Chapter Three
Nobody Knows My Name
Obama's academic performance at Punahou was unremarkable, but even though he was a B-student his college prospects were promising. Like the best New England prep schools, Punahou routinely sent its top-tier students to the best colleges and universities in the country--and the second-tier students, Obama included, did almost as well. Along with most of his classmates, Obama had developed a case of "rock fever." He was eager to get off the island. From a girl he met in Hawaii, he heard about Occidental, a small, highly regarded school of about sixteen hundred undergraduates in Eagle Rock, California, near Pasadena. Accepted at several colleges, Obama took a flyer: he chose Occidental.
Obama writes that just before leaving for the mainland and his freshman year, he paid a last visit to Frank Marshall Davis. As he always did, the old man welcomed Obama warmly--and then challenged him. Rattling Obama was his way of giving counsel. He had told Obama that black kids lucky enough to go to college invariably emerge into the world with "an advanced degree in compromise." Now he was telling Obama that no one was telling him the truth about "the real price of admission" to college.
And what was that? Obama asked.
"Leaving your race at the door," Davis said. "Leaving your people behind."
A place like Occidental wouldn't give Obama a real education, Davis insisted, so much as "train" him. "They'll train you so good, you'll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit. They'll give you a corner office and invite you to fancy dinners, and tell you you're a credit to your race. Until you want to actually start running things, and then they'll yank on your chain and let you know that you may be a well-trained, well-paid nigger, but you're a nigger just the same." Go to college, Davis said, but "keep your eyes open."
Obama thought of Davis much the way he thought of his mother--as a product of his time. And yet he couldn't dismiss him. Even before Obama joined the swim of African-American life, he had been warned about the perils of selling out, of tokenism and the limits of white tolerance. Obama soon discovered that the political and internal wariness that Davis prescribed was not so easy to uphold at Occidental. With Spanish Revival architecture and unfailing weather, Occidental was a favorite of Hollywood; in films from the Marx Brothers to "Clueless," Occidental was the generic California campus. The college was surrounded by a working-class Hispanic neighborhood, but students seldom got much beyond campus; when they did, it was usually to go roller-skating on the boardwalk at Venice Beach, body-surfing at Newport Beach, or to a concert downtown. Everyone knew everyone. "Oxy is like Peyton Place, it's so small," Obama's classmate and friend Phil Boerner said.
In September, 1979, Obama moved into a single-room triple in a dormitory known as Haines Hall Annex. He shared Room A104 with a Pakistani named Imad Husain, who is now a banker in Boston, and Paul Carpenter, now a mortgage banker in Los Angeles. His roommates and dorm mates were friendly and inviting. The hallway was unusually diverse for Occidental: there were African-Americans, Asians, Hispanics, Arabs. Occidental draws heavily on middle-and upper-middle-class kids from California, but Obama seemed at ease. Although he was getting financial aid, no one saw him as particularly disadvantaged.
Occidental required undergraduates to take a core curriculum. The year before Obama arrived, the multicultural movement had exerted some influence on Occidental; reading lists now included more texts from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, as well as from the United States and Europe. Obama took courses mainly in politics, history, and literature, and a minimum of science. From the start, one of his favorite professors was Roger Boesche, a Tocqueville scholar, who taught American and European political thought. As a freshman, Obama took a survey course in American politics with Boesche, which covered the British and American liberal theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and The Federalist Papers. The following year he took Boesche's political theory course, in which he read excerpts from Nietzsche, Tocqueville, Sartre, Marcuse, and Habermas. Boesche was an outspoken liberal on the political issues of the day--the upcoming election between Reagan and Carter; the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; the potential reinstatement of the draft--and Obama was sympathetic.
Obama studied regularly, but he also did plenty of hanging out at The Cooler, a ramshackle student center that was a favorite of the crowd he most identified with. As he put it, "The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Frantz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling constraints." As a memoirist, Obama winks at his own undergraduate pretensions, but he also spent time on more demotic pursuits. He and his friends were big fans of the Lakers and they watched games on TV at a local pizza joint. He also became very disciplined about exercise. Obama took long morning runs and played basketball and tennis.
At the start, Obama went by either Barry or Obama. Some teachers, seeing his real name on their rolls, tried to call him Barack but they were soon asked to call him Barry. When he did talk about his background, it was with a minimum of anguish or revelation. "I don't see him as tortured," Phil Boerner said. "He seemed pretty happy, even if reserved at times. Some of the things I later discovered about his early life, he really didn't mention. We were living in the moment."
