Times Books shipped about twelve thousand copies of Dreams from My Father and sold nine thousand. For less than ten thousand dollars, Times Books licensed the paperback to Kodansha, a Japanese-owned house, which was specializing in multicultural books for an American audience.
Dreams first appeared in the summer of 1995. The nineteen-nineties were rich with books by authors eager to write about themselves, their families, their deprivations, addictions, incarcerations, hallucinations, love affairs, illnesses, losses, and redemptions. Some of these books--like William Styron's Darkness Visible, Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, Mary Karr's The Liar's Club, Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, Paul Monette's Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, and James McBride's The Color of Water, all published by 1996--fulfilled Obama's literary ambitions: honesty, literary achievement, and astonishing sales. Obama waited more than a decade before his book became a best-seller.
Obama is hardly the only President to exhibit a literary bent before running for office. The most prolific of the literary Presidents was Theodore Roosevelt, who began his first book, a naval history of the War of 1812, while still an undergraduate at Harvard. As a reader, Roosevelt was heroic, capable of consuming two or three books in a night. His biographer Edmund Morris writes that in 1906 (as President!) Roosevelt read five hundred books or more, including all of Trollope's novels, the complete works of Thomas De Quincey, the complete prose of Milton, the poetry of Scott, Poe, and Longfellow, and William Dudley Foulke's Life of Oliver P. Morton. In all, Roosevelt wrote thirty-eight books, including, prior to his political career, biographies of Thomas Hart Benton, the Missouri senator and advocate of westward expansion, and Gouverneur Morris, the author of the preamble of the Constitution; a four-volume history, The Winning of the West; accounts of his many hunting trips; and scores of literary reviews and scientific articles. Woodrow Wilson, who had a doctorate in history and political science from Johns Hopkins, wrote Congressional Government and other academic studies well before his election as governor of New Jersey and then as President. Herbert Hoover was not unliterary. With his wife, Lou, he translated from Latin the Renaissance treatise on mining by Agricola, De re metallica. John Kennedy's literary efforts carried with them the aura of gilded sponsorship and professional assistance: his father promoted for publication his Harvard thesis "Why England Slept" and his aide Theodore Sorensen and others were more than helpful in the industrial production of Profiles in Courage.
Dreams from My Father ought not to be overvalued as a purely literary text; other writer-politicians such as Vaclav Havel and Andre Malraux wrote immensely greater and more mature work before holding office. But few American politicians of consequence before Obama have ventured to describe themselves personally with anything like the force and emotional openness of Dreams from My Father. It is enough to say that Dreams from My Father is a good book that became, through political circumstance, an important one.
Early in the history of the Republic, it was impossible to imagine political self-projections at all. The Founding Fathers were philosopher-statesmen who saw the executive branch as a check on the unruly and corruptible legislature. Campaigning itself was a degradation of the office. "Motives of delicacy," Washington said, "have prevented me hitherto from conversing or writing on this subject, whenever I could avoid it with decency." Washington established the American Presidency as an office neither to be sought nor to be declined. Even in a democracy, it was somehow bestowed, not battled for. The historian M. J. Heale has called the early Presidential posture "the mute tribune."
Self-presentation in the American political culture begins in earnest with Andrew Jackson. After retiring from the military, in 1815, and setting up house on a thousand-acre plantation near Nashville, Jackson hired John Eaton, a young lawyer and one of his former soldiers in the War of 1812, to write his biography. Several years later, Jackson used Eaton's hagiographic Life of Andrew Jackson for his 1824 presidential race. The book, considered the first campaign biography ever published in the United States, presented Jackson as something utterly new in American politics: "the self-made man." When Jackson ultimately won the Presidency in 1828, his choice for Secretary of War was his biographer, John Eaton.
