by David Garrow
Greg Sater had formed a volleyball league, and their court time was just after basketball, but the basketball players would refuse to give up the floor. “They would always give me shit,” Sater recalled, and then Barack would “sweet-talk me into giving them an extra few minutes, always.” He was “very disarming” and “very good at defusing situations and being a peacemaker.” Rob Fisher had similar memories from pickup basketball games, but they spent far more time studying than on the basketball court.
The press of coursework led Barack to give up on the irregular journal he had kept ever since his first year in New York, and he and Rob often studied at his Somerville apartment rather than in Harvard’s law library. Rob remembers that Barack was very proud of “three Filipino gun cases,” big long wooden boxes he had bought to serve as bookshelves, but otherwise the “apartment was very sparse,” with “a little TV,” some “spare furniture,” and overall an “ascetic” feeling. “He and I would sit around his apartment,” Rob recalled, “and just bang ideas back and forth for hours.”
Rob appreciated that Barack was “very much a synthetic thinker,” just as other classmates had sensed from his many summary expositions, and Rob realized as well that virtually everyone around them “recognized from the start” that Barack was “exceptional.” Rob understood that Barack’s time in Chicago had been “an extraordinary experience for him,” and although Rob has no memory of any such conversation, one of his closest friends vividly remembers a phone call early in Rob’s time at Harvard in which Rob said he had just met the first African American president of the United States.
“Barack and I both looked at law school as an intellectual playground, a place to develop ideas, to have fun with ideas,” Rob explained. “There is no question, when he was in law school, his path in his mind was to be a politician. That is where he was going, and that was crystal clear from day one of law school,” along with definitely returning to Chicago upon graduation. During their conversations, Rob learned that “Barack recognized he had exceptional talents, and that that was a gift from God, that was something special.” Barack “felt a great moral obligation to use” his “special gifts” to “help people . . . and that was very palpable, very real, and very deep.” Just as Sheila Jager had heard Barack speak about his destiny, Rob too understood that Barack had a sense of himself that was rooted in his experiences in Roseland. “The way he described it to me,” Rob recalled, during “long deep conversations . . . he pictured an elderly African American woman sitting on a porch and just saying to him, ‘Barack, you’ve got special gifts. You need to use them for people.’ That was a very deep-seated belief. There’s no question about that,” even in the fall of 1988. Rob also knew that Barack’s identification as black “was a choice,” and that “making choices about identity did limit personal choices, and that pained him.”
Barack “spent so much time together” with Cassandra “Sandy” Butts that a mutual friend explained how “everybody thought they were dating, even though I don’t think that was ever the case.” As Jackie Fuchs forthrightly put it, voicing a perception widely shared among female classmates, Barack “gave off zero sexuality. . . . He came off as completely asexual.” His relationship with Sandy, who was four years younger and whose parents had divorced before she was a year old, had an older brother–younger sister closeness.
“When I first met Barack, I thought he was this black guy from the Midwest, and he did not volunteer his background, other than coming from Chicago,” Cassandra explained. “I didn’t know that Barack’s mother was white until a couple of weeks into knowing him. It wasn’t something that he volunteered.” Sandy was interested in Africa and had visited Zimbabwe and Botswana as an undergraduate, and only after Barack mentioned his trip to Kenya did his family story emerge: “My mother is white.” Like Rob, Sandy also soon realized that Barack’s years in Chicago had been “the most formative” of his life, and “he talked about how powerful the position of mayor of Chicago was,” just as he had told Mike Kruglik and Bruce Orenstein months earlier. Barack “certainly saw in Harold Washington a model,” one who was “incredibly influential,” and “his ambition was to eventually run for mayor.” In Cassandra’s memory there was no question Barack “wanted to be mayor of Chicago, and that was all he talked about as far as holding office. . . . He only talked about being mayor, because he felt that is really where you have an impact. That’s where you could really make a difference in the lives of those people he had spent those years organizing.” She remembered too that “Barack used to say that one of his favorite sayings of the civil rights movement was ‘If you cannot bear the cross, you can’t wear the crown,’” a rough approximation of Martin Luther King’s January 17, 1963, statement—“The cross we bear precedes the crown we wear”—that was featured in the epigraph of the King biography that had been published midway through Barack’s time in Chicago.
