Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  Alinsky-style warfare had not only destroyed a likely Southeast Side consensus to accept a quid-pro-quo deal with Waste Management, it had deprived those neighborhoods of the multimillion-dollar bounty WMI had been willing to pay. It was a debacle all around. A decade later, Jim Fitch would be sent to federal prison for eighteen months and fined $1 million for looting bank funds throughout the 1980s in order to contribute to Southeast Side politicians. Another decade further on, with UNO having abandoned South Chicago and transformed itself into something that bore no resemblance to the organization that Mary Gonzales, Greg Galluzzo, and Mary Ellen Montes had originally built, UNO would endorse a Waste Management effort to expand Southeast Side landfills.

  In Barack’s final days before he left for Harvard, the DCP members to whom he had become closest held a small barbecue for him at Loretta Augustine’s home. He assured them, “If you have problems, you can contact me and I’ll do what I can.” He also had a trio or more of presents for them, wooden figurines he said he had brought back from Kenya. Dan Lee remembered that Barack gave him “a statue of a warrior with a chipped beard.” Cathy Askew recalled admiring a giraffe, but “I think he gave me the zebra because of the mixed black and white stripes,” an acknowledgment of their disagreement about biracial identity.

  Mary Ellen Montes did not attend that party, but one evening Barack took her out to dinner at a downtown restaurant. “We had our own kind of little going-away party, Barack and I, and it was just Barack and I,” she remembered. Barack promised to write to her, and he would, but that night, or the next morning, was the last time Lena and Barack would see each other in person.

  With the lease on the South Harper apartment expiring several days before Barack planned to leave, he joined Sheila in her apartment on South Kimbark. She was preparing to leave Chicago soon too to begin her dissertation fieldwork in South Korea thanks to a Fulbright fellowship, and when she joined Barack for a farewell visit to Jerry Kellman’s home, they had a question for Jerry and his wife. “They come to dinner at our house,” Jerry remembered, “and they say ‘Could you please keep this cat?’” The Kellmans willingly agreed to give Max a new home. “Barack was not sad to give Max away,” Sheila explained, but for Max the transition was all to the good, and he would enjoy eight years of love with the Kellmans.

  Jerry knew that Barack and Sheila were not breaking up, just headed in different geographical directions. He thought “they had a great, healthy relationship,” although one that was now constrained by Barack’s career plans. “By the time Barack left to go to law school, he had made the decision that he would go into public life,” Jerry realized. Indeed, “my sense is that Barack’s dream was to come back and possibly become mayor of Chicago.”

  But Barack was still trapped between his belief in his own destiny and his deep emotional tie to Sheila. One day that final week “he said that he’d come to a decision and asked me to go to Harvard with him and get married, mostly, I think, out of a sense of desperation over our eventual parting and not in any real faith in our future,” Sheila recalled. Her memory was reminiscent of Genevieve’s from three summers earlier, when Barack had asked her to come to Chicago with him, and Genevieve had thought Barack was asking her only because he was certain her answer would be no.

  Now, once again, the answer was no, and Sheila was upset by Barack’s presumption that she should postpone, if not abandon, her dissertation research in order to accompany him to Harvard. A “very angry exchange” followed, with Sheila feeling that Barack believed that his career interests should trump hers.

  Barack started eastward within a day or two, knowing he could stay temporarily with his uncle Omar, who had remained in greater Boston ever since first arriving there thanks to his older brother a quarter century earlier and whose phone number and address Aunt Zeituni had given Barack while he was in Nairobi. But before heading back down Stony Island Avenue to the Skyway and then the Indiana Toll Road, Barack needed to have one other conversation.

  “I was a little troubled about the notion of going off to Harvard. I thought that maybe I was betraying my ideals and not living up to my values. I was feeling guilty,” he told a college audience just six years later. Barack called Donita at Trinity and made an appointment to see Jeremiah Wright to seek his counsel about those doubts. In a way, it was just like the conversation he had had nine Augusts earlier, in Honolulu, when eighteen-year-old Barry had gone to visit Frank Marshall Davis before leaving for Occidental and life on the mainland.