The bands pounding out of the stereo in Obama's room and the rooms along the dorm hallway included the B-52s, The Specials, Talking Heads, Roxy Music, UB40, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, Earth, Wind & Fire, Bob Marley, Black Uhuru, The Flying Lizards. Obama also had a taste for jazz, for Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Billie Holiday, along with middle-brow contemporaries like Grover Washington, Jr. Obama's accustomed uniform was shorts or jeans, T-shirt or Hawaiian aloha shirt, and flip-flops. Part of his getup was also a Marlboro dangling from his lips. ("I smoke like this because I want to keep my weight down," Obama told one friend. "After I get married, I'll stop and just get real fat.") By the standards of the time and place, he was hardly heroic in his drug use. Marijuana and hash were almost as common as beer at the Haines dorm parties, and Obama was not reluctant to join in the fun. The second semester of his sophomore year was known to some in his circle as "the spring of powdered cocaine," and Obama has never denied his acquaintance with "a little blow," either. It wasn't until his junior year, when he transferred to Columbia, that he vowed to stop getting high and to commit himself to his studies and his future.
Phil Boerner, who was not only Obama's freshman-year hallmate but also his roommate when, two years later, they both transferred to Columbia, kept a diary as a young man, and in an entry from 1983 he recalled a typical late-night scene in the dorm featuring his friend:
Moment: Freshman year at Oxy. The stereo in Barry's room is on--a Hendrix or Stones record is being played--and the record is skipping. I'm in the hall--"The Annex" outside. I hear the record skipping, and conclude that something is amiss. I peek into the room--their door was always unlocked, and it wasn't even closed all the way this time--and see Barry crashed out on his bed. I tiptoe in to turn off the record. Just as I'm creeping up to the stereo, which is right beside his bed, he opens one eye and looks at me. He doesn't say anything, but I feel an explanation is necessary as to why I'm sneaking into his room. Certainly not to steal something, as he might have thought, if he'd been a suspicious person, which he wasn't, and isn't. Well, I said to him, "The record is skipping," and proceeded to turn off the stereo. He mumbled something--"Thanks," perhaps, and rolled over and returned to snoring softly. I crept out of the room, closing the door behind me.
Obama's circle was multiracial. Among his closest friends were three older students from South Asia: two Pakistanis, Mohammed Hasan Chandoo and Wahid Hamid, and an Indian, Vinai Thummalapally. "I think that one of the reasons he felt comfortable with us was because we were accepted by virtually all people," Hamid said. "We didn't come with a lot of predispositions about race. We weren't carrying that American baggage. We were brown, I suppose you could say, and we got along with people who were white and black. I think we had an immediate connection with him because we allowed him to be who he was, someone able to straddle things. And I think that is how Barack sees himself, as someone able to understand, for obvious reasons of his background, where both whites and blacks come from. As a politician, he is not your typical black candidate or white candidate--that's part of his strength--but it was harder when he was young. But by virtue of his strengths and his skills and talents, he was an endearing individual. People liked him rather immediately. He managed to get along. He was gifted that way--and those gifts allowed the world to be less problematic for him than it could have been for someone without those skills."
There were very few black students at Occidental in Obama's time there--around seventy-five out of sixteen hundred. "And you could count the black faculty members on two fingers," one of Obama's classmates said. African-American students really did negotiate Occidental in different ways. Some kept more or less to themselves, sitting at the "black tables" at lunch, constructing an enclosed social world out of a sense both of preserving black culture and of a lack of welcome from the white students. The college's weekly newspaper, The Occidental, quoted one black student, Earl Chew, as saying, "Coming here was hard for me. A lot of things that I knew as a black student--that I knew as a black, period--weren't accepted on this campus."
Obama moved fairly easily among groups, just as he had at Punahou. Louis Hook, who was a leader of the Black Students Association, recalled that Obama wasn't an especially active member of the group; rather, he "came in and out of it." He said most black students on campus were trying to sustain the "feel of the civil-rights movement" and some of Obama's friends and acquaintances wondered why he hung out with white and South Asian kids as often as he did. Obama, Hook concluded, "was a crossover guy," who "blended across the different communities. That was unusual. Some appreciated it, and some didn't look that highly on it. There was a split among black kids among people who really needed the reinforcement of their own culture and some who could deal inside it and outside it. Obama was in the category that didn't grow up in the African-American tradition. So for him, he could deal with it but was comfortable without it, too."
Obama discovered that, for the most part, the complaints of the black students at Occidental were the same as everyone else's: "Surviving classes. Finding a well-paying gig after graduation. Trying to get laid." In fact, Obama writes, "I had stumbled upon one of the well-kept secrets about black people: that most of us weren't interested in revolt; that most of us were tired of thinking about race all the time; that if we preferred to keep to ourselves it was mainly because that was the easiest way to stop thinking about it, easier than spending all your time mad or trying to guess whatever it was that white folks were thinking about you."
