Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  Barack and Michelle’s attendance at Trinity’s 11:00 A.M. Sunday service had become less frequent, and neither had become active in any of Trinity’s vibrant service ministries. Michelle’s thoughts increasingly turned toward wanting to have her first child, and she believed that once she had a child, she could work only part-time, something that would be impossible as executive director of Public Allies Chicago. She hoped to find a position that offered financial security and was closer to home, and that spring the University of Chicago advertised for a new associate dean charged with maximizing student volunteer opportunities. Michelle applied, despite strong childhood memories of the university’s total disconnect from the African American neighborhoods just to its south and west. “I grew up five minutes from the university and never once went on campus,” Michelle recalled. “All the buildings have their backs to the community. The university didn’t think kids like me existed, and I certainly didn’t want anything to do with that place.” For four years during Michelle’s childhood, her mother Marian worked as a secretary at the U of C, but Michelle had continued to think of it as “a very foreign place” and one she “never knew anything about.”

  Ian Larkin “was surprised” when Michelle told him she was leaving Public Allies, but she did give three full months notice before her September 1 start date at the U of C. The university’s press release quoted vice president Arthur Sussman as saying that “Michelle understands the Hyde Park community and the world of public service,” and Public Allies gave her a friendly send-off with a farewell party at board member Sunny Fischer’s Evanston home.

  In late May, when Mariana Cook, a New York photographer working on a book about couples in America, visited Michelle and Barack at East View, the informally posed pictures as well as Michelle’s interview comments portrayed a woman focused on defending her privacy from the uncertainties of the external world. Michelle’s Public Allies colleague Craig Huffman had heard her say “very directly” that politics was too low a calling for her husband, and she voiced those feelings very strongly to Cook. “There is a strong possibility that Barack will pursue a political career,” but “there is a little tension with that,” because “I’m very wary of politics” and “I don’t trust the people” in it. She believed “he’s too much of a good guy for the kind of brutality” politics entails, and she worried that “when you are involved in politics, your life is an open book, and people can come in who don’t necessarily have good intent. I’m pretty private,” and “in politics you’ve got to open yourself to a lot of different people.”

  Michelle told Cook, “I want to have kids and travel,” and she expressed a greater openness apart from politics: “it’ll be interesting to see what life has to offer. In many ways, we are here for the ride, just sort of seeing what opportunities open themselves up.” She was happy she was not at a law firm, and she was pleased that “Barack has helped me kind of loosen up and feel comfortable with taking risks and not doing things the traditional way” thanks to “how he grew up.” Barack told Cook that “all my life, I have been stitching together a family, through stories or memories or friends,” and “imagining what it would be like to have a stable, solid, secure family life” like the one Michelle had enjoyed during her upbringing.16

  Once Barack’s campaign obligations lessened after his primary win, he and Michelle could enjoy more leisurely evenings than they had during the months of his uncertain candidacy. Back in the early fall, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn had heeded Alice Palmer’s request to introduce Barack to their friends, and after that gathering, Barack and Michelle began to see a great deal more of not only Bill and Bernardine but also their three closest friends, Rashid and Mona Khalidi and Carole Travis.

  Just before Bill and Bernardine moved to Chicago from Manhattan in the summer of 1987, mutual friends had told them about the Khalidis, another New York couple moving to Hyde Park who were also raising three children. Rashid, a well-known historian of Palestine, had been named a professor in the U of C’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. “I proposed, the second or third week we were out here, that we have dinner once a week at each other’s houses,” Bernardine recalled, as the Khalidis lived just five blocks from Bill and Bernardine. The arrangement worked so well, thanks in part to Mona and Bill each being excellent cooks, that “we had dinner together ultimately almost every night,” three evenings per week at each home.

  By 1995 their regular dinners also included their friend Carole Travis, a former United Auto Workers local union president and law school graduate who was political director of the Service Employees International Union’s Illinois state council. Carole had a great apartment on the top floor of 5300 South Shore Drive—the building where Harold Washington had lived—and she often hosted parties there. Carole and Bernardine had known each other as fellow political activists since the late 1960s, and while Carole appreciated that Bill and Bernardine had been “totally fucking crazy” during their years in the violent Weather Underground, in subsequent years Bill, like Bernardine, had “reinvented himself” as a well-respected educator.