  Years later, before their relationship was torn apart, Wright would say that Barack was “like a son to me.” One of the most knowledgeable and savvy women in black Chicago would make the same point: “Jeremiah Wright was the black male father figure for Barack,” she emphasized. “Don’t underestimate the influence that Jeremiah had on Barack.” Wright would not specifically remember their conversation that August day, but Barack always would. In a way, it was a three years’ bookend to the admonishing monologue about being a do-gooder that Bob Elia have given him that night in the motel lobby on South Hermitage Road.

  That exchange would stay with Barack always, as would this one, but the substance of Wright’s message was identical to the warning that old Frank had voiced: “You’re not going to college to get educated. You’re going there to get trained,” trained “to manipulate words so they don’t mean anything anymore,” trained “to forget what you already know.” Wright’s message was just five words, ones that would ring in Barack’s ears for the entire two-day drive eastward: “Don’t let Harvard change you!”83

  Chapter Five

  EMERGENCE AND ACHIEVEMENT

  HARVARD LAW SCHOOL

  SEPTEMBER 1988–MAY 1991

  Omar Onyango Obama, the younger brother whom Barack Obama Sr. had helped come to the United States in 1963 to attend high school, was by August 1988 an unmarried forty-four-year-old store clerk living in central Cambridge. Omar’s apartment at 48 Bishop Allen Drive was his twenty-seven-year-old nephew’s first destination when Barack exited the Massachusetts Turnpike upon arriving from Chicago. Omar had never completed high school, but his mundane work life had not kept him from developing keen political interests. “I am a Pan-Africanist,” he wrote in a letter to Ebony magazine, one who shared “the dreams of brothers Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois and Malcolm X.” Barack had never met his uncle Omar, but Omar happily hosted him while Barack scoured the Boston Globe’s classified ads looking for a place of his own.

  John “Jay” Holmes owned the handsome, almost century-old Queen Anne–style Langmaid Terrace apartment building at 359–365 Broadway in Somerville’s Winter Hill neighborhood. Harvard Law School was a twelve-minute, two-and-half-mile drive away, but for $700 a month a one-bedroom basement-level “garden” apartment there offered more private and spacious quarters, including a nice exposed-brick living room, than other rentals closer in. By the end of August, Barack was happily settled at 365 Broadway #B1, and on September 1, Harvard Law School (HLS)’s two-day registration and orientation for first-year students—“1Ls”—got under way on its multibuilding campus on the east side of Massachusetts Avenue, a short distance north of Harvard Square.

  The entering class of 1991 numbered 548 students, selected from among seventy-one hundred applicants. Forty percent of the new class were women, and 22 percent were nonwhite, including fifty-seven African American students, of whom almost two-thirds were women. That was impressive diversity: the 2L and 3L classes had started with sixty and seventy-three African Americans, respectively. While the average age of the new 1Ls was twenty-three, with an overwhelming majority coming directly from their undergraduate studies, 5 percent of the class was over the age of thirty, including “many students who experienced the ‘real world’ before coming to law school,” according to the weekly Harvard Law Record. Word among the faculty was that “preferences for applicants who had taken time off, engaged in public works, or participated in other significant outside activities or experiences” had played a sign
ificant role in admissions decisions.

  The school had an illustrious reputation but a deeply troubled internal culture. For three years, the faculty had been embroiled in toxic ideological warfare that had seen four junior faculty members denied permanent appointments, the first such tenure denials in seventeen years. That quartet was seen as “crits,” or proponents of “critical legal studies” (CLS), a left-wing school of thought that viewed legal rules and doctrines as inherently conservative rather than politically neutral. While several prominent crits, including CLS’s most erudite proponent, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, a Brazilian legal philosopher, were senior members of the Harvard law faculty, other full professors, including Robert C. Clark and David Rosenberg, were perceived as conservative “law and economics” devotees who were generally hostile to the work of crits.

