The Obamas' social world began to expand exponentially. They were intelligent, attractive, eager, and ambitious, and they entered many worlds at once: the liberal, integrated world of Hyde Park; the intellectual world of the University of Chicago; the boards of charitable foundations; the growing post-civil-rights world of African-Americans who went to prestigious universities and were making their fortunes and ready to exert political influence. The Obamas were young and idealistic, and older people wanted to befriend and guide them. Despite Obama's rejection of a job offer at Sidley Austin and Michelle's decision to quit the firm, Newton Minow took them to the Chicago Symphony at the Ravinia Festival, where they ran into prominent friends. Bettylu Saltzman, the heiress and political activist who befriended Obama during Project Vote, helped guide Barack and Michelle to some of the wealthiest people in town. And, through his teaching colleagues, Obama became increasingly familiar with the professors, attorneys, physicians, and executives at the central intellectual institution in town.
An example: one of the partners at Obama's law firm, Allison Davis, was a member of a small, elite coterie in Hyde Park--African-American families who had compiled records of achievement over two or three generations. Davis's great-grandfather was an abolitionist lawyer; his grandfather chaired the anti-lynching commission of the N.A.A.C.P.; his father was valedictorian at Williams (though, as a black man, he was not allowed to live in the dorms) and an anthropologist who was the first African-American scholar to be awarded a full, tenured position at the University of Chicago or any major American research university. In 1947, Davis's father brought the family to Hawaii, so that he could study the uniquely integrated school system there. Davis is light-skinned, so much so that he became a kind of anthropologist himself, tuning in to what whites say about blacks when there are, seemingly, no blacks around to overhear them.
Allison Davis was an elder in a new breed. There had long been a moneyed black elite in the city, like the real-estate man Dempsey Travis, who was active in old-line Democratic politics and wrote histories of black politics and jazz in the city. On the South Side, there had been well-to-do black doctors, lawyers, car dealers, and merchants. Now there was a critical mass of African-Americans who, having gone to the country's best universities, were intent on creating a new elite. Davis hosted many dinner parties and, around the Christmas-New Year holiday, he threw a huge bash; he invited the younger people from the university, from City Hall, from among Cook County pols, from the foundations and the arts. "The Old Guard wasn't there--this was the next generation," Marilyn Katz, a former S.D.S. radical who was running a public-relations business, with clients from City Hall, said. "You would see a range of people from black professionals, the white progressive intelligentsia, the North Side-development scene people like Buzzy Ruttenberg, people from the University of Chicago, the parents at private schools like Parker, St. Ignatius, and the Lab School, in Hyde Park. Eventually, years later, there would be a big overlap of these schools and the finance committee of the Obama campaign in Illinois. Early on, Barack was there, but he wasn't a star yet."
Davis knew everyone, it seemed, and everyone came to his parties: John Rogers, who had grown up in Hyde Park--a street there is named for his mother, Jewel Lafontant, a lawyer and a prominent figure in Republican politics--and founded the investment firm Ariel Capital Management. Jim Reynolds, Jr., of Loop Capital Markets. Robert Blackwell, Jr., of the tech-consultancy firm Electronic Knowledge Interchange. The publisher Hermene Hartman. All of them became Obama's friends. "I tried to include Barack and Michelle in everything," Davis said.
Obama also met some Chicago operators of dubious value and intent. When he was still in law school, he got a job offer from the Rezmar Corporation, a developer of low-income housing run by a Syrian immigrant named Antoin (Tony) Rezko. Rezko came to Chicago when he was nineteen, intending to study civil engineering. He made a fortune setting up fast-food franchises--Panda Express Chinese restaurants and Papa John's pizzerias--and even did some business with Muhammad Ali. Rezko could see that one of the swiftest ways to riches in Chicago was through political connections, and he soon began to climb. At Ali's request, he held a fundraiser in 1983 for Harold Washington. In 1989, Rezko and his associate Daniel Mahru set up Rezmar and, partnering with various community groups, got government loans to develop apartments on the South Side. In 1990, one of Rezko's vice-presidents, David Brint, called Obama at Harvard, after reading about him in the newspaper, and offered him a job--one of many that he turned down. As it happened, Allison Davis was appointed by the mayor to the Chicago Plan Commission and Davis Miner did the legal work for a joint venture between the Woodlawn Preservation and Investment Corporation and Rezmar. Obama did not do much real-estate work at Davis Miner; in all he spent just five hours on work for Rezmar. But the contact was made and a friendship was formed. When the time came for Obama to enter politics, Tony Rezko was ready.
