Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 112

Here are some excerpts from a book I recently read, "Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama," bu David Garrow:



Over a quarter century later, Obama would say that he saw the change from Barry to Barack as “an assertion that I was coming of age, an assertion of being comfortable with the fact that I was different and that I didn’t need to try to fit in in a certain way.” With his Oxy friends “he would never correct you” if he was addressed as Barry, Asad explains, but when Obama returned to Honolulu for Christmas 1980, he told his mother and his sister that from now on he would no longer use his childhood nickname and instead would identify himself as Barack Obama. But to his family, just as with Hasan, Eric, and Bill, the name change signified no break in who they thought he was. As Snider explained, “I did not think of Barack as black. I did think of him as the Hawaiian surfer guy.”

Obama also realized that the beer drinking, pot smoking, and cocaine snorting that Oxy, like Punahou, offered him, and that had cemented his reputation as “a hard-core party animal” to some friends, was incompatible with any self-transformation into a more serious student and person. Sim Heninger and Bill Snider believed that Obama’s decision to apply to Columbia sprang from a desire for greater self-discipline, and over a quarter century later Obama would remark, “I think part of the attraction of transferring was it’s hard to remake yourself around people who have known you for a long time.” He knew he was at a “dead end” at Oxy and needed a fresh start, that “I need to connect with something bigger than myself.” So when Barack mailed his transfer application sometime just before Oxy’s spring break began on March 20, at bottom he was making “a conscious decision: I want to grow up.”

“They called truces here and there, but it kept popping back up” that Saturday afternoon, as “she screamed and they fought.” Sheila’s voice came through loud and clear: “That’s wrong! That’s wrong! That’s not a reason,” she was heard saying. As the others talked quietly, the explanation of what they were hearing was shared: Barack’s political destiny meant that he and Sheila could not have a long-term future together, no matter how deeply they loved each other. But she refused to accept his rationale: “the fact that it was her race.” It was clear—audibly clear—that “she was unbelievably in love with him,” that “the sex for her was the way to bring it back.” Barack “was very drawn to her, they were very close,” yet he felt trapped between the woman he loved and the destiny he knew was his. According to one friend, Barack “wasn’t black enough to pull that off and to rise up” with a white wife.

As early as his second year at Oxy, Barack had felt “a longing for a place,” for “a community . . . where I could put down stakes.” The idea of home, of finding a real home, “was something so powerful and compelling for me” because growing up he had been a youngster who “never entirely felt like he was rooted. That was part of my upbringing, to be traveling and always . . . wanting a place,” “a community that was mine.” His “history of being uprooted” allowed Barack to develop in less than two years what Sheila knew was “his deep emotional attachment to” Chicago, one that was almost entirely a product of Greater Roseland, not Hyde Park. 

“When he worked with these folks, he saw what he never saw in his life,” Fred Simari explained. “He grew tremendously through this,” through what he acknowledged was “the transformative experience” of his life, through what Fred saw was “him getting molded.” Greg Galluzzo saw it too and said that Barack “really doesn’t understand what it means to be African American until he arrives in Chicago.” But, working with the people of the Far South Side, Barack “recognizes in them their greatness and then affirms something inside of himself.” Through “the richest experience” of his life, through discovering and experiencing black Americans for the first time, Barack “fell in love with the people, and then he fell in love with himself.”

Asif thought Sheila had a deeper commitment to their lives together than did Barack, and now, listening to Barack talk about his goals, Asif understood that his friend “wanted to have a less complex public footprint” as a future candidate for public office, particularly in the black community. Asif recalls Barack saying, “The lines are very clearly drawn. . . . If I am going out with a white woman, I have no standing here.” 

Asif realized just how profound the tension had become for Barack between the personal and the political. “If he was going to enter public life, either he was going to do it as an African American, or he wasn’t going to do it.” When asked if Barack had said he could not marry someone white, Asif assented. “He said that, exactly. That’s what he told me.”

Dozens of Obama’s classmates remember him consistently waiting until a discussion’s latter part before he chimed in, with comments that he thought synthesized what others had said. “He never really took a very strong, argumentative position,” Ali Rubin recalled. Dozens laughingly recalled his insistent usage of the word “folks” as well as his regular introductory refrain of “It’s my sense” or “My sense is,” phrases that DCP members remembered hearing regularly during his time in Chicago. Barack “particularly loved to engage with Professor Parker,” Haverford College graduate Lisa Paget recalled. She has a “vivid” memory of Barack remarking, “Professor Parker, I think what the folks here are trying to say is” so as “to synthesize what other people were saying.” Barack “clearly liked to speak,” but “sometimes people got frustrated because they didn’t feel like they needed him” to speak for them. “‘Say what your own thinking is, don’t tell him what we’re thinking!’”