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. During 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."
Obama was to open the rally. In his memoir, he writes that, as he prepared his brief speech, he remembered his father's visit to his fifth-grade classroom and how he had won over everyone with his words. "If I could just find the right words," he thought. If he could do that, he could have an impact. He took the microphone in a "trancelike" state. The sun was shining in his eyes, but he could see in the distance, over the heads of the demonstrators, someone playing Frisbee in the distance.
"There's a struggle going on," Obama began. He could sense that only a few people had heard him. He raised his voice. "I say, there's a struggle going on! It's happening an ocean away. But it's a struggle that touches each and every one of us. Whether we know it or not. Whether we want it or not. A struggle that demands we choose sides. Not between black and white. Not between rich and poor. No--it's a harder choice than that. It's a choice between dignity and servitude. Between fairness and injustice. Between commitment and indifference. A choice between right and wrong ..."
Obama was neither the best nor the most dramatic speaker at the rally. The school paper made no mention of him. What most people remember about his presentation is that, before he could get very far, two white students, acting the role of South African police goons, dragged him from the podium in a gesture of prearranged guerrilla theater. His moment was over.
The impact of the other speakers was greater. Ngubeni, who, as a student in South Africa, had been a member of the grassroots Black Consciousness Movement and an associate of Steve Biko, the martyred anti-apartheid leader, declared that the movement had to begin in the United States because "all the bosses are over here."
By the time the demonstration was over, Obama's euphoria had evaporated. He saw some white trustees watching them from inside the building, laughing. He worried that the protest and his own speech had been a childish farce. "After the rally, a pair of folk singers harmonized as we wandered off to class, feeling groovy," Mifflin wrote years later.
But Obama had made a slight impression, at least on some. "He spoke much the same way he does now--reasoned, with passion, but not some hot head spouting off," Rebecca Rivera, a fellow protester, said. "Then, before he could finish, the stupid skit they had planned took him offstage. He was just getting going. I just remember thinking, Who is this guy? And why haven't we heard from him before? As people were dispersing, I remember saying to Barry, 'That was a great speech, I wish you would get more involved.' And, of course, that was the spring and soon he was gone. He was off to bigger and better things."
Obama's involvement in student politics had been earnest, but infrequent, cool, and removed. ("I was on the outside again, watching, judging, skeptical.") Rivera, and many others, remembered Obama as only fitfully engaged. "The impression he gave me was 'I get involved when it is important enough,'" she said. "The stuff we minority students were arguing about seemed important, but it was pretty small potatoes."
The faculty at Occidental had been opposed to apartheid, voting unanimously to divest, but the trustees stubbornly resisted; as late as 1990, with the white South African government in retreat, the trustees fended off a motion to divest. "And then it was clear," Boesche said, "that Nelson Mandela would have to take care of all this for us."
Despite all his political frustration, Obama enjoyed Occidental, but he wanted a bigger, more urban environment. He wanted to get away from the hothouse feeling of a small college. "I was concerned with urban issues," he said years later, "and I wanted to be around more black folks in big cities." He wanted to go East, preferably to New York. He looked into the possibility of transferring to Columbia University.
"We felt like we were in a groove and we wanted life to be more difficult," Phil Boerner, who also applied to Columbia that spring, said. "It was a country-club atmosphere. We wanted to make things harder for ourselves. Obama used to tell his friends that he wanted to go somewhere where the weather was cold and miserable so that he would be forced to spend his days indoors, reading."
Caroline Boss recalls Obama at college with admiring affection. "It's a story of self-discovery, isn't it?" she said. "He wants to get his feet wet, learn about the U.S. and being black as part of an American history and condition, and he gets that in California. And then California feels too pat, he is too dissipated, he is getting away with too much, hanging out too much, so he says to himself, Go put yourself in a very cold place. He picks Harlem."
Except for those he knew best, Obama seemed to slip out of sight with barely a word. Ken Sulzer, one of Obama's earliest friends on campus, recalled, "I remember in senior year, someone said, 'Hey, where's Obama?' We didn't realize he'd gone. But I thought, Good for him. A decade later, when I read about him becoming the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, I said to myself, What the hell? Barry Obama. He's Barack now? Who knew?"
In the summer of 1981, before arriving in New York, Obama traveled to Asia for three weeks, first to Pakistan to visit Chandoo and Hamid, and then to Indonesia to see his mother and Maya. "They took a trip in Pakistan together that Fox News tried to twist into something awful," Margot Mifflin said. In fact, the trip reacquainted Obama with some of the realities of the developing world. "When Obama came back," Mifflin said, "he said he'd been shocked by many things, but especially the poverty. When they rode through the countryside, he was amazed at how the peasants bowed to the landowners in respect as they passed. It blew his mind."
