Barack and Michelle

by Christopher Andersen

  Barack thought he was a pretty decent basketball player, and didn’t hesitate to say so. But Michelle’s brother discovered when they played a five-on-five game that Barack wasn’t overconfident, either. “He wasn’t cocky or talking trash,” Craig said. “Barack was very team-oriented, very unselfish; he’s confident—not afraid to shoot the ball when he’s open—and he fit right in.”

  However, what most impressed Craig about that first game was that, even though they were on the same team, Barack did not always pass him the ball. “He wasn’t trying to suck up to my sister through me,” Craig said. “I thought, ‘You know, I like that.’”

  Right after the game, Craig called Michelle with his verdict. “Your boy is straight,” he told her, “and he can ball.” Still, he wondered if what he said really made any difference at all. “If the test had proven negative,” he said with a shrug, “who knows what would have happened.”

  Marian and Fraser Robinson were equally delighted to hear that Barack had passed Craig’s basketball test. There were two facts about Barack, however, that might have dampened their initial enthusiasm. Michelle and Barack were careful not to tell her parents that he smoked—or that his mother was white. “Mr. and Mrs. Robinson were very solid, very proud, in some ways quite conservative black Americans,” said a longtime friend of Michelle’s. “Michelle and Barack didn’t want to spring his biracial, multicultural past on them until they came to know and love him as a black man, as one of them.” According to Marian, it would be months before she and her husband learned that Barack’s mother was Caucasian and that he had essentially been raised by his white grandparents.

  Even Michelle had a hard time absorbing it all.

  “Can you believe it?” she told her friends. “He’s got white grandparents from Kansas!”

  She reasoned that they actually had more in common than they realized. “When there are people who are different from us,” she later mused, “we automatically think, well, that’s nothing like me and we have nothing in common. But we have more in common than not. His grandparents are very much midwestern, and in that respect, the midwestern value is: work hard, treat people with decency and respect, and do what you say you are going to do, your word is your bond. We’re both worried about doing our best,” she said of Barack and herself, “and doing the right thing.”

  Notwithstanding his midwestern lineage, Barack’s family was, as he put it, “scattered to the four winds.” What he lacked—stability, roots, a sense of place and belonging—Michelle and her family had in abundance. Conversely, he was different, exotic, more open-minded and, in a sense, free-spirited than she had ever been. “Barack has opened my eyes to a lot of things about the world,” she said. “No doubt about it—he’s a fascinating guy.”

  For the rest of the summer, Barack and Michelle were inseparable. They refrained from public displays of affection—“They were too cool and sophisticated to be hanging all over each other,” said a mutual friend—and tried to downplay their blossoming romance in the office. “It was cute,” said another lawyer in the intellectual property office. “Barack would be in her office and they’d be talking in these hushed tones. Then you’d knock, and they’d snap to, clearing their throats, pretending to be all business. It was silly, since everybody knew they were an item.”

  Actually, Michelle had been far from reluctant to share the good news with her friends. Verna Williams, her pal from Harvard, had often commiserated with Michelle over the sorry state of their love lives. “Verna! Guess what?” Michelle now told Williams over the phone. “I’ve got this great guy in my life. His name is Barack.”

  “I could tell this was something different,” Williams later said, “something special. We had known each other when we dated other guys. You go through this whole ‘he’s not ready for commitment’ thing…but Barack was none of these things. He was just a good, solid guy.”

  He was also someone who was even more driven than Michelle to accomplish great things. “This brother is not interested in ever making a dime,” she thought to herself. “I would just have to love him for his values.”

  Michelle knew Barack was joking when he teased her about some of the clients she handled, especially Barney and Coors beer. But at the same time, she also felt that her law degree was good for more than just making money.

  Both Barrack and Michelle wanted to lift their fellow African Americans out of poverty, to give them better health care, housing, and educational opportunities. Barack had thought long and hard about how to acquire the kind of political power that could bring about those changes. He did not want to sound presumptuous or egotistical, he told her, but he had already mapped out his political future. He would share those plans with her, if she agreed not to discuss them with anyone else.

