Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  Asked two decades later what he recalled from his time at BI, Barack answered “the coldness of capitalism.” He told an earlier questioner, “I did that for one year to the day,” a clear indicator of his desire to leave that world for something he found more fulfilling. But giving up his BI paycheck meant leaving the apartment on West 114th Street, and on the weekend of December 1 and 2, Barack temporarily moved in with Genevieve on the top floor of 640 2nd Street in Park Slope.

  Earlier in the fall, they had taken the bus to her family’s estate in Norfolk, Connecticut, where they slept in an open-air cottage and joined Genevieve’s mother and stepfather for one meal. Barack later recounted paddling a canoe on a nearby pond, and a photo shows a happy and relaxed young couple outdoors in the morning sun. Their first week together in Genevieve’s cramped quarters produced minor irritations, but a nice weekend then included seeing the Eddie Murphy film Beverly Hills Cop in downtown Brooklyn. Genevieve was the only white person in the audience, but she says she and Barack never experienced any hostility or rudeness toward them as an interracial couple.

  In the days just before Barack left to spend the holidays in Honolulu, their feelings of being in each other’s way multiplied, with Barack saying, “I know it’s irritating to have me here,” and telling Genevieve that she was being “impatient and domineering.” But they exchanged Christmas gifts, with Barack embarrassed when Genevieve bought an expensive white Aran cable-knit wool sweater for him at Saks Fifth Avenue. When he asked her what she wanted, Genevieve suggested lingerie, which she says “threw him into an absolute tailspin” before he returned with something that Genevieve privately thought was “incredibly tame.”54

  A week before Christmas, Obama flew to Honolulu, and he spent much of his time in transit reading a book by Studs Terkel, most likely his newly published The Good War: An Oral History of World War II. On New Year’s Day, he wrote to Genevieve that “my trip has progressed without any notable events” but that “I was foolish to think that I’d have the time or energy to work on my writing” in Hawaii because “reacquainting myself with the family has proven to be a fulltime job . . . they all have used me as a sounding board for all sorts of conflicts and emotions that have previously stayed below the surface. . . . I’ve been the catalyst for tears, confessions, ruminations, and accusations.”

  Genevieve had never met any of Barack’s family, but he offered her sketches of them all. “My mother is as I last saw her, gregarious and sensitive, although she’s undergoing some difficult changes after uprooting herself from Indonesia” to live in a visibly humble cinder-block apartment building at 1512 Spreckels Street, where she and fourteen-year-old Maya shared the two-bedroom unit 402, less than a block from Maya’s ninth-grade classrooms at Punahou.

  “My grandfather,” Barack went on, now age sixty-six and retired, “appears immutable. He looks more robust than ever, even while eating donuts, smoking a cigarette, and drinking whiskey simultaneously. My grandmother is doing less well—she continues to drink herself into oblivion,” indeed “incoherence,” when not working. “Her unhappiness saddens me deeply. . . . It may be my helplessness in the face of her problem that angers me more than the problem itself. But she retires next year, and if the fortitude she’s channeled exclusively into her work can’t be transferred into the remainder of her life, not much life will remain.” With Maya, “I watch with joy her development into a fine person,” but being back in the all too familiar tenth-floor apartment at 1617 South Beretania meant that “ghosts of myself and others in my past lurk around every corner.”

  Obama wrote that his relatives all “think I’m too somber. . . . My mother explains that I was normal until 14, from there went directly to 35.” Stan joked that Barack is “as mean to himself as he is to everyone else. The only difference is he likes it.” But Obama was clearly discomforted by this return to his childhood surroundings. “I have trouble fitting into these Island Ways,” he told Genevieve. Within blocks were “the apartment house where I was conceived . . . the hospital where I was born . . . and the school where I spent a third of my life.” But nonetheless “I’m displaced here, it’s not where I belong—sometimes I think my only home is on the road towards expectations, leaving what’s known, complete, behind. I no longer find that condition romantic—at times I resent it deeply—but I accept it.”

