The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  "At various points," Goldberg recalled, "someone would poke his head into the kitchen and say X, Y, and Z come back into the room. These were the people who were now out of the running and they joined the selectors. And in the kitchen there would be a sigh of relief."

  The only conservative who stayed in the race past the early elimination rounds was Amy Kett, a skilled but relative long-shot candidate. Her hardy but outnumbered faction of conservatives knew that she had no chance, but, together, they figured they might have some influence on the outcome. Brad Berenson and the other conservatives were looking for someone who dealt with them open-mindedly "and didn't personalize political differences."

  "At places like Harvard and Yale, young people often demonize folks who have differing political views," Berenson said, "and there were plenty of those at Harvard in 1990, when things were so political. Barack wasn't one of them. He earned the affection and trust of almost everyone. The only criticism from conservatives was that he was somewhat two-faced and made everyone think he was all things to all people, that he was concealing his true feelings. But I never subscribed to that criticism."

  When members of the Law Review recall the election process today almost all think of it in terms of reality television, a prolonged and brainy episode of "Survivor." A representative for the electors came into the kitchen and made the announcement. Amy Kett was out--off the island. (Not that her career suffered; Kett went on to clerk at the Supreme Court for Sandra Day O'Connor.)

  "At that point, the choice was among the liberals, and I recall that en masse the conservative vote swung over to Barack," Berenson said. "There was a general sense that he didn't think we were evil people, only misguided people, and he would credit us for good faith and intelligence."

  By twelve-thirty, the only candidates left were David Goldberg, a white liberal who was headed toward a career in civil-liberties law, and Barack Obama.

  Finally, someone came to get the two of them and give them the news. Obama was president. "Before I could say a word, another black student"--Ken Mack--"just came up and grabbed me and hugged me real hard," Obama recalled. "It was then that I knew it was more than just about me. It was about us. And I am walking through a lot of doors that had already been opened by others."

  The news of Obama's historic election--he was the first African-American president of the Law Review--was picked up by news media all over the world. Interviewed for the New York Times by Fox Butterfield, Obama reacted with unerring diplomacy, acknowledging both the expectations that his fellow African-American students had for him and his broader responsibilities. "The fact that I've been elected shows a lot of progress," he said. "It's encouraging. But it's important that stories like mine aren't used to say that everything is O.K. for blacks. You have to remember, that for every one of me, there are hundreds or thousands of black students with at least equal talent who don't get a chance.... I personally am interested in pushing a strong minority perspective. I'm fairly opinionated about this. But, as president of the Law Review, I have a limited role as only first among equals."

  Obama's friend Earl Martin Phalen was one of the many African-American students on campus who were overcome by the election. They had formed bonds in class listening to the outrages that had been committed against their forebears--crimes of slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, myriad forms of discrimination and humiliation--and so, for this generation, this victory, Obama was their Charles Hamilton Houston. "It was an affirmation of intellectual prowess and belonging for people of color," Phalen, who is now an education activist, said. "Barack was also very proud of the fact and aware of the historical significance, but it wasn't like reparations for him." Phalen is black; he was adopted by and reared in a large white family outside of Boston. "You appreciate race," Phalen said, "and you understand its significance, but at the end of the day we were similarly brought up and we knew the main thing was that it's about content of character. Barack knew that."

  Obama gave many interviews after his election and only slipped once when he airily informed a reporter for the Associated Press, "The suburbs bore me." Nearly all the articles contained what the writer Ryan Lizza has called the "essential elements of Obama-mania": "the fascination with his early life, the adulatory quotes from friends who thought that he would be President one day, and Obama's frank, though sometimes ostentatious, capacity for self-reflection." Obama told the Boston Globe something that he has repeated throughout his political career: "To some extent, I'm a symbolic stand-in for a lot of the changes that have been made."

  The next step for the new president of the Law Review was to assemble an editorial team, a process made complicated by ego, politics, and race. Obama could have loaded the masthead with liberals and African-Americans. Instead, he followed the traditional system of selection and the result was that three of the four executive editors were conservatives: Amy Kett, Adam Charnes, who later worked in the Bush Justice Department, and Jim Chen, who became an academic after clerking for Clarence Thomas. Brad Berenson, Kenneth Mack, Julius Genachowski, and Tom Perrelli also got masthead jobs--a mixed ideological cast.

  It was almost inevitable, considering the atmosphere of resentments and the long decades of racial denial at the Law Review, that Obama would fail to satisfy everyone, including other African-Americans. His friend Christine Spurell had never really understood Obama's penchant for listening so intently to the conservatives and synthesizing their views; in those days, she was much more impatient than her friend. But she had worked upwards of sixty hours a week during her first year on the Review and worked well together with Obama editing an article about Martin Luther King. "My heart was bursting with pride," she said, when Obama became president. She also counted on his awarding her a masthead position. When he did not, she felt betrayed.

