The Bridge: The Life And Rise Of Barack Obama Part 7

"They offered us coffee and doughnuts and said, 'The director will be with you soon,'" Randle recalled. "Now the media couldn't see us." They waited for two more hours. Finally, Randle told Obama they should leave, and they did. While they were waiting for the bus, Randle told Obama, "Barack, this is the beginning of a long struggle for us. We can't do C.H.A. first; we have to go to H.U.D. first"--the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. "You go first to the top of the mountain." When they got back home, Obama and Randle started giving out the number of Zirl Smith to residents of the projects. "Light up the phones," they told them.

What thrilled Obama was not so much the subsequent news coverage as the fact that the women he had helped organize and brought downtown on the bus were able to speak so clearly, if nervously, in front of the cameras. His delegation was smaller than he had hoped, but its members had banded together, wryly calling themselves Obama's Army. They had a nickname for Obama--Baby Face.

Obama wrote that the trip to the C.H.A. with his little army changed him "in a fundamental way." It wasn't the smattering of publicity that they received, and it certainly wasn't any concrete success--the asbestos remained for years. Rather, for a young man not long out of college, it was an indication of what might be possible. But he soon saw the limits of that promise. to the C.H.A. with his little army changed him "in a fundamental way." It wasn't the smattering of publicity that they received, and it certainly wasn't any concrete success--the asbestos remained for years. Rather, for a young man not long out of college, it was an indication of what might be possible. But he soon saw the limits of that promise.

When Obama and the others finally met with officials from H.U.D. and the C.H.A., they were told that they could not get both asbestos removal and and basic repairs. ("I had a basic repairs. ("I had a big big hole in my bathtub!" Randle said.) The agencies tried to undermine the organizers by going to key residents and fixing their plumbing. After yet more meetings, Zirl Smith agreed to try to do better. "He didn't know where he was going to get the money for asbestos but he would try," Randle said. "I called Barack and said, I don't know if he is playing games, but we have to continue working on this." hole in my bathtub!" Randle said.) The agencies tried to undermine the organizers by going to key residents and fixing their plumbing. After yet more meetings, Zirl Smith agreed to try to do better. "He didn't know where he was going to get the money for asbestos but he would try," Randle said. "I called Barack and said, I don't know if he is playing games, but we have to continue working on this."

Martha Allen's article in The Chicago Reporter The Chicago Reporter created interest in the larger, mainstream media in town. created interest in the larger, mainstream media in town. Walter Jacobson did a report Walter Jacobson did a report on WBBM and both the on WBBM and both the Tribune Tribune and the and the Sun-Times Sun-Times began to write about the problem. began to write about the problem.

At that point, Obama organized a ma.s.s meeting at Our Lady of the Gardens with Zirl Smith. More than seven hundred people showed up in the church's stiflingly hot gym--most of them single women, but also older people, children, and even reporters.

Ordinarily, Obama had a penchant for organization--scripting meetings, preparing speakers and backup speakers, jotting notes on a clipboard, and then holding follow-up sessions to evaluate how they had done. But he could not lead this meeting the way he had hoped. The crowd, which was already angry, was incensed when Smith was more than an hour late. The public-address system was scratchy and weak. Kellman tried to take the lead, orchestrating a chant, but Obama quickly pulled him aside, telling him that perhaps it was not the best idea to have a white organizer leading a pep rally at Altgeld Gardens.

"He asked me to be a little less visible," Kellman recalled. "He was very stressed. It was still his first year."

Obama kept handing the microphone over to his activists, hoping that they could educate the crowd on the asbestos problem and kill time until Zirl Smith arrived. There was shouting and booing. At last, Smith showed up; Obama told one female activist that they should not give up the microphone lest Smith monopolize the entire discussion. Randle began by asking Smith whether he was going to address the problem--yes or no. As Smith prepared to respond, she did not hand him the microphone but, rather, pointed it toward his mouth. He began by promising to work on the problem--"We're trying to determine the severity of the asbestos...."--but made it plain that if she didn't give him the mike he was going to leave. After nearly two hours of waiting, the crowd was in a state of sweaty irritation. Someone in the crowd fell ill. Smith said that he would call an ambulance from his car. Still, no one would give him the mike. And so after ten minutes, he left the church gymnasium in a huff.

"Chaos! Our wonderful meeting had turned to chaos!" Randle said.

"No more rent!" some of the Altgeld tenants cried as Smith headed for his car.

Obama was humiliated. The possibility that he had felt at the C.H.A. office in the Loop had now evaporated. Several women approached him and yelled at him for embarra.s.sing them, for making them look like fools in front of city officials and the TV cameras.

That night, Obama called his colleague John Owens, an African-American organizer who had gone with him that summer to a training retreat at a monastery near Malibu, California. Obama was stricken. At the retreat they had worked hard on all the fundamentals of organizing--preparation, interviews, power a.n.a.lysis, tactics--but now his plans had ended in a shambles. "Barack was really embarra.s.sed," Owens said. "He thought he hadn't prepped everyone the way he should have."

This was 1986. Most of the asbestos was not removed until 1990 and some was not removed for years after that. But the city did begin to act. The C.H.A. started more testing, established an "asbestos hotline" to answer questions about health hazards, and appealed to the federal government to pay for asbestos removal in the projects. It would take time, but by organizing standards that was a good outcome.

Yet most of what was miserable about Altgeld Gardens in 1986 is still miserable. And over the next two years, working on issues of school reform, job banks, and public safety at the Gardens and in other neighborhoods on the South Side, Obama made far less progress.

"It was hard for all of us," Linda Randle said. "In your struggles as an organizer, you have more losses than you have wins. It goes with the territory. You are out there all day and you talk with people and you think they are getting it but they haven't really. So you have to step back and maybe go at it from a different angle and figure out where they want to go. Over and over again."

"Organizing is a Sisyphean endeavor," Kruglik said, recalling that night in Altgeld. "The power structure in a place like Chicago is not much different than it was thirty or forty years ago. Barack was angry about how people suffered, the injustice of that kind of poverty. He knew that people suffered like that because of the decisions that people in power made."

In those years, Obama spent a lot of time thinking about faith and religion. At every church and community center he visited, sooner or later someone asked him what church he belonged to. Obama danced around the question, changed the subject.

