Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  Ann had been through there several times in the previous two years, as one of her closest friends, Bron Solyom, and her husband Garrett had been living there on Sanur Beach, next door to the Tandjung Sari Hotel, since 1991. Barack’s old choom gang friend Kenji Salz was there too, in Denpasar, and “Bobby Titcomb went to Bali all the time,” another Punahou friend explained, and shipped back furniture and whatever else to Honolulu. A few years later, Barack immediately said “Bali” when asked his favorite vacation place, and one late 1992 day Ann visited Bron and Garrett Solyom and told them that Barack “wanted to find a spot where he can just sit down and finish this book he’s writing.” So “we went up and down Sanur,” Bron recounted, between the Tandjung Sari to the south and the Bali Beach Hotel to the north, “and we looked at a few places and Ann found a place which she felt would be fine, not very far away from us, and so she rented it—I think it was to be for, say, two months.”

  Barack mentioned his decision to several friends before informing his new wife. “What do you think Michelle’s going to say when I tell her I’ve got to go?” Valerie Jarrett recalled Barack asking her. Allison Davis had a similar memory: “I can’t finish this thing here. There are too many interruptions. I’m just going to take off so I can finish this.” Allison asked where he was going, and when Barack answered, he enthusiastically congratulated him—“My man!”—before asking, “What’s Michelle going to do?” Allison also wondered what Michelle would think about her husband choosing a locale where there would be “all these Balinese women floating around.” Barack responded, “She’s going to be angry. She’s going to be really pissed,” but when Barack finally told her what his mother had arranged, Michelle’s reaction was surprise—“Didn’t we just get married?”—but not anger. The book had become “the bane of their existence,” Michelle’s friends knew, and “he needed to go and get it done so that we could move on with our lives,” Michelle later explained.

  Their closest family members agreed. “He felt it important to go away and just immerse himself in the writing,” Janis Robinson recalled. “He really could not do it here,” and “he went away so that he could really just focus on the book.” Years later Barack remarked, perhaps with Bali in mind, that “sometimes, particularly when we were early in our marriage, I wasn’t always thinking about the fact that my free-spirited ways might be having an impact on the person I’m with.”

  So rather than spend all of December, January, and February braving winter in Chicago, or farther north on Lake Geneva, Barack instead flew westward across the Pacific. “Barack came, and we made some arrangements for him to bring his laundry—we had one household staff member who took care of everything,” Bron Solyom explained. “He’d bring the laundry,” and “so we’d see him on and off” when Barack stopped “for a drink and a chat.” But now Barack’s discipline was such that “we could never persuade him to sit and have a meal,” Bron recalled. “He was just totally thinking about what he was doing, he was totally focused, and I think that’s really all he did, and he was done with it faster than he thought.”

  Rather than the full two months, he was done within “five or six weeks,” she and Garrett believed. “He had a pile of yellow notepads the one time we stopped by his house with Ann,” who was in Bali before moving to New York in late January 1993 to begin a new job at Women’s World Banking. Carrying his notepads, Barack also flew back to the U.S., and he stopped for several days in San Francisco before returning to Chicago. Barack had not seen his younger brother Mark in almost five years, not since they had first met in Nairobi in 1988, but Mark now lived in San Francisco, and he and Barack met for lunch one day. “He seemed humbler, less arrogant this time than he was back in Kenya,” Mark thought, “a different, warmer” person than he had been then.

  Mark later realized that Barack’s sudden interest had no doubt been stimulated by Barack’s pondering over how to address the full story of his far-flung Kenyan family in the final part of his book manuscript. But now Barack was on the road to completion, and when late that winter he arrived back in Chicago, Michelle and his in-laws were happy to learn that the odd venture had proven entirely successful. “Being away was very beneficial . . . it definitely helped,” Janis Robinson remembered.11

  Back in Chicago, Barack faced a trio of responsibilities: he could finally begin full-time work at Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, he would continue to work on his book manuscript so that he would have something far better than what he had sent Poseidon for Jane Dystel to show to possible new publishers, and at the end of March, he would start teaching at the University of Chicago Law School (UCLS). As Davis Miner’s newest and most junior member, Barack inherited a narrow office on the second floor of the 14 West Erie Street town house. With Allison Davis focused on housing development work, third-rank partner Chuck Barnhill based in Madison, Wisconsin, and George Galland specializing in health law issues, Judd Miner and fellow associate Jeff Cummings, the firm’s other African American attorney, would be the colleagues with whom Barack would work the most.

  Judd was litigating two major city council redistricting challenges, Barnett v. City of Chicago and a pair of cases in St. Louis. All three had highly complicated procedural postures stemming from the involvement of multiple attorneys and the filing of successive complaints, and both cities had petitioned the respective federal courts to dismiss the cases. As of March 1993, Judd was trying to stave off initial defeats in both cities, and Barack immediately was thrown into the thick of two difficult, complex challenges. Virtually all of his time was devoted to researching and drafting arguments for Judd’s various motions and responses, and Judd later said that “Barack’s work was enormously thoughtful and always well done.”

