Rising Star

by David Garrow

  Peter Yu’s presidency had suggested that intellect, editing prowess, and Bluebook skills were no sure recipe for success. “I think his presidency and his style paved the way for Barack,” Frank Cooper explained. Diane Ring, a 3L, saw it similarly. “They’re looking for something different next time around,” she thought, “someone with more people skills.” Jackie Scott, a 2L, concurred. “You needed someone who wasn’t just that academic person, who could bring the Review together. That was an overriding concern,” and one the conservatives shared. “David was regarded as a very political person, and Barack was not,” conservative quarterback Brad Berenson explained. Liberal 2L Scott Siff agreed that “Barack was perceived as less left than David,” but it was not only the conservatives who shifted decisively to Barack as the clock neared midnight.

  “A lot of the conversations also happened in separate groups,” Frank Cooper explained, and as the evening progressed, both Cooper and Crystal Nix quietly mustered their forces. As an SE, Crystal had been a “kind of friend-mentor” toward nonpolitical 2L Anne Toker, and Toker remembered Nix “coming to talk to me and kind of making the pitch for Barack.” Crystal likewise lobbied 3L Mark Martins. In terms of leadership experience, no editor could trump Martins. Valedictorian of his West Point graduating class, Martins had gone to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar before serving two years as a platoon leader in the 82nd Airborne Division. When Martins had drawn the only pool assignment more loathed than a sub-cite—cleaning Gannett House—classmates laughed when he brought his own vacuum cleaner. But Martins too agreed with Nix’s argument. “We’re not merely trying to pick the best editor, we’re trying to pick the best leader was how I saw it,” and Nix “mentioned the importance of that to me . . . before I voted.”

  Along with Radhika Rao and Micki Chen, Frank Cooper was able to enlist both Dan Bromberg, his former roommate, as well as his present one, Jean Manas, following Manas’s elimination. “Toward the end, you could see it start to swing,” Cooper remembered. “People like Micki and Radhika and Dan, they were absolutely critical in swinging it because you really needed someone who was not African American to create momentum behind the fact that this person could be the right president of the Law Review for everybody on the Law Review.” Tom Perrelli saw it similarly. “What often moved that room was an unexpected person who hadn’t said anything stepping up and saying ‘You know, I really like’” someone of a different political stripe. Daniel Slifkin was audibly British and had arrived at Harvard with advanced standing after earning two First Class Honors undergraduate degrees at Oxford. Hours earlier Slifkin had summarized Tom Perrelli’s work, but during the fall, Slifkin had observed that Obama “was a very exceptional person from the get-go: more mature, more poised, more articulate,” as well as “very smart.” In his distinctive voice, Slifkin now stated the case and declared, “we should make Barack Obama the president of the Law Review.”

  Earlier Amy Kett had been tarred as an opponent of affirmative action, but now she spoke up to say, “I think the obvious choice is Barack.” Not knowing the context, Amy did not understand why Brad Berenson and fellow conservative Adam Charnes were nodding vigorously in approval as she softly declared, “I would love to be represented by Barack.” The African American editors knew the symbolic importance of the approaching vote, but so did editors of every ethnicity. Jorge Ramírez, a 3L, had spent seven years in Cambridge, first as an undergraduate, and among the 3L editors “there was a core group that saw this as an historic opportunity.” Tracy Higgins, a 3L who had known Crystal Nix as a fellow Princeton undergraduate, fully appreciated that “it would be a kind of historic moment for the Law Review.” Pauline Wan agreed. “I think people wanted to elect a black president,” for “that would be a coup for our year.” To her “the personality of the man” loomed far larger than race, because Barack’s “personality is capable of uniting a group of very disparate individuals who all think they’re smarter than everybody else in the room. To be able to do that is a huge talent.” Barbara Schneider, a 3L, agreed that “it was his personality” rather than race or politics that proved decisive, as did 3L Patrick O’Brien. “He had a gravitas and wisdom and maturity about him,” and without question Barack “was a race-transcending guy.”

