Rising Star

by David Garrow

  The 2Ls had three ways out of the “hideous experience” of doing pool work: join the five-person “Devo” team, whose work would satisfy the law school’s written work requirement; join a multiperson group assigned to edit an especially difficult article; or write a note of one’s own, an option often postponed until the 3L year and almost always done for independent study credit under faculty supervision. Gordon Whitman, the 3L Articles Office cochair, had worked for a year as a community organizer in Philadelphia before starting law school and had successfully pushed for the acceptance of a manuscript that argued that the real-world theology of Martin Luther King Jr. offered a superior perspective for examining the contentions made by “critical legal studies” scholars.

  The article’s author, Anthony E. Cook, was an African American associate professor of law at the University of Florida who had graduated magna cum laude from Princeton before getting his law degree at Yale. Cook’s dense and complicated analysis looked especially daunting, and Whitman recruited four new 2L editors to work on it: Christine Lee, the young Oberlin graduate who was just about to turn twenty-two, the now twenty-eight-year-old Barack Obama, whom Lee had disliked from their first introduction a year earlier, and two other visibly sharp 2Ls, Susan Freiwald, a 1987 magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, and John Parry, a 1986 summa cum laude graduate of Princeton. The lengthy manuscript would require weeks of work—it was not scheduled for publication until the March issue—and these four knew by early September what their fall work for the Review would entail.19

  Fall semester classes began on September 6. Barack and Rob had carefully debated their choices. In Laurence Tribe’s huge and oversubscribed Constitutional Law section, which met five hours per week, they were joined by a number of their 1L Section III classmates. The assigned casebook, William B. Lockhart et al.’s Constitutional Law: Cases and Materials, 6th ed., was the best available. Word among students was that African American professor Christopher Edley, who was back after serving as issues director for Michael Dukakis’s presidential campaign, was “refreshingly good.” His class, Administrative Law, might sound dry and arcane, but Edley taught the sixty-five-student, four-hour-a-week class as an entirely practical “this is how the public policy process works” course, and he supplemented the main text, Walter Gellhorn et al.’s Administrative Law, 8th ed., with various other materials.

  Rob and Barack had “an extended discussion” about taking Corporations, as most 2Ls did, weighing the upside value of “understanding the world” versus how their grades in the four-credit class might harm their goal of graduating magna cum laude. But they began it and kept it, finding that Professor Reinier Kraakman, a Yale law graduate with a Harvard sociology Ph.D., “had an interesting mind and approach.” Kraakman focused on “the control of managers in publicly held corporations” and emphasized “the functional analysis of legal rules as one set of constraints on corporate actors.” Rob and Barack found it “a good class, really cool,” and “really enjoyed it.”

  Edley’s Ad Law was “almost as exciting as the Torts class” a year earlier with David Rosenberg. “Barack and I loved the Ad Law class” and “had a tremendous amount of fun” in it, Rob remembers, for Edley was “inspiring” and had “this very functional, argumentative intellectual approach.” The course “stimulated a lot of deep discussions,” plus a number of office-hours conversations with Edley, whom Rob thought was “truly a great teacher.”

  Mark Kozlowski recalled that Tribe’s Constitutional Law had “a really lively atmosphere.” As in all sizable classes, seats were preassigned, and Scott Scheper, a 1988 summa cum laude graduate of Case Western Reserve University, found himself in a second-row aisle seat, at the front of the bowl-style classroom, with Obama just to his right. Like Scheper, Laura Jehl, a 1986 highest honors graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, had been in a different 1L section than Obama. But she already knew Tribe from her work on U.S. senator Edward M. Kennedy’s Judiciary Committee staff, and she was also already one of Tribe’s research assistants. Jehl took note of Obama from the outset of Tribe’s class. He “spoke up and said something eminently reasonable, eminently thoughtful,” and with an “absolutely amazing voice.”

  Section III survivor Jennifer Radding remembered that Barack “was exceptional in Tribe’s class” and that “Tribe was like in love with him in a very intellectual way.” Sarah Leah Whitson witnessed it too. “Barack seemed to be operating at another level. . . . His rapport back and forth with Tribe felt more like a dialogue among equals.” Kevin Downey, a 1988 magna cum laude graduate of Dartmouth, noted how Obama spoke in “narrative-based” style that often included references to his own experiences, while Rob Fisher, who also stood out, made “more analytic comments.” Downey thought they “were leagues beyond the rest of us.”

  Seated next to Obama, Scott Scheper had as close a view as anyone. Tribe was “a whole lot more theoretical” than he had anticipated, more interested in “What’s right? What should be?” than in “How is? What is?” Obama was “facile and adept,” and “talked more than any other single individual” in the class. Scheper recalled that “Tribe spent a whole lot of time not six feet from me in what almost became personal dialogue between him and Barack. . . . He would leave the lectern and come over . . . to our side of the class and be right in front of the front row and then Barack would be talking to him.” The scene made Scheper “sort of self-conscious that I had to maintain my posture because the whole class was looking right at me because that’s where the focus of the dialogue was.”