  Bill and Bernardine had quickly made many good friends in Hyde Park, including Michelle and Barack’s friend Valerie Jarrett’s parents the Bowmans. “Barbara and Jimmy were close friends of ours right away,” Bernardine remembered. Bill still called himself “an unreconstructed lefty,” and their prior affiliations were no secret, as a mid-April Chicago Tribune story on a joint speaking appearance at Lake Forest College highlighted. But their calls for renewed student activism—“What will your grandchildren remember you for?” Bernardine asked the undergraduates—were well within anyone’s liberal mainstream.

  Carole, Mona, and Rashid first met Barack and Michelle at Bill and Bernardine’s dinner table, which most evenings also included the two couples’ six children. Carole remembered one early dinner conversation at the height of the Alice Palmer contretemps. “Michelle didn’t like him doing politics, but Michelle, in that instance, was ‘I was there. She said, “You’ve got my endorsement,” and we’ve begun working on it. . . . We’re not giving up.’ . . . Michelle was adamant on that.” By the spring of 1996 Barack and Michelle were a regular presence at the two couples’ “very informal” dinners. “I would invite them often,” Mona recounted. “We used to do a lot of dinners together,” and “they came to our house often.”

  Bernardine recalled an evening when Michelle was mulling her decision to leave Public Allies. “She wanted to be closer to home” and the shift “was definitely tied to having children” so that Michelle could have “more flexible hours.” Carole remembered that “Mona and Rashid always had a big table, and there were tons of people who came through that table,” which became an “intellectual center” of the Hyde Park community. “Bill and Bernardine’s table was a political table,” Carole added, but when Barack joined in “he was never ideological.”

  Scott Turow, the well-known writer and attorney, first met Barack and Michelle at a summer 1996 dinner party at Bill and Bernardine’s just after Michelle had accepted her U of C job. He was seated next to Michelle, and “she just blew me away,” offering a memorable account of how her grandmother, who died in 1988, had on her deathbed warned Michelle, “Don’t you start the revolution with my great-grandchildren. I want them to go to Princeton too!” Scott thought Michelle was “an amazing person,” and when dinner was over, she introduced Scott to Barack, who of course was familiar with Scott’s famous first book. “He began talking to me about One L,” and mentioned his own book. They spoke for twenty minutes about writing, and Barack seemed so “deeply interested in literature” that Scott was uncertain “whether his career was going to be in politics or in literature.” Rashid Khalidi “came in after dinner,” and “he and Barack clearly had a prior acquaintance, because they were kidding each other about something,” Scott recalled.

  Carole Travis’s parties at her apartment were larger affairs, and “Barack was at a number of them,” although not Michelle. T
om Geoghegan, fresh from his successful resolution of the Wisconsin steelworkers’ fifteen-year legal struggle, recalled one crowded gathering at Carole’s where Jesse Jackson Sr. was among the guests. Tom spent much of the evening talking with Barack, whom he had met previously and who was familiar with Tom’s own reflective, 1991 memoir about his work as a labor lawyer, Which Side Are You On? Tom remembered how “he was such a pleasure to talk to.”17

  Barack’s role as chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge board continued to be a recurring drain on his time. He remained convinced that “the spirit of the Challenge is to fund more than the status quo,” and he agreed with executive director Ken Rolling’s view that the proposals funded so far were neither creative nor inventive. In mid-May, Brown University president Vartan Gregorian, the Annenberg effort’s top overseer, visited Chicago to have dinner with Barack, Pat Graham, and two other CAC board members to strengthen the link between the Chicago venture and the national program. For nine months the Chicago board had insisted that Rolling alone, aided hugely by the all-volunteer Chicago School Reform Collaborative, could administer the project, but at dinner Gregorian won the Chicago board leaders’ agreement to hire several support staffers. Gregorian, like Rolling, hoped for bolder proposals, and he pressed the Chicago board members to raise additional matching funds.

