The Bridge_The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

Chapter Five
Ambition
In the early fall of 1988, Obama arrived in Cambridge sure that he would learn what he later called "a way of thinking." He was taking on thousands of dollars in debt for the privilege. Unlike many students who end up in law school without quite knowing why, apart from its value as another blue-chip credential, Obama approached Harvard purposefully, as a serious place that offered dimensions of knowledge that he could never acquire as an organizer on the South Side of Chicago. At Harvard, he would join the world of the super-meritocrats of his generation, shifting from outsider to insider. "I would learn about interest rates, corporate mergers, the legislative process, about the way businesses and banks were put together; how real-estate ventures succeeded or failed," he wrote. "I would learn power's currency in all its intricacy and detail, knowledge that would have compromised me before coming to Chicago but that I could now bring back to where it was needed, back to Roseland, back to Altgeld; bring it back like Promethean fire." Harvard also had a personal dimension: Barack, Sr., had left his wife and his two-year-old son to go there. If Obama had inherited anything from his father it was the notion that Harvard was the sine qua non, the place you went to go the farthest, achieve the most. At Harvard he would match his father, then surpass him; at Harvard he would acquire his serene self-confidence and a sense of his own destiny.
A modern would-be politician, particularly a Democrat like Barack Obama, arrives at Harvard Law School keenly aware that the law school--its students and faculty--provided much of the brainpower for the New Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society. Before Obama, Rutherford B. Hayes was the only President to graduate from the law school, but Harvard alumni have always been well represented in Congress and, especially, on the Supreme Court. On the current Supreme Court, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Stephen Breyer all graduated from the law school. (Ruth Bader Ginsburg attended for a year and made the Law Review, then moved with her husband to New York, and finished at Columbia.)
The law school, which is just a short walk north of Harvard Yard, is a jumble of architectural styles, ranging from Austin Hall, the Romanesque creation, in 1883, of H. H. Richardson, to the Harkness Commons, a fairly brutal concoction from the Bauhaus catalogue of Walter Gropius. The land was the bequest of the Royall family, Southern plantation owners who brought their slaves North, to an estate in Medford, Massachusetts. In 1781, Isaac Royall, Jr., left Harvard an endowment that served to establish the college's first chair of law. The proceeds from the sale of the Medford estate, in 1806, became the seed money of the law school as a whole. The school, which was established in 1817, was small at first and fairly insignificant, until, in 1870, Christopher Columbus Langdell came to Harvard and instigated a new curriculum, based on the study of individual legal cases and a style of Socratic inquisition.
By the time Obama arrived at Harvard, the law-school curriculum had grown much more flexible than in Langdell's day and the student body more diverse, but the school was still a fractious place, riven by political conflict and intramural resentments. As if to flaunt its own unhappiness, the law-school community commonly referred to itself as a bastion of Levantine infighting--alternately "Beirut on the Charles" and "the Beirut of legal education."
Obama said that Harvard Law School was the "perfect place to examine how the power structure works." Indeed, the "power structure"--a phrase common in organizing circles--and how it is, or is not, examined by the likes of Harvard Law School was the focus of a battle that had already raged for a decade when Obama enrolled. In 1977, a group of legal academics--radicals, as most would readily have identified themselves--met at a conference in Madison, Wisconsin, to discuss a barely formed school of thought that was soon to be called Critical Legal Studies. Influenced by post-structuralism, the Frankfurt School of critical theory, and the Legal Realism of the nineteen-twenties, the scholars interested in Critical Legal Studies sought to demystify the law and the language of law and legal studies, to challenge its self-regard as a disinterested system of precedent. Critical Legal Studies posited that law is politics by other means, that the practice and discourse of law--and legal education--is merely another lever of entrenched power, a way of enforcing the primacy and perquisites of the wealthy, the powerful, the male, and the white. According to the adherents of Critical Legal Studies, many of the conditions of the legal status quo--the high incarceration rates among people of color, the higher penalties for drugs used mainly among the poor--are inscribed in a legal system that only pretends to be consistent and non-ideological.
Many students at Harvard in the late seventies, the eighties, and the early nineties, who were not necessarily left-wing, were excited by this analysis. The leading Crits at Harvard were three vastly different scholars: Morton Horwitz, Duncan Kennedy, and Roberto Mangabeira Unger.
"Barack didn't study directly with Horwitz or Kennedy, but they were very much in the air, and he absorbed what was going on," Obama's classmate Kenneth Mack, who is now himself a professor of law at Harvard, said. "The Crit who was most important to his studies--not that he was an acolyte--was Roberto Unger."
Unger, a social theorist, born in Brazil, was one of those academics who combine a personal charisma and a mode of study that attract young students. The American legal system, Unger contends, pretends to neutrality and a reliance on precedent, but what it actually does is enforce the permanence and the property rights of elites; the law guards against radical challenges to the elites and engages only in narrow issues. Unger is less a legal scholar than a political philosopher, and the more conventional students at Harvard avoided his courses. "His course descriptions in the catalogue were impenetrable and you knew he was worse in class," a near-contemporary of Obama's said.
Obama took two of his courses. The first was Jurisprudence. As Unger taught the course, Jurisprudence was a radical critique of contemporary Western political thought and legal theory and Obama's most prolonged academic exposure to the rudiments of Critical Legal Studies. A classmate who took the course with Obama described Jurisprudence as a "multi-step argument" that inspected, and then undermined, the presumptions of American legal thought. In his third year, Obama enrolled in Reinventing Democracy, a course in which Unger combined a critique of Western democracies--or neo-liberalism, as he referred to it--and the potential forms democracy could, or should, take. Unger argued against the "mandarins" who presided over contemporary democratic society and tried, in often highly experimental terms, to urge a rethinking of Western institutions. He urged the adoption of a "universal social inheritance" going well beyond the terms of the New Deal.
"The Reinventing Democracy course was relatively small and very intense," Unger said. In class, Unger contrasted the "bold but shapeless" course of F.D.R.'s initiatives in the early days of the New Deal, his "institutional experimentalism," with the more "restrictive focus" of his later years in office. He also expounded on what he saw as the Democratic Party's failure in the second half of the twentieth century to follow up on the efforts of the early New Deal. The reforms of the Johnson Administration, for example, were deemed modest. The class debated the Republican ascendancy in post-war America--its concessions to moneyed interests and its cultural rhetoric, directed toward the white middle-class majority.
"Everyone recognized that this late-twentieth-century exercise in conservative statecraft would not have enjoyed such success had the Democratic Party, and the progressives in general, not abdicated so completely their responsibility to build and to defend a national alternative," Unger said. "Many worried, however, that it would be hard to undo this defeat and supply the alternative without the deus ex machina of a crisis of dimensions resembling that of the Depression of the nineteen-thirties."
Unger, who later served in the Brazilian government of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, disputed the idea, proposed by some classmates, that Obama was put off by the abstruse theoretical nature of the course. "Obama shared in the more philosophical part of the discussion as vigorously as he did in the more context-oriented part," he said by e-mail from Sao Paulo. "The impression you report, of impatience with speculative exploration, is false. It does justice neither to him nor to me to represent these conversations under the lens of the trope of philistine activist against starry-eyed theoretician. He was always interested in ideas, big and small."
Unger continued to communicate sporadically with Obama by "e-mail and BlackBerry correspondence" over the years, keeping in touch through the Presidential campaign, but he added, "At no time can I say I became his friend." He avoided inquiries from the press for "a simple reason":
I am a leftist, and, by conviction as well as by temperament, a revolutionary.... Any association of mine with Barack Obama in the course of the campaign could do only harm.
Unger said that, as a student and afterward, Obama shared with other gifted Americans "a very strong sense of the limits that American politics and political culture impose on what can be said and done, and ultimately on what can be felt and thought." That sense of caution crimps political debate and diminishes the capacity for political boldness: "Obama is probably smarter than Franklin Roosevelt was but lacks the full thrust of Roosevelt's providential self-confidence." Unger also offered an analysis of Obama's personality and "subjectivity":
Obama's manner in dealing with other people and acting in the world fully exemplifies the cheerful impersonal friendliness--the middle distance--that marks American sociability. (Now allow me to speak as a critic. Remember Madame de Stael's meetings that deprive us of solitude without affording us company? Or Schopenhauer's porcupines, who shift restlessly from getting cold at a distance to prickling one another at close quarters, until they settle into some acceptable compromise position?) The cheerful impersonal friendliness serves to mask recesses of loneliness and secretiveness in the American character, and no less with Obama than with anyone else. He is enigmatic--and seemed so as much then as now--in a characteristically American way.
Moreover, he excelled at the style of sociability that is most prized in the American professional and business class and serves as the supreme object of education in the top prep schools: how to cooperate with your peers by casting on them a spell of charismatic seduction, which you nevertheless disguise under a veneer of self-depreciation and informality. Obama did not master this style in prep school, but he became a virtuoso at it nevertheless, as the condition of preferment in American society that it is. As often happens, the outsider turned out to be better at it than the vast majority of the insiders.
Together with the meritocratic educational achievements, the mastery of the preferred social style turns Obama into what is, in a real sense, the first American elite President--that is the first who talks and acts as a member of the American elite--since John Kennedy....
Obama's mixed race, his apparent and assumed blackness, his non-elite class origins and lack of inherited money, his Third-World childhood experiences--all this creates the distance of the outsider, while the achieved elite character makes the distance seem less threatening.