"It's true," Hamid said. "The trip gave him a grounding of sorts. To be exposed to a place like Pakistan as an adult, he saw how differently people live. He stayed with me and Hasan in Karachi, but he also wanted to get out in the countryside, and we went to rural Sindh, to the lands of a feudal landlord who was in school with me in high school and before. We went to this person's lands, where the feudal system is still strong. Barack could see how the owner lives and how the serfs and workers are so subservient.... Barack also met an individual there of African descent. Africans were brought to Pakistan years ago by the Arabs--part of the slave trade, though in another direction. And to see people like that was very striking for Barack. He sat across from him and, even though they didn't share a common language, they tried to communicate. It was a moment that stayed in his mind."
Obama spent much of his time in Pakistan with his friends' families--Chandoo's family is fairly wealthy, Hamid is upper-middle-class by Pakistani standards--but he also played basketball with kids in the street and explored the neighborhoods of Karachi during Ramadan. By talking with his friends, he got a deeper sense of the political and religious divisions of an infinitely complex political culture. "I am from the Sunni sect and Hasan from the Shia, so he learned a lot about the dialogue between the two," Hamid said.
As a transfer student, Obama wasn't able to get Columbia housing, and so for the next couple of years he lived in a series of cheap off-campus apartments. The first year he had made arrangements to share a third-floor walkup with his Occidental friend Phil Boerner, at 142 West 109th Street, off Amsterdam Avenue. They split the monthly rent of three hundred and sixty dollars. The apartment's charms included spotty heat, irregular hot water, and a railroad-flat layout. They adjusted, using the showers at the Columbia gym and camping out for long hours at Butler Library.
Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1965, leading protesters in Selma across the Edmund Pettus Bridge
Obama and John Lewis at Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, on March 4, 2007, commemorating "Bloody Sunday"
Tom Mboya (rear, left) with scholarship students leaving on the "airlift" for Kenyan students to the United States
Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., as an exchange student in Honolulu, in 1962
Obama, age two, at home in Honolulu, in 1963, with his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham
Ann Dunham with her second husband, Lolo Soetoro; their infant daughter, Maya Soetoro; and Obama, in Jakarta, Indonesia, 1968
After transferring to Columbia, Obama with his grandparents, Stanley Armour Dunham and Madelyn Lee Payne Dunham
Obama at Occidental College, in 1980, clowning and smoking a cigarette
During his first trip to Kenya, in 1987, Obama posed with members of his Kenyan family, including his half-sister Auma, lower left; Auma's mother, Kezia; and his grandmother Sarah
Obama's grandmother Sarah, at home in the village of Kogelo in northwestern Kenya
Obama at Harvard Law School, in 1990, just after being elected president of the Harvard Law Review
Obama's leadership of the Project Vote registration drive in Illinois during the 1992 elections gave him a political boost, especially on Chicago's South Side.
Barack and Michelle Obama at their home in Hyde Park in 1996, photographed by Mariana Cook, who interviewed them for her book on couples
Chicago mayor Harold Washington was a political role model for Obama.
Campaigning for the Illinois State Senate in 1996 on the South Side
Bobby Rush and Fred Hampton as Black Panthers
As an incumbent congressman, Rush easily defeated Obama in 2000--a race that Obama considered his political education.
Obama speaking at a 2002 anti-Iraq War rally, in Chicago--an event that was a boost to his Presidential hopes six years later
Obama campaigning in 2004 for the U.S. Senate
The Obamas soak in the applause after his keynote address to the Democratic National Convention, in Boston, on July 27, 2004.
Another moment of triumph as Obama easily wins a seat in the U.S. Senate, defeating Alan Keyes.
Getting a haircut at his barbershop in Hyde Park
Rushing up the Capitol steps to a vote in November, 2005
Obama and John McCain, at a Senate hearing room in February, 2006, pose like fighters after a heated exchange of letters during a dispute about ethics reform.
A frosty moment with Hillary Clinton before a primary debate at the Kodak Theatre, in Los Angeles
Obama with his friend and pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, in March, 2005
The Reverend Joseph Lowery was one of the civil-rights-era leaders who was with Obama from the start of the 2008 Presidential campaign
John Lewis, one of Obama's heroes, started out loyal to Hillary Clinton and then switched sides after sensing he was "on the wrong side of history."