  "A few weeks later he called me into his office and he said, 'We have to fix this problem between us,'" she recalled. "I was so angry with him. He said something to the effect of, 'I don't know what our problem is. Maybe it's that we're both half-white? I don't know.' I think he was saying that maybe that makes us so familiar to each other that we irritate each other or are suspicious of each other. I remember I was crying during that conversation, mostly out of anger and frustration, which shows how significantly I felt let down. I remember saying something to the effect of 'I don't care what our problem is, we're not likely to resolve it, nor am I interested in resolving it.'"

  After their talk, the two came to a "detente," Spurell said, and nearly two decades later, she said that she came to see that Obama sidelined her because she was too confrontational, too abrasive--qualities that he could not bear. "I had no patience for the idiots on the other side and Barack did, which annoyed me, even angered me sometimes, but it made him the better person, certainly a better one to be the president of the Law Review," she said.

  The highlight of Obama's year-long stint as president may well have occurred at the annual banquet, at the Harvard Club, in Boston, which celebrates the journal's changing of the guard. A formal occasion, the banquet brings together the staff of the Review, along with alumni and their spouses. Nearly all the banquet guests were white; the waiters, dressed in starched white uniforms, were largely African-American. Obama spoke about how a skinny black kid with "a funny name" being elected to the presidency of the Law Review was important not for him, mainly, but as a breakthrough for everyone. As he expressed his gratitude to the people who had "paved the way," some of Obama's classmates noticed the black waiters standing at the back of the room listening intently. At the end of the speech, as everyone stood and applauded, one of the older waiters hurried up the aisle to shake Obama's hand.

  * * *

  The Harvard Law Review publishes monthly during the academic year--more than two thousand pages in all--and Obama spent forty to sixty hours a week at Gannett House reading, meeting with editors, and editing articles. He did not, however, take the journal too seriously. He was well aware of the absurdity of law students' selecting and editing th
e work of experienced jurists and scholars, and he had no illusions of the Law Review's effect in the larger world of academia and jurisprudence. The Review has a circulation of four thousand and is the most frequently cited journal of its kind, but, very often, when arguments got out of hand, Obama would say, "Remember, folks, nobody reads it." David Ellen, who succeeded Obama as president of the Law Review, said, "We spent the most time together talking when we were making the transition from him to me, and his whole message was about keeping the Review in perspective. He knew that this was not a very big deal out in the real world, and he knew because he had already been out there."

  "Barack could motivate people to do things that were against their self-interest, and he got people without much in common to stay responsible to the greater project--and he had a very light touch," David Goldberg said. "Politically, I thought he was, clearly, on the issues, a liberal. I never thought of him as a transformative thinker but as a thoughtful person."

  Obama was editor of Volume 104 of the Law Review. There is no discernible ideological accent in his issues except for a desire to mix things up. In that period, the Review published articles that ranged over a spectrum--one article was a foursquare assault on affirmative-action policy--but were, in the main, liberal. There were articles calling for the elderly, women, and African-Americans to have a greater capacity to file discrimination suits. And yet, if Obama was a liberal, he was not always predictable. He worked closely with Robin West, a professor at the University of Maryland at the time and an expert on feminist legal theory, on an article that was critical of conservative judges and even of liberals who make a priority of rights before liberation. Quoting Vaclav Havel, West wrote that a citizen's sense of responsibility was no less important than his or her rights. She argued that goals of tolerance and diversity might be "weakened, not strengthened, by taking rights so 'super seriously' that we come to stop examining our responsibility." Obama, West said, clearly agreed with her, "and so it wasn't at all surprising to hear him, so many years later, making similar arguments about race, racism, and responsibility and not allowing that discourse to fall into the hands of social conservatives and libertarians."

  Obama's issues featured an unsigned note on feminist theory and the state's legal position toward pregnant women and drug abuse. There were multiple responses to a controversial article by Randall Kennedy in an earlier volume, "Racial Critiques of Legal Academia," that accused white academia of too readily accepting mediocre work by black academics. Obama also oversaw the publication of an article by Charles Fried, a conservative professor at Harvard Law School and the Solicitor General during the Reagan Administration, attacking affirmative action as "racial balkanization."

  In its own small universe, the Harvard Law Review is often judged on its efficiency--Does it come out on time? Is it well edited and proofread? Every year until his death in 1994, Erwin Griswold, the former dean of the Law School and former U.S. Solicitor General, sent frequent letters to the president--"Grizzer-grams," they were called--lauding a good article or, far more often, pointing out flaws of prose, reasoning, editing, or timeliness. Obama's "Grizzer-grams" were mainly complimentary.

  In January, 1960, ten years after Charles Houston's death and six years after Brown, Derrick Bell, a young lawyer in the Justice Department, left the government and joined Thurgood Marshall full-time at the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund. This was not a difficult decision for Bell. The Justice Department had angered him by demanding that he give up his membership in the N.A.A.C.P. lest it compromise his legal objectivity.

  "That was kind of nervy, don't you think!" Bell recalled.

  He spent the next eight years in the civil-rights movement and then entered the academy, where he has remained a self-described "ardent protester" on behalf of African-Americans.

