by David Garrow
“We spent the rest of the summer together,” Barack later wrote, but a mid-July phone call informed him that a letter inviting him to join the Law Review was in the mail. That good news meant he had to be back in Cambridge by August 16 to work on the Review’s first issue. He took several days to ponder his choice. “We had a conversation about whether or not he was going to do Law Review,” fellow summer associate Tom Reed recalled. “‘I’m not sure if I’m going to do it,’” Tom remembered Barack saying. “He was clearly on the fence,” and “there was a moment where he was considering whether that was appropriate for his path.” But finally he told HLR as well as Sidley that he was accepting the offer.
Barack and Michelle kept a very low profile at the law firm, and neither Tom Reed nor Evie Shockley had any idea they were dating. Michelle told only Kelly Jo MacArthur. “When she met Barack, things happened pretty quickly,” Kelly Jo remembered. Michelle recalled years later during a joint interview her memories of “the apartment you were in when we first started dating,” the sublet near Baskin-Robbins. “That was a dump.” But bumping into people they knew seemed inevitable. Jean Rudd of the Woods Fund recounted, “I have a very vivid memory of having lunch on Dearborn Street at an outdoor café there, and Barack and this tall, beautiful woman walk by. And he stopped and introduced us and said that ‘This is my boss.’ . . . We chatted a little while,” and when they left “I remember saying, ‘What a couple.’”17
One late July evening, Michelle invited Barack home for dinner to meet her parents and brother. Craig Robinson, at twenty-seven years old, was two years older than his sister and also had attended Princeton University. As a senior he was Ivy League basketball’s 1983 Player of the Year, and after graduation he had played professional basketball in Europe for several years before returning home. Craig met Janis Hardiman, a 1982 Barnard College graduate, soon after she moved to Chicago in 1983, and by 1987 they were engaged and living together in Hyde Park while Craig took classes toward an M.B.A. degree at the University of Chicago. Janis and Craig married in August 1988, soon after Michelle’s graduation from Harvard Law School. Ever since Michelle’s senior year of high school, Craig had known that his sister was quick to dispose of boyfriends, so he made a point of being at the Robinson family home at 7436 South Euclid Avenue to meet this newest suitor.
Craig and Michelle’s parents, Fraser and Marian Robinson, were, like their children, lifelong residents of Chicago’s South Side. Both high school graduates, they had married in October 1960, but Fraser’s hope of finishing college was dashed by insufficient funds. In January 1964, just a few days before Michelle’s birth, Fraser was hired by the city water department, and Marian became a stay-at-home mom. In 1965 the young family moved from the Parkway Gardens Homes in Woodlawn to the cramped top floor of Marian’s aunt’s home on Euclid Avenue, in solidly middle-class South Shore. Craig and Michelle attended nearby Bryn Mawr Elementary School, where Craig skipped third grade and Michelle skipped second. Separate small bedrooms and a common study area gave them their own modest spaces at home. At work, tending steam boilers, Fraser won two promotions along with salary increases, but an increasingly dark cloud hung silently over the happy young family: at age thirty, Fraser had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, though, as Craig later wrote, “we never had an in-depth discussion at home about the frightening course that MS was known to take.” In time, Fraser needed to use a cane and then crutches to help him walk, but he stuck with his job. “We saw him struggle to get up and go to work,” Michelle recalled. “He didn’t complain—ever. He put his energy into us.”
When Michelle reached ninth grade and was admitted to Whitney Young High School, west of downtown, she spent hours a day riding city buses to and from school. Craig won admission to Princeton in 1979, and his father insisted the family would make the necessary financial sacrifices for Craig to go there rather than accept a full scholarship from some less prestigious institution. Michelle grew up thinking she was smarter than her brother, and although Craig had a difficult freshman year, Michelle resolved that if he could attend Princeton, so could she. Her mother knew that test taking was not her forte, and a high school counselor discouraged her interest in Princeton, but Michelle applied anyway and was admitted. The difference between the South Shore world from which Michelle came and the privileged backgrounds of Princeton’s overwhelmingly white and often wealthy student body was profoundly stark.