The Election Night celebration in Grant Park, in Chicago
One of more than a million people who gathered in Washington for the inauguration of Barack Obama on January 20, 2009
Obama's academic emphasis was on political science--particularly foreign policy, social issues, political theory, and American history--but he also took a course in modern fiction with Edward Said. Best known for his advocacy of the Palestinian cause and for his academic excoriation of the Eurocentric "Orientalism" practiced by Western authors and scholars, Said had done important work in literary criticism and theory. And yet Said's theoretical approach in the course left Obama cold. "My whole thing, and Barack had a similar view, was that we would rather read Shakespeare's plays than the criticism," Boerner said. "Said was more interested in the literary theory, which didn't appeal to Barack or me." Obama referred to Said as a "flake."
In his spare time, Obama wandered around the city, taking in Sunday services at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, a socialist conference at Cooper Union, African cultural fairs in Brooklyn and Harlem, jazz at the West End. He took long walks and runs in Riverside Park and Central Park. He shopped at the Strand downtown and Papyrus and the other bookstores around the Columbia campus. When Hasan Chandoo visited, they went to hear Jesse Jackson speak in Harlem. There was far less partying now. This was the beginning of what Obama has wryly referred to as his "ascetic period."
"When I transferred, I decided to buckle down and get serious," Obama told the Columbia alumni magazine two decades later. "I spent a lot of time in the library. I didn't socialize that much. I was like a monk." Obama often fasted on Sundays, vowed to give up drugs and drinking (he was less successful with cigarettes), and started keeping a journal, including, by his own admission, "daily reflections and very bad poetry." He wrote in the journal about his childhood and adolescence, and these entries helped feed the memoir that he wrote years later. He took a vow of self-improvement. He was a member of the generation primed to join and enjoy the first big Wall Street boom of the early eighties, but he was determined to resist the era's financial temptations. A certain self-righteousness and self-denial crept into his being: "Fearful of falling into old habits, I took on the temperament if not the convictions of a street-corner preacher, prepared to see temptation everywhere, ready to overrun a fragile will."
"You know, I'm amused now when I read quotes from high-school teachers and grammar school teachers, who say, 'You know, he always was a great leader,'" Obama told me. "That kind of hindsight is pretty shaky. And I think it's just as shaky for me to engage in that kind of speculation as it is for anybody. I will tell you that I think I had a hunger to shape the world in some way, to make the world a better place, that was triggered around the time that I transferred from Occidental to Columbia. So there's a phase, which I wrote about in my first book, where, for whatever reason, a whole bunch of stuff that had been inside me--questions of identity, questions of purpose, questions of, not just race, but also the international nature of my upbringing--all those things started converging in some way. And so there's this period of time when I move to New York and go to Columbia, where I pull in and wrestle with that stuff, and do a lot of writing and a lot of reading and a lot of thinking and a lot of walking through Central Park. And somehow I emerge on the other side of that ready and eager to take a chance in what is a pretty unlikely venture: moving to Chicago and becoming an organizer. So I would say that's a moment in which I gain a seriousness of purpose that I had lacked before. Now, whether it was just a matter of, you know, me hitting a certain age where people start getting a little more serious--whether it was a combination of factors--my father dying, me realizing I had never known him, me moving from Hawaii to a place like New York that stimulates a lot of new ideas--you know, it's hard to say what exactly prompted that."
Obama and Boerner lived cheaply. They ate bagel lunches in the neighborhood around Broadway. At night, they cooked beans and rice or ate the cheapest dishes at Empire Szechuan on Ninety-seventh and Broadway. Obama wore military-surplus khakis or jeans and a leather jacket.
One of Obama's first and closest friends in those early months in New York was Sohale Siddiqi. Born and brought up in Pakistan, Siddiqi had overstayed his tourist visa and was living, illegally, on the Upper East Side, working as a waiter and as a salesman in a clothing store; he was drinking, taking drugs, and getting by. Obama and Boerner had grown disgusted with their apartment and had decided to look for other accommodations. Obama, after living alone in a studio apartment for his second semester, agreed to room the following year with Siddiqi, in a sixth-floor walkup at 339 East Ninety-fourth Street.
"We didn't have a chance in hell of getting this apartment unless we fabricated the lease application," Siddiqi said. Siddiqi fibbed about his job, saying that he had a high-paying employment at a catering company; Obama declined to lie, but they managed to get the apartment anyway. Small wonder. The place was a dump in a drug-ridden neighborhood.
The roommates were friendly but lived entirely different lives. Siddiqi was a libertine, but Obama's days of dissolution, mild as they had been, were over. "I think self-deprivation was his shtick--denying himself pleasure, good food, and all of that," Siddiqi said. "At that age, I thought he was a saint and a square, and he took himself too seriously. I would ask him why he was so serious. He was genuinely concerned with the plight of the poor. He'd give me lectures, which I found very boring. He must have found me very irritating.... We were both very lost. We were both alienated, although he might not put it that way."
