The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  The masthead positions on the Law Review are filled by second-year students, who compete for them. The top position is president; there are also Supreme Court co-chairs, a treasurer, a managing editor, a few executive editors, two notes editors, and three supervising editors. Any one of those positions is an enormous boost in the race for jobs at the best law firms, judges' chambers, and corporate offices.

  Obama's first year on the Law Review was typical: excruciating detail work and meetings, relieved only by the necessity of going to classes and keeping up with coursework. What spare time he had he spent playing basketball or hanging around the editors' lounge at Gannett House. The lounge, Mack recalled, is "the place where impressions and assessments quickly took root among a group of very ambitious people."

  The political debates at Gannett House were even more furious than elsewhere on campus. Radicals argued with liberals, liberals argued with the conservative Federalists; as one editor put it, "Everyone was screaming at everyone else." Brad Berenson, a classmate of Obama's and a member of the Federalist Society who went on to work for the Bush Administration, said, "I've worked in Washington for twenty years--in the White House, in the Supreme Court--and the most bitter political atmosphere I've ever experienced was at the Harvard Law Review."

  Both as undergraduates and as law students, the African-Americans on the Law Review were negotiating an elite white world, but here the arguments and status anxieties were particularly vivid. "Being on the Law Review was the most race-conscious experience of my life, and race-based attitudes and prejudices crossed political and ideological lines among the ambitious law students on its staff," Mack said. "Many of the white editors were, consciously or unconsciously, distrustful of the intellectual capacities of African-American editors or authors. Simply being taken seriously as an intellectual was often an uphill battle."

  "Honestly, we were just very polarized on the Law Review," Christine Spurell, an African-American who was a friend and classmate of Obama's, said. "It's like you got to campus, and the black students were all sitting together. It was the same thing with the Law Review. The black students were all sitting together. Barack was the one who was truly able to move between different groups and have credibility with all of them.... I don't know why at the time he was able to communicate so well with them, even spend social time with them, which was not something I would ever have done ... I don't think he was agenda-driven. I think he genuinely thought, Some of these guys are nice, all of them are smart, some of them are funny, all of them have something to say."

  In the summer of 1989, Obama's professor and friend Martha Minow recommended to her father, Newton Minow, that he hire Obama as a summer associate. She called him "the best student I've ever had." As it turned out, the firm's recruiter had already seen to it. At Sidley, in Chicago, Obama met an associate and Harvard Law graduate named Michelle Robinson. She was slated to be his "adviser" for his three-month stint there. Robinson, like everyone at the firm, had heard about Obama--this "hotshot," as she called him--and it was her job to take him to lunch and watch out for him. She had heard that Obama was biracial and had grown up in Hawaii. For Robinson, who was born and reared on the South Side, Hawaii was not where anyone was from; it was where rich people went on vacation. Obama's background and his intellectual reputation were all daunting.

  "He sounded too good to be true," she said to David Mendell of the Chicago Tribune. "I had dated a lot of brothers who had this kind of reputation coming in, so I figured he was one of these smooth brothers who could talk straight and impress people. So we had lunch, and he had this bad sport jacket and a cigarette dangling from his mouth and I thought, 'Oh, here you go. Here's this good-looking, smooth-talking guy. I've been down this road before.'"

  To her surprise, Robinson found Obama funny, self-deprecating, "intriguing"--"We clicked right away"--but she was intent on keeping their relationship professional. She fended off Obama's requests for a date. At the beginning of the summer, Michelle had made a "proclamation" to her mother: "I'm not worrying about dating ... I'm going to focus on me." Besides, she and Obama were two of the very few African-Americans at the firm; the idea of dating Obama struck Michelle as "tacky." Instead, she introduced him to a friend. This did not put Obama off. "Man, she is hot!" Obama told a friend. "So I am going to work my magic on her."

  Finally, Robinson agreed to go out with Obama--"but we won't call it a date." Robinson was living with her parents in South Shore, not far from Obama's apartment, in Hyde Park. They spent a long summer day together. They went first to the Art Institute and then had lunch in the museum's courtyard cafe. A jazz band played as they ate. Then they walked up Michigan Avenue and went to Spike Lee's latest film, "Do the Right Thing." Michelle thought to herself that Obama was pretty good: he knew something about art and now he was showing off his "street cred." She was both amused and smitten. Not long after, they wound up back in Hyde Park, at a Baskin-Robbins, the ice-cream chain where Obama had worked as a teenager in Honolulu. They also had their first kiss and, as Obama recalled years later, "It tasted like chocolate."

  "Probably by the end of that date," Michelle said, "I was sold."