Decades later, particularly for classmates who had become jurists or prominent attorneys, recollections of just how intensely irritating Obama’s classroom performance had been were burnished with good humor. But even though he was always prepared, always articulate, and always on target, many fellow students tired of Obama’s need to orate. Barack “spoke in complete paragraphs,” Jennifer Radding recalled, but “he often got hissed by us because sometimes we would all make comments” and then “he would raise his hand and say ‘I think what my colleagues are trying to say if I might sum up,’ and we’d be like ‘We can speak for ourselves—shut the fuck up!’” Radding thought Obama was “a formal person, reserved” but “always friendly.” Yet “I’m not sure he related to women as well on a colleague basis” as he did with older male friends like Rob, Mark Kozlowski, and Dan Rabinovitz, a former community organizer interested in politics. Jennifer remembered Barack asking Rob and Dan substantive questions, and “then he’d ask me did I party over the weekend.” One day “I called him on it, and I just said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. You’re someone who’s so liberal, and so women’s rights, and you talk to women like they’re not on the same level.’ It horrified him to hear that,” and “I wasn’t the only one who felt this way.” 

The joking about Obama’s classroom performance intensified as the fall semester progressed. One classmate, Jerry Sorkin, christened him “The Great Obama” because “he had kind of a superior attitude,” Sorkin’s friend David Attisani remembered. “Barack would start a lot of his speeches with the words ‘My sense is,’ and Jerry would walk around kind of stroking his chin saying ‘My sense is.’” Gina Torielli recalled that when Obama or especially Sherry Colb raised their hands to speak, more than a few of the younger men would “take out their watches to start timing how long” they talked. In time it became a competitive game, one played at many law schools over multiple generations, and often called “turkey bingo,” in which irritated classmates wager a few dollars on how long different gunners would exchange comments with the professor. Section III named its contest “The Obamanometer,” Greg Sater recalled, for it measured “how long he could talk.” But Sater explained how there “was a great feeling of relief to all of us whenever he would raise his hand because that would take time off the clock and would lower the chances of us being called upon.” 

No one questioned the value of what Barack, Sherry, or David Troutt had to say, but much of Section III got tired of hearing the same voices day after day. With Barack, Greg said, “we were envious of him in many ways because of his intellect,” self-confidence, and poise, but that did not stop the Obamanometer. “We’d kind of look at each other and tap our watch,” he recalled. “You might raise five fingers,” predicting that long a disquisition, “and then your buddy might raise seven.” Jackie Fuchs remembered the label a little differently, explaining that students would “judge how pretentious someone’s remarks are in class by how high they rank on the Obamanometer.

Before Barack’s return to Cambridge, Michelle told Craig, “I really like this guy” and made a request. She had heard her father and Craig say that “you can tell a lot about a personality on the court,” something Craig had learned from Pete Carril, his college coach at Princeton. Michelle knew that Craig played basketball regularly at courts around Hyde Park, and he remembers her asking: “I want you to take him to play, to see what type of guy he is when he’s not around me.” Craig agreed to take on this task, but he recalled, “I was nervous because I had already met Barack a few times and liked him a lot.” 

Craig quickly scheduled a meet-up, and they played “a hard five-on-five” for more than an hour. Craig’s nervousness quickly fell away because he could see that Barack was “very team oriented, very unselfish,” and “was aggressive without being a jerk.” Craig was happy he could “report back to my sister that this guy is first rate,” and Michelle was pleased. “It was good to hear directly from my brother that he was solid, and he was real, and he was confident, confident but not arrogant, and a team player.” Craig saw only one huge flaw in Barack’s skill set, but it was not relevant to Michelle’s question. “Barack is a left-handed player who can only go to his left.”

Gross recalled how Barack’s “tie would always be off by the time the class started” and “he was really insistent, in every class and on every subject, that we clearly articulate all of the arguments on all sides.” Susan Epstein was struck by how it was “a very diverse class in an otherwise largely white school,” a class with “a real wide range of political perspectives.” Even with each session featuring what Adam remembered as “really hard discussions about incredibly complicated issues,” everyone was always “incredibly respectful” and Barack did “an amazing job” of “making certain we teased out all sides,” that “every angle and every nuance” was covered. 

In sharp contrast to many Chicago professors, particularly the fiery and intense Richard Epstein, whose Socratic questioning never left any doubt as to what the right answer was, Barack’s approach was “incredibly refreshing.” Susan Epstein realized that Barack “never really said what his view was,” and 2L Rob Mahnke believed Barack “was very guarded about what he was thinking,” as if “he was masking his own views.” 