Despite his exasperation with Obama, Siddiqi learned to admire his forgiving temperament. Obama, he noticed, never said anything when Siddiqi's mother, who had never spent time around a black man, was rude to him. Long after Obama moved out, because of Siddiqi's constant partying, Obama proved a constant friend when Siddiqi developed a serious cocaine problem. Many years later, as a way of warding off the press, Siddiqi recorded a telling message for his answering machine: "My name is Hal Siddiqi and I approve of this message. Vote for peace, vote for hope, vote for change, and vote for Obama."
On the night of November 24, 1982, during Obama's first semester of his senior year at Columbia, his father got behind the wheel of his car after a night of drinking at an old colonial bar in Nairobi, ran off the road, and crashed into the stump of a gum tree. He died instantly.
Obama, Sr., had spent the day working on a new infrastructure plan for the Kenyan capital. Although he'd become, by all accounts, a bitter man, one in perpetual danger of losing any opportunity to work, he had had a decent day. He had heard rumors that he might be promoted to a relatively good government job, maybe in the Ministry of Finance, and he bought rounds of drinks for his friends that night. A man of promise, Obama had failed not only his ambitions, but also the dozens of family members who depended on him for financial help and prestige. "He couldn't cope," said Obama's sister Auma. "He was one person trying to look after hundreds."
An aunt called Barack, Jr., on a scratchy line from Nairobi to tell him the news. Hundreds of people in Kenya gathered to mourn Barack, Sr., but the government-controlled press paid him no great tribute. "At the time of his death," Obama wrote, "my father remained a myth to me, both more and less than a man."
At Columbia, Obama kept showing up at talks and lectures, including one by the former SNCC leader and Black Power proponent Kwame Ture--Stokely Carmichael--but he was not walking any picket lines or immersing himself in any movements. "I don't remember him going to rallies or signing petitions," Phil Boerner said.
At Columbia, Obama was a serious, if unspectacular, student. He majored in political science with a concentration in international relations and became interested in the nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. In his senior year, in Michael Baron's course in American foreign policy and international politics, he wrote a seminar paper on prospects for bilateral disarmament. The class analyzed decision-making and the perils of "groupthink," the ways that disastrous policies, like the escalation of the Vietnam War, develop.
In March, 1983, Obama wrote an article for Sundial, a student weekly, titled "Breaking the War Mentality." Nominally a report on two campus groups--Arms Race Alternatives and Students Against Militarism--the article makes plain Obama's revulsion at what he saw as Cold War militarism and his positive feelings about the nuclear-freeze movement, which was very much in the air in the early years of the Reagan Administration, before the emergence in Moscow of Mikhail Gorbachev. He wrote:
Generally, the narrow focus of the Freeze movement as well as academic discussions of first versus second strike capabilities, suit the military-industrial interests, as they continue adding to their billion dollar erector sets. When Peter Tosh sings that "everybody's asking for peace, but nobody's asking for justice," one is forced to wonder whether disarmament or arms control issues, severed from economic and political issues, might be another instance of focusing on the symptoms of a problem instead of the disease itself.
Indeed, the most pervasive malady of the collegiate system specifically, and the American experience generally, is that elaborate patterns of knowledge and theory have been disembodied from individual choices and government policy. What the members of ARA and SAM try to do is infuse what they have learned about the current situation, bring the words of that formidable roster on the face of Butler Library, names like Thoreau, Jefferson, and Whitman, to bear on the twisted logic of which we are today a part.
Both in the seminar and in his muddled article for Sundial, Obama expressed sympathy for the urge to reduce, even eliminate, nuclear arsenals. In a letter to Boerner, he joked that he wrote the piece for Sundial "purely for calculated reasons of beefing up" his resume. "No keeping your hands clean, eh?" At around the same time, he started sending out letters to various social organizations, looking for work.
Two months before graduation, Obama told Boerner he was bored. "School is just making the same motions, long stretches of numbness punctuated with the occasional insight," he wrote in a letter to Boerner. "Nothing significant, Philip. Life rolls on, and I feel a growing competence and maturity. Take care of yourself and Karen, and write a decent note, you madman, with a pen so the words aren't smudged by the postman's fingers. Will get back to you when I know my location for next year. OBAMA."
