The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  "Everyone recognized that this late-twentieth-century exercise in conservative statecraft would not have enjoyed such success had the Democratic Party, and the progressives in general, not abdicated so completely their responsibility to build and to defend a national alternative," Unger said. "Many worried, however, that it would be hard to undo this defeat and supply the alternative without the deus ex machina of a crisis of dimensions resembling that of the Depression of the nineteen-thirties."

  Unger, who later served in the Brazilian government of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, disputed the idea, proposed by some classmates, that Obama was put off by the abstruse theoretical nature of the course. "Obama shared in the more philosophical part of the discussion as vigorously as he did in the more context-oriented part," he said by e-mail from Sao Paulo. "The impression you report, of impatience with speculative exploration, is false. It does justice neither to him nor to me to represent these conversations under the lens of the trope of philistine activist against starry-eyed theoretician. He was always interested in ideas, big and small."

  Unger continued to communicate sporadically with Obama by "e-mail and BlackBerry correspondence" over the years, keeping in touch through the Presidential campaign, but he added, "At no time can I say I became his friend." He avoided inquiries from the press for "a simple reason":

  I am a leftist, and, by conviction as well as by temperament, a revolutionary.... Any association of mine with Barack Obama in the course of the campaign could do only harm.

  Unger said that, as a student and afterward, Obama shared with other gifted Americans "a very strong sense of the limits that American politics and political culture impose on what can be said and done, and ultimately on what can be felt and thought." That sense of caution crimps political debate and diminishes the capacity for political boldness: "Obama is probably smarter than Franklin Roosevelt was but lacks the full thrust of Roosevelt's providential self-confidence." Unger also offered an analysis of Obama's personality and "subjectivity":

  Obama's manner in dealing with other people and acting in the world fully exemplifies the cheerful impersonal friendliness--the middle distance--that marks American sociability. (Now allow me to speak as a critic. Remember Madame de Stael's meetings that deprive us of solitude without affording us company? Or Schopenhauer's porcupines, who shift restlessly from getting cold at a distance to prickling one another at close quarters, until they settle into some acceptable compromise position?) The cheerful impersonal friendliness serves to mask recesses of loneliness and secretiveness in the American character, and no less with Obama than with anyone else. He is enigmatic--and seemed so as much then as now--in a characteristically American way.

  Moreover, he excelled at the style of sociability that is most prized in the American professional and business class and serves as the supreme object of education in the top prep schools: how to cooperate with your peers by casting on them a spell of charismatic seduction, which you nevertheless disguise under a veneer of self-depreciation and informality. Obama did not master this style in prep school, but he became a virtuoso at it nevertheless, as the condition of preferment in American society that it is. As often happens, the outsider turned out to be better at it than the vast majority of the insiders.

  Together with the meritocratic educational achievements, the mastery of the preferred social style turns Obama into what is, in a real sense, the first American elite President--that is the first who talks and acts as a member of the American elite--since John Kennedy....

  Obama's mixed race, his apparent and assumed blackness, his non-elite class origins and lack of inherited money, his Third-World childhood experiences--all this creates the distance of the outsider, while the achieved elite character makes the distance seem less threatening.

  By the time Obama appeared on campus, there had also appeared an increasing number of conservative and libertarian scholars centered on the Federalist Society, a many-branched group that had begun in 1982 at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Chicago. The main tenet of the Federalists was, in their terms, judicial restraint; critics argued that the Federalist vision of restraint was a form of conservative activism. The founders included such conservative jurists as Robert Bork. (On the current Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito are Federalists.) Some Federalists believe in the Law-and-Economics approach, a theoretical marriage of Milton Friedman's free-market economics and judicial minimalism, and they look to the pioneering work not only of Smith and Pareto but of the economist Ronald Coase, and such jurists as Frank Easterbrook and Richard Posner. At Harvard Law School, where an A.C.L.U. liberal is considered a centrist, the advent of the Federalists--a vocal minority--heightened the political tension on campus.

