“Hey,” Barack would answer with a wink, “you have to keep at least one vice. Besides, I’m not that strong.”
After they returned to the mainland—she to Sidley Austin in Chicago, he to resume his law studies at Harvard—Michelle and Barack were fully committed to their long-distance relationship. “We were both determined,” he recalled, “to do whatever it took to make it work.” As for the smoking: “I’m working on him,” she told one of her coworkers at Sidley Austin. “I’m working on him…”
For the next two years, they would burn up the phone lines between Cambridge and Chicago. Although he devoted as much as sixty hours a week to his studies and the Law Review, on the odd occasion Barack would hop a plane to Chicago for a quick weekend visit. “It’s not something I would have had the maturity to do before,” Barack later said. “Michelle centered me in a sense. She made it possible for me to really concentrate on what was important in life.”
Just one month after he returned from visiting Hawaii with Michelle, Barack launched his carefully thought-out plan to become the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. The mere fact that he was already serving as an editor of the highly regarded publication was impressive enough. The Law Review numbered among its esteemed alumni Supreme Court Justices Felix Frankfurter, Stephen Breyer, Antonin Scalia, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Archibald MacLeish, Harvard University President Derek Bok, Yale University President Kingman Brewster, and Elliot Richardson, who at various times served as Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Commerce, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, and Attorney General. The Law Review elections were quirkily arcane. In accordance with tradition, the process began Sunday morning with the nineteen candidates—including four African Americans—cooking meals for their fellow editors while they cast ballots. At first Barack was not among those running. Sticking to his plan not to appear eager for the job, he grudgingly agreed to run only after being urged by his friends to do so.
“He was clearly seen as a leader, but at the same time he never put himself out as a leader,” Cassandra Butts said of her friend and classmate. “He had a very quiet, very calm presence. And his leadership style was such that people were drawn to him and they embraced him as a leader.”
Brad Berenson agreed. “Barack was very laid-back, much less nakedly ambitious than some of the others on the Law Review,” he said. “He never struck me as one of the strivers. He didn’t come across to people as a political operator, which is testament to what a good political operator he really was.” At the same time, Berenson said, “I never thought that he was disingenuous or twofaced—saying one thing to me and another to somebody else. We were on opposite sides of the political spectrum, but there was no escaping that he was a very, very decent person—a classy guy.”
The balloting continued for the next sixteen hours, as one by one candidates were eliminated from the race. By midnight, no clear front-runner had emerged. “It’s late at night and we’re trying to figure out how to resolve this thing,” recalled Kenneth Mack, one of the other black candidates, who was out of the running early on. “Clearly Barack has a lot of support, but it’s not resolved yet.”
Then a conservative editor who disagreed with just about everything Barack stood for spoke up. “We are a divided institution,” he said, “and what we need is the best person to reach out to all constituencies and lead us forward. That person is Barack.” According to Mack, “Conservatives marveled at his use of language and metaphors that resonated with their core beliefs.”
When the votes were tallied and Barack had won, a tearful Mack leaped up and embraced the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. The first call Barack placed was to Michelle in Chicago.
“Say hello,” he told her the minute she answered the phone, “to the new president of the Harvard Law Review.”
“You’re kidding!” Michelle squealed. “Oh, baby, that’s wonderful.” When she told her parents, they were even more surprised. “But,” Marian Robinson said, “he never even told us he was running…”
Later that day at Sidley Austin, Michelle’s fellow attorneys dropped in to congratulate her and sing the praises of their recent summer associate. “She was glowing,” said one, “and obviously very proud of Barack. But she kept her cool about it, too. There’s a quiet dignity about Michelle—a sense of what’s appropriate behavior in the workplace, and she was still soft-pedaling their relationship to some extent.”
The African American editors on the Review were jubilant, and even the white conservatives were pleased with Barack as their new leader. “Conservatives were eager to have somebody who would treat them fairly,” Bradford Berenson said, “who would listen to what they had to say, who would not abuse the powers of the office to favor his ideological soul mates…. Somebody who would basically play it straight. Barack fit the bill better than anyone else.” Another conservative on the Review echoed that sentiment: “Whatever his politics we felt he would give us a fair shake.”
Barack was so evenhanded, in fact, that he risked alienating his liberal friends by appointing three members of the Federalist Society to top spots on the masthead, and only one African American. “Barack took ten times as much grief from those on the left on the Review as from those of us on the right,” Berenson said. “And the reason was, I think there was an expectation among those editors on the left that he would use his position to advance the cause.” Instead, Berenson added, his “foremost goal was to put out a first-rate publication, and he was not going to let politics or ideology get in the way of doing that.”
As he had predicted, Barack’s election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review in February of 1990 made national news. He was profiled in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and told the Associated Press, “From experience, I know that for every one of me there are a hundred, or thousand, black and minority students who are just as smart and just as talented and never get the opportunity.” In his first TV interview, he observed that his election “symbolizes some progress, at least within the small confines of the legal community. I think it’s real important to keep the focus on the broader world out there and see that for a lot of kids, the doors that have been opened to me aren’t open to them.”
