Epilogue
One year after the 2008 election it was fair to wonder whether the most profound moment of the Obama era would be its first. Obama himself had said at a press conference, in March, 2009, that the "justifiable pride" the country had taken in electing the first black President had "lasted about a day." This did not seem to concern him much. "Right now," he said, "the American people are judging me exactly the way I should be judged"--on performance. And yet by the time the year was over, his visions of post-partisan comity had given way to the reality of prolonged battle with congressional Republicans and conservative Democrats. In the 2008 election, Obama had won some unlikely states, including Virginia, North Carolina, and Colorado. Now, for many Americans, including independents who had voted for Obama, the sense of dissatisfaction ran deep. In Massachusetts, a Republican of slender gifts named Scott Brown was elected to replace the late Edward Kennedy in the Senate. Obama moved quickly to put his campaign manager, David Plouffe, in charge of the Democratic effort in the 2010 midterm elections, but that was hardly a guarantee that the Party would avoid a disaster like the 1994 midterms.
After Scott Brown's win, Barry Blitt, the New Yorker artist who had drawn the controversial cover called "The Politics of Fear," drew another--a four-paneled cover that showed Obama walking on water in radiant dawn light. But, as he draws closer to the viewer, he loses his miraculous footing and plunges into the drink. The morning that issue of the magazine was on the newsstands, I got a call from Eric Lesser, David Axelrod's assistant, saying that Axelrod and Obama were laughing about the cover: could I send a framed copy signed by Barry Blitt to the President? A couple of days later, Obama told some correspondents about his amusement; their meeting was off the record but it quickly leaked. I couldn't help thinking that while Obama might actually have thought the drawing was amusing, he was also eager to broadcast his own sense of humor and the idea that he had never believed in his own hype.
It was hard to imagine that any President would have remained popular for long in a time of terrible unemployment, record deficits, and political rancor. During the transition period, Obama learned more about the depth of the economic crisis. "Things were plummeting. The skies were darkening," Axelrod told me. "All the economic data pointed to the likelihood of a deep, deep recession. This was not the way we wanted to start the Presidency. I remember talking to Obama and saying, 'It would be fun to start this without a recession and two wars to deal with.' And he said, 'Yes, but if we didn't have that, we wouldn't be here in the first place.'" The terror threat on the day of the inauguration, Axelrod said, "was a raw initiation into the responsibilities of the Presidency."
Some of Obama's achievements during his first year in office were related to what did not happen. Thanks to government interventions, neither the banking system nor the automobile industry collapsed. By most accounts, the country had not only avoided a depression, it was, slowly, fitfully, and unequally, emerging from recession. And yet the reality of ten-per-cent unemployment and the galling spectacle of investment bankers' coming to Capitol Hill to justify their gaudy bonuses prevented any sense of gratitude or celebration. There were other achievements. Obama appointed Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic justice on the Supreme Court. He liberalized national science policy. He set a firm timetable to withdraw American troops from Iraq. He moved against discriminatory policies toward homosexuals in the military. Despite the pleas of some of his advisers, Obama also began his term by calling on Congress to overhaul the health-care system; he got further in that effort than any President in a half-century, but he lost momentum when Brown won his seat in the Senate. At the same time, there were policies sure to dismay those Obama voters who, despite the evidence accumulated during his relatively brief career as a state and U.S. senator, believed he would forgo the habit of compromise. His failure to follow through on a promise to close Guantanamo within a year; his dismissal of his chief counsel, Gregory Craig; and many other decisions did little to encourage the left. The Democratic left probably did not imagine that arguably the most influential member of the Obama cabinet would be a Republican fixture of the capital, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.
Surely the most absurd moment of Obama's first year in office came not long after he committed more than thirty thousand new troops to Afghanistan. On October 9, 2009, Robert Gibbs woke the President with a call at around six in the morning to tell him that there had been an announcement in Oslo: Obama, after less than nine months in office, had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. The President's reaction was a more elongated and colorful version of "Shut up."
"It was not helpful to us politically," Obama told me in an interview at the Oval Office in mid-January, 2010. "Although Axelrod and I joke about it, the one thing we didn't anticipate this year was having to apologize for having won the Nobel Peace Prize."
Obama's acceptance speech in Oslo brought to mind his 2002 anti war speech on Federal Plaza, in Chicago. Neither was the statement of a pacifist and, as such, neither wholly pleased its audience. Obama could admire King, but he could never be him. He was not the leader of a movement; he was a politician, a commander-in-chief.
