Barack and Michelle

by Christopher Andersen

  “Abner, do you know so-and-so?” Barack would ask.

  “Yes.”

  “How well do you know him? I’d really like to meet him.”

  “He wasn’t obnoxious about it—not at all,” Mikva recalled. “But he certainly wasn’t shy when it came to asking for help, either.”

  Mikva, like so many others Barack approached for help, obliged by setting up a series of lunches. It was also during Project Vote that Barack met Bettylu Saltzman, daughter of Chicago shopping mall magnate and former Commerce Secretary Philip M. Klutznick. Saltzman not only touted the nervy political neophyte to her rich and powerful friends as a future President, but she introduced him to a man who had been chief political consultant to both Harold Washington and the incumbent Mayor Daley: David Axelrod.

  Again, it was Barack who sought out the meeting with Axelrod. “I think he was strategic in his choice of friends and mentors,” Chicago Alderman Toni Preckwinkle said. “I think he saw the positions he held as stepping-stones to other things.”

  At the same time, Barack had his mind on another important project that was in the works: his upcoming wedding. Michelle had seen the white half of his family during their Christmas trip to Hawaii, and he was grateful that she had gotten the chance to know Gramps before he passed away. But for Michelle to really understand the man she was going to marry, Barack felt it was important that she meet the people who had shaped his father’s life.

  In late spring of 1992, Barack took Michelle to meet the other half of his far-flung family—the half brothers, half sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, stepmothers, and step-grandmother who lived in Kenya. As they strolled the dirt roads of Alego, the small village on the shores of Lake Victoria where Barack’s father grew up, Michelle recalled, she was “deeply moved. Not just to be in Africa, but to be where Barack’s family lived for generations…it was overwhelming, really.”

  In Alego, Michelle proved an instant hit with Barack’s relatives. With her statuesque bearing, athletic gait, ebony skin, and ready smile, she fit in easily. It also helped that she made a serious effort to learn Luo, the local dialect. Barack’s step-grandmother Sarah, who spoke only a few words of English and communicated with him through an interpreter, was especially impressed with his choice of fiancée. “She is very beautiful,” Granny said, “and obviously she has very good taste in men.”

  When Michelle asked to see what life was like for urban Kenyans, Barack and his half sister Auma took Michelle to Nairobi’s Kibera district, the largest slum in Africa. This firsthand look at the desperate conditions Africa’s poor city dwellers live in left Michelle shaken. “I cried,” the usually hard-nosed Michelle confessed. “You couldn’t look at those children and not cry.”

  Before they left, Michelle and Barack invited all of the Obamas to their wedding in early October. A few would actually make it, including Auma, who boasted a PhD in German literature from the University of Heidelberg, and Auma’s brother Malik. Also known as Abongo or Roy, Malik had a special assignment—to serve as best man.

  On October 3, 1992—a Saturday—some 130 invited guests filled the pews of Trinity United Church of Christ to see Michelle LaVaughn Robinson wed Barack Hussein Obama. The best man wore a traditional black African gown trimmed in white and a matching cap. The ring bearers, Michelle’s five- and six-year-old cousins, wore little tuxedos with African cloth caps that matched their cummerbunds.

  The rest of the men, including the groom, Michelle’s uncles, Barack’s old friends from Punahou Academy in Hawaii, and his roommates at Occidental, wore white tie.

  In keeping with Barack’s Kenyan roots and the Afrocentric bent of Trinity United, several in attendance—including the Reverend Jeremiah Wright—joined Malik Abongo in wearing traditional African dress. But most, including Valerie Jarrett, Jesse Jackson, and the scores of public officials, corporate lawyers, business leaders, activists, academics, and community organizers who made up their rapidly expanding world, opted for the usual business suits and dressy outfits. Barack’s mother, Ann, who had flown in from Hawaii with his sister Maya, wore a knee-length black skirt and an orange silk blouse; Marian Robinson, a floor-length black skirt and a sequined black-and-white top.