By the time Obama appeared on campus, there had also appeared an increasing number of conservative and libertarian scholars centered on the Federalist Society, a many-branched group that had begun in 1982 at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Chicago. The main tenet of the Federalists was, in their terms, judicial restraint; critics argued that the Federalist vision of restraint was a form of conservative activism. The founders included such conservative jurists as Robert Bork. (On the current Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito are Federalists.) Some Federalists believe in the Law-and-Economics approach, a theoretical marriage of Milton Friedman's free-market economics and judicial minimalism, and they look to the pioneering work not only of Smith and Pareto but of the economist Ronald Coase, and such jurists as Frank Easterbrook and Richard Posner. At Harvard Law School, where an A.C.L.U. liberal is considered a centrist, the advent of the Federalists--a vocal minority--heightened the political tension on campus.
"Posner wasn't at Harvard, of course, but Barack was extremely interested in what he was saying and writing, too," Mack said. "Some students on the left just wouldn't read about the 'law and economics' school on general principle. That wasn't Barack."
The combination of C.L.S. radicals, A.C.L.U. liberals, and Federalist conservatives made for constant fights at the law school, particularly over tenure decisions. In the fall of 1987, one of the younger Critical Legal Studies adherents, Clare Dalton, a specialist in family law and the wife of the economist Robert Reich, was denied tenure, despite overwhelming support from the outside review committee. When Derrick Bell, the first black professor to gain a place on the Harvard Law School faculty, staged a sit-in supporting Dalton, Robert Clark, a leading professor at the law school, cracked, "This is a university, not a lunch counter in the Deep South." He eventually apologized for the remark, but the tone of the conflict was set.
"By the time Barack got to campus, in 1988, all the talk and the debates were shifting to race," said Elena Kagan, who became dean of the law school and then, in 2009, was named Obama's Solicitor General. In part as a result of affirmative action, ten to twelve per cent of the student body at the law school was African-American, and the racial atmosphere, as at so many other institutions, was marked by a general undertone of resentment and disquiet. At meals, blacks sat mainly with blacks, whites with whites. Some of Obama's classmates told me that, as students in their early and mid-twenties, they were beginning to imagine their professional lives in the "white world"--in law firms, corporations, public service--and the process of finding a sense of confidence and identity and balance was not easy at Harvard Law.
"You had the sense that there were a lot of white students thinking to themselves about us, Do you, the black students, really belong here?" Earl Martin Phalen, a friend of Obama's, said. "So many of us carried a chip around, angrily insisting, 'We're as smart as you. There are a lot more people that got in as legacies than from affirmative action.'"
The law-school class, with more than five hundred students, is divided into four sections; Obama took all his first-year classes in Section Three. His professors included a pro-life feminist and eventual Bush Administration ambassador to the Holy See, Mary Ann Glendon, for property; a human-rights specialist, Henry Steiner, for torts; Richard Parker, a constitutional scholar, for criminal law; a civil-rights specialist, David Shapiro, for civil procedure; and a visiting scholar from Northwestern, Ian Macneil, for contracts. "We felt as if we had the hardest, worst, most inflexible section," one of Obama's section mates, David Dante Troutt, complained. "We felt like a control group in the presence of folks receiving the revolutionary new drug."
To Mack, Obama seemed far more mature and centered than his classmates; he seemed "wise in the ways of the world," not merely because he was older by a few years but also because of his serene manner, his intellectual engagement, and his evident desire to enter public service rather than serve a corporate firm. Mack, and other first-year friends, like Cassandra Butts, knew little about Obama's complicated background at first. From his appearance, they could hardly guess at his complicated background. Obama looked African-American and identified himself as such.
"We were friends fairly immediately and then over the next two years, we saw each other all the time," Mack said. "He wasn't interested in a lot of the things young people are interested in. He was much more serious from the beginning. He didn't go to many big parties. We'd go over to his house for drinks and dinner. That was more his idea of a good, social night than going to the sort of big party that twenty-somethings go to. I went to a lot of parties and I don't think I ever saw Barack at one of them. But he could talk about sports, about politics, public policy, foreign relations. He wanted to talk about everything. And he was very much interested in Martin Luther King and the civil-rights movement. He was versed in King's ideas and rhetoric. He had really thought a lot about it on a level most students had not. Even then there was that quote of King's that he always loved and recited: 'The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.' That appealed to Barack in the sense that things were going to take a long time to accomplish and that you need to have faith, long-term faith."
Obama lived much as he had in New York and Chicago. He rented a seven-hundred-dollar-a-month basement apartment in Somerville, a working-class town near Cambridge, and he outfitted it with secondhand furniture. He played basketball with friends at the gym, ate his meals at a sandwich shop in Harvard Square, and, like most of his classmates, spent nearly all of his time studying. The novelist Scott Turow, who became a friend and an early political supporter in Chicago, came to the law school in 1975; the first-year grind he describes in his memoir One L--nerve-racked, sleep-deprived, tobacco-driven--rang true when Obama read it. Obama, who carved out a regular space at the law library and put in long study days, told Turow that they had shared much the same experience of Harvard. Beyond the "boot camp" details of the book, Turow writes of the way the school encourages a steely ambition in its students, the "almost inescapable temptation to scramble, despite obstacles and ugliness and bruises, for what sometimes looks to all of us to be the very top of the tallest heap."
Almost from the start, Obama attracted attention at Harvard for the confidence of his bearing and his way of absorbing and synthesizing the arguments of others in a way that made even the most strident opponent feel understood. Once, at a debate over affirmative action with the staff of the Harvard Law Review, Obama spoke as if he were threading together the various arguments in the room, weighing their relative strengths, never judging or dismissing a point of view. "If anybody had walked by, they would have assumed he was a professor," Thomas J. Perrelli, a friend of Obama's who went on to work in his Justice Department, said. "He was leading the discussion, but he wasn't trying to impose his own perspective on it. He was much more mediating."
Obama's earnest, consensus-seeking style became a source of joking among his friends. A group would go together to the movies and tease Obama by imitating his solicitude: "Do you want salt on your popcorn? Do you even want popcorn?"
In a political atmosphere where bitter arguments were commonplace, Obama's open-mindedness seemed strange even to his friends. "In law school, we had a seminar together and Charles Fried, who is very conservative, was one of our speakers," Cassandra Butts, who first met Obama at the financial-aid office, recalled. The issue of the Second Amendment came up, and Fried was expressing the view of a Second Amendment absolutist. "One of our classmates was in favor of gun control--he'd come from an urban environment where guns were a big issue," Butts continued. "And, while Barack agreed with our classmate, he was much more willing to hear Fried out. He was very moved by the fact that Fried grew up in the Soviet bloc"--in Czechoslovakia--"where they didn't have those freedoms. After the class, our classmate was still challenging Fried and Barack was just not as passionate and I didn't understand that."
Obama also impressed his teachers with his capacity to be heard without showing off. Ian Macneil, the visiting contracts professor from Northwestern, said that even in his large class Obama stood out. "I was always a little too impatient in class, so if students went off the track I would interrupt before I should. When I did that with Barack, he said, 'Let me finish.' He wasn't rude, just firm."
Although Obama was popular, he was not voracious in his social networking. Obama always needed time to himself. "Barack never absorbed energy from being with a crowd of random people," David Goldberg, a classmate who is now a civil-rights lawyer in New York, said. "Barack needs some kind of context. He doesn't have the ability to walk into any situation and be attracted to people. He needs a little momentum, some kind of challenge."
As Obama's friends learned more about his background, they began to draw conclusions about his distinctive bearing and his way of dealing with other people, intellectually and personally. "Barack is the interpreter," Cassandra Butts said. "To be a good interpreter means you need fluency in two languages, as well as cultural fluency on both sides. When you go to a foreign country and you don't know the language, your interpreter is someone you rely on, because he is your compass. Barack has been that for me from the time I met him. He has been the ultimate interpreter in his political life. As a biracial person, he has had to come to an understanding of the two worlds he's lived in: his identification as an African-American man and the white world of his mother and his grandparents. Living in those worlds, he functions as an interpreter to others. He has seen people in both worlds at their most intimate moments, when their humanity and imperfections shone through. His role is as an interpreter, in explaining one side to the other."
As much as anyone can, Obama had chosen his racial identity, pursued it. By the time he got to Harvard, the issue was long settled. Without hesitation, he became active in the Black Law Students Association. "He's operating outside the precincts of black America," Randall Kennedy, an African-American professor at the law school, said. "He is growing up in Hawaii, for godssakes. And then when he comes to the mainland and tries to find his way, he has to work at it. He does have to go find it. He is not socialized like other people. I can't help thinking that he might have thought it a burden at the time, but maybe some of the things he missed out on were a benefit to miss out on. For one thing, the learned responses, the learned mantras and slogans, the learned resentments of that time that one got in college--he talks in his book how useful it was to get along easily with white people. You remember that at the time for some black people getting along with white people was seen not as a virtue but as a vice."
Both Obama and Butts signed up for Kennedy's course, an elective called "Race, Racism and American Law." Kennedy had caused some controversy, writing critically in The New Republic and elsewhere about some aspects of affirmative action. At the first class, Obama and Butts watched as a predictable debate unfolded between black students who objected to Kennedy's critique and students on the right, almost all white, who embraced it. Obama feared a semester-long shout-fest. He dropped the course.
