Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  In Boerum Hill, Genevieve mourned the departure of a man she would never see again, “sitting in a chair weeping about the fact that he had left.” She wrote in her journal, “So. Alone again . . . Barack’s leaving—now being goneness.” A chapter in both of their lives had closed, and for Barack a brand-new one was about to open.60

  “Around 9:00PM, too tired to drive further,” Barack turned off of I-80 at the last exit before the Ohio state line. Leaving the interstate, a local highway afforded an easy right turn onto South Hermitage Road. A Holiday Inn was brightly visible, but so was a sign advertising a budget motel a few hundred yards farther north, on the west side of the road across from the Tam O’Shanter Golf Course. Less than eight weeks earlier a tornado, rare in the Shenango Valley, had leveled many surrounding trees, but the funnel cloud had inflicted only incidental damage on the Fairway Inn.

  “I rang the bell at a small, ill-lit lobby, and out came a tall, gangly man with a checkered shirt, plaid jacket and golf hat. He looked like an overgrown leprechaun. . . . He pulled out a slip of paper and ran off the nightly rates in rapid fire. I told him I would take the cheapest room and gave him my driver’s license,” which featured Barack’s full name. The owner “was struck by my name”—“Hussein . . .isn’t that some bad guy there in the Middle East?”—“and asked me what I did for a living. I explained my new job, and he went into a ten-minute monologue.”

  Ten-minute monologues were not unusual for Bob Elia, but the one he delivered that evening to Barack Hussein Obama would replay itself again and again in Obama’s mind in the years to come. Barack recounted Bob’s monologue in a letter to Genevieve two weeks later, and he would allude to it three years later in a magazine essay. He would also transmogrify Elia into a fictional black security guard in his first book, and he would recount Elia’s monologue virtually word for word almost half a dozen times to diverse audiences more than twenty years later.

  Many individuals who come to believe that their lives stand for more—sometimes much more—than the sum of their own personal experiences retrospectively identify one signal event, one single conversation, as representing the moment when they first knew that they could contribute to the world something more eternal than their own individual fate. Such experiences occur in places sacred, historic, and profane: the kitchen of a parsonage at 309 South Jackson Street in a southern capital city on a January night, the front yard of Coffin Point Plantation on St. Helena Island on a balmy New Year’s Eve, or the lobby of a budget motel at 2810 South Hermitage Road in Hermitage, Pennsylvania, on a warm July evening.

  A minister of the gospel might understandably believe he was communicating with a higher being—“He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. No never alone. No never alone.” Someone less religious might hear a voice from history’s recent past, offering fortitude against the national security state. But when Barack Obama’s foundational experience occurred, the voice he was hearing was indisputably that of fifty-two-year-old, six-foot-two-inch Bob Elia.

  Bob grew up in nearby Farrell, Pennsylvania, where most of the racially diverse population drew its paychecks at Sharon Steel’s Roemer Works. Bob had a number of black friends across the early decades of his life. By 1985 the local Sharon Herald had for several years been publishing the syndicated columns of conservative black economists Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams, and Bob had taken a hankering to both men’s writings, regularly clipping and saving Williams’s essays. Bob often cited their analyses when telling acquaintances how they might better themselves, and operating a motel gave Bob a never-ending population of new guests to whom he could offer his thoughts on how they could improve their lives.

  Barack’s brief response that he was headed to Chicago to become a community organizer was fuel for Bob Elia’s fire. “Look here, Mr. Hussein, I’m going to give you the best advice anyone’s ever given you. . . . Drop this public service crap and pursue something that’s going to get you some money and status . . . and then maybe you’ll have the power to do something for your people. I’m telling you now because I see potential in you . . . you got a nice voice, you can be one of them T.V. announcers, or one of those high-priced salesmen. Peddling bullshit, but look here, bullshit’s the American way.” Bob cited Williams or Sowell in telling Barack that political and social influence follow from economic strength, period. “Black people need more like this fellah, not Jesse with rhymes and jive. . . . Most folks at the bottom can’t be helped by you” and “most of ’em don’t want your help.”