  First, he planned to write a memoir. John F. Kennedy had launched his political career with Profiles in Courage, Barack pointed out. What he had to offer was the inspirational story of a biracial American whose journey of self-discovery bridged races, cultures, continents. Michelle was astonished to learn that for years Barack had been taking meticulous notes with the idea of just that kind of book in mind.

  Barack had total confidence in his abilities as a writer—in fact, he had told several of his fellow students at Harvard that he might forgo legal practice altogether to pursue a career as a novelist. Finding a publisher would not be easy, but Barack had a plan for that, too.

  “When I go back to Harvard,” he told Michelle, “I think I’m going to run for president of the Law Review.” Michelle was sufficiently impressed by the fact that Barack, who was only starting his second year at Harvard Law, already had a masthead position on the Review. That he might try to become its first African American president seemed as far-fetched as it was exciting.

  Barack explained that the Review was in a state of turmoil, that it was sharply divided between liberals and conservatives, and that he was really the only editor who had taken pains not to offend anyone. By his calculations, the balance of power would rest in the hands of the conservatives and their more moderate allies. Barack had made an effort to get to know members of the Federalist Society, and discovered that he actually liked some of them—so much so that he was hanging out with them as much as he was with his liberal black friends. The conservatives, he explained to a skeptical Michelle, “are really very nice, and smart, maybe the smartest guys there. And some of them are just fun to be around.”

  “Have you told anyone you want to run for president of the Law Review?” Michelle asked.

  “No, I don’t want anyone to know that I’m even interested,” he said. “I don’t want to look too eager.” He stood his best chance to get elected, Barack said, if he appeared to be a last-minute compromise candidate. “So, please,” he said. “Don’t tell anybody right now—not at the office, not even your family. I don’t want it getting back to anyone at Harvard.”

  In the middle of explaining his grand plan, Barack took a long drag on a cigarette—his twentieth that day. “You’re gonna have to stop that,” Michelle told him.

  “Stop what?”

  “The smoking—gotta quit,” she said. Growing up in a household where both parents smoked, as children Michelle and her brother used to pull the tobacco out of their parents’ cigarettes and douse it with Tabasco sauce so they would quit. The ploy didn’t work, of course, but Michelle was no more tolerant toward smokers than she had been as a little girl on the South Side. “It’s a nasty habit,” she told Barack, “and it’s going to kill you if you don’t stop. So I’d really like it if you quit smoking.”

  Barack, who had no intention of quitting, rolled his eyes, snubbed out his cigarette, and continued: If he could manage to emerge as a peacemaker at the Law Review and get himself elected as its first black president, the publicity would be “enormous.” Although by no means a slam dunk, finding a publisher for his book under those circumstances would certainly be a lot easier.

  Once his book had become a bestseller, Barack would retur
n to Chicago, law degree in hand, to pick up where his idol Harold Washington had left off and run for mayor. And after that? Michelle asked, half in jest.

  “I think maybe I’ll run for the Senate,” he answered without skipping a beat. “Then President—why not?”

  Michelle threw back her head and let out a hearty laugh. “He’s pulling my leg now,” she thought to herself.

  “Why are you laughing?” he asked, feigning a wounded look. He certainly appreciated how absurd it sounded. “Hey, come on, now. Don’t laugh. Stranger things have happened.”

  That November, Barack returned to Chicago to spend Thanksgiving with Michelle. Since things were obviously getting serious between his sister and the Harvard Law hotshot, Craig, now working as an investment banker on Wall Street, thought it was time to turn up the heat. “You know,” Craig said, “I thought I’d do the obnoxious big brother thing and ask him about his future.”

  “So, Barack,” Craig said, clearing his throat, “what do you want to do with your life?”

  “Well,” Barack replied with an earnest smile, “I thought I might like to get into politics.”

