After absorbing the blast of cold and the thudding roar from the Mall, Obama glanced to his right. He spotted on the steps, a few feet away, John Lewis--squat, bald, hatless--the eleven-term representative of Georgia's Fifth Congressional District and the only one of the speakers at the 1963 March on Washington still alive. Obama bent to embrace him.
"Congratulations, Mr. President," Lewis whispered in his ear.
Obama smiled at the sound of that and said, "Thank you, John. I'll need your prayers."
"You'll have them, Mr. President. That, and all my support."
At the March on Washington, King's speech was the most eloquent, John Lewis's the most radical. Lewis was just twenty-three at the time, the leader of SNCC. In the original draft of his speech, his demand for racial justice and "serious revolution" was so fearless that, in the last minutes before the program began, Dr. King, Bayard Rustin, Roy Wilkins, and other movement organizers negotiated with him to remove any phrases that might offend the Kennedy Administration. Lewis planned to say, "We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own 'scorched earth' policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground--nonviolently. We shall fragment the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of democracy." He had to lose the bit about Sherman's army, but the rest of the text, capped by its final warning--"We will not be patient!"--left no doubt about Lewis or about the audacious generation that he represented.
Two years later, in Selma, Lewis led the march at the Edmund Pettus Bridge straight into a blockade set up by Alabama state troopers. The first nightstick wielded in anger landed on his skull. At the White House that night, Lyndon Johnson watched it all on television and deepened his resolve to push the Voting Rights Act. The day before Obama's inauguration, which came just after what would have been King's eightieth birthday, Lewis told me at his office, in the Cannon House Office Building, "Barack Obama is what comes at the end of that bridge in Selma."
Inaugural weekend had been "bewildering" to John Lewis. "It is almost too much, too emotional," he said. Preaching at the Shiloh Baptist Church on Ninth Street N.W., Lewis had told parishioners that he would have thought that only a "crazy" person would predict the election of an African-American President in his lifetime, but now he was sure that the masses on the Mall would be joined by the "saints and angels": by Harriet Tubman and Carter G. Woodson, Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. DuBois, Nat Turner and Frederick Douglass, John Brown and Sojourner Truth.
For hours, Lewis greeted constituents at his office and handed out inaugural tickets. When he shook people's hands, he could feel that they were still freezing from the hours they had spent in long lines outside. He offered them coffee, hot chocolate, sandwiches, and donuts. After a while, he set off to visit the Mall, moving, it seemed, in a daze of unreality. He could scarcely believe the size of the crowds gathering so early--especially the great numbers of African-Americans, young and old, many of them from distant places.
As Lewis walked around the Mall, greeting people, posing for hundreds of photographs, a young man introduced himself as the police chief of Rock Hill, South Carolina. Lewis smiled incredulously. "Imagine that," he said. "I was beaten near to death at the Rock Hill Greyhound bus terminal during the Freedom Rides in 1961. Now the police chief is black."
One teenage boy sweetly asked, "Mr. Lewis, my mama says you marched with Dr. King. Is that true?" Like an old fighter who is not displeased to recount tales of ancient battle, Lewis nodded and said, well, yes he had, and perhaps for the five-thousandth time he sketched the journey from Selma to Montgomery.
"Barack was born long after he could experience or understand the movement," Lewis said, heading back to the Capitol. "He had to move toward it in his own time, but it is so clear that he digested it, the spirit and the language of the movement. The way he made it his own reminds me of a trip I made to South Africa in March, 1994, before the post-apartheid elections. We met with a few leaders of the African National Congress--young people--and despite their age they knew everything about the late fifties and sixties in the American South, the birth of the civil-rights movement. They were using the same rhetoric, they had the same emotional force. One young South African actor got up and recited a poem by a black slave woman from Georgia! And that is the way it is with Barack. He has absorbed the lessons and spirit of the civil-rights movement. But, at the same time, he doesn't have the scars of the movement. He has not been knocked around as much by the past."
Obama's promise to shut down Guantanamo, to outlaw torture and begin reversing immediately some of the most egregious policies of the Bush era, to start the march toward universal health care and end the long war in Iraq, gave Lewis hope that the idealism of "the movement" had finally come to the White House. In these inaugural days, it was hard for him--for anyone--to acknowledge that governing would be far different from campaigning, a switch from poetry to prose, from celebration and adulation to battle and compromise, even defeat. Obama's popularity would plummet soon enough. One of the qualities that he valued most in himself--the capacity for pragmatic conciliation--would inevitably run up against a range of opponents and forces that resisted his charms. A supremely self-confident politician whose first closely contested ballot was the Iowa caucus, who was four years out of the Illinois legislature, would be tested beyond description. He would soon encounter his own limitations, and the public would see the gulf between romance and accomplishment. But for a few days at least, John Lewis and millions of others cherished the moment of promise.
"People have been afraid to hope again, to believe again," Lewis said. "We have lost great leaders: John F. Kennedy, Martin, Robert Kennedy. And so people might have questioned whether or not to place their full faith in a symbol and a leader. The danger of disappointment is immense, the problems are so big. None of them can be solved in a day or a year. And that's the way it was with the civil-rights movement. This is the struggle of a lifetime. We play our part and fulfill our role."
