Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  Recalling that seminar, Michael Dorf explained how Rob and Barack “seemed sort of like a pair” and “I thought of them almost interchangeably.” One participant believed that “Barack wasn’t that impressed with Tribe,” that “he’s not really a deep thinker” like Unger or even David Rosenberg. Yet when Tribe and Dorf some months later published the much-refined results of Tribe’s project as a slender book titled On Reading the Constitution, they twice expressly thanked the duo: “Robert Fisher and Barack Obama have influenced our thinking on virtually every subject discussed in these pages,” the coauthors wrote in their acknowledgments, and a footnote stated that “We are grateful to Robert Fisher and Barack Obama for the metaphor of constitutional interpretation as conversation.”31

  Interest in Barack by journalists continued, and Crystal Nix encouraged Tammerlin Drummond, a black female reporter friend who had just joined the Los Angeles Times, to come interview him. Drummond flew to Boston and spent two days with Barack at the Review. He told her about the tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt he now had thanks to Harvard, but cheerfully said, “One of the luxuries of going to Harvard Law School is it means you can take risks in your life. 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.” Drummond wrote that Obama envisioned spending “two years at a corporate law firm, then look for community work. Down the road, he plans to run for public office.”

  Drummond also spoke with Christine Lee and reported that Obama “has come under the most criticism from fellow black students for being too conciliatory toward conservatives and not choosing more blacks to other top positions on the law review.” Christine complained that Obama is “willing to talk to” the conservatives and “has a grasp of where they are coming from,” neither of which was true for her. “His election was significant at the time, but now it’s meaningless because he’s becoming just like all the others.” Radhika Rao told Drummond that Obama is “very, very diplomatic” and “has a lot of experience in handling people, which stands him in good stead” at the Review. By far the most difficult challenge was Christine, who was “taking passive aggressive swipes” at him every chance she could get. “The tension between us was just so high,” she remembered. “I kind of felt like he was full of shit, and I could see exactly the ways in which he was full of shit.”

  Lee recalled that one day Obama called her into his small top-floor office, and that “as soon as I got in there I started to cry.” Barack told her, “We have to fix this problem between us” so that they could work together on the Review. He made some reference to both of them being half-white, but Christine’s anger was so intense, she had no interest in ameliorating their situation. “I don’t care what our problem is. We’re not likely to resolve it, nor am I interested in resolving it.” Deeply depressed at how Review politics had denied her the masthead post her work had merited, Christine began seeing a campus counselor. “Half of our meetings were about Barack,” she recalled.

  Before the end of February, Barack had to do his first “P-reads” on the contents of the forthcoming April issue: one article, five student notes, including one coauthored by Crystal Nix, Jean Manas, and a third editor, another one by Jim Chen, two book notes, including one by Susan Freiwald, and two recent cases similar to his own January piece. “He just did a great job,” Freiwald remembered, and most authors agreed with her about Barack’s “light touch” as an editor. Even Erwin Griswold was happy, praising the April issue as “extraordinarily fine” and stressing that “There is nothing in this issue which smacks of professors talking to themselves.”

  When a young black journalist from American Lawyer magazine came to interview him, Obama readily voiced a Griswold-like critique of the journal he now headed. “Generally, law review articles are written to confuse rather than illuminate,” he said. “While some of that is due to the complexity of the law, some of it is just plain pretense. The average practitioner isn’t interested in wading through pages and pages of drivel.” Barack also told her he aspired to influence national issues, such as “whether money goes to the Stealth bomber or to needy schools.”