  “So you might run for alderman or something like that someday?” Craig asked.

  “No,” Barack said, shaking his head. “I was really thinking more on a national scale. Maybe run for Congress or the Senate.”

  Barack paused for a moment, obviously considering whether he should go on, and Craig was about to jump in when the brash young law student continued. “Who knows?” he said. “If I did a good job, I might even run for President someday.”

  Craig’s eyes darted around the room, hoping that his Aunt Gracie, whose contempt for politicians was legendary, hadn’t heard Barack. “Don’t say that too loud,” Craig cautioned his sister’s boyfriend. “Someone might hear you and think you were nuts.”

  In truth, Barack and Michelle had not even let on about his more immediate plans to seek a different presidency at Harvard. “He didn’t talk about himself,” Marian remembered. “He didn’t tell us that he was running for president of the Harvard Law Review. We never realized that he was as bright as he is.”

  It was around this time that Michelle told her parents about Barack’s white mother and grandparents. Marian Robinson in particular was “very surprised”—and “a little bit worried” about his white relatives and how they would all get along if her only daughter wound up marrying him. At least he’s not white, she thought to herself. “I guess I worry about race mixing,” she explained, “because of the difficulties, not so much for prejudice or anything. It’s very hard.” (As it happened, Craig would marry a white woman.)

  Now it was Michelle’s turn to meet Barack’s family, and to gain some insight into the people and places that had shaped the young man she had fallen in love with. Barack had always spent Christmas in Hawaii with Gramps, Toot, and—when they could make the journey from Indonesia—his mother and Maya.

  Landing at Honolulu International Airport, Barack and Michelle stepped off the plane onto the tarmac and into the bright Hawaiian sunshine. When they had left Chicago nine hours earlier, the city was in the icy grip of a winter storm. “So you grew up here,” she said, nodding her head. “Poor guy.”

  Hand in hand, they walked toward the terminal and the teenage greeters who would stand on tiptoe to wrap flower leis around both their necks. Once inside the terminal, Barack searched the crowd for familiar faces.

  “Barry! Barry!” Gramps shouted. “Over here!” Barack looked over to see them all smiling and waving—his eighteen-year-old sister Maya, his grandmother, and his mother, clad in a muumuu-like Indonesian batik daster and—as was so often the case—crying with joy.

  Michelle had been warned that Barry was the name Barack had grown up with, but she was surprised to hear it nonetheless. Gramps gave Michelle a welcoming hug, and Michelle bent down to embrace Ann, Maya, and Toot one by one. “Well, Barry,” Gramps said, nudging Barack, “she’s quite a looker.”

  Toot rolled her eyes. She would be no less impressed by Michelle, but for very different reasons. From that first meeting, it was clear to Toot that Michelle was what she called a “no-nonsense” woman like herself—someone who would support Barry while at the same time grounding him in reality.

  Michelle told Toot and the others about Barack’s plan to run for office, and shared her doubts about seeing such a “decent guy” in the rough-and-tumble world of Chicago politics.

  “He’s a dreamer, like his mother,” Toot explained. “That’s why he needs someone like you around.” In the end, Toot would pay the young lawyer from Chicago what she considered to be the ultimate compliment. “Michelle,” Toot told her grandson, “is a very sensible girl.”

  Ann Dunham Soetoro might indeed have been a dreamer, but Michelle connected with her as well. Barack’s mother and sister had just flown in from Indonesia, where she was helping to build a microfinance program that granted small loans to credit-poor entrepreneurs. It was Ann’s anthropological research into the ways people actually work that set the guidelines used by the Bank Rakyat Indonesia. Eventually, the microfinance program Ann helped set up would rank number one in the world, with more than thirty million members.

  Now a heavyset woman with frizzy black hair, Ann was, in the words of her friend Mary Zurbuchen, “a big personality and a big presence.” As a grassroots activist, she had been thrilled when Barack became a community organizer in Chicago. As an academic who was still working on her PhD dissertation in anthropology, she was equally delighted when her son enrolled in Harvard Law School and when he made the Law Review. “All of us knew where Barack was going to school,” said another of Ann’s friends, Georgia McCauley. “All of us knew how brilliant he was.”

