The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  "Marilyn is a very good organizer, I am not," Saltzman said. "So I woke her up."

  "Thank God you called," Katz said, and the two talked about how to proceed.

  Two days later, the two women convened a meeting of about a dozen people at Saltzman's penthouse apartment, including a number of veteran left-wing activists, Michael Klonsky and Carl Davidson, and Rhona Hoffman, who ran a well-known art gallery. "We all took assignments," Saltzman said. Robert Howard, a local attorney, got permission to use Federal Plaza on South Dearborn at midday on October 2nd. Marilyn Katz and Davidson, another S.D.S. veteran, knew that with a well-aimed e-mail spray they could get a core of left-wing groups to come to Federal Plaza. Then they tried to assemble a list of speakers, which included Jesse Jackson, Sr., and various clergy and local politicians. Saltzman called John Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, but he already had a speaking engagement in Wisconsin. Later in the week, she called Barack Obama at home. Michelle answered and said she would give him the message.

  "I finally spoke to him on Monday for a Tuesday rally," she recalled. "Few knew who he was. The only people who really knew him were in Hyde Park, people who were his friends and associates."

  Saltzman called on Obama simply because she had a sense that he had a future. "I didn't know him as well as Valerie Jarrett and Marty Nesbitt did. I am a North Sider. I'm white. It's a different group of people. I don't really know what he had in place. I just had this instinct about him."

  Before agreeing to speak at the rally, Obama called a few trusted friends to discuss the political ramifications. He had already commissioned a benchmark poll to explore a Senate run and was fairly sure he was going to do it. For a Hyde Park politician, the risk of speaking was mild--at the university both the left and many on the right opposed an invasion of Iraq--but the issue got more complicated the farther away you went from Chicago. "Nationally, the conventional wisdom was to support the war," Will Burns said. "The war hadn't started yet, there was lots of triumphalism, lots of talk about mushroom clouds. If you are running for Senate, there's the chance of looking 'soft on terror.' This was just a year after 9/11."

  Pete Giangreco, who had agreed to advise Obama and do his direct-mail campaign for a potential Senate campaign, got a call from Obama to discuss the invitation to speak. "The war was pretty popular then," Giangreco said. "Opposing it wouldn't be a problem in the primary, but it could be a really big problem in a general election. All kinds of people might have a problem with being 'soft': Reagan Democrats, downscale ethnic folks in Chicago, and people downstate who didn't live in college towns. Talking from a targeting standpoint, I said we already had a challenge with these folks. His name, Barack Obama, was different and not very helpful, and, while Roland Burris and Carol Moseley Braun had won statewide races, it's always a challenge for an African-American. So I said, 'You might be able to capture the folks on the left who are against this war, and against any war, frankly, but there were all the others to take into account.' He just took it all in. He finally said, 'Well, my instinct is to do this.' And my reaction was 'If this is what you really believe, you'll score huge points for courage and saying what you think.'"

  "Politically, the reason why Barack's political advisers were saying it was a good idea for him to speak was because the coalition he needed to get elected was blacks and liberals, and he wasn't going to get liberals if he was supporting Bush in the war," Chris Sautter, Obama's media consultant in the 2000 congressional race, said. As Obama talked it through further with Giangreco, Shomon, and David Axelrod, he concluded that he could devise a rhetorical construction that would express his opposition to an invasion of Iraq without making him seem disqualifyingly weak on terror.

  In defiance of the weather report, on October 2nd, the sun was shining. People milled around the speaker's platform holding up antiwar signs. Estimates of the crowd ranged from the Tribune's "about 1,000" to the Chicago Defender's "nearly 3,000." The organizers thought it was somewhere in the middle. Some of the trappings of the demonstration were comically reminiscent of earlier times. While the old John Lennon tune "Give Peace a Chance" played on the public-address system, Obama leaned over to Saltzman and said, "Can't they play something else?"

  The Tribune reporter at the rally, Bill Glauber, described the crowd as a combination of college students, veterans of the anti-Vietnam War movement, and "a few second-generation activists following in the wake of parents radicalized by Vietnam." Bill Ayers was there; so were most of the board members from the Woods Foundation and students from Northwestern and other colleges in the area. Remarking on the calm atmosphere at the rally, Glauber said that it "wasn't a replay of the Days of Rage--it was more like a gentle call to arms for a nascent peace movement desperate to head off a new Gulf War."

  The demonstration lasted less than an hour. Marilyn Katz read a statement from Senator Durbin, who had come out in opposition to the war: "When the Senate votes this week on President Bush's resolution to wage war against Iraq with preemptive force, I will vote no. I do not believe the Bush Administration has answered one simple question: Why now?"

