Barack and Rob were also beginning to think about summer jobs for 1989, and Barack wanted to return to Chicago. Barack’s old friend Beenu Mahmood, who had welcomed him there in 1985 while he was a summer associate at Sidley & Austin, was now in his third year as a lawyer in Sidley’s New York office, and “I suggested that he seriously look at Sidley,” Beenu remembers. Barack had kept in regular touch with Beenu, who believed by 1988 that “Barack was the most deliberate person I ever met in terms of constructing his own identity.”
Sidley actively sought out top 1Ls, and Beenu recalls speaking with Sidley managing partner Thomas A. Cole about Barack. Well before Christmas, his résumé arrived at Sidley’s Chicago office, where 1972 Harvard Law School graduate John G. Levi oversaw the firm’s recruiting at his alma mater and 1976 Northwestern Law School graduate Geraldine Alexis headed up Sidley’s minority associate recruiting effort.
On the Friday after Thanksgiving, Barack learned the surprising news in that day’s New York Times: “Albert Raby, Civil Rights Leader in Chicago with King, Dies at 55.” A memorial service at the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Chapel attracted more than a thousand mourners, and Teresa Sarmina, one of Raby’s former spouses, spoke of how he “would get excited about a person and the potential he could see in that person.”
In Cambridge, the last two weeks of fall semester classes featured a December 7 meeting with Ian Macneil that about 60 percent of Section III attended. “A wide range of complaints were voiced,” Macneil recalled, and tensions were raised further because the final exam in the yearlong course would not take place until late May. Only in their final week of classes in mid-December did Section III learn that its other exams would take place on the afternoons of Monday January 9, Wednesday the 11th, and Friday the 13th. With Civ Pro teacher David Shapiro leaving for Washington, students’ marks on the two-and-a-half-hour open-book midyear test would constitute half of their eventual grade on Harvard’s somewhat odd A+, A, A-, B+ B, B-, C-, and D eight-point scale. Shapiro posed only two essay questions of equal weight, one involving securities fraud and the other concerning an interlocutory (interim) appeal involving hundreds of lawsuits stemming from a hotel fire. No one could have found it easy. Two days later, Richard Parker’s three-and-a-half-hour open-book Crim Law exam posed three questions weighted at 50, 25, and 25 percent. The first posed a hilariously complicated fictional scenario involving a racially profiled terror suspect carrying cocaine who bumps into a knife-wielding drunk who then stabs a passerby. Students were instructed to “respond specifically to all” of six analytical issues. The shorter second and third questions were visibly easier, with the former offering as one of two options an essay on the Burger and Rehnquist Courts’ rulings on searches and interrogations. The third requested a response to a quotation asserting that changes in substantive criminal law doctrines offered a better chance of combating racism than did procedural reforms. On Friday the 13th, Section III’s exam week ended with a three-hour, open-book, two-question Torts exam from David Rosenberg. “Careful organization will be highly valued, as will conciseness and clarity of presentation,” the exam advised. One question dealt with a gang fight prompted by a movie about gang warfare, the second probed a manufacturer’s liability after a polio vaccination of a child infected the youngster’s father.9
With his first three exams complete, Obama flew to Chicago for ten days before spring semester classes began. Staying with Jerry Kellman’s family, Barack immediately learned that Al Raby’s death was not the only sadness that had befallen his Chicago friends. When Barack left Chicago in mid-August, Mike Kruglik replaced Greg Galluzzo as DCP’s consultant-adviser, and in Mike’s first heart-to-heart conversation with John Owens, Johnnie confessed that he was losing a struggle with cocaine addiction. “I was shocked,” Kruglik recalled, but he immediately arranged for Owens to enter a thirty-day residential treatment program on Chicago’s North Side and drove him there to help him check in.
A month later, Johnnie was back at DCP, but the group’s core members felt he had not been prepared to fully shoulder the weight of being executive director. “John was good, but he was not Barack,” Betty Garrett explained. “There was no one in my eyesight that would have been able to fill Barack’s shoes.” Aletha Strong Gibson remembered that they all realized that Owens “wasn’t quite ready” to assume such “a high-pressure position.”
Jean Rudd and Ken Rolling at Woods felt similarly. “When Barack left, Johnnie was really very feeling kind of abandoned,” Jean recalled. “He wasn’t quite ready to be in charge yet” and “just wasn’t confident at that point.” Ken agreed that “John became director before his time.” When Barack learned what had happened, he discussed the situation with Jean, Ken, and Jerry, who remembered that he was “deeply concerned about it” because “he’s feeling responsible.” Kellman also thought that if “DCP blows up in a scandal,” it could hurt Barack’s reputation. Owens recalled that Barack “suggested that I change the name of DCP” because he “figured if I didn’t do a good job with it or something went wrong, it wouldn’t come back to haunt him.” Johnnie saw Barack as deeply strategic about his own future, but Barack refused to acknowledge that. “I was pressing him one time, and he got angry. ‘No! I said no!’ ” But Barack’s exceptionally rare outburst did not alter Owens’s firm belief.
During Obama’s first semester at Harvard, the Illinois legislature had finally approved a comprehensive Chicago school reform bill, which Chicago United’s Patrick Keleher praised as “a fantastic bill,” one that called for every Chicago public school to be governed by an eleven-member Local School Council composed of six parents, two area residents, two teachers, and the principal. UNO and Gamaliel had played a significant role in the victory, but the hard work of implementing it still lay ahead.
Barack had corresponded regularly with Mary Ellen Montes throughout the fall. “The letters came for a while,” Lena remembered, but then there was “a determining letter that was sort of like we weren’t going to write to each other anymore, and so we didn’t.” By January 1989, Lena was involved with someone else, and she and Barack were never again in touch. In Lena’s and Sheila’s absence, and with his friendship with Johnnie now seriously strained, Barack’s two strongest Chicago relationships were with Kellman and Kruglik, and during his ten days back in Chicago, he readily helped both of them with their ongoing organizing work.
Jerry was now fully occupied in Gary, Indiana, and thanks to both Woods and the Diocese of Gary, he had just publicly launched Lake Interfaith Families Together (LIFT), named after the county that encompassed much of northwest Indiana. In Chicago’s south suburbs, Mike was rapidly growing the South Suburban Action Conference (SSAC), and in January 1989, he hired a new young African American organizer, Thomas Rush, a 1988 graduate of Haverford College.
Rush recalled that even during his first long conversation with Kruglik, Mike mentioned Barack, with the implication being that “this guy was special within organizing.” Mike asked Barack to call Thomas, and the next morning they met for forty-five minutes over coffee. Knowing that Barack was at Harvard, Rush expected someone arrogant, but instead he thought Obama was calm and self-assured, with an “even temperament.” Rush remembered that when Barack mentioned Jeremiah Wright, it was “almost like his mind left for a minute” as Barack looked away. When Thomas asked how attending Harvard Law School would connect to further organizing work, Barack said, “I don’t know that I’ll be directly involved, but this will always be a process that I support, whatever I do.”
A few days later, during a LIFT training in Gary, which Kruglik and Rush attended, Obama, along with Kellman, led the day’s sessions for a group of some forty people. At the end of the day, Rush rode back into Chicago with Barack. As Thomas recalled it, Barack mentioned “that he would like to find a good relationship,” ideally “a woman with the body of Whitney Houston and the mind of Toni Morrison.”
Before Barack returned to Cambridge,