Rising Star

by David Garrow

  On Wednesday, May 1, the CCNY chapter of NYPIRG held a demonstration at Broadway and 137th Street to protest the abysmal condition of that IRT #1 line station. This was part of NYPIRG’s Straphangers Campaign for better subway service across the city. The next day a noontime rally outside NAC drew attention to how the NYPIRG chapter, in tandem with CCNY’s student government, had gathered more than a thousand handwritten letters to members of Congress opposing the Reagan administration’s proposed budget cuts for Pell Grants and guaranteed student loans in the pending Higher Education Reauthorization Act.

  That weekend Barack and Genevieve went to Hasan’s apartment on Saturday night and got “high on coke,” she recorded in her journal. On Sunday Barack sat around her Warren Street apartment reading the New York Times and watching basketball. As he left that evening, Barack “said he felt strained,” and then told Genevieve, “This apartment is alien to me,” a comment she found hurtful. “Barack is discovering the ennui of life being uneventful and unfulfilling and not knowing where to look for the source of it,” she wrote. In retrospect she thought he was “depressed” and “not really talking that much.” She sensed “a great deal of disappointment and more emotional involvement” with his NYPIRG job than at BI. Barack’s inability to distance himself from his job as he had at BI made him “significantly more troubled by what was going on at work.” Genevieve thought that “as long as he was still at BI and paying his dues,” Barack had believed that a community organizing job would “be the fulfillment of his dream” and gave him hope for the future after his self-imposed 365-day sentence was up. But “the disappointment with how his actual experience” at NYPIRG had played out was leaving him “very broody.”

  Yet the CCNY students and NYPIRG staffers who worked most closely with Barack could not have been happier with him. On Tuesday, May 7, NYPIRG’s annual Lobby Day in Albany drew almost two hundred students from around the state, and the senate leader who previously had blocked passage of NYPIRG’s Toxic Victims Access to Justice bill told reporters, “I am convinced we will have an agreed-upon bill before the session ends.” The next afternoon CCNY’s NYPIRG chapter hosted a well-publicized community forum on federal budget cuts featuring Frances Fox Piven. CCNY’s classes ended one week later, on May 15, and the NYPIRG chapter held an end-of-semester pizza party in their Math Hut office.

  Alison Kelley had interacted with Barack as much as anyone over the preceding three months, and Obama had encouraged her to overcome her shyness and learn new skills, accept an invitation to join a singing group, and run for a seat on NYPIRG’s state board. “He was relentless,” and he had “a huge impact,” even if he did not realize it. “He changed the vector of my life in so many ways,” Alison later recalled. Barack was also “constantly bringing stuff in for us to read,” including publications on South Africa. In return, “Every day I’d hound him because he smoked,” and Barack’s usual reply was “We all have flaws.” Nonetheless, “every single female had a crush on him” and “everyone thought he was cute,” but “he was just always warm and friendly . . . in a very professional way.”

  At the end of the semester, “we begged him to stay. We loved him,” because “we all felt that he was the perfect person for our chapter, to meet our needs,” Alison recounted. But Barack was explicit that he would not return to CCNY for the fall semester nor stay with NYPIRG over the summer. “He talked about being frustrated, that he wasn’t moving fast enough,” Alison remembered. “It was so clear that he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, and he didn’t feel that he fit in anywhere.” Barack “was just deeply searching for his niche in the world . . . searching in terms of his own psyche.” He “seemed unsure of where he belonged” and “didn’t know where he was going.”

  Eileen Hershenov “desperately wanted him to stay,” and her boss Chris Meyer remembered “having a conversation with Barack” after “Eileen put me up to trying to convince him to stay.” To Eileen it was clear that Barack “was interested in organizing but not this kind of organizing.” NYPIRG executive director Tom Wathen concluded that Barack viewed NYPIRG’s issues as “too vanilla,” and “we were disappointed, but not surprised” when he resigned at the end of CCNY’s spring semester.

