The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  Dressed in khakis and a light-blue dress shirt, Obama stepped to the microphone outside the Harkness Commons, surrounded by students, Bell, and placards reading "Diversity Now" and "Reflect Reality." Obama spoke in support of Bell's struggle to win a tenured position for a woman of color. He called Bell the "Rosa Parks of legal education": "I remember him sauntering up to the front," Obama said, "and not giving us a lecture but engaging us in a conversation." He commended Bell for "speaking the truth," and then, his speech concluded, he hugged him in front of a cheering crowd. Charles Ogletree recalled that Obama's speech stood out for its eloquence and emotional force, "even though he wasn't the most vocal and central advocate in that debate."

  Everyone remembers Obama in much the same way: that he held generally progressive views on the political and racial controversies on campus, but never took the lead. He always used language of reconciliation rather than of insistence.

  "Barack was someone who was politically engaged, but it was not a central part of his institutional personality," Christopher Edley, Jr., said. "As a community organizer, he had been doing the real thing in Chicago before coming to Harvard. The institutional politics at Harvard Law School can be quite consuming if you don't have the perspective provided by familiarity with politics of a more consequential sort. My sense was that, while he was sympathetic to those local struggles, he was really about something beyond all of that. And, frankly, that was what was so appealing. I felt something of a connection to him because of my own experience in national politics. For him it was difficult to get too excited about Zip Code 02138."

  Bell soon left Harvard and never returned. (He teaches at New York University.)

  In discussions at the Law Review, Obama held fast to a consistent theme: that students at Harvard and other privileged institutions needed to work for the public good. "One of the luxuries of going to Harvard Law School is it means you can take risks in your life," Obama said in one of his interviews at the time. "You can try to do things to improve society and still land on your feet. That's what a Harvard education should buy--enough confidence and security to pursue your dreams and give something back."

  One debate that Obama engaged in with some passion at the Review was over affirmative action. He supported it, and when his friend Cassandra Butts decided to review Shelby Steele's influential book The Content of Our Character--a conservative analysis of race relations that saw affirmative action as a policy that reinforced a victim psychology among blacks and flattered the virtue of whites--Obama spoke with her about her critique. The "simplistic rhetoric" that, in 1989, Butts criticized in her article for the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review is very similar to Steele's rhetoric nearly two decades later in his book A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win. Steele asserted that Obama was caught in a racial dynamic in which black candidates are either "challengers," who accuse white Americans of ongoing racism and demand outdated policies like affirmative action, or "bargainers," who agree to minimize the history of American racism in exchange for white political support.

  At Harvard, in the midst of a debate over the low number of women on the Law Review and whether to employ some form of affirmative action to increase it, Jim Chen, one of the most vocal conservatives at the journal, wrote a tough-minded letter to the Harvard Law Record. He decried affirmative action for the tarnish that it leaves on its beneficiaries.

  Obama wrote to the Record, defending affirmative action and closing with a more introspective argument:

  I'd also like to add one personal note, in response to the letter from Mr. Jim Chen which was published in the October 26 issue of the Record, and which articulated broad objections to the Review's general affirmative action policy. I respect Mr. Chen's personal concern over the possible stigmatizing effects of affirmative action, and do not question the depth or sincerity of his feelings. I must say, however, that as someone who has undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action programs during my academic career, and as someone who may have benefited from the Law Review's affirmative action policy when I was selected to join the Review last year, I have not personally felt stigmatized either within the broader law school community or as a staff member of the Review. Indeed, my election last year as President of the Review would seem to indicate that at least among Review staff, and hopefully for the majority of professors at Harvard, affirmative action in no way tarnishes the accomplishments of those who are members of historically underrepresented groups.

  I would therefore agree with the suggestion that in the future, our concern in this area is most appropriately directed at any employer who would even insinuate that someone with Mr. Chen's extraordinary record of academic success might be somehow unqualified for work in a corporate firm, or that such success might be somehow undeserved. Such attributes speak less to the merits or problems of affirmative action policies, and more to the tragically deep-rooted ignorance and bias that exists in the legal community and our society at large.

  Barack Obama

  President, Harvard Law Review

  Note the deft and confident wave of the lance: the way Obama points out that affirmative action might also help an Asian-American, one like Jim Chen. (Though he forgets that affirmative action is hardly uncontroversial among Asian-Americans.) As a mature politician, Obama came to reject the need for affirmative action for African-Americans who, like his own children, were already cosseted by American advantage. Some of his Harvard friends say that Obama believed that affirmative action had likely helped him get into Columbia and Harvard. "I have no way of knowing whether I was a beneficiary of affirmative action either in my admission to Harvard or my initial election to the Review," Obama told the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. "If I was, then I certainly am not ashamed of the fact, for I would argue that affirmative action is important precisely because those who benefit typically rise to the challenge when given an opportunity. Persons outside Harvard may have perceived my election to the presidency of the Review as a consequence of affirmative action, since they did not know me personally. At least one white friend of mine mentioned that a federal appellate court judge asked him during his clerkship whether I had been elected on the merits. And this issue did come up among those who were making the hiring decisions at the [University of Chicago] law school--something that might not have even been raised with respect to a white former president of the Review."