  Michelle’s maid of honor, Santita Jackson, sang as the bride walked down the aisle in a classic off-the-shoulder white silk sleeveless gown worn with long white gloves. As the afternoon light streamed through the cavernous sanctuary’s stained glass windows, Wright pronounced Michelle and Barack man and wife. Barack would later observe that, despite the emotion of the moment, only his half sister Auma cried. Still, Valerie Jarrett recalled, “it was magical. They were clearly madly in love with each other.”

  The reception was held at the South Shore Cultural Center, a majestic pink-walled, tile-roofed Mediterranean-style villa that had once been an exclusive whites-only country club. For their first official dance as man and wife, they chose Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable.” Santita Jackson also sang one of Michelle’s favorite Stevie Wonder ballads, “You and I.”

  The Obama nuptials stood out from other weddings, Michelle’s friend and law firm colleague Kelly Jo MacArthur observed, “because people understood that putting the two of them together was like putting hydrogen and oxygen together to create this unbelievable life force. Everybody knew it. We understood that together they were going to be so much more than they would have been individually.”

  Barack’s church mothers—Loretta Augustin-Herron, Yvonne Lloyd, and Linda Randle—were also among the guests. “We were overjoyed with the choice he made,” said Augustin-Herron, who admitted that Barack’s “other family” had been wondering aloud if anyone would be good enough for their surrogate son. “Michelle was smart, attractive, fun—right up there on the same level with Barack. And she was so genuinely nice—none of that phony stuff. When she talked to you, she made you feel like she really cared—just like Barack. She had class.”

  “It was obvious to all of us that Michelle was the right woman for our Barack,” Augustin-Herron said. “She is obviously his equal, and he needs to have an equal as his partner in life—someone he can talk to on the same level.” It was also obvious, Randle added, that “Michelle can stand on her own two feet. The last thing Barack needed was a woman who was high maintenance.”

  As they met the wedding party on the receiving line, all three women were impressed by Ann Soetoro. “Barack’s mother was so warm and kind,” Lloyd recalled. “You could really see there was a lot of her in him. I told her she did a good job of raising her son, and she just nodded and smiled. Of course, later I discovered that Barack’s grandmother was probably an even bigger influence on his life.”

  The couple honeymooned in California, driving up the narrow Pacific Coast Highway that winds along the coastline from Santa Barbara past Big Sur and Carmel on the way to San Francisco. They made the trip with the windows rolled down—despite Michelle’s objections, he was smoking more than ever—and whenever he flicked his ashes out the window, Michelle was quick to admonish him. “Hey,” she said, anxiously looking at the next blind bend in the road, “both hands on the wheel, buddy.”

  When she wasn’t gasping at the oncoming trucks that seemed to come perilously close to running them off the road and into the sea, Michelle marveled at the endless vistas of blue-green water and waves crashing on the rocks below. “They reveled,” Maya said, waxing poetic, “in the majesty of the cliffs and the water.”

  Back home in Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Barack Obama moved in with Michelle’s mom while they looked for a place of their own. Six months later, they paid $277,500 for a two-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of a three-story condominium complex on South Eastview Park, near the lakefront and not far from the University of Chicago campus in Hyde Park.

  The newlyweds gave several small dinner parties at their spacious new condo, which was decorated with paintings, photographs, and artifacts from their travels to Kenya and Hawaii. Over simple but elegant dishes like shrimp over pasta, the Obamas would en
tertain no more than two or three couples. “Michelle was charming, gracious, very professional,” Mikva recalled of these evenings. “It was obvious she was not the kind of woman who would be happy just baking cookies. And of course she was beautiful—strikingly so.”