  "Posner wasn't at Harvard, of course, but Barack was extremely interested in what he was saying and writing, too," Mack said. "Some students on the left just wouldn't read about the 'law and economics' school on general principle. That wasn't Barack."

  The combination of C.L.S. radicals, A.C.L.U. liberals, and Federalist conservatives made for constant fights at the law school, particularly over tenure decisions. In the fall of 1987, one of the younger Critical Legal Studies adherents, Clare Dalton, a specialist in family law and the wife of the economist Robert Reich, was denied tenure, despite overwhelming support from the outside review committee. When Derrick Bell, the first black professor to gain a place on the Harvard Law School faculty, staged a sit-in supporting Dalton, Robert Clark, a leading professor at the law school, cracked, "This is a university, not a lunch counter in the Deep South." He eventually apologized for the remark, but the tone of the conflict was set.

  "By the time Barack got to campus, in 1988, all the talk and the debates were shifting to race," said Elena Kagan, who became dean of the law school and then, in 2009, was named Obama's Solicitor General. In part as a result of affirmative action, ten to twelve per cent of the student body at the law school was African-American, and the racial atmosphere, as at so many other institutions, was marked by a general undertone of resentment and disquiet. At meals, blacks sat mainly with blacks, whites with whites. Some of Obama's classmates told me that, as students in their early and mid-twenties, they were beginning to imagine their professional lives in the "white world"--in law firms, corporations, public service--and the process of finding a sense of confidence and identity and balance was not easy at Harvard Law.

  "You had the sense that there were a lot of white students thinking to themselves about us, Do you, the black students, really belong here?" Earl Martin Phalen, a friend of Obama's, said. "So many of us carried a chip around, angrily insisting, 'We're as smart as you. There are a lot more people that got in as legacies than from affirmative action.'"

  The law-school class, with more than five hundred students, is divided into four sections; Obama took all his first-year classes in Section Three. His professors included a pro-life feminist and eventual Bush Administration ambassador to the Holy See, Mary Ann Glendon, for property; a human-rights specialist, Henry Steiner, for torts; Richard Parker, a constitutional scholar, for criminal law; a civil-rights specialist, David Shapiro, for civil procedure; and a visiting scholar from Northwestern, Ian Macneil, for contracts. "We felt as if we had the hardest, worst, most inflexible section," one of Obama's section mates, David Dante Troutt, complained. "We felt like a control group in the presence of folks receiving the revolutionary new drug."

  To Mack, Obama seemed far more mature and centered than his classmates; he seemed "wise in the ways of the world," not merely because he was older by a few years but also because of his serene manner, his intellectual engagement, and his evident desire to enter public service rather than serve a corporate firm. Mack, and other first-year friends, like Cassandra Butts, knew little about Obama's complicated background at first. From his appearance, they could hardly guess at his complicated background. Obama looked African-American and identified himself as such.

  "We were friends fairly immediately and then over the next
two years, we saw each other all the time," Mack said. "He wasn't interested in a lot of the things young people are interested in. He was much more serious from the beginning. He didn't go to many big parties. We'd go over to his house for drinks and dinner. That was more his idea of a good, social night than going to the sort of big party that twenty-somethings go to. I went to a lot of parties and I don't think I ever saw Barack at one of them. But he could talk about sports, about politics, public policy, foreign relations. He wanted to talk about everything. And he was very much interested in Martin Luther King and the civil-rights movement. He was versed in King's ideas and rhetoric. He had really thought a lot about it on a level most students had not. Even then there was that quote of King's that he always loved and recited: 'The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.' That appealed to Barack in the sense that things were going to take a long time to accomplish and that you need to have faith, long-term faith."