Cassandra believed Barack’s intellectual seriousness made him “a bit of a geek in law school,” but his Chicago experiences gave him a real-world grounding most of his younger classmates lacked. She remembered a 1L discussion among black students about whether the preferred label should be “black” or “African American.” “Barack listens to all of this, and near the end . . . he basically makes the point that it was kind of this false choice, that whether we’re called ‘African Americans’ or ‘black,’ it really doesn’t matter, what matters is what we’re doing to help the people who are in communities that don’t have the luxury of having this debate.” Cassandra thought of Barack as “African and American,” with “a sense of direction and focus” that distinguished him. Compared to his younger classmates, Barack seemed “incredibly mature,” with a “very calm” demeanor, and Cassandra thought “Barack was as fully formed as a person could be at that point in his life.”
An informal study group emerged that included David Troutt, Gina Torielli, and Barack. They met sometimes at the BLSA office or at Torielli’s apartment. On one occasion, when Barack was outside smoking, Gina worried that “my landlord was going to call the police” after seeing a black man on the front porch. On another, when everyone was saying what their dream job was, Barack “said he wanted to be governor of Illinois.” Still, most of Barack’s study time was spent with Rob, and when the law school’s 1989 Yearbook appeared some months later, an early page featured an uncaptioned photo of Barack sprawled on a couch listening as a smiling Rob spoke while holding a loose-leaf notebook. “When I think of those two that year,” Gina Torielli explained, that picture “is how I remember often finding them.” The photo captured the ring on Barack’s left index finger that he had worn ever since his first year at Oxy. Rob remembered precisely when the picture was taken. “I was explaining macroeconomics to Barack, and . . . we also had an extended discussion about the national debt in that session and how and whether it mattered.” It was no accident that Cassandra thought Barack something of a geek, or that virtually everyone in Section III looked up to Rob and Barack as the smartest minds in their midst.
Barack was more forthcoming with Rob than with anyone else at Harvard, indeed with anyone other than Sheila and Lena. Even though Barack “never mentioned mayoral politics” and never said anything “that would suggest to me that he had his sights on mayoral politics,” it was clear “he was just extremely politically ambitious” and “wanted to go as far as he could. There was no doubt in my mind he was thinking presidency” and “he shared that with me at the time.”
Obama’s classmates could see that too. We “knew he’d be in politics. That was obvious right from the start,” Sherry Colb explained, and Lisa Paget agreed that Barack “was clearly going to be a politician.” David Attisani thought that Harvard’s classrooms were “something of a rehearsal for him for public life,” that “he was getting himself ready” and seemed to be “self-consciously grooming himself for . . . some kind of public life.” In retrospect, Jackie Fuchs thought Barack “had already decided that he was a future president,” and wonder
ed if his self-transformation mirrored that of her past bandmate, Joan Jett. “I’m sure Barack as a child was perfectly ordinary, just like Joan was. Until the moment he decided that he was a star.” Fuchs was not enamored of the 1988 Barack—“in law school the only thing I would have voted for Obama to do would have been to shut up”—but among the 1Ls who socialized together, David Troutt believed there was “none more careful, more guarded about his personal life than Barack.” David Attisani likewise viewed Barack as “a very private guy” who was “quite cautious about where he appeared socially.”
One Thursday evening, several young members of Section III, including Scott Sherman, a 1988 highest honors graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, decided to head down to Harvard Square to drink. Seeing Obama studying nearby, Sherman invited him to join the group, but Barack demurred. “No, you young guys go on down and have fun. I have work to do here,” and Barack’s comment left Sherman “feeling like a sophomoric frat boy. He was serious” and “he was not wasting his time at the law school,” Sherman recalled. “He was there for a reason,” and there was no gainsaying the five-year age gap between Barack and most of his fellow students.