  At the time, there were those among Barack’s ever-widening circle of wealthy and influential friends who regarded him as something of a bore. “Because Barack was so smart,” said their friend Cindy Moelis, a Stanford Law School graduate whose father was president of New York’s Equity Leasing Corporation and a breeder of Thoroughbred racehorses. Moelis, who met Michelle when both women were working at city hall, was married to fellow Stanford Law School alum Robert Rivkin, the Harvard-educated son of John F. Kennedy’s Ambassador to Luxembourg.

  “Barack was pretty serious when we were in our thirties,” Moelis said. So somber, in fact, that she used to poke him and say, “Come on, let’s talk about the last movie you saw.”

  According to those closest to him at the time, Barack was preoccupied with one thing: following in Harold Washington’s footsteps. Once the November 1992 election was over and both the Clinton and Moseley Braun campaigns thanked Obama’s Project Vote campaign for making the difference in Illinois, Barack decided to join a law firm. He was thinking of taking up the offer of Judson Miner, the lawyer who had earlier been told that he was 647th in line. But first he wanted Michelle’s opinion. She told him that, if he wanted to join a legal outfit that was the diametric opposite of Sidley Austin, he could not do better than the small civil rights firm of Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland.

  Unlike Michelle, who had appeared in court during her legal aid days at Harvard and occasionally written briefs in the civil cases handled by Sidley Austin, Barack would never be involved in a trial or write a brief on his own. Over the nine years he was associated with the firm—which primarily handled discrimination cases and worked with developers of affordable housing projects—Barack worked exclusively as part of a team of lawyers, apparently never taking the lead.

  For Barack, who had also signed on as a visiting lecturer at the University of Chicago School of Law, there was far more to Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland than the practice of law. His name was Judson Miner. One of the chief legal minds behind the rise of Harold Washington, Miner served as corporation counsel—the city’s chief lawyer—during Washington’s tenure in city hall.

  Whatever contacts Barack hadn’t already made through Michelle, Valerie Jarrett, and the Sidley Austin partners, he now secured through Miner. “If Judson doesn’t know somebody,” Barack cracked, “then I guess I don’t have to know them, either.”

  It was just as well. Michelle was again beginning to feel restless in her job as Chicago’s economic development coordinator—a position that, since it catered directly to the business community, was beginning to resemble her old job at Sidley Austin.

  Barack had his own reasons for wanting Michelle out of city hall. With his sights still set on becoming Mayor—or perhaps a U.S. Senator—both he and Michelle worried that her continuing association with the Daley regime might tarnish the reputation he sought to build as a young reformer. “You don’t have to think evil of Obama or city hall,” said veteran Chicago activist Quentin Young, “to realize that it could be a liability to a person who is politically on the rise.”

  As it happened, Public Allies was looking for a new executive director, and Barack, who still sat on the board, proposed Michelle for the job. Before she took it, he resigned from the board to avoid any appearance of impropriety.

  “It sounded risky and just out there,” she said. “But for some reason it just spoke to me. This was the first time I said, ‘This is what I say I care about. Right here. And I will have to run it.’”

  As head of the nonprofit foundation that was eventually wrapped into the federal AmeriCorps program, Michelle proved to be even more aggressive—and effective—than her husband had been. Going after millions in contributions from Chicago’s long-established philanthropies, she now found herself introduced to a whole new set of movers and shakers—the old money crowd that wielded tremendous power and influence while managing to stay discreetly below the radar.

  Once again, Michelle asserted herself as a tough taskmaster, upbraiding staff members who were not performing to her standards and, in some cases, telling them it was time to “move on.” Even those who were higher up in the chain of command were intimidated by Michelle. “Even though she worked for me,” said Vanessa Kirsch, who actually picked Michelle for the job, “I definitely felt like I worked for her.”

  Through Public Allies, Michelle took scores of young activists under her wing. “Each ally was placed with a not-for-profit, about twenty to thirty a year,” said one of those protégés, Craig Huffman. “When you think of the number of people who got to know who Michelle was, and by extension Barack, that’s a whole generation from all over Chicago.”