  Obama lived much as he had in New York and Chicago. He rented a seven-hundred-dollar-a-month basement apartment in Somerville, a working-class town near Cambridge, and he outfitted it with secondhand furniture. He played basketball with friends at the gym, ate his meals at a sandwich shop in Harvard Square, and, like most of his classmates, spent nearly all of his time studying. The novelist Scott Turow, who became a friend and an early political supporter in Chicago, came to the law school in 1975; the first-year grind he describes in his memoir One L--nerve-racked, sleep-deprived, tobacco-driven--rang true when Obama read it. Obama, who carved out a regular space at the law library and put in long study days, told Turow that they had shared much the same experience of Harvard. Beyond the "boot camp" details of the book, Turow writes of the way the school encourages a steely ambition in its students, the "almost inescapable temptation to scramble, despite obstacles and ugliness and bruises, for what sometimes looks to all of us to be the very top of the tallest heap."

  Almost from the start, Obama attracted attention at Harvard for the confidence of his bearing and his way of absorbing and synthesizing the arguments of others in a way that made even the most strident opponent feel understood. Once, at a debate over affirmative action with the staff of the Harvard Law Review, Obama spoke as if he were threading together the various arguments in the room, weighing their relative strengths, never judging or dismissing a point of view. "If anybody had walked by, they would have assumed he was a professor," Thomas J. Perrelli, a friend of Obama's who went on to work in his Justice Department, said. "He was leading the discussion, but he wasn't trying to impose his own perspective on it. He was much more mediating."

  Obama's earnest, consensus-seeking style became a source of joking among his friends. A group would go together to the movies and tease Obama by imitating his solicitude: "Do you want salt on your popcorn? Do you even want popcorn?"

  In a political atmosphere where bitter arguments were commonplace, Obama's open-mindedness seemed strange even to his friends. "In law school, we had a seminar together and Charles Fried, who is very conservative, was one of our speakers," Cassandra Butts, who first met Obama at the financial-aid office, recalled. The issue of the Second Amendment came up, and Fried was expressing the view of a Second Amendment absolutist. "One of our classmates was in favor of gun control--he'd come from an urban environment where guns were a big issue," Butts continued. "And, while Barack agreed with our classmate, he was much more willing to hear Fried out. He was very moved by the fact that Fried grew up in the Soviet bloc"--in Czechoslovakia--"where they didn't have those freedoms. After the class, our classmate was still challenging Fried and Barack was just not as passionate and I didn't understand that."

  Obama also impressed his teachers with his capacity to be heard without showing off. Ian Macneil, the visiting contracts professor from Northwestern, said that even in his large class Obama stood out. "I was always a little too impatient in class, so if students went off the track I would interrupt before I should. When I did that with Barack, he said, 'Let me finish.' He wasn't rude, just firm."

  Although Obama was popular, he was not voracious in his social networking. Obama always needed time to himself. "Barack never absorbed energy from being with a crowd of random people," David Goldberg, a classmate who is now a civil-rights lawyer in New York, said. "Barack needs some kind of context. He doesn't have the ability to walk into any situation and be attracted to people. He needs a little momentum, some kind of challenge."

  As Obama's friends learned more about his background, they began to draw conclusions about his distinctive bearing and his way of dealing with other people, intellectually and personally. "Barack is the interpreter," Cassandra Butts said. "To be a good interpreter means you need fluency in two languages, as well as cultural fluency on both sides. When you go to a foreign country and you don't know the language, your interpreter is someone you rely on, because he is your compass. Barack has been that for me from the time I met him. He has been the ultimate interpreter in his political life. As a biracial person, he has had to come to an understanding of the two worlds he's lived in: his identification as an African-American man and the white world of his mother and his grandparents. Living in those worlds, he functions as an interpreter to others. He has seen people in both worlds at their most intimate moments, when their humanity and imperfections shone through. His role is as an interpreter, in explaining one side to the other."

