A second course Obama took that spring was International Monetary Theory and Policy, taught by Maurice Obstfeld, a young associate professor of economics who had received his Ph.D. at MIT four years earlier. Barack had already taken Intermediate Macroeconomics, and Obstfeld’s class focused on “the evolution of the world monetary system since 1945” and “monetary problems in international trade.” The third upper-level elective he chose was Sociology W3229y, State Socialist Societies, taught by Andrew G. Walder, a brand-new assistant professor in his first year of teaching who had earned his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 1981. Walder’s syllabus explained that the course would be “an analysis of state socialism as a system. The primary focus will be on the central features of these societies that distinguish them from others,” i.e., “the core features of state socialism,” and “we will spend most of the term comparing China and the Soviet Union.”
Walder recommended that students purchase seven books from which most of the required reading would be drawn, and recommended half a dozen others. The semester began with “The Origins of Russian and Chinese Communism,” and students read Alex Nove’s Stalinism and After, a survey of Soviet political history that focused on how deadly Soviet rule had proven for the regime’s many victims, including the early Bolsheviks. The second major topic was “The Communist Party as an Organization,” and over several weeks students read Elizabeth Pond’s From the Yaroslavsky Station: Russia Perceived, a journalistic work structured around the author’s rich and lengthy Trans-Siberian Railway journey.
Prior to Walder’s seven-to-ten-page typed, take-home midterm exam, the class covered “The Communist Party as a Status Group” and “Organized Surveillance and Repression.” Students read Hedrick Smith’s well-known The Russians as well as Jonathan Unger’s new Education Under Mao. Fox Butterfield’s China: Alive in the Bitter Sea, Miklos Haraszti’s A Worker in a Workers’ State, and Roy Medvedev’s Let History Judge were three other titles on the syllabus. The second half of the semester covered topics such as “Bureaucracy, Office-Holding, and Corruption” as well as “Social Stratification and Inequality.” Everyone read David Lane’s The End of Social Inequality? Class, Status and Power Under State Socialism, which argues that “inequality is a characteristic of state-socialist society as it is of the capitalist.”
The final assigned reading prior to Walder’s ten-to-twelve-page typed, take-home final exam was Milovan Djilas’s 1957 classic The New Class. Smuggled out of Yugoslavia and published in the U.S. while the author languished in a political prison, the book’s publication was “an immediate sensation,” according to the New York Times. Djilas in the late 1940s had served as Yugoslavian ruler Josip Broz Tito’s personal intermediary to Joseph Stalin, but he was expelled from Yugoslavia’s Communist Party after expressing heretical thoughts. His best-selling book gave voice to those insights. Once a Communist Party “has consolidated its power, party membership means that one belongs to a privileged class. And at the core of the party are the all-powerful exploiters and masters.” Experiencing that in Yugoslavia had transformed Djilas into a democratic socialist. “To the extent that one class, party, or leader stifles criticism completely, or holds absolute power, it or he inevitably falls into an unrealistic, egotistical, and pretentious judgment of reality.”
The New Class was a powerful way to end a semester, or indeed to complete one’s undergraduate education. As one student said with some understatement years later, “Walder was anything but a Marxist,” and Walder himself drily observed that what his syllabus presented “was not a flattering portrayal of political and social life in these now-thankfully defunct systems.” Only an extreme control freak would withhold his academic transcripts from public view simply so as to avoid any public discussion of what possible ideological influence either Walder’s impressive reading list or Len Davis’s teaching about the political uses of fiction might have had upon an intellectually hungry twenty-one-year-old mind.35
Several weeks into that spring semester, Obama wrote another lengthy letter to Alex McNear in Eagle Rock. “I run every other day up at the small indoor track” at Columbia, a bit of news that Barack then spun into a lengthy descriptive portrait of the act of running. “After getting clean, I go to the Greek coffee shop . . . and have the best bran muffin in New York City—dark and fibrous . . . and coffee and a glass of water. I light a cigarette, make some talk with the Ethiopian cashier with big murky eyes and the sly smile and a small tattoo on her right hand in foreign code.”