  NYPIRG’s top priority, the Toxic Victims Access to Justice bill, would be signed into law a year later by New York governor Mario Cuomo, but in Obama’s own subsequent references to his time at NYPIRG, he never once mentioned that signal achievement. The first time he described his experience, nine years later, he stated that “when I first got involved in organizing, in Harlem, I was out there because of liberal guilt, and I got disabused of that real quickly.” NYPIRG “sent me out into the middle of Harlem to try to get people involved in environmental and recycling issues,” but “the folks in Harlem weren’t all that interested . . . and I would guilt them all the time.” That description bore no relationship whatsoever to Obama’s actual work on CCNY’s campus, nor would the single phrase he devoted to his NYPIRG work in his subsequent book—“trying to convince the minority students at City College about the importance of recycling”—be much better.

  In a trio of cable news show interviews in subsequent years, Obama would say that he was “an organizer in Harlem” for “about a year,” that for “six months” he “recruited students out of the City College of New York . . . to work in the community,” and that he left NYPIRG because “the organization ran out of money.” None of these statements were accurate.58

  At much the same time that his work at CCNY ended, in mid-May 1985, Barack’s relationship with Genevieve deteriorated seriously. Genevieve wrote a brief poem entitled “Where’s the Beef?” invoking a famous 1984 political aphorism. That same day she told her closest friend at PS 133, “I just wanted to chop his dick off,” and the next day, she recorded in her journal, “I called him a prick.” Years later she had no idea what had made her so “aggressively angry at him” or why her feelings had been “so vicious.” That weekend, however, they once again partied with the Pakistanis, but less than two weeks later, Genevieve wrote in her journal about “Barack leaving my life—at least as far as lovers go. In the same way that the relationship was founded on calculated boundaries and carefully, rationally considered developments, it seems to be ending along coolly considered lines.”

  Once again, Genevieve’s own issues were front and center, as she acknowledged, after rereading her journal entries, “how consistently I mention having been drunk and how many times I’ve said I was giving up pot.” Yet “from the beginning what I have been most concerned with has been my sense of Barack’s withholding the kind of emotional involvement I was seeking. I guess I hoped time would change things, and he’d let go and ‘fall in love’ with me. Now, at this point, I’m left wondering if Barack’s reserve, etc., is not just the time in his life, but, after all, emotional scarring that will make it difficult for him to get involved even after he’s sorted his life through with age and experience. Hard to say.”

  But within just a few days, on Genevieve’s birthday, June 7, Barack gave her a huge philodendron. Even so, a few days later, Genevieve composed another deeply critical poem about him:

  You masquerade, you pompous jive, you act,

  but clothes don’t make a man,

  and I know you just coverin’ a whole lot of pain and confusion.

  You think you got it taken care of,

  but I’m tellin’ you bro, you don’t.

  You masquerade, you pompous jive, you act.

  A week later, Genevieve wrote a letter to a friend that she never sent. Only one week of school remained, and “I don’t know how I’ve managed to survive this year: it has been horrendous.” She was continuing to debate whether to teach again in 1985–86, but she was happy at 481 Warren Street, where “I’m making a home for myself. I had wanted to live with Barack—we were lovers for a year—but the relationship as far as steadiness goes has dropped away. The fact that he’s 23 put us in very different places, and I was demanding more than he c
ould give. So I just quietly stopped asking, and it all fell away. We are friends and feel close, and suddenly I find that it’s not me who’s the confused, needy person in a relationship.”59

  By the second week of June 1985, Barack Obama was unemployed again, and he had broken up with the woman with whom he had had the closest and most intimate relationship of his entire life. He was also living alone in an unfurnished apartment that Genevieve described as “creepy and very dark” under “very sketchy” circumstances that left Barack visibly nervous the few times Genevieve ever visited him there.

  But his NYPIRG experience at CCNY had not extinguished Barack’s desire to pursue some different kind of organizing, and with time on his hands, he spent a good amount of it at the Mid-Manhattan Public Library, on the east side of Fifth Avenue just south of 40th Street. “I started casting a wide net to see if there were jobs available doing grass roots organizing all across the country,” he later recounted. As Obama remembered it, he felt “a hunger for some sort of meaning in my life. I wanted to be part of something larger,” something “larger than myself,” indeed something less “‘vanilla’” than NYPIRG. One resource he carefully perused was the June issue of Community Jobs. “I wrote to every organization” that advertised, and one résumé and cover letter he put in the mail some time in mid-June was addressed to Gerald Kellman, Director, Calumet Community Religious Conference, 351 E. 113th St., Chicago, IL 60628.