  By 2002 in Chicago, Jesse Jackson, Sr., was viewed, even by longtime allies, black and white, with mixed feelings. People paid tribute to his work in the civil-rights movement and to his historic Presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988, but they were also weary of his penchant for self-centeredness. Obama's relationship with Jackson was never entirely warm, despite the fact that Michelle Obama had grown up as a close friend of the family. The point of conflict, even early on, was simple: Jackson tended to treat young black politicians in Chicago with wariness, at best, and Obama, while he respected Jackson, also saw him as vain and out of date. Nevertheless, Jackson remained a reliable speaker against the Bush Administration, and he performed well that day.

  "This is a rally to stop a war from occurring," Jackson said, and then he asked the crowd to look at the sky and count to ten. Looking down again, Jackson said, "I just diverted your attention away from the rally. That's what George Bush is doing. The sky is not falling and we're not threatened by Saddam Hussein." Jackson accused the Administration of trying to divert public attention, above all, from its economic failures.

  In addition to Jackson and Obama, the speakers included the Reverend Paul Rutgers, the executive director of the Council of Religious Leaders of Metropolitan Chicago, and a former state senator, Jesus Garcia.

  Obama's speech, which ran just a few minutes, was an exquisitely calibrated rhetorical performance, signaling both his opposition to war with Iraq and a willingness to use force when necessary. It was a speech intended as much to assure people that he was not a wide-eyed pacifist as it was to show his antiwar solidarity.

  Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an antiwar rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances. The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in history, and yet it was only through the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of multitudes, that we could begin to perfect this union, and drive the scourge of slavery from our soil. I don't oppose all wars.

  My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton's army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil, and he did not fight in vain. I don't oppose all wars.

  After September 11th, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this Administration's pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such tragedy from happening again. I don't oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism.

  What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle an
d Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

  What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics. Now let me be clear--I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied U.N. resolutions, thwarted U.N. inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He's a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.

  But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military is at a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history. I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars.

  Carl Davidson, one of the rally's organizers, was listening to the speech when a friend sitting next to him nudged him and said, "Who does he think this speech is for? It's not for this crowd." Davidson said he thought, This guy's got bigger fish to fry.

  "It was a great rally and it wasn't an easy thing to do," Bill Ayers said. "There was a howling storm of patriotic nationalism going on. I remember Obama's speech vividly because it was all done in the cadence of the black church. 'I'm not against all war, just a foolish war ... ' That's so Obama: smart, unifying, and very moderate."

  Obama received polite applause and his admiring sponsor, Bettylu Saltzman, thought he had performed effectively. But another civic leader at the rally, Juan Andrade, Jr., the president of the United States Hispanic Leadership Institute, said that while he has since seen Obama give magnificent speeches, "there was nothing magic" about his performance that day. "There was nothing about that speech that would have given anybody any sense that he was going places. We were just glad that he was one of those who was willing to step up at a time when very few people seemed to be willing to do that." One of the organizers, Michael Klonsky, an S.D.S. leader who became a professor of education, remembers thinking at the time how qualified Obama's opposition to the war was. "He knew the war was a dead end but he was kind of clever," Klonsky said. "At the time, I didn't see much point in giving a treatise on just and unjust wars. Looking back, this was a guy with political ambitions who didn't want to box himself in."

  The 2002 antiwar speech was a precursor to Obama's speech on December 10, 2009, in Oslo, when he accepted the Nobel Prize for Peace. There, too, Obama spoke, to some extent, at cross-purposes with the audience in front of him. In Oslo, he made plain that the choices facing a head of state, a commander-in-chief, are not the same as those of the head of a movement, like King or Gandhi. In front of a Norwegian audience that could not have been entirely pleased with his decision just a week earlier to send an additional thirty thousand troops to Afghanistan, Obama refused the purity of pacifism and insisted on the complexity of the real world ("I face the world as it is ...") and the need, unfortunately, to rely on force when diplomacy has failed and the moral and political circumstances demand it. In Oslo, Obama implicitly rebuked the Bush Administration's use of torture and its invasion of Iraq, but it was this insistence on complexity, the refusal to adopt a purely pacific rhetoric, that was reminiscent of the speech on Federal Plaza.

  While some of Obama's advisers worried that phrases like "a dumb war" might come back to haunt Obama, it would turn out that the war was far worse than dumb. It was a catastrophe that went on longer than the Second World War. But when Obama's team would eventually make use of the speech to advertise their candidate's strategic and moral judgment, they discovered there was no videotape. "There wasn't any, just some crappy snippet," Giangreco said. Had Obama been a certain, well-organized candidate for the Senate, he might have made sure there was someone there with a camera. "I would kill for that," David Axelrod said years later. "No one realized at the time that it would be a historic thing."

  Toward the end of the rally, Obama told Bettylu Saltzman that he couldn't stick around long. He was headed downstate to Decatur, the county seat of Macon County.

  "There really was no doubt he was running," she recalled. "Why else do you go to Decatur, Illinois?"