Rereading this decades later, McNear wondered whether her letters to Barack “were just as pretentious . . . equally as convolutedly long and laborious.” Barack wrote, “I enjoyed your letter. I like the way you use words,” and then proceeded to a long disquisition on the concept of resistance against a “bankrupt” and “distorted system. . . . But people are busy keeping mouths fed and surroundings intact, and it is left to the obsessed ones like us to make the alternatives more tangible . . . so that resistance and destruction arrive in the form of creation.” He then paused to say “excuse the sermons,” but “I also have thought about us and conclude that I like what we have. . . . Perhaps what I’ve been after is a correspondence, a union, yes—but never exclusive, cocoon-like, ingrown. Rather something outwards, a point of extension.”
With graduation approaching, he had more mundane issues to discuss. “I’ve been sending out letters to development and social services agencies, as well as a few publications, so I should find out in the next few months what I have to work with next year. Classes are the average fare. A class called Novel and Ideology has an interesting reading list covering several of the things we spoke of” when Barack was in Los Angeles. “Of what I’ve read so far I recommend Marxism and Literature by Raymond Williams. A lot of it is simplification, but it generally has a pretty good aim at some Marxist applications of cultural study. Anyway, it might be a good point of departure for further haranguing between us.”
Obama then ends the letter, but the next day he added a long postscript that began by mentioning homeless panhandlers he often saw. “I play with words and work pretty patterns in my head, but the hole is dark and deep below, immeasurably deep. Know that it’s always there, rats nibbling at the foundations, and it can set me to tremble.” Then he thought to respond to something Alex had said about T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land and told her to read Eliot’s 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” as well as his Four Quartets. “Remember how I said there’s a certain brand of conservatism I respect more than bourgeois liberalism.” Barack finally concluded by saying, “I can’t mobilize my thoughts right now, so . . . I leave you to piece together this jumble.”36
The label “jumble” could also apply to an article Barack submitted to Sundial, a weekly Columbia student newsmagazine. Just prior to its publication, he wrote to Phil Boerner in Arkansas and mentioned he had “been sending out some letters of inquiry to some social service organizations and will also be making up a resume (no comment) soon. I’ve also written an article for the Sundial purely for calculated reasons of beefing up the thing. No keeping your hands clean, eh.”
The article, titled “Breaking the War Mentality,” began by asserting that “The more sensitive among us struggle to extrapolate experiences of war from our everyday experience, discussing the latest mortality statistics from Guatemala, sensitizing ourselves to our parents’ wartime memories, or incorporating into our frameworks of reality as depicted by a Mailer or a Coppola. But the taste of war—the sounds and chill, the dead bodies, are remote and far removed. We know that wars have occurred, will occur, are occurring, but bringing such experiences down into our hearts, and taking continual, tangible steps to prevent war, becomes a difficult task.”
Following that introduction, Obama cited what he called “the growing threat of war” while profiling the first of two campus antinuclear groups, Arms Race Alternatives. “Generally, the narrow focus of the Freeze movement as well as academic discussions of fi
rst versus second strike capabilities, suit the military-industrial interests, as they continue adding to their billion dollar erector sets,” he opined. “One is forced to wonder whether disarmament or arms control issues, severed from economic and political issues, might be another instance of focusing on the symptoms of a problem instead of the disease itself.”
Obama also referenced a recently adopted federal law, set to take effect on July 1, that required every male recipient of federal student aid to demonstrate that he had registered for the draft. Some voices were calling for noncompliance, and Obama observed that “an estimated half-million non-registrants can definitely be a powerful signal” that could herald a “future mobilization against the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country.” He then described the second campus group, Students Against Militarism. Declaring that “perhaps the essential goodness of humanity is an arguable proposition,” Barack contended that “the most pervasive malady of the collegiate system specifically, and the American experience generally, is that elaborate patterns of knowledge and theory have been disembodied from individual choices and government policy.” He ended by commending both groups, saying that by trying to “enhance the possibility of a decent world, they may help deprive us of a spectacular experience—that of war.”