"The speeches are of a piece, and they reflect my fundamental view of the issues of war and peace, which is that we have to recognize that this is a dangerous world and that there are people who will do terrible things and have to be fought," Obama said. "But we also have to recognize that in fighting against those things, there's the possibility that we ourselves engage in terrible things. And so, trying to maintain that balance of the tragic recognition that war is sometimes necessary but never anything less than tragic and never worthy of glorification is, I think, one of the best attributes of America's own character. That's why I celebrate Lincoln. That's why I think we survived the Civil War--because we had a leader of such wisdom and depth that there was no triumphalism on his part at the end, or at all."
One lesson that Obama seemed to internalize early in his term was that there was no percentage in talking about race when it was not on his terms. In July, 2009, at the very end of a press conference on domestic policy, Obama was asked about an incident in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in which a police officer handcuffed and arrested a Harvard professor and pioneer in African-American studies, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his own home after a neighbor reported that someone might have been breaking into the house.
Obama, who had worked on racial-profiling issues during his years in the Illinois state legislature and was even pulled aside for an extra search at Logan Airport after his triumphant speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, waded in. "Now, I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that, but I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry," Obama told the reporters. "Number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. And, number three, what I think we know, separate and apart from this incident, is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. And that's just a fact."
In the coming days, Obama was criticized for sins ranging from a disrespect for the police to mouthing off without knowing both sides of the story. Although he was a great deal more right than wrong in his defense of Gates, Obama and his advisers regretted the furor, not least because it raised a sensitive subject precisely when he was trying to push an ambitious political agenda in an era of bitterly partisan political rhetoric. You got the feeling that the White House staff would have preferred to talk about anything--Bill Ayers, Tony Rezko, anything--other than Professor Gates and Sergeant James Crowley. Obama tried to resolve the affair with a "beer summit" at the White House, but in the months to come, at some of the conservative Tea Party rallies around the country and elsewhere, there were signs of persistent resentment about the incident and, more worrying, about the spectacle of a black President's speaking out honestly, even emotionally, about race in general. The angriest of the Tea Party demonstrators usually avoided overtly racist language; instead they spoke of "taking our country back."
Obama was extremely cautious in talking about the racial component of the opposition to him. Certainly it was not the dominant strain of opposition, but it was a presence. "America evolves, and sometimes those evolutions are painful," Obama told me. "People don't progress in a straight line. Countries don't progress in a straight line. So there's enormous excitement and interest around the election of an African-American President. It's inevitable that there's going to be some backlash, potentially, to what that means--not in a crudely racist way, necessarily. But it signifies change, in the same way that immigration signifies change, in the same way that a shift from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy signifies change, in the same way that the Internet signifies change and terrorism signifies change. And so I think that nobody should have ever been under the illusion--certainly I wasn't, and I was very explicit about this when I campaigned--that by virtue of my election, suddenly race problems would be solved or conversely that the American people would want to spend all their time talking about race. I think it signifies progress, but the progress preceded the election. The progress facilitated the election. The progress has to do with the day-to-day interactions of people who are working together and going to church together and teaching their kids to treat everybody equally and fairly. All those little interactions that are taking place across the country add up to a more just, more tolerant, society. But that's an ongoing process. It's one that requires each of us, every day, to try to expand our sense of understanding. And there are going to be folks who don't want to promote that understanding because they're afraid of the future. They don't like that evolution. They think, in some fashion, that it will disadvantage them or, in some sense, diminishes the past. I tend to be fairly forgiving about the anxiety that people feel about change because I think, if you're human, you recognize that in yourself."
In matters of decor, Obama altered the Oval Office only slightly. The Resolute desk, a gift from Queen Victoria to Rutherford B. Hayes, is still there; an antique grandfather clock still ticks the seconds, an unnervingly loud reminder to the occupant that his stay is brief. Obama, however, made one striking change. He returned a bust of Winston Churchill by the sculptor Jacob Epstein to the British government, which had lent it to George W. Bush as a gesture of solidarity after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and replaced it with busts of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. For Obama, the black freedom struggle defines not just the African-American experience, but the American experience itself.