“The first time when I set foot in Princeton, when I first got in, I thought ‘There’s no way I can compete with these kids . . . I got in but I’m not supposed to be here,’” Michelle recalled. “I remember being shocked by college students who drove BMWs. I didn’t even know parents who drove BMWs.” In addition, black undergraduates realized that Princeton’s racial climate, even in 1981, left much to be desired. Angela Kennedy, one of Michelle’s closest friends, with whom she spent one summer working as counselors at a girls’ camp in New York’s Catskill Mountains, recalled that “It was a very sexist, segregated place. Things reminded you every single second that you’re black, you’re black, you’re black.”
Michelle thrived in Princeton’s classrooms, and by the beginning of her senior year, she was applying to Harvard Law School. Yet in a reprise of high school, her faculty adviser on her senior thesis downplayed her chances. After initially being wait-listed, in late spring of 1985 she was accepted to Harvard.
Michelle’s college thesis, “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community,” was a powerfully self-revealing document. “My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘Blackness’ than ever before,” Michelle wrote. “I have found that at Princeton . . . I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong.” Growing up in South Shore, neither of her parents had been especially outspoken about race, but Marian Robinson’s father Purnell “Southside” Shields, who died in 1983, “was a very angry man,” Michelle’s mother explained. “I had a father who could be very angry about race,” and Marian had given Craig the middle name Malcolm after the early 1960s’ angriest racial firebrand. Marian was likewise wary of interracial relationships. “I worry about races mixing because of the difficulty,” she confessed years later. “It’s just very hard.”
But Princeton made Michelle understand that “I’m as black as it gets.” In her thesis, she observed that “with Whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be Black first and a student second.” Looking ahead, that left her fearful. “The path I have chosen to follow by attending Princeton will likely lead to my further integration and/or assimilation in a White cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant.” She confessed that “my goals after Princeton are not as clear as before” and she rued how “the University does not often meet the social and academic needs of its Black population.” In addition, “unfortunately there are very few adequate support groups which provide some form of guidance and counsel for Black students having difficulty making the transition from their home environments to Princeton’s environment,” as both Michelle and her brother had. She now knew that Princeton was “infamous for being racially the most conservative of the Ivy League Universities.” And her exposure to some fellow students had taught her something else, something prescient indeed: “a Black individual may be unable to understand or appreciate the Black culture because that individual was not raised in that culture, yet still be able to identify as being a Black person.”
Harvard Law School did not offer a much different experience. Czerny Brasuell, Michelle’s one black female Princeton mentor, recounted Michelle telling her by telephone from Cambridge that “If I could do this over, I’m not sure that I would.” A female classmate told Michelle’s biographer Liza Mundy that Harvard “was not a friendly, happy atmosphere.” But once again Michelle persevered. After her 1L year, she returned to Chicago as a summer associate at the law firm of Chadwell & Kayser, working for female partner J
an Anne Dubin and staying with her parents in the home that her great-aunt had deeded to the Robinsons several years earlier, prior to her own death.
Back at Harvard for her 2L year, Michelle volunteered significant time at the Legal Aid Bureau, located one floor—and many status rungs—below the Harvard Law Review on Gannett House’s ground level. After her 2L year, she was a summer associate at Sidley & Austin’s Chicago office. When Sidley offered her a position once she graduated, Michelle readily accepted. At Harvard, “the plan was you go into a corporate firm. So that’s what I did. And there I was. All of a sudden, I was on this path.”
At graduation, her parents paid for a teasingly congratulatory message in the 1988 Harvard Law School Yearbook: “We knew you would do this fifteen years ago when we could never make you shut up.” That summer, Sidley paid for the bar review class she took alongside a friend of her brother’s, Alan King, but only on May 12, 1989—after taking the Illinois exam a second time—did Michelle become a member of the Illinois Bar. Working in Sidley’s intellectual property group, Michelle yearned for meaningful assignments. Given her Harvard loans, her Sidley salary was attractive, but she had not really intended to be a corporate lawyer. “I hadn’t really thought about how I got there,” she recalled. “It was just sort of what you did.”
