Rising Star

by David Garrow

  The overall assessment of Barack’s eight-issue year was that he did “a very able job as president” and put out “a very good volume of the Review,” as even Erwin Griswold agreed. Almost everything in the editorial pipeline for the March, April, and May issues came to Barack in the early weeks of 1991, starting with the lead article for March, an analysis of the constitutional implications of government funding of both religious schools and abortions, written by repeat author Michael W. McConnell. Articles Office cochair David Goldberg had championed the McConnell manuscript, notwithstanding some liberal discontent, and the primary editor for it, conservative 3L grade-on Darin McAtee, thought it was a “fantastic” piece of work. The Articles Office believed it could be reduced in length, but editor Kevin Downey quickly realized that “McConnell was not going to accept the article being reduced in size.”

  McAtee knew Obama had batted away political objections to McConnell’s argument, and Downey was aware that Barack was investing more time in McConnell than in any other author except David Wilkins. Downey believed Barack “had a very vigorous back and forth” with McConnell that “was somewhat exasperating,” but McConnell came away impressed with what “an usually good editor” Obama was. “We had the opportunity of chatting quite a bit,” McConnell recalled, and Barack “helped me to make it a better article from the point of view of what I wanted it to be. He had some very intelligent organizational suggestions and was just very impressive.”

  Student authors found that Obama’s editing touch remained light. Marisa Chun, whose note was running in the March issue, thought Barack was “a really good editor” who “did not overedit.” Scott Siff remembered that Obama “did a lot of work” and made a lot of written comments on his note on international law for April. When they met to discuss it, Barack warned Scott that “you’ve gone so far left you’re not going to be credible.” Instead, “the better way to do it is to take a much more balanced approach, present the ideas on both sides . . . and let the readers get there” on their own. “I thought it was a brilliant perspective,” Scott recalled. The May issue contained the five-part Developments in the Law package on international environmental law, and Obama met with all five 2L authors. Trent Norris’s contribution covered international organizations, and Barack “didn’t seem particularly interested in the topic,” Norris recalled. “I expected more searching comments from him than I got.” His manuscript “was loaded with acronyms,” and Barack asked, “Is there a way to make this look a little more like English?”52

  The law school had a two-day break before spring classes began on January 30, and Barack flew to Atlanta to take part in the taping of a two-hour African American Summit for the ’90s, which Turner Broadcasting would telecast in late February. Other participants on the ten-person panel included NAACP executive director Benjamin Hooks, former congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, and Southern Christian Leadership Conference president Rev. Joseph E. Lowery. Obama waited until the entire first hour had passed before speaking up.

  “Whenever we blame society for everything, or blame white racism for everything, then inevitably we’re giving away our own power to some extent, the possibility that we can take responsibility and take action. At the same time, we can’t let the federal government off the hook or the judiciary system off the hook. I mean the fact of the matter is we can take individual responsibility but still mobilize as communities to make the kinds of structural changes that are going to be necessary.”

  Eight minutes later, Barack stated that “someone who is using drugs is using drugs because they don’t have hope. They don’t have opportunities, they don’t have jobs, education, some sense of meaning in terms of what they’re going to be doing with their lives. It’s not enough . . . to tell these people to say ‘No’ to drugs, and what you need to be able to do is to tell them what to say ‘Yes’ to, what to affirm.” A moment later, Barack said, “it’s going to be impossible, I think, over the long term to deal with some of these issues until we do tie them to issues of employment, issues of education.” He worried that the Supreme Court might mandate “formally color blind” government policies, thereby ending affirmative action and “sending a signal . . . that enrollment of blacks in universities, colleges is less important, less of a priority for America.”

  More than fifteen minutes passed before Barack responded to another panelist’s mention of self-esteem. “Buying in black stores is important, shopping in black areas is important, at some point we all have to make a commitment to live in these black areas. I think the fact of the matter is, and it’s already been mentioned, that middle-class folks have a tendency to move out and . . . that means we take the money out, means we shop in suburban malls, etc., etc., and young people my age, I know, have a great deal of difficulty committing themselves to moving back into these communities and dealing with a whole range of these issues, whether it be health, education, economic empowerment, etc. So one thing I think we do need to think about is geographically how are we living and are we making a commitment to these inner cities. That’s a hard thing to do. It’s a hard thing for us to experiment with sending our kids to public schools as opposed to taking them out and putting them in private schools, but at some point when we talk about leadership, that’s something that we are going to have to think about. That’s something that we are going to have to do.”

