Finally Barack was able to interject a more pressing question: Where could he get dinner? Bob recommended the West Middlesex Diner, back down South Hermitage Road just south of I-80. Wanting some fresh air and time to reflect, “I took the man’s words on a long walk along the highway to a small all-night diner and had supper,” Barack wrote Genevieve. After eating, “the walk back was cool and silent, the stars cluttering the sky as they hadn’t in five years. Back in my room, The Year of Living Dangerously”—a 1982 film set in a city that Barack himself knew, Jakarta on the eve of the mid-1960s mass killings—“was playing” on the black-and-white television. If Bob Elia’s fervent plea to reconsider his new job had given him something to think about, being reminded of his years in a truly foreign land while in the middle of this drive offered even more.
Elia’s comments would echo in Barack’s memory for decades to come. Three years later, some of Bob’s advice would be attributed to a black female school aide. “Listen, Obama. You’re a bright young man…. I just cannot understand why a bright young man like you would … become a community organizer … ’cause the pay is low, the hours is long, and don’t nobody appreciate you.” In its next rendition, Bob’s remarks would be made by “Ike,” a fictional black security guard: “Forget about this organizing business and do something that’s gonna make you some money…. I’m telling you this ’cause I can see potential in you. Young man like you, got a nice voice—hell, you could be one a them announcers on TV. Or sales … making some real money there. That’s what we need, see. Not more folks running around here, all rhymes and jive. You can’t help folks that ain’t gonna make it nohow, and they won’t appreciate you trying.”
More than twenty years later, Barack would accurately recount how “I stopped for the night at a small town in Pennsylvania whose name I can’t remember any more, and I found a motel that looked cheap and clean, and I pulled into the driveway, and I went to the counter where there was this old guy doing crossword puzzles” who “asked me where I was headed, and I explained to him I was going to Chicago because I was going to be a community organizer, and he asked me what was that.” Then came Bob’s monologue: “You look like a nice clean-cut young man, you’ve got a nice voice. So let me give you a piece of advice: forget this community organizing business. You can’t change the world, and people will not appreciate you trying. What you should do is go into television broadcasting. I’m telling you, you can make a name for yourself there.”
“Objectively speaking, he made some sense,” Barack would reflect in that retelling. Two weeks later, he repeated the centerpiece of Bob’s monologue word for word. Thirteen months later Obama recited Bob’s message once more, as he did again five months after that. In May 2008, Obama recounted his memory of that night yet again: “You’ve got a nice voice, so you should think about going into television broadcasting. I’m telling you, you have a future there.”
In contrast to Barack’s indelible memory of their conversation, twenty-nine years later Bob Elia had no recollection of young Obama. When asked, though, he almost immediately told a caller, “You’ve got a nice voice” before launching into a ten-minute monologue on the life-extending powers of a trio of multisyllabic nutritional supplements.
But in 1985, on the next summer morning, Barack checked out of the motel without reencountering Bob, and after heading down South Hermitage Road and bearing right onto I-80, the Ohio state line was just a few miles ahead. I-80 became the Ohio Turnpike and then the Indiana Toll Road once it crossed another state line. Chicago lay six hours ahead, but as Barack Obama drove west, he was headed toward a place he really had never been, indeed toward a place he really had never known: he was heading west toward home.61
ROSELAND, HYDE PARK, AND KENYA
AUGUST 1985–AUGUST 1988
West of South Bend, the Indiana Toll Road slides southward as the shoreline of Lake Michigan draws near. The Indiana Dunes give way to Burns Harbor and its huge steel mill, which marks the eastern edge of the Calumet region’s industrial lakeshore. Gary and East Chicago offer a gritty industrial visage before the highway turns sharply north as the Illinois state line approaches. There the interstate becomes the Chicago Skyway, with the East Side, the Calumet River, and then South Chicago flashing by underneath the elevated roadway.
On Saturday afternoon, July 27, Barack Hussein Obama took the next exit heading for Hyde Park, turning northward on the broad boulevard of Stony Island Avenue. At 67th Street, Jackson Park appeared on the east side of the road, offering sunlit greenery all the way to 56th Street. Beenu Mahmood’s summer apartment at 5500 South Shore Drive was just a few blocks away.
Obama stopped at a pay phone but discovered he had miswritten Beenu’s number, and he called Sohale to get it right. Then Beenu met Barack in front of the tall luxury building, whose tenants had access to a heated swimming pool plus an on-site deli—“not exactly the setting I had envisioned for launching my career as selfless organizer of the people,” Barack wrote Genevieve a few days later. “The discordance only increased when we went to a fancy outdoor café downtown to feast on barbecued ribs.”
Beenu’s fiancée, Samia Ahad, was in Chicago too, and after a restful Sunday Barack drove south to Roseland on Monday morning, while Beenu headed to Sidley & Austin’s downtown office. At Holy Rosary’s rectory, on 113th Street across from the sprawling Palmer Park, Barack met his Calumet Community Religious Conference and Developing Communities Project coworkers. Mike Kruglik, he wrote Genevieve, “reminds me of the grumpy dwarf in Snow White” with “a thick beard and mustache. He speaks with the blunt, succinct clip of working class Chicago.” That first day “he barely acknowledged my presence” but as the week went on it became clear that Mike is “both competent and warm.” Adrienne Jackson was “prim,” “helpful and committed,” with “polished administrative skills,” and Obama quickly determined that she, like himself, had been “hired as much to give the staff a racial balance as she was for her abilities.” Of Jerry Kellman, Barack told Genevieve, “In his rumpled, messy way, he exhibits a real passion for justice and the concept of grassroots organizing. He speaks softly and is chronically late, but is real sharp in his analysis of power and politics, and is also disarmingly blunt and at times manipulative. A complicated man … but someone from whom I expect I can learn a few things.”
Obama also wrote that he “made full use of the amenities” that Beenu’s building offered “without guilt.” Samia was on her way to becoming a professionally acclaimed chef, and one evening she cooked a Pakistani dinner; Beenu’s friend Asif Agha joined them, even though the apartment had no dining table or chairs. Asif, like Beenu, had graduated from the famous Karachi Grammar School before receiving his undergraduate degree from Princeton University. He was the same age as Barack, and he had arrived in Hyde Park two years earlier to begin graduate study in languages reaching from Greek to Tibetan, under the auspices of the University of Chicago’s interdisciplinary Committee on Social Thought. With Beenu about to return to Manhattan for his third year at Columbia Law School, Asif was another smart and outgoing member of the