  Several weeks in, Scheper’s demanding Trial Advocacy Workshop kept him away from Con Law for several classes. When he returned, Rob Fisher was in his spot, and Scheper realized that Obama “gave away my seat because I didn’t come to class.” Barack immediately apologized: “I thought you dropped the class.” Then the regular pattern resumed. Obama “was always engaged in these esoteric discussions with Professor Tribe. . . . They spent a lot of time talking about what the law should be.” All told, Rob explained, with Tribe plus Edley and Kraakman, fall 1989 “was a pretty fun semester.”20

  That fall was Robert Clark’s first as dean of the law school. The school had been in the news over the summer because of the arrest and suspension of an African American 3L accused of raping a Harvard undergraduate. But Clark played right into the hands of his detractors when he terminated the school’s public interest career counselor before the semester began. Clark called the move “a reorientation of resources” away from something that served only “symbolic, guilt-alleviating purposes,” but progressive students reacted immediately. A protest rally attracted a crowd of three hundred, with Barack’s close friend Cassandra Butts telling the Harvard Law Record, “I came to law school in particular because I was very much interested in helping people who don’t have access to the law and who see the law as being more of a hindrance than a help to them.”

  Students viewed Clark’s move as a tangible, public rebuke of those motives, and quickly created the Emergency Coalition for Public Interest Placement. National legal publications and the Boston Globe all covered the controversy, but the Harvard Crimson highlighted how tiny a percentage of Harvard Law students actually took public interest jobs once they graduated. Butts told the Crimson that many students arrived with such an interest, “but with the emphasis here on corporate law, they don’t always leave with that attitude.” Given the “insurmountable number of loans they need to pay off,” students may “choose to go into corporate work, but they will be more sensitive to the need for pro bono lawyers.” As the fall semester progressed, eight hundred law students signed letters protesting Clark’s move, then dumped them outside the dean’s office during a one-hundred-person rally that the Record said had “an emotional, near confrontational tone.” As Christopher Edley ruefully recalled, Clark “was screwing up massively.”21

  In late September, Barack flew back to Chicago to take part in a Friday-afternoon roundtable discussion on community organiz
ing. Funded by Ken Rolling and Jean Rudd at Woods, the event built on the commissioned essays Obama and others had written for Illinois Issues a year earlier. Sokoni Karanja, Wieboldt’s Anne Hallett, and several local academics were part of the group, and, as he had in other settings, Barack refrained from talking until the discussion was well under way. When he did speak, Barack highlighted what he called “the educative function of organizing,” for “at some point you have to link up . . . with the larger trends, larger movements in the city or the country. I think we are not very good at that.” He suggested that “I am not sure we talk enough in organizing” about organizing’s internal culture, and “we don’t understand what the relationship between organizing and politics should be. . . . I would like to think that ideally you would focus on the local but educate for the broader arena, and that you are creating a base for political or national issues.” Barack expressed disappointment that organizing had a “suspicion of politics,” for “politics is a major arena of power” and “to marginalize yourself from that process is a damaging thing, and one that needs to be rethought.” His critique was fundamental, and strong. “Organizing right now doesn’t have a long-term vision.”

  In the 1960s, “a lot was lost during the civil rights movement because there was not enough effective organizing consolidating those gains,” but now organizers were ignoring the potential of working with movement-style efforts, and “that long-term vision needs to be developed.” Barack returned to organizing’s educative mission. “How do you educate people enough so that they can be forcing their politicians to articulate their broader views and wider horizons?” he asked. “People expect politicians to express some long-term interests of theirs and not just appeal to the lowest common denominator.”

  Barack sat back before again weighing in. “There is this big slippery slope of folks and communities that are sinking,” he reminded the group. How can organizing help them? “How do you link up some of the most important lessons about organizing . . . with some powerful messages that came out of the civil rights movement or what Jesse Jackson has done or what’s been done by other charismatic leaders? A whole sense of hope is generated out of what they do. Jesse Jackson can go into these communities and get these people excited and inspired. The organizational framework to consolidate that is missing,” especially given the lack of minority organizers. “The best organizers in the black community right now are the crack dealers. They are fantastic. There’s tremendous entrepreneurship and skill,” all being used to distribute illegal drugs. To help black neighborhoods, “organizing in these communities . . . can’t just be instrumental . . . it has to be recreating and recasting how these communities think about themselves.”

  After a pause, Barack turned to one of his chief takeaways from his time in Roseland. Harold Washington “was an essentially charismatic leader,” although “his election was an expression of a lot of organizing that had been taking place over a long time.” All indications were that “to a large extent” Washington “wanted to give back to that process. He wanted to give those groups recognition and empower them in some sense,” as he had done so visibly with Mary Ellen Montes and UNO, but “real empowerment was not done.” An African American historian on the panel objected to Barack criticizing Harold Washington. Sokoni Karanja agreed with the angry historian, but Anne Hallett sided with Barack, who pursued his point. “When you have a charismatic leader, whether it’s Jesse Jackson or Harold Washington . . . there has to be some sort of interaction” that moves all that energy back “into the community to build up more organizing . . . more of that needs to be done.” Then the conversation shifted, but Obama made one final point: “Organizing can also be a bridge between the private and the public, between politics and people’s everyday lives.”