With everyone around him applying to law school, graduate school, and investment-bank training programs, Obama got it into his head to become a community organizer. He was a young man who lacked membership in a community and a purpose, and to work as an organizer would move him toward community, maybe even toward "the beloved community" that King had spoken of a generation before. In his early twenties, Obama admits, he was "operating mainly on impulse," full of a yearning both to surpass his parents' frustrations and to connect to a romantic past. He recalls staying up late at night thinking about the civil-rights movement and its heroes and martyrs: students at lunch counters defiantly placing their orders, SNCC workers registering voters in Mississippi, preachers and churchwomen in jail singing freedom songs. Obama wanted to be part of the legacy of the movement. But, since the movement was long gone, he applied for membership in that which persisted.
"That was my idea of organizing," he writes. "It was a promise of redemption." Obama, his friend Wahid Hamid said, "had already developed a sense that he wanted to get involved in community work and not go down the regular path. He was trying to figure out how to have the biggest impact and not succumb to a traditional path like being a research associate at an investment bank or a corporate lawyer."
In the summer of 1983, after graduation, Obama visited his family in Indonesia. He wrote a postcard to Boerner, saying, "I'm sitting on the porch in my sarong, sipping strong coffee and drawing on a clove cigarette, watching the heavy dusk close over the paddy terraces of Java. Very kick back, so far away from the madness. I'm halfway through vacation, but still feel the tug of that tense existence, though. Right now, my plans are uncertain; most probably I will go back after a month or two in Hawaii."
When Obama got back to New York, he found that the many letters he had written to organizing groups and other progressive outfits had gone unanswered. Frustrated and broke, he interviewed for a job, in late summer of 1983, with Business International Corporation, a publishing and consulting group that collected data on international business and finance and issued various newsletters and reports for its corporate clients and organized government roundtables on trade.
"I remember distinctly meeting him," Cathy Lazere, a supervisor at Business International, said. "He was lanky, comfortable with himself, smart. He was so young that his resume still had his high-school stuff on it. He had taken some international economics in college. And, as you might expect, he talked about his name, a little about his mother in Indonesia, the Kenyan father. I hired him, and let's just say the salary was nowhere near enough to pay off his college debts." Founded by Eldridge Haynes, of McGraw-Hill, in 1953, Business International, or B.I., as it is known, was among the first research firms designed to provide information services for multinational firms.
Obama worked in the financial-services division, interviewing business experts, researching trends in foreign exchange, following market developments. He also edited a reference guide on overseas markets, called Financing Foreign Operations, and wrote for a newsletter called Business International Money Report. He wrote about currency swaps and leverage leases. (The currency swaps and derivatives that Obama covered for Business International Money Report were components of the financial engineering that led to the crash of 2008.) Obama also helped write financial reports on Mexico and Brazil.
In his memoir, Obama paints a picture of the office that is rather more corporate and formal than it was. He had no secretary, and he wore jeans more often than a suit. "We had Wang word processors that the young people shared," Lazere said, "and I remember Barack working hard and puffing away on Marlboros. You could still smoke in those days. He was very even-tempered, even-keeled. He definitely had a certain emotional intelligence, the ability to figure out what people wanted."
Obama was not uninterested in economics--he had taken a senior seminar at Columbia on foreign aid and capital flows between the developed and developing worlds--but he found himself doing research on companies, investments, and levels of risk, and, at times, found it stultifying, even morally discomfiting. He had a young idealist's disdain for even the most tentative step into the world of commerce: "Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors--see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand--and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve." He made his boredom plain to his mother in Indonesia. In a letter to Alice Dewey, Ann Dunham reported on her son:
Barry is working in New York this year, saving his pennies so he can travel next year. My understanding from a rather mumbled telephone conversation is that he works for a consulting organization that writes reports on request about social, political, and economic conditions in Third World countries. He calls it "working for the enemy" because some of the reports are written for commercial firms that want to invest in those countries. He seems to be learning a lot about the realities of international finance and politics, however, and I think that information will stand him in good stead in the future.
Once in a while, Obama brought his ideals into the office. William Millar, a colleague on the money report, recalled that Obama told him they should boycott any firms doing business in South Africa. "I said he needed to realize that it's the non-South African companies who were hiring blacks and giving them positions of authority with decent pay," Millar recalled. "That's what accelerates change--not isolation."
Obama's supervisors liked him. They found him intelligent but removed, possessing a "certain hauteur, a cultivated air of mystery." They called him, affectionately, "Mr. Cool." One afternoon, Obama was having lunch at a Korean restaurant with a colleague when the subject of exercise came up. Obama mentioned that he worked out in Riverside Park after work and on weekends.
"I jog there, too," the colleague said.
"I don't jog," Obama replied. "I run."
