Barack and Michelle

by Christopher Andersen

  Within the confines of the Black Law Students Association, Michelle was not reluctant to speak out on racial issues. “We got into big debates on the condition of black folks in America,” Verna Williams said. “She’s got a temper.” When the subject of race came up elsewhere, however, Michelle usually remained quiet. “She kept her feelings to herself most of the time,” another friend said, “because she didn’t want to be pigeonholed as just another angry black person. She didn’t want to be defined solely by her race. Michelle had lots to say about lots of other things.”

  That was particularly evident in David B. Wilkins’s course on the legal profession. During each class, Professor Wilkins grilled students on how they would behave when confronted with an ethical dilemma. “Not surprisingly,” Wilkins said, “many students shy away from putting themselves on the line in this way, preferring to hedge their bets or deploy technical arguments that seem to absolve them from the responsibilities of decision making.” Not Ms. Robinson. “Michelle,” Wilkins continued, “had no need for such fig leaves. She always stated her position clearly and decisively.”

  That ability so impressed Verna Williams that she asked Michelle to be her partner in a mock trial. “She had incredible presence,” Williams said. “She was very, very smart, very charismatic, very well spoken.”

  A student who possessed these gifts might have been expected to go straight to the Harvard Law Review, a traditional path to a Supreme Court clerkship or, at the very least, a job with one of the nation’s top law firms. Instead, Michelle chose to spend whatever time she could outside the classroom toiling in the cluttered offices of the school’s legal aid bureau.

  Like the other students who chose to participate, Michelle pledged to devote a minimum of twenty hours each week to handling the legal woes of the Boston area’s poor population. Michelle helped out in the bureau’s divorce clinic, worked at hammering out settlements in child custody disputes, and fought to obtain various benefits for people who had been denied them. But housing issues consumed most of Michelle’s time at the bureau. Having seen so many of her Chicago neighbors struggle to pay the rent, she fought hard for families facing eviction or suffering at the hands of an unscrupulous landlord.

  Many of her colleagues who came from more affluent backgrounds were witnessing urban poverty up close for the first time. A few, tired and frustrated, became emotional. Michelle, who had little patience for such self-indulgent displays, waited until she was back in her residence hall to vent her frustration. “Oh, puh-leeze,” Michelle complained to one of her African American classmates. “Do you think these people want to hear some rich white girl crying? They’ve got real problems. Give me a break!”

  Michelle’s legal aid experience was the most rewarding of her academic career and seemed to point to a future in public service. The thrust of the Harvard Law School curriculum, however, was decidedly in the direction of corporate law. Toward that end, she followed Chicago lawyer Stephen Carlson’s advice and spent the summer following her second year working for Carlson’s high-powered law firm, Sidley & Austin.

  As she approached graduation, Michelle faced a hard reality: she had massive student loans to repay, and her parents, who had sacrificed so much to send both children to Ivy League schools, were deeply in debt. When Sidley & Austin, then the fifth-largest law firm in the world, offered Michelle a job with a starting salary of nearly seventy thousand dollars (the equivalent of around a hundred thousand in 2009), she grabbed it. “The idea of making more money than both your parents combined ever made,” she later said, “is one you don’t walk away from.”

  “She came to Harvard Law School with no ambiguity about her race or gender,” said her law school adviser, Charles Ogletree. Michelle had decided that she “would navigate corporate America, but never forget her father’s values or where she came from.”

  In the summer of 1988, Michelle moved back into her parents’ tiny apartment on South Euclid Avenue and began making the daily commute to Sidley & Austin’s offices in the Loop. Within a week she asked to be assigned to the firm’s intellectual property group. Compared with such humdrum subdisciplines as antitrust or contract law, intellectual property (along with entertainment and marketing law) involved representing a wide variety of high-profile clients, from TV production companies, clothing manufacturers, radio stations, and breweries to record producers, advertising agencies, and sports figures.

  As a result, the mood was usually upbeat in the intellectual property corridor, where lawyers read scripts as well as briefs and occasionally lunched with celebrity clients. Michelle, however, picked this area of the law over the others for more practical reasons: since there were only a few lawyers assigned to the intellectual property group, she stood a greater chance of making an impression—and advancing more quickly through the ranks.

  Michelle was, in a word, ambitious. Not merely ambitious but, said Quincy White, her boss at the time, “quite possibly the most ambitious associate I’ve ever seen.” From the outset, she demanded—and got—plum assignments that otherwise would have gone to more senior members of the firm.

  When the firm was hired to handle the legal affairs of a beloved children’s TV character named Barney, Michelle jumped at the chance. For the next year, she hammered out deals with stations that wanted to air the wildly popular show and oversaw the marketing of stuffed toys based on the talkative purple dinosaur and his sidekick, Baby Bop.

  That was not enough for Michelle, however, so once again she complained to her superiors and was handed another plum client—Coors beer. Notwithstanding the fact that the Coors account was considered one of the most interesting, challenging, and of course visible assignments any lawyer at the firm could hope for, Michelle soon grew restless. No job the firm could give her, White later reflected, would satisfy Michelle’s overriding “ambition to change the world.”