For the inaugural ceremony, Obama had invited Rick Warren to give the invocation, a gesture to mainstream evangelicals, but surely the most moving performance on the podium, besides Obama's own somber address, was the final benediction. A few weeks before the ceremony, Obama had called the Reverend Joseph Lowery, Dr. King's comrade in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who was now eighty-seven years old. Obama left a message and asked him to call him on his cell phone. Lowery had campaigned with Obama in Iowa and Georgia. He had introduced him in Selma with his speech about all the "good crazy" things going on in the country. He had been with Obama from the start. Lowery returned the call, saying, "I am looking for the fellow who is going to be the forty-fourth President."
"Well, I believe that would be me, Brother Lowery," Obama replied.
When Obama asked him to do the benediction on January 20th, Lowery said, "Let me check my calendar." Then, after a long pause, he said, "Hmmm, I do believe I am free that day." The news spread quickly and some of Lowery's friends questioned why Rick Warren had been given the honor of giving the invocation.
"Don't worry," he answered them. "This way I get the last word."
Lowery sat near the Supreme Court justices. He thought that the justices in their robes looked like elders in a church choir. ("Are you going to sing?" he asked the Chief Justice. John Roberts smiled and said, "God forbid." Then Lowery poked Clarence Thomas in the ribs and said, "When are you gonna retire and come home to Georgia?")
When his turn came to speak, Lowery stepped slowly to the microphone and, as he looked out at the vast crowd, he could see the monuments, blurry in the distance. For a second or two, he was overwhelmed by a powerful thought, a kind of hallucination: "When you have eighty-seven-year-old eyes, there is always a haze. But the eyes of my soul at that moment could see the Lincoln Memorial and the ears of my soul could hear Martin's voice on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial summoning the nation to move out of the low land of race and color to the higher ground of the
content of our character. And I thought the nation had finally responded to the summons, nearly forty-six years later, by inaugurating a black man as the forty-fourth President of the United States."
Lowery gathered himself and then, in a worn growly whisper, he began his benediction with James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Every Voice and Sing." The principal of a segregated school in Jacksonville, Florida, Johnson wrote the poem in 1900 to celebrate Lincoln's birthday. By the nineteen-twenties, the hymn, with music written by Johnson's brother, was known as the Negro national anthem and was sung in black churches and schools as a form of protest against Jim Crow and as a sign of faith in a higher American ideal. Johnson spoke of the "exquisite anguish" that he felt whenever he heard the lines "sung by Negro children." Now Lowery, standing a few feet from the first African-American President, read the final verse:
God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far along the way,
Thou who has by Thy might led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to thee oh God, and
True to our native land.
The weather was bitter cold. For months Lowery had been suffering from severe back and leg pain. His voice was not as strong as it was in Selma when he helped ignite Obama's campaign in Brown Chapel, but he had come prepared with a prayer crafted to the historical moment. In closing, he was both sly and full of feeling, refusing self-satisfaction or sentimentality:
Lord, in the memory of all the saints, who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right.
Obama, who had bowed his head in prayer, broke into a broad smile. Lowery said he was improvising on the familiar Sunday-school song "Jesus Loves the Little Children," but the language he was playing with was really an old saying taken up by, among others, Big Bill Broonzy in "Black, Brown, and White," a blues lament about the Jim Crow South. The riff seemed to almost everyone a gesture both joyful and wary, a celebration of historic progress and a reminder that the day of post-racial America had yet to come. Lowery, one of the titans of the Moses generation, had paid obeisance to the fallen "saints," and then had all the millions who were watching say amen. Three times we all said amen. An incredible moment, and yet some commentators, including Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, two of Obama's most hysterical antagonists, could see only anti-white malice in Lowery's words. "Even at the inauguration of a black President," Beck said, "it seems white America is being called racist." Lowery, though, was unfazed. "The only second thought I have," he said, "is that, with more than a million people there, I didn't find a way to take up an offering."
The ceremony was over. On the east front of the Capitol, George W. Bush's helicopter rose into the air, hovered a moment, and headed for Andrews Air Force Base and the flight home to Texas. People began waving derisively and singing, "Nah, nah, nah, nah, hey, hey, goodbye!" Then they cheered as the new President and his guests left the grandstand.
Obama had kept a wall of heroes at the Hart Senate Office Building down the street: a portrait of Gandhi at his spinning wheel; Thurgood Marshall in his judicial robes; Nelson Mandela reclining in a gold armchair, his cane at his side; Martin Luther King, Jr., at the microphone; Alexander Gardner's photograph of a war-weary Lincoln. Obama also displayed a framed cover of Life magazine from March, 1965; it showed a long line of demonstrators, led by John Lewis, about to confront the Alabama state troopers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Lewis had signed and framed the cover and had given it to Obama as a gift. Now, at the luncheon following the swearing-in ceremony, Lewis approached Obama with a sheet of paper and, to mark the occasion, he asked him to sign it. The forty-fourth President of the United States wrote, "Because of you, John. Barack Obama."