"He was constantly being pressured about joining a church," Alvin Love, of Lilydale First Baptist Church, said. "I didn't push the way other ministers in D.C.P. [Developing Communities Project] did, so he was comfortable talking about it with me. He knew it was inconsistent to be a church-based organizer without being a member of any church, and he was feeling that pressure. He said, 'I believe, but I don't want to join a church for convenience' sake. I want to be serious and be comfortable wherever I join.' He would visit visit churches. You never knew when he was visiting whether he was doing that as an organizer or coming to wors.h.i.+p. Over the years, I had the feeling it was to wors.h.i.+p as much as it was for work." churches. You never knew when he was visiting whether he was doing that as an organizer or coming to wors.h.i.+p. Over the years, I had the feeling it was to wors.h.i.+p as much as it was for work."

Love recommended that Obama seek the advice of an older pastor, L. K. Curry, at Emmanuel Baptist Church on Eighty-third Street. After hearing Obama talk about both his spiritual search and his interest in issues of social justice, Curry recommended that Obama pay a call on one of the best-known ministers on the South Side, Jeremiah Wright, the pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ on Ninety-fifth Street. No organizing effort would fail to gain from Wright's support--and, besides, Curry told Obama, he might like what he found inside the chapel.

The son and grandson of pastors, Jeremiah Wright grew up in the racially mixed neighborhood of Germantown, in Philadelphia. He attended Virginia Union University from 1959 to 1961, a historically black college in Richmond, and then spent six years in the military--he was in the Marines from 1961 to 1963 and then trained as a cardiopulmonary technician at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. In 1966, the year before he left the military, he was part of a team that cared for Lyndon Johnson after he underwent heart surgery. Wright finished his bachelor's degree and got a master's in English at Howard University, and then received another master's, in the history of religions, at the University of Chicago.

Compared with most African-Americans, in the South and in the Northern cities, Wright had a middle-cla.s.s upbringing, but not a sheltered one. In a sermon that deeply affected Obama In a sermon that deeply affected Obama, "The Audacity to Hope," Wright confided that when he was fifteen he was arrested for auto theft and that when he went away to college he briefly left the church and, under the influence of Malcolm X, flirted with Islam: "I tried one brief time being a Muslim: 'As salaam alaik.u.m.'" He had experienced racism--in Virginia, in the military, even in enlightened Germantown--and understood the complexes that came with it. "When I was growing up "When I was growing up," he said in a sermon called "Unhitch the Trailer," "folks used to buy a bleaching cream called Nadinola to try to change what G.o.d had done."

In the nineteen-sixties, the United Church of Christ, a mainly white denomination, established a small parish on the South Side, at Ninety-fifth Street, hoping to draw on the privately owned homes in the area. In the early nineteen-seventies, the paris.h.i.+oners at the new church, Trinity, wanted to play gospel music rather than the traditional Anglo-European hymns; they wanted the church to be more involved in the civil-rights movement, in social activism, in African culture. Most of the ministers on the South Side at the time were cultural conservatives: wary of the black liberation movement; wary of reform in their services; reluctant to adopt political positions that would put them in opposition to their patrons in City Hall. As a result, young people, searching for greater black ident.i.ty as well as a spiritual home, were leaving the church for the Nation of Islam, black nationalism, or small sects like the Black Hebrew Israelites. Trinity promised a Christian home for young people who were politically and socially aware, and wanted that awareness to be part of their church.

Jeremiah Wright, who arrived in Chicago in 1969 and became Trinity's pastor in March, 1972, was among the young clergymen who reacted to the changing political atmosphere and rose to the challenge from rival confessions and sects. He had grown up in an educated household filled with both memories of segregation in Virginia and intense discussion about the heroes of black culture and education. At Virginia Union, he had become increasingly politicized, and at Howard he had heard Stokely Carmichael preach the ideas of Black Power, read the books of Afrocentric scholars such as Cheikh Anta Diop, and studied with some of the faculty's most charismatic black scholars, including Sterling Brown. That was the moment, he said, "when the kids turned black." Wright, like many other young, educated preachers, felt that the time had come for a black church that was a center of racial solidarity and social justice, just as it had been in the years leading toward the Civil War. It was, Wright felt, as if he had been preparing to take over at a church like Trinity all his life.

"The members of this church said, 'No, no, no--we're not going to become Islamic or Hebrew, we're Christian,'" Wright told me. "We're going to be a black church in the black community. As a matter of fact, we're doing nothing in this community. We need to change." In Chicago, Wright had seen churches that either had "throw-down good music" or "a strong social justice component," but rarely both. Wright wanted both. He presented himself to Trinity as a devout intellectual, seminary-trained, and also as a modern race man determined to build a church community committed not only to civil rights but to the day-to-day problems that afflicted so many on the South Side: crime, gangs, drugs, pregnant teenagers, discrimination, poverty, poor education.

Wright began at Trinity with fewer than a hundred wors.h.i.+ppers. At first, he told Roger Wilkins At first, he told Roger Wilkins for the 1987 PBS doc.u.mentary "Keeping the Faith," Trinity was a "white church in blackface." Eventually, he expanded the church to more than six thousand paris.h.i.+oners. He created dozens of educational programs and became one of the leading exemplars of black-liberation theology in the country. Wright's politics embraced not only the liberal and radical leaders of civil rights and Black Power--in 1977, he hung up a banner on the church reading, "Free South Africa"--but also an unusually progressive set of social views. He approved of female pastors, preached tolerance of h.o.m.os.e.xuals, and provided counseling for victims of H.I.V./AIDS. Above all, Wright was considered a brilliant preacher. In 1993, for the 1987 PBS doc.u.mentary "Keeping the Faith," Trinity was a "white church in blackface." Eventually, he expanded the church to more than six thousand paris.h.i.+oners. He created dozens of educational programs and became one of the leading exemplars of black-liberation theology in the country. Wright's politics embraced not only the liberal and radical leaders of civil rights and Black Power--in 1977, he hung up a banner on the church reading, "Free South Africa"--but also an unusually progressive set of social views. He approved of female pastors, preached tolerance of h.o.m.os.e.xuals, and provided counseling for victims of H.I.V./AIDS. Above all, Wright was considered a brilliant preacher. In 1993, Ebony Ebony published a poll of the top fifteen black preachers in the country; Wright was second only to Gardner Taylor, and was one of the youngest in an august group including Samuel D. Proctor, Charles Adams, and Otis Moss, Jr. published a poll of the top fifteen black preachers in the country; Wright was second only to Gardner Taylor, and was one of the youngest in an august group including Samuel D. Proctor, Charles Adams, and Otis Moss, Jr.

