Rising Star

by David Garrow

  But “those of us on the political left” often forget “the degree to which coalition and consensus-building among the American electorate has necessarily preceded any major federal program to reform or restructure America’s economic and political landscape.” Therefore African Americans needed to understand how “the indiscriminate use of rights rhetoric in conventional political battles only adds fuel to the suspicion of the average white that all claims of right are nothing more than hypocritical attempts on the part of blacks to disguise their pluralist self-interest in the language of prophesy.” Thus “rights rhetoric will be effective to the extent that it conforms to the aspirations of a color-blind society,” and African Americans should grasp the pragmatic need for “a shift away from rights rhetoric and towards the language of opportunity.” Underscoring the crux of their argument, Barack and Rob wrote that “the American commitment to equality of opportunity, mythical though it may be, offers the most powerful analytic framework for moving beyond the current stalemate. Pushing the logic of equality of opportunity as far as it can go” would best boost black advancement. “Precisely because America is a racist society . . . we cannot realistically expect white America to make special concessions towards blacks over the long haul,” they emphasized, while also acknowledging that “the greatest testimony to the force of racist ideology in American culture is that it infects not only the mind of whites, but the mind of blacks as well.” In the chapter’s concluding pages, Barack and Rob declared that “the energy for change in race relations in America will come from a bolder political vision . . . rather than a bolder legal theory.” That vision would require “framing the political debate in terms of opportunity,” for “the language of opportunity is better suited for the immediate tasks at hand, precisely because it better conforms to the underlying logic of American liberalism.”

  The two friends had written a pragmatic call that realism should trump idealism, and Rob recalled how he and Barack had each “intensely edited all parts of the documents,” for it “was very much a product of both of our minds.” Reflecting on what was the most intellectually intense friendship Barack would ever have, Rob saw the two chapters as the culmination of their three years of almost daily interaction. “This belief in the power of rational discourse to find better answers, and the enjoyment we took in that process, was certainly a major foundation to our friendship.”

  Martha Minow was very impressed. “This is going to be an important book/work,” she wrote Rob and Barack. While she found their argument “powerful and valuable,” she did have some smart suggestions on how they could improve their first chapter. She thought its organization was “perplexing,” as it needed “some more pronounced structure.” In an unusual thank-you from a law professor, Minow volunteered that “I enjoyed the chance to talk with you and work with you both.” She added that “as I told Rob, I have less to say now about the race section; perhaps we can get together for a meal or drink to talk about the ideas. I think parts of it are just beautiful.”

  Minow remembered once going to Barack’s basement apartment for some small group discussion and informal dinner, and she knew that Barack “wanted to go into politics.” For Barack, there was a direct connection between his experiences in Roseland and the arguments he and Rob articulated in their manuscript, where they addressed “the same line of questioning that I had been engaging in as a community organizer: ‘How do we bring about a more just society? What are the institutional arrangements that would give people opportunity?’”

  The other piece of writing Barack was focusing on that spring was “Journeys in Black and White.” Review classmate Scott Siff, who had tried writing a novel, remembered Barack giving him a fairly extensive manuscript to read. It was certainly not either of Barack and Rob’s two prospective book chapters, because, as Siff recalled, “it was this kind of memoir-ish thing,” although some parts “were more sociological commentary.” Yet “the social commentary was a little light” and “it didn’t hold together,” for “these long discursive . . . observations about society” did not work nearly as well as the more appealing memoir portions, but those “were much more limited.”

  In order to expand those, Barack could draw from his journals from years past, and sometime that spring he asked Sheila Jager if she had kept the letters and postcards he had sent to her during his trip to Kenya almost three years earlier. Barack and Sheila had continued to see each other irregularly throughout the 1990–91 academic year, notwithstanding the deepening of Barack’s relationship with Michelle Robinson. “I always felt bad about it,” Sheila confessed more than two decades later.

  That spring, Sheila met a thirty-three-year-old Korean American graduate student and U.S. Army officer, Jiyul Kim. A Boston native and 1981 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Kim had spent five years as an intelligence officer before becoming an East Asia specialist who hoped to complete a Harvard Ph.D. Sheila’s relationship with Jiyul quickly began to blossom just as Barack’s final weeks of law school approached. “As much as I loved him, I was relieved when our paths finally parted,” Sheila explained, because “we went through many painful things together,” and “I really traveled to some dark places during that period of my life.”

  When they saw each other for the final time late that spring, they parted “on the best of terms,” she recalled. She remembered Barack as “a profoundly lonely person at heart,” someone who “was and is truly unreachable,” but she always believed “that with me he was able to let go of all those masks of his.”57

  The last week of March was the law school’s spring recess and gave Barack a chance to return to Chicago. The publishing contract for “Journeys in Black and White” gave him the funds necessary to postpone deciding whether or not to accept the job offer from Sidley that he had in hand. Even so, Sidley was happy to accommodate him that coming summer as he studied for Illinois’s moderately difficult bar exam. Kelly Jo MacArthur, Michelle Robinson’s close friend at Sidley, had “felt like they were very committed that year,” but as Barack’s graduation approached, “Michelle wanted to know what was going to happen” above and beyond Barack once again living with her and her mother Marian, at the Robinson family home in South Shore. “It all kind of came together at the end of his third year,” MacArthur remembered; “that’s about when things kind of locked in,” even though nothing expressly definitive had yet been said regarding marriage.