Leaning against a pillar in jeans, black turtleneck, and Bass Weejuns, the collar of his windbreaker turned up to frame his boyish face, Barack cut a dashing figure on campus. He was, bar none, the best-known and most respected student at Harvard. Seasoned professors gossiped about which Supreme Court Justice he was likely to clerk for, and female classmates joked that Blair Underwood would probably be best suited to portray Barack in the movie version of his life.
For all his successes at Harvard, Barack did suffer one embarrassing defeat. When a panel of coeds charged with screening candidates for a pinup calendar of black men at Harvard rejected him, Barack was peeved. The reason he didn’t make the cut: “Barack,” one of the judges recalled matter-of-factly, “just wasn’t hot enough.”
Jane Dystel disagreed—at least in terms of the young man’s potential as an author. Spotting the glowing profile of Barack in the New York Times, the young literary agent asked him to write up a brief book proposal based on his life. Dystel then submitted the proposal to several editors and a deal was struck with Poseidon Press, a small imprint of Simon & Schuster. He pocketed the first half of the $150,000 advance—a hefty sum for a first-time author—and returned to his law studies with the intention of writing the book between classes.
Understandably, Michelle was thrilled that her boyfriend had landed a lucrative book deal, and shared the news with one of her dearest friends, her old Princeton roommate Suzanne Alele. The Nigerian-born daughter of two physicians, Alele was raised in Kingston, Jamaica, and moved to Washington, DC, as a teenager. At Princeton, the beautiful, bright Alele majored in biology, ran track, managed the lightweight football team, and, according to one classmate, “saved the rest of u
s from computer catastrophes.”
Alele earned her master’s at the University of Maryland and went to work for the Federal Reserve as a computer specialist, but she was always seen by those who knew her as laid-back, fun-loving, and not at all concerned about trying to please others. She traveled the world and made a point of urging her friends—especially Michelle—to lighten up.
In February, around the time Barack was elected president of the Harvard Law Review, Alele was diagnosed with advanced lymphoma. Four months later, Michelle got the call she had been dreading. Michelle rushed to the National Institutes of Health in Washington and was holding her friend’s hand when she passed away on June 23, 1990. Alele was just twenty-five.
“I was confronted for the first time in my life with the fact that nothing was really guaranteed,” Michelle recalled. Although Suzanne’s life was cut short, Michelle envied the way her friend had chosen to spend it. “One of the things I remembered about Suzanne is she always made decisions that would make her happy and create a level of fulfillment,” Michelle said. “She was less concerned with pleasing other people, and thank God.”
After Alele’s funeral, Michelle seriously began to question the path she had chosen. “If I died in four months,” she asked herself, “is this how I would have wanted to spend this time? Am I waking up every morning feeling excited about the work I’m doing? I need to figure out what I really love.”
She worried that she had “unthinkingly” taken the “automatic path” from Harvard to a corporate career. “I started thinking about the fact that I went to some of the best schools in the country and I have no idea what I want to do,” she said. “That kind of stuff got me worked up because I thought, ‘This isn’t education. You can make money and have a nice degree, but what are you learning about giving to the world, and finding your passion and letting that guide you?’”
Besides, she began to feel guilty about the material trappings of success. Known as something of a clotheshorse by her Sidley Austin colleagues, she was careful to dress down around less affluent relatives and South Shore neighbors. “Can I go to the family reunion in my Benz and be comfortable,” she wondered, “while my cousins are struggling to keep a roof over their heads?”
Despite these mounting doubts, Michelle continued to make her mark in the intellectual property department at Sidley Austin. It would take another, even more personal tragedy to force a change in the course of Michelle’s life.
In March of 1991, Fraser Robinson went through his time-consuming daily ritual of getting out of bed, dressing, and driving to his job at the water treatment plant. It had become all the more painful in the wake of a recent kidney operation, but he was determined to tough it out.
Fraser never made it to the plant. Unbeknownst to Michelle’s dad, he was suffering major complications from the kidney surgery. He died behind the wheel of his car at age fifty-five.
Michelle was devastated, but she was also able to draw inspiration from her father’s death. “He died on his way to work,” Michelle said. “He wasn’t feeling well, but he was going to get in that car and go. That’s how we grew up, living your life to be sure that you make the most of it. If what you’re doing doesn’t bring you joy every single day, what’s the point?”
Barack rushed to Michelle’s side, and she wept on his shoulder as her father’s casket was lowered into the ground. It was then, Barack later said, “that I promised Fraser Robinson I would take care of his girl.” (Strangely, although Barack would later write that this took place only six months after he met Michelle, he had actually known her for nearly two years by the time her father died.)
Graveside promise or no, Barack had been dancing around the subject of matrimony for well over a year. There was never any question about how he felt. “I’m hooked, I’m in love,” he told his Occidental roommate Vinai Thummalapally and anyone else who would listen. “She was highly intelligent, highly educated, and gorgeous,” Newton Minow said. “He was completely devoted to Michelle.” But Barack remained skittish when talk turned to marriage. The issue had become, Michelle conceded, “a bone of contention between us.”