An important contemporary intellectual influence on Wright and his church was James Cone, a brilliant young professor of divinity from Fordyce, Arkansas. After enduring the humiliations After enduring the humiliations of the Jim Crow South in his youth, Cone reacted to the ferment of the 1967 riots in Detroit by writing of the Jim Crow South in his youth, Cone reacted to the ferment of the 1967 riots in Detroit by writing Black Theology and Black Power Black Theology and Black Power, an impa.s.sioned manifesto for a black church determined to "emanc.i.p.ate the gospel from its 'whiteness' so that blacks may be capable of making an honest self-affirmation through Jesus Christ." The book was published in 1969, when Cone was thirty-one.

A student of the modern European theologians--Paul Tillich and Karl Barth, in particular--Cone recognized that, while his church preached justice and mercy, it had little or nothing to say about the suffering in his community. In an America that continued In an America that continued to oppress blacks, the church that preached a gospel of Christ must demand radical change: "Unless theology can become 'ghetto theology,' a theology which speaks to black people, the gospel message has no promise of life for the black man--it is a lifeless message." Cone had thought about leaving the church but decided instead to transform it. to oppress blacks, the church that preached a gospel of Christ must demand radical change: "Unless theology can become 'ghetto theology,' a theology which speaks to black people, the gospel message has no promise of life for the black man--it is a lifeless message." Cone had thought about leaving the church but decided instead to transform it. Blackness, for Cone Blackness, for Cone, became a central metaphor for Christian suffering and Christianity itself a "religion of protest against the suffering and affliction of man." The text of Black Theology and Black Power Black Theology and Black Power cites the European theologians that Cone had been studying as a divinity student and as a young pastor, but it also leans on the ideas and language of Frederick Dougla.s.s, Frantz Fanon, the Declaration of Independence, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Its tone is unapologetically ferocious. cites the European theologians that Cone had been studying as a divinity student and as a young pastor, but it also leans on the ideas and language of Frederick Dougla.s.s, Frantz Fanon, the Declaration of Independence, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Its tone is unapologetically ferocious. By way of explanation By way of explanation (and certainly not apology), Cone quotes Baldwin: "To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in rage almost all of the time." Cone's book conceives a radical synthesis of Christian faith and Black Power, King's message of love and Malcolm's of insistence. For Cone, Christianity must focus on the oppressed, and for that role G.o.d has obviously chosen black men and women. (At times, Cone cautions that his concept of "blackness" is not restricted to African-Americans but, rather, is a metaphor for the dispossessed; he is not a separatist or a supremacist.) (and certainly not apology), Cone quotes Baldwin: "To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in rage almost all of the time." Cone's book conceives a radical synthesis of Christian faith and Black Power, King's message of love and Malcolm's of insistence. For Cone, Christianity must focus on the oppressed, and for that role G.o.d has obviously chosen black men and women. (At times, Cone cautions that his concept of "blackness" is not restricted to African-Americans but, rather, is a metaphor for the dispossessed; he is not a separatist or a supremacist.) Cone reminds the reader that the American black church, born in slavery, was a singular inst.i.tution, posed against a white society that had robbed black men and women of their liberty, families, languages, and social cohesion. The spirituals, Cone writes The spirituals, Cone writes, were not merely protest songs but a "psychological adjustment to the existence of serfdom."

The black-liberation theology that Cone conceived and that Wright brought to his church is rooted in nineteenth-century ideas: in David Walker's abolitionist Appeal Appeal, published in 1829, which refers to the "G.o.d of the Ethiopians"; in Frederick Dougla.s.s's slave narrative that distinguishes between the Christianity of Jesus Christ ("good, pure, and holy") and Christianity in America ("bad, corrupt, and wicked"); in Bishop Henry McNeal Turner's newspaper, Voice of Missions Voice of Missions, where he wrote, "We have as much right biblically and otherwise to believe that G.o.d is a Negro, as you buckra or white people have to believe that G.o.d is a fine looking, symmetrical and ornamented white man." In In The Negro Church The Negro Church in America in America, E. Franklin Frazier writes, "The 'color' of G.o.d could only a.s.sume importance in a society in which color played a major part in the determination of human capacity, human privilege, and human value. It was not and is not a question of whether G.o.d is physically black, but it is a question of whether a man who is black can identify with a white G.o.d and can depend on His love and protection." Cone and Wright were part of a deep tradition when they married notions of rebellion and faith. Black-liberation theologians reminded their readers that Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, and Denmark Vesey were not just rebel slaves; they were preachers. The A.M.E. Zion Church was known as the "freedom church," because it was a spiritual home for abolitionists like Frederick Dougla.s.s, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Eliza Ann Gardner.

Wright was not a pure follower of Cone. Relying on his own reading in Afrocentric history and theology, Wright rejected Cone's notion that the white slave masters had stripped the black man of his spiritual and cultural links to Africa. Unlike Cone, Wright insisted on the African origins of spirituals and the blues; he was more deeply influenced by Afrocentric thinking, in general. In church, Wright often wore African-patterned robes. He also came to believe in some of the more dubious theories linked to Afrocentrism. For instance, to explain For instance, to explain the so-called differences in European and African "learning styles," Wright endorsed the idea that Africans and African-Americans were "right-brain" people, who are not "object-oriented" but, rather, "subject-oriented": "They learn from a person" rather than a book. the so-called differences in European and African "learning styles," Wright endorsed the idea that Africans and African-Americans were "right-brain" people, who are not "object-oriented" but, rather, "subject-oriented": "They learn from a person" rather than a book.

Initially, Obama approached Wright as an organizer. He wanted Trinity, with its thousands of paris.h.i.+oners, to consider joining a coalition of other churches on the South Side.

Wright welcomed the young man but laughed at his idea. "That isn't going to happen in this city," he said. "I ain't seen it. I've been in this city since 1969. We don't agree with each other on whether you baptize in the name of Jesus or baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost." The churches in Chicago, he insisted, were just too various, too at odds. Some believe in speaking in tongues, some are sedate and traditional. Some support h.o.m.os.e.xuals and female ministers; others, most decidedly, did not. The divisions ran deeper than the divisions between Orthodox and Conservative Jews, between Hasidim and Reform, Wright said. The idea of organizing all the churches in and around Roseland, as Obama proposed, was impossible. Wright teased Obama for his dewy idealism, saying, "You know what Joseph's brothers said when they saw him coming across the field: 'Behold, the dreamer!'"

Wright's reaction was typical among the pastors of some of the largest black churches on the South Side. Ministers like James Meeks, at Salem Baptist, told organizers that it was easier for them, politically, if they just picked up the telephone and called the Mayor. Meeks worked with the Developing Communities Project for a short while, Alvin Love recalled, "but Barack couldn't keep him in. One of the biggest problems for a community organizer is managing egos when you deal with the pastors." Wright, Love said, "figured he was already way ahead of any organizer on social-justice issues. Why deal with an organizer?"