  Nearly all of Obama's colleagues on the Review came to appreciate his talent for mediation. They even came to know enough about his past to make fun of him. In the annual parody issue of the Law Review, "the Revue," they "quoted" Obama on his complicated background: "I was born in Oslo, Norway, the son of a Volvo factory worker and part-time ice fisherman. My mother was a backup singer for ABBA. They were good folks." In Chicago, "I discovered I was black, and I have remained so ever since." After being elected, he united people into "a happy, cohesive folk" while "empowering all the folks out there in America who didn't know about me by giving a series of articulate and startlingly mature interviews to all the folks in the media."

  In Obama's last year of law school, he was starting to think hard about his future--and his teachers were thinking about it, too. Christopher Edley, Jr., was one of many faculty members who sensed that future was bound to be large and ambitious: "He was noticeable to a certain degree in class, but not one of the more vocal students. It was outside of class when he would come by my office to chat that I really got a sense of him. I claim to have been the first to use the phrase 'preternatural calmness' to describe him. That's what was so striking about him. Even as we would talk about career paths, he seemed so centered that, in combination with his evident intelligence, I just wanted to buy stock in him. I knew that the capital gains would be enormous."

  David Wilkins, a young African-American professor at the law school, said, "After Barack was elected president of the Law Review, I talked with him--to congratulate him and also to talk with him about what he was going to do wit
h it going forward. And so I said, 'Well, of course you're going to clerk for someone on the Supreme Court, and you'll probably even have your choice of which justice to clerk for. And then maybe you'll become a law professor'--as if that were the highest thing to attain to. And then he gave me that calm look that we've grown so used to seeing, kind of both bemused and respectful. There was a long pause. And then he said, 'Well, I am sure that would be a great honor and all, but that's not really what I had in mind for myself.' That's the guy: totally grounded. And he knew, more or less, exactly what he wanted to do."

  Abner Mikva, a former congressman from Chicago who sat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, offered Obama a clerkship, but the young man turned him down. Mikva was shocked. His was the second-most-important court in the land, a sure stepping-stone to a Supreme Court clerkship. Was Obama angling for the Supreme Court right away? Was he trying to figure out exactly which justice to clerk for? That was a little cheeky. No, that wasn't it, either.

  At Harvard, Obama secretly found the study of law, he wrote, "disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power." The language was not far from the left-leaning instruction on campus. But Obama also saw the law as a form of memory, "a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with itself." In the language of the founding documents of the nation, he could hear, he wrote, the language of Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany, the struggles of the civil-rights movement, Japanese-Americans in internment camps, Russian Jews in sweatshops, immigrants at the Rio Grande, the tenants of Altgeld Gardens--all of them "clamoring for recognition" and asking the same question that Obama directed at the ghost of his father: "What is our community, and how might that community be reconciled with our freedom? How far do our obligations reach? How do we transform mere power into justice?" The idealist had now formulated his questions, gathered his tools.

  Michael McConnell, a conservative constitutional scholar who was later appointed to the federal-appeals bench by George W. Bush, was so impressed with the meticulous and fair-minded editing that Obama displayed on a piece he wrote for the Law Review, "The Origins and Historical Understanding of Free Exercise of Religion," that he told the chairman of the appointments committee of the University of Chicago Law School, Douglas Baird, and told him to keep Obama in mind for a teaching job. McConnell was impressed that Obama had edited the piece so that it was a better version of itself rather than so transformed it that the author no longer recognized it. Baird felt that McConnell was a superb judge of talent, and so he called Obama and asked if he was interested.

  "Well, no, actually," Obama said. "What I want to do is write this book."

  Chapter Six

  A Narrative of Ascent

  When Obama left Cambridge to start his public life, he could not have anticipated some of the breaks that would accelerate his career: the political elders who stepped aside and provided him with crucial openings; a devastating electoral loss that turned out to be a kind of gift; political rivals who imploded as the news of their unfortunate personal lives became public; invitations to speak at an antiwar rally in 2002 and, two years later, at a national convention. In retrospect, the greatest break of all may have been that Jerry Kellman called him not from an immensity like New York (where he might have got lost or waited far longer to emerge), or from a city like Detroit or Washington, D.C. (where he might have run for mayor, but without hope of a larger career). Chicago itself was, for Obama, a stroke of fortune: a big-time metropolis and a political center with a large African-American base, but situated in a state whose demographics reflected the country as a whole. After the fall of the old Daley machine, Chicago was opening up to younger politicians, to blacks and Latinos. Chicago was home for Obama, it was a community; it was also an ideal place to begin a life in politics. Obama did not stay long enough to become a fixture of Chicago--his roots were not deep--but the city provided a series of profound lessons and opportunities.

