Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  Soon after the news stories, law school administrators convened a small meeting with Macneil and several students. Ali Rubin remembered that Barack had “distanced himself from” the complaints, and Mark Kozlowski knew that Barack felt “there was nothing we could do about it.” Rob remembered that “Barack and I both felt that the revolution was a little over the top,” and by April, Obama was playing “a mediating role” and was “calming people down.”

  Lauren Ezrol, one of Section III’s official representatives on the Law School Council, recalled being summoned to the meeting. “It was Barack, me, and then everyone else in the room was an administrative type, like a dean of students, and Macneil was there.” They were “supposed to try to work out the issues,” but rather than some dean taking the lead, instead Barack “was the one who with great confidence talked to Macneil” and “worked out whatever resolution” was agreed to. Ezrol thought Obama was “unbelievably impressive,” and his interaction with Macneil was entirely amicable. “I was just blown away,” Ezrol remembered, “to see someone operate with such ease and confidence and maturity. It was remarkable.” Years later, just prior to his death, at age eighty, in 2010, Macneil recalled that Obama was “a calm person in a class that was not altogether characterized by people being calm,” adding that it was “obvious that his class respected him.”14

  Barack and Rob continued to visit David Rosenberg even after their fall Torts class ended. Rosenberg believed they should expose themselves to “the best minds on the faculty,” and as the time for choosing 2L fall courses drew near, Rosenberg recommended well-known constitutional law teacher Laurence H. Tribe. For most 1Ls, it would take a good deal of gumption to approach one of Harvard’s most prominent professors, Rosenberg knew, but on Friday, March 31, Obama did so, and Tribe was immediately taken by this heretofore unknown student. As Tribe remembered it, their first conversation lasted for more than an hour, and before it ended, Tribe asked Obama to become one of his many research assistants, which Tribe had never asked of a 1L who had yet to take one of his courses. Tribe wrote his name—“Barack Obama 1L!”—on that day’s desk calendar page, and soon Barack drew Rob Fisher into this relationship with Tribe as well.

  When word spread among their close aquaintances that both Obama and Fisher were now working for Tribe, Ken Mack can remember thinking how astonishing that was. Tribe was so impressed by Barack that he mentioned him to his colleague Martha Minow, a 1979 Yale Law School graduate who had clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall before joining the Harvard faculty in 1981. Minow was always interested in students from Chicago, because she had grown up in the city’s northern suburbs and her father, Newton Minow, who had served as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission during the Kennedy administration, was now a Sidley & Austin senior partner. Martha told her father about Tribe’s impression of Obama, and he picked up the phone and called John Levi to ask if Sidley’s Harvard recruiters knew about this 1L who had wowed Laurence Tribe. Levi had a ready answer: “We’ve already hired him. . . . He’s coming here for the summer.”

  Before Barack began studying in earnest for late May’s final exams, he faced a trio of choices. Wednesday night, April 12, was the informational meeting for 1Ls interested in the weeklong writing competition that would take place in early June to select thirty-eight members of the Class of 1991 for the prestigious Harvard Law Review. The next evening was the initial editors’ meeting for the upcoming year’s Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review, which Barack had worked on as one of thirty 1Ls during the preceding months. One 2L editor, Sung-Hee Suh, remembered Barack “talking very calmly” during a sometimes heated discussion of hate speech, “articulating both sides” of the debate as students of color and free speech absolutists disagreed vehemently on the issue. She recalled thinking he was very “calm, cool, and collected.” Outgoing managing editor Wendy Pollack noted that Barack did not participate in the journal’s election for the upcoming year’s board, a clear sign that he intended to try for the premier Law Review instead. Barack had asked David Rosenberg whether he should do so, and Rosenberg said, “Yes, of course.”

  April 13 was also preregistration for fall classes, but the 1Ls would not learn until May 8 whether or not they had gotten into popular, oversubscribed courses, such as Laurence Tribe’s section of Constitutional Law. Cassandra Butts remembered that “Barack did not get in,” but some “special pleading” with Tribe quickly succeeded.