  Obama was never more loquacious than when Allison Pugh, an Associated Press reporter, interviewed him in the “Hark,” the law school’s student center. Perhaps remembering his 1983 stay at Wahid Hamid’s Long Island apartment, he declared that he was “not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me. And I’m not interested in isolating myself.” Instead, “I feel good when I’m engaged in what I think are the core issues of the society, and the core issues to me are what’s happening to poor folks in this society.” Referencing both Indonesia and Kenya, Barack noted that “I lived in a country where I saw extreme poverty at a very early age” and “my grandmother still lives in a mud-walled house with no running water or electricity.” He continued to stress that his election was not evidence of broader black progress and that people should not “point to a Barack Obama any more than you point to a Bill Cosby or a Michael Jordan and say ‘Well, things are hunky dory.’” Politically, “it’s critical at this stage for people who want to see genuine change to focus locally,” and in inner cities “it is crucial that we figure out how to rebuild the core of leadership and institutions in these communities.” Stating that “I’m interested in organizations, not movements, because movements dissipate and organizations don’t,” Barack believed that the U.S. needed “some new renewed sense of purpose and direction. . . . Hopefully, more and more people will begin to feel that their story is somehow part of this larger story of how we’re going to reshape America in a way that is less mean-spirited and more generous.” Pugh observed that Obama “radiates an oddly self-conscious sense of destiny,” and her story ended with him announcing that “I really hope to be part of a transformation of this country.” To another interviewer, Obama added that “if I go into politics it should grow out of work I’ve done on the local level, not because I’m some media creation.”32

  Before his Review victory, Barack had agreed to join two 3Ls in organizing BLSA’s spring conference, the group’s big annual weekend event. “The New Decade: The Mission of Black Professionals in the 1990s” was this year’s theme. Two days of panel discussions and social events drew scores of African American alumni back to Cambridge and kicked off on Friday, March 9, with an employer forum featuring representatives from thirty-five major law firms. Evening receptions and speeches took place at Cambridge’s fanciest venue, the Charles Hotel. Obama’s newfound fame was threatening to overload his already jam-packed schedule. Thursday evening he moderated a debate about affirmative action at Harvard’s JFK School of Government featuring the eminent sociologist Nathan Glazer versus the university’s relevant policy coordinator. On Saturday afternoon at the BLSA conference, Barack moderated a panel discussion on economic development, and his much-heralded election led 3L BLSA president Tynia Richard to ask him to introduce that evening’s dinner speaker, NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorney Elaine Jones.

  Barack’s role was intended to be modest, but even two decades later virtually everyone could recall and quote from his remarks. The Harvard Law Record said Obama “told the audience that despite the achievements blacks as individuals may realize, one must never forget where one came from or lose sight of the community goals. Obama stated that only when we acknowledge that one is part of a communal enterprise, can one hope to effect lasting change.” That summary omitted the clarion call phrase almost all listeners remember Obama invoking multiple times, as the words of Jeremiah Wright echoed through the luxury hotel’s ballroom: “Don’t let Harvard change you!”

  Tynia Richard, who did not know Barack well, had expected him to sound like “a nerd,” but instead found his speech “stunning.” Another 3L, Alan Jenkins, remembered Obama warning that Harvard could change you in ways both bad and good. “It was a very, very striking moment,” he thought, “not just the eloquen
ce but the self-possession.” To Jenkins, Barack’s remarks were “the best speech I had ever heard in person at that time.” Nicole Lamb, a 2L, found it “impressive and articulate,” and could see that Barack “spoke without notes.” His “Don’t let Harvard change you!” refrain just “mesmerized the audience.” Ken Mack recalled that Barack talked about being accepted by Harvard while working in Chicago, and that some older black man had given him that advice: “Don’t let Harvard change you!” He “kept returning to the theme,” and “the enthusiasm in the room keeps growing as he keeps coming back to that refrain.” It was an “incredibly compelling speech,” and “when he was done, people just broke out into wild applause.” The law school’s black faculty were there too. David Wilkins remembered Barack’s remarks as “just mesmerizing” and Randall Kennedy recalled the “standing ovation” when it concluded.33

  Review work and the bevy of requests flowing from his election left Barack increasingly stretched and strained. Throughout his first three semesters at Harvard his course attendance had been regular if not perfect, but now, especially with Tax, which met Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings at 8:15 A.M., Obama began missing a heavy majority of classes. The presidency was “a grinding job,” Mack could see, and by the third week of March, Barack was so exhausted that he jokingly remarked that if Review editors wanted to revolt, he was ready to be deposed.