Years later, classmates pictured how Barack appeared back then. “He always wore the same ugly leather jacket,” Jennifer Radding said, and everyone remembered seeing him smoking outside Harkness Commons—“the Hark”—or, during the winter, in a basement smoking room that was one of the few authorized locations after a Cambridge antismoking ordinance had taken effect eighteen months earlier. “He really did smoke a lot,” Mark Kozlowski recalled, and sometimes in the basement, Barack talked with Kenyan LL.M. student Maina Kiai, who also had arrived that fall. Kiai remembered him “always asking questions about Kenya and Africa,” and “we talked a great deal about poverty in the USA.” Diana Derycz also recalled Barack as a “big smoker” who was “outside smoking” before classes even in winter. Sarah Leah Whitson believed that by 1988 at Harvard Law smoking was a symbolically transgressive act that set one apart from the student mainstream. Rob Fisher thought that Barack “enjoyed it,” and Lisa Paget remembered that when Barack was “walking on campus in his leather jacket with his typical cigarette in his hand, he had swagger.”
Barack was also among several dozen 1Ls who signed up to do scut work—“sub-citing,” as in substantive citation checking—for the Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review, one of the law school’s student-run journals that welcomed 1L participation. At the end of October, Barack’s sister Maya, who was a freshman at Barnard College in Manhattan, came up for a weekend, including a Halloween-evening dinner party at Barack’s apartment for which ten or so people were encouraged to come in costume. Rob and Barack’s 1L friend Dan Rabinovitz and his buddy Thom Thacker came wearing whale outfits inspired by the freeing that week of two creatures that had been trapped in the ice off Point Barrow, Alaska.
“I remember from early on thinking that Barack was the single most impressive individual I’d ever met,” Rabinovitz recalled, and that his Somerville apartment “seemed incredibly hip.” Barack had “made it a great place to live,” and his taste for Miles Davis and similar musicians was evident from “the wonderful jazz playing in the background.” Dan had also been an organizer, and he agreed with Barack “that to really deal with the fundamental issues in people’s lives, you needed to engage the political system.” Dan too remembers how Barack “made clear absolutely it was his intention to go back to Chicago and to be involved politically.” Thom Thacker vividly recalls that Halloween evening, perhaps because Barack “possessed a magnetic charm” or more likely because Maya was now “drop-dead gorgeous.” But either that evening or a few days later, Thom would recount how “I remember Dan remarking to me that he thought Barack would be president of the United States one day.”
On November 8, 1988, George Bush handily defeated Michael Dukakis to keep the presidency in Republican hands. “Dukakis’s loss was a major loss, and we were feeling it,” David Troutt recalled, but Mark Kozlowski remembers David Rosenberg beginning Wednesday’s Torts class with a caustic quip about the Supreme Court aspirations of one of his favorite colleagues: “Larry Tribe can unpack!” Rosenberg’s respect and affection for Rob and Barack was now expressing itself in a different way, because when their favorite NBA team, the Chicago Bulls—“We were both big Michael Jordan fans,” Rob says—was in Boston that night to play the Celtics, Rosenberg gave them “like second row” tickets so they could watch an “awesome” 110–104 Bulls victory in which Jordan scored fifty-two points.8
By early November, Rob, Barack, and Mark Kozlowski had agreed to work together on the upcoming spring semester Ames Moot Court exercise, and they also enlisted Lisa Hertzer, another member of their small Legal Methods class and a 1988 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford. The Legal Methods course had proven more daunting for 3L instructor Scott Becker than for most of the 1Ls. “Barack was so far ahead of the curve intellectually,” Becker remembered, that often sessions featured the “hyper-ambitious” Obama explaining, “I think this is what Scott means by that,” although never in a way that embarrassed Becker.