  Frank Cooper knew that “you had some people who were just torn” between the pair of finalists, but in the end, even David Goldberg’s two most ardent backers voted for Barack. “We bailed on David because we wanted to elect the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. I don’t think it’s that complex a story,” remembered Articles Office cochair Gordon Whitman. “It was a sense that I could be part of history. We knew we were breaking a big barrier, and that we’d be famous for it.” Throughout the day Whitman had been snapping photos to capture the occasion, but “I’ve always felt bad for David.” Andy Schapiro liked both finalists, and “I don’t recall having to choose between Goldy and Barack until late,” he recalled, using David’s nickname. “Goldy was my best friend,” but Schapiro too voted for Obama.

  Dinner had ended hours earlier, and with the day’s cooking complete, the finalists had retreated to the editor’s lounge on the second floor of Gannett House to await the result. David Goldberg remembered that a bottle of vodka was there. “We drank shots of vodka,” with Barack remarking, “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” They were alone except for undergraduate assistant Chad Oldfather, who would remember Peter Yu finally coming up the stairs to ask the two finalists to come with him to Pound Hall. It was now after midnight, and Oldfather left without knowing who had won.

  In the Ropes-Gray Room, the weary electors knew the runner-up would enter the room first, and everyone applauded when David Goldberg entered. Goldberg had been “quite sure” for hours what the outcome would be, and so his weary smile—captured in one of Gordon Whitman’s photos—was entirely heartfelt. Then Goldberg stood aside and Obama entered the room to even greater applause.

  “I remember the look on his face,” Jennifer Borum recalled. “It was like he was in shock.” Ken Mack remembered that he was by the door, “and so I just sort of stepped forward, and Barack stepped forward, and we just spontaneously hugged. We hugged for a very long time.” Mack knew when Goldberg had appeared first that Obama’s victory would be an “immensely powerful symbolic breakthrough” for African Americans at the country’s most famous university, but only during Ken’s embrace did Barack grasp its meaning. “It was a hard hug and it lasted for a while,” he recounted a few days later. “At that point I realized this was not just an individual thing” and “not about me,” or at least “more than just about me. It was about us,” about an African American for the first time attaining the pinnacle post at the world’s top law school. As they hugged, “tears rolled down both of our faces,” Mack remembered, and Gordon Whitman caught the moment in a dimly hued photo as Barack’s two hands grasped the back of Ken’s white shirt.

  It had been “an exhausting, draining day,” 3L Barbara Eyman explained, sixteen hours all told, and “it wasn’t really until after the vote was over that we collectively felt the historic nature of the vote.” Mack understood how “people really got emotional at that moment,” with Christine Lee and the other African American editors erupting in joy. This jubilation was puzzling to any 2Ls who had not been aware that Obama’s election would represent a pathbreaking step. Michael Weinberger “had not realized that this would have any kind of a racial meaning. It’s just a law review.” Only when he saw the African American editors “crying and running and hugging” did Weinberger recognize the moment’s symbolic importance to them. “That just had not been part of my consciousness” when voting for Obama. “I was completely clueless.”27

  Derrick Bell awoke to his ringing telephone. The clock showed 12:50 A.M. It was Crystal Nix, calling to tell the law school’s most outspoken black professor about their victory. “All of us knew that if we pulled it off, it would be big news,” Frank Cooper realized. “It was such a moment of high for every African
American on that campus,” David Hill remembered. Frank Harper explained that everyone felt “a sense of pride and achievement,” that a black student could attain such an eminent position. By the time that Obama finally strolled into Gannett House, well after 12:00 P.M. on Monday afternoon, editorial assistant Susan Higgins had been swamped for hours with press calls. She had arrived that morning wondering “Who’s my new boss?” and was surprised it was Obama because “he was definitely not in the mold of everybody else” who wanted a masthead position as a springboard to appellate and then Supreme Court clerkships. Many editors were bemused as well as elated by the press calls, and joshing began around a cast list for “The Barack Obama Story, a Made-for-TV Movie, Starring Blair Underwood as Barack Obama.”