Jackson's brand of self-description has never faded from American politics. In 1852, just after completing The Blithedale Romance, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a slapdash biography of his Bowdoin College friend Franklin Pierce. It took around a month to complete. Hawthorne's reward was a consulship in Liverpool; the country's reward was a miserable President. William Dean Howells wrote a biography of Lincoln in the course of a few weeks and without ever meeting the man. The portrait, which was published in 1860, is the foundation of a million others: the "rude cabin of the settler," the earnest, rail-splitting autodidact, the "young backwoodsman" reading Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England "under a wide-spreading oak" in the woods near New Salem. "People went by, and he took no account of them," Howells wrote of Lincoln's studies in the forest, "the salutations of acquaintances were returned with silence, or a vacant stare."
The stories have their variations: the modest warrior-statesmen dominate, though there occasionally appears an intellectual woodsman, like Lincoln. But the template remains basically the same: the rise from modest circumstances to an adulthood of selfless service to flag and country. The biographers recount Jackson's mother telling her boys about the poverty of Ireland; Henry Clay's loss of his father in childhood; William Henry Harrison's log cabin; and Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill. F.D.R.'s early biographers describe the classrooms of Groton as if they were carved from pinewood. "American campaign biographies still follow a script written nearly two centuries ago," the historian Jill Lepore writes. "East of piffle and west of hokum, the Boy from Hope always grows up to be the Man of the People. Will we ever stop electing Andrew Jackson?"
Obama's Dreams from My Father was not intended as a campaign biography, but it ended up acting as one. For a politician who was making the personal political and placing his own story and background at the center of his candidacy, writing Dreams from My Father was the ultimate act of self-creation. Its stories are at the center of Obama's thinking, his self-regard, his public rhetoric.
In the closing weeks of the 2008 Presidential campaign, as it seemed more and more evident that only a miracle worthy of Dorian Gray could rescue John McCain from defeat, a little-known conservative writer, magazine editor, and former talk-radio-show host named Jack Cashill advanced a theory popular on various right-wing Web sites, including American Thinker and World Net Daily, that Barack Obama was not the author of Dreams from My Father. This was a charge that, if ever proved true, or believed to be true among enough voters, could have been the end of the candidacy. Obama himself admitted that many people had got involved in his campaign "because they feel they know me through my books." This accusation of fraud possessed a diabolical potency for those who wished him ill. It suggested that the man poised to become the first African-American President, one celebrated for his language and his eloquence, could not possibly be such a good writer.
The true author of Obama's book, Jack Cashill suggested, was likely Bill Ayers, best known as the co-founder of the Weather Underground and the "terrorist" referred to in speeches by Sarah Palin. Cashill wrote that he had carefully studied books by Ayers, who had written a memoir and books about education, and through a process that he called "deconstruction," this latter-day Derrida charged that these volumes contained too much in common to skirt suspicion. For instance, Cashill wrote, they both misspelled Frantz Fanon as "Franz." They were both obsessed with eyes: "Ayers is fixated with faces, especially eyes. He writes of 'sparkling' eyes, 'shining' eyes, 'laughing' eyes, 'twinkling' eyes, eyes 'like ice.' ... Obama is also fixated with faces, especially eyes. He also writes of 'sparkling' eyes, 'shining' eyes, 'laughing' eyes, 'twinkling' eyes.... Obama also used the highly distinctive phrase 'like ice.'"
And so on.
Cashill's assertions might well have remained a mere
twinkling in the Web's farthest lunatic orbit had it not been for the fact that more powerful voices hoped to give his theory wider currency. A writer for the National Review's popular blog The Corner declared Cashill's scholarly readings "thorough, thoughtful, and alarming." And Rush Limbaugh, during his nationwide radio broadcast on October 10, 2008, digressed from a mocking segment about Dreams from My Father to take up the Ayers-as-author theory:
You know, there are stories out there, he may not have written this book.... There's no evidence that Obama has ever written anything prior to this except a poem, and the poem was as dumb as "A River, Rock, and Tree" that Maya Angelou did at the Slickster's inauguration back in 1993. There's no evidence that he has any kind of writing talent. We haven't seen anything he wrote at Harvard Law, or when he was at Columbia, or any tests that he's written. But if you read his books, if you listen to his audio reading of the book here, you don't hear this when Obama goes out and speaks. I would like for him to be given a test on his own book. You know how Charles Barkley once said he was misquoted in his own book? (laughs) I would like for Obama to actually be given a test on his own book.