  Robinson had dated, but she had never had a serious boyfriend before; none had ever made the grade. Barack, for his part, had dated quite a lot but bothered to bring a girl home to meet his family in Hawaii only once before. After a few dates, Michelle invited Barack to dinner at her parents' house, a modest brick bungalow on Euclid Avenue, in South Shore. He won over her parents, who had been concerned about Obama's being biracial. Like their daughter, they had never met anyone like him. The Robinsons had not had to fashion an African-American identity for themselves in the prolonged and complicated way that Obama had. The richness and history of black American life was evident in their family history: Michelle's great-great grandfather Jim Robinson worked as a slave harvesting rice on Friendfield Plantation, near Georgetown, South Carolina. But the genealogical complexity that is so common among African-Americans was a fact of life among the Robinsons, too. The genealogist Megan Smolenyak eventually discovered that Michelle Obama's great-great-great-great-grandparents included a slave named Melvinia who gave birth in 1859 to a biracial son, the result of a union with a white man. Although most sexual unions between blacks and whites then were coercive, nothing is known of the father of Melvinia's first-born son except for his race. Michelle Obama's family background also includes a Native American strand.

  The Robinson family had come North with the Great Migration. The students at Michelle's high school, a magnet school for gifted kids, were mainly African-American; the school was named after civil-rights leader Whitney Young. One of Michelle's closest friends there was Santita Jackson, Jesse Jackson's daughter. Michelle's father, Fraser Robinson III, worked for the city for thirty years, doing maintenance on boilers and pumps at a water-filtration plant. He was eventually promoted to foreman. He was also volunteer precinct captain for the Democratic Party. He suffered from multiple sclerosis and walked with two canes; when he could no longer walk he used a motorized wheelchair. (Fraser Robinson died of complications from kidney surgery, in 1991.) Michelle's mother, Marian, stayed at home with the children until they were in high school and then worked as a secretary for the Spiegel's catalogue store.

  The Robinsons were hard-working, close, and ambitious for their children. "When you grow up as a black kid in a white world, so many times people are telling you--sometimes not maliciously, sometimes maliciously--you're not good enough," Craig Robinson, Michelle's brother, said. "To have a family, which we did, who constantly reminded you how smart you were, how good you were, how pleasant it was to be around you, how successful you could be, it's hard to combat. Our parents gave us a little head start by making us feel confident."

  In 1981, Michelle followed Craig, a basketball star, to Princeton. In a class of fourteen hundred, she was one of ninety-four African-Americans. Among African-Americans at Ivy League schools, the feeling was that Princeton was an especially
unwelcoming place. Even as late as the nineteen-eighties there were pockets of the university--some of the eating clubs, in particular--that supported its lingering reputation as "the northernmost college of the old Confederacy." There were only five tenured African-Americans on the faculty and just a handful of courses in African-American studies. One of Michelle's freshman-year roommates at Pyne Hall, a girl named Catherine Donnelly, from New Orleans, moved out midway through the year. Donnelly's mother was so upset at the notion of her daughter rooming with a black girl that she telephoned influential alumni and hectored the university administration to get Catherine another room. "It was my secret shame," Donnelly recalled.

  In her sophomore year, Robinson roomed with three other women of color and joined various black organizations, including the Organization of Black Unity. Much of her social life revolved around the Third World Center. Robinson majored in sociology, with a concentration in African-American studies, and wrote a senior thesis entitled "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community." "My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'Blackness' than ever before," she wrote. "I have found that at Princeton no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong. Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with Whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be Black first and a student second." Michelle sent out hundreds of questionnaires for her thesis to black alumni asking about their lives, their attitudes, and whether they favored an "integrationist and/or assimilationist" ideology or a "separationist and/or pluralist" view. The thesis conveys a deep disappointment that, in her view, so many black alumni assimilate so quickly and completely into mainstream white society. The thesis shows a young woman struggling not only with Princeton but also with the larger questions faced by someone who grew up on the South Side, acquired an Ivy-League credential, and then has to decide how to live her life.

  Marvin Bressler, a sociology professor at Princeton who knew Craig and Michelle Robinson well as undergraduates, said that the two grew up in an African-American version of a "Norman Rockwell family": a tight-knit family that emphasized loyalty, hard work, church, respect for their elders. Their world was the South Side and almost entirely African-American. To come to Princeton, Bressler said, was for kids like Craig and Michelle profoundly disorienting: "You show up as a freshman. There already exist, with respect to race, competing organizations that want you. And they are asking, 'Is your fundamental identity as a woman? Or is it as an African-American?' Hovering over this is an intense discomfort that you think of initially as prejudice. There is no discrimination in the old sense, but you come from Chicago and now there are these Gothic towers and all those smooth Groton types looking so confident and secure."

  Michelle continued to worry that the longer she stayed inside white-dominated institutions the more tenuous her connection to black life might become. Robin Givhan, an African-American woman from Detroit, was a year behind Michelle at Princeton and now covers her for the Washington Post. "When you're in college, everything revolves around you and your drama--my paranoia, neuroses, insecurities," Givhan recalled. She described the radically different ways that her black friends at Princeton worked out their various dramas. There was Crystal, from New Jersey, "who left for a trip to Africa with her hair in a bun and came back with cornrows and deeply conscious of her race--that became the defining aspect of her personality." There was Beverly, from Michigan, who was friendly with Brooke Shields, avoided the Third World Center, and "took on this 'I'm-not-really-that-black' temper." The way Michelle Robinson approached Princeton, Givhan said, reflected a genuine, and understandable, urge to hold on to a sense of community, and an anxiety about being assimilated too completely into "the white mainstream." White kids, taken up with their own dramas, had a way of looking straight past students like Michelle.

