The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  Like so many students, he was trying to figure out who he was. "He hadn't yet defined himself," Margot Mifflin, who was dating Obama's close friend Hasan Chandoo, said. "I didn't realize at the time how much work he had to do to define himself. One friend of his, and of mine, said to me not long ago, 'Since when is Barry black? He's as white as he is black.' She was saying that he was of mixed race. He'd grown up with white grandparents and a white mother. She didn't think there was anything cynical in the way that Barry identified himself, but we knew him as both black and white. I don't ever remember talking to him about his race. And we all called him Barry."

  One of Obama's black friends at Occidental was an older student named Eric Moore, who, as the son of an Air Force officer, had grown up in Colorado, Ohio, and Japan. For three months, as part of the Operation Crossroads program, Moore worked at a rural medical clinic in the Siaya district of Kenya, near Lake Victoria and not far from where Barack, Sr., was born. The Luo tribe dominates the region, and Obama was eager to hear more about Moore's adventures in the villages there. "That was a source of connectivity between us," Moore recalled. "Coincidentally, in some ways I knew more about him than he knew about himself at that point."

  One day, not long after returning from Kenya, Moore asked Obama, "What kind of name is 'Barry' for a brother?"

  It was a natural question to ask, Moore said: "He wasn't embracing the Kenyan side, at least outwardly. He was proud, but he hadn't been there. So he told me his real name was Barack Obama. And I told him, 'That's a very strong name. I would embrace that.' I said, 'I would rock Barack.'"

  There was no single moment when Obama declared an end to Barry--some friends never made the transition--but, by the time he left Occidental, after two years, he no longer introduced himself in the old way. He was coming to see himself as--to insist upon--"Barack Obama."

  "It makes sense," his sister Maya said. "He was growing up. 'Barry' is a kid's name. In Indonesia he was 'Beri' and our Kansan grandparents struggled a little with 'Barack,' because of the rolling of the r's back then. His father, Barack, Sr., made some of the same adjustments. He called himself Bar-ack."

  In his sophomore year, Obama shared an apartment in Pasadena with Hasan Chandoo. Handsome, smart, charming, rich, profane, and a political radical, Chandoo came from a Shia Muslim family that had lived all over the world and made a fortune in shipping. Chandoo had spent most of his life in Karachi; he went to an American-run high school there where he seemed to major in poker and golf. At Occidental, he became a somewhat more serious student, but he was well known for having leftist politics and late-night parties. He was more committed to the parties than to the politics. He was a flamboyant figure, who drove a flashy Fiat around campus.

  Their apartment was plain and lightly tended. "It was a two-bedroom apartment that was distinctly underdecorated," Margot Mifflin recalled. "It looked like they never settled in. They were always throwing parties and Hasan would cook really hot food and tell us to cool it down with yogurt. And then there was a lot of dancing: the Talking Heads album 'Remain in Light' was out and Bob Marley was huge--and Barry had a taste for that not-so-great soft Grover Washington stuff."

  Obama's South Asian friends "were very progressive, intelligent, worldly," Eric Moore said. "Hasan Chandoo was like Omar Sharif, the smoothest international playboy. They were Pakistanis, but bankers, business people, secular guys, American citizens. They were very cool and sophisticated."

  Chandoo and Hamid, among others, helped "ignite" Obama politically. "In college, Hasan was a socialist, a Marxist, which is funny since he is from a wealthy family," Mifflin said. "But he was socialist in the way we were back then--an idealist who believed in economic equality, that's all. I am not sure how he defined it then, but he really studied it. Barack learned a lot from him, especially the notions of fairness and equality that you see in him today." Chandoo, for his part, readily admits to his youthful radicalism, but says that Obama was never the least bit doctrinaire: "The only thing doctrinaire about him was his austerity!"