For many black students, the most welcoming faculty member was Charles Ogletree, a civil-rights lawyer and scholar who was born into a family of farmers in California's Central Valley. Ogletree, known to his friends and students as Tree, joined the Harvard faculty in 1985 and was counsel to Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas's Senate confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court. At Harvard, he led "the Saturday School," a freewheeling seminar at which he presented outside speakers, staged debates, coached first-year students in their coursework and the art of taking law exams, and, in general, led discussions on subjects ranging from the political controversy of the day to the past achievements and future goals of the civil-rights movement to special topics in legal history. Ogletree brought in a survivor of the Japanese internment camps during the Second World War; Jesse Jackson to talk about the political scene; and the boxing impresario Don King, who, in his youth in Ohio, had been involved as an unnamed numbers runner in Mapp v. Ohio, an important search-and-seizure case in the early sixties. The students at the Saturday School were generally African-American, but everyone was welcome. Sometimes, Ogletree had upperclassmen in the law school act out the arguments of a controversial case. "Barack came to a lot of those sessions," Ogletree recalled. "It gave everyone an extra opportunity to learn about the law, listen to faculty work out their ideas and also prepare for classes, get ready to take an exam. Barack was interested in the vitality of the debate about power and the law and the underrepresentation of certain groups.
"Black identity was not given to him--he sought it," Ogletree went on. "It was clear at the Harvard Law School that most of his closest buddies were African-American males, and he shared with them a whole range of experiences, from talking trash on the basketball court to talking about the issues of law and politics. He was well read. He had taken the time in college to read the books of the black-studies movement. He had certainly read Richard Wright and James Baldwin, but he also knew all about the generation of Thurgood Marshall and all those trained at historically black colleges. He came well-steeped in the history of the civil-rights movement and wanted to know even more."
* * *
The professor who became Obama's intellectual mentor at Harvard was a mainstream liberal--the constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe. A civil libertarian, Tribe is, by almost any standard, among the most brilliant scholars of constitutional law of his, or any other, generation, a dazzling mind engaged in issues of political significance.
The year before Obama began law school, Tribe, at the invitation of the Senate Judiciary Committee and its chairman, Joseph Biden, of Delaware, testified against Ronald Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. So fluid and commanding was Tribe in oral argument that Biden decided to make him his cornerstone witness. In three hours of testimony, Tribe attacked Bork's judicial writings, insisting that he was "out of the mainstream" on issues of privacy, reproductive rights, school selection, and many other issues. As a liberal, Tribe believes that the Constitution is a living document that requires constant interpretation in light of an expanding vision of human dignity; he argues that "original intent," the mantra of conservatives like Bork, is a cover for resisting evolutionary social change. Tribe was, in many ways, the intellectual backbone of the effort to spurn Bork. No one questioned his credentials; he had won nine of twelve cases that he argued before the Supreme Court. The Senate voted, 58-42, to reject Bork, and Reagan ended up nominating Anthony Kennedy instead. (Although Kennedy hardly proved a liberal, he has been far less conservative in his votes and written opinions than Bork would have been.)
Tribe's testimony and his many television appearances were so effective, however, that they made up a kind of kamikaze mission where his future was concerned. Tribe craved a seat on the Supreme Court and he hoped that a Democratic President would nominate him, but, after the Bork hearings, Republican elephants, blessed with long memories, vowed that they would never forgive him.
Tribe was born in Shanghai in 1941, to Jewish parents who had fled the tsarist pogroms. His father was held in a Japanese-run internment camp near Shanghai, and, when the war was over and he was released, he brought the family to San Francisco. Tribe was a versatile prodigy. He won a full scholarship to Harvard and wound up studying math and graduating summa cum laude having done all the coursework for a doctorate. He did not pursue a career in mathematics because he saw that he could not match his contemporary at Harvard Saul Kripke, an eccentric logician and philosopher, who had been writing about modal logic since he was seventeen.
Looking for a field with "real-life ramifications," Tribe went to Harvard Law School and, after graduation, began teaching. Tenured at Harvard at twenty-nine, he published, in 1978, a seventeen-hundred-page treatise entitled American Constitutional Law, the most authoritative volume on modern constitutional doctrine. As a litigator at the Supreme Court, Tribe has presented cases on free speech, homosexual rights, and women's rights. In 1986, he took on Bowers v. Hardwick, a case in which he argued for the rights of gay men and women to practice consensual sex without fear of state prosecution. The Court ruled against Tribe's client, Michael Hardwick, and for the State of Georgia, five to four. Not long after Lewis Powell retired from the Court, he publicly admitted that he regretted voting with the majority, and, in 2003, in a case called Lawrence v. Texas, Bowers was overturned. Anthony Kennedy, who, in great measure, owed his job to Tribe, wrote the opinion for the majority.
Tribe also distinguished himself among academics by becoming a wealthy man litigating corporate cases. For helping to win a ten-billion-dollar judgment for Pennzoil against Texaco, his fee was reportedly three million dollars. Not a few of his colleagues were shocked by a 1994 article in The American Lawyer called "Midas Touch in the Ivory Tower: The Croesus of Cambridge" that reported that Tribe was earning between one and three million dollars a year.
By the time the Class of 1991 arrived on campus, Tribe had taught thousands of students. One afternoon--on March 29, 1989-he jotted a note to himself on his desk calendar. It read, "Barack Obama, One L.!" He wanted to remind himself of an encounter that day with an impressive student who had come by his office to talk. "Barack wanted to get to know me because he was interested in my work," Tribe recalled. "I soon saw that he was very purposive about being at the law school. It wasn't a school of maintaining options as it is for many students. Barack had a clear sense that he wanted to know about the legal infrastructure of things: corporate law, constitutional law as the framework. I was impressed by his maturity and his sense of purpose, his fluency."
Tribe signed up Obama as his primary research assistant, and they worked on three projects together: Tribe's book Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes; a highly theoretical article called "The Curvature of Constitutional Space," in which Tribe called on metaphors derived from quantum physics and Einsteinian relativity to describe matters of societal obligations and the law; and an article called "On Reading the Constitution." Obama caught up quickly in subjects, like physics, in which he had no background. For their work on "The Curvature of Constitutional Space," Tribe and Obama spent hours discussing the case of DeShaney v. Winnebago County, a children's-rights issue that reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1989. The case centered on a boy named Joshua DeShaney. When his parents divorced in 1980 in Wyoming, his father was given custody, and the boy then moved with him to Wisconsin. Soon, social-services workers received reports of the father hurting the child. After an abuse report and hospitalization in January, 1983, the Winnebago County Department of Social Services got a court order to keep the boy away from his father and in the hospital, but a "child-protection team," consisting of a psychologist, a detective, several social-services caseworkers, a pediatrician, and a county lawyer, recommended that the juvenile court return the boy to his father. The beatings--and the complaints--resumed. In 1984, the father beat his son so severely that Joshua was in a coma and had to undergo brain surgery. As a result of repeated traumatic beatings, the boy became severely retarded and paralyzed. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court absolved Winnebago County of any constitutional responsibility for the child.
Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote for the majority, "A state's failure to protect an individual against private violence" was not a denial of the victim's rights. "While the state may have been aware of the dangers that Joshua faced in the free world, it played no part in their creation, nor did it do anything to render him any more vulnerable to them." This decision provoked an unusually passionate response from Harry Blackmun in dissent: "Poor Joshua! Victim of repeated attacks by an irresponsible, bullying, cowardly and intemperate father, and abandoned by [county officials] who placed him in a dangerous predicament.... It is a sad commentary upon American life and constitutional principles."
In his discussions with Obama, Tribe called the majority's decision a form of "Newtonian blindness." In other words, he said, "the law recognized only forces at a distance and not the arrangement of the way the space around the kid was warped. Barack and I talked about this metaphor from physics, the way state power curves and bends social action.
"In going over the literature on Einstein," Tribe continued, Obama pointed out that "if one deemed the state responsible, then there would be no social space for private choice. The theme of arranging the world so that people become more accountable to themselves as agents. I remember him talking about how the case related to black fathers needing to be responsible. The theme that so often emerged was the theme of mutual responsibility, that legal institutions had to encourage people to take care of each other, and any institutional arrangement that left people completely to their own devices was fundamentally flawed."
The article was Tribe's, not Obama's, but they spent many hours together in Tribe's office or taking walks along the Charles River talking about such cases. Obama didn't talk with Tribe about running for office, but he made it plain that he had come to the law school to find better ways of "helping people whose lives had been ripped apart," as Tribe put it. When an unsigned legal note by Obama on abortion surfaced years later during the Presidential campaign, Tribe said: "It was consonant with the ways he thought with me about the puzzles of abortion, the incommensurability of the arguments: bodily integrity on one hand and the value of unfinished life on the other. He kept both values in mind in a way that would be meaningful to both sides."
What Tribe and Obama mainly discussed was the law itself. They rarely waded into ideological abstraction. "To make a beeline to Larry Tribe is to say that you want to be a lawyer," Martha Minow, a liberal who taught a course in law and society, said. "It was the kids who self-consciously identify themselves as radical or quite left-wing who head for elsewhere. That wasn't Barack."
Minow, who became dean of the law school in 2009, was another of Obama's mentors at Harvard, and they formed a friendship that had great implications for Obama's professional and personal life. Minow grew up in Chicago; the daughter of Newton Minow, who was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission in the Kennedy Administration and a partner at the corporate law firm of Sidley Austin. Obama met his future wife, Michelle Robinson, at the firm as a summer intern. The more Minow learned from Obama and about his past, the more she came to understand his capacity to discuss the most explosive political or racial issue with an uncanny balance of commitment and dispassion. "Obama is black, but without the torment," she says. "He clearly identifies himself as African-American, he clearly identifies with African-American history and the civil-rights movement, but his life came largely--not completely, but largely--without the terrible oppression.