  With another associate, Mark Kende, leaving in April to become a law professor, Barack also inherited a federal district court case in which the firm was representing Ahmad Baravati, a stockbroker who had won a National Association of Securities Dealers arbitration award of $180,000 against the firm that previously had employed him and now was contesting that ruling. Additional filings were necessary because the firm, Josephthal, Lyon & Ross, was challenging a standard industry practice.

  Barack also continued to devote as much time as he could to trimming and polishing “Journeys in Black and White.” Allison Davis, whose spacious office adjoined Barack’s narrow quarters, often saw him with his feet up on the desk and a keyboard in his lap, typing away on some part of the manuscript. George Galland, the most businesslike of the Chicago partners, sometimes expressed concern about Barack’s priorities, but Barack’s easy manner—“very self-assured, very directed, very bright, good sense of humor,” Davis said—made for an easy transition to his primary new job. In addition, everyone at the firm seemed to realize that practicing law would occupy Barack for only so long. As young partner Laura Tilly put it, “from the first day he walked in, it was clear that this was not the end of his career.” Everyone knew “this guy is not going to be here drafting loan documents in five years.”12

  UCLS’s unusual eight-week quarters meant that Barack’s Current Issues in Racism and the Law would meet once a week for two hours from late March to late May. Barack had been an occasional presence at the law school throughout the fall and winter, and Douglas Baird, the colleague who knew him best, recommended Barack to Jesse Ruiz, a first-year student who had grown up in Roseland and whose father had worked at Wisconsin Steel. Ruiz introduced himself to Barack, who mentioned his own Roseland background, and Ruiz realized that three years earlier he had read the Tribune story about Barack’s Law Review presidency while he was considering law school. As word of the new instructor spread among UCLS’s minority students, “we were excited about having a black professor,” 2L Gabriel Gore recalled. That was unsurprising given a setting in which there were so “very few” black faces that “law students of color were questioned about whether they were in fact law students,” 2L Jeanne Gills explained. A half-dozen African Americans were among the twelve or so law stude
nts who were joined by several social science graduate students who signed up for Barack’s class.

  Barack structured the course in two parts. For the first four weeks, he assigned a heavy load—some 550 pages total—of selected readings, what he called “a basic primer” surveying the role of race in American law from the colonial period and slavery to Reconstruction and then the twentieth century. Barack had retained a copy of Randall Kennedy’s Harvard Law School syllabus for the Race, Racism, and American Law course he had briefly attended, and essays by well-known historical figures—Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey—were followed by Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (1963), and a trio of well-known Supreme Court decisions from the 1970s: San Antonio v. Rodriguez (1973), Washington v. Davis (1976), and Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corporation. The readings ended with brief excerpts from contemporary race commentators like Derrick Bell and Shelby Steele, and most of the packet was made up of selections that Barack had previously read and annotated. A cover note said, “You’ll see that much of the material has been marked up,” but “my wife tells me that she wouldn’t have minded getting the professor’s notations on her reading material when she was in law school.”

  The final four weeks featured topical presentations by three- or four-student groups on a current issue of their choice. Barack’s syllabus offered a dozen or so possibilities, such as racial reparations. “Do such proposals have any realistic chance of working their way through the political system?” he asked. University hate speech regulations was another. “Are such codes a reasonable measure to protect minorities from harassment, or is the cure worse than the disease?” A third was affirmative action and “the meaning of merit. . . . Do minorities gain or lose when fixed notions of merit give way to more flexible standards for allocating goods and privileges?” The presentations should “draw out the full spectrum of views on the issue you’re dealing with” and do so with “rigor and specificity.” Each student also would submit a paper of at least twelve pages, and Barack requested “a focused, tightly-crafted argument, and analytic rigor in working through the legal or policy problems raised by your topic.” He also expected “a thorough examination of the diversity of opinion that exists on the issue or theme” and “a willingness . . . to take a stand and offer concrete proposals or approaches.” The presentation and the paper each would count for 40 percent of a student’s grade, with a fifteen-minute quiz on the last day of class constituting the other 20 percent. It would require identifying five or six quotations “whose sources will be obvious to anyone who has done the reading” and absorbed the presentations.

  Julie Fernandes, a 2L, remembered the class as “a professor-led conversation that was very inclusive and very exploratory, very intellectual in a really good way.” The readings were instructive for students who “weren’t aware of the foundational nature of the race question” in American law. Brett Hart, another 2L, found it “much more conversational” than other courses and 2L Jeanne Gills remembered “very constructive conversations,” particularly about race. Gabe Gore remembered that the social science grad students “would make comments that would make all of us law students kind of laugh,” but Barack explored them and seemed to “find them relevant and interesting.” Julie Fernandes thought it was “a great class” in part because Barack “didn’t allow me to rest on my assumptions about the world,” and 2L Julia Bronson said Barack was “very easygoing” with a “confident demeanor” yet “friendly and pleasant.” Elaine Horn, another 2L, remembered that her paper argued against adding a new category for multiracial individuals to the U.S. Census, and only two years later did she learn that Barack was biracial.13

  By April 1993 Michelle Obama had worked for the city of Chicago for eighteen months, but her shift the previous fall to Valerie Jarrett’s Planning and Development department had failed to satisfy her need for truly fulfilling work. Leaving Sidley for the public sector “still wasn’t enough, because city government is like a corporation in many ways,” Michelle later explained. Like Barack, “we both wanted to effect the community on a larger scale than either of us could do individually,” and “we wanted to do it outside of big corporations.”

