Barack and Michelle

by Christopher Andersen

  Barack looked puzzled. “You are a minister,” he said. “Why are you sounding so skeptical?”

  “Man, these preachers in Chicago,” Wright told him. “You are not going to organize us. That’s not going to happen.”

  “But why—?”

  “Barack,” Wright interrupted, “no, no, no. Not going to happen.”

  They were not the words Barack had wanted to hear, but in time he came to appreciate Wright’s candor. So much so that, when it came time to determine which church would be appropriate for him to join—a process that involved Barack actually interviewing each pastor—he ultimately chose Trinity United. There was an added advantage to joining that particular church: it sat just outside the boundaries of Barack’s carefully circumscribed organizing district. “Trinity was as close as it could be to the area Barack was operating in without actually being in it,” said Alvin Love, pastor of Lilydale First Baptist Church and one of the local clergymen who worked closely with Barack. “If he joined my church or any of the others he was working with, it would look like he was playing favorites. He got around that problem by joining Trinity.”

  Not that Barack had ever been much of a churchgoer. He had inherited a distinctly laid-back attitude toward religion from his parents and his grandparents, and although he had sampled both the Christian and Muslim faiths as a child, he considered himself something of an agnostic by the time he arrived in Chicago.

  Now that he had bonded with his fellow African Americans in the City of Big Shoulders, he realized that something was missing. Those wonderful, warm grandmothers and mothers notwithstanding, he still felt emotionally isolated, a person apart. He could never fully share in the black experience, he realized, without belonging to a church.

  “Early on,” a confidant later said, Barack “was in search of his identity as an African American and, more importantly, as an African American man.” Jeremiah Wright “was instrumental in helping him understand the black experience in America.”

  But Trinity United wasn’t just any African American church. It was the church of Chicago’s black elite. When Oprah Winfrey arrived in Chicago from Baltimore in 1984, joining Trinity was a way for her to connect with the established movers and shakers in Chicago’s black community.

  What they got was a heavy dose of Afrocentrist, black liberation theology. Often clad in a colorful dashiki, Wright devoted much of his time at the pulpit to railing against whites in general and the U.S. government in particular. With Ronald Reagan in the White House, Barack often heard Wright blame Reagan’s America for many, if not most, of the world’s ills. “A nation that will keep people in slavery for two hundred and forty-four years will exploit poor people generally,” Wright said, adding that “all of America’s wealth today could not adequately compensate us for centuries of exploitation and humiliation.”

  Less than a year before Wright met Barack, the reverend had accompanied his friend Louis Farrakhan, controversial head of the Nation of Islam, to visit Libyan strong man Muammar Gadhafi. Trinity United gave Farrakhan, a virulent anti-Semite who called Judaism a “gutter religion,” praised Hitler as “a very great man,” and described white people as “potential humans,” a lifetime achievement “Empowerment Award” for his “commitment to truth, education, and leadership.”

  In addition to praising Farrakhan in his sermons, Wright denounced his own countrymen as “war criminals,” described America’s military as “some demonic destructive suction tube,” and proclaimed that the United States had “committed more war crimes almost than any other nation in the world and we won’t stop because of our pride, our arrogance as a nation.” To Wright, America was simply “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”

  Wright, said Chicago journalist Salim Muwakkil, “had the reputation of a militant guy who provided kind of a vicarious militance for Chicago’s black elites. So they could get a dose of militance on Sunday and go back home and feel pretty good about doing their part for the black movement.”

  Barack was intrigued by Wright’s message of black empowerment; the pastor’s rantings against the “white power” structure in Washington and the state of Israel—not to mention his defense of Communists in Nicaragua and the Castro regime in Cuba—were met by a chorus of amens every week, and fellow churchgoers remember that Barack chimed in with the rest.

  Wright’s politically charged sermons weren’t the only thing that distinguished him from his fellow black clergymen. While most African American pastors regarded homosexuality as a sin, Wright was an ardent supporter of gay rights.

  Trinity United’s policy of inclusion undoubtedly appealed to Barack, as did Wright’s passionate take on the black experience in America. But just as important was the caliber of people who flocked to Trinity United each Sunday. The congregation included doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, sports figures, and recording stars. None shone brighter than Oprah. Although she would apparently not recall it, Oprah first met the fresh-faced community organizer when he walked up to her after services and introduced himself as a big fan. “Oprah was already a big, big deal,” one church member recalled. “Barack couldn’t take his eyes off her. I think that’s when it clicked, you know, like ‘this is the place where I gotta be!’”

  Chicago City Alderman Toni Preckwinkle agreed. “Not only does it have one of the largest African American congregations in the city,” Preckwinkle said, “but there are a lot of influential people among the parishioners. It’s certainly a good place for a young politician looking to make social connections.” But Preckwinkle believed that Wright was the deciding factor in Barack’s decision to join Trinity United. “Jeremiah Wright is a powerful speaker and a very charismatic individual.” Barack, she believed, “could not have helped but be impressed by him.”