  That sentence was as self-revealing as any Obama had ever written, but the contrast between “the incredible isolation of people here” in far-off Hawaii and “the nervous energy or self-consciousness you find in New York” was discombobulating. “My contradictory feeling for Hawaii reflects itself in my relationship with Bobby, who embodies the beauty and limitations of the place. He’s making a comfortable living running a concession at a local high-school, and supplements his income with cash from a few big cocaine deals he was involved with last year”—an aspect of a best friend’s life that was unobjectionable only if you viewed cocaine use itself as unremarkable.

  Obama observed that Titcomb “jokes about his appetite for food and women, exhibiting a charm and flair in everything he does, but a sustained commitment or depth in nothing.” But Barack added, “He loves me and I love him, but he senses different priorities in me now,” though “I admire and envy his easy manner and fluid grace.” One day the two old friends went scuba diving two miles off Oahu, fifty feet down. On another, Ann’s mentor Alice Dewey “argued in husky tones with me and a few other of my mother’s friends over politics, sexual relations, art and the economy.” Only “after five hours and four cups of coffee” did Barack drive her home.

  Alluding most likely to how they had met exactly one year earlier, Barack asked Genevieve, “How did you spend New Year’s Eve? Mine was not as eventful as the last one.” He told her he was flying back to New York on January 22 and would likely stay with Hasan and his cousin Ahmed at the Eagle Warehouse apartment “until I find a place. I confess to a fear of failing to find a useful gig for myself upon my return, but have no thoughts of doing anything else. I expect the transition may be tough on me,” as his prior attempts to obtain a politically satisfying job had failed, “but I expect you to have some patience with my foolishness and kick me when I get out of line. I miss you very much, and hope your enthusiasm for school stays high.” He signed off “Love, Barack.”

  The same day Barack wrote that letter to Genevieve, his mother Ann privately recorded her own plans for the New Year. Many of her jottings concerned the multiple debts she owed her parents, including $1,764 per semester for Maya’s Punahou tuition, and $175 for an airplane ticket for “Barry.” The “$4,846 withdrawn from account by Toot” was later updated with “$3,940 repaid 2/6/85.” A long numerical “People List” began with Maya as #1, Ann’s Indonesian lover Adi Sasono #2, “Bar” #3, her parents #s 4 and 5, and included former brother-in-law Omar Obama as #175. The “Long Range Goals” she listed on New Year’s Day began “1. Finish Ph.D. 2. 60K 3. In shape 4. Remarry 5. Another culture 6. House + land 7. Pay off debts (taxes) 8. Memoirs of Indon. 9. Spir. develop (ilmu batin) 10. Raise Maya well 11. Continuing constructive dialogue w/ Barry.”55

  Once Obama returned on January 22, Genevieve was disappointed that having him back in her daily life was “so disruptive, instead of a sweet re-meeting.” Given how challenging teaching first grade at PS 133 was, “I actually find his interruption of my focus on school as damaging, disconcerting,” but “he’s really into travelling his path with concentrated determination as well. It is still true that I want to live alone.” Obama later wrote of refusing the offer of a well-paid job from an impressive black man who headed a New York City civil rights group and had recently dined at the White House with “Jack,” the secretary of housing and urban development. Arthur H. Barnes headed up the New York Urban Coalition, but African American New Yorker Samuel R. Pierce was HUD secretary; only four years later did Jack Kemp succeed him.

  Instead Obama focused on a job ad from the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG), for its Project Coordi
nator post at the City College of New York (CCNY) in West Harlem. NYPIRG, founded in 1973, was based on a campus chapter model first outlined in Action for a Change. A Student’s Manual for Public Interest Organizing, a 1971 book written by famous consumer advocate Ralph Nader and three coauthors, one of whom, Donald K. Ross, became NYPIRG’s initial executive director. By 1985 NYPIRG had chapters at most campuses of New York State’s two public college systems, the predominantly white State University of New York (SUNY) and the largely minority City University of New York (CUNY). Campus referenda that authorized a $2-per-student-per-semester fee provided NYPIRG’s financial base.