  Barack quickly continued. “Right now what I hear around this table is the need for some sort of comprehensive political strategy or economic strategy that does get beyond the either/or approach. Two specifics that I keep on hearing is we still tend to be caught up in a division between either it’s-all-government’s-fault or it’s-our-fault. Either blame the victim or blame white racism. It’s clear that in our discussion both of those things are going to have to operate if we’re going to come up with a strategy.”

  Barack paused only briefly before making his final contribution to the broadcast. “The second thing is, this whole issue of integration versus segregation to me seems to be a nonstarter. It’s clear that we can develop productive communities on our own. It is also clear to me that we’ve got a complex, interdependent economy, a complex, interdependent society that on the one hand we want to make sure that young black males have a lot of pride and see role models in the schools, at the same time they’re going to have to learn how to read and write and do the same mathematics that a Japanese child does or a white child does if they want to succeed economically. So if we can start getting beyond some of these divisions and look at the possibilities of crafting pragmatic, practical strategies that are focusing on what’s going to make it work and less about whether it fits into one ideological mold or another, I think that would be the most important thing on all these issues.”

  Barack’s Summit comments, especially his final remarks, were a clear distillation of everything he and Rob Fisher had been debating since the beginning of their 1L year. “Crafting pragmatic, practical strategies” while ignoring ideological molds was the essence of their sweeping book outline, with echoes of John McKnight—“productive communities”—melding with David Rosenberg’s economic perspective and lessons Barack had learned in Roseland’s troubled high schools. While in Atlanta, Obama also taped a sixty-second Black History Month tribute to pioneering civil rights lawyer Charles Hamilton Houston. After cataloging Houston’s achievements, he ended the brief TV spot by saying, “I’m Barack Obama, remembering Charles Hamilton Houston and celebrating a great moment in our history.”

  Back in Cambridge for the beginning of spring classes, Barack, Rob, Cassandra Butts, and Mark Kozlowski all attended the first session of Randall Kennedy’s Race, Racism, and American Law. “Barack entered the class with skepticism about whether it was a good idea,” Cassandra explained, because Kennedy’s relentless independent-mindedness had made him something of a campus lightning rod, as Derrick Bell’s public denigration of him a year earlier had so egregiously highlighted. Barack feared that the course “was going to be kind of a slugfest, and it t
ook him one class to have that confirmed,” Cassandra recalled. “You’re just not going to get anything out of this,” Barack told her. “They’re not going to give Randy an opportunity to really explore the issues and have an interesting nuanced discussion.” Rob and Mark stayed in the course, but Cassandra soon followed Barack in dropping it.

  On Sunday, February 3, Obama’s successor would be elected and his term as president would end. In preparation, the 2L editors discussed adopting a new set of bylaws to govern how decisions were made and “reduce the level of tension at body meetings that results from a free-flow, ad hoc form of procedure,” as everyone had experienced. Just like a year earlier, a candidates’ forum preceded the daylong election, and when Bruce Spiva asked Barack for pointers about running, his reply was “not to take yourself too seriously. ‘Don’t worry about it. Have a beer before you go to sleep.’” Carol Platt, one of several conservatives running, remembered that at the forum “the big debate question was, ‘What would you do about affirmative action?’” Almost as many editors stood for president as had a year earlier, and with Obama presiding and Tom Perrelli tallying the paper ballots, Sunday’s first round of voting reduced the number of contenders to eight. A second round halved that number as the conservatives sought to muster their votes behind the strongest candidates. One possibility, Patrick Philbin, was acerbically criticized by liberals, and in the end, the final choice came down to Bruce Spiva versus David Ellen, whom fellow 2Ls viewed as “very scholarly, very soft spoken, very intellectual.” The question of whether the Review’s president should be a leader or an editor “was definitely part of the debate,” and when Ellen triumphed, more than a few 2Ls believed that “people are reacting to what was lacking in Barack.”