  When Obama returned to Chicago after graduation, he certainly could have taken a job with the corporate law firm or investment bank of his choosing. Instead, he accepted a place at the best-known civil-rights firm in town, Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland. The firm, with around a dozen lawyers, had its offices in a brick town house on West Erie Street, north of the Loop; the concentration was on voting rights, tenant rights, employment rights, anti-trust, whistleblower cases--a classic liberal "good guy" firm. Judson Miner, a liberal advocate who had been Harold Washington's corporation counsel, brought Obama to the firm and convinced him over a series of long lunches that he could work on cases that would "let him sleep soundly at night." The work, Miner promised, would feel like an extension of his work as an organizer on the South Side.

  Obama also had Doug Baird's offer to teach law part-time at the University of Chicago. He was given the rank of a lecturer--a non-tenured, adjunct position--and provided with a stipend, benefits, and a small office on the sixth floor of the D'Angelo Law Library. At first, Baird did not require Obama to teach at all; both he and the dean, Geoffrey Stone, understood that Obama would spend most of his time writing a book about race and voting rights. When he decided to turn the book into a more personal rumination on family and race, they were unfazed.

  All of Obama's employers in Chicago--Allison Davis and Judson Miner at the law firm, the deans at the university--proved indulgent of Obama's divided attentions; sooner or later, they figured, he would increase his commitments or go into politics. His intelligence, charm, and serene ambition were plain to see. The first time he met Geoffrey Stone, Obama was not yet thirty, and yet Stone's assistant, Charlotte Maffia, joined the legion predicting something large for him: she said that he would soon be governor of Illinois. Only occasionally were there rumbles of resentment about the young lawyer taking time to indulge his literary ambition. "He spent a lot of time working on his book," Allison Davis admitted to a reporter for Chicago magazine. "Some of my partners weren't happy with that, Barack sitting there with his keyboard on his lap and his feet up on the desk writing the book."

  Obama was starting his new life in Chicago in a far different spirit than he had the first time. Gone was the self-conscious asceticism, the intermittent periods of loneliness. When he started his life as a lawyer and teacher in 1992, he had a community and a partner. The writing was going slowly, but his relationship with Michelle Robinson had survived the separations during law school. They were living together now in Hyde Park and were engaged to be married.

  In the spring of 1992, before he could get much work done as a lawyer or complete his book, Obama made a commitment to lead a voter registration drive in the African-American and Hispanic communities called Project Vote. The drive was aimed at combating the Reagan Administration's rollback of social programs by registering as many as a hundred and fifty thousand of the four hundred thousand unregistered African-Americans in Illinois. The work had to be accomplished by October 5th.

  Project Vote, which was founded by the civil-rights activist Sandy Newman in 1982, just before Harold Washington's first successful race for City Hall, could not rely on the old Democratic Party machine's method of padding the rolls by handing out cash payments known as "bounties." The program needed a director who was familiar with the city and who had organizing skills, someone who could reach people in the churches, the schools, the community centers, and on the street. "I kept hearing about Obama in community-organizing circles," Newman, who was Project Vote's national director, said. A well-known activist in town, Jacky Grimshaw, pressed Newman to interview Obama, saying that he had the right managerial and diplomatic skills to recruit volunteers and persuade community groups to join in the effort. After talking through the job with Obama, Newman called John Schmidt, a partner at the law firm of Skadden Arps, who had agreed to co-chair the Chicago branch of Project Vote, and asked him to meet with Obama.

  Schmidt c
alled Obama, who was doing some training work with organizers on the West Side, and invited him to the office. As they talked, Schmidt realized that in his long career in law and as a close aide to Richard M. Daley at City Hall, he had never before met someone who had deliberately spurned a sure clerkship at the Supreme Court. The work they discussed was tedious, and Schmidt worried that Obama would walk away from it after a few days or weeks. Traditionally, the Chicago machine did not want anyone registering to vote if that person was not going to vote with the machine. As a result, election law in the city required that registrars come for training sessions at the Board of Elections, downtown, teach people to fill out the forms precisely, collect the forms, and get them on the rolls. It meant getting people, mainly churchwomen, to stand outside of Sunday services all over the city and persuade people to sign up.

  Obama said he didn't mind the prospect of such work. His one reservation about taking the job was that he would miss the deadline, June 15th, for handing in his book manuscript. He wondered if he could work on Project Vote part-time--a suggestion that Newman dismissed. "I told him, 'Do you want to write this memoir at such a young age or rescue democracy?'" Newman recalled. The stakes were high: the Reagan-Bush era was in its eleventh year, and the Democrats in Illinois had a chance not only to elect Bill Clinton to the White House, but also to elect an African-American, Carol Moseley Braun, to the Senate. Obama accepted Newman's offer to run Project Vote in Illinois--which would be centered mainly in Cook County. The salary was around twenty-five thousand dollars. To a great degree, it was an extension of his work as a community organizer, but it was also a bridge to electoral politics. Through Project Vote, he had to call on committeemen, aldermen, state legislators, lawyers, activists, clergy--the intricate web of associations that formed the political culture of Chicago and the state of Illinois. If he could register a significant number of new Democratic voters, he would bank the sort of capital that counts most: political I.O.U.s.