  Another day Ken remembered Barack saying, “I’ve got too much energy this morning. I actually got eight hours’ sleep last night.” Barack vented to Rob about Review problems, and Rob remembered repeatedly hearing about “a particular younger African American woman who really thought he was evil.” Speaking requests included one from black graduate students at the Harvard Business School, and a listener from MIT was wowed. Barack’s “ability to articulate . . . the issues” was “just head and shoulders above anyone else,” Bernard Loyd thought. All the press coverage brought letters from both old friends, like Andy Roth, who was still in New York, and complete strangers. U.S. senator Paul Simon of Illinois wrote after seeing the Philadelphia Inquirer profile of Obama. “I was very interested to learn of your work with the Developing Communities Project in Chicago,” Simon remarked, and “I was especially heartened to learn of your plans for a career in public service.” Phone calls included a congratulatory one from organizing buddy Bruce Orenstein in Chicago plus one from a New York literary agent, Jane Dystel, who asked if Obama would consider writing a book. His response was “cool and reserved,” Dystel remembered, but Barack agreed to speak with her when he was next in Manhattan to see his sister Maya.

  All told, the six weeks following his HLR election were exhilarating, as his BLSA speech so powerfully reflected, but it was also debilitating. “I like to read novels, listen to Miles Davis,” he told one interviewer. “I don’t get to do that anymore.” Law Review colleagues would recall hearing “Miles Davis on in the background” when they called Barack at his Somerville apartment, and Cassandra Butts remembered Barack playing a Wynton Marsalis album—the 1989 release The Majesty of the Blues—that also featured Rev. Jeremiah Wright, narrating a sixteen-minute track entitled “Premature Autopsies.” “That’s my pastor,” Barack told Cassandra.34

  The law school’s spring break the last week of March gave Barack a much-needed respite and an opportunity to see Michelle Robinson in Chicago. Six months had passed since his last visit. The previous October, the first elections were held for the new Local School Councils (LSC) created by the 1988 school reform law. The New York Times quoted Obama’s old Roseland colleague Salim Al Nurridin as insisting that those “are going to be more important to us than the election of Harold Washington,” and UNO’s Danny Solis proclaimed them “the largest experiment in grassroots democracy the country has ever seen.”

  More than 313,000 votes were cast in the school-by-school contests, and in Altgeld Gardens a trio of women who had worked with Barack were elected to Carver Primary School’s council. Proponents were ecstatic, with UIC professor William Ayers, increasingly the city’s leading voice for school reform, celebrating what he called “the most far-reaching change in governance ever envisioned in a modern big-city school system.” In a New York Times op-ed, Ayers said he believed that “successful changes in schools tend to come from the bottom, not the top.” Business leaders whose support for the reform law had been so crucial established a new organization, Leadership for Quality Education, to support its implementation, but Patrick Keleher, so central to the 1987–88 efforts, feared that more than a revolution in local school governance would be needed to solve “the public education disaster in this city.”

  One casualty of the LSCs’ emergence was UNO, which had become a powerful network of Hispanic neighborhood groups. Greg Galluzzo and especially Mary Gonzales believed that church-based organizations could not in the long run emphasize public education issues, while Danny Solis and Phil Mullins emphatically disagreed. Personality clashes magnified an angry and ugly power struggle, one that ended with UNO and Gamaliel formally divorcing. Barack followed this from Cambridge, grilling Bruce Orenstein for details but firmly rebuffing Phil’s effort to draw him to their side. DCP was troubled too. Johnnie Owens had passed through Boston for an evening and spent the night at Barack’s apartment, where the two old friends talked into the early-morning hours. But Johnnie was also struggling. A state-funded evaluation team had been hired to work with DCP, but its leader, UIC professor James Kelly, found the assignment difficult to perform. “Six months,” he wrote, were “devoted to establishing contact with” Owens. “That was no small or easy task. . . . Meetings were scheduled. John did not appear,” a pattern that recurred at least four times.