  Following tradition, Ellen and Spiva waited at Gannett House before Obama and David Goldberg came to get them. Then Goldberg escorted Spiva back to the full body, followed by Obama with David Ellen. Like Goldberg had, Spiva preferred to take on Articles, but when Ellen said he needed diversity at the top of the masthead, Spiva reluctantly agreed to become Treasurer. Carol Platt came in first for managing editor and rebuffed Ellen’s request that she instead become an EE. On Monday, Obama had lunch with Ellen and told him not to take the Review too seriously and to keep things in perspective. On Tuesday, when the formal transition took place, exiting ME Tom Perrelli told his fellow 3Ls they needed to continue working on the Review, and before week’s end, Obama wrote to Erwin Griswold and introduced Ellen as “a fine young man with an extraordinary combination of intellectual depth and attention to detail.” Barack also thanked Griswold for his letters, which he said had “made a difficult job easier.”53

  With this time-consuming and often draining role behind him, Barack sat down for a long interview with the Harvard Law Record. “It’s been a good year. I’m glad I did it,” Obama said, while acknowledging that “at times it has been a bumpy road.” Regarding his own election, “I think that I was part of a trend. I don’t think that I was, necessarily, so exceptional. I happened to be there when the Law Review was already going through some changes,” as with Crystal Nix and Peter Yu’s roles on the previous masthead. “The elections this year prove that the trend continues. I’m heartened by how well minorities did in this year’s elections, and how well women did,” with Spiva, Platt, and a black female EE, especially given the small number of 2L women. “The elections show that women and minorities are afforded a great deal of respect, that their voices are listened to, that people recognize that they can do a good job, and that they are deserving of leadership positions.” Barack was echoing BLSA’s efforts three years earlier, and also his rebuttal of Jim Chen’s stigma alarum the previous fall, but he pursued his point further. “Our selection process works,” and “I don’t think there is anybody at the Review,” irrespective of their views on affirmative action, “who would question the fact that the editors this year were top-notch.” Privately, some did, but Barack stressed that “I tend to be very much a pragmatist.”

  Asked if being president had changed him, Barack replied, “Certainly I have changed. It has been a terrific learning experience for me. The sheer volume of work . . . that you have to do forces you to be a better writer” and “forces you to learn actively rather than passively.” Regarding all the press interest, “the publicity has been instructive in that it forced me to articulate publicly things that I had been thinking about for a long time. . . . I like to think that I haven’t become more cautious in my opinions.” But Barack again downplayed the significance of it all, cautioning that “we are students and thus our ambitions for something like the Review, which has a long tradition, tend to be very modest.” He hoped his year had witnessed “a shift in tone” toward “making the Review a little less hierarchical, pulling in a larger group of editors into the decision-making process,” albeit through many hours of angry arguments. He also hoped editors were “taking ourselves a little less seriously,” and volunteered that “I am skeptical of the idea that it is somehow superior to other activities . . . or other student organizations.” He noted that “the Review has a very short institutional memory” and rued “the tremendous time commitments” it required. “I would have liked the luxury of being more strategic about my tenure” and “able to implement some management changes.”

  Lastly, Barack was asked, “where do you see yourself” in five, ten, or twenty years? “Of course, I can’t project twenty years out,” but “I will be spending next year writing a book on issues of race, politics, and race relations in this country. It will be a series of reflections on where we are in terms of race relations . . . drawing on my experiences as an organizer in Chicago, the experiences of my family in Africa, as well as some of the work that I’ve done here at the law school. After that, I will work for three or four years as a lawyer. Eventually, I will return to the public sector, either in government or as an organizer. I’d like to address ways to redevelop inner cities, and how to get corporations to locate in low income areas.”

