Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  He believed that “American history moves in waves and cycles” and that “notions of common ground are the glue that hold our society together.” Strassman pressed him with a foreshadowing question: “You’re willing to stake your political career on there being a common ground?” Barack replied, “that’s the core of my faith.” Asked about being an author, Barack said his book tour had been “exhausting,” and that “I had a more romantic notion of the publishing and book tour process.” He quickly added that “the reception has been terrific,” but that evening at Eso Won Books, an African American shop in Leimert Park, only nine people, including one of the owners, attended Barack’s reading.37

  On Saturday morning Barack flew back to Chicago, and that evening Valerie Jarrett was hosting a book party for him in the backyard of her parents’ spacious Hyde Park home. Michelle and Valerie’s good friend Susan Sher remembered that no more than ten people attended, though Valerie insisted it was closer to forty. Gwen LaRoche, Judd Miner, and 5th Ward alderman Barbara Holt were among those in attendance, and Barack soon did another signing at a bookstore at the Ford City Mall in Chicago’s West Lawn neighborhood owned by the family of Michelle’s Public Allies board member Craig Huffman.

  Barack continued to try to win attention for the book, and Woods Fund program officer Kaye Wilson recommended he reach out to well-known Chicago editor Hermene Hartman to request a review in her N’Digo magazine. That came to naught, but Barack did score an hour-long morning “drive time” talk show appearance on WJJD-AM with an unlikely pair of interviewers: African American radio professional Ty Wansley and his “lightning rod” sidekick, former 10th Ward alderman and mayoral candidate Ed Vrdolyak. Barack already knew the show’s producer, Barack Echols, his father’s namesake whom he had met two years earlier at the Hyde Park video store. Wansley asked most of the questions, and one participant thought that the usually fiery Vrdolyak was “a little bit intimidated” by as erudite a guest as Barack. The weekly Hyde Park Herald also interviewed the neighborhood’s newest author. Barack said that visiting Kenya to learn more about his father was “a healing process,” and that “for all of his absences and faults, my father provided a positive image to live up to or disappoint. Have I made my peace with him? Yes, I think I have.”

  Published reviews continued to be laudatory. A Philadelphia tabloid praised the book’s “mind-tingling prose” and the Boston Globe termed Dreams “a life-affirming, inspiring book.” Yet another paper called it “compelling,” and a prominent black monthly said Dreams was “wonderfully written in a bright, louvered style that indulges in a little too much detachment.” A southern daily paper said Barack “shows wisdom well beyond his years,” and the NAACP’s monthly magazine, The Crisis, lauded Dreams as “eloquent and thoughtful.” An accompanying interview quoted Barack as saying that “while I’m not advocating segregation, in segregated black communities, historically, there was a lot to be grateful for. There were black doctors, black lawyers. They didn’t leave the black community when they became successful, like so many successful blacks do today.”

  While Dreams From My Father garnered heaps of praise from reviewers unacquainted with Barack, most people who had known him well during his life, particularly those from his time at Punahou, were astonished or disbelieving when they read Dreams’ depiction of how racial anger and disaffection had dominated his school years. Both Greg Orme and Mike Ramos, Barack’s two closest teenage companions, felt many passages, especially the account of their own supposedly acute racial discomfort at the mostly black Schofield Barracks party, were at best overstated exaggerations. “I never knew, until reading the book later, how much that night had upset him,” Greg explained, because Barack “never verbalized any of that” racial anger which Dreams so forcefully dramatized. Bobby Titcomb agreed. “I didn’t know that Barack was having those internal struggles until I read his book.” Barack’s Punahou basketball teammates agreed. “We had no clue,” stated Alan Lum, and Tom Topolinski said, “I never heard or felt or sensed any kind of identity crisis.” Kelli Furushima, the cute classmate with whom Barack flirted and whose yearbooks he warmly inscribed, said he “seemed to be a happy guy” and “gave no indication of feeling uncomfortable.” Reading Dreams, Kelli found it “hard to imagine that he felt that way.”