Nevertheless, Obama was fascinated by Jeremiah Wright and began to discuss more intimate things with him. Ann Dunham had always described herself as "spiritual" and did not hesitate to have her children read sections of the Old and New Testaments, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, and other religious texts, but she was never a churchgoer, never a believer in the standard sense. Not having been brought up in the church, Obama was full of questions, academic and theological. Wright said, "His search was: 'I need a faith that doesn't put other people's faiths down, and all I'm hearing about is you're going to h.e.l.l if you don't believe what I believe.' He didn't hear that from me."

Obama's colleagues were not surprised that he had found his way to the black church--particularly to Jeremiah Wright and Trinity. "Barack had no problem moving into the black church because it is rooted in social justice," Kellman said. "Some ministers can be awful and 'Where is mine,' but historically, this church saw these folks through from slavery. It was almost all they had to work with and it still is around these communities. He was vaguely aware of this but until he came to Chicago he didn't experience it. He had heard tapes of King, the music of it. He knew the church was central to the civil-rights movement. He wanted to be part of a community of people who make values part of the center of their lives. In Judaism, there is no individual salvation. It's community. Barack moves into that sense of the church. It took him years to figure out how to use some of that in his own rhetoric."

If it was merely a large and influential church he sought, Obama could have chosen the Reverend Arthur Brazier's enormous Pentecostal church on the South Side. Brazier had worked with Alinsky in the Woodlawn Organization and had been one of the black ministers who stood by King in Chicago. But Wright was even more politically involved and more progressive. "Reverend Wright and I are on different levels of Christian perspective," Brazier said. "Reverend Wright is more into black liberation, he is more of a humanitarian type who sought to free African-Americans from plantation politics. My view was more on the spiritual side. I was more concerned, as I am today, with people accepting Jesus Christ. Winning souls for Christ. The civil-rights movement was an adjunct; as a Christian, you couldn't close your eyes to the injustice. But in my opinion the church was not established to do that. It was to win souls for Christ."

The more Obama attended services at Trinity, the more Wright's rhetoric infused his thinking and language. Obama admired the way Wright responded to the needs of his community--he helped paris.h.i.+oners with AIDS, created support groups for addicts and alcoholics, developed an "African-centered" grade school, the Kwame Nkrumah Academy, and, every summer, took church members to Africa.

The political p.r.o.nouncements by Wright that, two decades later, plagued Obama's Presidential run were not yet in evidence. "The only troublesome issue was how to relate to Louis Farrakhan," Kellman recalled. "And in the black community people were willing to cross the line and not care about anti-Semitism as long as he was helping people. And I don't think Barack was engaging Wright on that issue."

Obama's black and white friends say that his motives for joining Trinity were complicated, yet Trinity was undeniably a "power church" in town. Obama "saw it as a power base," Mike Kruglik said. "You can't interpret what Obama does without thinking of the power factor. Even then. For a long time, I wouldn't talk about this, but he told me way back then that he was intrigued by the possibility of becoming mayor of Chicago. His a.n.a.lysis was that the mayor in this town is extremely powerful and all the problems he was dealing with then could be solved if the mayor was focused on them."

In fact, Obama, who was working with the poor and the working cla.s.s, was initially concerned about Trinity from a cla.s.s point of view. There were black churches--and white churches, too--that put affluence next to G.o.dliness and he wanted to make sure that he was in the right place. "Some people say "Some people say that Trinity is too upwardly mobile," he remarked to Wright. that Trinity is too upwardly mobile," he remarked to Wright.

In 1981, a committee at Trinity, chaired by a paris.h.i.+oner named Vallmer Jordan, had adopted a twelve-point doc.u.ment of "self-determination" called "The Black Value System." The doc.u.ment, which was written under the influence of the Black Power movement and came under scrutiny during Obama's Presidential campaign, calls for commitment to G.o.d, the black community, and family, dedication to education ("We must forswear anti-intellectualism"), a strong work ethic and self-discipline, charity for black inst.i.tutions, and support for worthy black politicians. Article 8, on the "disavowal of the pursuit of 'middlecla.s.sness,'" warns that the black community is weakened by the division between its most fortunate and talented members and those whose lives are consumed by misfortune, crime, and incarceration ("placing them in concentration camps, and/or structuring an economic environment that induces captive youth to fill the jails and prisons"). And while it is permissible to pursue middle-cla.s.s prosperity "with all our might," members of the community must be wary of being seduced "into a socioeconomic cla.s.s system which, while training them to earn more dollars, hypnotizes them into believing they are better than others and teaches them to think in terms of 'we' and 'they' instead of 'us.'"

Vallmer Jordan admitted that there had been a "hunk of resistance" to the article on "middlecla.s.sness" among church members, until it was made very clear to congregants, not least to the substantial number of well-to-do members who no longer lived in the neighborhood, and who drove to church each Sunday, that they were being warned against their own potential alienation, a drift away from the community.

"We refuse to be silk-stocking," Wright says. The standing joke is that Trinity has B.A.s, B.D.s, M.D.s, J.D.s, Ph.D.s, and A.D.C.s, too--Aid to Dependent Children. "We've got welfare, those letters don't matter here," Wright said. "What matters is that you're made in the image of G.o.d. That kind of message, and trying to push that kind of message, is what makes us different."

When conservative critics suggested during the campaign that Trinity's Black Value System was a kind of black-nationalist manifesto, Obama replied, "Those are values that the conservative movement in particular has suggested are necessary for black advancement. So I would be puzzled that they would object or quibble with the bulk of a doc.u.ment that basically espouses profoundly conservative values of self-reliance and self-help." during the campaign that Trinity's Black Value System was a kind of black-nationalist manifesto, Obama replied, "Those are values that the conservative movement in particular has suggested are necessary for black advancement. So I would be puzzled that they would object or quibble with the bulk of a doc.u.ment that basically espouses profoundly conservative values of self-reliance and self-help."

After a couple of years, Obama had built the Developing Communities Project into a good, small program, but he could readily see its limits. His relations.h.i.+p with Kellman had grown frayed at times, but they still were able to meet, take walks, talk about their work and politics. Obama found himself thinking about a larger arena, about ways to make a greater impact. Obama knew that he could not live the conventional life of a corporate lawyer or executive. Once, Kellman sent him out to Northbrook on a project, and Obama found himself dressing in a suit and commuting on the train. "I never want to do this on a regular basis," Obama told him. "I can't live like this. It's my idea of a nightmare."