Epilogue
One year after the 2008 election it was fair to wonder whether the most profound moment of the Obama era would be its first. Obama himself had said at a press conference, in March, 2009, that the "justifiable pride" the country had taken in electing the first black President had "lasted about a day." This did not seem to concern him much. "Right now," he said, "the American people are judging me exactly the way I should be judged"--on performance. And yet by the time the year was over, his visions of post-partisan comity had given way to the reality of prolonged battle with congressional Republicans and conservative Democrats. In the 2008 election, Obama had won some unlikely states, including Virginia, North Carolina, and Colorado. Now, for many Americans, including independents who had voted for Obama, the sense of dissatisfaction ran deep. In Massachusetts, a Republican of slender gifts named Scott Brown was elected to replace the late Edward Kennedy in the Senate. Obama moved quickly to put his campaign manager, David Plouffe, in charge of the Democratic effort in the 2010 midterm elections, but that was hardly a guarantee that the Party would avoid a disaster like the 1994 midterms.
After Scott Brown's win, Barry Blitt, the New Yorker artist who had drawn the controversial cover called "The Politics of Fear," drew another--a four-paneled cover that showed Obama walking on water in radiant dawn light. But, as he draws closer to the viewer, he loses his miraculous footing and plunges into the drink. The morning that issue of the magazine was on the newsstands, I got a call from Eric Lesser, David Axelrod's assistant, saying that Axelrod and Obama were laughing about the cover: could I send a framed copy signed by Barry Blitt to the President? A couple of days later, Obama told some correspondents about his amusement; their meeting was off the record but it quickly leaked. I couldn't help thinking that while Obama might actually have thought the drawing was amusing, he was also eager to broadcast his own sense of humor and the idea that he had never believed in his own hype.
It was hard to imagine that any President would have remained popular for long in a time of terrible unemployment, record deficits, and political rancor. During the transition period, Obama learned more about the depth of the economic crisis. "Things were plummeting. The skies were darkening," Axelrod told me. "All the economic data pointed to the likelihood of a deep, deep recession. This was not the way we wanted to start the Presidency. I remember talking to Obama and saying, 'It would be fun to start this without a recession and two wars to deal with.' And he said, 'Yes, but if we didn't have that, we wouldn't be here in the first place.'" The terror threat on the day of the inauguration, Axelrod said, "was a raw initiation into the responsibilities of the Presidency."
Some of Obama's achievements during his first year in office were related to what did not happen. Thanks to government interventions, neither the banking system nor the automobile industry collapsed. By most accounts, the country had not only avoided a depression, it was, slowly, fitfully, and unequally, emerging from recession. And yet the reality of ten-per-cent unemployment and the galling spectacle of investment bankers' coming to Capitol Hill to justify their gaudy bonuses prevented any sense of gratitude or celebration. There were other achievements. Obama appointed Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic justice on the Supreme Court. He liberalized national science policy. He set a firm timetable to withdraw American troops from Iraq. He moved against discriminatory policies toward homosexuals in the military. Despite the pleas of some of his advisers, Obama also began his term by calling on Congress to overhaul the health-care system; he got further in that effort than any President in a half-century, but he lost momentum when Brown won his seat in the Senate. At the same time, there were policies sure to dismay those Obama voters who, despite the evidence accumulated during his relatively brief career as a state and U.S. senator, believed he would forgo th
e habit of compromise. His failure to follow through on a promise to close Guantanamo within a year; his dismissal of his chief counsel, Gregory Craig; and many other decisions did little to encourage the left. The Democratic left probably did not imagine that arguably the most influential member of the Obama cabinet would be a Republican fixture of the capital, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.
Surely the most absurd moment of Obama's first year in office came not long after he committed more than thirty thousand new troops to Afghanistan. On October 9, 2009, Robert Gibbs woke the President with a call at around six in the morning to tell him that there had been an announcement in Oslo: Obama, after less than nine months in office, had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. The President's reaction was a more elongated and colorful version of "Shut up."
"It was not helpful to us politically," Obama told me in an interview at the Oval Office in mid-January, 2010. "Although Axelrod and I joke about it, the one thing we didn't anticipate this year was having to apologize for having won the Nobel Peace Prize."
Obama's acceptance speech in Oslo brought to mind his 2002 anti war speech on Federal Plaza, in Chicago. Neither was the statement of a pacifist and, as such, neither wholly pleased its audience. Obama could admire King, but he could never be him. He was not the leader of a movement; he was a politician, a commander-in-chief.
"The speeches are of a piece, and they reflect my fundamental view of the issues of war and peace, which is that we have to recognize that this is a dangerous world and that there are people who will do terrible things and have to be fought," Obama said. "But we also have to recognize that in fighting against those things, there's the possibility that we ourselves engage in terrible things. And so, trying to maintain that balance of the tragic recognition that war is sometimes necessary but never anything less than tragic and never worthy of glorification is, I think, one of the best attributes of America's own character. That's why I celebrate Lincoln. That's why I think we survived the Civil War--because we had a leader of such wisdom and depth that there was no triumphalism on his part at the end, or at all."
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama Page 76
