The Unwinding

by George Packer

  The worst moment came when Tammy had to tell Granny. Tammy couldn’t remember her great-grandmother crying when Big Mama died, but she cried when she heard Tammy’s news, and that hurt Tammy to her core. Years later, she understood: no one in the family had ever graduated from high school, and Tammy was supposed to be the first. “Here’s another one that is not going to graduate,” Tammy said. “Granny was saying that she’s worked, scrubbed floors, cooked people’s food, spent time away from her family, and what mattered most for her is that I was educated and had a home, and that hadn’t happened yet. We had a home but nobody was getting educated.” Tammy’s father stormed into the house on Charlotte and told her, “You’re never going to be anything but a welfare bitch.”

  A resolve formed in Tammy then. She wouldn’t end up like those girls in the projects, and she wouldn’t end up like her mother. She would stay in school and start taking it seriously—she had been a mediocre student, but now she was going to work at it—and then she was going to find a good job (nursing wasn’t realistic anymore, not with her grades in chemistry), because her child was going to have a much better life than she did, better than her baby brothers, with a mother who took care of her. She had something to prove now, not just to her father and them, but to herself.

  The baby girl was born on May 9, 1982. Barry didn’t show up when he was supposed to sign the birth certificate, and Tammy learned that he was fooling around with other girls. They quarreled, and she refused to see him anymore. She went back to school in time to take her finals. A few months later, she ran into Barry at the West Lake projects, where she had a summer job as a day camp counselor. He was standing in line at the community center for some sort of giveaway with one of his girlfriends, who was pregnant. That broke Tammy’s heart—but it was okay, it was all right, she knew she’d rebound. She stopped going to church because her situation was considered shameful. When Barry tried to get back together with her, she turned him away. “This is not your job,” she told him. “She’s not yours. You didn’t sign the birth certificate.” She didn’t want her daughter to grow up like her, having a tumultuous relationship with a man who never seemed to care about her. She wanted her daughter to be loved and wanted by everyone around her. She and the baby were on their own, while everything on the east side went to hell.

  Tammy got off her mother’s check and signed up for her own. She hated being on welfare—the agency workers were nasty—but she needed it to pay for food and child care. She finished high school on time, in 1984, and became the first person in her family to get a diploma. The feminine style of her senior year recalled the forties, with the girls in their yearbook pictures arranging their hair and dress and lipstick like Billie Holiday. Tammy posed in a gray felt hat with a black ribbon and a mesh veil, but the look in her eyes told of the life that had intervened since she was a girl in pigtails.

  She got an associate’s degree at a technical college and worked for two years as a supermarket cashier in the hope that she’d get a management job, but none opened up. She had two more children, both by a man named Jordan: a boy in 1985 and another girl in 1987. She was always careful with money—now that she could drive, she shopped in the suburbs, where prices were lower, and she bought the kids’ Christmas presents on layaway, securing the gifts at the store with a deposit until she could pay in full. But with three kids, Granny, and the house on Charlotte to take care of, she had to find more secure work.

  By the late eighties, Youngstown was building a museum to its industrial history, designed by the architect Michael Graves in the shape of a steel mill, with stylized smokestacks. But up in Warren, the Packard Electric plants were still operating, with eight thousand workers making wiring harnesses and electrical components for General Motors cars. It was lighter, cleaner work than steelmaking, and two-thirds of the employees were women, a lot of them single mothers like Tammy. She went in to interview and was hired for the assembly line at $7.30 an hour. So in 1988 she got off welfare and became a factory worker.