  Something was indeed missing from Michelle’s life—something that no job could fill. Still living at home at a time when most of her childhood friends had moved on, Michelle seldom socialized with her coworkers and dated only sporadically. Her job at Sidley & Austin had become her life.

  Meanwhile, the rest of the Robinsons were busy wringing their hands over Michelle’s chances of ever having a serious relationship. “Oh, my god,” Craig told his parents, “my sister’s never getting married, because each guy she meets, she’s going to chew him up, spit him out.”

  Whenever she did go out once or twice with a guy, she wound up, in Craig’s words, “firing him. She’d just fire these guys, one after the other. It was brutal. Some of them were great guys, but they didn’t stand a chance.” Once again, Dad was to blame. Marian had given up telling Michelle to stop measuring the men she dated against her father. “She wouldn’t listen,” Marian said. “She wanted the kind of marriage I had.”

  So now it was up to Craig to step in. “Look, Miche,” Craig said, taking his sister aside after she “fired” yet another prospective mate. “You’re not going to find guys who are going to be perfect, because they didn’t have Dad as a father. So you’ve got to sort of come up with your own framework.”

  “Nope,” Michelle replied matter-of-factly. “I’m not looking for Dad, but I’m not about to settle, either.”

  “But, Miche…”

  “Hey,” she shot back, holding up her hand to silence her brother, “it’s my life. You guys have got to stop worrying about me. The right guy is out there, and I’ll know him when I see him.”

  Hers is the voice I hear inside my head when I make decisions.

  —Barack

  It takes a lot to push his buttons.

  He has incredibly low blood pressure.

  —Michelle

  4

  He must have driven past Michelle’s house a thousand times in his beat-up Honda, without ever knowing it. As soon as he landed there in the summer of 1985, Barack crisscrossed Chicago’s South Side in search of African American pastors willing to band together for the common good.

>   After all, it had been two years since black voters joined together with Latinos and white liberals to send Harold Washington to city hall as Chicago’s first black mayor. Now that Barack had been hired by veteran community organizer Jerry Kellman to bring black churches together as part of his Developing Communities Project (DCP), he had little doubt that he would succeed.

  Barack had been in Chicago just once before, at the age of ten, when his grandmother had taken him and his half sister Maya on a monthlong whirlwind tour of the U.S. mainland. But he knew from carefully studying the works of Martin Luther King Jr. that the South Side of Chicago had been the epicenter of the civil rights movement in the North—the “capital of the African American community,” Obama proclaimed, as well as “the birthplace of community organizing.”

  Chicago was also the home of Saul Alinsky, the leftist firebrand whose 1946 book Reveille for Radicals was widely regarded as the bible of the protest movement. Colorful, outspoken, and often outrageous, Alinsky believed that the only way to effect change was by confronting power—with boycotts, protest marches, sit-ins, and strikes. The agitator emeritus believed in a win-at-all-costs approach in the battle for power, and that required zeroing in with laserlike focus on one’s enemies. Advised Alinsky: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

  But there was also a more pragmatic side to Alinsky’s teachings—one that appealed to the twenty-three-year-old biracial Ivy Leaguer. Alinsky, rightly considered the founder of community organizing, advised activists to immerse themselves in the culture and language of the people they hoped to represent. Toward that end, he urged organizers to learn “the local legends, anecdotes, values, idioms” and to listen carefully to their community’s grievances. It was only by bonding with the poor and disenfranchised on a personal level, Alinsky argued, that community organizers could help them acquire the only thing that counted: power.

  It was a message that had not been lost on a young Wellesley College student named Hillary Rodham back in the late 1960s. For her trenchant analysis of Alinsky and Chicago’s Community Action Program, part of the larger War on Poverty, the future Mrs. Bill Clinton received an A+.

  Hillary so impressed Alinsky that he offered her a chance to work with him after she graduated from Wellesley, but she turned him down. Instead, choosing the same road Barack would choose years later, Hillary applied to several of the country’s top law schools. Accepted by both Harvard and Yale law schools, Hillary chose Yale. “The only way to make a real difference,” Hillary told Alinsky when he accused her of selling out, “is to acquire power.”

  Jerry Kellman, the battle-scarred community organizer who had lured Barack to Chicago, was another of Alinsky’s loyal disciples. In bringing Chicago’s black churches under the banner of the Developing Communities Project, Barack would willingly employ Alinsky’s methods. “Once I found an issue people cared about,” he reasoned, “I could take them into action. With enough actions, I could start to build power.”

  That Chicago’s black churches were a repository of political power was undeniable. But, as Barack soon discovered, the ministers who wielded that power were loath to share it with anyone. Those pastors who deigned to meet with him at all dismissed him as a naive young do-gooder. The response at the grassroots level was no less discouraging. As the old Chicago saying went, “We don’t want nobody that nobody sent.”

  “Well,” Barack’s fellow organizer Mike Kruglik said, “Barack was somebody that nobody sent.”

  Discouraged but not defeated, Barack persevered. Operating out of a cramped office at Holy Rosary Church at 113th Street and Calumet Avenue, he followed Jerry Kellman’s explicit instructions to contact thirty people every day. Older black women, understandably, were the first to warm to the skinny young man with the cherubic looks. They called him “Baby Face.”