  One of Monday’s callers was 1989 Law Review member Sheryll Cashin, who was clerking for Judge Abner Mikva, a former Chicago congressman who now sat on the prestigious U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Cashin and Crystal Nix were close friends, and though Nix had not awoken her in the middle of the night, she had called early that morning with the historic news. Cashin in turn told Mikva, who in his ten years on the court had become known as a “feeder” judge, someone whose law clerks often went on to work for Supreme Court justices such as William J. Brennan and Thurgood Marshall. Judicial guidelines prevented formal clerkship offers from being extended until later in the spring, but Mikva was immediately interested in hiring the Review’s first African American president. Cashin knew Obama from the previous year, and the message Mikva asked her to convey was clear. “I was charged with letting him know that if he wanted a clerkship with him, he had it,” she remembered.

  Sometime Monday Cashin reached Obama. “I’m calling you because Judge Mikva’s very interested in you” and “very much would like you to apply” to clerk for him come 1991. Barack’s response was immediate: “I’m flattered, but no thanks—I’m going back to Chicago.” Cashin paused. “I was shocked—this was unheard of,” for especially among Review officers, “nobody didn’t clerk.” Cashin tried to persuade Obama to at least apply, but he was adamant. “Tell the man thank you, but I’m going back to Chicago,” Barack reiterated. “I was just floored,” Sheryll recalled, especially because a clerkship with Mikva virtually guaranteed a subsequent Supreme Court clerkship, and large law firms were known to pay newly minted high court clerks a $35,000 bonus. Cashin remembered that Mikva reacted with “amused surprise” when she recounted the astonishing conversation.

  In Chicago, Michelle Robinson reacted similarly when Barack called her. “You’re not going to clerk for them? You’re kidding me!” and “He’s like ‘No, that’s not why I went to law school. If you’re going to make change, you’re not going to do it as a Supreme Court clerk.’” When Mikva visited Harvard a few weeks later and met Obama, “I teased him about not interviewing with me.” Barack cited his desire to return to Chicago and made it “absolutely” explicit he intended to run for office. Obama mentioned Mikva’s offer to Laurence Tribe, seeking reassurance, and Tribe agreed, but Cashin and Michelle Robinson were far from alone in feeling baffled by his lack of interest in attaining a Supreme Court clerkship.

  Obama spent the balance of Monday giving interviews, and by mid-evening the Associated Press had sent out a story headlined “First Black President of Harvard Law Review Elected” all across the country. Obama told the wire service, “I wouldn’t want people to see my election as a symbol that there aren’t problems out there with the situation of African-Americans in society,” with Roseland high schoolers clearly in mind. “From experience, I know that for every one of me there are a hundred, or thousand, black and minority students who are just as smart and just as talented and never get the opportunity.” He also stressed that his selection “sends a signal out that blacks can excel in competitive situations like scholarship.” Again alluding to his experience in Chicago, Obama added, “I want to get people involved in having a say in how their lives are run. More and more of that needs to be done.” The AP stated that Obama “has not ruled out a future in politics.”

  Tuesday morning Obama’s election made news in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Harvard Crimson, as well as in papers that ran the AP story. The Times’ story showed that Obama was a disciplined interviewee, for his comments echoed what he told the AP. Reporter Fox Butterfield wrote that “Mr. Obama said he planned to spend two or three years in private law practice and then return to Chicago to reenter community work, either in politics or in local organizing.” His quotes in the Globe also tracked his statements to the AP, but he told the Crimson that his election marked “a significant change from the Harvard Law School of the past,” and the paper reported that Obama “plans to continue working in the public sector when he graduates from law school, but is unsure what form that work would take. He said he will consider anything from running for elected office to setting up community service programs.”