  Former teammate Dan Hale explained that “the book was not, shall we say, highly thought of” among Punahou staff members because its portrayal of pot-smoking, beer-guzzling students “did not paint a very flattering picture of the school.” More significant, teachers like Pal Eldredge, who knew “Barry” year upon year, and Eric Kusunoki, who saw him every morning throughout high school, agreed with Mike, Greg, Bobby, Kelli, and Barack’s other fellow students about the book. Eldredge thought Dreams was “shocking” because “I had no clue he felt like that.” Kusunoki reacted similarly. Bitter angst “never came out in his behavior. He never verbalized it, he never acted it out,” and “I was totally unaware” of the disaffected attitude chronicled in Dreams.

  When Barack’s former coworkers at Business International Corporation first discovered Dreams a decade after its publication, they were astonished by how Barack described the company. Jeanne Reynolds Schmidt “immediately thought this was not the same place I worked! It was not a high-level consulting firm,” and “it was hardly an upscale environment. And I laughed when I read in the book that he had his own secretary.” Susan Arterian Chang agreed. “The BI that Barack describes in his memoirs is unrecognizable to me,” and Cathy Lazere, Barack’s immediate supervisor, called Dreams’ portrayal of BI “fabricated.”

  Reactions of complete astonishment reached all the way to Barack’s closest friends during law school. Cassandra Butts had seen an initial draft of the Kenya chapters, but when she read Dreams’ account of Barack’s pre-Chicago life, she realized that “that wasn’t the person that we knew” at Harvard. “He was so far removed from that person and from that search when we knew him in law school, that was shocking, actually” to read. In subsequent years, few observers ever focused on just how glaring the contradiction was between everyone’s memories of Barack, particularly from his Punahou years, and how Dreams portrayed a deeply troubled life. “The serene man his friends describe could not be more different from the person Obama himself describes in his memoir,” Larissa MacFarquhar noted. Barack would stress that Dreams “was not journalism,” and that “the main thing I was trying to do was just write a good enough book that I wasn’t embarrassed.” Yet MacFarquhar rightly observed that “the contrast between the Obama of the book and the Obama visible to the world is nonetheless so extreme as to be striking.” In rebuttal, Barack insisted to her that “that angry character lasts from the time I was fifteen to the time I was twenty-one or so,” but another journalist rightly wondered “how to interpret the fact that this turmoil was not evident even to his closest friends” at either Punahou or Oxy.

  One careful reader concluded that “there’s a very oddly detached quality to the book, almost as if he’s describing somebody else.” But only Jonathan Raban, an experienced world traveler as well as a distinguished novelist, would accurately take Dreams’ full measure. The book “is less memoir than novel,” he realized, an insight that the historian David Greenberg later echoed in calling Dreams “semi-fictional.” In truth, as Barack’s actual life story from the 1960s to the 1990s would subsequently reveal, Dreams From My Father was neither an autobiography nor a memoir. A prescient reader like Raban would note how many characters are “composites with fictional names,” how Dreams’ “total-recall dialogue is as much imagined as remembered,” and how “its time sequences are intricately shuffled” while reflecting upon how novelistic Dreams actually was.

  Less than a decade later one journalist rightly emphasized that Barack “was already weighing a political career when he wrote the book.” Keith Kakugawa, just like Mike and Greg, wondered why Dreams so dramatically magnified their teenage years’ racial tensions, but the explanation for their and others’ puzzl
ement about Dreams’ depiction of the Punahou years was transparently obvious if one realized how Barack’s embrace of his own blackness during his initial three years in Chicago, and then in Kenya, had retroactively led him to reshape his entire self-presentation of the first twenty-four years of his life.

  As the multiracial author Gary Kamiya perceptively put it, in Dreams Barack “made himself black.” And, as Greg Galluzzo realized in comparing the Barack of Dreams to the young man with whom he had spent scores of hours, “his book could be called A Journey to Blackness.” Barack enthusiastically told one later questioner that “I love to write,” that “I love fiction, I love to read fiction, but I’m not sure I have enough talent to write fiction.” Yet for once in his life, if only for one sole time, Barack Obama sold himself short. Dreams From My Father was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction. True to that genre, it featured many true-to-life figures and a bevy of accurately described events that indeed had occurred, but it employed the techniques and literary license of a novel, and its most important composite character was the narrator himself.38

  Back in Chicago following his book tour, Barack had lunch with Jesse Ruiz, his former law student who had dutifully bought a copy of Dreams for Barack to sign. “Hey, you might be famous one day,” Jesse teased him, and Barack told him that soon he would be running for Palmer’s state Senate seat. “Guys like you can help me become mayor one day,” but Jesse responded dubiously: “Don’t be hanging your hat on mayor.”