New Yorker editor David Remnick would later characterize Obama’s article as “muddled,” but when it returned to public view twenty-six years after it was first published, it generated astonishingly little discussion of what it said about the political views Obama had held on the cusp of his graduation from college. In his letter to Phil, Barack belittled how “school is just making the same motions, long stretches of numbness punctuated with the occasional insight.” Referencing their disappointing fall semester course, he complained that “Said still didn’t have the grades out for his class until a month into the term, and he cancelled his second term class, so we should feel justified in labelling him a flake.”
As he had in his earlier letter to Alex, Barack singled out Davis’s Ideology and the Novel as an “interesting” course, one “where I make cutting remarks to bourgeois English majors and can get away with it.” But overall, “nothing significant, Philip. Life rolls on, and I feel a growing competence and maturity.” After insulting what he called Phil’s “sojourn to Buttfuck, Arkansas,” Barack closed by saying, “Will get back to you when I know my location for next year.”37
In Boerner’s absence, Barack had been spending time with old Oxy friend Andy Roth, who was working at the John Wiley publishing house. On Friday, April 1, he and Andy attended the first day of the inaugural Socialist Scholars Conference, held at the famous Cooper Union. Roth remembered them both attending an “interesting” talk by sociologist Bogdan Denitch, one of the most committed leaders of Democratic Socialists of America. But rather than attend the conference’s second day, Barack wrote another long letter to Alex McNear. “There are moments of uncertainty in everything that I believe; it’s that very uncertainty that keeps my head alive,” Barack explained. “In pursuit of such hopes, I attended a socialist scholars conference yesterday with Andy. A generally collegiate affair with a lot of vague discourse and bombast. Still, I was pleasantly surprised at the large turnout, and the flashes of insight and seriousness amongst the participants. As I told Andy, one gets the feeling that the stage is being set, that conduits of word and spirit are being layed across diverse minds—feminists, black nationalists, romantics. What remains to be had is a script, a crystallization of events. Until that time a pervasive mood of unreality hangs over such events, a mood that you can see the people fighting against in their eyes, their tone.”
A decade later Obama wrote passingly but imprecisely about “the socialist conferences I sometimes attended at Cooper Union.” His erroneous use of the plural gave future critics fodder to imagine that the “impact of these conferences on Obama was immense” and that listening to Denitch and similar speakers had “turned out to be Obama’s life-defining experience,” a notion that his letter the very next day to Alex utterly rebuts.38
At the outset of that letter, Barack wrote of “churning out assignments” on “state communism” and “the international monetary system” before pausing to reflect on “the wilderness we call life” while smoking and drinking scotch. He reported that he had given his papers to “an elderly woman with a hair-lip and hoarse voice” for typing. This lady was Miss Diane Dee, who was a famous figure around Columbia for decades. A later New York Times profile said “her advertising flyers” are “indigenous to campus walls,” but that her “unkempt hair” and “tired face” made her seem “half-crazed.” One 1983 Columbia graduate believed “she was crazy,” and Gerald Feinberg’s son Jeremy recalled her as “a colorful character—someone I’d expect to appear in a conspiracy theory movie or a Michael Moore film, or both.”