  Barack’s service on the national board of the nascent Public Allies network had entailed little in the sixteen months since the initial late 1991 conference in Wisconsin, but by early 1993, in part thanks to grants from the Woods Fund and the Joyce and MacArthur Foundations, Public Allies was about to supplement its first chapter in Washington, D.C., with a second one in Chicago that would debut in September. Field director Jason Scott, Public Allies’ third national staffer after cofounders Katrina Browne and Vanessa Kirsch, “started going out to Chicago” by early fall 1992, relying primarily on John McKnight and his Northwestern colleague Jody Kretzmann, plus Jacky Grimshaw, to tell him whom to see.

  Barack was high on the list, and Jason met him for coffee in a dreary basement cafeteria near Project VOTE!’s South Michigan Avenue office. Barack was “pretty impressive,” but Public Allies’ band of mid-twenties enthusiasts was having a difficult time selling their training and mentorship model to leaders whose organizations would host the young recruits—“allies”—who were eager to begin public service careers.

  In February, Public Allies sublet a small office at 332 South Michigan—the same building from which Barack had run Project VOTE!—and lined up Tim Webb, a University of Chicago graduate student, to head the incipient Chicago project. Scores of eighteen-to-twenty-somethings eager to become “allies” were easily recruited, in part because the several dozen who eventually would be chosen would make $14,000 or more during their year of service, with the hope being that the host organizations would so love the highly motivated, well-mentored young people that they would add them to their permanent staff after the initial sponsored year ended. A kickoff event called “Tomorrow’s Leaders Today” at which those young people would be introduced to potential organizational sponsors was scheduled for April 20. On the last day of March, the Chicago Tribune ran a feature story heralding the new effort. April’s Chicago Magazine ran a brief profile of Webb, but behind the scenes, Barack told Jason Scott and Vanessa Kirsch that they should try to recruit an older, far-better-credentialed Chicago director than the twenty-four-year-old Webb, namely Barack’s wife Michelle. So “Vanessa and I went to see Michelle” with that idea, and “she more or less threw us out of her office,” Scott recalled. “I have this great job. Why would I leave? I can’t believe Barack put you up to this.”

  At home on South Euclid, however, the newlyweds renewed their conversation about wanting to “affect the community on a larger scale.” Barack now had a respectable monthly paycheck from Davis Miner, plus extra income from his UCLS teaching. Michelle was earning almost $67,000 at her city job; would Public Allies’ foundation support allow her to avoid too great a reduction if she followed through on Barack’s gambit? Jason Scott was the second if not the first to learn what she had decided. Michelle “literally called back two weeks later and took the job,” which was doubly surprising because “we hadn’t actually offered her the job,” Jason recalled. “All I remember is like ‘I’ll take the job!’” The top trio’s astonishment turned quickly to joy because “we were just so honored and excited to be able to hire her,” Katrina Browne explained.

  Things came together quickly thanks to support from Echoing Green, a nonprofit sponsor of social entrepreneurs that already was assisting Public Allies. Echoing Green agreed to cover Michelle’s student loan payments, and the Chicago participants celebrated because “getting her was quite a coup.” The five-year age gap between the twenty-nine-year-old Michelle and the recent college graduates seemed as large as Barack’s age difference had at Harvard, but with Michelle on board, the long-scheduled April 20 kickoff event took on new significance and quickly acquired an all-star roster of speakers and attendees. Barack served as master of ceremo
nies, and keynote remarks were offered by Father Mike Pfleger and young Jesse Jackson Jr. Mayor Richard Daley and Illinois governor Jim Edgar were in attendance, and Barack introduced Daley’s commissioner of planning and development, Valerie Jarrett, who then introduced Public Allies’ new Chicago director. Only when Michelle Obama stepped forward did young participants like Bethann Hester discover who the new boss would be. Everyone was ecstatic to have her, and as national finance director Julian Posada explained, for all of Public Allies, “the bar when she walked in was raised, from day one.”14

  By late spring, thanks to both his own improved discipline and agent Jane Dystel’s efforts, Barack had a brand-new lifeline for “Journeys in Black and White.” The manuscript was still not complete, but all the work Barack had done in Bali and upon his return gave Dystel renewed confidence that a new publishing house would find the manuscript highly appealing. She telephoned Henry Ferris, a young editor at Times Books who earlier had worked at Simon & Schuster and then Houghton Mifflin. Dystel explained what had happened at Poseidon and raved about Barack’s background and his now highly personal story. Ferris agreed to read it, and when he did, he was struck by Barack’s “incredible gift for language and storytelling.” The manuscript was still “quite raw” and much too long, even though Barack still had not completed the final section recounting his 1988 journey to meet his Kenyan relatives.