  “He was a skinny young man,” Jerry Kellman said. “And in some of the communities he worked, there were a lot of single moms, single grandmothers, and they wanted to take him in and feed him and fatten him up. He was an eligible young man. They wanted to introduce him to their daughters and to their granddaughters.” According to Kellman, Barack “found a home” in Chicago and was “very comfortable there.”

  Three women in particular—Linda Randle, Yvonne Lloyd, and Loretta Augustin-Herron—became nothing less than surrogate mothers to Barack. “He was so young—most of us had children who were older than he was,” Augustin-Herron remembered. “It’s funny to look back now and realize that even then, when he was just twenty-three, nobody challenged him. We accepted him immediately because he had a way of making you know right off the bat that he really cared. He listened—really listened—which was something none of us were used to.”

  Barack pushed his surrogate moms and other community activists to stand up for themselves against landlords and bureaucrats. Toward that end, he would put them through their paces with hours of role-playing so that they could state their case to the appropriate authorities. “We’d say, “Barack, why don’t you do this?’” Yvonne Lloyd recalled, “and he’d say, ‘No, this is your community, not mine. You all need to do this for yourselves, not for me.’” When tempers ran high, as they often did, it was Barack who “told everyone to calm down and stay focused,” Linda Randle said. “We were all strong women and pretty high-strung anyway. He’d say, ‘All you’re raising is your blood pressure. We’ll take the high road.’ He was always cool, nothing ever seemed to bother him.”

  Yet Randle, Augustin-Herron, Lloyd, and the others worried about him. “He worked ten, twelve hours a day,” Augustin-Herron said. “He never ate anything except salads. We told him he was too skinny, and he’d just laugh.”

  They were also concerned that he did not seem to have time for anything except work and his cat, Max. “He worked day and night,” Lloyd said. “I don’t know if he ever slept.” When he bought a used yellow Datsun 210 hatchback from a Glenview, Illinois, police officer for five hundred dollars, they had even more cause for concern. The Datsun (Barack said it reminded him of an “overripe banana”) was pitted with rust and had a hole in the door that allowed passengers to watch the pavement zipping by.

  “All of us would cram into Barack’s little car,” Lloyd said, “and I’d ask, ‘Why are you drivin’ around in this raggedy thing? When are you going to get a real car?’”

  “Hey,” Barack always answered with a laugh, “it gets me from point A to point B, right?”

  As eager as they might have initially been to set him up with their daughters and the daughters of friends, the church ladies who were such a large part of Barack’s life during this period—he now referred to them as “my other family”—soon realized that he preferred to keep the details of his love life to himself.

  “Barack definitely dated,” Jerry Kellman said. “But he was just too driven to get deeply involved with a woman.” With one exception: For several months, Barack lived with a dark-haired young white woman who would remain a mystery even to his church moms. “They were obviously both very private people when it came to that,” Augustin-Herron said. “They obviously wanted to keep the details of whatever it was they had to themselves.”

  For the most part, over the two and a half years he spent as a community organizer, life for Barack was one mind-numbing meeting after another. Lloyd recalled that he was always jotting thoughts down in an ever-present notebook, ostensibly for the purpose of reporting back to his superiors. He also liked to doodle caricatures—usually of dour-looking officials he would draw laughing. A few of his doodles were less charitable—like the ones that depicted certain pastors or intransigent city officials with pointy heads.

  To be sure, Barack could boast of a few concrete achievements at community organizing during his initial stint in Chicago. The most significant of these was his participation in a very public crusade—actually spearheaded by fellow activist Hazel Johnson—to remove asbestos from Altgeld Gardens, a decaying public housing project that was home to over two thousa
nd people.

  Barack’s main assignment—to bring together the black churches as a single, monolithic force for good—did not go quite so smoothly. “The pastors of these churches were used to running things. They weren’t interested in sharing the power and the glory with anybody else,” Randle said. “You’re talking about some pretty big egos.”

  One of those who first pointed out to Barack the folly of this approach happened to be the South Side’s most flamboyant and influential black clergyman, the Reverend Jeremiah Alvesta Wright. The son of a Philadelphia preacher, Wright had been arrested for grand theft auto at the age of fifteen, enlisted in the marines, and then served as a navy corpsman specializing in cardiopulmonary care. In his office, Wright displayed a photo of himself in scrubs, tending to President Lyndon Johnson following LBJ’s throat surgery in 1966.

  Wright went on to earn a master’s degree in sacred music from Howard University. Through a combination of bombast and showmanship, the dapper, goatee-sporting minister built Trinity United Church of Christ at Ninety-fifth and Parnell Streets into an ecclesiastical powerhouse with over eight thousand congregants.

  Wright was one of the first church leaders Barack had approached in his efforts to build a coalition of black churches. The brawny minister, who had placed a Free Africa sign on the church lawn to protest apartheid, had listened patiently as Barack made his case.

  “Oh, that sounds good, Barack, real good,” Wright said, his voice tinged with sarcasm. “But you don’t know Chicago, do you?”