  Jeremiah Wright was not the only black leader Barack idolized. Mayor Harold Washington had become a bona fide hero to the black citizens of Chicago, and when he died of a massive coronary in November of 1987, they were devastated. Barack was no exception. Depressed and discouraged by his limited success as a community organizer, Barack set his sights on a specific goal: to become the next black mayor of Chicago.

  Barack surveyed the political scene and noticed that Washington—and for that matter most elected officials—had one thing he did not: a law degree. “I’m not going to accomplish anything significant,” he told Wright, “unless I get a law degree.”

  Aiming for the top, Barack enlisted the help of several influential figures to get him into Harvard Law School. One of his more colorful Chicago associates was Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour, a radical Muslim who had been a mentor of Black Panther Party founders Bobby Seale and Huey Newton. At al-Mansour’s request, Percy Sutton, the respected New York political figure who had once been Malcolm X’s lawyer, wrote a letter of recommendation on behalf of Barack. So did Northwestern University professor John McKnight, another disciple of Saul Alinsky, who had been impressed by Barack’s work in the community.

  In February of 1988, Barack received notice of his acceptance to Harvard Law. Before he left, he returned to Trinity United to hear Rev. Wright give yet another sermon—one that, he would later say, changed his life.

  Wright spoke of a painting titled Hope, which depicts a harpist sitting on a mountaintop. On closer examination, Wright continued, you could “see that the woman is bruised and bloodied, dressed in tattered rags, the harp reduced to a single frayed string.” In the valley below, “everywhere are the ravages of famine, the drumbeat of war, a world groaning under strife and deprivation.”

  Although years later Barack would claim not to have been aware of Wright’s more incendiary comments, the reverend used this sermon—Barack’s favorite—to denounce the bombing of Hiroshima as genocide, attack the callousness of U.S. government leaders, and proclaim that “white folks’ greed runs a world in need.” Still, the overriding message of the sermon was one of hope—or, to be precise, the “audacity” of hope.

  “Hope! The harpist,” Wright conti
nued, “is looking upwards, a few faint notes floating upwards towards the heavens. She dares to hope…. She has the audacity…to make music…and praise God…on the one string she has left!…The audacity of hope! The audacity of hope.”

  The sermon, which also drew parallels between American blacks emerging from slavery and the Jews being led out of Egypt, reduced Barack to tears. “Those stories—of survival and freedom, and hope—became our story, my story,” he later recalled. “The blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world.”

  At another Sunday-morning service, Wright would baptize Barack. As moving as Wright’s “Audacity of Hope” sermon had been, Barack would later concede that his baptism was a calculated decision—a matter “of choice and not an epiphany.” The doubts he had about religion “did not magically disappear.” By formally joining Trinity United and accepting Wright as his spiritual mentor, Barack embraced a tradition of faith that had sustained the black community through slavery and segregation. He was also signaling to Chicago’s African American community that he intended to return and be a part of it.

  But first he would have to relocate to Boston and earn that all-important Ivy League law degree. In this new phase of his life, there was no place for the young woman he had been living with. “It was the one time when Barack seemed to be really stressed,” Loretta Augustin-Herron said. “He broke it off because he didn’t think the situation was fair to her—he didn’t want her to put her life on hold for him, which she had offered to do. But Barack was pretty upset about leaving—it seemed to me that he obviously cared for her—and he seemed to be asking if it was the right thing to do.”

  Offering what she described as “words of motherly advice,” Augustin-Herron told him, “Look, if you need to go to Harvard, then go. If she puts her life on hold for you, then the day will come when she will resent you. And if you put your life on hold for her, then the day will come when you resent her. So you’re doing the right thing.”

  Before starting classes at Harvard, Barack decided to see a bit of that larger world. The year before, Lolo Soetoro, the Indonesian stepfather he had once been so close to, had died of a liver ailment at the age of fifty-one. Like Barack’s biological father, Lolo had been disappointed by life and sought to mask that disappointment with alcohol. This latest death in Barack’s far-flung family prompted him to once again turn outward, away from America, in search of his identity.

  First, he spent three weeks in Europe before deciding it wasn’t really where he wanted to be. The maternal side of his family might have been firmly rooted in the soil of England and Scotland, but that was of little consequence to someone the world saw as black. “It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful,” Barack said. “It just wasn’t mine.”

  Kenya, however, was Barack’s. His subsequent five-weeklong pilgrimage to his father’s homeland would be a transforming experience for Barack. Not only would he meet many of his Kenyan relatives (including at least five brothers, two sisters, a step-grandmother, and assorted uncles, aunts, cousins, and stepmothers), but he would also finally confront the bitter truth about his father.

  None of this came quickly. When he first set foot on African soil, Barack expected to experience a soul-jarring sense of “homecoming”—an instant and visceral connection with the land of his ancestors. Instead, the grinding poverty he witnessed as he made his way to his ancestral village of Nyang’oma Kogelo—first by all-night train and then via an overcrowded matatu ( jitney) with bald tires—left him feeling “exhausted and numb.”