  To slap an ideological tag on Chandoo and Hamid, let alone Obama, is not only unfair; it also credits them with thinking far more programmatically than they did. "I would say we were idealistic and well-read in terms of understanding all the ideologies," Hamid said. "I remember going home to Pakistan and sitting across from my mother in the summer waxing eloquent about the benefits of socialism. She said, 'Wahid, this is all well and good, but I think you will grow up.' I guess that's what happened. We weren't Marxists. We were idealistic and believed in the betterment of the lot of the masses and not just the few. If you describe that as socialist, then maybe we did have some socialist thoughts at the time. Barack was pretty similar. I don't remember there being a dissonance between us. There was consistency in our thinking. We were all trying to improve."

  "Barry and Hasan spent a lot of their time soap-boxing about politics," Mifflin said. "One of our friends remembers a group study session at which Obama got up to orate about one political subject or another and at the end someone said, 'You should be the first black President.' But, on the other hand, no one seriously thought of him as 'the one'--the one super-talented person who would become something huge. He was just one of our crowd."

  For many years, Obama stayed in touch with his South Asian friends, particularly Hamid, who was for a long time an executive at PepsiCo, and Chandoo, who became a consultant and investor. During the campaign and even afterward, Hamid and Chandoo were wary of talking to the press, lest they say something that could be used against themselves or, worse, against Obama. They were well aware of the fact that some of Obama's most virulent opponents during the 2008 campaign were prepared to manipulate the Obama-as-Muslim myth at a moment's notice. "It got to the point where reporters were banging on our apartment door in the middle of the night," Hamid said.

  The political conversation at Occidental when Obama arrived centered on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Jimmy Carter's reaction to it. There were also candlelight walks against the proliferation of nuclear arms, a rally against Carter's reinstitution of registration for the draft, and, in 1980, denunciations of the election of Ronald Reagan. The Occidental published an endorsement of Jimmy Carter that was less notable for its rejection of Reagan than for its nose-holding support of the doomed incumbent. The headline was "Lukewarm."

  Race, as both an on-campus political issue and a focus of national and international politics, was also at the center of discussion. Before Obama matriculated at Occidental, there had been an incident in which a popular professor of art history, an African-American named Mary Jane Hewitt, was denied a promotion. Two reporters from The Occidental heard that there were possible irregularities in the promotion process and, with the help of a cooperative campus security guard, broke into the administration building and got access to the tenure file. The editors of The Occidental did not publish the file but used it to guide their reporting. "We were very paranoid," one editor said. "We sat out on the fifty-yard line of the football field discussing what to do. Smoking pot all the time. It was L.A." Eventually, news of the break-in leaked and the two reporters were brought to an honor court proceeding; two of the more left-wing professors on campus, Norman Cohen and David Axeen, acted as faculty lawyers for the student-reporters. The students were not punished.

  As with most college students, Obama had little notion of how to act on his political impulses. "I want to get into public service," Obama told Thummalapally. "I want to write and help people who are disadvantaged." What exactly he might do remained vague. In the eyes of some of his freshman-year friends, Obama became less happy-go-lucky as a sophomore. "I did see a change in him," said Kent Goss, a classmate who played a lot of basketball with Obama. "He was much more serious, more focused, more cerebral.... I saw him hanging out with a different crowd, which was a more serious crowd, a more intellectual crowd."

  Obama took creative-writing courses, along with his more academic courses, and sometimes thought he might pursue a
career as a writer. He published poems in Feast, the campus literary magazine, and also in a xeroxed magazine put out by one of his friends, Mark Dery, called Plastic Laughter. Dery was known as the "punk poet" on campus. The better, and longer, of Obama's two poems in Feast exhibited the influence of the free-verse poets of the time; "Pop" clearly reflects Obama's relationship with his grandfather Stanley Dunham. Obama showed it to his friends without telling them that it was about the man who had played such a big part in rearing him in Honolulu and his struggle, at once, to love and escape him as he made his way as an adult.

  Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken

  In, sprinkled with ashes,

  Pop switches channels, takes another

  Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks

  What to do with me, a green young man

  Who fails to consider the

  Flim and flam of the world, since

  Things have been easy for me;

  I stare hard at his face, a stare

  That deflects off his brow;

  I'm sure he's unaware of his

  Dark, watery eyes, that

  Glance in different directions,

  And his slow, unwelcome twitches,

  Fail to pass....

  Not everyone in the Occidental literary crowd liked Obama. One classmate described him as "too GQ" and, according to Mifflin, "the artsier crowd said he was too sophisticated, too smooth somehow."

  Obama was hardly a joyless artiste. By all accounts he was interested in women and dated fairly frequently, but he had no steady girlfriend in his two years at Occidental. "Some of us were all hooked up, but not Barry," Margot Mifflin said. "I never saw him date one person there for an extended time.... It wasn't as if Barry was just hanging out with the pretty ladies on campus. He was about ideas and engagement. He wanted to be with people who were thinking about things."

  "Everybody liked him," Lisa Jack, a friend who took a series of photographs of Obama in 1980, said. "He was a hot, nice, everything-going-for-him dude. If he saw you sitting alone in The Cooler, he would come sit down with you. I don't know about deep relationships, but he had no problems getting women attracted to him. He wasn't lecherous or disrespectful. He managed to do it in a way that was cool. You couldn't help but like him."

  Lawrence Goldyn, one of Obama's political-science professors at Occidental, was one of the very few openly gay teachers on campus. A Stanford-trained political scientist, Goldyn came to Occidental in the late-seventies. Obama took Goldyn's class on European politics. Goldyn was miserable at Occidental, where he felt the disdain of the administration. "I was sort of radioactive," he said. "I eventually had to go to medical school to make a living. It was a tough time. They told me I was too stuck on sexual politics ... They looked at me and all they could see was homosexual, homosexual, homosexual." Goldyn became the adviser to the gay student union. "I got the left-outs, the black women, the gays gravitating to me," he said. "I don't think kids of color and gay people felt very welcome there. They felt like outsiders." Goldyn was grateful for students like Obama, who held him in high regard and sought him out after class. "There were a few like that--not a lot, a handful," he recalled. "There were some older political kids who gravitated to me because they liked my point of view. That a freshman or sophomore would do that showed intellectual courage."

  During the Presidential campaign, Obama told a gay magazine, the Advocate, that Goldyn "was a wonderful guy. He was the first openly gay professor that I had ever come into contact with, or openly gay person of authority that I had come in contact with. He wasn't proselytizing all the time, but just his comfort in his own skin and the friendship we developed helped to educate me on a number of these issues."

  There were many professors on campus who had been active in the sixties and who regaled their students with tales of civil-rights and antiwar demonstrations. That generation of professors was gradually replacing the men and women of the Second World War generation. "The transformation was happening right when Obama was here," Roger Boesche, who had been politically active as an undergraduate at Stanford in the sixties, said. Hearing about the exploits of those young professors was both fascinating and deflating. Among Obama's friends--among so many young people going to college in the seventies and eighties--there was a feeling of belatedness, a sense that political activism had lost most of its energy. They had come along too late for the March on Washington, Black Power, the Stonewall riots, the antiwar and women's-liberation demonstrations. Rightly or not, many of them felt they had the desire but not a cause.

  Among campus political groups, the Democratic Socialist Alliance was one of the few with any energy and capacity for organization. A student named Gary Chapman, who now teaches technology policy at the University of Texas, formed the Alliance not long before Obama came to Occidental, and its supporters strung up a huge banner over the central quad bearing a portrait of Karl Marx. In 1978-79, the year before Obama matriculated, some students sympathetic to the Alliance had tried to push a political agenda--against apartheid; for increased diversity on campus--by running a slate of left-leaning candidates for student government. Caroline Boss, a friend of Obama's and one of the main leftist political leaders at Occidental, said that the college soon became the scene of intense discussion about American foreign policy, women's studies, gay rights, Latino studies, urban studies--and, especially, the apartheid regime in South Africa.