  The 2002 elections were hugely successful for the Illinois Democrats--a statewide rebuke to the Bush Administration. Promising "to end business as usual," Rod Blagojevich was elected governor over the Republican, George Ryan, and both houses of the state legislature now had Democratic majorities--for the first time in twenty-six years. In the State Senate, Emil Jones got the post of president, displacing Pate Philip.

  In the early spring of 2002, Obama went to see Emil Jones. Since 1997, Jones had been his mentor in the persistent realities of Illinois politics. He had helped soothe the friction between Obama and antagonists like Hendon and Trotter. Jones, a former sewer inspector and an old-school Party regular, could see that Obama was a new breed:

  He said to me, he said, "You're the Senate president now, and with that, you have a lot of pow-er."... And I told Barack, "You think I got a lot of pow-er now?" And he said, "Yeah, you got a lot of pow-er." And I said, "What kind of pow-er do I have?" He said, "You have the pow-er to make a United States sen-a-tor!"

  I said to Barack, "That sounds good!" I said, "I haven't even thought of that." I said, "Do you have someone in mind you think I could make?," and he said, "Yeah. Me." The most interesting conversation. And so I said to him, "Let me think about this." We met a little later that day, and I said, "That sounds good. Let's go for it."

  Before he became president of the Senate, Emil Jones had not yet gained great respect in the legislature. People looked on Michael Madigan, the Democratic speaker of the House and Lisa's father, as the Party's pillar. "The truth is, Emil was always underestimated," Will Burns, who worked for Jones before joining Obama's congressional campaign, said. "It was thought he didn't have the same political acumen as Madigan or Richie Daley. But he was underestimated, really, because he was black. No one would say it, but as an African-American I can't easily dismiss the effect of race on people's perceptions. There was the sense that he was just an old pol and that's it. So, for Emil, the challenge of helping Barack, using his position and leverage, to elect him to the Senate, was good for Barack and it was also good for him."

  The most important thing that Jones could do now for Obama was to provide him with an increasingly substantive legislative docket--something that no Democrat could boast while languishing in the minority. Obama, like many others in the Senate, had been in the habit of dodging controversial votes (including on abortion measures) by voting "present" rather than "yea" or "nay." This was a well-known tactic that could be adopted to avoid being drawn into a vote whose only purpose was to expose the opposition in one way or another, but, still, Obama's frequent use of it--a hundred and twenty-nine times--allowed opponents to criticize him for lacking the courage of his convictions. A "present" vote has variously been described as "a soft 'no'" and "'no' with an explanation." But Emil Jones, of all people, was not interested in idealistic flameouts. Such creatures were alien to him. After their meeting, Jones started to funnel bills to Obama, some of which had lain dormant in
committee for years. Jones knew that Obama had developed a penchant for compromise. He could work with Republicans and downstate Democrats with far greater finesse than most of his colleagues. When the bills passed, they would have Obama's name on them, as sponsor, and potentially help him in a run for higher office.

  "We attained the majority in the seventh year and I passed twenty-six bills in a row," Obama told me. "In one year, we reformed the death penalty in Illinois, expanded health care for kids, set up a state earned-income tax credit. It wasn't that I was smarter in year seven than I was in year six, or more experienced; it was that we had power.... You can have the best agenda in the world, but if you don't control the gavel you cannot move an agenda forward."

  Eventually, Jones was known around the Senate chamber as Obama's "godfather." (And when Obama became a national political phenomenon, Jones set the ring tone on his cell phone to play the opening bars of Nino Rota's theme for the "Godfather" films.) Donne Trotter said that there were days when nearly every bill had Obama's name on it. Jones, for example, let Obama be the main sponsor of a bill insisting that police videotape interrogations as a check on brutality cases and false confessions. Obama was able to bring on board not only Republicans but also police associations that had initially balked at such legislation. Even Blagojevich had initially opposed the measure, which was the first of its kind in the country. In May, 2003, it passed the Senate unanimously and Blagojevich withdrew his objections. "I had reservations about supporting it without the participation of law enforcement," the Governor said. "But Senator Obama ironed out some of the practical challenges that concerned me."

  Obama also co-sponsored legislation banning ephedra, a diet supplement that had led to the death of a Northwestern University football player. He won a ban on the use of pyrotechnics in nightclubs after scores of people were killed in two tragic incidents. Forging a compromise between police associations and civil-liberties organizations, he crafted a series of racial-profiling measures that demanded that police record the race of every motorist they pulled over and send the records for analysis to the Department of Transportation. ("Driving while black, driving while Hispanic, and driving while Middle Eastern are not crimes.") He sponsored a bill that allowed twenty thousand children to be included in Kid Care, a program for kids without health insurance. And he passed legislation that provided added tax relief for low-income families with the Earned Income Tax Credit.