  Jerry Kellman remembered receiving Obama’s résumé, seeing his surname and Hawaiian background, and asking his Japanese American wife April whether “Obama” might be Japanese. “Sure, it could be,” she replied. Within a day or so Jerry telephoned Barack in New York, and early in that conversation, it was clear that Obama was African American—just what Jerry’s ad, and his DCP leadership, hoped to find. Jerry’s father lived on the Upper West Side, and Jerry was already scheduled to visit him two weeks later. He told Barack they should talk in person in Manhattan.

  Barack was ecstatic and nervous about his upcoming meeting with Kellman. “He was very much keyed up about it,” Genevieve remembered, “with a very strong sense of wanting to impress and be found suitable . . . but also a great deal of angst about how the future of his entire life hinged on this meeting.” There was the deep attraction of a real community organizing job, but also, visible yet unspoken, was a strong desire to break free from the weekly pattern of “partying” with Hasan, Sohale, and Imad. “He felt trapped by the Pakistanis and their expectations that he would continue to party with them,” Genevieve realized. Barack “had zero drive to substance use from within himself. It was just an ‘If I don’t, they’ll think I’m stuck up’” fear on his part. “He was only doing it so as not to rub it in their face that they were still doing the same-old same-old and he wasn’t interested.” That problem did not present itself when the group gathered at Beenu Mahmood’s apartment on Riverside Drive, or when Wahid attended, but otherwise the weekend cocaine parties extended right up through the spring and summer of 1985—“nonstop—without a doubt—continuous,” Genevieve replied when asked about that time. “It’s uppity to decline because you’re being superior, and he just didn’t want to.” She believed Barack “was very uncomfortable with what he felt was incredibly deep division between where they were going and how they chose to conduct themselves. . . . If he had been capable of hurting their feelings and being disloyal, he would have stopped engaging” in the weekend gatherings, but he was not, so the prospect of having to leave New York for an organizing job elsewhere held out a promise of freeing him from the bonds of a friendship he could not bring himself to break but very much wanted to sunder. “He mostly wanted to get away from the Pakistanis,” Genevieve believed, for “the restrictions the Pakistanis put on his sense of expanded identity and hopes for the future” had become too much.

  Hasan Chandoo sensed much the same thing, especially come that spring and early summer of 1985. Barack “had a tough life in New York. No money, hard work,” and in private he had begun to lecture Hasan about how his profligate use of pot and cocaine was part and parcel of a criminal drug economy that was doing untold damage to black young men and black neighborhoods. “He’s telling me as a friend, ‘Stay away from this shit’” and become “more disciplined,” Hasan recalled. “I listened to him” and “I was taken by his maturity,” but “I didn’t stop completely.”

  Just before the July 4 holiday, Keith Patchel returned to 350 West 48th Street from Stockholm. Keith was eight months into the sort of lifestyle change Barack was advocating to Hasan, and as a result “I wasn’t there very much” since “I was going to a lot of meetings.” Apartment 4E was “such a casual, come and go kind of place” that “there were endless occasions when I wouldn’t see my roommates for days at a time, especially” given the apartment’s layout. “I do remember somebody being there” when Keith returned, “somebody in a Hawaiian shirt,” but “we could both be living there and not see each other for days at a time.” Only after being told who that had been did Keith come to the realization that “I do have a recollection of meeting Barack.”

  Sometime soon after the July 4 holiday, Jerry Kellman arrived in Manhattan and met Obama at a coffee shop for a good two hours. “The whole purpose of this interview for me was to ascertain his motivation,” Kellman recalled, “because it seemed like he must have had so many opportunities” given Barack’s résumé. “He was good-looking and articulate and obviously very, very bright.” When Jerry asked him what he knew about Chicago, Barack’s immediate reply—“Hog butcher for the world,” the opening line of Carl Sandburg’s famous 1914 poem “Chicago”—demonstrated just how much literature Barack had absorbed during his college years.