"I am a direct beneficiary of their sacrifice and their effort--my entire generation is," he said. "There is a certain awe that I continue to hold when I consider the courage, tenacity, and audacity of the civil-rights leaders of that time. They were so young. That's what always amazes me. King was twenty-six when Montgomery starts. At the height of his fame and influence, he's in his mid-thirties. I mean, he's a kid. And that was true for all these leaders. So, part of what I was trying to communicate in Selma"--in March, 2007--"was this sense that the battles they fought were so much more difficult, fraught with so many risks, that it would be foolish to compare me running for the Senate, or for that matter the Presidency, to them risking their lives in a highly uncertain and dangerous situation." Obama disavowed the comparison between their struggles and his political campaigns, saying, "They are related only in the sense that at the core of the civil-rights movement, even in the midst of anger, despair, Black Power, Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, all that stuff, there is a voice that is best captured by King, which is that we as African-Americans are American, and that our story is America's story, and that by perfecting our rights we perfect the Union--which is a very optimistic story, in the end."
When there are no television cameras around, Obama speaks even more deliberately than usual. I could hear the grandfather clock ticking during his long pauses. Outside his door, a flock of advisers was accumulating. There was little over a week left before the State of the Union address.
"It's fundamentally different from the story that many minority groups go through in other countries," Obama said finally. "There's no equivalent, if you think about it, in many other countries--that sense that through the deliverance of the least of these, the society as a whole is transformed for the better. And, in that sense, what I was trying to communicate is: we didn't quite get there, but that journey continues."
Debts and Sources
The sentimental narrative of Barack Obama is that his election in 2008 was the end, somehow, of the most painful of all American struggles. Nothing has ended, of course, and questions of race--cultural, legal, penal, educational, social--remain despite all the evident promise and progress since the civil-rights movement. De-facto segregation, for example, persists in countless neighborhoods and schools, and Chicago, Obama's chosen city, is rated the most segregated city in America. And yet his election had undeniable historical meaning. It is preposterously early for definitive, scholarly biographies. My hope was to write a piece of biographical journalism that, through interviews with his contemporaries and certain historical actors, examined Obama's life before his Presidency and some of the currents that helped to form him.
In this effort, I had the help of two extraordinary people: Katherine Stirling and Christopher Jennings. I am grateful to them both for their care, intelligence, and hard work.
Katherine Stirling carried out innumerable tasks, all necessary to a work of this sort: setting up interviews, running down contacts and source materials, and transcribing interviews. She also read the manuscript and made enormously helpful suggestions all along the way.
Chris Jennings checked the manuscript and saved me from missteps of fact, large and small--a complicated job for a long magazine piece, an immeasurably more difficult one when the author has a maddening tendency to revise a book-length manuscript until the final bell.
I want to express my thanks to my sources, the great majority of whom spoke to me on the record. While it is often problematic for friends, family members, colleagues, rivals, enemies, and acquaintances of a sitting President to talk freely to a reporter, I was gratified to discover that so many people were willing to do so and did not insist on diving automatically into the waters of deep background. These sources are quoted liberally throughout the text. There were, of course, some sources, particularly in government and in the Presidential campaign, who did ask to speak anonymously. Where I have quoted or relied on published interviews, articles, and books, I have provided the source information in the endnotes.
My gratitude for interviews to: Neil Abercrombie; Mark Alexander; Susan Arterian; Gha-is Askia; Eli Attie; Loretta Augustine-Herron; David Axelrod; William Ayers; Ashley Baia; Michael Baron; Cornell Belcher; Derrick Bell; Brad Berenson; Jeff Berkowitz; Mary Bernstein; Timuel Black; Robert Blackwell, Jr.; Rod Blagojevich; Mark Blumenthal; Philip Boerner; Roger Boesche; Julian Bond; John Bonifaz; Caroline Boss; Susan Botkin; Maxine Box; Bishop Arthur Brazier; Marvin Bressler; David Brooks; Rosellen Brown; Will Burns; Jill Burton-Dascher; Cassandra Butts.
Mary Beth Cahill; Geoffrey Canada; Paul Carpenter; Bob Casey; Jim Cauley; Lou Celi; Hasan Chandoo; Bill Clinton; James Clyburn; David William Cohen; Steve Coll; Susan Coll; Jack Corrigan; John Corrigan; Jeffrey Cox; Allison Davis; Jarvis DeBerry; Alice Dewey; David Dinkins; Alan and Lois Dobry; Gary and Kendra Duncan; Anita Dunn; Christopher Edley, Jr.; Joella Edwards; Pal Eldredge; Lolis Elie; David Ellen; Richard Epstein; Virginia Dashner Ewalt.
