Obama also referenced a recently adopted federal law, set to take effect on July 1, that required every male recipient of federal student aid to demonstrate that he had registered for the draft. Some voices were calling for noncompliance, and Obama observed that “an estimated half-million non-registrants can definitely be a powerful signal” that could herald a “future mobilization against the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country.” He then described the second campus group, Students Against Militarism. Declaring that “perhaps the essential goodness of humanity is an arguable proposition,” Barack contended that “the most pervasive malady of the collegiate system specifically, and the American experience generally, is that elaborate patterns of knowledge and theory have been disembodied from individual choices and government policy.” He ended by commending both groups, saying that by trying to “enhance the possibility of a decent world, they may help deprive us of a spectacular experience—that of war.”
New Yorker editor David Remnick would later characterize Obama’s article as “muddled,” but when it returned to public view twenty-six years after it was first published, it generated astonishingly little discussion of what it said about the political views Obama had held on the cusp of his graduation from college. In his letter to Phil, Barack belittled how “school is just making the same motions, long stretches of numbness punctuated with the occasional insight.” Referencing their disappointing fall semester course, he complained that “Said still didn’t have the grades out for his class until a month into the term, and he cancelled his second term class, so we should feel justified in labelling him a flake.”
As he had in his earlier letter to Alex, Barack singled out Davis’s Ideology and the Novel as an “interesting” course, one “where I make cutting remarks to bourgeois English majors and can get away with it.” But overall, “nothing significant, Philip. Life rolls on, and I feel a growing competence and maturity.” After insulting what he called Phil’s “sojourn to Buttfuck, Arkansas,” Barack closed by saying, “Will get back to you when I know my location for next year.”37
In Boerner’s absence, Barack had been spending time with old Oxy friend Andy Roth, who was working at the John Wiley publishing house. On Friday, April 1, he and Andy attended the first day of the inaugural Socialist Scholars Conference, held at the famous Cooper Union. Roth remembered them both attending an “interesting” talk by sociologist Bogdan Denitch, one of the most committed leaders of Democratic Socialists of America. But rather than attend the conference’s second day, Barack wrote another long letter to Alex McNear. “There are moments of uncertainty in everything that I believe; it’s that very uncertainty that keeps my head alive,” Barack explained. “In pursuit of such hopes, I attended a socialist scholars conference yesterday with Andy. A generally collegiate affair with a lot of vague discourse and bombast. Still, I was pleasantly surprised at the large turnout, and the flashes of insight and seriousness amongst the participants. As I told Andy, one gets the feeling that the stage is being set, that conduits of word and spirit are being layed across diverse minds—feminists, black nationalists, romantics. What remains to be had is a script, a crystallization of events. Until that time a pervasive mood of unreality hangs over such events, a mood that you can see the people fighting against in their eyes, their tone.”
A decade later Obama wrote passingly but imprecisely about “the socialist conferences I sometimes attended at Cooper Union.” His erroneous use of the plural gave future critics fodder to imagine that the “impact of these conferences on Obama was immense” and that listening to Denitch and similar speakers had “turned out to be Obama’s life-defining experience,” a notion that his letter the very next day to Alex utterly rebuts.38
At the outset of that letter, Barack wrote of “churning out assignments” on “state communism” and “the international monetary system” before pausing to reflect on “the wilderness we call life” while smoking and drinking scotch. He reported that he had given his papers to “an elderly woman with a hair-lip and hoarse voice” for typing. This lady was Miss Diane Dee, who was a famous figure around Columbia for decades. A later New York Times profile said “her advertising flyers” are “indigenous to campus walls,” but that her “unkempt hair” and “tired face” made her seem “half-crazed.” One 1983 Columbia graduate believed “she was crazy,” and Gerald Feinberg’s son Jeremy recalled her as “a colorful character—someone I’d expect to appear in a conspiracy theory movie or a Michael Moore film, or both.”
Barack told Alex that Miss Dee was someone “upon whom my graduation depends,” and he was starting to panic because she “has missed two deadlines so far and now seems to have disappeared … no one has answered the phone at her apartment for four days.” He worried that “she’s a mad woman who lures unsuspecting undergraduate papers into her home and then burns them, or uses them to line the bottom of the goldfinch cage.” Following his description of the Socialist Scholars Conference, Barack told Alex that a “sense of unreality describes my position of late. I feel sunk in that long corridor between old values, actions, modes of thought, and those that I seek, that I work towards … this ambivalence is acted out in my non-decision as yet about next year” following graduation.39
Three days after Obama wrote that letter, Columbia’s Coalition for a Free South Africa, in tandem with Students for a Democratic Campus, held a divestment rally outside Low Library, Columbia’s administration building. Student leaders Danny Armstrong and Barbara Ransby had been pressing the issue for months, and the scheduling of a university board of trustees meeting on the fifteenth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination offered an occasion for an afternoon protest. Barack convinced his largely apolitical apartment mate Sohale Siddiqi to attend the rally with him. But Siddiqi thought that compared to the black New Yorkers Siddiqi knew from the restaurant where he worked, “Barack didn’t seem like one of them.” Obama “was soft-spoken and gentle” and used “clean language.” Indeed, “I didn’t consider him American,” never mind African American. Siddiqi believed Barack “seemed like an international individual.”
Siddiqi recalls having witnessed an intensifying change in Barack over the preceding eight months. “He had kind of gone into a bit of a shell and wasn’t as talkative or outgoing as in his earlier days,” Sohale said. When Barack did speak, “he’d give me lectures” about “the plight of the poor” and downtrodden. “He seemed very troubled by it,” and “I would ask him why he was so serious.” Sohale’s interest in drinking, picking up women, and enjoying cocaine held little appeal for the newly abstemious Barack. “He took himself too seriously,” Sohale felt, and “I would find him ponderous and dull and lecturing.”
The April 4 rally drew a disappointing crowd of about a hundred, but afterward a core group of about fifteen student coalition members kept up a 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. weekday vigil to highlight Columbia’s refusal to divest. Barack was not among them, and few of Columbia and Barnard’s black undergraduates from 1981 to 1983 have any recollection of Barack Obama. Coalition leader Danny Armstrong said, “I recall seeing Obama on campus” but never interacted with him. Barbara Ransby, a graduate student who managed the coalition’s contact list and chaired most of its meetings, had “utterly no recollection of Obama.” Verna Bigger Myers, president of the Black Students’ Organization (BSO) in 1981–82, remembered that on a campus with so few minority undergraduates, “all the black people see the other black people” even if they did not really know them. Myers’s close friend Janis Hardiman, who a decade later would be Obama’s sister-in-law, remembered Barack as “sort of a phantom who just kind of walked into” BSO meetings but “did not have an active role” or participate in any the group’s activities.
Wayne Weddington, a junior in 1982–83, remembers seeing Obama at BSO meetings, and Darwin Malloy, a year ahead of Obama, recalled meeting him in the cafeteria in John Jay Hall but agrees that “most people would only remember him as a familiar face.” Malloy believed his friend Gerrard Bushell