In late October, 1987, his third year as an organizer, Obama went with Kellman to a conference on the black church and social justice at the Harvard Divinity School. One night, as they took a walk in Cambridge, Obama told Kellman that he was thinking seriously about leaving Chicago. Obama talked with him about his father, about how he was learning from encounters with various half siblings how Barack, Sr., had lived the last years of his life--impotent with rage, unable to fulfill any of the personal and political dreams he had had when he was a promising student at the University of Hawaii. Obama was determined to do better; he was determined to acquire the proper tools to make his mark on a far broader canvas than he ever could as a community organizer.

It was time, Obama told Kellman, for him to get a legal education. He wanted to go to Harvard.

"Harvard Law School was also a personal security decision," Kellman said. "He wanted to make a living, a decent living. He wasn't a materialist at all. He wanted security to support a family." Money certainly was a part of his decision. By then, Obama's salary had gone up to thirty-five thousand dollars. He was not uninterested in making more than that. He wanted a family, and a reliable income. But above all he wanted to move on, acquire the tools he needed for politics. More often than not, Obama said, organizing ended up in failure; the gains were too small, too rare. Kellman, who soon left organizing himself for a while, did not argue the point. If anything, his level of frustration ran deeper. The conversations at the divinity school intensified Kellman's conviction that one day Obama would return to Chicago and run for public office.

On November 25, 1987, Harold Was.h.i.+ngton, who had been reelected the year before, died at his desk at City Hall--a death, Obama wrote, that was "sudden, simple, final, almost ridiculous in its ordinariness." Like most of the city, Obama spent much of that Thanksgiving weekend watching on television as the lines of mourners at City Hall stood in the cold rain; he listened to WVON, the main black talk-radio station in town, take calls from African-Americans who regarded Was.h.i.+ngton as a fallen king. In many ways, Obama revered Was.h.i.+ngton In many ways, Obama revered Was.h.i.+ngton, but he also despaired that Was.h.i.+ngton had not left behind a strong political organization: "Black politics had centered on one man who radiated like a sun." After eight days of negotiations, the City Council installed Eugene Sawyer, a black member of the old machine, as mayor. Sawyer had shown support for Was.h.i.+ngton but now had to rely on the white conservative aldermen like the "Eddies," Edward Vrdolyak and Ed Burke, Was.h.i.+ngton's archenemies in what was known as the "Council Wars." (Vrdolyak, the epitome of a corrupt machine alderman, finally ended his long career in 2008 with a string of federal indictments and a conviction for mail and wire fraud.) Obama went to City Hall to witness what he called "the second death": Sawyer's official elevation. Outside, Obama watched as the crowd, mainly older black men and women, denounced the African-American aldermen who were doing business with Vrdolyak and waved dollar bills at Sawyer, calling him an Uncle Tom. In the weeks after Was.h.i.+ngton's death and the sorry spectacle of Sawyer's installation, some of Obama's friends, including Mike Kruglik, became even more convinced that he would one day return to Chicago and run for office.

Toward the end of his time as an organizer, Obama met with Bruce Orenstein, an organizer for the United Neighborhood Organization, who had worked with him in an attempt to devise a way to profit off of the local landfills to fund community improvements on the far South Side. A proposal they had put together had won support from Harold Was.h.i.+ngton, but it collapsed after he died. Sawyer was not Harold Was.h.i.+ngton. Both Obama and Orenstein were frustrated and ready to move on--Obama to law school, Orenstein into video projects. When Orenstein asked him over a beer where he planned to be in ten years, Obama replied, "I'm going to write a book and I want to be mayor of Chicago."

Obama asked John McKnight, a co-founder, with Greg Galluzzo, of the Gamaliel Foundation and a professor of communications at Northwestern, and Michael Baron, his politics professor at Columbia, to write letters of recommendation for him to Harvard Law. (He also applied to Yale and Stanford.) McKnight had met Obama when he arrived in Chicago as a trainee. Obama told him that now that he had seen what could be done on a "neighborhood level," he wanted to explore what could be done in public life. McKnight, who has been involved with organizing for decades, and who shared the organizer's traditional wariness of politicians, cautioned him: an organizer was an advocate for people and their interests; a politician, he said, is "the reverse," someone who synthesizes and compromises interests. Would he be satisfied with that? "That's why I want to go into public life," Obama replied. McKnight agreed to write the letter. He had the idea that Obama had not received exceptional grades as an undergraduate--"I don't think he did too well in college"--but he had been deeply impressed by his intelligence and his commitment as an organizer.

Just after he left his job as an organizer, Obama published a short article in a local monthly, Illinois Issues Illinois Issues, ent.i.tled "Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City." In the article, Obama makes clear that he came away from the experience in Chicago believing that neither electoral politics nor government development programs would help the inner cities unless they were "undergirded by a systemic approach to community organization." Despite the hope created by the election of black mayors like Was.h.i.+ngton, in Chicago, and in Gary, Indiana, the high-school dropout rates were still at nearly fifty per cent; the old forms of discrimination had been replaced by inst.i.tutional racism; the flight of the middle cla.s.s and a Reagan-era decline in public support had left inner cities in despair.

Obama was not entirely frustrated with his experience in Chicago. He credited the Developing Communities Project and programs like it with gains in job training, school accountability, and better crime and drug programs. He and his colleagues had been able to set up a jobs-training center on Michigan Avenue in Roseland, on the site of a shut-down department store. (Harold Was.h.i.+ngton himself came to the ribbon-cutting.) And yet, like so many projects that Obama and his fellow organizers worked on, the jobs initiative floundered because there was so little work around. The center closed after three years. "I do know that we got some training done," Alvin Love said. "But I don't know how many people really got new jobs."

By 1988, Obama's ideas about organizing no longer focused much on Saul Alinsky. For Obama, organizing was a way of thinking about fixing specific problems and also building a culture. "We tend to think of organizing "We tend to think of organizing as a mechanical, instrumental thing," Obama said in 1989 at a roundtable discussion organized by the Woods Charitable Fund, in Chicago. "I think Alinsky to some extent may not have emphasized this, but I think the unions that Alinsky saw--I think John L. Lewis understood that he was building a culture. When you look at what's happened to union organizing, one of the losses has been that sense of building a culture, of building up stories and getting people to reflect on what their lives mean and how people in the neighborhood can be heroes, and how they are part of a larger force. That got shoved to the side." as a mechanical, instrumental thing," Obama said in 1989 at a roundtable discussion organized by the Woods Charitable Fund, in Chicago. "I think Alinsky to some extent may not have emphasized this, but I think the unions that Alinsky saw--I think John L. Lewis understood that he was building a culture. When you look at what's happened to union organizing, one of the losses has been that sense of building a culture, of building up stories and getting people to reflect on what their lives mean and how people in the neighborhood can be heroes, and how they are part of a larger force. That got shoved to the side."