  Monday, May 15, was the last day of spring classes, and Lauren Ezrol and Michelle Jacobs both recall Obama telling their Contracts class that anyone who would like a copy of the outline he had prepared from both semesters’ worth of notes was welcome to it. Jacobs remembered that the document was easily 100, if not 150, typed pages and “had little jokes in it. It was great.” Barack had many takers, because almost everyone agreed with Greg Sater’s assessment that Barack “was the smartest in the class.” Lauren Ezrol agreed: “he just seemed smart and impressive and so sure of himself and well-spoken and older.”

  Barack had his Legal History take-home exam on Monday, May 22, followed by Section III’s trio of tests: Property on Wednesday afternoon, Contracts on Friday morning, and Civ Pro on Tuesday, May 30. Property and Civ Pro would cover just the spring, but Macneil’s Contracts exam would determine everyone’s entire grade for the full year, six credits, and “people were really worried,” Brad Wiegmann remembered. David Attisani asserted that Section III suffered “mass hysteria” in advance of the Macneil final.

  Mary Ann Glendon’s Property exam was an unpleasant surprise to many members of Section III, with Mark Kozlowski remembering that some of the questions “had nothing to do with the stuff we had covered in class.” Steven Heinen agreed, recalling that students first encountered the word “easement” only on the test. Half of the test, involving six specific questions, concerned Native Americans on “Vintucket” island who were being pressured to sell their seaside property to an aggressive celebrity. An estranged, unmarried couple’s frozen embryos, a building lease, and a “takings” issue constituted the balance of Glendon’s exam.

  Friday morning, May 26, brought literal shrieks of horror when angry students confronted Ian Macneil’s bizarrely demanding Contracts exam, which instructed them to write their answers “ONLY INSIDE THE BOX AFTER EACH QUESTION” on the twenty-five-page test. The first, three-part, twenty-minute question asked whether a U.S.–Soviet nuclear missile treaty did or did not constitute a contract, depending on how that concept was defined. An answer of up to fourteen lines was permitted. Ten subsequent questions, ranging from ten to twenty-five minutes apiece, involved, among other topics, a nephew cut out of a will on account of his race and the sale of fourteen hundred convertible sofas. Student complaints raged. Following the Memorial Day weekend, Section III’s “very intense year,” as Paolo Di Rosa termed it, ended with a straightforward two-question open-book Civ Pro exam from Stephen Subrin.15

  Two hundred eighty-five 1Ls—179 men and 106 women—had decided to enter the Harvard Law Review’s writing competition, and only one day separated the end of final exams and the distribution of the HLR materials. The weeklong assignment consisted of two parts. First was a Bluebook test—The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, then in its fourteenth edition, dated back to 1926, and was the most widely used style manual in legal academia. First-year students had been introduced to the volume’s arcane instructions, especially for abbreviations, the previous fall in Legal Methods, but this HLR competition was their first real opportunity to apply its editing rules.

  The second and far more demanding part entailed writing a lengthy essay—in law review parlance a “note”—weighing the merits and demerits of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in DeShaney v. Winnebago County. A 6–3 majority had rebuffed a claim that a child who suffered severe brain damage at his father’s hands could sue the local child protection agency, alleging a deprivation of his Fourteenth Amendment right to “liberty.” The Fourteenth Amendment covers on
ly state action, and the majority held that state officials do not have a constitutional obligation to protect children from their parents. Justice Harry A. Blackmun filed an emotional dissent.

  Barack had a full week to work on the two-part assignment before it had to be postmarked and mailed to the Review’s offices. But on the day it was due, his car would not start, and time was short. He called Rob Fisher, who was just heading out the door, but Rob immediately drove to Somerville and took Barack to the closest post office, where there was a long line. But Rob remembered Barack successfully sweet-talking his way forward, explaining to people that his envelope had to be postmarked by noon.