  James Vorenberg, dean of the law school since 1981, had announced his upcoming departure from that post in April 1988, just as tensions over a second issue of faculty composition—racial and gender diversity—were reaching a new peak as well. Seven years earlier, the roughly sixty-member Harvard law faculty had included just one tenured woman and a single tenured black male, who passed away in 1983. By 1988 there were five senior women, all white, and two tenured black men—Derrick Bell and Christopher Edley—with one more woman and three additional black men—Charles Ogletree, Randall Kennedy, and David Wilkins—all on the cusp of consideration for permanent appointments. In May 1988, the Black Law Students Association (BLSA) occupied Vorenberg’s office in a “study vigil” to protest the school’s failure to appoint additional minority faculty, with Professor Bell and legendary civil rights organizer Robert Moses addressing a student rally the next day.

  Even with their healthy representation in each entering class, Harvard’s black law students felt a constant need to prove they were just as qualified as their white classmates to succeed at HLS. “Everything here says you can’t do it,” graduating BLSA president Verna Williams remarked in a fifty-page 1988 BLSA publication. “BLSA fights that negative attitude, and that builds you up.” The 1988 class had found BLSA in “disarray” upon their 1985 arrival and had worked to show that black students could attain leadership positions in multiple student organizations. By their 3L year, they had succeeded, with 1987–88 marking “the first time in HLS history that black law students, in significant numbers, had not only gotten involved in campus organizations outside of BLSA, but had done so with such success and capability that their peers . . . asked them to lead the organizations.”

  But law students of all races were deeply unhappy with the institution’s culture. In the late 1980s “attending Harvard Law School was a miserable experience for the majority of its students,” one highly supportive alumnus later acknowledged, and a 1988 forum soliciting student input regarding the selection of Vorenberg’s successor instead focused on “the alienation students have felt from the law faculty,” the Harvard Crimson reported. “I don’t always feel that professors are here who can teach,” one 3L woman told the paper. “Law school seems to exist primarily for the professors.” Another 3L wrote in a subsequent memoir, “I didn’t know any of my law school professors,” and described how “the one thing that actually drew the student body together was a widespread disenchantment with our teachers.” He also recounted that although 70 percent of his classmates had arrived at Harvard expressing an interest in practicing public interest law, only six out of 474 actually accepted legal-services jobs after graduation.

  Four years earlier a young sociologist, Robert Granfield, had begun questioning scores of Harvard law students to analyze the “complex ideological process that systematically channels students away from socially oriented work.” He concluded that “students come to believe that effective social progress occurs primarily through the use of elite positions and resources.” Graduates “feel that they have emerged with their altruism intact, while having actually been co-opted” into joining large corporate law firms as a result of their acculturation at what he called “a tremendously powerful co-optive institution.” The bottom line was that “employment in organizations designed principally to serve the corporate rich came to be seen as highly compatible with public service ideals.”

  BLSA’s long, mid-1988 report included a four-page essay entitled “Minority and Women Law Professors: A Comparison of Teaching Styles,” written by a graduating 3L who had accepted a job at the Chicago office of Sidley & Austin, one of the country’s most prominent corporate law firms. Michelle Robinson had taken Criminal Law with Charles Ogletree and Family Law with Martha Minow, a young professor who had been awarded tenure in 1986 and whose father was one of Sidley & Austin’s best-known partners. Robinson briefly interviewed both Ogletree and Minow, as well as David Wilkins, because she saw each of them as highly atypical faculty members: “each one of these professors spends an enormous amount of time with students—particularly minority and women students,” she wrote. Robinson clearly admired Minow, writing that “sitting in her Family Law class is like sitting in the studio audience during a taping of the Phil Donahue Show.” Not all compliments are actually flattering, but it was David Wilkins, in just his second year of teaching at Harvard, who supplied the real gist of Robinson’s essay. “The problem here is that only about ten percent of the professors care enough about students to spend time with them,” he bluntly told her. “Consequently, this ten percent gets a disproportionate share of students to counsel.” He pointed out further that they bore that heavy ancillary burden while also striving to write the law review articles necessary for promotion to tenured full professor.