  HER OWN: OPRAH WINFREY

  She was so big that she owned the letter O. She was the richest black woman in the world—in the world—but she remained Everywoman and made that her theme song. Five afternoons a week, forty million Americans in at least 138 markets (and millions more viewers in 145 countries) laughed and wept and gasped and gossiped and wished and celebrated with her. Being a billionaire only made her more beloved. She was still just like them, she knew them, came from them, from below them, and she made millions of women feel they were not alone. What they felt she felt, and what she felt they felt (and how you felt about yourself was the most important thing). When she learned to go with her heart, they learned to go with theirs, and when she learned to say no and not feel guilty about it even though it meant people wouldn’t like her (which was her greatest achievement), they learned to do the same thing. She wanted to get the whole country reading again. She wanted to destroy the welfare mentality and lift a hundred families out of the Chicago projects. She wanted to lead a national conversation about race and heal the wounds of slavery with a movie, because, she said, “Everything is about imagery.” She wanted to help people live their best lives. She wanted her studio audiences to get their favorite things every Christmas (Sony 52-inch 3-D HDTVs, Pontiac G6s, Royal Caribbean cruises). She wanted to open a door so that her viewers could see themselves more clearly, to be the light to get them to God, or whatever else they called it. She wanted them to have it all, like her.

  She exalted openness and authenticity, but she could afford them on her own terms. Anyone allowed into her presence had to sign away freedom of speech for life. She bought the rights to every photograph of herself and threatened to sue anyone who infringed the inviolability of her image. She withdrew her autobiography just weeks before publication after friends warned that it revealed too much about some parts of her life even as it falsified others. Her face underwent drastic alterations year by year.

  “According to the laws of the Universe, I am not likely to get mugged, because I am helping people be all that they can be,” she said. “A black person has to ask herself, ‘If Oprah Winfrey can make it, what does it say about me?’ They no longer have any excuse,” she said. “Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Fannie Lou Hamer are all a part of me. I’ve always felt that my life is their life fulfilled. They never dreamed it could be this good. I still feel they’re all with me, going, ‘Go, girl. Go for it,’” she said. “I feel tremendously powerful because I do believe I have reached a point in life where my personality is aligned with what my soul came to do,” she said. “I’m the kind of person who can get along with anyone. I have a fear of being disliked, even by people I dislike,” she said. “Doing talk shows is like breathing to me,” she said. “I stopped wanting to be white when I was ten years old and saw Diana Ross and the Supremes perform on The Ed Sullivan Show,” she said. “Nobody had any clue that my life could be anything but working in some factory or a cotton field in Mississippi,” she said. “I was just a poor little ole nappy-headed colored chile.”

  The yellow brick road of blessings that led to the purple fields of her vast empire (Harpo Productions, Harpo Studios, Harpo Films, The Oprah Winfrey Show, Oprah Winfrey Network, O: The Oprah Magazine—her picture on every cover—O at Home, The Oprah Radio Network, Oprah and Friends, Oprah’s Studio Merchandise, The Oprah Store, Oprah Winfrey’s Boutique, Oprah’s Book Club, Oprah’s Favorite Things, Oprah’s Big Give, the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, Oprah’s Angel Network, oprah.com) began on a farm in the middle of Mississippi in 1954. Her name was a misspelling of the biblical Orpah. For the first six years she was raised by her grandmother, Hattie Mae Lee, a cook and housekeeper who was the granddaughter of slaves, and her grandfather, Earlist, who scared her to death. They were so poor that she never wore a store-bought dress, and her only pets were a pair of cockroaches in a jar. At least, that was what she would tell interviewers. Her family would say that she was stretching it to make a better story,
that she was provided for and doted on, that her self-confidence came from those years.

  When Oprah was six, her grandmother could no longer care for her, so she was sent to Milwaukee to live in a rooming house with her mother. Vernita Lee worked as a maid, bore two more children by two more fathers, and went on welfare. Mother and daughter didn’t get along, and Oprah grew up a wild child to the sounds of Motown, stealing her mother’s cash, promiscuous at thirteen, doing “the Horse” with young men for money, her sister would later say, while Vernita was at work. But she also attracted the attention of white authority figures who admired her bookishness, her theatrical voice, and her drive and wanted to promote her. At fourteen she was sent to Nashville to live under the Christian discipline of her father, Vernon Winfrey, a barber (it turned out that Vernon couldn’t have been her father—she never learned who was). In Nashville, as in Milwaukee, she had better relations with white people than with her own family, and later she would say that she never felt oppressed except by black people who disliked her very dark skin or envied her success.