  On the Joyce Foundation board, Barack’s first eighteen months left colleagues like Wisconsin law professor Carin Clauss quite aware of his strong interest in education policy. “His confidence, his sense of self” was readily apparent during the thrice-a-year all-day meetings, although another member explained that “the Joyce Board has a certain tenor and Barack came in without regard to the tenor. . . . Initially some people were taken aback” because Barack is “a pontificator.” By 1996 Barack had become “an excellent board member” with “a lot of outstanding insights,” yet a colleague like Clauss, who did not share the men’s great interest in basketball, was struck that “with the guys” Barack “was always talking basketball,” not policy issues.

  Two wedding trips bracketed Barack and Michelle’s summer. In late May they traveled to southern Maryland for Rob Fisher’s marriage to his longtime girlfriend Lisa. In August, they flew to London for Barack’s sister Auma’s marriage to Ian Manners, a white British businessman. Madelyn Dunham came all the way from Honolulu to attend, so Barack was able to see much of his far-flung family. One evening prior to the wedding, Ian’s brother-in-law Brian took Barack and a few others on a pub crawl in Wokingham, a Berkshire market town west of London. Barack was unimpressed with English bitter, and bailed entirely when a female stripper showed up to entertain the all-male group.

  Back in Chicago, Barack’s status as a senator-to-be was gradually becoming a part of his life. He checked with Emil Jones’s Springfield staff about the legislature’s 1997 schedule before setting his upcoming law school class times. Impressed with Cynthia Miller, a young black woman who was temping at the law school for the summer while finishing a graduate degree, Barack told her he was looking for a part-time district director to staff the empty 71st Street campaign office that in the fall would be his legislative office. As Alice Palmer and Dick Newhouse had done before him, Barack thought it was important to be in South Shore rather than Hyde Park, and Cynthia agreed to sign on as of October.

  Senate Democrats invited Barack to join them on a Chicago boat cruise one evening, and powerful downstate senator Vince Demuzio warned his colleague Pat Welch that the new member was “a bomb thrower.” Welch, expecting someone in a dashiki, was pleasantly relieved upon meeting Barack. Over a midsummer lunch, Carole Travis introduced Barack to Michael McGann, SEIU’s Springfield lobbyist, and McGann recalled thinking that Barack “was already oozing ambition all over the place.” A group of four other lobbyists asked to see the incoming new senator at Davis Miner. Former Democratic Senate staffer Jeff Stauter explained that they did not know anything about him before that meeting, except that Barack had vanquished Alice Palmer in “a pretty bold and cold move.” After introducing themselves to Barack in the firm’s basement conference room, “we spent quite a bit of time there,” Stauter recalled, and “right away there was a recognition among all of us that this guy was going somewhere.”

  Earlier in the year, Carol Harwell had told Barack that as an Illinois legislator “you can’t drive a foreign car,” as Barack was still using Michelle’s hand-me-down Saab. “He was pissy about that,” Carol remembered, but Barack acquired a black Jeep Cherokee, while remaining reluctant to get rid of the Saab. But Malik Nevels, the ’94–’95 Public Ally who had worked on the Jackson congressional race, needed to buy a car before starting law school at Urbana-Champaign. He called Barack, who invited him to East View for a test drive. The Saab was in “great condition” and had only sixty thousand miles on it, but Malik, with only $2,500 available, thought it was outside his price range. Barack asked how much he had. “Okay, we’ve got a deal,” Barack responded, and he drafted a handwritten sales contract for the car, the title for which was still in Michelle Robinson’s name. Malik eagerly signed, but tried to hand the keys back to Barack because he could see the car was “a complete mess,” with “food underneath the seat” and cigarette butts and scraps of paper scattered everywhere. “Aren’t you going to clean it up first?” Malik asked. Barack replied, “You’re on your way to law school, right?” Malik nodded. “Let me give you your first lesson in contract law,” Barack went on, pointing out the words “as is” in the handwritten document. A happy but chagrined Malik cleaned the Saab himself.18