  Two phone calls Barack had received from Chicago that spring also factored into his thinking. One had come as a direct result of how impressively he had performed his P-read edit on Michael McConnell’s Law Review article. McConnell had mentioned what an “impeccable editor” the Review’s president was to his University of Chicago Law School colleague Douglas Baird, who had already heard Obama’s name. Baird’s service as chairman of the university’s Library Board made him well acquainted with the senior librarian who for a quarter century had been overseeing the library’s increasing use of computer automation, Charles Payne—Madelyn Dunham’s younger brother. Some months earlier, law school librarian Judith Wright had asked Baird if he knew that Payne’s grandnephew was the Harvard Law Review’s first African American president, which Baird did not and at first believed was impossible.

  Baird also chaired the law school’s Appointments Committee, and Chicago was actively interested in diversifying its virtually all-white faculty. So, with the consent of law school dean Geoffrey Stone, “I just made a cold call to the Harvard Law Review and asked to speak with Barack Obama,” Baird remembered. Baird asked Obama, “Do you have an interest in law teaching?” and Barack said no, that he had a contract to write a book on race-related issues such as voting rights and that he would be returning to Chicago to work on it. Baird then invited Obama to write his book at the U of C’s law school, explaining that he could be a Law & Government Fellow, just as there previously had been Law & Economics Fellows. The appointment would be unsalaried, but it would give Barack a small office and word processor as w
ell as access to the university’s libraries. After a quick series of follow-up phone calls, Barack was assured of a quiet place to write just a fifteen-minute drive from the Robinson family’s home.

  The second call came from Judson Miner, who four years earlier had been Chicago’s corporation counsel, Mayor Harold Washington’s top lawyer. Miner had read one or another story about Obama, perhaps the Chicago Reporter one from some months earlier noting Obama’s intent to practice law in Chicago, and Miner also called Obama at the Law Review to try to interest him in the small civil rights litigation firm Miner and Allison Davis had founded twenty years earlier, Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland. Obama mentioned his book contract but agreed to meet Miner for lunch once he arrived in Chicago, when Miner took him to the Thai Star Cafe on North State Street, just around the corner from the handsome West Erie Street town house that housed the firm’s offices.

  Rather than “talking about his coming to work here,” Miner and Obama instead had “quite a comprehensive discussion that focused primarily on how gratifying did I find being a civil rights lawyer,” Miner recalled. They agreed to keep in touch, and immediately after the two-hour conversation, Miner called his wife Linda and told her, “I just had lunch with the most impressive person I’ve ever met.”58

  Back at Harvard, the final five weeks of spring classes began with an array of protests mounted by the Coalition for Civil Rights, the student group that had unsuccessfully sued Harvard to try to advance faculty diversity. An April 4 student “strike” drew several hundred supporters, but a new tactic—quietly invading classes—angered and alienated many students. One band of poster-carrying CCR members silently encircled Kathleen Sullivan’s 1L Crim Law classroom for twenty minutes and then returned to repeat the stunt for the class’s final ten minutes. That evening BLSA mounted an overnight sit-in in Dean Clark’s office, but called off the occupation when word arrived that Gerry Frug’s wife Mary Joe, herself a law professor at the New England School of Law, had been brutally stabbed to death on a Cambridge sidewalk at 8:45 P.M. the previous evening. Frug’s killer was never caught, and the following Wednesday CCR resumed its protests by physically blocking all access to the dean’s office. CCR leader Keith Boykin called Clark “undemocratic, virtually authoritarian,” and the dean responded to the blockade with a letter threatening administrative punishment for such actions. David Troutt termed that warning “Gestapo-like,” while Clark told the Record that “certain behaviors can’t be accepted” and confessed, “I see myself as being excessively nice.” The Record’s final issue of the year closed with one letter from Law School Republicans calling for Clark to discipline the protesters and another from a pair of BLSA members declaring that the Record was “beginning to resemble a fascist version of the National Enquirer.”

  Amid such cheery exchanges, the Law Review’s editors assembled at Boston’s Harvard Club for their annual banquet. Obama spoke briefly before David Ellen introduced Wayne Budd, the African American U.S. attorney for Massachusetts. Barack advised everyone to spend less time debating whether to capitalize the B in “black” and more on real-world issues. The Revue made fun of Barack’s book advance, his use of “folks,” and his work on Larry Tribe’s abortion book. Charles Fried’s request for a muffin was revisited, and problematic authors like Ian Ayres and Patricia Williams suffered send-ups, as did 3L editor Monica Harris. Ayres’s treatment reflected a clear case of buyers’ remorse: “Ian Errs, Taking the Revue for a Ride: Recriminations from Half-Baked Empirical Research,” and the Charny and Wilkins “Don’t Embarrass the Revue” standard was lampooned as well.