  She quit Tennessee State before graduating and went to work at a local TV station. When she got a job on an evening newscast in Baltimore in 1976, she was going to be the black Barbara Walters, or Mary Tyler Moore. But she couldn’t write copy, and she was too breezy and uninformed for news, so they moved her over to the morning talk show. It was a comedown in her own eyes, but she became a local star. She was so likable, so funny, wearing her heart on her sleeve, asking the juicy, borderline-rude questions that the audience wanted asked (Did it bother Frank Perdue when people said he looked like a chicken?). At the end of 1983, WLS in Chicago offered her a two-hundred-thousand-dollar job on its morning show.

  She was a figure of the eighties and Chicago, the center of a new black elite. When she arrived, Harold Washington had just been elected mayor, Jesse Jackson was beginning his first presidential campaign, Michael Jordan was about to be drafted by the Bulls. There was a quote taped to Oprah’s mirror that she attributed to Jackson: “If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it.” Empowerment, entrepreneurship, the self-made celeb, wealth as the ultimate and inevitable emblem of worth—that was her ethos (she had hated Black Power at Tennessee State in the early seventies, didn’t care about politics at all). They said an overweight black talk show host would never make it in racist Chicago, but it took exactly a week for her to kick Phil Donahue’s butt in the ratings, and within a year he moved his show to New York. She knew what the mostly white, suburban, stay-at-home moms in her viewing audience wanted, and she wasn’t afraid to get down and dirty—“Men Who Rape and Treatment for Rapists,” “Housewife Prostitutes,” “Man-Stealing Relatives,” “I Want My Abused Kids Back.” She wasn’t afraid of racists or baby killers or the profoundly handicapped. She could dish, she could empathize, she could mock herself, she could say penis on the air (vajayjay would take two more decades).

  And on the morning of December 5, 1985, during a show about incest, she stood by with the microphone as a white, late-middle-aged, conservatively dressed, nearly inaudible woman in the audience confessed that her son was her father’s child, and the young, dark, heavy, puff-haired host with the giant bronze earrings suddenly asked for a commercial break, hid her own crumpling face with her hand, cried into the woman’s shoulder, wrapped her arms around the woman for comfort, and said, “The same thing happened to me.” She had been molested by various male relatives almost continuously from ages nine to fourteen. (Five years later, the world learned that at fourteen Oprah had borne a son who died after five weeks. Her drug-addicted sister sold the story to a tabloid for nineteen thousand dollars.)

  Letters poured in, the switchboard was overloaded, ratings soared. She had broken the silence for millions of women, and in that moment Oprah Winfrey became Oprah—Everywoman battling and overcoming victimhood, girlfriend of everyone watching the show. Fame and money were not enough: to be Oprah, she had to find the secret path to the hidden wound inside every member of her vast and isolated audience. Then her greatness could be theirs, too. Her material and spiritual success were not a privilege that set her apart but the mark of triumph over suffering that connected her to every one of them. She invited them into her life through her public struggles with the pounds, which she kept taking off and putting on again, like so many women (she ate the way she spent and gave, impulsively and lavishly), and the wedding to Stedman Graham, postponed year after year (but he was perfect for her: tall, handsome, light-skinned, boring, a corporate marketing executive, author of You Can Make It Happen and Build Your Own Life Brand).

  Her bond with her viewers was unbreakable. Many of them had never had a black person in their living room before, except on a sitcom, and she made them less lonely, more tolerant and open, more curious about books and ideas, while they made her unimaginably rich. As she got bigger and bigger, from $100 million a year to $260 million, from $725 million net worth to $1.5 billion, from “Unforgivable Acts Between Couples” and “Women Who Are Allergic to Their Husbands” to “Change Your Life” and “The Seat of the Soul,” from Laurie the abuse victim to Maya Angelou the abuse victim, she never lost the love of her audience. As she spent more and more of her on-camera time with her friends Tom and Julia and Diane and Toni and Maria and Arnold and Barack and Michelle, celebrities celebrating celebrity, her most loyal friends were still her seven million day-in-day-out viewers. As the end of a typical day had her flying back from Rancho La Puerta to Chicago on her private jet (“It’s great to have a private jet. Anyone that tells you that having your own private jet isn’t great is lying”) to attend Stedman’s book party on the top floor of Michael Jordan’s restaurant, arriving in a state of rage because the National Enquirer had just published unauthorized photos of the ornate marble, satin, velvet, and silk furnishings in her lakefront condo, her most ardent supporters remained the aging lower-middle-class women from Rockford and Eau Claire who lined up for hours outside Harpo Studios on the Near West Side.