  Gradually, as family members welcomed the young American into their lives and answered many of the lingering questions about his father that had haunted him since childhood, Barack would begin to experience the same stirrings of self-realization that many of his friends had talked about after they visited Africa for the first time. It was a gradual process, one that by necessity would require a “span of weeks or months,” he would later write, during which time “you could experience…the freedom of believing your hair grows as it’s supposed to grow and that your rump sways the way a rump is supposed to sway…. Here the world was black, and so you were just you.” Coming on the heels of his Chicago interlude, this voyage of self-discovery to Africa would at long last enable Barack to reconcile the two halves of his divided inheritance.

  Barack stood out from the crowd the moment he set foot in Harvard Square—and not just because he was the son of a midwestern white woman and an African man. Barack was, at twenty-seven, five years older than most of his fellow first-year law students. He had also been raised in Hawaii and Indonesia, attended college in California and New York, and worked as a community organizer in one of Chicago’s toughest neighborhoods. As had been the case at Occidental and Columbia, he seemed to possess a kind of quiet confidence and maturity—“suave and debonair” were the words one female classmate chose to describe him—that impressed students and faculty members alike.

  Michelle Robinson had graduated just a few months before Barack arrived at Harvard, and the atmosphere was just as tense. “There was,” recalled Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, “a very rich stew of issues there to greet him.” At the law school, black students continued to press for more minority representation on the faculty, and one professor, Derrick Bell, quit in protest.

  Barack stood on the law school steps before a lunchtime crowd to publicly laud Bell for his courage—and kidded the professor about how much he was appreciated for his “good looks and easy charm.” He also joined the Black Law Students Association, where he called upon his own experiences as an activist in Chicago in urging his fellow African Americans on campus to commit to giving something back to the less fortunate in their communities after they graduated. “Everybody says they’re going to give back,” Barack observed, “but sometimes there’s a mighty chasm between the saying and the doing.”

  For the most part, however, Harvard Law was a repeat of Barack’s near-monastic experience at Columbia years earlier. Between hastily consumed meals at the C’est Bon sandwich shop in Harvard Square, he hunkered down in the poorly lit law library, a serious, solitary figure poring over case law and statutes well into the night.

  Larry Tribe, one of Harvard’s best-known constitutional scholars, was so impressed with Barack that he took him on as his research assistant. “He had a maturity, a sort of levelheadedness that was not common for people of his, or for that matter, any age,” Tribe recalled. “He actually thought carefully before he said anything, and when he spoke, he spoke in complete paragraphs. For the first time in all my forty years in this profession, I hired him on the spot.”

  For a paper Tribe was writing titled “The Curvature of Constitutional Space,” Barack researched and then analyzed Einstein’s theory of relativity, the concept of curved space, and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. He also helped with the research on two of Tribe’s books—On Reading the Constitution and Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes.

  “Barack didn’t come to an issue with a set of prepackaged ideas. He was entirely open to new approaches, fresh ways of looking at things. Back then, when he was just a first-year law student, I didn’t hesitate to tell people that he was amazing—the most all-around impressive student I’d seen in decades.”

  Tribe wasn’t alone. Michelle’s former adviser, Professor Charles Ogletree, marveled at how the first-year student quickly emerged as “a moderating influence on the campus by being mature, very much open to a variety of perspectives, but trusted by everyone.” Martha Minow, whose father, Newton Minow, had famously described television as a “vast wasteland” while heading the Federal Communications Commission during the Kennedy era, was another of Barack’s professors. She considered him to be flat-out “brilliant—I don’t think I’ve ever had a student quite like him.”

  But it was at the prestigious Harvard Law Review—which Michelle Robinson h
ad eschewed in favor of joining Harvard’s legal aid office—that Barack would ultimately make his mark. In addition to the racial storms that rocked the university as a whole and the law school in particular, an ideological battle raged on the Law Review between liberals and conservatives. The political environment was “borderline toxic,” said Bradford Berenson, one of Obama’s seventy-nine fellow Law Review editors and a member of the conservative Federalist Society. “We stopped short of physical violence, but I remember plenty of raised voices.”

  In fact, shouting matches were common at the Law Review offices, which were housed on the upper floors of Gannett House, a white-columned Greek Revival building that was the oldest structure on campus. (As if to underscore its less lofty status, the legal aid bureau where Michelle had toiled was located in the building’s basement.) Berenson, who would go on to work on the Supreme Court and at the Bush White House, described the politics on the Law Review as “the bitterest [he’d] ever seen in terms of it getting personal and nasty.” Christine Spurell, one of the black writers on the Law Review and an outspoken foe of the Federalists, agreed: “People did a lot of talking and a lot of fighting. By the end, it’s like one big, unhappy family.”

  Yet somehow Barack remained above the fray, in part by making himself equally accessible to blacks and whites, liberals and conservatives alike. Although he never wavered in his liberal beliefs—the only article he actually wrote for the publication, for example, was a spirited defense of abortion—Barack carefully considered the views of the conservative minority, rather than dismissing them outright.

  He was also able to bridge the racial divide on the Law Review. “The black kids were all sitting together,” Spurell said. “Barack was the one who was truly able to move between the different groups and have credibility with all of them.”

  Having spent his entire life walking the fine lines between races, cultures, religions, and classes, it seemed only natural for Barack to assume the role of mediator and peacemaker. But when he actually made friends with several of the conservatives on the Law Review, his fellow blacks were less than amused.