Obama now saw Alinsky's theories and opinions as deeply flawed. Alinsky's critique of Martin Luther King, for example, showed a dismissal not only of charismatic leaders.h.i.+p but also of long-term vision. Obama particularly disputed Alinsky's emphasis on confrontation. He thought the time had come to find new ways to reach young African-Americans. "They are "They are not necessarily going to town hall meetings, and they are not going to pick up not necessarily going to town hall meetings, and they are not going to pick up Reveille for Radicals," Reveille for Radicals," Obama said. "They are going to see the Spike Lee film, or they are going to listen to the rap group." Obama said. "They are going to see the Spike Lee film, or they are going to listen to the rap group."

Obama was clearly thinking about broader politics now and about how he, or anyone, could bring the experience of organizing to elected office. "How do you link up some of the most important lessons about organizing--accounting, training, leaders.h.i.+p, and that stuff--with some powerful messages that came out of the civil-rights movement or what Jesse Jackson has done or what's been done by other charismatic leaders?" he asked the panel. "A whole sense of hope is generated out of what they do. Jesse Jackson can go into these communities and get these people excited and inspired. The organizational framework to consolidate that is missing. The best organizers in the black community right now are the crack dealers. They are fantastic. There's tremendous entrepreneurs.h.i.+p and skill. So when I talk about vision or culture it has to do with how organizing in those communities can't just be instrumental. It can't just be civic. It can't just be, 'Let's get power, call in the alderman,' etc. It has to be recreating and recasting how these communities think about themselves."

Obama could not have foreseen the full scope of his political future, but it's evident that he was thinking about the effect that someone like him could have both in imbuing a community with a sense of hope and in providing the organized framework for making that hope an a.s.set for reform. He rejected organizing's "suspicion of politics." To disdain politics, he told the panel To disdain politics, he told the panel, was to disdain "a major arena of power. That's where your major dialogue, discussion, is taking place. To marginalize yourself from that process is a damaging thing, and one that needs to be rethought."

Obama, who had been attracted to community organizing by the example and the romance of the civil-rights movement, was, by the time his experience with it was over, thinking about how to combine elements of charismatic leaders.h.i.+p, the principles of organizing, and a set of liberal political and policy principles. He was no longer interested in being an outsider; his thoughts were turning to elective politics. Going to law school--and, not incidentally, going to an inst.i.tution like Harvard--was part of learning the fundamentals of a system he had seen mainly from the street.

Obama never completely left the world of community organizing. On vacations from law school, he visited a new girlfriend in Chicago named Mich.e.l.le Robinson, and also Kellman and Kruglik. He later served on the boards of the Woods Fund and the Lugenia Burns Hope Center, which helped fund organizing efforts in the city. He spoke at numerous retreats and training sessions. And while he learned a tremendous amount from his experience, he had also come to embrace the possibilities of charismatic leaders--whether an outsider like King or an insider like Was.h.i.+ngton--and what can be reaped in a political process of battle and compromise.

In May, 1988, Obama made a clean break with the first chapter of his life in Chicago. He had split up with his old girlfriend. ("I ran into her a couple of weeks after he left and she seemed upset, brokenhearted," John Owens recalled. "Barack tends to make a strong impression on women.") As Obama handed over the leaders.h.i.+p of the Developing Communities Project to Owens, he was determined to work on a broader level. "Barack's biggest success in Chicago had not been in bricks and mortar," his friend and comrade Reverend Alvin Love said. "He'd found out things about himself and his community. That was important. But what he really did was give people like me and Loretta, John Owens, and Yvonne Lloyd, and dozens and dozens of others, the tools to keep the work going, whether he was around or not."

Before leaving, Obama gave his cat, Max, to Jerry Kellman. Then he said good-bye to his friends and drove out of town.

Chapter Five.

Ambition.

In the early fall of 1988, Obama arrived in Cambridge sure that he would learn what he later called "a way of thinking." He was taking on thousands of dollars in debt for the privilege. Unlike many students who end up in law school without quite knowing why, apart from its value as another blue-chip credential, Obama approached Harvard purposefully, as a serious place that offered dimensions of knowledge that he could never acquire as an organizer on the South Side of Chicago. At Harvard, he would join the world of the super-meritocrats of his generation, s.h.i.+fting from outsider to insider. "I would learn about interest rates "I would learn about interest rates, corporate mergers, the legislative process, about the way businesses and banks were put together; how real-estate ventures succeeded or failed," he wrote. "I would learn power's currency in all its intricacy and detail, knowledge that would have compromised me before coming to Chicago but that I could now bring back to where it was needed, back to Roseland, back to Altgeld; bring it back like Promethean fire." Harvard also had a personal dimension: Barack, Sr., had left his wife and his two-year-old son to go there. If Obama had inherited anything from his father it was the notion that Harvard was the sine qua non, the place you went to go the farthest, achieve the most. At Harvard he would match his father, then surpa.s.s him; at Harvard he would acquire his serene self-confidence and a sense of his own destiny.

A modern would-be politician, particularly a Democrat like Barack Obama, arrives at Harvard Law School keenly aware that the law school--its students and faculty--provided much of the brainpower for the New Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society. Before Obama, Rutherford B. Hayes was the only President to graduate from the law school, but Harvard alumni have always been well represented in Congress and, especially, on the Supreme Court. On the current Supreme Court, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Stephen Breyer all graduated from the law school. (Ruth Bader Ginsburg attended for a year and made the Law Review Law Review, then moved with her husband to New York, and finished at Columbia.) The law school, which is just a short walk north of Harvard Yard, is a jumble of architectural styles, ranging from Austin Hall, the Romanesque creation, in 1883, of H. H. Richardson, to the Harkness Commons, a fairly brutal concoction from the Bauhaus catalogue of Walter Gropius. The land was the bequest of the Royall family, Southern plantation owners who brought their slaves North, to an estate in Medford, Ma.s.sachusetts. In 1781, Isaac Royall, Jr., left Harvard an endowment that served to establish the college's first chair of law. The proceeds from the sale of the Medford estate, in 1806, became the seed money of the law school as a whole. The school, which was established in 1817, was small at first and fairly insignificant, until, in 1870, Christopher Columbus Langdell came to Harvard and instigated a new curriculum, based on the study of individual legal cases and a style of Socratic inquisition.

By the time Obama arrived at Harvard, the law-school curriculum had grown much more flexible than in Langdell's day and the student body more diverse, but the school was still a fractious place, riven by political conflict and intramural resentments. As if to flaunt its own unhappiness, the law-school community commonly referred to itself as a bastion of Levantine infighting--alternately "Beirut on the Charles" and "the Beirut of legal education."