If Obama was on the make politically, his new friends and acquaintances thought, he carried it off with a certain elan. "Barack made lots and lots of alliances," Davis said, "but he was so affable and gregarious that I never had the sense that he was mining the invitees for future campaign contributions." Davis felt that, given the proper opening, Obama could make a political career in Chicago. "All the deals have been made in New York, everything has been divided up and dealt out," he said. "If you look at the social page of the New York Times on Sundays, it's stagnant, more European in terms of traditions and entry into positions of influence. Here in Chicago, you don't confront the same barriers."
By far the most important new friend in Barack and Michelle Obama's lives was Valerie Jarrett. A graduate of Stanford and Michigan Law School, Jarrett began her professional life working for a corporate law firm. The work was so dull, so detached from her desire to make a social and political impact, that she often just closed the door and stared out the window of her office on the seventy-ninth floor of the Sears Tower, crying, wondering what she was doing with her life.
Jarrett came from perhaps the most talented and prestigious African-American family in the city. Her great-grandfather was Robert Taylor, one of the first accredited African-American architects. One of her grandfathers was Robert Rochon Taylor, the head of the Chicago Housing Authority; ironically, one of Daley's most hideous public housing projects was named for him. Jarrett was born in Shiraz, in Iran, where her father, James Bowman, a prominent pathologist and geneticist, was running a hospital. Valerie's mother, Barbara, was a specialist in early-childhood education. When the Bowmans returned home to Chicago, Valerie was fluent in Farsi and French, as well as in English.
On Election Day in 1983, she had campaigned door-to-door for Harold Washington at a housing project near Cicero. When she wore her "Washington" button to work she took note of the suspicious glances of many of the white lawyers in the firm. After his victory at the polls, Washington persuaded many of the black professionals in town to come to work at City Hall. In 1987, Jarrett went to work for Judson Miner in the corporation counsel's office on various redevelopment projects near O'Hare Airport. After Washington's death, many of the committed black professionals at City Hall, disenchanted with his successor, Eugene Sawyer, who was so much weaker, so much more pliant to the will of the machine, left, and, if they didn't leave then they left when Daley was elected, in 1989. Jarrett, who came to believe that the younger Daley was not a racist like his father, stayed on, eventually becoming a deputy chief of staff in Daley's office and the Commissioner of the Department of Planning and Development. Working for Daley, in the view of some of Jarrett's friends, was a form of selling out, of racial betrayal, but she was soon one of the best-connected people in Chicago.
The Harvard law professor David Wilkins, a native of Hyde Park, spent between 1995 and 1999 working on a research project about blacks in the legal profession. Most of the lawyers in town, he discovered, knew Jarrett. "No one in my generation of black people in Chicago is more respected than Valerie," Wilkins said. "Valerie was the
liaison between the white North Shore elites and the black South Side elites. Daley was smart enough to realize that he needed black people supporting him in order to rule. He knew that there had to be another Harold Washington out there, and he had to position himself against that threat. In the meantime, Valerie saw the real way that power is wielded. She knew everyone. And after a while she ran the housing authority, the transit authority, and the Chicago stock exchange--all quasi-independent regulatory bodies with a lot of power."