  One day late, the Chicago Tribune highlighted the hometown tie. “Over the long run, the way to improve the conditions in the cities and schools—to fight crime and drugs—is to work on the local level,” Obama stated. In an ironic segue, the Trib then quoted Johnnie Owens saying that while at DCP, Obama “honestly evaluated his performance and made up his mind to do better.” The Trib said Obama will “spend a couple of years practicing law after graduation next year and then it’s most likely back to community organizing, maybe politics.” But Obama emphasized that “I’ll definitely be coming back to Chicago,” which he called “a great town” and “an ideal laboratory.”

  In far-off Honolulu, the Star-Bulletin headlined “Ex-Islander Gets Prestigious Harvard Post,” but a conversation a reporter at the newspaper had with Madelyn Dunham, now sixty-seven years old, produced a potpourri of misinformation. Obama Sr. had never been “Kenya’s finance minister,” Barack’s first job in New York was not as “a social worker,” and in Chicago he had not formed “a consulting firm to advise people who wanted to set up small businesses.”

  Two student journalists at the law school’s own Harvard Law Record wrote a lengthy profile, speaking with Rob Fisher, Christine Lee, Cassandra Butts, and Laurence Tribe in addition to Obama, who again repeated almost verbatim what he had said to the AP and then the Times. But for the law school audience, he made other points too. “My election is a positive sign in that it shows people are ready to put in leadership positions black folks who have strong concerns about black issues,” he asserted. “What happens at Harvard really gets magnified,” he knew, “but there is so much more left to do in terms of hiring more minority faculty, in terms of dealing with the disaffection blacks feel in the university, and the need for more diverse career opportunities.”

  Obama also thanked BLSA and a trio of black professors—Derrick Bell, Christopher Edley, and Charles Ogletree—as “ground breakers” who had paved the way for him to walk “through doors other folks broke down,” the same metaphor Vince Eagan had used two weeks earlier. Obama said BLSA and public interest advocates had helped create “an atmosphere that allows a person of my interests and perspectives to be in the mainstream. It means white conservatives can trust me,” and he called for the law school to “start thinking more about its relationship to the larger society and about the kind of commitment the school should make to assure kids like me get in these positions again.” Implicitly citing Chicago, he said that “those interested in public policy have to think about how the private sector can be harnessed to promote urban development.”

  Laurence Tribe told the Record about Obama’s work on both his physics article and his forthcoming book Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes and expressed his hope that Obama would be “a future legal scholar.” The president of BLSA, 3L Tynia Richard, said Obama’s victory was “a momentous event,” and Chris Edley termed it a “milestone.” Christine Lee seemed to be attempting some misdirection by asserting that “race was not a factor” in the election and that “It was not strategized politically.” But 2L editor Frank Am
anat accurately said that “the biggest thing he brings to the Review is his maturity. He’s had a lot of exposure to the outside world.” Most significant, the Record spoke with Rob Fisher, and introduced Rob’s comments about Barack by writing that “those who know him say his charisma and self-confidence are most at home in the political arena.” Rob explained, “I don’t think Barack sees this as a stepping-stone to the academic aspects of the law. But whatever he does, he is extraordinarily committed to making a contribution to the resolution of social problems in this country. There is no possibility that this will send him in a different direction.”

  As the week progressed, multiple journalists prepared Obama profiles and even Time magazine reported on his election. Obama told the Boston Globe he would return to Chicago after graduation because “I have a certain mission to make sure that the gifts I’ve received are plowed back into the community.” The Globe called Johnnie Owens at DCP, who recounted thinking four years earlier that “This guy sounds like he’s president of the country already” when Barack first spoke to him. The Globe also contacted Maya, who had returned to Barnard for her third and final semester there. “He has been like this as long as I can remember,” she said about his seriousness. “I wish I could shed light on exactly what has made him so old at such a young age.”