"Barack is a universalist who doesn't deny his particularity," Minow continued. "He is very specifically African African-American, but he is also someone with a white mother and white grandparents. He could and would identify with different people. In America, you are 'raced' whether you have chosen it or not. He struggled with that as a college student and as a law student. But he came to accept and embrace what and who he is, and, at the same time, he has this very special sense of universalism that would become such an important part of his political message later on."
At Harvard and, later, in a seminar led by the political scientist Robert Putnam, Minow noticed Obama's ability to shift his tone and language just enough to put anyone--the white Harvard professor, a black friend from the inner city, a bank president, clergymen, conservatives, liberals, radicals--at ease. Later, when he entered politics, reporters who followed him noticed the same thing. "He can turn on and off the signals that work best," she said. "That's not a bad thing at all--just the opposite. I think that's the promise of a multicultural society.
"It's partly because he is biracial, partly because of his father and being abandoned, and Indonesia," Minow went on. "All of this leads to a search for self-definition and gives him a non-knee-jerk way of thinking about race."
Over the years, Obama stayed in touch with Tribe and Minow. They discussed electronic eavesdropping, Guantanamo, the politicization of the Justice Department under the Bush Administration, future Supreme Court justices. And they have occasionally disagreed--about same-sex marriages, for instance, which Tribe supported and Obama opposed.
"Overall, Obama has, and had then, a problem-solving orientation," Tribe said. "He seems not to be powerfully driven by an a-priori framework, so what emerges is quite pragmatic and even tentative. It's hard to describe what his presuppositions are, other than that the country stands for ideals of fairness, decency, mutual concern, and the frame of reference that is established by our founding and the critical turning points of the Civil War and the New Deal, as a frame to identify who we are. When Earl Warren was Chief Justice, he would ask, after an oral argument, 'But is it fair?' For Barack, the characteristic question is, 'Is that what we aspire to be as a country? Is that who we are?'"
In the speech he made in March, 2007, at Brown Chapel, in Selma, commemorating Bloody Sunday, Obama observed that, as a member of the Joshua generation, he stood "on the shoulders of giants." At Harvard, the giant was Charles Hamilton Houston. Very few students arrived at the law school knowing the name. And yet Houston was, in his way, as crucial to the civil-rights movement as the marchers in Selma. He was their precursor. At Harvard, he was Obama's precursor, too.
In May, 1915, The Crisis, the official publication of the N.A.A.C.P., published a one-sentence item: "Charles H. Houston, a colored senior of Amherst College, has been elected to the Phi Beta Kappa." This is the first public recognition of the man who became, in the nineteen-thirties and forties, the chief architect of the legal war against school segregation.
Houston's civil-rights movement, however, was not one of culture or protest. It was a movement of lawyers, who argued a stream of cases that sought equal rights of citizenship for people of color. Following the end of the Civil War and, between 1865 and 1870, the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, the hopes of Reconstruction faded and were overrun by nearly a century of lynchings, segregated public schools and facilities, and all the other elements of institutionalized racism in America. "Charles Houston became the critical figure who linked the passion of Frederick Douglass demanding black freedom and of William DuBois demanding black equality to the undelivered promises of the Constitution of the United States," Richard Kluger wrote in Simple Justice, his history of the fight for desegregation and Brown v. Board of Education.
Born in 1895, Charles Hamilton Houston was raised in Jim Crow Washington. His father was a well-to-do lawyer, a member of the capital's tight-knit black bourgeoisie. A member of Harvard Law School's class of 1922, Houston was the first black ever to win a spot on the Law Review.
After Harvard, Houston taught at Howard University. Founded in 1867, Howard was an outgrowth of the Freedman's Bureau; the original property was a beer hall. Many of the doctors, dentists, lawyers, nurses, engineers who emerged from that era and created a black middle class and a black intelligentsia attended Howard. The great power behind the school's expansion was its first black president, the economist and minister Mordecai Johnson. On the advice of Louis Brandeis, Johnson reorganized the law school and hired Charles Houston to assemble a faculty--and it was to be a faculty with a distinct political purpose. Houston's most important student was Thurgood Marshall, who became his protege at the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund.
Attacking the "separate but equal" principle of the Supreme Court's 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, Houston piled up numerous victories for racial justice. In the 1936 case of Murray v. Pearson, for example, Houston established that the University of Maryland could not exclude African-American students--as it had Thurgood Marshall. Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada required equal educational opportunities for young people of all races, a principle that was extended to the entire country by the Supreme Court. Houston was committed to purpose; as he put it, "a lawyer's either a social engineer or he's a parasite on society."
The battles that Houston and proteges like Marshall, Spottswood Robinson, A. Leon Higginbotham, and William Hastie waged at the time had little support in the white world. As Houston's biographer Genna Rae McNeil points out, Houston came along before the rise of King and the civil-rights movement, at a time when other courses of action were limited to "advocacy of black separatism, accommodation to the system, collaboration with the predominantly white working-class" left, or "affiliation with groups promoting justice for all through the overthrow of the government."
Houston died in 1950, four years before Marshall argued Brown v. Board of Education, the case that ended the legal structure of school segregation. Houston was just fifty-four. After the great victory in Brown, Marshall paid tribute to Houston, saying, "We were just carrying his bags, that's all."
For African-American students at Harvard, Houston was an important symbol. "Houston was a big figure in the background of our minds," Ken Mack said. "And when Barack and I arrived it happened to be a moment when Houston was being recovered in historical memory. He was an especially big figure for all the black students on the Law Review. That book"--Genna Rae McNeil's 1983 biography of Houston, Groundwork--"had come out. You'd walk through the building and there are all these pictures of the editors since 1900, all these white faces, dozens each year, until you hit 1922--and then you see that one black face. Houston. It was a powerful thing to think that you were in some way the heir of one of the most powerful civil-rights figures in American history." (In 1991, Obama filmed, for TBS, a "Black History Minute" on Houston's life.)
For decades, the Law Review retained all the characteristics of an elite American institution, including racial prejudice. In its first eighty-five years, there were precisely three black members: Houston; William Henry Hastie, who later worked with Houston at the N.A.A.C.P. and became a federal appeals-court judge; and William Coleman, who was appointed Secretary of Transportation in the Ford Administration. (The first female president of the Review was Susan Estrich, who was elected in 1976 and went on, in 1988, to run Michael Dukakis's ill-fated Presidential campaign.)
The Harvard Law Review is a precipitate of the school's best and most ambitious students: only about three or four dozen are selected out of a class of more than five hundred students. Felix Frankfurter once said that life at the Review creates the "atmosphere and habits of objectivity and disinterestedness, respect for professional excellence, and a zest for being very good at this business which is the law." There are other publications on campus--the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review (where Obama had some experience), the Harvard Journal on Legislation, the Harvard International Law Journal, the conservative Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy--but the Law Review has always been the focus of greatest attention, whether from corporate law firms, investment banks, or judges looking for clerks. The sense of election and entitlement could not be greater among the editors. It is an old tradition. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis began automatically selecting, each year, two high-ranking Law Review editors as their clerks. The Review's alumni include Felix Frankfurter ('06); Antonin Scalia ('60); Richard Posner ('62); Nuremberg trial counsel Telford Taylor ('32); former Secretary of State Dean Acheson ('18); former Attorney General Elliot Richardson ('47); Senators Thomas Eagleton ('53) and Robert Taft ('13); former Yale president Kingman Brewster ('48); Washington Post publisher Philip Graham ('39); the poet Archibald MacLeish ('19); and Alger Hiss ('29).
Obama nearly botched his bid to get on the Law Review--and join this inner sanctum of the establishment--when, on the way to the post office to mail his application form, his balky Toyota Tercel broke down. After a flurry of frantic phone calls, he got a ride from his classmate Rob Fisher. Obama's grades were good--he graduated magna cum laude--and he got in.
The Law Review is situated in Gannett House, a white three-story Greek-Revival house. It is named for Caleb Gannett, a minister who lived nearby in the eighteenth century. Law Review editors routinely spend forty, fifty, sixty hours a week there, with first-year editors proofreading and copyediting articles and checking footnotes and citations, all according to the strictures of A Uniform System of Citations. (The style guide, better known as The Bluebook, is sold by the Review and is the publication's biggest money-maker.)
The masthead positions on the Law Review are filled by second-year students, who compete for them. The top position is president; there are also Supreme Court co-chairs, a treasurer, a managing editor, a few executive editors, two notes editors, and three supervising editors. Any one of those positions is an enormous boost in the race for jobs at the best law firms, judges' chambers, and corporate offices.
Obama's first year on the Law Review was typical: excruciating detail work and meetings, relieved only by the necessity of going to classes and keeping up with coursework. What spare time he had he spent playing basketball or hanging around the editors' lounge at Gannett House. The lounge, Mack recalled, is "the place where impressions and assessments quickly took root among a group of very ambitious people."