In July, 1991, a colleague of Jarrett's at City Hall, a lawyer named Susan Sher, handed her the resume of an impressive young woman at Sidley Austin: Michelle Robinson. Someone had written across the resume that Robinson wanted to leave the firm; she was bored and wanted to "give back."
"They said she was a terrific young woman, disenchanted with the practice of law," Jarrett recalled. "And I thought, I know that type, because that's exactly what I was. I thought that sounds like somebody I would get along with."
"She is made for you," Sher told Jarrett.
Jarrett met with Robinson and, almost immediately, offered her a place in her office. But, before Robinson accepted, she asked Jarrett if she would have dinner with her and her fiance, Barack Obama.
Although Jarrett was older and infinitely more experienced in the public life of Chicago, she was nervous about meeting Obama. She had already heard a lot about him. As the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, she said, "he was a really big deal within the African-American legal community."
They met at a restaurant called Cafe Le Loup and immediately fell into a long discussion of their childhood travels. "Barack felt extraordinarily familiar," Jarrett said. "He and I shared a view of where the United States fit in the world, which is often different from the view people have who have not traveled outside the United States as young children." Through her travels, Jarrett felt that she had come to see the United States with a greater objectivity as one country among many, rather than as the center of all wisdom and experience. "We were also both, in a sense, only children," she went on, "because his sister is so much younger than he is, and I am an only child. We were forced to be with adults at a very young age, and, therefore, if not to participate, be in the room where there were adult conversations going on about world politics. We were both inundated with a lot of diverse information, which gives you a lot of appreciation for diversity of thought and how that shapes you. And I think that's why we clicked."
Jarrett also observed Barack and Michelle together. They were not yet married, but it seemed to her that they were already "kindred spirits."
"I was struck then by how you could have people that were raised in such different worlds, yet have the same values," she said. "Michelle had a lot of what Barack missed in childhood: two parents, everyone home for dinner, a brother, family unity, a place to call their own. It was a nuclear family grounded in one neighborhood, but with the same values of work, personal responsibility, treating each other the way you want to be treated, and compassion, and just core decency. That's how they both were raised in the end. Barack's father abandoned him, and that left, I think, a hole in his heart. By finding Michelle and her dad and seeing their really close relationship, he thought, This is what I want in my life. Often times, you re-create your childhood. Often people say that children who had alcoholics as parents become alcoholics. And I think sometimes you decide that I'm going to do the opposite. In this case Barack said, I want to be the opposite kind of husband and father that my father was."
Michelle Robinson took the job with Jarrett, and Jarrett soon began inviting her and Obama to numerous social occasions. She wanted to open up to them the various worlds of Chicago that she knew so well through her parents and through her own work. Eventually, Jarrett became their emissary to everyone from the leaders of the growing black business community to media titans like Linda Johnson Rice, the publisher of Ebony and Jet, and to various city and state politicians.
"I wasn't shy about calling people and saying, You've got to meet this guy: coffee, or lunch, or whatever," Jarrett recalled. "Sometimes I'd go along, sometimes I wouldn't. My parents have a big backyard, and we're always inviting people over, and Michelle and Barack were there all the time, and so they met a lot of people. I always felt that I was doing someone a favor by introducing that person to him. It wasn't like I was doing this just to help his political career.
"I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is.... He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability--the extraordinary, uncanny ability--to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them, and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. I mean, he's the kind of guy you'd hate in law school, who would pick up his book the night before the final, read it, and ace the test. So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that they had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy." Jarrett was quite sure that one of the few things that truly engaged him fully before going to the White House was writing Dreams from My Father. "He's been bored to death his whole life," she said. "He's just too talented to do what ordinary people do. He would never be satisfied with what ordinary people do."