  Like many of her fellow students, Robinson lamented the law faculty’s relative lack of “people who possess the enthusiasm, sensitivity and ingenuity necessary to bring excitement back into the classroom.” She also decried the school’s lack of interest in hiring a more diverse faculty and said it “merely reinforces racist and sexist stereotypes,” attitudes that also were manifest in “the rude statements and questions posed by students”—white students—“to Professors Wilkins and Ogletree.” But as Robinson’s acceptance of Sidley & Austin’s highly remunerative job offer underscored, another defining element of the law school’s culture was that the high cost of a Harvard education provided a powerful incentive for graduates to take the best-paying jobs available.

  Several hundred graduating students had completed a Robert Granfield questionnaire that probed that subject, and a heavy majority acknowledged that “the necessity of repaying educational loans” had been a decisive factor in their own job decisions. With most graduates leaving Harvard saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in debt, law students “are co-opted into futures of providing service for the corporate elite,” Granfield concluded. Verna Myers had arrived at the law school straight from her 1981–82 senior year as president of Columbia and Barnard’s Black Student Organization. “I went to Harvard expecting to change the world,” but in 1985, “I left Harvard thinking ‘How can I pay my loans?’”1

  The first day of Harvard’s fall 1988 registration for 1Ls featured a 1:00 P.M. financial aid session. Tuition for the year was $12,300, with total costs for a student living off-campus estimated at $22,450. That day or the next, the new students also received their course schedules for the fall semester. The entering class was divided into four numerically identified sections—I, II, III, and IV—of about 140 students apiece. Each section had five core first-year courses: Civil Procedure, Contracts, Torts, Criminal Law, and Property. Within each of those four sections, each student was also assigned to a thirteen-member “O Group”—O as in Orientation—which would then become their ungraded, fall semester one-afternoon-a-week Legal Methods class, taught by an upper-class student. Each O Group had a faculty mentor, and for Section III, to which Obama was assigned, one of the five substantive courses, Torts, would be divided into a trio of smaller, forty-five student classes. For Section III, Civil Procedure and Contracts would last the entire year, three hours a week. Torts and Criminal L
aw would meet five hours per week in the fall semester. In the spring, when 1Ls could choose a single elective from among half a dozen choices, Section III would have Property five hours per week, and the Legal Methods class would morph into a prolonged “moot court” exercise in which two-person teams briefed and argued faux court cases. One odd feature of Harvard’s first-year schedule was that final exams for the fall classes took place only in mid-January, well after the Christmas and New Year’s break.

  The first classmates the new students met were their fellow members of the O Group, who introduced themselves alphabetically. Richard Cloobeck was a twenty-two-year-old Dartmouth graduate from Los Angeles. African American Eric Collins, from North Carolina, had just graduated from Princeton. Twenty-three-year-old UCLA graduate Diana Derycz had just finished a master’s degree at Stanford. Then came a trio of visibly older men. Rob Fisher had grown up on a farm in Charles County in southern Maryland before graduating from Duke in 1976 and completing a Ph.D. in economics there six years later. From 1982 until a few months earlier he had taught economics at the College of the Holy Cross in western Massachusetts. Mark Kozlowski, a 1980 graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, had spent the past eight years studying political theory at Columbia University and was about to submit his Ph.D. dissertation on the constitutional thought of American framer and president James Madison. When Barack Obama introduced himself, “the way he spoke was very, very memorable,” Richard Cloobeck recounted. “He was talking about black folks and white folks” and “what really, really struck me is that I got the impression he was neither.” Mark Kozlowski remembered Barack mentioning both Hawaii and Indonesia when he spoke. “I was immediately very impressed with Barack” and “I was immediately taken with the voice.” The trio of Fisher, Kozlowski, and Obama made Cloobeck realize “there was a big distinction between the older people and the younger people,” and Diana Derycz remembered similarly, thinking “how brainy people were” in this new northeastern environment.