At Oxy in 1980–81, Andy Roth had been one of the many men interested in Alex McNear. When Alex returned to her mother’s apartment at 21 East 90th Street in June 1982 to spend the summer taking a theater course at NYU and interning at a publishing company, they got in touch, and whether from Andy or another Oxy friend, Alex got Barack’s phone number and called him. Sometime in midsummer, they had dinner at an Italian restaurant on Lexington Avenue, and although that evening remained chaste, according to Alex, they “started to see a lot of each other” that summer, becoming “really very close.”
Alex’s parents had divorced when she was four years old. Her father had remained in Chicago, and her mother, originally from Wisconsin, got a graduate degree from UW–Madison before moving to New York. Her comfortable apartment, with its library of “thousands of books” in a tall building just off Madison Avenue, was a world away from Barack and Sohale’s dismal quarters only eight blocks to the northeast. Alex remembers that apartment as “sparsely decorated” with “very little furniture” and recalls “opening the refrigerator and seeing like virtually nothing in there.”
Understandably Alex and Barack “didn’t spend a lot of time there,” and apart from one visit with Phil and a party that also included Andy, they socialized only with each other. After going out to dinner, a museum, or a Broadway play like Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold” … and the Boys, about South African apartheid, “he’d come over, and we’d stay at my apartment.” Barack “did not seem like someone who was at all experienced” or indeed “terribly driven,” but his “shyness” and “lack of experience” matched the novelty of their intimacy for her too.27
Barack’s senior-year classes at Columbia began on September 8. One entering freshman remembered Obama as a fellow student in his yearlong Contemporary Civilization core course, and a junior political science major recalled chatting with Barack a number of times in a hallway in the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) building before one or another political science class. Barack, Phil, and Phil’s cousin Pern all enrolled in C3207, Modern Fiction, taught by Edward Said, a Palestinian American literary scholar whom Columbia’s student newspaper months earlier had called a “bitter” critic of Israel at “a largely Jewish university.” Said would “come in and ramble on for an hour about who knows what,” Pern remembered. The reading list for the twice-a-week, one-hundred-student class included Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, and William Faulkner. Pern thought Said could be “brilliant,” and “when he was focused, he was incredible.” But preparing for class was clearly not one of Said’s priorities, and Phil and Barack did not share Pern’s opinion. “We did not think highly of Said,” Phil recounted. “We thought his class was pretty worthless.”
Having settled on political science as his major, Barack had to take a two-semester senior colloquium and seminar in one of the department’s four subfields. Barack’s course credits fit best with international relations, and he and seven fellow seniors ended up in W3811x and y, taught by Michael L. Baron. A young instructor who had completed his Columbia Ph.D. dissertation on U.S. policy toward China after World War II two years earlier, Baron was returning to Columbia after a year of teaching in Beijing. Baron’s dissertation had argued that President Harry S. Truman “was an activist in foreign policy, basing decisions primarily on personal proclivities,” and this course focused on U.S. foreign policy decision-making rather than a particular topical area.
The assigned readings during the fall semester analyzed how past important decisions had been made: the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the fall 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and the escalation of the Vietnam War. Readings included works by Joseph Nye and Ernest May, as well as Irving Janis’s famous 1972 Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes. Baron recalled that “we definitely focused on groupthink.” Throughout the fall, their focus was historical and practical, not theoretical: “What do you need to do to make a good decision? Which presidents were making good decisions,” first and foremost by “taking advice from people outside the inner circle?”
Baron as well as two other students in the small class recall Obama as a standout performer. “He was a very bright student,” Baron said years later, “clearly one of the top one or two students in the class.” One classmate remembered Barack as “a very, very active participant” in class discussions, and another who “didn’t think the seminar was that great” nonetheless was “impressed with Barack…. There was a maturity about what he said and how he said it” that surpassed the comments offered by most if not all of his fellow seniors.
One way of satisfying half of Columbia’s science requirement was Elementary Physics, C1001x, taught by Gerald Feinberg, a professor in his late forties who had taught at Columbia for more than twenty years. The catalog described the course as “an introduction to physics for students with no previous background in physics” and stated that “very little mathematics is used.” Indeed, Feinberg’s popular 1977 book, What Is the World Made Of? Atoms, Leptons, Quarks, and Other Tantalizing Particles, which Feinberg assigned that fall, declared, “I am convinced that a substantial comprehension of modern physics can be obtained without advanced mathematical training.” That book, like Feinberg’s syllabus, focused on “the study of atoms and of their subatomic constituents.” It explained quantum theory, the special theory of relativity, and especially particle physics, “the main feature of the physics of the last twenty-five years.” The course was essentially “a history of physics,” Feinberg’s son Jeremy recalled from personal experience, and his dad “called it physics for poets.”28
In mid-September, Alex McNear left Manhattan to return to Oxy for the fall quarter, and on September 26, Barack sent her a long letter reporting on his first two weeks of classes after receiving a note from her. “I sit in the campus cafe drinking V-8 juice and listening to a badly scratched opera being broadcast. I am taking a break from studying a theoretical analysis of strategic deterrence in the international arena, muddling through concepts like first strike, mutual assured destruction, nuclear payload, and other such elaborated madness. So forgive the dryness and confusion that have undoubtedly rubbed off.”
Describing himself as trying to stretch “across as many disciplines as possible,” Obama sounded as if he had sat in on a number of courses while considering which ones to take. “My favorite so far is a physics course for non-mathematicians that I’m taking to fulfill the science requirement. We study electrons, neutrons, quarks, electromagnetic fields and other tantalizing phenomenon under the auspice of a Professor Fienberg [sic]. He embodies every stereotype of a science professor from the bow-tie to the sparse, balding hair combed back and monotonous Midwestern twang. Behind the thick glasses that pinch his nose, one can sense the passion he brings to the topic and the quiet, unobtrusive cockiness you find in scientists, certain that no one knows any more than they do.”
Obama’s descriptive sketch of Feinberg confirms the impression that Alex and Phil each had of Barack in 1982: that he wanted very much to become a writer. Presented with that depiction of his father years later, Jeremy Feinberg was impressed: “the physical description … is spot-on” and even Obama’s characterization of his voice was accurate. In Barack’s letter, he then cited what he called “the frustrations of studying men and their frequently dingy institutions” while adding that “the fact that of course the knowledge I absorb in the class facilitates nuclear war prevents a real clean break.”
Then he shifted gears. “A steady flow of visitors camped in our living room for two weeks or so, and I had a chance to catch up with friends and play host.” Hasan and his cousin