  Kellman knew from his years in organizing that “people who were as young as” Barack—not yet twenty-four—sometimes “burn out very quickly” when they “for the first time in their life, encounter significant failure” as novice organizers. For that reason, Kellman wanted to understand why a Columbia graduate who had earned almost $20,000 at BI was applying for this trainee position and its advertised salary of $10,000. Kellman explained CCRC’s hope of staunching the Calumet region’s loss of steel industry jobs, and how church congregations were CCRC’s organizational base. He also made clear that for DCP’s Chicago parishes, he inescapably needed a black organizer. But Jerry had to know why this animated Barack.

  “What he told me was that he wanted to make positive changes around economic equality,” Kellman recalled. Barack “was clearly an idealist” and “was very hungry to learn.” Indeed Obama “challenged me on whether we could teach him” more than he had experienced at NYPIRG. “‘How are you going to train me?’ and ‘What am I going to learn?’” were questions Jerry could answer convincingly given his organizing experience stretching back to IAF. Barack wondered too “how would he survive financially” on $10,000, and Kellman suggested Hyde Park as a place to live while making it clear that if Barack rose from his initial trainee status, his salary would go up as well. Jerry then offered Obama a job on the spot, which he accepted, and upon discovering that Barack did not own a car, which would be essential on the Far South Side, Kellman offered him an additional $1,000 to buy a car. A check would be in the mail as soon as Jerry returned to Chicago, and Barack agreed to make the drive to Chicago as soon as he acquired a car that would get him there. Beenu Mahmood was in Chicago, living in Hyde Park while working as a summer associate at the law firm of Sidley & Austin prior to his final year of law school, so Obama knew he had an initial place to stay.

  Either that day or the next, Barack went to Brooklyn to see Genevieve at her Warren Street apartment. “He was very, very sure that Chicago would offer him the organizing experience that New York” had not, she recalled, but what she remembered most clearly was the question he posed to her: “Do you want to move to Chicago with me?” Given how their relationship had “devolved” over the previous two months, Genevieve was surprised, but “I was so sick of the withheldness that I never even hes
itated with ‘No.’” Years later she would debate with herself whether Barack asked only because he was certain she would decline, or whether he still felt a deep attachment to her.

  Only in retrospect would she come to believe that “all the tension he was feeling that May and June had very little to do with me” as opposed to Barack’s need to find a purpose in his life. Now he was headed to a predominantly African American working environment, even though, in her view, “he had zero experience of black culture.” Genevieve had long recognized and teased him about “the grandness of his vision,” even though “it wasn’t at all an articulated vision.” But now Barack was undertaking the most consequential decision of his still young life, leaving a city to which he repeatedly had returned following his college graduation two years earlier for a new metropolis he had glimpsed only as a young child for whom the Field Museum’s shrunken heads were Chicago’s most memorable attraction.

  By July 16 Barack was looking to buy an affordable used car, and within a week, he acquired an “old, beat up” blue Honda Civic for the grand sum of $800, $200 less than what Kellman had sent him. Genevieve recorded in her journal “the thought of being alone again and somehow defenseless once Barack’s gone.” He had a good-bye lunch with Andy Roth on the Upper East Side, and early on Friday afternoon, July 26, 1985, Barack pulled away from 350 West 48th Street with all of his worldly possessions in his “raggedy” Honda.

  “My radio/cassette sprang to life with a slight touch of the antenna, just as I was about to enter the West Side Highway,” he wrote some days later. “I tuned into the jazz station and drove over the George Washington Bridge, straining my neck to catch a last glimpse of the Manhattan skyline. It was overcast.” Once across the soaring span, he bore right when the expressway forked, with the New Jersey Turnpike bending south and Interstate 80 heading west as the urban clutter of Hackensack and Paterson gave way to the rural countryside of northwest New Jersey before the road descended to the Delaware Water Gap and the historic river that marked the Pennsylvania state line. It was a road he had never traveled, and as Pennsylvania passed by with nary a single city to be seen, all Barack would remember of the transit was “hazy green.”