  Ann, unlike her mother, saw no reason to doubt that her son would succeed if he decided to pursue a career in politics. Contrary to what Toot might have thought of her, Ann was not all dreamer. She spoke passionately about her desire to help the world’s poor, but her approach—as evidenced by her success with the microfinance program in Indonesia—was focused, pragmatic. “She wasn’t ideological,” Barack would later say. “I inherited that, I think, from her. She was suspicious of cant.”

  While Toot urged her grandson to aim for a career in international law and ultimately a spot on the U.S. Supreme Court, Ann told her son to aim for the White House. If anyone had a shot at being the first black President, she said, it was him.

  If Michelle had ever wondered where Barack got his confidence and his seemingly boundless ambition, here was the answer. Barack had been the focus of these people’s lives just as she and her brother had been the focus of their parents’ lives. “We’re all products of the Midwest, really,” she said. “There’s a lot of Kansas in his grandparents and his mother, and that means there’s a lot of Kansas in Barack.”

  Perhaps. But Michelle would also learn that, in her words, “to understand Barack you must first understand Hawaii.” During that first eye-opening Christmas visit to the islands, the “very sensible” midwesterner immersed herself in the people, places, and things that had shaped the young Barack. He took her to the beaches where he liked to snorkle and bodysurf, to the parks and palis (cliffs) that were no less beautiful to the locals because they attracted thousands of tourists, to the campus of Punahou prep school, to the Baskin-Robbins store on South King Street where he had found it so hard to look cool scooping ice cream. There were also sunset luaus, torchlit hula demonstrations, romantic walks on the beach, and mai tais at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel on Waikiki.

  This was a world as far away from the South Side of Chicago as it could possibly be, and yet what impressed Michelle most were the similarities in their backgrounds. Like Fraser and Marian Robinson, Toot and Gramps were hardworking people who had never gone to college but did not hesitate to make the sacrifices necessary to send their children—and in Barack’s case, their grandchild—to college. The Dunhams’ modest two-bedroom apartment in a white concrete building had a tiny balcony, but in most othe
r respects it was comparable to the Robinsons’ cramped apartment on South Euclid.

  Barack’s family also reveled in the kind of small, reassuringly familiar traditions shared by so many American families. “From the start,” Maya said, “Michelle was a ready convert to our lazy and fun Christmas rituals.” These included marathon games of Scrabble, watching TV Christmas specials, and the obligatory Christmas-morning package-opening frenzy followed by a brunch of pancakes, cheddar cheese eggs, papaya, and freshly squeezed orange juice.

  For Michelle, the Christmas visit to Hawaii yielded other insights into Barack. During the long Thanksgiving weekend he had spent with the Robinsons in Chicago, he had handled an inebriated uncle of Michelle’s with compassion and respect. Now she could see from the way he interacted with his grandparents that he had a lifetime of practice dealing with drinkers. He had shared with Michelle the details of his father’s life—how disappointment over the course of his government career in Kenya had resulted in his becoming a hopeless, self-destructive alcoholic. Now she witnessed firsthand the drinking problem that also existed on the maternal side of Barack’s family. In addition to the smoking habit they shared with their grandson, Toot and Gramps were both two-fisted drinkers. “It’s one way of coping with life’s disappointments,” he explained. “They’ve done everything for me. I’m in no position to judge.”

  In truth, Barack shared with Michelle the nagging concern that he might be genetically predisposed to substance abuse. It was one of the reasons why, after spending his high school and early college years drinking to excess, smoking pot, and occasionally snorting cocaine, he suddenly decided to quit—everything, that is, except smoking.

  “You’re a runner,” Michelle pointed out. “You exercise regularly. Don’t you see how crazy it is to do all that and then light up a cigarette?”