This may not have been Limbaugh's most racist insinuation of the campaign. His delighted airing of the song "Barack, the Magic Negro," sung to the tune of "Puff, the Magic Dragon," probably reached a wider audience, and his description of Obama as a "Halfrican American" was, perhaps, more immediately pernicious, as it played on the rumors that the candidate lacked a proper American birth certificate, attended a madrassa as a boy in Indonesia, and was, in fact, either a Kenyan or an Indonesian citizen.
Still, Cashill's and Limbaugh's libel about Obama's memoir--the denial of literacy, the denial of authorship--had a particularly ugly pedigree. Writing elevated a slave from non-being, from commodity, to human status, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has written: a slave wrote, above all, to "demonstrate her or his own membership in the human community." In Frederick Douglass's narrative, his master, Mr. Auld, says, "Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world.... If you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him."
And yet writers like Douglass had to call on white men to authenticate their texts, the better to disprove the antebellum Jack Cashills and Rush Limbaughs ready to declare fraud. For the wary white readership, the abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips provided prefaces for Douglass's book that represented seals of white endorsement. Garrison had first heard Douglass describe his life story at a speech at the Atheneum on Nantucket, in 1841, and now he was prepared to vouch for his text. "Mr. Douglass has very properly chosen to write his own Narrative, in his own style," Garrison wrote, "and according to the best of his ability, rather than to employ some one else. It is, therefore, entirely his own production." Garrison vouched for Douglass's literacy. The title, too, indicates a need to deny a sham. It is called the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself.
A century and a half later, thinking a degree of racial progress had been achieved, Barack Obama and his publisher had not thought to collect such endorsements.
Part Three
So he tested these truths of his against the blight of Chicago.
--Saul Bellow, The Dean's December
Chapter Seven
Somebody Nobody Sent
In the summer of 1991, Barack Obama moved back to Chicago and waited for his public life to begin. Abner Mikva, a fixture of liberal independent politics in Chicago and a judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, had offered him a clerkship, and although Obama turned him down, the two men became friends, having breakfast or lunch downtown or at the Quadrangle Club in Hyde Park to talk politics. Obama confided that at some point--soon, he hoped--he wanted to run for office. Mikva was coming to see that, while Obama was more serene than Bill Clinton, far less grasping and needy, he was immodest in his ambition. "I thought, this guy has more chutzpah than Dick Tracy," Mikva said. "You don't just show up in Chicago and plant your flag."
By way of avuncular counsel, Mikva told Obama one of the most famous stories in the history of Chicago politics. Mikva grew up in Milwaukee, where the political culture was so open that, legend had it, someone who volunteered at party headquarters in the morning could wind up county chairman by nightfall. In 1948, Mikva, a student at the University of Chicago Law School, wanted to work for the Democratic Party, which was running two liberals: Paul Douglas for the Senate and Adlai Stevenson for governor. On the way home from class one night, Mikva stopped by the ward headquarters. "Timothy O'Sullivan, Ward Committeeman" was painted on the window. Mikva went in and asked if he could work for Stevenson and Douglas. The ward committeeman took the cigar out of his mouth and asked, "Who sent you?"
"Nobody sent me," Mikva replied. "I just want to help."
The committeeman jammed the cheroot back in his mouth and frowned.
"We don't want nobody that nobody sent," he said and dismissed the young law student.
Recalling the story and Obama's resigned reaction, Mikva said, "That's Chicago. It's a place where people put their relatives in jobs, where the machine ruled and, to an extent, still does. You just don't show up and come barging in."