  Barack’s comments revealed how profoundly he disagreed with the worldview of IAF and Greg Galluzzo, and how convinced he was that social change energies should be focused on the political arena. In later years hardly anyone would appreciate the significance of what Obama said that day. Ben Joravsky, a fellow participant who was already on his way to becoming one of Chicago’s most perceptive political journalists, later recalled Obama’s “veneer of cool” but dismissed his comments as those of “a windy sociology professor with nothing particularly insightful to say.” Only journalist John B. Judis, examining this moment many years later, would highlight how Obama had voiced “a litany of criticisms of Alinsky-style organizing” and note that he had “rejected the guiding principles of community organizing: the elevation of self-interest over moral vision; the disdain for charismatic leaders and their movements; and the suspicion of politics itself.” But, Judis wrote, Obama “did so in a way that seemed to elude the other participants,” who objected only to Barack’s remark that Harold Washington had not left behind any tangible political legacy.

  Judis mused that even Obama “seemed initially oblivious to the harsh implications of his own words,” but Washington’s fundamental failure should have been obvious to everyone in the room, especially because the mayor’s political base had so quickly fallen apart after his death, leaving Chicago with a white, Democratic machine mayor with an all-too-familiar surname. Six months earlier, Cook County state’s attorney Richard M. Daley had defeated Gene Sawyer in the Democratic primary by 55 to 44 percent, and five weeks later, Daley was elected mayor, besting Alderman Tim Evans, running as an independent, by 55 to 41 percent. Ed Vrdolyak, now a Republican, garnered 3 percent and soon added a sideline as a radio talk show host to his lucrative South Chicago law practice.22

  The Chicago trip was also a chance for Barack to spend a weekend with Michelle Robinson, and either then or soon after, he asked her to accompany him to Honolulu over the winter holidays. Back in Cambridge, Barack kept his distance from the burgeoning student protest campaign, despite his friendship with the outspoken Cassandra Butts, who, second only to Rob Fisher, was his best friend in Cambridge. Laura Jehl, who was working with Cassandra on a manuscript for the Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review, knew that Barack and Rob were “inseparable,” and she also saw how Barack and Cassandra “were around together a lot but they didn’t appear to be together,” as she put it. “It did not seem to be romantic” and “it did not appear to be sexual.” Another female friend concurred: “the vibe they gave off was fraternal.” Laura thought that as attractive as Barack was, “there was also absolutely no body language of him that I was aware of towards anybody,” and other women all agreed: “I didn’t see any sexual energy from him” said one, and “never any sense” at all, recalls another.

  On evenings when Barack worked on the Anthony Cook manuscript at Gannett House, he and fellow 2L African American editor Ken Mack often walked to a sandwich shop in Harvard Square for dinner. On several nights, Gordon Whitman gave Barack a lift home and spoke about how he was volunteering at the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance, a Boston group headed by veteran community organizer Lew Finfer. After Barack mentioned his Chicago experience, Whitman told Finfer he should meet him. Finfer called Obama, and they met up one day at a Harvard Square coffee shop. Finfer found Barack “cool” and “dispassionate,” but hoped to interest him in a return to organizing after law school. Barack politely said no. “I have a plan to return to Chicago and go into politics.”

  One mid-October night, 3L executive editor Tom Krause, a U.S. Navy veteran who was overseeing the group edit of the Anthony Cook article, hosted a party following a lecture by Alex Kozinski, the well-known federal appellate judge for whom Krause would be clerking after graduation. Krause invited a number of editors of all political persuasions, and Barack attended. Review editors were prized candidates for clerkships with top federal judges like Kozinski, and an astonishing 102 members of the law school’s 1989 graduating class had won clerkships. Each fall 2Ls began eyeing and discussing which jurists they would apply to in the spring, and Ken Mack was astounded when Barack told him one evening that he was so focused on returning to Chicago after graduat
ion that he would forgo applying for clerkships. When this news spread among African American students, there was open disbelief that such a top performer would pass up so prestigious an accolade. Kenny Smith was surprised and impressed, but others sensed an attitude of group disappointment. As Frank Harper put it, there were “these steps you’re supposed to take” and “people thought that he was making a catastrophic error by not clerking.”

  Obama was a semiregular presence at BLSA meetings and parties. Cochairing a BLSA committee made him a formal member of BLSA’s executive board, but the group’s style was decidedly informal, with its annual spring conference the one major event requiring time and attendance by its members. After some BLSA gatherings Barack, Ken, and basketball buddies Frank Harper and David Hill would go to a pizza parlor on Mass Ave a bit north of the law school. Often joining them were two new 1Ls. Karla Martin was an African American 1987 Harvard College graduate; Peter Cicchino was white, gay, a year older than Barack, and had spent six years as a lay member of the Jesuits. Cicchino would become a defining member of the school’s public interest community and a landmark figure in the public emergence of gay people at Harvard Law. Karla remembers Barack saying that he “wanted to be a change agent” notwithstanding his absence from student protest ranks. “It was clear he had ambitions,” but “how that was going to play out was not clear.”