Jonathan Favreau; Andrew Feldstein; Henry Ferris; Thomas L. Friedman; Greg Galluzzo; Marshall Ganz; Tom Geoghegan; Pete Giangreco; Mack Gilkeson; Robin Givhan; David Goldberg; Lawrence Goldyn; Mariko Gordon; Kent Goss; Anton Gunn; Wahid Hamid; Melissa Harris-Lacewell; Carol Anne Harwell; Lisa Hay; George Haywood; Rickey Hendon; Eileen Hershenov; Louis Hook; Patrick Hughes; Blair Hull; Charlayne Hunter-Gault; Dennis Hutchinson.
Lisa Jack; Jesse Jackson, Sr.; Denny Jacobs; T. D. Jakes; Valerie Jarrett; Benjamin Jealous; Emil Jones, Jr.; Ben Joravsky; Vernon Jordan; Elena Kagan; Dan Kahan; John Kass; Marilyn Katz; Jerry Kellman; Cliff Kelley; Randall Kennedy; Al Kindle; Michael Klonsky; Mike Kruglik; Eric Kusunoki.
Cathy Lazere; John Lewis; Kimberly Lightford; Terry Link; Anne Marie Lipinski; Mark Lippert; Ronald Loui; Alvin Love; Joseph Lowery; Kenneth Mack; Chris MacLachlin; Susan Mboya; Salil Mehra; David Mendell; Margot Mifflin; Abner Mikva; Judson Miner; Martha Minow; Newton Minow; Ivory Mitchell; Eric Moore; Pat Moore; Mark Morial; Bob Moses; Salim Muwakkil.
Martin Nesbitt; Eric Newhall; Sandy Newman; Salim al Nurridin; Martha Nussbaum; Barack Obama; Philip Ochieng; Charles Ogletree; Frederick Okatcha; Bruce Orenstein; Peter Osnos; Olara Otunnu; John Owens; Mansasseh Oyucho; Clarence Page; Edward (Buzz) Palmer; Marylyn Prosser Pauley; Charles Payne; Mark Penn; Tony Peterson; Earl Martin Phalen; Wendell Pierce; David Plouffe; Jeremiah Posedel; Richard Posner; Colin Powell; Toni Preckwinkle; John Presta; Francine Pummel.
Linda Randle; Kwame Raoul; Vicky Rideout; Rebecca Rivera; Byron Rodriguez; John Rogers; Donald Rose; Brian Ross; Pete Rouse; Bobby Rush; Mark Salter; Bettylu Saltzman; Chris Sautter; John Schmidt; Bobby Seale; Al Sharpton; Michael Sheehan; Dan Shomon; Sephira Shuttlesworth; Tavis Smiley; Jerome Smith; Rik Smith; Maya Soetoro-Ng; Daniel Sokol; Bronwen Solyon; Aaron Sorkin; Christine Spurell (Lee); Robert Starks; Iona Stenhouse; Geoffrey Stone; Ken Sulzer; Mona Sutphen.
Larry Tavares; Elizabeth Taylor; Studs Terkel; Don Terry; Laurence Tribe; Donne Trotter; Scott Turow; Roberto Mangabeira Unger; C. T. Vivian; Nicholas von Hoffman; Chip Wall; Maria Warren; Dawna Weatherly-Williams; Lois Weisberg; Cora Weiss; Cornel West; Robin West; Jim Wichterman; David B. Wilkins; Roger Wilkins; Jeremiah Wright; Quentin Young; Fareed Zakaria; Andrew (Pake) Zane; Eric Zorn; Mary Zurbuchen; Hank De Zutter.
I also would like to thank the scholars with whom I consulted during my reporting on matters ranging from Hawaiian history to the black church. Some are also quoted in the text. They include Danielle Allen; William Andrews; Mahzarin Banaji; Lawrence Bobo; David Bositis; Taylor Branch; Adam Cohen; David William Cohen; Gavan Daws; Michael Dawson; Alice Dewey; Caroline Elkins; Eric Foner; Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; Eddie Glaude, Jr.; Doris Kearns Goodwin; William J. Grimshaw; Lani Guinier; Jill Lepore; David Levering Lewis; Glenn Loury; John McWhorter; Tali Mendelberg; Orlando Patterson; Jonathan Reider; Dick Simpson; Werner Sollors; Robert Stepto; Elizabeth Taylor; Ronald Walters; Sean Wilentz; and William Julius Wilson.