  Barack also remained engaged with the slow-moving development of the Hope Center. An energetic full-time organizer, Tracy Leary, a two-year veteran of Gamaliel’s work in Gary, had been hired in early 1996, and the small initial group of trainees Barack had worked with the previous fall completed their training that spring. By April classes for a second, larger group were under way, and in mid-June Rev. Jeremiah Wright and civil rights organizer Bob Moses each conducted workshops for the group. Tracy had first met Barack in early 1995 through Gamaliel, and by fall 1995, Barack was also informally mentoring another young, somewhat unhappy black Gamaliel organizer, John Eason, whom Hope Center cofounder Sokoni Karanja introduced to Barack. Sokoni and Barack remained committed to “developing African-American leaders who can transform extremely low-income urban communities” where disinvestment had led to “an erosion of hope” that was magnified by “the lack of organization . . . in the African-American community.” That community needed “parents who restore standards of civility to the streets and who insist on quality education for their children,” but the duo believed that “the current palette of organizing tactics” gave short shrift to “uniquely African-American values and culture.” As Barack had articulated previously, “existing schools of organizing have limited visions about leadership identification, community power building, and ‘winnable’ issue cutting that tend to generate ‘big ego’ leaders, turfing and divisiveness, and small localized victories.” Their hope remained that the Hope Center could “generate a cadre of people who will understand that we can transform deeply impoverished communities if we have persistence, creativity, and the ability to mobilize a critical mass of people.”

  That summer 1996 program summary stated that “Obama has devoted about 10 percent of his time to the Center,” as compared to 25 percent for Sokoni, with Barack doing a two-hour “power analysis” training as one of the twelve weekly sessions for each group of Hope Center “initiates.” At a mid-July planning meeting, Barack observed that “we haven’t really figured out what our niche is” and “there has to be an organizing organization” to “plug” the trainees into. “Somebody has to be the organizer of this process” by providing such a group. Tracy Leary persuaded Barack to lead a five-hour workshop on the last Saturday of the month on “Building a Collective Organizing Strategy for Greater Grand Boulevard,” the more formal neighborhood name for Bronzeville. Tracy’s invitation letter explained how the Hope Center sought “n
ew cadres of citizen leaders who are committed to transforming our community” as well as “transforming extremely low income people.”

  Barack’s interest in the Hope Center reached back to his intense conversations years earlier with first Jeremiah Wright and then Mike Kruglik in which he had envisioned building “a very broad-based, African-American-led black church power base” that could transform Chicago politics citywide. It had a “spiritual dimension to it” yet was “ultimately very pragmatic,” and although he had more recently cited the untapped power of unified black churches, as he was entering public office, his political focus shifted to the pitfalls of the electoral system. In early August, the Cleveland Plain Dealer published a long, interview-based profile of Barack three weeks before the 1996 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Barack was decidedly unenthusiastic about both the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates. “Bob Dole seems to me to be a classic example of somebody who had no reason to run,” Barack opined. “You’re 73 years old, you’re already the third-most powerful man in the country. So why? He seems to be drawn by some psychological compulsion. And it’s too bad because in a lot of ways, he’s an admirable person.” President Bill Clinton’s campaign was “disturbing to someone who cares about certain issues,” and Barack remained just as outspokenly disappointed about Chicago politics as he had been in the Reader nine months earlier. “The realization that politics is a business . . . an activity that’s designed to advance one’s career, accumulate resources and help one’s friends,” as “opposed to a mission,” was “fascinating and disturbing,” he said. The upcoming Democratic gathering promised even worse, because “the convention’s for sale,” Barack realized. “You got these $10,000 a plate dinners and Golden Circle Clubs. I think when the average voter looks at that, they rightly feel they’re locked out of the process. They can’t attend a $10,000 breakfast, and they know that those who can are going to get the kind of access they can’t imagine.”19