  The week of August 14 commenced with Mel Reynolds testifying in his own defense, insisting that the prosecution’s tape recordings of his 1994 phone calls with Beverly Heard proved only that he had engaged in phone sex with her, not that they had had a physical relationship when she was underage. In his fourth day on the stand, however, Reynolds “unraveled” during a prosecutor’s questioning, and “jurors shook their heads” during the congressman’s “rambling tirades,” the Tribune reported. Equally significant, by the middle of that week word began to spread that Jesse Jackson Jr. was definitely going to join Alice Palmer in running for Reynolds’s seat, which a conviction might leave vacant well before the 1996 Democratic primary.

  Monday, August 21, featured closing arguments in Reynolds’s trial, with lead prosecutor Andrea Zorn mocking him as “Mr. Oxford law degree.” Later that day the case went to the jury, and the next evening the jurors returned guilty verdicts on every count. Reynolds faced a minimum of four years in prison, and while he could appeal, U.S. senator Carol Moseley Braun joined the Tribune in calling for Reynolds’s immediate resignation from Congress.

  Attention quickly turned to the race to succeed him. State representative Monique Davis, a member of Trinity United Church, immediately declared her candidacy, and state senators Emil Jones Jr. and Bill Shaw, as well as 17th Ward alderman Allan Streeter, all mulled entering the race too. That Sunday’s Chicago Sun-Times reported that “most strategists consider Palmer the early front-runner” but said Jones “would be the candidate to beat” if he entered the race. That afternoon Alice Palmer’s campaign held a backyard barbecue in the Beverly neighborhood, and among the attendees was Republican state senator Steve Rauschenberger of Elgin, who already had given Palmer a $100 contribution two weeks earlier.

  The thirty-eight-year-old Rauschenberger was one of the Illinois Republican Party’s brightest stars, a top member of the so-called Fab Five of young senators who had joined the chamber after the 1992 election. Earlier that year GOP Senate president James “Pate” Philip had named Rauschenberger chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee, notwithstanding his lack of seniority, and Crain’s Chicago Business said that Rauschenberger and other young Republicans, like thirty-four-year-old Palatine banker Peter Fitzgerald, “have transformed the Illinois Senate.” Unquestionably one of the sharpest members of the body, Rauschenberger respected Alice Palmer as a “very bright” and “eloquent” colleague, someone whose congressional aspirations in a heavily Democratic district he had no hesitancy in supporting with another $100 check.

  About 150 people attended the event, including Barack, and during the event Palmer spoke to the crowd and explained that Barack was her desired successor in the state Senate. Steve thought “that was the first time she publicly introduced Barack” and voiced her blessing. Progressive African American lobbyist William McNary remembered it too, as did Michael Lieteau, another experienced African American lobbyist who represented AT&T. Palmer’s prospects seemed bright, for as former Harold Washington aide Tim Wright explained, “we all thought she was going to be congresswoman until Jesse” Jackson Jr. entered the race.

  The next morning the Chicago Defender broke the news that Jackson would formally announce his candidacy on September 9 at a noontime rally at Salem Baptist Church. Other observers believed Emil Jones, not Jackson, might offer the stiffest competition. Sun-Times columnist Steve Neal, an outspoken fan, asserted that Palmer “is in the strongest position for a special election” following Reynolds’s expected resignation, but other prognosticators noted that Palmer’s 13th Senate District constituted only 7 percent of the 2nd Congressional District, far less than city wards like the 9th and 34th, whose Democratic organizations would support Jones.