  "A lot of work had been going on for the previous three years getting the campus more aware of practices at the college, looking at what was happening in South Africa," Caroline Boss said. "Already, before Barry, we'd had these rather sad, but nonetheless real, marches to Bank of America, to withdraw my twenty dollars."

  Boss and many others began a campaign to get the board of trustees at Occidental to sell off stock invested in multinational corporations doing business in apartheid South Africa. The divestment movement had come to some notice in 1962, when the United Nations General Assembly passed a non-binding resolution calling for economic sanctions against South Africa. In 1977, a Baptist preacher and civil-rights activist, the Reverend Leon Sullivan, thrust the issue into the press. Sullivan, a board member of General Motors, the biggest American employer of blacks in South Africa, led a campaign of corporate responsibility directed against G.M. and other U.S.-based companies with an interest in South Africa. His draft of a code of corporate conduct, the Sullivan Principles, mandated that these multinationals provide equal rights for their black workers. On campuses across the country, students asked boards of trustees to divest from businesses that continued to work with the apartheid regime, and at some schools--Hampshire College, Michigan State, Ohio University, Columbia University, and the University of Wisconsin--the protests made a significant impact. There were pickets, sit-ins, teach-ins, the building of shantytowns, and other gestures modestly reminiscent of the civil-rights and antiwar movements. Nelson Mandela later said that the divestment movement helped hasten the collapse of the apartheid regime, by isolating it and causing billions of dollars in capital flight. The critics of divestment either accused its advocates of hypocrisy--why did they not ask the same of investors in Communist countries?--or, like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, argued for a policy of "constructive engagement."

  At Occidental, a small core of students put together a report for the trustees saying that divestment was the right thing to do, and that it would not demonstrably hurt the school's endowment. They were backed by the Democratic Socialist Alliance; an African-American student group called Ujima; Hispanic and gay groups; and a coordinating alliance called the Third World Coalition. But there was also a great deal of apathy on campus, especially among the pre-professional and fraternity crowds.

  Obama went to meetings of these various groups, but not very often. "Obama was a person who was mainly an observer," Boss said. "He came into it gradually, but increasingly, in the political sense. He had strong intellectual curiosity. He was frustrated at the idea of living life passively. D
uring his sophomore year he definitely had a distinctive kind of self-awareness that he grew into, a sense of purpose. That was really striking about him--for instance, when he announced himself as 'Barack' and not 'Barry' anymore. It came to him. And we talked about it, and he talked with others, too. He just announced it and said, 'Listen, I am using my full given name.' He associated it with connecting to his father. He was proud of his father and his heritage, even though he hadn't researched it yet. But he had this sense of his father as a man of destiny, as someone who could start as a goat herder and become a government figure. It was a legacy and something to take forward.

  "He stepped from an international world and a Hawaiian world replete with ethnicities, very much the cosmopolitan," Boss continued, "and then he comes here and steps onto the continent, and gets with a crowd of African-Americans who have a keener sense of what that means and a deeper understanding of a slave history and the American experience. And so he was interested in what that meant for him personally. This discovery process, it's a bildungsroman, a person who is the quintessential cosmopolitan in this process of self-discovery, grappling with this question of 'Who am I?'"

  Chandoo, Obama, Caroline Boss, and several other students, some from the Democratic Socialist Alliance, some from various ethnic associations on campus, planned a divestment rally for February 18, 1981. This was Obama's first foray as a public political actor.

  It was, as Margot Mifflin recalled, a "sun-bleached winter day," with about three hundred students--activists, black and international students, blond surfers--milling outside Coons Hall, the main administration building, which was nicknamed "the Chrysler showroom" for its charmless, glass-paneled architecture. The board of trustees was scheduled to meet inside. The organizers of the rally came up with a list of speakers that included an American history professor, Norman Cohen; a visitor from South Africa named Tim Ngubeni; and a range of students: Caroline Boss, Earl Chew, Chandoo, and Obama. Students held signs reading "Apartheid Kills" and "No Profit from Apartheid."