Craig Robinson recalled the late July evening when Michelle introduced Barack to her family. “My sister brought him over to my mom and dad’s house. We all met him, had dinner. They left to go to the movie, and my mom and dad and I were talking: ‘Oh, what a nice guy. This is going to be great. Wonder how long he will last?’” Craig thought Barack was “smart, easygoing, good sense of humor,” but given Michelle’s proclivity for discarding boyfriends, Craig remembered thinking, “Too bad he won’t be around for long.” Marian Robinson was also impressed because “He didn’t talk about himself,” but instead drew out the Robinsons about their own lives and interests. “I didn’t know his mother was white for a long time,” Marian recalled. “It didn’t come up.”
Barack’s taste in movies ran to the realistic, and opening that weekend was Leola, the story of a bright seventeen-year-old African American Chicago girl whose desire to attend college was endangered when she became pregnant. Filmmaker Ruby Oliver was a fifty-year-old former day care operator, and seven weeks after they saw it, Barack talked about the ninety-five-minute movie—later retitled Love Your Mama—while addressing the real-life challenges confronted by black youths. Michelle and Barack continued to see each other almost every day, and when they went out, Michelle usually paid. “He had no money; he was really broke,” she remembered, plus “his wardrobe was kind of cruddy.” Barack’s Occidental roommate Paul Carpenter was visiting Chicago that August, and he heard about Michelle when the two old friends and Paul’s wife Beth had dinner one evening. Another night, Craig and his wife Janis dropped off Michelle at Barack’s sublet in Hyde Park, and Janis and Barack recognized each other from their time at Columbia. “He came out of his apartment to get Michelle, then he and I both said, ‘Oh my gosh, I remember you,’” Janis recounted.
Before Barack’s return to Cambridge, Michelle told Craig, “I really like this guy” and made a request. She had heard her father and Craig say that “you can tell a lot about a personality on the court,” something Craig had learned from Pete Carril, his college coach at Princeton. Michelle knew that Craig played basketball regularly at courts around Hyde Park, and he remembers her asking: “I want you to take him to play, to see what type of guy he is when he’s not around me.” Craig agreed to take on this task, but he recalled, “I was nervous because I had already met Barack a few times and liked him a lot.”
Craig quickly scheduled a meet-up, and they played “a hard five-on-five” for more than an hour. Craig’s nervousness quickly fell away because he could see that Barack was “very team oriented, very unselfish,” and “was aggressive without being a jerk.” Craig was happy he could “report back to my sister that this guy is first rate,” and Michelle was pleased. “It was good to hear directly from my brother that he was solid, and he was real, and he was confident, confident but not arrogant, and a team player.” Craig saw only one huge flaw in Barack’s skill set, but it was not relevant to Michelle’s question. “Barack is a left-handed player who can only go to his left.”
Before Obama headed back to Cambridge in mid-August, he knew that this new, two-month-old relationship with Michelle Robinson was perhaps on a par with his now-truncated, three-year-old involvement with Sheila. For Barack, the differences were huge. Sheila was also the biracial offspring of international parents; she had lived in Paris, spoke French and now Korean, and was comfortable around the globe—just like Australian-born, Indonesian-reared diplomat’s daughter Genevieve Cook before her. Michelle Robinson was a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, but she was a 100 percent product of Chicago’s African American South Side, just like so many of the women and men who had revolutionized Barack’s understanding of himself during his transformative years in Roseland.
Barack’s prior relationships had been with women who, like himself through 1985, were citizens of the world as much as they were of any particular country or city. Before Princeton, Michelle Robinson had spent one week each summer with her family at Dukes Happy Holiday Resort, an African American forest lodge in White Cloud, Michigan, forty miles north of Grand Rapids. But if Barack truly believed that his destiny entailed what he thought, he knew full well the value of having roots in one place and having that place be essential to your journey. And who more than Michelle Robinson and her family could personify the strong, deep roots of black Chicago?