  As much as anyone can, Obama had chosen his racial identity, pursued it. By the time he got to Harvard, the issue was long settled. Without hesitation, he became active in the Black Law Students Association. "He's operating outside the precincts of black America," Randall Kennedy, an African-American professor at the law school, said. "He is growing up in Hawaii, for godssakes. And then when he comes to the mainland and tries to find his way, he has to work at it. He does have to go find it. He is not socialized like other people. I can't help thinking that he might have thought it a burden at the time, but maybe some of the things he missed out on were a benefit to miss out on. For one thing, the learned responses, the learned mantras and slogans, the learned resentments of that time that one got in college--he talks in his book how useful it was to get along easily with white people. You remember that at the time for some black people getting along with white people was seen not as a virtue but as a vice."

  Both Obama and Butts signed up for Kennedy's course, an elective called "Race, Racism and American Law." Kennedy had caused some controversy, writing critically in The New Republic and elsewhere about some aspects of affirmative action. At the first class, Obama and Butts watched as a predictable debate unfolded between black students who objected to Kennedy's critique and students on the right, almost all white, who embraced it. Obama feared a semester-long shout-fest. He dropped the course.

  For many black students, the most welcoming faculty member was Charles Ogletree, a civil-rights lawyer and scholar who was born into a family of farmers in California's Central Valley. Ogletree, known to his friends and students as Tree, joined the Harvard faculty in 1985 and was counsel to Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas's Senate confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court. At Harvard, he led "the Saturday School," a freewheeling seminar at which he presented outside speakers, staged debates, coached first-year students in their coursework and the art of taking law exams, and, in general, led discussions on subjects ranging from the political controversy of the day to the past achievements and future goals of the civil-rights movement to special topics in legal history. Ogletree brought in a survivor of the Japanese internment camps during the Second World War; Jesse Jackson to talk about the political scene; and the boxing impresario Don King, who, in his youth in Ohio, had been involved as an unnamed numbers runner in Mapp v. Ohio, an important search-and-seizure case in the early sixties. The students at the Saturday School were generally African-American, but everyone was welcome. Sometimes, Ogletree had upperclassmen in the law school act out the arguments of a controversial case. "Barack came to a lot of those sessions," Ogletree
recalled. "It gave everyone an extra opportunity to learn about the law, listen to faculty work out their ideas and also prepare for classes, get ready to take an exam. Barack was interested in the vitality of the debate about power and the law and the underrepresentation of certain groups.

  "Black identity was not given to him--he sought it," Ogletree went on. "It was clear at the Harvard Law School that most of his closest buddies were African-American males, and he shared with them a whole range of experiences, from talking trash on the basketball court to talking about the issues of law and politics. He was well read. He had taken the time in college to read the books of the black-studies movement. He had certainly read Richard Wright and James Baldwin, but he also knew all about the generation of Thurgood Marshall and all those trained at historically black colleges. He came well-steeped in the history of the civil-rights movement and wanted to know even more."

  * * *

  The professor who became Obama's intellectual mentor at Harvard was a mainstream liberal--the constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe. A civil libertarian, Tribe is, by almost any standard, among the most brilliant scholars of constitutional law of his, or any other, generation, a dazzling mind engaged in issues of political significance.

  The year before Obama began law school, Tribe, at the invitation of the Senate Judiciary Committee and its chairman, Joseph Biden, of Delaware, testified against Ronald Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. So fluid and commanding was Tribe in oral argument that Biden decided to make him his cornerstone witness. In three hours of testimony, Tribe attacked Bork's judicial writings, insisting that he was "out of the mainstream" on issues of privacy, reproductive rights, school selection, and many other issues. As a liberal, Tribe believes that the Constitution is a living document that requires constant interpretation in light of an expanding vision of human dignity; he argues that "original intent," the mantra of conservatives like Bork, is a cover for resisting evolutionary social change. Tribe was, in many ways, the intellectual backbone of the effort to spurn Bork. No one questioned his credentials; he had won nine of twelve cases that he argued before the Supreme Court. The Senate voted, 58-42, to reject Bork, and Reagan ended up nominating Anthony Kennedy instead. (Although Kennedy hardly proved a liberal, he has been far less conservative in his votes and written opinions than Bork would have been.)