said’s priorities, and Phil and Barack did not share Pern’s opinion. “We did not think highly of Said,” Phil recounted. “We thought his class was pretty worthless.”

  Having settled on political science as his major, Barack had to take a two-semester senior colloquium and seminar in one of the department’s four subfields. Barack’s course credits fit best with international relations, and he and seven fellow seniors ended up in W3811x and y, taught by Michael L. Baron. A young instructor who had completed his Columbia Ph.D. dissertation on U.S. policy toward China after World War II two years earlier, Baron was returning to Columbia after a year of teaching in Beijing. Baron’s dissertation had argued that President Harry S. Truman “was an activist in foreign policy, basing decisions primarily on personal proclivities,” and this course focused on U.S. foreign policy decision-making rather than a particular topical area.

  The assigned readings during the fall semester analyzed how past important decisions had been made: the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the fall 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and the escalation of the Vietnam War. Readings included works by Joseph Nye and Ernest May, as well as Irving Janis’s famous 1972 Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes. Baron recalled that “we definitely focused on groupthink.” Throughout the fall, their focus was historical and practical, not theoretical: “What do you need to do to make a good decision? Which presidents were making good decisions,” first and foremost by “taking advice from people outside the inner circle?”

  Baron as well as two other students in the small class recall Obama as a standout performer. “He was a very bright student,” Baron said years later, “clearly one of the top one or two students in the class.” One classmate remembered Barack as “a very, very active participant” in class discussions, and another who “didn’t think the seminar was that great” nonetheless was “impressed with Barack. . . . There was a maturity about what he said and how he said it” that surpassed the comments offered by most if not all of his fellow seniors.

  One way of satisfying half of Columbia’s science requirement was Elementary Physics, C1001x, taught by Gerald Feinberg, a professor in his late forties who had taught at Columbia for more than twenty years. The catalog described the course as “an introduction to physics for students with no previous background in physics” and stated that “very little mathematics is used.” Indeed, Feinberg’s popular 1977 book, What Is the World Made Of? Atoms, Leptons, Quarks, and Other Tantalizing Particles, which Feinberg assigned that fall, declared, “I am convinced that a substantial comprehension of modern physics can be obtained without advanced mathematical training.” That book, like Feinberg’s syllabus, focused on “the study of atoms and of their subatomic constituents.” It explained quantum theory, the special theory of relativity, and especially particle physics, “the main feature of the physics of the last twenty-five ye
ars.” The course was essentially “a history of physics,” Feinberg’s son Jeremy recalled from personal experience, and his dad “called it physics for poets.”28

  In mid-September, Alex McNear left Manhattan to return to Oxy for the fall quarter, and on September 26, Barack sent her a long letter reporting on his first two weeks of classes after receiving a note from her. “I sit in the campus cafe drinking V-8 juice and listening to a badly scratched opera being broadcast. I am taking a break from studying a theoretical analysis of strategic deterrence in the international arena, muddling through concepts like first strike, mutual assured destruction, nuclear payload, and other such elaborated madness. So forgive the dryness and confusion that have undoubtedly rubbed off.”

  Describing himself as trying to stretch “across as many disciplines as possible,” Obama sounded as if he had sat in on a number of courses while considering which ones to take. “My favorite so far is a physics course for non-mathematicians that I’m taking to fulfill the science requirement. We study electrons, neutrons, quarks, electromagnetic fields and other tantalizing phenomenon under the auspice of a Professor Fienberg [sic]. He embodies every stereotype of a science professor from the bow-tie to the sparse, balding hair combed back and monotonous Midwestern twang. Behind the thick glasses that pinch his nose, one can sense the passion he brings to the topic and the quiet, unobtrusive cockiness you find in scientists, certain that no one knows any more than they do.”

  Obama’s descriptive sketch of Feinberg confirms the impression that Alex and Phil each had of Barack in 1982: that he wanted very much to become a writer. Presented with that depiction of his father years later, Jeremy Feinberg was impressed: “the physical description . . . is spot-on” and even Obama’s characterization of his voice was accurate. In Barack’s letter, he then cited what he called “the frustrations of studying men and their frequently dingy institutions” while adding that “the fact that of course the knowledge I absorb in the class facilitates nuclear war prevents a real clean break.”