  The Record also published an oddly misdirected critique of the Review, calling it “a profoundly bland, unimaginative, and conformist magazine” that made it “one of the least stimulating experiences available to the contemporary magazine browser.” An irritated Erwin Griswold wrote to Barack noting that the Record had made two glaring errors in its critique, but he praised Michael McConnell’s article on which Obama had worked as “an interesting and rather innovative analysis.” A few weeks later, Griswold likewise expressed great enthusiasm for the year’s “Devo,” saying he was “much impressed by its breadth and depth.”

  The major challenge at the Review continued to be the revision of The Bluebook. By the time of the presidential transition, Ken Mack and Frank Amanat had made only modest headway, and Mack and his masthead successor, Trent Norris, alerted everyone to the extent of the forthcoming changes. The anger of the departing EEs over the planned modernizations—including authors’ first names and Floyd Abrams’s First Amendment—was so intense that Jim Chen began preparing a rebuttal, which he would publish in The University of Chicago Law Review, the Review’s archrival. Norris described the previous officers’ “failure to recognize the enormous responsibility we bear as publishers of The Bluebook,” especially considering that “the revenues from The Bluebook support everything else we do.” Chen’s resentful critique declared that “interest group appeasement dominated the revision,” but reviews in other top law journals particularly praised the addition of authors’ first names. “In this age of multiple Smiths, Joneses, and Dworkins, first names help,” especially when “there are more than forty law professors named Smith.”

  Perrelli had stressed that 3L editors had to continue working on the Review, but one morning new ME Carol Platt discovered that 3L Monica Harris had taped over her mailbox and appended a note asking Platt to please speak to her before giving her any further work. Both women would remember being “very friendly with each other,” as Harris put it, ever since being fellow undergraduates at
Princeton, but now Platt “tore the tape off from her box” and left Harris a note, giving her a proofread, the easiest possible assignment. Fellow editors knew Harris as “a very big personality” but also as someone who was rarely seen in Gannett House, notwithstanding how she had a note scheduled for publication in April. That Harris was African American exacerbated some editors’ unhappiness, since “she was kind of the poster child for the anti–affirmative action feeling that existed among” conservative editors, one 3L recalled.

  Platt remembered that “I was nervous” after removing Harris’s tape-over, but Review work was “a zero sum game,” and if some editors did not contribute, the ME would be left with more assignments to distribute among everyone else. Before long, Platt saw Harris and 2L editor Nancy McCullough at the Review’s copy machine, not far from the ME and EEs’ office. “‘Why are you giving Monica work?’” Platt recalled McCullough asking. “Monica told you she didn’t want any more assignments.” Platt replied that if so, Harris should stop using the Review’s copy machine, stop eating free bagels, leave Gannett House, and remove the Review from her résumé. At that, Harris followed Platt into the ME’s office and “Monica kind of nudged me,” Platt recalled, telling her, “‘I don’t appreciate you speaking to me like that in public.’” Platt replied that “I wasn’t embarrassed by anything I was saying,” and then Harris “nudged me again and she said, ‘Let’s take this outside,’” Platt remembered.

  While Harris was robust, Carol stood five foot one and barely topped a hundred pounds, but “we go down the stairs, we go outside in front” of Gannett House, and “Monica starts doing the dance of rage . . . and she’s got her finger in my face. ‘You had better take that fucking finger out of my face or I am going to rip it off,’” Platt remembered saying. Harris recalled the confrontation similarly. “I just remember her getting up in my face . . . almost like she was trying to get me to get physical with her. ‘Go ahead. You know you want to hit me,’” Harris remembered Platt saying. From inside Gannett House, both at the first-floor Legal Aid Bureau as well as upstairs, the cry went out: “Oh my god! It’s a catfight at the Law Review!” At the Bureau someone picked up a phone, and as the confrontation continued, “all of a sudden the Harvard police show up,” Platt remembered. “They handled it very nicely. They said, ‘Is there a problem here, ladies?’ Monica was still doing the dance of rage, and I said, ‘Well, yes, officers, actually there is. I am trying to deal with a recalcitrant pool worker.’” That of course meant nothing to the police. Looking back on this years later, Platt wondered, “What planet was I on? That’s what I said.”