Although Michelle would not know that Barack had shared his deeply private sense of destiny first with Sheila and then with Lena, before he left for Cambridge, Barack told Michelle about his belief about his future role. “He sincerely felt, from day one that I’ve known him, that he has an obligation,” Michelle explained, “because he has the talent, he has the passion and he has been blessed.”18
The Harvard Law Review, founded in 1887, was in 1989 the oldest and most prestigious legal publication in the United States. Edited entirely by students—beginning with thirty-eight from the rising 2L class, supplemented each successive summer by several top-GPA 3L “grade-ons” for an annual total of about forty—the Review published eight hefty issues a year—November through June—with the law students contributing twenty to forty or more hours of work weekly, aided by a trio of female office staffers and a quintet of part-time undergraduate work-study students. Beyond the law students, there was an oversight board of two professors, the dean, and an alumnus, but they played only a nominal role. In addition, playing an obtrusive role in the Review’s life was eighty-five-year-old eminence grise Erwin N. Griswold, the law school’s dean from 1946 to 1967 (and himself the Review’s top officer—president—in 1927–28), who critiqued every issue and was available to hector the student editors.
The mid-August return to Cambridge served two long traditions. One was to initiate the new 2L editors into the sometimes-complex internal workings of the Review. The masthead—the president, treasurer, managing editor, supervising editors (SEs), and executive editors (EEs)—oversaw the work of five “offices”: Articles, which reviewed scores of long manuscripts submitted by law professors nationwide and chose a dozen or so per year for publication; Notes, which selected and edited substantive analyses written by the HLR editors themselves; Book Reviews and Commentaries, which assigned and handled shorter pieces; “Devo,” or Developments in the Law, which prepared a major team-written study of some cutting-edge topic for publication in each year’s May issue; and Supreme Court, which oversaw the annual November issue and its several dozen student-written synopses of significant cases decided during the prior term of the U.S. Supreme Court. The November issue also contained the Review’s two top-status faculty contributions: the foreword, written every year since 1951 by an emerging star chosen by the editors, and a major case comment authored by an eminen
t academic, a feature added in 1985.
In HLR’s very elaborate editing system, overseen by the managing editor, student-written work moved from the offices to the SEs and then the EEs; faculty pieces went directly from the offices to the EEs. Everything also went through a “P-read,” in which the Review’s president recommended editorial changes. Each fall and winter “the 2Ls are the labor, the 3Ls are the management,” 2L editor Brad Berenson recounted, until a new masthead for the upcoming year was chosen from among the 2Ls early in February.
The second reason for the pre-semester start was that the November issue had to go to the printer by mid-October. The 2Ls needed an intensive refresher course in Bluebook legal citation style, followed by an introduction to two other common tasks: sub-citing, in which the accuracy of every quotation and footnoted reference in each piece was confirmed by checking the original source, and roto-pool, in which every faculty-submitted manuscript was read and evaluated by several editors before full consideration by the Articles Office.
Most 2Ls spent their first HLR semester in “the pool,” where almost every weekday morning a pink slip of paper from managing editor Scott Collins would appear in their pigeonhole mailbox in the editors’ lounge on the second floor of Gannett House, telling them what their work assignment was. Editors were enticed there each morning by a spread of free muffins and bagels. “My chocolate chip muffin was the mainstay of my morning,” 3L editor Diane Ring recalled. Thanks to the hefty income the Review received from sales of The Bluebook, free pastries seemed like “a very interesting strategy to make sure you got all those second-years on the doorstep every morning getting their assignment, doing the work,” Ring explained. Patrick O’Brien, also a 3L, remembered that “a lot of my law review involvement had to do with free bagels and cream cheese. It would get me there every morning for a free breakfast.” There also were free evening snacks for those who worked late, and as a result, Berenson recalled, Gannett House became “a gathering place,” “almost like a fraternity house for the editors.” Marisa Chun, a 2L, explained that the editors’ lounge and its television served as “our living room.” With everyone’s classes in nearby buildings, popping in and out was a constant feature of HLR life. For some editors, Gannett House became the center of their daily lives, while for others, especially those who were already married, the Review was more like a demanding part-time job.