  A few days later Neal reported that Jones was definitely running and that former mayoral contender Joe Gardner would back him, which was ironic in light of reports that Mayor Daley, worried about Palmer as a potential citywide challenger should she win election to Congress, also supported Jones. Mel Reynolds appeared on Larry King Live to announce that he indeed would resign from Congress, effective October 1, and on September 11 Governor Jim Edgar set the primary election for Tuesday, November 28, with the pro forma general election to follow two weeks later.39

  Barack and Carol Harwell had been busy setting up his campaign. Carol had wanted to rent an office on East 71st Street in South Shore that was already wired for multiple phone lines, but Michelle Obama insisted on a better-looking but unequipped space a few blocks west at 2152 East 71st. Barack rented computers and printers, and the Obamas provided a fancy coffee machine they had received as a wedding present to the humbly furnished storefront. The campaign also managed to secure a quite numerically appropriate phone number: 312-363-1996. Carol asked a friend to be office manager and recruited forty-three-year-old Ron Davis, the Kennedy King college math instructor whom she and Barack both knew from Project VOTE!, to be the campaign’s field director.

  Once Reynolds announced his resignation, guaranteeing a special election, Barack asked Palmer whether this scenario—where she now could run for Congress without having to surrender her Senate seat—meant that he should hold off on publicly announcing his own candidacy. “If you want to hedge your bets and wait and see if you win, then I’m comfortable with that, and I can sort of keep my campaign in a holding pattern until we see what happens,” Barack said he told her. “No, Barack,” Palmer responded. “I’m going to win this congressional race, and so you have my blessing and my go-ahead.”

  Word of Palmer’s commitment appeared in the Hyde Park Herald, which reported that “according to sources close to her campaign,” Palmer “has no plans to try and recapture her Senate seat if her bid is unsuccessful.” Years later, Palmer readily confirmed those reports: “I certainly did say that I wasn’t going to run. There’s no question about that.” The Herald identified Barack as a “neophyte” politician who replied “warily” to questions and hoped “grass roots folks” would back him. “Obama has the support of Palmer” and also was endorsed by state representative Barbara Flynn Currie, the Herald stated. Carol Harwell scheduled a formal announcement for September 19 at Hyde Park’s Ramada Inn, known to many as the place where Harold Washington had launched his successful mayoral candidacy, and Alice Palmer readily agreed to introduce Barack and offer a ringing endorsement.

  Then daunting news arrived from Hawaii: chemotherapy had not stopped the spread of Ann Dunham’s cancer, and A
nn and Madelyn were about to fly to New York so that Ann could be examined by an oncologist at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Maya, in grad school at NYU, met them at the airport, where Ann required a wheelchair. Over the summer Ann had kept Barack apprised about her disability insurance difficulties with Cigna, which was trying to deny her benefit claim, and within a day or two of Ann’s arrival in New York, Barack and Michelle flew in from Chicago.

  Ann had told at least one of her friends about her unhappiness over how her son had portrayed her in Dreams, particularly his rendition of the time in 1982 when he and Maya had accompanied her to the screening of Black Orpheus. But in New York, Ann made no mention of that, and one day Barack and Michelle joined her for lunch with her old friend Pete Vayda and his wife.

  Barack also spent an hour speaking with broadcaster Bill Moyers, who at Debbie Leff’s suggestion wanted to ask Barack to join the board of the Florence and John Schumann Foundation, of which Moyers was president. Then, on September 15, the oncologist informed Ann that her cancer was now stage 4 and her odds were poor, but he recommended a change to a different chemotherapy regime when she returned to Honolulu.40

  Back in Chicago, Barack and Michelle were startled to learn that their good friend Valerie Jarrett had been bounced as Chicago’s commissioner of planning and economic development. Jarrett would become executive vice president of a real estate management firm, the Habitat Co., and also take on a part-time role as chairman of the Chicago Transit Authority.

  On the electoral front, state senator Emil Jones Jr. announced he soon would formally enter the congressional race. Alice Palmer supporters proclaimed that Jones was more valuable as Senate Democratic leader than he would be in Congress, and that Jesse Jackson Jr. was too inexperienced for such a post. As Barack’s own Tuesday-evening announcement neared, Carol Harwell recruited former alderman Cliff Kelley, now a prominent radio host, to MC the event, and Tuesday’s Chicago Defender publicized it with an unfortunately worded page 3 headline: “Harvard Lawyer Eyes Palmer Seat.”