People in the office had the distinct impression that Obama was a friendly guy looking to mark time, make some money, and move on. "When I gave him something to do, he would smile and say 'Gotcha,'" Lazere said. "The truth is, I thought he would end up as a novelist or something, taking the world in. He was a real observer, a little off to the side, watching, not totally engaged." Obama kept his work life and his social life separate, preferring to see his Columbia friends rather than socialize with his colleagues. "He always seemed a little aloof," said Lou Celi, who managed the global-finance division. "At the time, I just figured he was doing his own thing and wasn't as sociable as some of the others in the office. Some people, you know all about their lives outside work. Not Barack."
"There were several African-American women who worked in the library as our internal clipping service," said Cathy Lazere. They cut out relevant articles on business, finance, and trade, and often doubled as receptionists. "They would have been about ten years older than Barack--around my age or older," she recalled. "He created quite a frisson when he arrived on the scene, but to my knowledge he had very little interaction with them. Most people assumed from his bearing that he was a wealthy preppy kid. Some of the preppies I had met at Yale were like the Lost Boys of Peter Pan. I thought Barack might have been like that. Beneath his cool-cat facade, I sensed a little loneliness, since he was never fully engaged in what was going on around him."
Obama sometimes took part in an evening discussion group with Phil Boerner and his wife-to-be, Karen; Paul Herrmannsfeldt, who went on to work at McGraw-Hill; George Nashak, who works with the homeless; and Bruce Basara, who pursued a doctorate in philosophy. They read Nietzsche, Sartre, Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Samuel Beckett's Murphy. Boerner admitted that the group often either failed to do the reading or relied on what they remembered from their undergraduate courses, but it was a way to keep thinking and talking "about serious stuff after graduation."
Obama left B.I. after little more than a year, telling his colleagues that he was going to become a community organizer. A big mistake, Celi told him in his exit interview. "Now he seems so in charge, but back then Barack seemed like a lot of kids who graduate from college and don't know what they want to do with their lives," Celi said. "I thought he had the writing talent so that he could move up in publishing. Turned out he had other fish to fry."
"Despite all the self-assurance, Barack was trying to think through his life," Lazere said. "He was the only black professional in the office then, and I think New York was making him think about his identity and what to do with himself."
* * *
In early 1985, Obama took a job at the New York Public Interest Research Group, a nonprofit organization, begun in the seventies, with help from Ralph Nader, that promotes consumer, environmental, and government reform. He spent the next four months working mainly out of a trailer office at 140th Street and Convent Avenue, helping to mobilize students at the City College of New York. He got students to write letters and speak up on a variety of issues: a Straphangers Campaign to rebuild public transportation in the city; an effort to fend off construction of a municipal trash incinerator in Brooklyn; a voter-registration drive; and a campaign to increase recycling. Obama's first taste of organizing didn't last long and did little to shake the foundations of the city, but he did impress his supervisor, Eileen Hershenov, with his ambitions for the future.
"Barack and I had some really engaged conversations about models of organizing," she said. They talked about their admiration for Bob Moses's voter-registration drives with SNCC, the radically different organizing means of Saul Alinksy in Chicago and the Students for a Democratic Society during the Vietnam War. "And we talked about models of charismatic leadership, the pros and cons of that, what it can achieve, and the dangers of not leaving behind a real organization," Hershenov said. "Remember, this was the Reagan era. People were not exactly taking to the streets for a social movement. We weren't red-diaper babies, either. But we were thinking about how you engage the world: what works coming out of the sixties, what structures and models worked and what didn't."
Obama was working at City College with students who tended to be older, lower-income, some of them with families of their own already. "They were pressed for time," Hershenov said. "So how do you get them to organize, especially when what you were pushing was not something tied to identity politics or some sort of 'cool' Marxist, Gramsci, theory-oriented thing? NYPIRG was a Naderite group, and seen as kind of wishy-washy and bourgeois. But Barack was getting students involved in bread-and-butter community issues and he was very good at it. And, while Barack himself was not a radical, he had read, he could speak that language if need be. He had the gift of being able to talk with everyone: students on the left, in the center, faculty, everyone."
Obama drove to Washington with some student leaders to get members of the New York congressional delegation to oppose cuts in public funding for student aid. After delivering stacks of petitions to members with offices in the Rayburn Building, he and a few friends walked around the city and ended up on Pennsylvania Avenue, peering through the iron gates at the White House. Obama had never seen the building before. Inside, the high command of the Reagan Administration--an Administration that Obama and his friends saw as the ideological enemy--was at work. Obama was struck, above all, by the proximity of the White House to the street. "It embodied the notion that our leaders were not so different from us," he wrote later. "They remained subject to laws and our collective consent."
At the end of the academic year, Obama knew that he had had enough of New York. Hershenov tried to get him to stay another year. It was rare to get such a thoughtful organizer. "I asked him if it would help if I got on my knees and begged--and so I did," she said. "But it didn't help. It was time for him to go."