Barack told Alex that Miss Dee was someone “upon whom my graduation depends,” and he was starting to panic because she “has missed two deadlines so far and now seems to have disappeared . . . no one has answered the phone at her apartment for four days.” He worried that “she’s a mad woman who lures unsuspecting undergraduate papers into her home and then burns them, or uses them to line the bottom of the goldfinch cage.” Following his description of the Socialist Scholars Conference, Barack told Alex that a “sense of unreality describes my position of late. I feel sunk in that long corridor between old values, actions, modes of thought, and those that I seek, that I work towards . . . this ambivalence is acted out in my non-decision as yet about next year” following graduation.39
Three days after Obama wrote that letter, Columbia’s Coalition for a Free South Africa, in tandem with Students for a Democratic Campus, held a divestment rally outside Low Library, Columbia’s administration building. Student leaders Danny Armstrong and Barbara Ransby had been pressing the issue for months, and the scheduling of a university board of trustees meeting on the fifteenth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination offered an occasion for an afternoon protest. Barack convinced his largely apolitical apartment mate Sohale Siddiqi to attend the rally with him. But Siddiqi thought that compared to the black New Yorkers Siddiqi knew from the restaurant where he worked, “Barack didn’t seem like one of them.” Obama “was soft-spoken and gentle” and used “clean language.” Indeed, “I didn’t consider him American,” never mind African American. Siddiqi believed Barack “seemed like an international individual.”
Siddiqi recalls having witnessed an intensifying change in Barack over the preceding eight months. “He had kind of gone into a bit of a shell and wasn’t as talkative or outgoing as in his earlier days,” Sohale said. When Barack did speak, “he’d give me lectures” about “the plight of the poor” and downtrodden. “He seemed very troubled by it,” and “I would ask him why he was so serious.” Sohale’s interest in drinking, picking up women, and enjoying cocaine held little appeal for the newly abstemious Barack. “He took himself too seriously,” Sohale felt, and “I would find him ponderous and dull and lecturing.”
The April 4 rally drew a disappointing crowd of about a hundred, but afterward a core group of about fifteen student coalition members kept up a 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. weekday vigil to highlight Columbia’s refusal to divest. Barack was not among them, and few of Columbia and Barnard’s black undergraduates from 1981 to 1983 have any recollection of Barack Obama. Coalition leader Danny Armstrong said, “I recall seeing Obama on campus” but never interacted with him. Barbara Ransby, a graduate student who managed the coalition’s contact list and chaired most of its meetings, had “utterly no recollection of Obama.” Verna Bigger Myers, president of the Black Students’ Organization (BSO) in 1981–82, remembered that on a campus with so few minority undergraduates, “all the black people see the other black people” even if they did not really know them. Myers’s close friend Janis Hardiman, who a decade later would be Obama’s sister-in-law, remembered Barack as “sort of a phantom who just kind of walked into” BSO m
eetings but “did not have an active role” or participate in any the group’s activities.
Wayne Weddington, a junior in 1982–83, remembers seeing Obama at BSO meetings, and Darwin Malloy, a year ahead of Obama, recalled meeting him in the cafeteria in John Jay Hall but agrees that “most people would only remember him as a familiar face.” Malloy believed his friend Gerrard Bushell “probably had more interaction with him than anyone,” but Bushell said he “would see him periodically” and “remember him by face” but no more.
Obama would dramatically exaggerate his involvement in Columbia’s divestment activism on several occasions, telling one interviewer that “I was a leader on these issues both at Occidental and at Columbia.” Talking about his two years there to a second questioner, Obama asserted that “while I was on campus, I was very active in a number of student movements” and particularly “I was very active in the divestment movement on campus.” Several years later, on his first visit to South Africa, Obama declared that “I became deeply involved with the divestment movement” and “I remember meeting with a group of ANC leaders” or at least “ANC members one day in New York City.” There are no contemporary records or other participants’ memories that attest to any such encounter.
Columbia’s African American students were also acutely aware that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences included only four black professors. By far the most visible was the handsome, bow-tie-wearing Charles V. Hamilton, best known as the coauthor of Stokely Carmichael’s 1967 book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. Hamilton had arrived at Columbia in 1969, was named to a chaired professorship two years later, and in 1982 was the recipient of the university’s award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. “Everyone knew who Hamilton was,” one 1983 political science major recalled. In addition, as one younger colleague said, “Hamilton was always approachable. The hallway outside his office at the southwest end of the SIPA building was often filled with students.”
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