  On the cover sheet that accompanied the submission, the applicant was asked for their summer contact information. They also had the option of indicating their gender and race, and they could provide a brief personal statement if they had experienced any major hardships in life. The writing competition dated back to 1969, but only in 1981 did the Review introduce affirmative action into the process to increase diversity. Only a trio of rising 2L editors who oversaw the selection process would know whether and to what degree those indicators were considered when all entrants’ scores were collated.

  At the Review’s offices on the second and third floors of Gannett House, a wooden Greek Revival structure that dated to 1838, newly hired twenty-four-year-old editorial assistant Susan Higgins collected the 285 entries, assigned each a number, removed their cover sheets, and began sending batches of the submissions to the three dozen 2L editors, now scattered at their summer jobs all across the country. They would grade the numbered papers and send them back to Cambridge. Some of those 2Ls wondered whether the choice of DeShaney inadvertently gave 1Ls of one particular political stripe an advantage on their essays. “There were more interesting arguments to be made on the conservative side,” thought Dan Bromberg, a 1986 summa cum laude graduate of Yale, “and so more points to be won” there than for 1Ls who sided with the dissenters. The grading was a multiweek process, at the end of which the 2L officers, including President Peter Yu, the Review’s first Asian American leader, collated the results and factored in the contestants’ 1L grades that Susan Higgins had gotten from the registrar’s office.

  Half of the thirty-eight slots would go to the top writing competition scorers; the other half would be determined by an equation based 30 percent upon those scores and 70 percent upon their 1L grades. If a contestant had indicated their minority status, that fact, but not their names, was flagged on their submission. Gordon Whitman, incoming cochair of the Review’s Articles Office and a member of the selection trio, recalled that race was “a little bit of a featherweight on the process,” but it did not count “a whole lot.” Only when the numerical selections had been made did Susan Higgins match the chosen numbers with the individuals’ names: “I was the keeper of the names with the numbers,” she explained.

  In midsummer, the successful contestants—twenty-two men and sixteen women—received a phone call, and then a confirming letter, telling them they had been selected. But there was a tangible cost: they would have to leave their highly remunerative summer jobs three weeks early to return to Cambridge before the beginning of fall classes, to start work on the Review’s first issue of the new academic year.16

  In preparation for the summer, Barack had “sublet the cheapest apartment I could find,” hardly a block north from where he and Sheila had lived in Hyde Park. He also had “purchased the first three suits ever to appear in my closet and a new pair of shoes that turned out to be half a size too small and would absolutely cripple me for the next nine weeks.” Working at a corporate law firm like Sidley reintensified his fears from a year earlier that going to Harvard “represented the abandonment of my youthful ideals.” But choosing Harvard over Northwestern’s full-cost scholarship meant that “with student loans rapidly mounting, I was in no position to turn down the three months of salary Sidley was offering.”

  Obama arrived late for his first day at Sidley’s offices at 10 South Dearborn. It was a rainy June morning. Some days earlier, he had spoken by phone with Michelle Robinson, whom Geraldine Alexis and senior associate Linzey Jones had assigned as Barack’s summer adviser because of their mutual Harvard ties. Obama remembered that “she was very corporate and very proper on the phone, trying to explain to me how the summer program at Sidley and Austin was going to go.”

  Barack was shown to her office that first day, and Michelle recalled in 2004 that “he was actually cute and a lot more articulate and impressive than I expected. My first job was to take him to lunch, and we ended up talking for what seemed like hours.” She had expected a biracial, Hawaiian-raised Harvard Law student to be “nerdy, strange, off-putting” and even “weird,” but instead Barack was “confident, at ease with himself . . . easy to talk to and had a good sense of humor,” she recounted. “I was pleasantly surprised by who he turned out to be.” She did however recall that “he had this bad sport jacket and a cigarette dangling from his mouth.”