The political debates at Gannett House were even more furious than elsewhere on campus. Radicals argued with liberals, liberals argued with the conservative Federalists; as one editor put it, "Everyone was screaming at everyone else." Brad Berenson, a classmate of Obama's and a member of the Federalist Society who went on to work for the Bush Administration, said, "I've worked in Washington for twenty years--in the White House, in the Supreme Court--and the most bitter political atmosphere I've ever experienced was at the Harvard Law Review."
Both as undergraduates and as law students, the African-Americans on the Law Review were negotiating an elite white world, but here the arguments and status anxieties were particularly vivid. "Being on the Law Review was the most race-conscious experience of my life, and race-based attitudes and prejudices crossed political and ideological lines among the ambitious law students on its staff," Mack said. "Many of the white editors were, consciously or unconsciously, distrustful of the intellectual capacities of African-American editors or authors. Simply being taken seriously as an intellectual was often an uphill battle."
"Honestly, we were just very polarized on the Law Review," Christine Spurell, an African-American who was a friend and classmate of Obama's, said. "It's like you got to campus, and the black students were all sitting together. It was the same thing with the Law Review. The black students were all sitting together. Barack was the one who was truly able to move between different groups and have credibility with all of them.... I don't know why at the time he was able to communicate so well with them, even spend social time with them, which was not something I would ever have done ... I don't think he was agenda-driven. I think he genuinely thought, Some of these guys are nice, all of them are smart, some of them are funny, all of them have something to say."
In the summer of 1989, Obama's professor and friend Martha Minow recommended to her father, Newton Minow, that he hire Obama as a summer associate. She called him "the best student I've ever had." As it turned out, the firm's recruiter had already seen to it. At Sidley, in Chicago, Obama met an associate and Harvard Law graduate named Michelle Robinson. She was slated to be his "adviser" for his three-month stint there. Robinson, like everyone at the firm, had heard about Obama--this "hotshot," as she called him--and it was her job to take him to lunch and watch out for him. She had heard that Obama was biracial and had grown up in Hawaii. For Robinson, who was born and reared on the South Side, Hawaii was not where anyone was from; it was where rich people went on vacation. Obama's background and his intellectual reputation were all daunting.
"He sounded too good to be true," she said to David Mendell of the Chicago Tribune. "I had dated a lot of brothers who had this kind of reputation coming in, so I figured he was one of these smooth brothers who could talk straight and impress people. So we had lunch, and he had this bad sport jacket and a cigarette dangling from his mouth and I thought, 'Oh, here you go. Here's this good-looking, smooth-talking guy. I've been down this road before.'"
To her surprise, Robinson found Obama funny, self-deprecating, "intriguing"--"We clicked right away"--but she was intent on keeping their relationship professional. She fended off Obama's requests for a date. At the beginning of the summer, Michelle had made a "proclamation" to her mother: "I'm not worrying about dating ... I'm going to focus on me." Besides, she and Obama were two of the very few African-Americans at the firm; the idea of dating Obama struck Michelle as "tacky." Instead, she introduced him to a friend. This did not put Obama off. "Man, she is hot!" Obama told a friend. "So I am going to work my magic on her."
Finally, Robinson agreed to go out with Obama--"but we won't call it a date." Robinson was living with her parents in South Shore, not far from Obama's apartment, in Hyde Park. They spent a long summer day together. They went first to the Art Institute and then had lunch in the museum's courtyard cafe. A jazz band played as they ate. Then they walked up Michigan Avenue and went to Spike Lee's latest film, "Do the Right Thing." Michelle thought to herself that Obama was pretty good: he knew something about art and now he was showing off his "street cred." She was both amused and smitten. Not long after, they wound up back in Hyde Park, at a Baskin-Robbins, the ice-cream chain where Obama had worked as a teenager in Honolulu. They also had their first kiss and, as Obama recalled years later, "It tasted like chocolate."
"Probably by the end of that date," Michelle said, "I was sold."
Robinson had dated, but she had never had a serious boyfriend before; none had ever made the grade. Barack, for his part, had dated quite a lot but bothered to bring a girl home to meet his family in Hawaii only once before. After a few dates, Michelle invited Barack to dinner at her parents' house, a modest brick bungalow on Euclid Avenue, in South Shore. He won over her parents, who had been concerned about Obama's being biracial. Like their daughter, they had never met anyone like him. The Robinsons had not had to fashion an African-American identity for themselves in the prolonged and complicated way that Obama had. The richness and history of black American life was evident in their family history: Michelle's great-great grandfather Jim Robinson worked as a slave harvesting rice on Friendfield Plantation, near Georgetown, South Carolina. But the genealogical complexity that is so common among African-Americans was a fact of life among the Robinsons, too. The genealogist Megan Smolenyak eventually discovered that Michelle Obama's great-great-great-great-grandparents included a slave named Melvinia who gave birth in 1859 to a biracial son, the result of a union with a white man. Although most sexual unions between blacks and whites then were coercive, nothing is known of the father of Melvinia's first-born son except for his race. Michelle Obama's family background also includes a Native American strand.
The Robinson family had come North with the Great Migration. The students at Michelle's high school, a magnet school for gifted kids, were mainly African-American; the school was named after civil-rights leader Whitney Young. One of Michelle's closest friends there was Santita Jackson, Jesse Jackson's daughter. Michelle's father, Fraser Robinson III, worked for the city for thirty years, doing maintenance on boilers and pumps at a water-filtration plant. He was eventually promoted to foreman. He was also volunteer precinct captain for the Democratic Party. He suffered from multiple sclerosis and walked with two canes; when he could no longer walk he used a motorized wheelchair. (Fraser Robinson died of complications from kidney surgery, in 1991.) Michelle's mother, Marian, stayed at home with the children until they were in high school and then worked as a secretary for the Spiegel's catalogue store.
The Robinsons were hard-working, close, and ambitious for their children. "When you grow up as a black kid in a white world, so many times people are telling you--sometimes not maliciously, sometimes maliciously--you're not good enough," Craig Robinson, Michelle's brother, said. "To have a family, which we did, who constantly reminded you how smart you were, how good you were, how pleasant it was to be around you, how successful you could be, it's hard to combat. Our parents gave us a little head start by making us feel confident."
In 1981, Michelle followed Craig, a basketball star, to Princeton. In a class of fourteen hundred, she was one of ninety-four African-Americans. Among African-Americans at Ivy League schools, the feeling was that Princeton was an especially unwelcoming place. Even as late as the nineteen-eighties there were pockets of the university--some of the eating clubs, in particular--that supported its lingering reputation as "the northernmost college of the old Confederacy." There were only five tenured African-Americans on the faculty and just a handful of courses in African-American studies. One of Michelle's freshman-year roommates at Pyne Hall, a girl named Catherine Donnelly, from New Orleans, moved out midway through the year. Donnelly's mother was so upset at the notion of her daughter rooming with a black girl that she telephoned influential alumni and hectored the university administration to get Catherine another room. "It was my secret shame," Donnelly recalled.
In her sophomore year, Robinson roomed with three other women of color and joined various black organizations, including the Organization of Black Unity. Much of her social life revolved around the Third World Center. Robinson majored in sociology, with a concentration in African-American studies, and wrote a senior thesis entitled "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community." "My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'Blackness' than ever before," she wrote. "I have found that at Princeton no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong. Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with Whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be Black first and a student second." Michelle sent out hundreds of questionnaires for her thesis to black alumni asking about their lives, their attitudes, and whether they favored an "integrationist and/or assimilationist" ideology or a "separationist and/or pluralist" view. The thesis conveys a deep disappointment that, in her view, so many black alumni assimilate so quickly and completely into mainstream white society. The thesis shows a young woman struggling not only with Princeton but also with the larger questions faced by someone who grew up on the South Side, acquired an Ivy-League credential, and then has to decide how to live her life.
Marvin Bressler, a sociology professor at Princeton who knew Craig and Michelle Robinson well as undergraduates, said that the two grew up in an African-American version of a "Norman Rockwell family": a tight-knit family that emphasized loyalty, hard work, church, respect for their elders. Their world was the South Side and almost entirely African-American. To come to Princeton, Bressler said, was for kids like Craig and Michelle profoundly disorienting: "You show up as a freshman. There already exist, with respect to race, competing organizations that want you. And they are asking, 'Is your fundamental identity as a woman? Or is it as an African-American?' Hovering over this is an intense discomfort that you think of initially as prejudice. There is no discrimination in the old sense, but you come from Chicago and now there are these Gothic towers and all those smooth Groton types looking so confident and secure."
Michelle continued to worry that the longer she stayed inside white-dominated institutions the more tenuous her connection to black life might become. Robin Givhan, an African-American woman from Detroit, was a year behind Michelle at Princeton and now covers her for the Washington Post. "When you're in college, everything revolves around you and your drama--my paranoia, neuroses, insecurities," Givhan recalled. She described the radically different ways that her black friends at Princeton worked out their various dramas. There was Crystal, from New Jersey, "who left for a trip to Africa with her hair in a bun and came back with cornrows and deeply conscious of her race--that became the defining aspect of her personality." There was Beverly, from Michigan, who was friendly with Brooke Shields, avoided the Third World Center, and "took on this 'I'm-not-really-that-black' temper." The way Michelle Robinson approached Princeton, Givhan said, reflected a genuine, and understandable, urge to hold on to a sense of community, and an anxiety about being assimilated too completely into "the white mainstream." White kids, taken up with their own dramas, had a way of looking straight past students like Michelle.