  Not all of the Obamas’ time was spent tending to their widening network of sociopolitical contacts. In fact, Barack was faced with another, more pressing deadline. The autobiography he was supposed to turn in to Simon & Schuster in 1991 was now two years overdue, and Barack remained hopelessly blocked.

  When the publisher finally canceled the project in 1993, Barack worried that they would come after him for the $75,000 he had already been paid—half the agreed-to $150,000 advance. But when Barack informed them that he had spent the money—and that both he and his wife were still chipping away at their massive student loan debt—the publisher agreed not to press the issue.

  With only a partial manuscript in hand, Barack turned again to his gravel-voiced agent, Jane Dystel, who promptly landed him yet another deal—this time for $40,000—with the Times Books division of Random House. For months Barack worked until the early-morning hours in what Michelle dubbed “the Hole,” his tiny, cluttered office tucked discreetly behind their kitchen.

  “The Book,” as he now referred to it, was more than just a vanity project. Drowning in debt, the Obamas needed a massive infusion of capital if they were to stay afloat financially. “Let’s face it,” she told him point-blank, “one of us is going to have to get a job with a big corporate firm and make some real money or we’re going to have to move back in with Mom.”

  But Barack had a plan. He was convinced that the book he was working on would become a bestseller, and he was already thinking of a sequel.

  “It was like Jack and his magic beans,” she later recalled of those conversations. “He’s like, ‘Look, honey, I’m going to write these books and we’ll be fine,’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, sure, right.’”

  She had good reason to be skeptical. When he sat down to write what would become Dreams from My Father, Barack had filled up scores of legal pads with notes, all in his overarching left-handed scrawl. Beyond jotting down his thoughts and observations over the years, however, he had not really done much writing. At the Harvard Law Review, while he was responsible for selecting which articles were sufficiently scholarly to make the cut, his only Review article was an unsigned defense of legalized abortion.

  Lamentably, Barack had tried his hand at verse. Back during his undergraduate years at Occidental, he published two poems in Feast, a student literary journal. Later, in a masterpiece of understatement, he would call these literary efforts “very bad.” From Barack’s poem titled “Underground”:

  Under water grottos, caverns

  Filled with apes

  That eat figs.

  Stepping on the figs

  That the apes

  Eat, they crunch.

  In another poem, titled “Pop”—the only other known, signed example of his writing up until this point—Barack seemed to be writing about drinking and getting high with an older friend:

  Under my seat, I pull out the

  Mirror I’ve been saving; I’m laughing,

  Laughing loud, the blood rushing from his face

  To mine, as he grows small,

  A spot in my brain, something
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  That may be squeezed out, like a

  Watermelon seed between

  Two fingers.

  Desperate to finish the book, Barack and Michelle took a leave of absence from their jobs and decamped to the Indonesian island of Bali so that, as his sister Maya put it, he could “find a peaceful sanctuary, where there were no phones, to work on the book.” When he returned in early 1994, Barack burrowed even deeper into the Hole in a last-gasp effort to finish it.

  Two months later, with a September 1994 deadline looming, Barack was still stymied. It was around this time that, at Michelle’s urging, he sought advice from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers. Michelle had known Ayers’s wife, Bernadine Dohrn, at Sidley Austin, where Dohrn worked as a paralegal between 1984 and 1988. Dohrn’s father-in-law, former Commonwealth Edison CEO Thomas Ayers, just happened to be one of the firm’s most important clients.

  Barack got to know Bill Ayers’s father and his brother, John, when all three served on the Leadership Council of the Chicago Public Education Fund. Another mutual friend of Ayers and Barack was Jean Rudd, whose nonprofit Woods Fund had provided Jerry Kellman with the money he needed to hire Barack as an organizer back in 1985.

  Neither Michelle nor Barack seemed particularly troubled to discover that William Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn had been two of the 1960s’ most infamous radicals—leaders of the Weather Underground terrorist group that set off thirty bombs in the 1960s and 1970s.