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.”
Before Obama headed back to Cambridge in mid-August, he knew that this new, two-month-old relationship with Michelle Robinson was perhaps on a par with his now-truncated, three-year-old involvement with Sheila. For Barack, the differences were huge. Sheila was also the biracial offspring of international parents; she had lived in Paris, spoke French and now Korean, and was comfortable around the globe—just like Australian-born, Indonesian-reared diplomat’s daughter Genevieve Cook before her. Michelle Robinson was a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, but she was a 100 percent product of Chicago’s African American South Side, just like so many of the women and men who had revolutionized Barack’s understanding of himself during his transformative years in Roseland.
Barack’s prior relationships had been with women who, like himself through 1985, were citizens of the world as much as they were of any particular country or city. Before Princeton, Michelle Robinson had spent one week each summer with her family at Dukes Happy Holiday Resort, an African American forest lodge in White Cloud, Michigan, forty miles north of Grand Rapids. But if Barack truly believed that his destiny entailed what he thought, he knew full well the value of having roots in one place and having that place be essential to your journey. And who more than Michelle Robinson and her family could personify the strong, deep roots of black Chicago?
Although Michelle would not know that Barack had shared his deeply private sense of destiny first with Sheila and then with Lena, before he left for Cambridge, Barack told Michelle about his belief about his future role. “He sincerely felt, from day one that I’ve known him, that he has an obligation,” Michelle explained, “because he has the talent, he has the passion and he has been blessed.”18
The Harvard Law Review, founded in 1887, was in 1989 the oldest and most prestigious legal publication in the United States. Edited entirely by students—beginning with thirty-eight from the rising 2L class, supplemented each successive summer by several top-GPA 3L “grade-ons” for an annual total of about forty—the Review published eight hefty issues a year—November through June—with the law students contributing twenty to forty or more hours of work weekly, aided by a trio of female office staffers and a quintet of part-time undergraduate work-study students. Beyond the law students, there was an oversight board of two professors, the dean, and an alumnus, but they played only a nominal role. In addition, playing an obtrusive role in the Review’s life was eighty-five-year-old eminence grise Erwin N. Griswold, the law school’s dean from 1946 to 1967 (and himself the Review’s top officer—president—in 1927–28), who critiqued every issue and was available to hector the student editors.
The mid-August return to Cambridge served two long traditions. One was to initiate the new 2L editors into the sometimes-complex internal workings of the Review. The masthead—the president, treasurer, managing editor, supervising editors (SEs), and executive editors (EEs)—oversaw the work of five “offices”: Articles, which reviewed scores of long manuscripts submitted by law professors nationwide and chose a dozen or so per year for publication; Notes, which selected and edited substantive analyses written by the HLR editors themselves; Book Reviews and Commentaries, which assigned and handled shorter pieces; “Devo,” or Developments in the Law, which prepared a major team-written study of some cutting-edge topic for publication in each year’s May issue; and Supreme Court, which oversaw the annual November issue and its several dozen student-written synopses of significant cases decided during the prior term of the U.S. Supreme Court. The November issue also contained the Review’s two top-status faculty contributions: the foreword, written every year since 1951 by an emerging star chosen by the editors, and a major case comment authored by an eminent academic, a feature added in 1985.
In HLR’s very elaborate editing system, overseen by the managing editor, student-written work moved from the offices to the SEs and then the EEs; faculty pieces went directly from the offices to the EEs. Everything also went through a “P-read,” in which the Review’s president recommended editorial changes. Each fall and winter “the 2Ls are the labor, the 3Ls are the management,” 2L editor Brad Berenson recounted, until a new masthead for the upcoming year was chosen from among the 2Ls early in February.
The second reason for the pre-semester start was that the November issue had to go to the printer by mid-October. The 2Ls needed an intensive refresher course in Bluebook legal citation style, followed by an introduction to two other common tasks: sub-citing, in which the accuracy of every quotation and footnoted reference in each piece was confirmed by checking the original source, and roto-pool, in which every faculty-submitted manuscript was read and evaluated by several editors before full consideration by the Articles Office.
Most 2Ls spent their first HLR semester in “the pool,” where almost every weekday morning a pink slip of paper from managing editor Scott Collins would appear in their pigeonhole mailbox in the editors’ lounge on the second floor of Gannett House, telling them what their work assignment was. Editors were enticed there each morning by a spread of free muffins and bagels. “My chocolate chip muffin was the mainstay of my morning,” 3L editor Diane Ring recalled. Thanks to the hefty income the Review received from sales of The Bluebook, free pastries seemed like “a very interesting strategy to make sure you got all those second-years on the doorstep every morning getting their assignment, doing the work,” Ring explained. Patrick O’Brien, also a 3L, remembered that “a lot of my law review involvement had to do with free bagels and cream cheese. It would get me there every morning for a free breakfast.” There also were free evening snacks for those who worked late, and as a result, Berenson recalled, Gannett House became “a gathering place,” “almost like a fraternity house for the editors.” Marisa Chun, a 2L, explained that the editors’ lounge and its television served as “our living room.” With everyone’s classes in nearby buildings, popping in and out was a constant feature of HLR life. For some editors, Gannett House became the center of their daily lives, while for others, especially those who were already married, the Review was more like a demanding part-time job.
The 2Ls had three ways out of the “hideous experience” of doing pool work: join the five-person “Devo” team, whose work would satisfy the law school’s written work requirement; join a multiperson group assigned to edit an especially difficult article; or write a note of one’s own, an option often postponed until the 3L year and almost always done for independent study credit under faculty supervision. Gordon Whitman, the 3L Articles Office cochair, had worked for a year as a community organizer in Philadelphia before starting law school and had successfully pushed for the acceptance of a manuscript that argued that the real-world theology of Martin Luther King Jr. offered a superior perspective for examining the contentions made by “critical legal studies” scholars.
The article’s author, Anthony E. Cook, was an African American associate professor of law at the University of Florida who had graduated magna cum laude from Princeton before getting his law degree at Yale.