Years later, Givhan, reading white columnists' praise of Michelle Obama's self-possession, found the descriptions ignorant and patronizing: "There was a part of me that thought, How low were your expectations? She went to Princeton and Harvard. She was an executive. Why the sense of awe? There was a part of me that found it irritating. I could line up a dozen of my friends who are Michelles and then some. What she did was just normal. In many ways, she is exceptional and it was disheartening that she had to ratchet her exceptionalism down to normal."
By the time Michelle Robinson got to Harvard Law School, she was far less anxious about the complications of negotiating such an institution. Charles Ogletree, who was her faculty mentor at Harvard, recalled, "The question for her was whether I retain my identity given to me by my African-American parents, or whether the education from an elite university has transformed me into something different than what they made me. By the time she got to Harvard, she had answered the question. She could be both brilliant and black."
Michelle Robinson took a different path at the law school than Obama did. She was far closer to Ogletree than to any white professor. She was more active in the black student association, joined one of the African-American-oriented publications, and worked for the Legal Aid organization, helping indigent clients in landlord and tenant cases. She thought hard about working for Legal Aid after law school, but Ogletree assured her that she could "do good and do well" if she practiced at a firm like Sidley Austin, where she had been a summer intern, as long as she obtained a promise that she could spend part of her time on pro-bono cases.
Despite their differences of background and emphasis, it was clear that Michelle and Barack were not going to spend their careers at a place like Sidley Austin. When they were first getting to know each other, Obama told Craig Robinson, "I think I'd like to teach at some point in time, and maybe even run for public office." Robinson asked if that meant running for alderman. "He said no, at some point he'd like to run for the U.S. Senate," Robinson said. "And then he said, 'Possibly even run for President at some point.' And I was, like, 'O.K., but don't say that to my aunt Gracie.'" Obama, for his part, doesn't remember the remark, but added, "If the conversation did come up, and I said I was interested in electoral politics ... my aspirations would have been higher than being alderman."
The ultimate prize at the Law Review is its presidency. A comical proportion of each year's law-review cadre (as many as half) ordinarily run for the presidency. At first, Obama was reluctant to run. The competition would take place in February of his second year. He was gaining a reputation among his African-American peers and among many faculty members. Christopher Edley, Jr., whose father had been a protege of Thurgood Marshall's, had been elected to the Review in 1975, the first black editor in many years. As a professor, he saw great promise in Obama.
"There are a couple of things about legal education that can be enormously valuable," Edley said. "One, of course, is studying how institutions of governance and property operate: how courts, legislatures, regulatory agencies operate. Second, it instills habits of mind that I think are enormously powerful even when you are not dealing with something that one would narrowly consider to be 'law.' For law students it's very important to understand the other side of the argument. If you are a litigator, a critical skill is trying to anticipate and dissect the best argument your opponent is going to make, so you drill down and understand his argument as well as your own. That gives you a certain humility, because it forces you to face the weaknesses in your own position and to appreciate that any difficult problem has, by definition, good arguments on both sides. That's where Barack was so strong. Now, why did he seem to hate debates in the Presidential race, and wasn't particularly good at them at first? Because the difference between someone who is a great lawyer and merely a great debater is that the lawyer appreciates nuance and only subsequently focuses on how to communicate. His talent, that habit of mind, was also evident in his openness in engaging people with whom he disagrees. It's antithetical for a good lawyer to have a self-righteous conviction that he has a monopoly on truth. You are trained to have an appreciation for complexity. It's not relativistic, but principled and humble at the same time. You come to the problem with your own compass, your opinions and principles, but you have to be open. That was Barack."
After talking with close friends like Cassandra Butts, Obama decided to run for president of the Law Review. "Most of my peers at the Law Review were a couple of years younger than I was," Obama said. "I thought I could apply some common sense and management skills to the job. I was already investing a lot of time in the Law Review, and my attitude was Why not try to run the Law Review?"
Maturity, not ideology, seemed to be Obama's appeal. "One thing that is hard to remember, but was true, was that there was at times some eye-rolling at the Law Review about Barack because it was almost as if he was part of the faculty, bigger than a law student," David Goldberg, who was a liberal rival for the presidency, said. "A lot of professors were usually indifferent to students. But they were almost sycophantic to him. It was clearly both because he was brilliant and because he was African-American. He was also incredibly mature and thoughtful and still had his heart in the right place."
In Obama's year, nineteen of the thirty-five second-year members of the Law Review editorial board decided to run for president. The outgoing students joined the second-year students who were not in the hunt in a large meeting room in Pound Hall, where they would caucus and vote. The presidential prospects were left to sit and wait in an adjacent kitchen; they were supposed to cook meals for the selectors during deliberations. The selectors studied thick "pool files" on the candidates, containing their writing samples and work for the Law Review. The process--detailed, argumentative, self-important--went on all day and late into the night.
"At various points," Goldberg recalled, "someone would poke his head into the kitchen and say X, Y, and Z come back into the room. These were the people who were now out of the running and they joined the selectors. And in the kitchen there would be a sigh of relief."
The only conservative who stayed in the race past the early elimination rounds was Amy Kett, a skilled but relative long-shot candidate. Her hardy but outnumbered faction of conservatives knew that she had no chance, but, together, they figured they might have some influence on the outcome. Brad Berenson and the other conservatives were looking for someone who dealt with them open-mindedly "and didn't personalize political differences."
"At places like Harvard and Yale, young people often demonize folks who have differing political views," Berenson said, "and there were plenty of those at Harvard in 1990, when things were so political. Barack wasn't one of them. He earned the affection and trust of almost everyone. The only criticism from conservatives was that he was somewhat two-faced and made everyone think he was all things to all people, that he was concealing his true feelings. But I never subscribed to that criticism."
When members of the Law Review recall the election process today almost all think of it in terms of reality television, a prolonged and brainy episode of "Survivor." A representative for the electors came into the kitchen and made the announcement. Amy Kett was out--off the island. (Not that her career suffered; Kett went on to clerk at the Supreme Court for Sandra Day O'Connor.)
"At that point, the choice was among the liberals, and I recall that en masse the conservative vote swung over to Barack," Berenson said. "There was a general sense that he didn't think we were evil people, only misguided people, and he would credit us for good faith and intelligence."
By twelve-thirty, the only candidates left were David Goldberg, a white liberal who was headed toward a career in civil-liberties law, and Barack Obama.
Finally, someone came to get the two of them and give them the news. Obama was president. "Before I could say a word, another black student"--Ken Mack--"just came up and grabbed me and hugged me real hard," Obama recalled. "It was then that I knew it was more than just about me. It was about us. And I am walking through a lot of doors that had already been opened by others."
The news of Obama's historic election--he was the first African-American president of the Law Review--was picked up by news media all over the world. Interviewed for the New York Times by Fox Butterfield, Obama reacted with unerring diplomacy, acknowledging both the expectations that his fellow African-American students had for him and his broader responsibilities. "The fact that I've been elected shows a lot of progress," he said. "It's encouraging. But it's important that stories like mine aren't used to say that everything is O.K. for blacks. You have to remember, that for every one of me, there are hundreds or thousands of black students with at least equal talent who don't get a chance.... I personally am interested in pushing a strong minority perspective. I'm fairly opinionated about this. But, as president of the Law Review, I have a limited role as only first among equals."
Obama's friend Earl Martin Phalen was one of the many African-American students on campus who were overcome by the election. They had formed bonds in class listening to the outrages that had been committed against their forebears--crimes of slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, myriad forms of discrimination and humiliation--and so, for this generation, this victory, Obama was their Charles Hamilton Houston. "It was an affirmation of intellectual prowess and belonging for people of color," Phalen, who is now an education activist, said. "Barack was also very proud of the fact and aware of the historical significance, but it wasn't like reparations for him." Phalen is black; he was adopted by and reared in a large white family outside of Boston. "You appreciate race," Phalen said, "and you understand its significance, but at the end of the day we were similarly brought up and we knew the main thing was that it's about content of character. Barack knew that."
Obama gave many interviews after his election and only slipped once when he airily informed a reporter for the Associated Press, "The suburbs bore me." Nearly all the articles contained what the writer Ryan Lizza has called the "essential elements of Obama-mania": "the fascination with his early life, the adulatory quotes from friends who thought that he would be President one day, and Obama's frank, though sometimes ostentatious, capacity for self-reflection." Obama told the Boston Globe something that he has repeated throughout his political career: "To some extent, I'm a symbolic stand-in for a lot of the changes that have been made."
The next step for the new president of the Law Review was to assemble an editorial team, a process made complicated by ego, politics, and race. Obama could have loaded the masthead with liberals and African-Americans. Instead, he followed the traditional system of selection and the result was that three of the four executive editors were conservatives: Amy Kett, Adam Charnes, who later worked in the Bush Justice Department, and Jim Chen, who became an academic after clerking for Clarence Thomas. Brad Berenson, Kenneth Mack, Julius Genachowski, and Tom Perrelli also got masthead jobs--a mixed ideological cast.
It was almost inevitable, considering the atmosphere of resentments and the long decades of racial denial at the Law Review, that Obama would fail to satisfy everyone, including other African-Americans. His friend Christine Spurell had never really understood Obama's penchant for listening so intently to the conservatives and synthesizing their views; in those days, she was much more impatient than her friend. But she had worked upwards of sixty hours a week during her first year on the Review and worked well together with Obama editing an article about Martin Luther King. "My heart was bursting with pride," she said, when Obama became president. She also counted on his awarding her a masthead position. When he did not, she felt betrayed.