Anyone who writes about Barack Obama's life owes a debt to the many reporters and writers who have covered him. Two standout reporters, David Mendell and Jeff Zeleny, both former Chicago Tribune staff writers, have provided, with their countless stories, a wealth of invaluable information. I also have reason to be grateful to Kim Barker, David Jackson, John Kass, Ray Long, Evan Osnos, Clarence Page, Kirsten Scharnberg, Don Terry, Jim Warren, and Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune; Scott Fornek, the late Steve Neal, Lynn Sweet, and Laura Washington of the Chicago Sun-Times; Hank De Zutter, Ben Joravsky, and Ted Kleine of the Chicago Reader; David Bernstein, David Brooks, Carol Felsenthal, and Grant Pick of Chicago magazine; Matt Bai, Jo Becker, Christopher Drew, Jodi Kantor, Serge F. Kovaleski, Janny Scott, and Jeff Zeleny (encore) of the New York Times; Edmund Sanders of the Los Angeles Times; Jackie Calmes of the Wall Street Journal; my colleagues Lauren Collins, William Finnegan, David Grann, Ryan Lizza, and Larissa MacFarquhar of The New Yorker; John Heilemann of New York; Zadie Smith and Garry Wills of the New York Review of Books; Salim Muwakkil of In These Times; Todd Purdum of Vanity Fair; Scott Helman, Sasha Issenberg, Sally Jacobs, Derrick Z. Jackson, Michael Levenson, and Jonathan Saltzman of the Boston Globe; Joshua Green and Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic; Joe Klein and Amanda Ripley of Time; Jonathan Alter, Jon Meacham, Richard Wolffe, and Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek; Michelle Cottle, Franklin Foer, Ryan Lizza, and Noam Scheiber of The New Republic; Eric Alterman and Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Nation; Benjamin Wallace-Wells of Rolling Stone; Ben Smith of Politico; Dan Balz, Robin Givhan, David Maraniss, Kevin Merida, Liza Mundy, and Peter Slevin of the Washington Post; and Nancy Benac of the Associated Press. The coverage of Barack Obama and the 2008 campaign by National Public Radio (particularly by Michele Norris), Slate, Real Clear Politics, The Root, Salon, and many other Web sites proved extremely useful. No student of Barack Obama and South Side politics can do without the Chicago Defender, the Hyde Park Herald, or the broadcasts of WVON.
To ask friends to read a book-length manuscript, or some portion of it, and to ask them for their thoughts, arguments, and corrections is to ask an enormous favor. I am grateful to those who did just that: Richard Brody, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Henry Finder, Jeffrey Frank, Ann Goldstein, Hendrik Hertzberg, Nicholas Lemann, George Packer, Peter Slevin, and Dorothy Wickenden. Thanks to Whitney Johnson for helping me with the photographs. I am especially grateful to my colleagues and friends at The New Yorker and to Si Newhouse, who has supported the magazine with consistency, determination, and grace.
My thanks to Knopf's commander-in-chief, Sonny Mehta, who took me in and led me to my wonderful editor, Dan Frank. Thanks, as well, to Chip Kidd, Katherine Hourigan, Lydia Buechler, Pat Johnson, Tony Chirico, Karen Mugler, George Wen, Kate Norris, and Paul Bogaards, at Knopf. My agent, Kathy Robbins, has watched out for me for many years, and so has my friend and assistant Brenda Phipps. I would also like to thank Eric Lewis, Michael Specter, Pam McCarthy, Lisa Hughes, Wendy Belzberg, Strauss Zelnick, Robert Glick, and Alexa Cassanos, as well as Barbara Remnick, Richard, Will, and Talia Remnick, Lisa Fernandez, the Feins in their multitude, and Pat Burnett and Deta McDaniel.
Finally, love and gratitude to my patient and loving family--Esther, Alex, Noah, and Natasha--and we all, in turn, extend our thanks to those who have helped Natasha over the years. My sons, Alex and Noah, were deeply encouraging. This book is dedicated to Esther Fein. For me, there is no life without her.
Notes
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