Obama did his best to steer clear of the machine. He spent a dozen years as a lawyer and as a teacher. His part-time work in both professions also helped shape his political sensibility, deepen his thinking (especially about the law and race), and widen his web of associations. Judson Miner, who was Obama's mentor at Davis Miner, was a model of anti-establishment, anti-machine politics. In 1969, two years after graduating from law school and a year after the riots at the Democratic Convention, he founded the Chicago Council of Lawyers, an organization of progressive attorneys intent on creating an alternative bar association to challenge the failings of the legal system and improve services for the poor. The council issued reports analyzing candidates for the bench, campaigned for judicial reforms, and placed articles in the local press. Miner did not cultivate the radical reputation of a William Kunstler, but, when he was still in his thirties, he gained a singular reputation in civil rights. In Chicago, he was the civil-rights lawyer, known for representing plaintiffs in sex- and race-discrimination suits, voting-rights suits, tenants'-rights and corporate-whistleblower cases. Among African-Americans, especially, Miner was celebrated for having been Harold Washington's corporation counsel--the top legal job in City Hall--in his final two years in office.
Davis Miner was a boutique firm with around a dozen lawyers. As with all small civil-rights firms, one of its biggest problems was that, when it sued the city or a large corporation, it was almost always in opposition to a huge LaSalle Street firm that was able to throw armies of associates into the fray, filing one defense motion after another, swamping the plaintiff under an avalanche of work and accumulating fees.
From 1992 to 1995, Obama was an ordinary associate at Davis Miner, even though he spent a great deal of time writing and some time teaching. From 1997 until 2004, when he ran for the U.S. Senate, he was "of counsel," a part-time position paid by the hour. Obama rarely went to court and his overall legal record was modest. He appeared in court as counsel in five district-court cases and five cases heard by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. All told, Miner said, Obama "contributed" to thirty cases, often in a secondary or tertiary role. Mainly, he drafted memoranda and motions, and prepared depositions. "I was one of the better writers," Obama recalled. "I ended up doing the more cerebral writing, less trial work. That's actually something I regret, not doing more trial work."
Obama may not have compiled a voluminous case record, but the cases he worked on reflected the sense of virtue he sought when he turned down corporate jobs and judicial clerkships. Unlike so many of his Harvard classmates, who were making six-figure salaries at corporate firms and expecting more, Obama, at a salary of around fifty thousand dollars a year, was battling corporations in court rather than defending them. In 1994, he worked on a suit against Citibank and its mortgag
e practices regarding minorities. The same year, he was on a team of lawyers that, in the Seventh Circuit, defended a securities trader named Ahmad Baravati, who had been blackballed by his employer, Josephthal, Lyon & Ross, after reporting fraudulent practices at the firm. Arguing that an arbitrator had the right to award Baravati a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in punitive damages, Obama parried with Judge Richard Posner, one of the leading conservative jurists in the country. In the end, Posner sided with Obama's client. ("I wrote the opinion on the case, but I don't remember any of the lawyers," Posner said. "It wasn't a memorable case.")
In 1995, the governor of Illinois, Jim Edgar, refused to implement legislation that allowed citizens to register to vote when they applied for a driver's license. Edgar, a Republican, was wary of the legislation, for it was sure to lead to the registration of many more Democrats than Republicans. A number of progressive groups, including the League of Women Voters and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), represented by Obama, joined the Justice Department in a lawsuit. Obama, whose keenest legal interest at Harvard and Chicago was voting rights, did not speak during the courtroom proceedings but his side won its case.
As a lecturer at the University of Chicago, Obama entered a world quite apart from community organizing on the South Side, civil-rights law downtown, and even Harvard Law School. Obama had known plenty of conservatives at Harvard; he won the presidency of the Law Review in part because the conservative minority thought that he was a liberal who would listen to them. The law-school faculty at Chicago was ideologically diverse--and prided itself, above all, on an atmosphere of fierce and open argument--but the conservative strain ran deep.
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama Page 34