During the second half of the quarter, when the students’ group presentations took place, discussions were “very student-directed” and Barack “didn’t talk that much,” Adam remembered. When Barack did speak up, he talked about “what policies could be enacted that would make a true difference,” Susan recalled. Barack “spent a fair amount of time talking about political rhetoric,” asking that “even if this might be a good policy, how would you get it enacted—what pragmatic steps would you need to take in the framing of it?” Yet despite eight weeks of persistent questioning by Barack, “I couldn’t tell you at the end of it what his views were.”

Matt knew Barack was “much more interested in a political career than a legal career,” and that night at dinner, after “everybody had had a lot of very good red wine to drink,” the conversation turned to how “politics are really sleazy here.” That theme was music to Michelle’s ears, because when Barack had first broached the possibility of succeeding Palmer, Michelle’s reaction had been highly negative. 

“I married you because you’re cute, and you’re smart, but this is the dumbest thing you could have ever asked,” Michelle later said she told Barack. “We would always have discussions about how do you create change,” debates that had stimulated her move from her city job to Public Allies, but “politics didn’t come into the discussion until the seat opened up,” Michelle later said. “I wasn’t a proponent of politics as a way you could make change,” and she believed “that politics is for dirty, nasty people who aren’t really trying to do much in the world.” So Michelle’s response had been “No, don’t do it,” an attitude also informed by her strong desire to have children and a strong belief that her offspring should enjoy the same sort of upbringing she and her brother Craig had had. 

“They were a very, very close-knit family,” her sister-in-law Janis explained, “and Michelle really liked the idea that her parents were present for whatever she was involved in. So she had the same expectation for her husband, so she was conflicted because she knew that Barack was going to have some kind of job that would take him away” if he ran for a state office. “So she had a little bit of hesitation,” and that night at dinner, with Matt in particular kidding Barack about wanting to be a politician, Michelle enthusiastically chimed in. 

“Barack was looking a little somber,” and when Matt went to the bathroom, Barack waylaid him before Matt could return to the dining room. He “grabbed me by my shirt and he pushed me into” another room “and he said ‘Listen, god damn it, Michelle doesn’t want me to get involved in politics, and I’ve already made the decision that I have, and now if I can’t count on my friends to help me with this, I’m really going to get nowhere, so I’d appreciate it if you would be quiet and stop everybody from talking about it.’” It was clear that “the wine was kind of talking,” yet Matt recalled, “I was quite shocked. . . . There was both an assertiveness and a familiarity” in Barack’s manner, and while he was “not angry,” there was no doubt that “he was real serious.” Michelle’s comments that night “made it clear she wanted him to get on a tenure track at UC Law School” and that “she was not at all interested in being a politician’s wife.” 

Years later Michelle remembered, “I thought Barack would be a partner at a law firm or maybe teach or work in the community,” but by late June 1995, there was no question that Barack had his eyes firmly set on succeeding Alice Palmer in the Illinois state Senate if she gave up her seat to run for Congress. Barack later said that Michelle finally relented, telling him, “Why don’t you give it a chance?”

One careful reader concluded that “there’s a very oddly detached quality to the book, almost as if he’s describing somebody else.” But only Jonathan Raban, an experienced world traveler as well as a distinguished novelist, would accurately take Dreams’ full measure. The book “is less memoir than novel,” he realized, an insight that the historian David Greenberg later echoed in calling Dreams “semi-fictional.” In truth, as Barack’s actual life story from the 1960s to the 1990s would subsequently reveal, Dreams From My Father was neither an autobiography nor a memoir. A prescient reader like Raban would note how many characters are “composites with fictional names,” how Dreams’ “total-recall dialogue is as much imagined as remembered,” and how “its time sequences are intricately shuffled” while reflecting upon how novelistic Dreams actually was. 

Less than a decade later one journalist rightly emphasized that Barack “was already weighing a political career when he wrote the book.” Keith Kakugawa, just like Mike and Greg, wondered why Dreams so dramatically magnified their teenage years’ racial tensions, but the explanation for their and others’ puzzlement about Dreams’ depiction of the Punahou years was transparently obvious if one realized how Barack’s embrace of his own blackness during his initial three years in Chicago, and then in Kenya, had retroactively led him to reshape his entire self-presentation of the first twenty-four years of his life. 

As the multiracial author Gary Kamiya perceptively put it, in Dreams Barack “made himself black.” And, as Greg Galluzzo realized in comparing the Barack of Dreams to the young man with whom he had spent scores of hours, “his book could be called A Journey to Blackness.” Barack enthusiastically told one later questioner that “I love to write,” that “I love fiction, I love to read fiction, but I’m not sure I have enough talent to write fiction.” Yet for once in his life, if only for one sole time, Barack Obama sold himself short. Dreams From My Father was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction. True to that genre, it featured many true-to-life figures and a bevy of accurately described events that indeed had occurred, but it employed the techniques and literary license of a novel, and its most important composite character was the narrator himself.