Mike Strautmanis, a young lawyer who had met Michelle when he worked as a paralegal at Sidley Austin, became friends with the Obamas--and eventually a trusted aide to both Obama and Jarrett. A native Chicagoan, Strautmanis could see how Jarrett was linking her new proteges to one social and political circle after another. "Valerie is the one," he recalled. "She was the one who could lead him to the black aristocracy. The lawyers. The business people. The politicians, even. And not only the black aristocracy but all the movers and shakers in Chicago. She invited them to Martha's Vineyard for vacation. She had dinner parties where she had all kinds of important people for Barack and Michelle to meet. She invited them to charity events, to sit on the boards of foundations. Without Valerie, it would have taken Barack a lot longer."
Judd Miner's networks were less business-oriented. He introduced Obama to people who worked for various liberal foundations and to progressives like Salim Muwakkil, an African-American journalist who had written for the Chicago Tribune, and, at various points, for the newspaper of the Nation of Islam and the democratic socialist paper In These Times. Miner, Muwakkil recalled, "wanted to hook [Obama] into progressive networks."
Before Obama ran for any office, he had a long conversation with Muwakkil at the Davis Miner offices. "We talked a lot about the esoterica of the black movement," Muwakkil said. They discussed the long-running debates between Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass, between Washington and DuBois and their points of convergence. Obama talked about the Black Arts Movement of the nineteen-sixties and seventies and how, in his view, racial dogma had suffocated its vitality. Obama said that he identified with Douglass and saw the limits of a nationalist politics.
"I sensed that he was vaguely on the left," Muwakkil said. "His ambitions were well disguised. His cool manner was always there, and it underplayed his ambition. One reason that he was so knowledgeable about the arcana of black politics is that he studied it and he crafted himself. He doesn't share the traditional ancestral narrative. That's not part of his being. One of the reasons he is so attractive to a lot of people is that he doesn't have this sense of cultural grievance. He never had that sense of a family being socialized to subservience. He has an ease of interaction with whites that a lot of African-Americans don't have. He had to learn that cultural repertoire of African-Americans. The notion that you are socialized in an environment that insisted that you were inferior, that you spend much of your energy proving that you aren't inferior, that kind of double consciousness--he didn't have to deal with that. He has Malcolm's capacity for self-creation. That's what Barack did. He made himself, like a kind of an existential hero. He picked this out and that out, and he created h
imself."
A crime opened the political door for Barack Obama.
On August 21, 1994, Mel Reynolds, representing the Second Congressional District of Illinois, was indicted by a Cook County grand jury for witness tampering and for an array of sexual crimes, including having sex with a sixteen-year-old campaign worker named Beverly Heard and asking her to take lewd photographs of an even younger girl. Reynolds, born in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, the son of a preacher, seemed a young man of great promise: he graduated from a public university in Illinois, won a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford, and earned a master's in public administration at Harvard. For five years, he fought to unseat Gus Savage, a nationalist whose penchant for anti-Semitic pronouncements proved so outrageous to the Jewish community that Reynolds had been able to win support not only from the Pritzkers and the Crowns, in Chicago, but from contributors across the country. Savage had also referred to Ron Brown, the first black head of the Democratic National Committee, as "Ron Beige" and to his critics as "faggots"; mocked "the suburban Zionist lobby"; and embraced Louis Farrakhan's depiction of Adolf Hitler as a "great man." Reynolds, who had worked on the Presidential campaigns of Edward Kennedy and Jesse Jackson, failed to unseat Savage in 1988 and 1990; in 1989 he was accused of sexually assaulting a twenty-year-old college student, but was acquitted. He won election to the House in 1992. Now, as he watched his brief career in Congress implode, he referred to Beverly Heard as an "emotionally disturbed nut case." During the trial in the summer of 1995, the judge ruled as admissible a series of tapes of Reynolds talking to Heard in the most obscene terms. The transcripts ran in the Tribune. Admitting that he made "mistakes" but denying to the end that he had had sex with an under-age girl, Reynolds went on "Larry King Live," on September 1, 1995, to announce his resignation from Congress. "You can't discuss race in Chicago," Reynolds said, casting about for excuses. "If you do, you will be relegated to the fringe." Beverly Heard, he added manfully, "set me up."
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama Page 36