  They had things that she didn’t—children, debts, spare time. They consumed the products that she advertised but would never buy—Maybelline, Jenny Craig, Little Caesar’s, IKEA. As their financial troubles grew, she would thrill them by selecting one of them and wiping out her debts on the air or buying her a house, or ramping up Oprah’s Favorite Things at Christmas to give away luxury items like diamond watches and Tory Burch gray flannel totes. But being instructed in Oprah’s magical thinking (vaccinations cause autism; positive thoughts lead to wealth, love, and success), and watching Oprah always doing more, owning more, not all her viewers began to live their best life. They didn’t have nine houses, or maybe any house; they couldn’t call John Travolta their friend; the laws of the universe left them vulnerable to mugging; they were not always attuned to their divine self; they were never all that they could be. And since there was no random suffering in life, Oprah left them with no excuse.

  JEFF CONNAUGHTON

  In 1987 the revolving door that was supposed to send Wall Street bankers into high-level positions at Treasury landed Connaughton a junior staff job on the Biden for President campaign, at twenty-four thousand dollars a year. He traded his brand-new Peugeot for his parents’ 1976 Chevy Malibu because he could no longer afford the lease payments. That was all right with him.

  His first assignment, before he’d even left Atlanta, was to find twenty people in Georgia to write the campaign a two-hundred-fifty-dollar check. Do that in twenty states, and the candidate qualified for federal matching funds. It was one of the hardest things Connaughton had ever done, but the fear of failing spurred him, and he begged everyone he knew in Georgia to write a check. He succeeded, and in the process he learned how fundraising worked: you didn’t have to convince anyone that Biden was going to win, or even that he was right on the issues—only that you needed this, as a favor. “Do it for me.” What mattered was who did the calling. But when he asked the ex-girlfriend who’d been a member of Phi Mu and now lived
in Georgia, she refused: she’d heard, thirdhand, that Biden “would sell his own grandmother to be president.”

  It was the first post-Reagan election. Like every campaign, Biden’s was chaotic and sleepless, fueled by improvisation and junk food: we don’t know what you’ll be doing, just show up in three days. In March, Connaughton rented a room outside Washington in Alexandria, Virginia, in the house of an official with the potato chip trade association, only to learn upon arrival that he would not be working in the campaign’s Washington offices, but out of Wilmington, Delaware. Biden for President occupied a huge empty store in a downscale office complex on the edge of town, with dozens of desks stretching out across a blue carpet. The path to the White House had been climbed from less glamorous base camps. Connaughton’s success at dialing up checks in Georgia meant that he would be a fundraiser. It sure as hell wasn’t politics as he’d imagined it the night of Biden’s speech in Tuscaloosa, but he was determined to be a good soldier. “Just tell me where to go,” he said. He was given a desk and began working twelve-hour days, commuting two hours each way from Virginia, eventually spending Tuesday through Thursday nights at a Days Inn near the office.

  Connaughton worked under Ted Kaufman, Biden’s veteran chief of staff, an El Greco beanpole with an elongated jaw and a dome of curly hair. Kaufman stood in the innermost Biden circle, and when the senator’s sister, Valerie, introduced Kaufman to Jeff, she said, “You’re lucky to be working for Ted, he’s so close to Joe he doesn’t have to worry.” Connaughton wished he’d had the presence of mind to ask, “Do people worry? Could you please elaborate on that in a couple of paragraphs?” The implication was pretty clear: “You, on the other hand, ought to be really worried because you don’t have any kind of relationship with Biden, and Bidenland is strewn with mines, some marked, others not.”