  Derrick Bell was, in Barack Obama's time, the most vivid symbol of racial politics at Harvard Law School. His maternal grandfather was a cook on the Pennsylvania Railroad. His father's side of the family was from rural Alabama, the Black Belt, and joined the migration North, to Pittsburgh. His father had less than a junior-high-school education and worked as a steelworker and as a janitor in a Pittsburgh department store. In 1962, Bell helped James Meredith win admittance to the University of Mississippi. In the town of Harmony, Mississippi, in 1964, he worked alongside a tough-minded local organizer named Biona MacDonald. Many of the local whites resisted every move toward change, staging intimidating shows of force, firing shots through black people's windows. Local banks foreclosed on the mortgages of people sympathetic to the movement. Bell was astonished by the fearlessness of Biona MacDonald, and how she continued to lead protests against segregation, despite threats and beatings, and so he asked her how she managed to endure. "I can't speak for everyone," she told Bell, "but as for me, I am an old woman. I lives to harass white folks."

  Bell tried to make the transition from civil-rights lawyer to legal academic, but he was turned down for jobs at Michigan, George Washington, and a half dozen other schools. He was good enough, it seemed, to lecture at Harvard or to get offers for low-paying visiting-professor jobs, but not for the tenure track. It was only after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, that law schools on the level of Harvard felt compelled to break the color barrier. Administrators finally realized that the legal victories of Brown v. Board of Education and the 1964 Civil Rights Act barring discrimination in employment had not done much to integrate university faculties. The riots that followed the assassination focused their attention.

  Derek Bok, the dean of Harvard Law School, flew to Los Angeles to offer Bell a job, and assured him, "You'll be the first, but not the last." That was fine, Bell replied, "because I don't want to be the token."

  After two years on the faculty, Bell threatened to resign. For the next two decades he repeatedly threatened to resign in order to get Harvard to hire more African-American men and, eventually, women. "My life," Bell said, "is a living manifestation of taking no shit."

  At Harvard, Bell also disturbed the peace with his iconoclastic writing. In "Serving Two Masters," a 1976 essay published in the Yale Law Journal, and in the 1987 book And We Are Not Saved, he reassessed his role in the movement to integrate American institutions and found himself, and the civil-rights movement, to have been sadly deluded. He was losing faith in the American capacity to make progress. Bell wrote, in "Serving Two Masters," "The time has come for civil rights lawyers to end their single-minded commitment to racial balance." He insisted on a new sense of "racial realism"--a realism that some would interpret as despair. "Black people will never gain full equality in this country," he wrote in the book Faces at the Bottom of the Well. "Even those herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than temporary 'peaks of progress,' short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance. This is a hard-to-accept fact that all history verifies. We must acknowledge it, not as a sign of submission, but as an act of ultimate defiance." Bell argued that in some ways Brown v. Board of Education, despite its good intentions, led to a failed integration. As whites left the cities for the suburbs, the tax base contracted and blacks were left behind in miserable, underfunded schools. The situation might have been better, Bell argued, had the "equal" part of the "separate but equal" ideal of the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson been enforced.

  In Obama's second year in law school, after Harvard declined to give a tenure-track offer to a visiting professor from the University of Pennsylvania, a black woman named Regina Austin, Bell threatened to take an indefinite, unpaid leave from the university. Bell championed Austin's writing on racial and gender barriers, but Austin had no federal clerkships or law-review appointments in her background; her credentials, in the conventional sense, were deemed unexceptional. "Still, I thought Regina was perfect," Bell said. "She was saying what needed to be said. And she was a lot more militant than I ever was. But they"--the appointments committee at the law school--"were always s
aying no. They always wanted to see the next one and the next one." By 1990, there were five black men on the faculty, but no black women. According to Martha Minow, Erwin Griswold, who was dean from 1946 to 1967, used to invite what few women students there were on the law-school campus to tea and say, "Now, why are you here, taking up the place of a man?"

  On April 9, 1990, without consulting Regina Austin, Bell wrote to the dean, Robert Clark. The letter, Bell told Clark, was an "inadequate but quite firm notice of my intention to request a leave without pay" that would, he said, continue indefinitely "until a woman of color is offered and accepts a tenured position on this faculty." "This was all going on while my wife, Jewel, was very sick with cancer," Bell said. "When I told her what I planned to do, she said, 'Derrick, why does it always have to be you?'" Much of Bell's letter to Clark was apologetic--apologetic for failing to realize sooner the importance of having black women on the faculty.

  Bell released the letter to his colleagues and staged a hunger strike. Some students discussed another plan of action to support diversity: they declared, not without an element of grandeur, that they would take their final exams but, rather than turning them in, place the papers in escrow until the university hired more minorities.

  To his classmates, how Obama would react to Derrick Bell's protest was a matter of some interest. Obama supported greater diversity on campus, but he had never been a leading activist in the Bell controversy or on any other political issue. Obama's popularity and stature as a Harvard "first" was such that Cassandra Butts asked him to speak at a campus rally.

  "Barack's being president of the Law Review--being the first African-American president--that was a very big deal, so I was glad he came out," Derrick Bell said. "That was not exactly a bastion of affirmative action over there at the Law Review. Around that time, there had been a huge battle just to add a writing competition as an additional criterion to get on the Review."