Obama said that Harvard Law School was the "perfect place to examine how the power structure works." Indeed, the "power structure"--a phrase common in organizing circles--and how it is, or is not, examined by the likes of Harvard Law School was the focus of a battle that had already raged for a decade when Obama enrolled. In 1977, a group of legal academics--radicals, as most would readily have identified themselves--met at a conference in Madison, Wisconsin, to discuss a barely formed school of thought that was soon to be called Critical Legal Studies. Influenced by post-structuralism, the Frankfurt School of critical theory, and the Legal Realism of the nineteen-twenties, the scholars interested in Critical Legal Studies sought to demystify the law and the language of law and legal studies, to challenge its self-regard as a disinterested system of precedent. Critical Legal Studies posited that law is politics by other means, that the practice and discourse of law--and legal education--is merely another lever of entrenched power, a way of enforcing the primacy and perquisites of the wealthy, the powerful, the male, and the white. According to the adherents of Critical Legal Studies, many of the conditions of the legal status quo--the high incarceration rates among people of color, the higher penalties for drugs used mainly among the poor--are inscribed in a legal system that only pretends to be consistent and non-ideological. was the "perfect place to examine how the power structure works." Indeed, the "power structure"--a phrase common in organizing circles--and how it is, or is not, examined by the likes of Harvard Law School was the focus of a battle that had already raged for a decade when Obama enrolled. In 1977, a group of legal academics--radicals, as most would readily have identified themselves--met at a conference in Madison, Wisconsin, to discuss a barely formed school of thought that was soon to be called Critical Legal Studies. Influenced by post-structuralism, the Frankfurt School of critical theory, and the Legal Realism of the nineteen-twenties, the scholars interested in Critical Legal Studies sought to demystify the law and the language of law and legal studies, to challenge its self-regard as a disinterested system of precedent. Critical Legal Studies posited that law is politics by other means, that the practice and discourse of law--and legal education--is merely another lever of entrenched power, a way of enforcing the primacy and perquisites of the wealthy, the powerful, the male, and the white. According to the adherents of Critical Legal Studies, many of the conditions of the legal status quo--the high incarceration rates among people of color, the higher penalties for drugs used mainly among the poor--are inscribed in a legal system that only pretends to be consistent and non-ideological.

Many students at Harvard in the late seventies, the eighties, and the early nineties, who were not necessarily left-wing, were excited by this a.n.a.lysis. The leading Crits at Harvard were three vastly different scholars: Morton Horwitz, Duncan Kennedy, and Roberto Mangabeira Unger.

"Barack didn't study directly with Horwitz or Kennedy, but they were very much in the air, and he absorbed what was going on," Obama's cla.s.smate Kenneth Mack, who is now himself a professor of law at Harvard, said. "The Crit who was most important to his studies--not that he was an acolyte--was Roberto Unger."

Unger, a social theorist, born in Brazil, was one of those academics who combine a personal charisma and a mode of study that attract young students. The American legal system, Unger contends, pretends pretends to neutrality and a reliance on precedent, but what it actually does is enforce the permanence and the property rights of elites; the law guards against radical challenges to the elites and engages only in narrow issues. Unger is less a legal scholar than a political philosopher, and the more conventional students at Harvard avoided his courses. "His course descriptions in the catalogue were impenetrable and you knew he was worse in cla.s.s," a near-contemporary of Obama's said. to neutrality and a reliance on precedent, but what it actually does is enforce the permanence and the property rights of elites; the law guards against radical challenges to the elites and engages only in narrow issues. Unger is less a legal scholar than a political philosopher, and the more conventional students at Harvard avoided his courses. "His course descriptions in the catalogue were impenetrable and you knew he was worse in cla.s.s," a near-contemporary of Obama's said.

Obama took two of his courses. The first was Jurisprudence. As Unger taught the course, Jurisprudence was a radical critique of contemporary Western political thought and legal theory and Obama's most prolonged academic exposure to the rudiments of Critical Legal Studies. A cla.s.smate who took the course with Obama described Jurisprudence as a "multi-step argument" that inspected, and then undermined, the presumptions of American legal thought. In his third year, Obama enrolled in Reinventing Democracy, a course in which Unger combined a critique of Western democracies--or neo-liberalism, as he referred to it--and the potential forms democracy could, or should, take. Unger argued against the "mandarins" who presided over contemporary democratic society and tried, in often highly experimental terms, to urge a rethinking of Western inst.i.tutions. He urged the adoption of a "universal social inheritance" going well beyond the terms of the New Deal.

"The Reinventing Democracy course was relatively small and very intense," Unger said. In cla.s.s, Unger contrasted the "bold but shapeless" course of F.D.R.'s initiatives in the early days of the New Deal, his "inst.i.tutional experimentalism," with the more "restrictive focus" of his later years in office. He also expounded on what he saw as the Democratic Party's failure in the second half of the twentieth century to follow up on the efforts of the early New Deal. The reforms of the Johnson Administration, for example, were deemed modest. The cla.s.s debated the Republican ascendancy in post-war America--its concessions to moneyed interests and its cultural rhetoric, directed toward the white middle-cla.s.s majority.

"Everyone recognized that this late-twentieth-century exercise in conservative statecraft would not have enjoyed such success had the Democratic Party, and the progressives in general, not abdicated so completely their responsibility to build and to defend a national alternative," Unger said. "Many worried, however, that it would be hard to undo this defeat and supply the alternative without the deus ex machina deus ex machina of a crisis of dimensions resembling that of the Depression of the nineteen-thirties." of a crisis of dimensions resembling that of the Depression of the nineteen-thirties."

Unger, who later served in the Brazilian government of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, disputed the idea, proposed by some cla.s.smates, that Obama was put off by the abstruse theoretical nature of the course. "Obama shared in the more philosophical part of the discussion as vigorously as he did in the more context-oriented part," he said by e-mail from Sao Paulo. "The impression you report, of impatience with speculative exploration, is false. It does justice neither to him nor to me to represent these conversations under the lens of the trope of philistine activist against starry-eyed theoretician. He was always interested in ideas, big and small."

Unger continued to communicate sporadically with Obama by "e-mail and BlackBerry correspondence" over the years, keeping in touch through the Presidential campaign, but he added, "At no time can I say I became his friend." He avoided inquiries from the press for "a simple reason": I am a leftist, and, by conviction as well as by temperament, a revolutionary.... Any a.s.sociation of mine with Barack Obama in the course of the campaign could do only harm.