  But Barack was a target throughout the longer-than-usual thirty-two-page booklet. “Obama, Supervised Reading & Research Is Hard Work, 1 Class a Week, Tops” reflected how undemanding his 3L course schedule had been, and quickly was followed by “Look on the bright side. At least you don’t have to worry about having to listen to me talk in any of your classes.” Barack’s avoidance of clear positions on tough issues was twice mocked—“Chief Justice Obama neither concurred, nor dissented, and gave no reasoning,” and “Barack quickly defused the situation by agreeing wholeheartedly with each of the competing people in turn”—as was his press attention: “International celebrity and bon vivant . . . mediocre bluebooker.” His and Rob’s plans were noted: “Await R. Fisher & B. Obama, Reinventing Democracy (forthcoming),” as was his relative absence from Gannett House: “Compare Ellen, Burning the Midnight Oil . . . with Obama, Is Gannett House Really Open All Night?, What a Waste of a Perfectly Good Office . . . (‘I work at home’).” But there was also clear praise: “Like me, you probably think that Barack has done a pretty decent job.”59

  As the semester was ending, Barack looked back on his three years at Harvard in a brief piece for the law school’s upcoming Yearbook. Everyone should “question our assumptions, listen to other viewpoints, and articulate our values in a spirit of mutual respect and tolerance,” something that had been sorely lacking throughout that spring. He also sensed “a continuing struggle on the part of many of us to infuse our role as lawyers with a larger sense of meaning,” because “we all have a responsibility to use our legal training in ways that make this country work better.” He worried about “an increasing anxiety among students about prospects for employment and economic security,” but hoped that “idealism—a hard-headed, unromantic idealism that does not expect change overnight” would prevail. In another, expressly racial context, Barack remarked that “people like myself are learning a certain language of mainstream society, of power and decision making. We have an obligation to go back to the black community, to listen and learn and help give our people a voice.”

  Fully two-thirds of Harvard Law School’s 1991 graduating class were heading into law firms, one-quarter had accepted judicial clerkships, and only 2.9 percent were taking public interest or legal services jobs. Section III classmate Jonathan King, an accomplished jazz pianist who was heading to a top Boston firm, remembered Barack telling him, “Don’t give up jazz,” and adding, “Do not let them squelch the poetry out of you.” Barack, like Rob, owed Roberto Unger a long paper for Reinventing Democracy, but with their coauthored work for Martha Minow complete, they would both graduate magna cum laude, just as they had long intended. On the official roster, his full name would appear as it never had before: “Barack Hussein Obama, 2d.”

  Looking back on his standout academic success at Harvard, Barack credited his five-year age advantage over most of his classmates in addition to the seasoning and experience he had gleaned in Roseland. “As an older student,” he recalled a decade later, “I knew why I was there and what I wanted to get out of it.” Plus, in many classes, “I had great enthusiasm for the subject matter,” and “when you’re interested in something, you end up doing well on it.” But part of his success also stemmed from his having “learned as an organizer to be able to articulate a position and express myself in clear ways that served me well as a law student.” At the Developing Communities Project, “my whole job was persuading people to do things differently, but not being able to pay them,” which meant “I had to be pretty persuasive, and I think it taught me to be able to focus in on those issues that were important to people and be able to describe them in ways that people found compelling, and I think that probably had something to do with my success at law school.”

  Barack’s decision to compete for membership on the Law Review was motivated in significant part by a desire to squelch any perception that his Harvard J.D. was proof of affirmative action at work, and Rob remembers the morning when he had stopped to answer his phone on his way out the door and was able to get Barack to the post office just in the nick of time. Otherwise, “he never would have been president of the Harvard Law Review.” Barack’s experiences on the Review had helped him become “enormously skilled at finding the center of the room,” one colleague believed, but neither Ken Mack nor Rob Fisher believed that either the Review, or indeed Harvard Law School, had significantly changed someone fo
r whom they were his closest friends. “I actually think the Law Review was very peripheral” in Barack’s experience at Harvard, Rob said. “He focused on it as a management problem,” and “I don’t think it was near his heart in the least. I don’t think the various little controversies shaped him very much” at all. Ken, who, like Rob, had been friends with Barack since the beginning of their 1L year, agreed. “I don’t think he changed much in law school. I don’t think he reoriented himself and redirected himself in any way.”

  Commencement was a full two weeks after the law school’s final exam period, and neither Barack nor Rob saw any reason for remaining in Cambridge to attend. All that Barack would miss was the news that he had lost his election bid to Harvard’s Board of Overseers. He gave notice to his landlord, who was disappointed to see a model tenant leave; had a mandatory exit interview with the financial aid office about “the $60,000 worth of loans” he had taken out over three years; and advertised a major yard sale. “I remember Barack selling everything in his apartment,” his bête noire Christine Lee recalled. “I bought his TV at graduation. It’s still the TV I watch in my bedroom,” incongruous as that seems. Over two decades later, “even the remote works.”