  Finally Barack was able to interject a more pressing question: Where could he get dinner? Bob recommended the West Middlesex Diner, back down South Hermitage Road just south of I-80. Wanting some fresh air and time to reflect, “I took the man’s words on a long walk along the highway to a small all-night diner and had supper,” Barack wrote Genevieve. After eating, “the walk back was cool and silent, the stars cluttering the sky as they hadn’t in five years. Back in my room, The Year of Living Dangerously”—a 1982 film set in a city that Barack himself knew, Jakarta on the eve of the mid-1960s mass killings—“was playing” on the black-and-white television. If Bob Elia’s fervent plea to reconsider his new job had given him something to think about, being reminded of his years in a truly foreign land while in the middle of this drive offered even more.

  Elia’s comments would echo in Barack’s memory for decades to come. Three years later, some of Bob’s advice would be attributed to a black female school aide. “Listen, Obama. You’re a bright young man. . . . I just cannot understand why a bright young man like you would . . . become a community organizer . . . ’cause the pay is low, the hours is long, and don’t nobody appreciate you.” In its next rendition, Bob’s remarks would be made by “Ike,” a fictional black security guard: “Forget about this organizing business and do something that’s gonna make you some money. . . . I’m telling you this ’cause I can see potential in you. Young man like you, got a nice voice—hell, you could be one a them announcers on TV. Or sales . . . making some real money there. That’s what we need, see. Not more folks running around here, all rhymes and jive. You can’t help folks that ain’t gonna make it nohow, and they won’t appreciate you trying.”

  More than twenty years later, Barack would accurately recount how “I stopped for the night at a small town in Pennsylvania whose name I can’t remember any more, and I found a motel that looked cheap and clean, and I pulled into the driveway, and I went to the counter where there was this old guy doing crossword puzzles” who “asked me where I was headed, and I explained to him I was going to Chicago because I was going to be a community organizer, and he asked me what was that.” Then came Bob’s monologue: “You look like a nice clean-cut young man, you’ve got a nice voice. So let me give you a piece of advice: forget this community organizing business. You can’t change the world, and people will not appreciate you trying. What you should do is go into television broadcasting. I’m telling you, you can make a name for yourself there.”

  “Objectively speaking, he made some sense,” Barack would reflect in that retelling. Two weeks later, he repeated the centerpiece of Bob’s monologue word for word. Thirteen months later Obama recited Bob’s message once more, as he did again five months after that. In May 2008, Obama recounted his memory of that night yet again: “You’ve got a nice voice, so you should think about going into television broadcasting. I’m telling you, you have a future there.”

  In contrast to Barack’s indelible memory of their conversation, twenty-nine years later Bob Elia had no recollection of young Obama. When asked, though, he almost immediately told a caller, “You’ve got a nice voice” before launching into a ten-minute monologue on the life-extending powers of a trio of multisyllabic nutritional supplements.

  But in 1985, on the next summer morning, Barack checked out of the motel without reencountering Bob, and after heading down South Hermitage Road and bearing right onto I-80, the Ohio state line was just a few miles ahead. I-80 became the Ohio T
urnpike and then the Indiana Toll Road once it crossed another state line. Chicago lay six hours ahead, but as Barack Obama drove west, he was headed toward a place he really had never been, indeed toward a place he really had never known: he was heading west toward home.61

  Chapter Four

  TRANSFORMATION AND IDENTITY

  ROSELAND, HYDE PARK, AND KENYA

  AUGUST 1985–AUGUST 1988

  West of South Bend, the Indiana Toll Road slides southward as the shoreline of Lake Michigan draws near. The Indiana Dunes give way to Burns Harbor and its huge steel mill, which marks the eastern edge of the Calumet region’s industrial lakeshore. Gary and East Chicago offer a gritty industrial visage before the highway turns sharply north as the Illinois state line approaches. There the interstate becomes the Chicago Skyway, with the East Side, the Calumet River, and then South Chicago flashing by underneath the elevated roadway.