  Rob Fisher was also working at Sidley’s Chicago office for the summer, and he remembered Barack coming by his office soon after they arrived. “He came in one day and said, ‘My mentor is really hot.’” As Michelle’s friend and Sidley colleague Kelly Jo MacArthur recalled, Barack wasted little time in making his interest clear. “He would try to charm her, flirt with her, and she would act very professional. He was undeniably charming and interesting and attractive,” but Michelle rebuffed Barack’s repeated suggestions that they do something together. “She was being so professional, so serious,” MacArthur remembered, and she also knew that Michelle was someone with “conservative morals.”

  When Barack pressed, Michelle was characteristically direct and told him that as his adviser, it would look bad if they began going out together. Instead, she tried to set him up with several of her girlfriends, just as she did with Tom Reed, another African American 1L summer associate and Chicago native who had been one year behind her as an undergraduate at Princeton. But Barack persisted. Finally, toward the end of June, Michelle reluctantly agreed. “OK, we will go on this one date, but we won’t call it a date. I will spend the day with you.”

  On Friday, June 30, they left Sidley’s offices at about noon and walked the few blocks to the Art Institute of Chicago on South Michigan Avenue to have lunch. “He was talking Picasso,” Michelle remembered. “He impressed me with his knowledge of art.” Then they “walked up Michigan Avenue. It was a really beautiful summer day, and we talked, and we talked.”

  Barack had a plan. Opening that evening was a movie that already had been the subject of three different articles in the Chicago Tribune: young African American director Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. It was an ingenious idea, but Michelle’s concern about appearances turned all too real when they saw Sidley’s Newton Minow and his wife Jo at the theater. “I think they were a little embarrassed” at being seen together, Minow recalled. After the film, Michelle remembered, “we had a deep conversation about that” and then ended the day “having drinks at the top of the John Hancock Building,” which “gives you a beautiful view of the city.”

  “I liked him a lot. He was cute, and he was funny, and he was charming,” Michelle remembered thinking, but after their encounter with the Minows she was all the more determined not to become a subject of office gossip. But when Barack invited her to accompany him to a training he had agreed to do for DCP at one of the Roseland churches, she agreed to go along.

  The small group was “mostly single parent mothers,” but she recalled that Barack’s “eloquent” presentation “about the world as it is and the world as it should be” was one she would never forget. “To see him transform himself from the guy who was a summer associate in a law firm with a suit and then to come into this church basement with folks who were like me, who grew up like me,” Michelle recounted, “and to be able to take off that suit and tie and become a whole ’nother person . . . someone who can make that transition and do it comfortably and feel
comfortable in his own skin and to touch people’s hearts in the way that he did, because people connected with his message,” was remarkably impressive. “I knew then and there there’s obviously something different about this guy,” something “special,” and “it touched me . . . he made me think in ways that I hadn’t before,” Michelle explained. “What I saw in him on that day was authenticity and truth and principle. That’s who I fell in love with” in that church, and “that’s why I fell in love with him.”

  Every summer Linzey Jones hosted a picnic at his home in south suburban Park Forest for all of Sidley’s minority attorneys and summer associates. Events like this were standard fare because summer programs at big law firms were aimed at enticing the students into eventually accepting a permanent job offer. Evie Shockley, an African American 1L from the University of Michigan Law School who shared an office with Barack for part of that summer, recalled attending a Cubs game, seeing Phantom of the Opera, and other theater outings. “It was easy to feel like you weren’t working,” she explained.

  That weekend day, Linzey Jones remembered Barack and Michelle being “very friendly with each other,” but Barack joined in when many of the men went to a nearby junior high school to play basketball for an hour. Michelle still lived with her parents in their South Shore home, a few miles below Hyde Park, and when she drove Barack back to his apartment, he offered to buy her an ice cream cone at the Baskin-Robbins on the north side of East 53rd Street. Michelle accepted, and ordered chocolate. Sitting outside, Barack told her about working at Baskin-Robbins in Honolulu “and how difficult it was to look cool when you had the apron and the little brown cap on.” Then, in a direct reprise of a question he had posed three summers earlier, also in Hyde Park, he asked Michelle “if I could kiss her. It tasted of chocolate.”