“Come on,” she would say to him, only half kidding. “What’s your problem? Let’s get with the program here.”
“It’s just a piece of paper,” he said, rolling his eyes in exasperation. “I mean, what does it really mean?”
“Oh, brother…”
The debate continued as Barack approached graduation in June of 1991. When Chicago attorney Judson Miner called the Law Review offices to offer him a job, Barack’s assistant answered, “You can leave your name and take a number. You’re number six hundred and forty-seven.”
At first Barack passed on all the offers—including one from Michelle’s firm, Sidley Austin. Determined to do something in public service, he resolved to return to Illinois and take the bar exam. He passed on the first try. (Michelle had failed on her first attempt but passed on the second.)
That night, Barack took Michelle to celebrate at Gordon, the landmark Chicago restaurant famous for its contemporary American cuisine. Over artichoke fritter appetizers, they once again launched into their long-running debate over marriage.
The argument died down enough for them to enjoy their entree, but began to heat up again as dessert approached.
“Marriage, it doesn’t mean anything,” Barack insisted. “It’s really how you feel.”
“Yeah, right,” Michelle replied sarcastically.
“I mean, come on, Michelle,” he continued. “We know we love each other. What do we need to get married for?”
She shot him a withering glance. “Look, buddy,” she said, “I’m not one of these girls who’ll just hang out forever. That’s just not who I am.”
Barack just sat there smirking as Michelle smoldered. In the middle of her tirade, the waiter arrived with Gordon’s signature dessert—flourless chocolate cake. On the plate was a small velvet box. “So I’m sort of stopped in my tracks,” she later said of the moment. Michelle opened the box to reveal a one-carat diamond engagement ring.
She looked up at Barack in stunned silence. “That,” he said, “sort of shuts you up, doesn’t it?”
For once, Michelle was indeed speechless.
It is true my wife is smarter, better looking. She’s also a little meaner than I am.
—Barack
I cannot be crazy, because then I’m a crazy mother and I’m an angry wife.
—Michelle
Every high-flying kite needs somebody with their feet on the ground. And that’s Michelle.
—Avis LaVelle, friend
I trust her completely, but at the same time she’s also a mystery to me in some ways.
—Barack
5
As a senior partner at Sidley Austin, Newton Minow used his considerable clout to promote Michelle’s career at the firm. He had grown equally fond of her boyfriend and wasted no time trying to entice him into the Sidley Austin fold as well.
Yet Minow was not really surprised that Barack was now standing across from him, listing all the reasons why he was going to have to turn down Minow’s generous offer of a job in favor of a life in politics. After all, Minow was no stranger to public service himself; he had been Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission in the Kennedy administration and active in the Democratic Party all his life.
“You don’t have to explain anything to me,” Minow told Barack after listening to him outline his interest in grassroots activism followed by a run for state, and then national, office. “You can accomplish a great deal of good in the public sector. I’ll do whatever I can to help.”
Barack cleared his throat. “You may not feel that way,” he said tentatively, “after you hear the rest of what I’ve got to say. I suggest,” he added, “you sit down.”
Minow, nonplussed, eased into the chair behind his desk. “What the hell is this?” he thought. Barack sat down opposite him.
“I’m taking Michelle with me.”
“Hold it,” Barack said, raising his hand. “Now just hold it! You don’t understand—”
“Oh, I understand, all right,” Minow shouted. “I understand perfectly—”
“We’re getting married,” Barack said, cutting Minow short.
“Oh,” Minow said, “that’s different.” He reached across his desk, pumped Barack’s hand, and congratulated him enthusiastically. He also reiterated his offer to help in any way he could to advance Barack’s—and Michelle’s—new career in the public sector.
It was only after Barack left that it occurred to Minow that Barack, who did not even work for the firm, had essentially resigned for Michelle. During a legal career that spanned a half century, Minow had never heard of a man acting so explicitly on behalf of his wife, much less his fiancée. This resignation by proxy seemed especially odd given the fact that Michelle had never exactly been hesitant to speak up for herself at the firm.
Although Michelle had not voiced her dissatisfaction to her superiors at Sidley Austin, the sudden deaths of her friend Suzanne Alele and her father had left her more confused than ever about the future. She was well aware that many of her fellow lawyers were happy with the work they were doing. But, she asked, “were they bounding out of bed to get to work in the morning? No.”
“You just knew that they weren’t going to contain her in that law firm,” Michelle’s Sidley Austin colleague Kelly Jo MacArthur recalled. Michelle wanted to make a real impact on public policy, but in this she was already deferring to Barack. “She was talking about him constantly,” another Sidley Austin lawyer said. “A lot of people brag about their husbands or boyfriends, but this was different. Her tone was almost worshipful. He was going to do great things, she kept saying.”
Barack and Michelle Page 15