  On Saturday afternoon, July 27, Barack Hussein Obama took the next exit heading for Hyde Park, turning northward on the broad boulevard of Stony Island Avenue. At 67th Street, Jackson Park appeared on the east side of the road, offering sunlit greenery all the way to 56th Street. Beenu Mahmood’s summer apartment at 5500 South Shore Drive was just a few blocks away.

  Obama stopped at a pay phone but discovered he had miswritten Beenu’s number, and he called Sohale to get it right. Then Beenu met Barack in front of the tall luxury building, whose tenants had access to a heated swimming pool plus an on-site deli—“not exactly the setting I had envisioned for launching my career as selfless organizer of the people,” Barack wrote Genevieve a few days later. “The discordance only increased when we went to a fancy outdoor café downtown to feast on barbecued ribs.”

  Beenu’s fiancée, Samia Ahad, was in Chicago too, and after a restful Sunday Barack drove south to Roseland on Monday morning, while Beenu headed to Sidley & Austin’s downtown office. At Holy Rosary’s rectory, on 113th Street across from the sprawling Palmer Park, Barack met his Calumet Community Religious Conference and Developing Communities Project coworkers. Mike Kruglik, he wrote Genevieve, “reminds me of the grumpy dwarf in Snow White” with “a thick beard and mustache. He speaks with the blunt, succinct clip of working class Chicago.” That first day “he barely acknowledged my presence” but as the week went on it became clear that Mike is “both competent and warm.” Adrienne Jackson was “prim,” “helpful and committed,” with “polished administrative skills,” and Obama quickly determined that she, like himself, had been “hired as much to give the staff a racial balance as she was for her abilities.” Of Jerry Kellman, Barack told Genevieve, “In his rumpled, messy way, he exhibits a real passion for justice and the concept of grassroots organizing. He speaks softly and is chronically late, but is real sharp in his analysis of power and politics, and is also disarmingly blunt and at times manipulative. A complicated man . . . but someone from whom I expect I can learn a few things.”

  Obama also wrote that he “made full use of the amenities” that Beenu’s building offered “without guilt.” Samia was on her way to becoming a professionally acclaimed chef, and one evening she cooked a Pakistani dinner; Beenu’s friend Asif Agha joined them, even though the apartment had no dining table or chairs. Asif, like Beenu, had graduated from the famous Karachi Grammar School before receiving his undergraduate degree from Princeton University. He was the same age as Barack, and he had arrived in Hyde Park two years earlier to begin graduate study in languages reaching from Greek to Tibetan, under the auspices of the University of Chicago’s interdisciplinary Committee on Social Thought. With Beenu about to return to Manhattan for his third year at Columbia Law School, Asif was another smart and outgoing member of the Pakistani diaspora that had provided Barack’s closest male friends for the past six years.

  Tuesday morning Barack discovered that he had left his car lights on all night, and he needed a jump start so he could meet his day’s schedule. Wednesday morning the car again failed to start, and Beenu, Samia, and Asif all helped push it to get it going. A deeply embarrassed Barack confessed to Genevieve that “I appeared to have left my brains back in N.Y.” because “similar lapses have repeated themselves.” By the next weekend, he had signed a lease for a small $300-a-month studio apartment, #22-I, at 1440 East 52nd Street, in the heart of Hyde Park. He also told Genevieve about the “pang of envy and resentment” he felt toward Beenu’s “prestigious, well-paying and basically straightforward work as a corporate lawyer” and how it contrasted with his far more precarious existence.

  Down in Roseland, Kellman’s first goal was to teach Obama community organizing’s defining centerpiece, the one-on-one interview, or what IAF traditionalists called “the relational meeting.” All Alinsky-style organizing recognized the cardinal principle that first “an organizer has to . . . listen—a lot.” According to Industrial Areas Foundation veteran and United Neighborhood Organization adviser Peter Martinez, the ability to listen is the “critical skill,” for it enables an organizer “to synergize all of the things that they’re experiencing so that they can incorporate that into their thinking in a way that when they talk with people, people can hear themselves coming back within the structure of what it is you’re suggesting might be done.” This, Martinez said, would keep people from feeling like the organizer is putting something “on top of them.”

