Obama observed that Titcomb “jokes about his appetite for food and women, exhibiting a charm and flair in everything he does, but a sustained commitment or depth in nothing.” But Barack added, “He loves me and I love him, but he senses different priorities in me now,” though “I admire and envy his easy manner and fluid grace.” One day the two old friends went scuba diving two miles off Oahu, fifty feet down. On another, Ann’s mentor Alice Dewey “argued in husky tones with me and a few other of my mother’s friends over politics, sexual relations, art and the economy.” Only “after five hours and four cups of coffee” did Barack drive her home.
Alluding most likely to how they had met exactly one year earlier, Barack asked Genevieve, “How did you spend New Year’s Eve? Mine was not as eventful as the last one.” He told her he was flying back to New York on January 22 and would likely stay with Hasan and his cousin Ahmed at the Eagle Warehouse apartment “until I find a place. I confess to a fear of failing to find a useful gig for myself upon my return, but have no thoughts of doing anything else. I expect the transition may be tough on me,” as his prior attempts to obtain a politically satisfying job had failed, “but I expect you to have some patience with my foolishness and kick me when I get out of line. I miss you very much, and hope your enthusiasm for school stays high.” He signed off “Love, Barack.”
The same day Barack wrote that letter to Genevieve, his mother Ann privately recorded her own plans for the New Year. Many of her jottings concerned the multiple debts she owed her parents, including $1,764 per semester for Maya’s Punahou tuition, and $175 for an airplane ticket for “Barry.” The “$4,846 withdrawn from account by Toot” was later updated with “$3,940 repaid 2/6/85.” A long numerical “People List” began with Maya as #1, Ann’s Indonesian lover Adi Sasono #2, “Bar” #3, her parents #s 4 and 5, and included former brother-in-law Omar Obama as #175. The “Long Range Goals” she listed on New Year’s Day began “1. Finish Ph.D. 2. 60K 3. In shape 4. Remarry 5. Another culture 6. House + land 7. Pay off debts (taxes) 8. Memoirs of Indon. 9. Spir. develop (ilmu batin) 10. Raise Maya well 11. Continuing constructive dialogue w/ Barry.”55
Once Obama returned on January 22, Genevieve was disappointed that having him back in her daily life was “so disruptive, instead of a sweet re-meeting.” Given how challenging teaching first grade at PS 133 was, “I actually find his interruption of my focus on school as damaging, disconcerting,” but “he’s really into travelling his path with concentrated determination as well. It is still true that I want to live alone.” Obama later wrote of refusing the offer of a well-paid job from an impressive black man who headed a New York City civil rights group and had recently dined at the White House with “Jack,” the secretary of housing and urban development. Arthur H. Barnes headed up the New York Urban Coalition, but African American New Yorker Samuel R. Pierce was HUD secretary; only four years later did Jack Kemp succeed him.
Instead Obama focused on a job ad from the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG), for its Project Coordinator post at the City College of New York (CCNY) in West Harlem. NYPIRG, founded in 1973, was based on a campus chapter model first outlined in Action for a Change. A Student’s Manual for Public Interest Organizing, a 1971 book written by famous consumer advocate Ralph Nader and three coauthors, one of whom, Donald K. Ross, became NYPIRG’s initial executive director. By 1985 NYPIRG had chapters at most campuses of New York State’s two public college systems, the predominantly white State University of New York (SUNY) and the largely minority City University of New York (CUNY). Campus referenda that authorized a $2-per-student-per-semester fee provided NYPIRG’s financial base.
The project coordinator post paid only about $9,200, half of what Barack had been making at BI, and the CCNY job was open at midyear because of the departure of a young woman whose fall tenure had been unsuccessful. Yet the CCNY chapter boasted one of NYPIRG’s most experienced student leaders, Buffalo native Diana Mitsu Klos, who had moved to New York City eighteen months earlier upon being elected NYPIRG’s student board chair for the 1983–84 academic year. NYPIRG’s campus projects statewide were overseen by Chris Meyer, and 1983 Yale graduate Eileen Hershenov supervised CCNY and other Manhattan chapters from NYPIRG’s tumbledown office at 9 Murray Street in lower Manhattan. On some day in late January or early February, Obama appeared there for a job interview with Hershenov and Meyer, who were “enormously impressed” with him, particularly since NYPIRG was “desperate to diversify” its predominantly white staff, especially at such a heavily minority campus as CCNY.
Obama’s hiring was all but immediate, as CCNY’s spring semester classes began on Monday, February 4. Eileen accompanied him up to City and introduced him to Diana Klos and seven or eight other core chapter members, including Alison Kelley, who thought Obama was “very poised, very together” right from day one. The NYPIRG chapter had a small office with desks and a telephone in a homely metal trailer known as the Math Hut that sat between CCNY’s iconic Shepard Hall and the college’s low-rise administration building south of 140th Street on the east side of Convent Avenue, just across from the North Academic Center (NAC), a hulking modern gray-brick behemoth that housed City’s humanities and social science departments.
The key to NYPIRG’s student recruitment efforts was “class raps,” where the project coordinator would ask faculty members to give up five minutes of class time so that students could hear a brief pitch about NYPIRG. As of February 1985, NYPIRG’s top statewide issue was its Toxic Victims Access to Justice Campaign, which sought passage of state legislation that would allow women and their offspring who had been harmed by the synthetic estrogen DES to file civil damage suits. New York was one of only seven states where such a right to sue did not exist, and generating citizen pressure on state legislators was a major focus of Hershenov and her colleagues’ work.
Barack and Diana were present in NYPIRG’s trailer office every day, and throughout February they concentrated on doing as many “class raps” as possible in advance of a late February “general interest meeting” intended to attract several hundred students. In some departments, like African American Studies, where senior professors like Leonard Jeffries Jr. and Eugenia “Sister” Bain were notorious for showing up late, if at all, for many scheduled classes, getting “class rap” time was easy. In others, like Political Science, Barack’s efforts met with mixed success. Frances Fox Piven, who taught Politics and the Welfare State, and Ned Schneier, whose Congress and the Legislative Process also met on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, both said yes. A young associate professor teaching civil rights and civil liberties would have been less amenable, replying that it was inappropriate to sacrifice classroom time for nonacademic matters.
Like all CUNY colleges, CCNY was entirely a commuter campus, and one with “nowhere to hang out anywhere near there,” as Alison Kelley recalled, so generating student participation in such a setting was a considerable challenge. Eileen Hershenov pitched in at least one day a week, and every Friday Obama joined project coordinators from NYPIRG’s ten other southern New York schools for an afternoon staff meeting at 9 Murray Street. NYPIRG had an active relationship with Saul Alinsky’s inheritors at the Industrial Areas Foundation, and one Friday Michael Gecan, one of IAF’s four top organizers, spoke to the group and also spoke individually with Obama.
Eileen Hershenov was Barack’s closest staff colleague, and they had several conversations about different models of organizing. She had read Clayborne Carson’s 1981 history of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), In Struggle, and could remember even two decades later at least one conversation with Obama about SNCC’s Mississippi grassroots organizing, which Bob Moses came to personify. “It was a very abstract intellectual conversation that I had with him,” she recalled, one that contrasted SNCC’s approach versus charismatic leaders, but all toward the end of “how do you empower people?”56
Even with his full-time weekday job up at CCNY, Obama spent all of February and early March splitting his time between Hasan’s apartment below the Brooklyn Bridge and Genevieve’s top-floor apartment in Park Slope, quite a commute on New York’s far from reliable subways. “Who is this boy/man/person,