"A few weeks later he called me into his office and he said, 'We have to fix this problem between us,'" she recalled. "I was so angry with him. He said something to the effect of, 'I don't know what our problem is. Maybe it's that we're both half-white? I don't know.' I think he was saying that maybe that makes us so familiar to each other that we irritate each other or are suspicious of each other. I remember I was crying during that conversation, mostly out of anger and frustration, which shows how significantly I felt let down. I remember saying something to the effect of 'I don't care what our problem is, we're not likely to resolve it, nor am I interested in resolving it.'"
After their talk, the two came to a "detente," Spurell said, and nearly two decades later, she said that she came to see that Obama sidelined her because she was too confrontational, too abrasive--qualities that he could not bear. "I had no patience for the idiots on the other side and Barack did, which annoyed me, even angered me sometimes, but it made him the better person, certainly a better one to be the president of the Law Review," she said.
The highlight of Obama's year-long stint as president may well have occurred at the annual banquet, at the Harvard Club, in Boston, which celebrates the journal's changing of the guard. A formal occasion, the banquet brings together the staff of the Review, along with alumni and their spouses. Nearly all the banquet guests were white; the waiters, dressed in starched white uniforms, were largely African-American. Obama spoke about how a skinny black kid with "a funny name" being elected to the presidency of the Law Review was important not for him, mainly, but as a breakthrough for everyone. As he expressed his gratitude to the people who had "paved the way," some of Obama's classmates noticed the black waiters standing at the back of the room listening intently. At the end of the speech, as everyone stood and applauded, one of the older waiters hurried up the aisle to shake Obama's hand.
* * *
The Harvard Law Review publishes monthly during the academic year--more than two thousand pages in all--and Obama spent forty to sixty hours a week at Gannett House reading, meeting with editors, and editing articles. He did not, however, take the journal too seriously. He was well aware of the absurdity of law students' selecting and editing the work of experienced jurists and scholars, and he had no illusions of the Law Review's effect in the larger world of academia and jurisprudence. The Review has a circulation of four thousand and is the most frequently cited journal of its kind, but, very often, when arguments got out of hand, Obama would say, "Remember, folks, nobody reads it." David Ellen, who succeeded Obama as president of the Law Review, said, "We spent the most time together talking when we were making the transition from him to me, and his whole message was about keeping the Review in perspective. He knew that this was not a very big deal out in the real world, and he knew because he had already been out there."
"Barack could motivate people to do things that were against their self-interest, and he got people without much in common to stay responsible to the greater project--and he had a very light touch," David Goldberg said. "Politically, I thought he was, clearly, on the issues, a liberal. I never thought of him as a transformative thinker but as a thoughtful person."
Obama was editor of Volume 104 of the Law Review. There is no discernible ideological accent in his issues except for a desire to mix things up. In that period, the Review published articles that ranged over a spectrum--one article was a foursquare assault on affirmative-action policy--but were, in the main, liberal. There were articles calling for the elderly, women, and African-Americans to have a greater capacity to file discrimination suits. And yet, if Obama was a liberal, he was not always predictable. He worked closely with Robin West, a professor at the University of Maryland at the time and an expert on feminist legal theory, on an article that was critical of conservative judges and even of liberals who make a priority of rights before liberation. Quoting Vaclav Havel, West wrote that a citizen's sense of responsibility was no less important than his or her rights. She argued that goals of tolerance and diversity might be "weakened, not strengthened, by taking rights so 'super seriously' that we come to stop examining our responsibility." Obama, West said, clearly agreed with her, "and so it wasn't at all surprising to hear him, so many years later, making similar arguments about race, racism, and responsibility and not allowing that discourse to fall into the hands of social conservatives and libertarians."
Obama's issues featured an unsigned note on feminist theory and the state's legal position toward pregnant women and drug abuse. There were multiple responses to a controversial article by Randall Kennedy in an earlier volume, "Racial Critiques of Legal Academia," that accused white academia of too readily accepting mediocre work by black academics. Obama also oversaw the publication of an article by Charles Fried, a conservative professor at Harvard Law School and the Solicitor General during the Reagan Administration, attacking affirmative action as "racial balkanization."
In its own small universe, the Harvard Law Review is often judged on its efficiency--Does it come out on time? Is it well edited and proofread? Every year until his death in 1994, Erwin Griswold, the former dean of the Law School and former U.S. Solicitor General, sent frequent letters to the president--"Grizzer-grams," they were called--lauding a good article or, far more often, pointing out flaws of prose, reasoning, editing, or timeliness. Obama's "Grizzer-grams" were mainly complimentary.
In January, 1960, ten years after Charles Houston's death and six years after Brown, Derrick Bell, a young lawyer in the Justice Department, left the government and joined Thurgood Marshall full-time at the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund. This was not a difficult decision for Bell. The Justice Department had angered him by demanding that he give up his membership in the N.A.A.C.P. lest it compromise his legal objectivity.
"That was kind of nervy, don't you think!" Bell recalled.
He spent the next eight years in the civil-rights movement and then entered the academy, where he has remained a self-described "ardent protester" on behalf of African-Americans.
Derrick Bell was, in Barack Obama's time, the most vivid symbol of racial politics at Harvard Law School. His maternal grandfather was a cook on the Pennsylvania Railroad. His father's side of the family was from rural Alabama, the Black Belt, and joined the migration North, to Pittsburgh. His father had less than a junior-high-school education and worked as a steelworker and as a janitor in a Pittsburgh department store. In 1962, Bell helped James Meredith win admittance to the University of Mississippi. In the town of Harmony, Mississippi, in 1964, he worked alongside a tough-minded local organizer named Biona MacDonald. Many of the local whites resisted every move toward change, staging intimidating shows of force, firing shots through black people's windows. Local banks foreclosed on the mortgages of people sympathetic to the movement. Bell was astonished by the fearlessness of Biona MacDonald, and how she continued to lead protests against segregation, despite threats and beatings, and so he asked her how she managed to endure. "I can't speak for everyone," she told Bell, "but as for me, I am an old woman. I lives to harass white folks."
Bell tried to make the transition from civil-rights lawyer to legal academic, but he was turned down for jobs at Michigan, George Washington, and a half dozen other schools. He was good enough, it seemed, to lecture at Harvard or to get offers for low-paying visiting-professor jobs, but not for the tenure track. It was only after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, that law schools on the level of Harvard felt compelled to break the color barrier. Administrators finally realized that the legal victories of Brown v. Board of Education and the 1964 Civil Rights Act barring discrimination in employment had not done much to integrate university faculties. The riots that followed the assassination focused their attention.
Derek Bok, the dean of Harvard Law School, flew to Los Angeles to offer Bell a job, and assured him, "You'll be the first, but not the last." That was fine, Bell replied, "because I don't want to be the token."
After two years on the faculty, Bell threatened to resign. For the next two decades he repeatedly threatened to resign in order to get Harvard to hire more African-American men and, eventually, women. "My life," Bell said, "is a living manifestation of taking no shit."
At Harvard, Bell also disturbed the peace with his iconoclastic writing. In "Serving Two Masters," a 1976 essay published in the Yale Law Journal, and in the 1987 book And We Are Not Saved, he reassessed his role in the movement to integrate American institutions and found himself, and the civil-rights movement, to have been sadly deluded. He was losing faith in the American capacity to make progress. Bell wrote, in "Serving Two Masters," "The time has come for civil rights lawyers to end their single-minded commitment to racial balance." He insisted on a new sense of "racial realism"--a realism that some would interpret as despair. "Black people will never gain full equality in this country," he wrote in the book Faces at the Bottom of the Well. "Even those herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than temporary 'peaks of progress,' short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance. This is a hard-to-accept fact that all history verifies. We must acknowledge it, not as a sign of submission, but as an act of ultimate defiance." Bell argued that in some ways Brown v. Board of Education, despite its good intentions, led to a failed integration. As whites left the cities for the suburbs, the tax base contracted and blacks were left behind in miserable, underfunded schools. The situation might have been better, Bell argued, had the "equal" part of the "separate but equal" ideal of the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson been enforced.
In Obama's second year in law school, after Harvard declined to give a tenure-track offer to a visiting professor from the University of Pennsylvania, a black woman named Regina Austin, Bell threatened to take an indefinite, unpaid leave from the university. Bell championed Austin's writing on racial and gender barriers, but Austin had no federal clerkships or law-review appointments in her background; her credentials, in the conventional sense, were deemed unexceptional. "Still, I thought Regina was perfect," Bell said. "She was saying what needed to be said. And she was a lot more militant than I ever was. But they"--the appointments committee at the law school--"were always saying no. They always wanted to see the next one and the next one." By 1990, there were five black men on the faculty, but no black women. According to Martha Minow, Erwin Griswold, who was dean from 1946 to 1967, used to invite what few women students there were on the law-school campus to tea and say, "Now, why are you here, taking up the place of a man?"
On April 9, 1990, without consulting Regina Austin, Bell wrote to the dean, Robert Clark. The letter, Bell told Clark, was an "inadequate but quite firm notice of my intention to request a leave without pay" that would, he said, continue indefinitely "until a woman of color is offered and accepts a tenured position on this faculty." "This was all going on while my wife, Jewel, was very sick with cancer," Bell said. "When I told her what I planned to do, she said, 'Derrick, why does it always have to be you?'" Much of Bell's letter to Clark was apologetic--apologetic for failing to realize sooner the importance of having black women on the faculty.