  Barack told Rob Fisher “that things weren’t going that well for the organization” and “he was just trying to make sure things didn’t fall apart,” but there was little Barack could do from faraway Cambridge. Things were going vastly better for Mike Kruglik’s SSAC in Cook County’s south suburbs and for Jerry Kellman’s growing LIFT in northwest Indiana. Joseph Cardinal Bernardin helped SSAC launch a multimillion-dollar effort to rehabilitate abandoned homes, and LIFT received over $1 million in grants to begin a similar program in Gary.35

  Chicago politics, increasingly dominated by newly elected mayor Richard M. Daley, also included another challenge to South Side African American congressman Gus Savage by the tenacious Mel Reynolds. Nine months before the primary, Reynolds won the support of Al Johnson, the African American Cadillac dealer who had been Harold Washington’s top fund-raiser. The Tribune described Johnson as “a major catch,” but then Reynolds was accused of offering $6,000 to a twenty-year-old college student to have sex. The young woman had ties to another possible Savage challenger, and the charges were soon dismissed.

  Seeking to highlight Savage’s well-known erratic reputation, Reynolds called for all candidates to submit to multiple drug tests and then alleged that his campaign office had suffered a break-in. With national journalists interested in the race, The New Republic reported that Savage “is widely considered a buffoon” on Capitol Hill.

  Amid claims that the Daley-controlled Democratic organization was quietly backing Reynolds, the former Rhodes Scholar told reporters, “I’m not an establishment guy. I have establishment credentials, but I’m a poor kid from a poor background.” Al Johnson told the New York Times that “Mel is a sterling example of everything we ask our young people to be.” In a lengthy Chicago Reader profile of Reynolds, Johnson praised Reynolds for returning “to the community to make a contribution” after attending Oxford and Harvard. A black pastor backing Reynolds praised him for having “not only a command of the needs of the district but also a broader perspective about the issues in the state and the nation.” The Reader noted Savage’s contention that Reynolds “is the candidate of the whites” and quoted a union leader decrying another anti-Reynolds theme: “The terrible thing in this campaign is that some people have tried to make a negative issue of Mel’s education. . . . Some people are saying that
he’s an ‘Oxfordian’ and make it a negative.” But Reader correspondent Florence Hamlish Levinsohn was ambivalent about Reynolds, writing that upstart challengers often “are egotists convinced of their ability to outshine the incumbent.” She quoted an unnamed activist recounting how Reynolds had reacted when asked to run for alderman. “I’m not starting down at that level. I’m going to be President.” Levinsohn concluded that “there is in Reynolds’s seriousness, puritanism, and piety an ambition so overarching that it is a little bit frightening.” She also saw him as “a highly educated man who is immensely proud of the moderation that his education has taught him.”

  On election day, Savage won a narrow 51 to 43 percent victory. That night he thanked Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan for his support and lambasted the “white racist press.” Ninth Ward alderman Robert Shaw asserted that Reynolds “is identified with those people from Boston and with the elitists of this town” and warned that “black people will not permit the white establishment or the newspapers or electronic media to pick a congressman for them.”

  A Tribune recap stated that Savage’s efforts to portray Reynolds “as an outsider bankrolled by sources unfriendly to blacks” came “perilously close to anti-Semitism.” Reynolds said of Savage that “everyone who runs against him is not black enough,” and a sidebar controversy ensued as Chicago’s white progressives questioned why liberal black columnist Vernon Jarrett had insistently attacked Reynolds. Jarrett called Reynolds a “mysterious phony,” who was “very ambitious to go to the top quickly.” In Cambridge, Review 3L Andy Schapiro, who came from the district’s southernmost reaches, had mentioned to Obama how excited he was to see Reynolds taking on Savage. Barack shook his head dismissively while replying, “I know Mel.”36