  The project coordinator post paid only about $9,200, half of what Barack had been making at BI, and the CCNY job was open at midyear because of the departure of a young woman whose fall tenure had been unsuccessful. Yet the CCNY chapter boasted one of NYPIRG’s most experienced student leaders, Buffalo native Diana Mitsu Klos, who had moved to New York City eighteen months earlier upon being elected NYPIRG’s student board chair for the 1983–84 academic year. NYPIRG’s campus projects statewide were overseen by Chris Meyer, and 1983 Yale graduate Eileen Hershenov supervised CCNY and other Manhattan chapters from NYPIRG’s tumbledown office at 9 Murray Street in lower Manhattan. On some day in late January or early February, Obama appeared there for a job interview with Hershenov and Meyer, who were “enormously impressed” with him, particularly since NYPIRG was “desperate to diversify” its predominantly white staff, especially at such a heavily minority campus as CCNY.

  Obama’s hiring was all but immediate, as CCNY’s spring semester classes began on Monday, February 4. Eileen accompanied him up to City and introduced him to Diana Klos and seven or eight other core chapter members, including Alison Kelley, who thought Obama was “very poised, very together” right from day one. The NYPIRG chapter had a small office with desks and a telephone in a homely metal trailer known as the Math Hut that sat between CCNY’s iconic Shepard Hall and the college’s low-rise administration building south of 140th Street on the east side of Convent Avenue, just across from the North Academic Center (NAC), a hulking modern gray-brick behemoth that housed City’s humanities and social science departments.

  The key to NYPIRG’s student recruitment efforts was “class raps,” where the project coordinator would ask faculty members to give up five minutes of class time so that students could hear a brief pitch about NYPIRG. As of February 1985, NYPIRG’s top statewide issue was its Toxic Victims Access to Justice Campaign, which sought passage of state legislation that would allow women and their offspring who had been harmed by the synthetic estrogen DES to file civil damage suits. New York was one of only seven states where such a right to sue did not exist, and generating citizen pressure on state legislators was a major focus of Hershenov and her colleagues’ work.

  Barack and Diana were present in NYPIRG’s trailer office every day, and throughout February they concentrated on doing as many “class raps” as possible in advance of a late February “general interest meeting” intended to attract several hundred students. In some departments, like African American Studies, where senior professors like Leonard Jeffries Jr. and Eugenia “Sister” Bain were notorious for showing up late, if at all, for many scheduled classes, getting “class rap” time was easy. In others, like Political Science, Barack’s efforts met with mixed success. Frances Fox Piven, who taught Politics and the Welfare State, and Ned Schneier, whose Congress and the Legislative Process also met on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, both said yes. A young associate professor teaching civil rights and civil liberties would have been less amenable, replying that it was inappropriate to sacrifice classroom time for nonacademic matters.

  Like all CUNY colleges, CCNY was entirely a commuter campus, and one with “nowhere to hang out anywhere near there,” as Alison Kelley recalled, so generating student participation in such a setting was a considerable challenge. Eileen Hershenov pitched in at least one day a week, and every Friday Obama joined project coordinators from NYPIRG’s ten other southern New York schools for an afternoon staff meeting at 9 Murray Street. NYPIRG had an active relationship with Saul Alinsky’s inheritors at the Industrial Areas Foundation, and one Friday Michael Gecan, one of IAF’s four top organizers, spoke to the group and also spoke individually with Obama.