Unger said that, as a student and afterward, Obama shared with other gifted Americans "a very strong sense of the limits that American politics and political culture impose on what can be said and done, and ultimately on what can be felt and thought." That sense of caution crimps political debate and diminishes the capacity for political boldness: "Obama is probably smarter than Franklin Roosevelt was but lacks the full thrust of Roosevelt's providential self-confidence." Unger also offered an a.n.a.lysis of Obama's personality and "subjectivity": Obama's manner in dealing with other people and acting in the world fully exemplifies the cheerful impersonal friendliness--the middle distance--that marks American sociability. (Now allow me to speak as a critic. Remember Madame de Stael's meetings that deprive us of solitude without affording us company? Or Schopenhauer's porcupines, who s.h.i.+ft restlessly from getting cold at a distance to p.r.i.c.kling one another at close quarters, until they settle into some acceptable compromise position?) The cheerful impersonal friendliness serves to mask recesses of loneliness and secretiveness in the American character, and no less with Obama than with anyone else. He is enigmatic--and seemed so as much then as now--in a characteristically American way.Moreover, he excelled at the style of sociability that is most prized in the American professional and business cla.s.s and serves as the supreme object of education in the top prep schools: how to cooperate with your peers by casting on them a spell of charismatic seduction, which you nevertheless disguise under a veneer of self-depreciation and informality. Obama did not master this style in prep school, but he became a virtuoso at it nevertheless, as the condition of preferment in American society that it is. As often happens, the outsider turned out to be better at it than the vast majority of the insiders.Together with the meritocratic educational achievements, the mastery of the preferred social style turns Obama into what is, in a real sense, the first American elite President--that is the first who talks and acts as a member of the American elite--since John Kennedy....Obama's mixed race, his apparent and a.s.sumed blackness, his non-elite cla.s.s origins and lack of inherited money, his Third-World childhood experiences--all this creates the distance of the outsider, while the achieved elite character makes the distance seem less threatening.

By the time Obama appeared on campus, there had also appeared an increasing number of conservative and libertarian scholars centered on the Federalist Society, a many-branched group that had begun in 1982 at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Chicago. The main tenet of the Federalists was, in their terms, judicial restraint; critics argued that the Federalist vision of restraint was a form of conservative activism. The founders included such conservative jurists as Robert Bork. (On the current Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito are Federalists.) Some Federalists believe in the Law-and-Economics approach, a theoretical marriage of Milton Friedman's free-market economics and judicial minimalism, and they look to the pioneering work not only of Smith and Pareto but of the economist Ronald Coase, and such jurists as Frank Easterbrook and Richard Posner. At Harvard Law School, where an A.C.L.U. liberal is considered a centrist, the advent of the Federalists--a vocal minority--heightened the political tension on campus. on campus, there had also appeared an increasing number of conservative and libertarian scholars centered on the Federalist Society, a many-branched group that had begun in 1982 at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Chicago. The main tenet of the Federalists was, in their terms, judicial restraint; critics argued that the Federalist vision of restraint was a form of conservative activism. The founders included such conservative jurists as Robert Bork. (On the current Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito are Federalists.) Some Federalists believe in the Law-and-Economics approach, a theoretical marriage of Milton Friedman's free-market economics and judicial minimalism, and they look to the pioneering work not only of Smith and Pareto but of the economist Ronald Coase, and such jurists as Frank Easterbrook and Richard Posner. At Harvard Law School, where an A.C.L.U. liberal is considered a centrist, the advent of the Federalists--a vocal minority--heightened the political tension on campus.

"Posner wasn't at Harvard, of course, but Barack was extremely interested in what he was saying and writing, too," Mack said. "Some students on the left just wouldn't read about the 'law and economics' school on general principle. That wasn't Barack."

The combination of C.L.S. radicals, A.C.L.U. liberals, and Federalist conservatives made for constant fights at the law school, particularly over tenure decisions. In the fall of 1987, one of the younger Critical Legal Studies adherents, Clare Dalton, a specialist in family law and the wife of the economist Robert Reich, was denied tenure, despite overwhelming support from the outside review committee. When Derrick Bell When Derrick Bell, the first black professor to gain a place on the Harvard Law School faculty, staged a sit-in supporting Dalton, Robert Clark, a leading professor at the law school, cracked, "This is a university, not a lunch counter in the Deep South." He eventually apologized for the remark, but the tone of the conflict was set.

"By the time Barack got to campus, in 1988, all the talk and the debates were s.h.i.+fting to race," said Elena Kagan, who became dean of the law school and then, in 2009, was named Obama's Solicitor General. In part as a result of affirmative action, ten to twelve per cent of the student body at the law school was African-American, and the racial atmosphere, as at so many other inst.i.tutions, was marked by a general undertone of resentment and disquiet. At meals, blacks sat mainly with blacks, whites with whites. Some of Obama's cla.s.smates told me that, as students in their early and mid-twenties, they were beginning to imagine their professional lives in the "white world"--in law firms, corporations, public service--and the process of finding a sense of confidence and ident.i.ty and balance was not easy at Harvard Law.

"You had the sense that there were a lot of white students thinking to themselves about us, Do you, the black students, really belong here?" Earl Martin Phalen, a friend of Obama's, said. "So many of us carried a chip around, angrily insisting, 'We're as smart as you. There are a lot more people that got in as legacies than from affirmative action.'"

The law-school cla.s.s, with more than five hundred students, is divided into four sections; Obama took all his first-year cla.s.ses in Section Three. His professors included a pro-life feminist and eventual Bush Administration amba.s.sador to the Holy See, Mary Ann Glendon, for property; a human-rights specialist, Henry Steiner, for torts; Richard Parker, a const.i.tutional scholar, for criminal law; a civil-rights specialist, David Shapiro, for civil procedure; and a visiting scholar from Northwestern, Ian Macneil, for contracts. "We felt as if we had the hardest "We felt as if we had the hardest, worst, most inflexible section," one of Obama's section mates, David Dante Troutt, complained. "We felt like a control group in the presence of folks receiving the revolutionary new drug."

To Mack, Obama seemed far more mature and centered than his cla.s.smates; he seemed "wise in the ways of the world," not merely because he was older by a few years but also because of his serene manner, his intellectual engagement, and his evident desire to enter public service rather than serve a corporate firm. Mack, and other first-year friends, like Ca.s.sandra b.u.t.ts, knew little about Obama's complicated background at first. From his appearance, they could hardly guess at his complicated background. Obama looked African-American and identified himself as such.

"We were friends fairly immediately and then over the next two years, we saw each other all the time," Mack said. "He wasn't interested in a lot of the