  Years later, Givhan, reading white columnists' praise of Michelle Obama's self-possession, found the descriptions ignorant and patronizing: "There was a part of me that thought, How low were your expectations? She went to Princeton and Harvard. She was an executive. Why the sense of awe? There was a part of me that found it irritating. I could line up a dozen of my friends who are Michelles and then some. What she did was just normal. In many ways, she is exceptional and it was disheartening that she had to ratchet her exceptionalism down to normal."

  By the time Michelle Robinson got to Harvard Law School, she was far less anxious about the complications of negotiating such an institution. Charles Ogletree, who was her faculty mentor at Harvard, recalled, "The question for her was whether I retain my identity given to me by my African-American parents, or whether the education from an elite university has transformed me into something different than what they made me. By the time she got to Harvard, she had answered the question. She could be both brilliant and black."

  Michelle Robinson took a different path at the law school than Obama did. She was far closer to Ogletree than to any white professor. She was more active in the black student association, joined one of the African-American-oriented publications, and worked for the Legal Aid organization, helping indigent clients in landlord and tenant cases. She thought hard about working for Legal Aid after law school, but Ogletree assured her that she could "do good and do well" if she practiced at a firm like Sidley Austin, where she had been a summer intern, as long as she obtained a promise that she could spend part of her time on pro-bono cases.

  Despite their differences of background and emphasis, it was clear that Michelle and Barack were not going to spend their careers at a place like Sidley Austin. When they were first getting to know each other, Obama told Craig Robinson, "I think I'd like to teach at some point in time, and maybe even run for public office." Robinson asked if that meant running for alderman. "He said no, at some point he'd like to run for the U.S. Senate," Robinson said. "And then he said, 'Possibly even run for President at some point.' And I was, like, 'O.K., but don't say that to my aunt Gracie.'" Obama, for his part, doesn't remember the remark, but added, "If the conversation did come up, and I said I was interested in electoral politics ... my aspirations would have been higher than being alderman."

  The ultimate prize at the Law Review is its presidency. A comical proportion of each year's law-review cadre (as many as half) ordinarily run for the presidency. At first, Obama was reluctant to run. The competition would take place in February of his second year. He was gaining a reputation among his African-American peers and among many faculty members. Christopher Edley, Jr., whose father had been a protege of Thurgood Marshall's, had been elected to the Review in 1975, the first black editor in many years. As a professor, he saw great promise in Obama.

  "There are a couple of things about legal education that can be enormously valuable," Edley said. "One, of course, is studying how institutions of governance and property operate: how courts, legislatures, regulatory agencies operate. Second, it instills habits of mind that I think are enormously powerful even when you are not dealing with something that one would narrowly consider to be 'law.' For law students it's very important to understand the other side of the argument. If you are a litigator, a critical skill is trying to anticipate and dissect the best argument your opponent is going to make, so you drill down and understand his argument as well as your own. That gives you a certain humility, because it forces you to face the weaknesses in your own position and to appreciate that any difficult problem has, by definition, good arguments on both sides. That's where Barack was so strong. Now, why did he seem to hate debates in the Presidential race, and wasn't particularly good at them at first? Because the difference between someone who is a great lawyer and merely a great debater is that the lawyer appreciates nuance and only subsequently focuses on how to communicate. His talent, that habit of mind, was also evident in his openness in engaging people with whom he disagrees. It's antithetical for a good lawyer to have a self-righteous convic
tion that he has a monopoly on truth. You are trained to have an appreciation for complexity. It's not relativistic, but principled and humble at the same time. You come to the problem with your own compass, your opinions and principles, but you have to be open. That was Barack."

  After talking with close friends like Cassandra Butts, Obama decided to run for president of the Law Review. "Most of my peers at the Law Review were a couple of years younger than I was," Obama said. "I thought I could apply some common sense and management skills to the job. I was already investing a lot of time in the Law Review, and my attitude was Why not try to run the Law Review?"

  Maturity, not ideology, seemed to be Obama's appeal. "One thing that is hard to remember, but was true, was that there was at times some eye-rolling at the Law Review about Barack because it was almost as if he was part of the faculty, bigger than a law student," David Goldberg, who was a liberal rival for the presidency, said. "A lot of professors were usually indifferent to students. But they were almost sycophantic to him. It was clearly both because he was brilliant and because he was African-American. He was also incredibly mature and thoughtful and still had his heart in the right place."

  In Obama's year, nineteen of the thirty-five second-year members of the Law Review editorial board decided to run for president. The outgoing students joined the second-year students who were not in the hunt in a large meeting room in Pound Hall, where they would caucus and vote. The presidential prospects were left to sit and wait in an adjacent kitchen; they were supposed to cook meals for the selectors during deliberations. The selectors studied thick "pool files" on the candidates, containing their writing samples and work for the Law Review. The process--detailed, argumentative, self-important--went on all day and late into the night.