  Kellman knew the first month was “very crucial” with any new recruit, and particularly with someone who “had never encountered blue-collar and lower-class African Americans.” During Obama’s first few days, Jerry took him along so that Barack could watch a veteran organizer ask people to talk about their lives and to say what they thought were the community’s problems, listening especially for how that person’s own self-interest could motivate them to take an active part in DCP. Obama “struggled with this in the beginning,” Kellman recalled, as his connections with people “could be superficial,” and “I would challenge Barack to go deeper, to connect with their strongest longings.” But Jerry was too busy to do this full-time, and so “very quickly he was out on his own, just talking to people, day after day,” with the expectation that each week Barack could conduct between twenty and thirty such one-on-ones with pastors and parishioners from DCP’s Roman Catholic churches. Among the first pastors Obama called upon were Father Joe Bennett at St. John de la Salle, the church that Adrienne Jackson attended, Father Tom Kaminski at St. Helena of the Cross, and Father John Calicott at Holy Name of Mary—who had been so responsible for Jerry’s ad in Community Jobs. Bennett remembered Barack asking him “all kinds of questions,” and when he left Bennett thought “what a sharp, brilliant young man.”

  Kellman also took Obama on a driving tour of the neighborhoods DCP and CCRC serviced. More than two decades later, Barack could spontaneously describe what he saw when Jerry drove east on 103rd Street past Trumbull Park before turning south on Torrence Avenue. “I can still remember the first time I saw a shuttered steel mill. It was late in the afternoon, and I took a drive with another organizer over to the old Wisconsin Steel plant on the southeast side of Chicago. . . . As we drove up . . . I saw a plant that was empty and rusty. And behind a chain-link fence, I saw weeds sprouting up through the concrete, and an old mangy cat running around. And I thought about all the good jobs it used to provide.” As Kellman had told him, “when a plant shuts down, it’s not just the workers who pay a price, it’s the whole community.”

  The people of South Deering had been living for more than five years with what Obama saw that afternoon. “The mill is just like a ghost hanging over the whole community like a cloud,” one St. Kevin parishioner explained, indeed “the ghost of the Industrial Revolution,” another resident realized. “It just sat there and rotted before everyone’s eyes,” Father George Schopp explained, and a beautifully written article in the August issue of Chicago Magazine—one that would have made a memorable impression on any aspiring young writer who read it—described South Deering in the summer of 1985 as “the essence of the Rust Belt . . . al
ong Torrence near Wisconsin Steel, the stores are empty; only a few taverns remain.”

  Kellman also took Obama southward from Roseland, to show him the brick expanse of Altgeld Gardens, which was so distant from all the rest of Chicago apart from the huge Calumet Industrial Development (CID) landfill just to the east where all of the city’s garbage was dumped, and the Metropolitan Sanitary District’s 127 acres of “drying beds” for sewerage sludge just north across 130th Street. Neither the dump nor the sewer plant ever drew much attention, yet just to the northeast, near the older Paxton Landfill, as Chicago Magazine’s Jerry Sullivan wrote, “the greatest concentration of rare birds in Illinois” was spending the summer “squeezed between a garbage dump and a shit farm.”

  Obscure scientific journals with names like Chemosphere occasionally published studies that detailed how the presence of airborne PCBs was “significantly higher” around “the Gardens” than anywhere else in Chicago, but just a week after Obama’s introductory tour of the area, an underground fire at an abandoned landfill abutting Paxton—a weird and unprecedented event—drew camera crews, reporters, and city officials to the Far South Side’s toxic wasteland. The chemical conflagration took more than twelve days to finally burn itself out, and region-wide press coverage featured UNO’s Mary Ellen Montes criticizing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for its lack of interest. City officials suggested blowing up the remaining metal drums with unknown contents, and UNO filed suit in federal court against the EPA in hopes of jarring federal officials into action.1