Bell released the letter to his colleagues and staged a hunger strike. Some students discussed another plan of action to support diversity: they declared, not without an element of grandeur, that they would take their final exams but, rather than turning them in, place the papers in escrow until the university hired more minorities.
To his classmates, how Obama would react to Derrick Bell's protest was a matter of some interest. Obama supported greater diversity on campus, but he had never been a leading activist in the Bell controversy or on any other political issue. Obama's popularity and stature as a Harvard "first" was such that Cassandra Butts asked him to speak at a campus rally.
"Barack's being president of the Law Review--being the first African-American president--that was a very big deal, so I was glad he came out," Derrick Bell said. "That was not exactly a bastion of affirmative action over there at the Law Review. Around that time, there had been a huge battle just to add a writing competition as an additional criterion to get on the Review."
Dressed in khakis and a light-blue dress shirt, Obama stepped to the microphone outside the Harkness Commons, surrounded by students, Bell, and placards reading "Diversity Now" and "Reflect Reality." Obama spoke in support of Bell's struggle to win a tenured position for a woman of color. He called Bell the "Rosa Parks of legal education": "I remember him sauntering up to the front," Obama said, "and not giving us a lecture but engaging us in a conversation." He commended Bell for "speaking the truth," and then, his speech concluded, he hugged him in front of a cheering crowd. Charles Ogletree recalled that Obama's speech stood out for its eloquence and emotional force, "even though he wasn't the most vocal and central advocate in that debate."
Everyone remembers Obama in much the same way: that he held generally progressive views on the political and racial controversies on campus, but never took the lead. He always used language of reconciliation rather than of insistence.
"Barack was someone who was politically engaged, but it was not a central part of his institutional personality," Christopher Edley, Jr., said. "As a community organizer, he had been doing the real thing in Chicago before coming to Harvard. The institutional politics at Harvard Law School can be quite consuming if you don't have the perspective provided by familiarity with politics of a more consequential sort. My sense was that, while he was sympathetic to those local struggles, he was really about something beyond all of that. And, frankly, that was what was so appealing. I felt something of a connection to him because of my own experience in national politics. For him it was difficult to get too excited about Zip Code 02138."
Bell soon left Harvard and never returned. (He teaches at New York University.)
In discussions at the Law Review, Obama held fast to a consistent theme: that students at Harvard and other privileged institutions needed to work for the public good. "One of the luxuries of going to Harvard Law School is it means you can take risks in your life," Obama said in one of his interviews at the time. "You can try to do things to improve society and still land on your feet. That's what a Harvard education should buy--enough confidence and security to pursue your dreams and give something back."
One debate that Obama engaged in with some passion at the Review was over affirmative action. He supported it, and when his friend Cassandra Butts decided to review Shelby Steele's influential book The Content of Our Character--a conservative analysis of race relations that saw affirmative action as a policy that reinforced a victim psychology among blacks and flattered the virtue of whites--Obama spoke with her about her critique. The "simplistic rhetoric" that, in 1989, Butts criticized in her article for the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review is very similar to Steele's rhetoric nearly two decades later in his book A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win. Steele asserted that Obama was caught in a racial dynamic in which black candidates are either "challengers," who accuse white Americans of ongoing racism and demand outdated policies like affirmative action, or "bargainers," who agree to minimize the history of American racism in exchange for white political support.
At Harvard, in the midst of a debate over the low number of women on the Law Review and whether to employ some form of affirmative action to increase it, Jim Chen, one of the most vocal conservatives at the journal, wrote a tough-minded letter to the Harvard Law Record. He decried affirmative action for the tarnish that it leaves on its beneficiaries.
Obama wrote to the Record, defending affirmative action and closing with a more introspective argument:
I'd also like to add one personal note, in response to the letter from Mr. Jim Chen which was published in the October 26 issue of the Record, and which articulated broad objections to the Review's general affirmative action policy. I respect Mr. Chen's personal concern over the possible stigmatizing effects of affirmative action, and do not question the depth or sincerity of his feelings. I must say, however, that as someone who has undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action programs during my academic career, and as someone who may have benefited from the Law Review's affirmative action policy when I was selected to join the Review last year, I have not personally felt stigmatized either within the broader law school community or as a staff member of the Review. Indeed, my election last year as President of the Review would seem to indicate that at least among Review staff, and hopefully for the majority of professors at Harvard, affirmative action in no way tarnishes the accomplishments of those who are members of historically underrepresented groups.
I would therefore agree with the suggestion that in the future, our concern in this area is most appropriately directed at any employer who would even insinuate that someone with Mr. Chen's extraordinary record of academic success might be somehow unqualified for work in a corporate firm, or that such success might be somehow undeserved. Such attributes speak less to the merits or problems of affirmative action policies, and more to the tragically deep-rooted ignorance and bias that exists in the legal community and our society at large.
Barack Obama
President, Harvard Law Review
Note the deft and confident wave of the lance: the way Obama points out that affirmative action might also help an Asian-American, one like Jim Chen. (Though he forgets that affirmative action is hardly uncontroversial among Asian-Americans.) As a mature politician, Obama came to reject the need for affirmative action for African-Americans who, like his own children, were already cosseted by American advantage. Some of his Harvard friends say that Obama believed that affirmative action had likely helped him get into Columbia and Harvard. "I have no way of knowing whether I was a beneficiary of affirmative action either in my admission to Harvard or my initial election to the Review," Obama told the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. "If I was, then I certainly am not ashamed of the fact, for I would argue that affirmative action is important precisely because those who benefit typically rise to the challenge when given an opportunity. Persons outside Harvard may have perceived my election to the presidency of the Review as a consequence of affirmative action, since they did not know me personally. At least one white friend of mine mentioned that a federal appellate court judge asked him during his clerkship whether I had been elected on the merits. And this issue did come up among those who were making the hiring decisions at the [University of Chicago] law school--something that might not have even been raised with respect to a white former president of the Review."
Nearly all of Obama's colleagues on the Review came to appreciate his talent for mediation. They even came to know enough about his past to make fun of him. In the annual parody issue of the Law Review, "the Revue," they "quoted" Obama on his complicated background: "I was born in Oslo, Norway, the son of a Volvo factory worker and part-time ice fisherman. My mother was a backup singer for ABBA. They were good folks." In Chicago, "I discovered I was black, and I have remained so ever since." After being elected, he united people into "a happy, cohesive folk" while "empowering all the folks out there in America who didn't know about me by giving a series of articulate and startlingly mature interviews to all the folks in the media."
In Obama's last year of law school, he was starting to think hard about his future--and his teachers were thinking about it, too. Christopher Edley, Jr., was one of many faculty members who sensed that future was bound to be large and ambitious: "He was noticeable to a certain degree in class, but not one of the more vocal students. It was outside of class when he would come by my office to chat that I really got a sense of him. I claim to have been the first to use the phrase 'preternatural calmness' to describe him. That's what was so striking about him. Even as we would talk about career paths, he seemed so centered that, in combination with his evident intelligence, I just wanted to buy stock in him. I knew that the capital gains would be enormous."
David Wilkins, a young African-American professor at the law school, said, "After Barack was elected president of the Law Review, I talked with him--to congratulate him and also to talk with him about what he was going to do with it going forward. And so I said, 'Well, of course you're going to clerk for someone on the Supreme Court, and you'll probably even have your choice of which justice to clerk for. And then maybe you'll become a law professor'--as if that were the highest thing to attain to. And then he gave me that calm look that we've grown so used to seeing, kind of both bemused and respectful. There was a long pause. And then he said, 'Well, I am sure that would be a great honor and all, but that's not really what I had in mind for myself.' That's the guy: totally grounded. And he knew, more or less, exactly what he wanted to do."
Abner Mikva, a former congressman from Chicago who sat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, offered Obama a clerkship, but the young man turned him down. Mikva was shocked. His was the second-most-important court in the land, a sure stepping-stone to a Supreme Court clerkship. Was Obama angling for the Supreme Court right away? Was he trying to figure out exactly which justice to clerk for? That was a little cheeky. No, that wasn't it, either.
At Harvard, Obama secretly found the study of law, he wrote, "disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power." The language was not far from the left-leaning instruction on campus. But Obama also saw the law as a form of memory, "a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with itself." In the language of the founding documents of the nation, he could hear, he wrote, the language of Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany, the struggles of the civil-rights movement, Japanese-Americans in internment camps, Russian Jews in sweatshops, immigrants at the Rio Grande, the tenants of Altgeld Gardens--all of them "clamoring for recognition" and asking the same question that Obama directed at the ghost of his father: "What is our community, and how might that community be reconciled with our freedom? How far do our obligations reach? How do we transform mere power into justice?" The idealist had now formulated his questions, gathered his tools.
Michael McConnell, a conservative constitutional scholar who was later appointed to the federal-appeals bench by George W. Bush, was so impressed with the meticulous and fair-minded editing that Obama displayed on a piece he wrote for the Law Review, "The Origins and Historical Understanding of Free Exercise of Religion," that he told the chairman of the appointments committee of the University of Chicago Law School, Douglas Baird, and told him to keep Obama in mind for a teaching job. McConnell was impressed that Obama had edited the piece so that it was a better version of itself rather than so transformed it that the author no longer recognized it. Baird felt that McConnell was a superb judge of talent, and so he called Obama and asked if he was interested.
"Well, no, actually," Obama said. "What I want to do is write this book."