Barack and Rob were also beginning to think about summer jobs for 1989, and Barack wanted to return to Chicago. Barack’s old friend Beenu Mahmood, who had welcomed him there in 1985 while he was a summer associate at Sidley & Austin, was now in his third year as a lawyer in Sidley’s New York office, and “I suggested that he seriously look at Sidley,” Beenu remembers. Barack had kept in regular touch with Beenu, who believed by 1988 that “Barack was the most deliberate person I ever met in terms of constructing his own identity.”
Sidley actively sought out top 1Ls, and Beenu recalls speaking with Sidley managing partner Thomas A. Cole about Barack. Well before Christmas, his résumé arrived at Sidley’s Chicago office, where 1972 Harvard Law School graduate John G. Levi oversaw the firm’s recruiting at his alma mater and 1976 Northwestern Law School graduate Geraldine Alexis headed up Sidley’s minority associate recruiting effort.
On the Friday after Thanksgiving, Barack learned the surprising news in that day’s New York Times: “Albert Raby, Civil Rights Leader in Chicago with King, Dies at 55.” A memorial service at the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Chapel attracted more than a thousand mourners, and Teresa Sarmina, one of Raby’s former spouses, spoke of how he “would get excited about a person and the potential he could see in that person.”
In Cambridge, the last two weeks of fall semester classes featured a December 7 meeting with Ian Macneil that about 60 percent of Section III attended. “A wide range of complaints were voiced,” Macneil recalled, and tensions were raised further because the final exam in the yearlong course would not take place until late May. Only in their final week of classes in mid-December did Section III learn that its other exams would take place on the afternoons of Monday January 9, Wednesday the 11th, and Friday the 13th. With Civ Pro teacher David Shapiro leaving for Washington, students’ marks on the two-and-a-half-hour open-book midyear test would constitute half of their eventual grade on Harvard’s somewhat odd A+, A, A-, B+ B, B-, C-, and D eight-point scale. Shapiro posed only two essay questions of equal weight, one involving securities fraud and the other concerning an interlocutory (interim) appeal involving hundreds of lawsuits stemming from a hotel fire. No one could have found it easy. Two days later, Richard Parker’s three-and-a-half-hour open-book Crim Law exam posed three questions weighted at 50, 25, and 25 percent. The first posed a hilariously complicated fictional scenario involving a racially profiled terror suspect carrying cocaine who bumps into a knife-wielding drunk who then stabs a passerby. Students were instructed to “respond specifically to all” of six analytical issues. The shorter second and third questions were visibly easier, with the former offering as one of two options an essay on the Burger and Rehnquist Courts’ rulings on searches and interrogations. The third requested a response to a quotation asserting that changes in substantive criminal law doctrines offered a better chance of com
bating racism than did procedural reforms. On Friday the 13th, Section III’s exam week ended with a three-hour, open-book, two-question Torts exam from David Rosenberg. “Careful organization will be highly valued, as will conciseness and clarity of presentation,” the exam advised. One question dealt with a gang fight prompted by a movie about gang warfare, the second probed a manufacturer’s liability after a polio vaccination of a child infected the youngster’s father.9
With his first three exams complete, Obama flew to Chicago for ten days before spring semester classes began. Staying with Jerry Kellman’s family, Barack immediately learned that Al Raby’s death was not the only sadness that had befallen his Chicago friends. When Barack left Chicago in mid-August, Mike Kruglik replaced Greg Galluzzo as DCP’s consultant-adviser, and in Mike’s first heart-to-heart conversation with John Owens, Johnnie confessed that he was losing a struggle with cocaine addiction. “I was shocked,” Kruglik recalled, but he immediately arranged for Owens to enter a thirty-day residential treatment program on Chicago’s North Side and drove him there to help him check in.
A month later, Johnnie was back at DCP, but the group’s core members felt he had not been prepared to fully shoulder the weight of being executive director. “John was good, but he was not Barack,” Betty Garrett explained. “There was no one in my eyesight that would have been able to fill Barack’s shoes.” Aletha Strong Gibson remembered that they all realized that Owens “wasn’t quite ready” to assume such “a high-pressure position.”