  Eileen Hershenov was Barack’s closest staff colleague, and they had several conversations about different models of organizing. She had read Clayborne Carson’s 1981 history of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), In Struggle, and could remember even two decades later at least one conversation with Obama about SNCC’s Mississippi grassroots organizing, which Bob Moses came to personify. “It was a very abstract intellectual conversation that I had with him,” she recalled, one that contrasted SNCC’s approach versus charismatic leaders, but all toward the end of “how do you empower people?”56

  Even with his full-time weekday job up at CCNY, Obama spent all of February and early March splitting his time between Hasan’s apartment below the Brooklyn Bridge and Genevieve’s top-floor apartment in Park Slope, quite a commute on New York’s far from reliable subways. “Who is this boy/man/person, Barack Obama?” Genevieve wrote in her journal in early February. “We communicate, we make love, we talk, we laugh. I insulted him the other night—a retaliatory ‘fuck you’” for his complaining about Genevieve “always wimping out on dinners with the gang” or saying “You stay, I’m leaving” as a night drew on. “Both of us feeling dissatisfied, wanting something more—but he from himself, and me from the pair of us. . . . I don’t really know or understand how he feels, privately, about me, us,” given his “veiled withholding.”

  The next day she wrote that “since I’ve known him, he has not yet developed a concrete sense of direction,” and in retrospect Genevieve remembered that Barack “came back from Hawaii definitely exuding impatience and frustration and dissatisfaction with the life he was leading.” She was increasingly stressed by her teaching and by the shared space at 640 2nd Street. In mid-March her unhappiness led Barack to remark, “You like to make trouble.” When that led to tears, Genevieve wrote that her own emotional insecurity “all relates back to my father, and his ‘abandonment’ of me and wanting desperately to have someone love me like a father.” But she also believed that “all of this insecurity” is “a product of the conversation” she and Barack had had “about living together,” coupled with all of the “distance on his part.” Before the end of March, Genevieve found a better apartment at 481 Warren Street #4A in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill neighborhood.

  Obama was still in touch with Oxy friends Phil Boerner and Andy Roth, and by early 1985 Andy was living with musician friend Keith Patchel in an informal sublet at 350 West 48th Street in Manhattan’s rough Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. Patchel had left for Sweden at the first of the year to work on a record with his friend Richard Lloyd, a member of the underground band Television, and in March Andy was headed to Managua, Nicaragua, for more than two months. Apartment 4E had been home to the grandparents of neighbor Nick Martakis, a friend of Television’s manager, and Keith and Andy simply paid Nick $200 or $250 a month in cash—“there was no lease” and “everything was on the down-low,” Keith explained. “Keith and I were expected to keep a low profile,” Andy remembered, and even incoming mail had to be addressed “c/o Martakis.” The building was “decrepit,” a step down even from Sohale’s apartment on East 94th Street, but it was relatively spacious. It was also a shorter subway trip to CCNY in West Harlem, and on Sunday, March 31, Barack moved in there, while continuing to spend each weekend at Genevieve’s Warren Street apartment in Brooklyn.

  Two visitors whom Barack had met two years earlier in Jakarta—his mother Ann’s anthropologist friends Pete Vayda and Tim Jessup—came for dinner one weekend. Tim was Genevieve’s older stepbrother—the son of her stepfather, Phil Jessup. Barack did not say much to Genevieve about his NYPIRG work, and he never introduced her to any staff or students: “that compartmentalizing thing,”
she later remarked. Genevieve continued to wrestle with her own issues, and in mid-April wrote in her journal, “I am making a commitment here and now to stop smoking pot. I must. Because I am debilitating myself.”

  Genevieve’s ongoing anxieties about teaching were always close to the surface. One mid-April weekend Genevieve told Barack that the older teachers at PS 133 had said, “Just stick in there. Nobody has a good first year, and the pension’s really good.” That pension reference so offended Barack he almost yelled in response. “It just really set him off. I had never seen him so upset,” Genevieve recounted. “He was almost thumping the table he was so upset—the idea that you would sell out for security” made him “so angry.” The next weekend Genevieve and Barack walked from Boerum Hill into Brooklyn Heights, and by Sunday afternoon, he was “acting a tad hostile. When he talks of enjoying being alone, I wonder that he so regularly attends this weekend pattern of ours,” she recorded.57