Over the holidays, Barack took off almost two weeks, flying first to Washington, D.C., to meet his—and Auma’s—older brother Roy Abon’go, who had married an African American Peace Corps volunteer named Mary. Before leaving Chicago, Barack told Tom Kaminski how apprehensive he was about seeing Roy, and the visit got off to a bad start when Roy failed to meet him at the airport. When Barack telephoned, Roy said a marital argument meant that Barack should find a hotel room rather than stay with Roy. The two brothers did have a long dinner that night, plus breakfast in the morning, before Barack headed to New York, where he would rendezvous with his mother and sister and where Beenu Mahmood and Hasan Chandoo were happy to offer free lodging and renew their close acquaintances.
Maya was now a tenth grader at Punahou, and Ann was still living in Honolulu, trying to finish her Ph.D. dissertation. Two months earlier, the Internal Revenue Service had levied a $17,600 assessment against her for unpaid taxes on her 1979 and 1980 income from USAID contractor DAI, but Ann would leave the levy unpaid for years to come. Barack ended up spending more time with Hasan, Beenu, and Wahid Hamid than with his mother and sister, and though he did not see Genevieve in person, a letter he wrote to her soon after New Year’s recounted an emotional phone conversation they had had, albeit one she would be unable to recall in any detail years later.
Hard guy that I am, I’ve managed to stay embittered and sullen towards you for a whole week and a half. But that’s about it. I won’t try to analyze whether what I did was correct or incorrect, right or wrong, for you or for me. I do know that I had to vent my feelings fully; otherwise I would have choked off something important inside me, permanently. Had to get my head and heart in better communication with each other, in better balance. The consensus seems to be that the whole episode was good for me. My mother and Maya enjoyed comforting me for a change. Asif, my linguist friend in Chicago, says I need the humility.
Whatever had transpired, Barack wrote, “reminded me of the rare, fleeting nature of things. My own dispensability,” and “perhaps I’m more apt to believe now something you seem to have understood better than I—when happiness presents itself … grab it with both hands.” But “I still feel some frustration at the fact that you seemed to have wrapped me up in a neat package in our conversations. Stiff, routinized, controlled. The man in the grey flannel suit. A stock figure. It felt like you had forgotten who I was.”
Friends, Barack wrote, “recognize who you are … even when you’re acting out of character,” as Barack apparently had. “I hope I haven’t lost that with you. I hope I remain as complicated and confusing and various and surprising in your mind as you are in mine.” He closed by saying that “phone calls will still be tough on me for the time being, but cards or letters are welcome.” He hoped to get back to New York in the summer to see the child whom Wahid and his wife Filly were expecting, and “hopefully we can spend some time more productively than this last time out. Some fun, maybe. Laughter. Ambivalently yours. But w/ unconditional love—Barack.”
More than six months since they had parted, the depth of Barack’s emotional tie to Genevieve remained powerful indeed.12
While Obama was away, two major developments upended Chicago politics. The Chicago Sun-Times gave Harold Washington a stinker of a Christmas morning gift by revealing that an undercover FBI informant, working at the behest of the local U.S. attorney, had made cash payoffs to several city officials and aldermen. As the story played out over the coming weeks, Michael Burnett, aka Michael Raymond, had been introduced to his targets by a “friendly, easy-going” young lobbyist, Raymond Akers, whose car sported a personalized license tag: LNDFLL. Akers was the city council lobbyist for Waste Management Incorporated (WMI), which had 1985 revenues totaling $1.63 billion.
Four months earlier two administration appointees had accepted as much as $10,000 in cash from Burnett, and on December 20, FBI agents had confronted 9th Ward alderman Perry Hutchinson at his Roseland home. On two occasions in early October, Hutchinson had accepted a total of $17,200 from Akers in a lakefront apartment near Chicago’s Navy Pier. Unbeknownst to Hutchinson, FBI agents in the apartment next door filmed the encounters with a camera inserted through the common wall. A week later Hutchinson accepted another $5,000 from Akers in Roseland. All told, Hutchinson had received $28,500, and he told journalists, “I figured as long as the guy was dumb enough to give me all of that money, I’d be smart enough to take it.” Hutchinson claimed he used $8,500 to hire an additional staffer and had distributed the remaining $20,000 to schools and community groups in Roseland. Reporters were unable to identify any recipients.
Soon it was revealed that a second black alderman and mayoral supporter, Clifford Kelley, who had led a city council effort to discredit a top WMI competitor, had accepted cash bribes too. Then news broke that city corporation counsel James Montgomery allegedly had been aware of at least one of these payoffs months before Washington first learned of the bribes on Christmas morning. The Chicago Tribune described this as “a widening scandal that some believe could cost [Washington] re-election” a year later. Montgomery quickly resigned, but several weeks later a Tribune story headlined “Lobbyist Paid for City Aide’s Vacation” showed that a year earlier, Akers had given a travel agent $4,200 in cash to cover a weeklong trip to Acapulco for Montgomery and his family. No charges ensued.
Independent white voters who loathed Chicago’s long history of public corruption had been essential to Washington’s 1983 triumph, and they would be needed for his reelection in 1987. Ironically, as the controversy built, mayoral opponents like Ed Vrdolyak remained largely silent. One opposing alderman explained to the Tribune: “If we do nothing, the mayor might ultimately bury himself.”
Despite Washington’s huge popularity among African Americans, his first three years in office had been anything but successful. Some months earlier, Chicago Magazine—not a bastion of Vrdolyak supporters—had published a thoroughly negative report on Washington’s record to date. He “has been miserably inept at communicating his ideas to the city” and “his administration is plagued by excessive disorganization,” Chicago reported. Washington had “gained 30 pounds” and looked “physically run-down.” One black activist who had championed his election back in 1983, Lu Palmer, complained that Washington was relying upon “apolitical technocrats” who were “barricaded on the fifth floor of City Hall. The people aren’t part of it.” The magazine also said Washington “may be the least powerful Chicago mayor in recent history” and singled out the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) as a “full-fledged disaster.” Politically, Washington’s agenda was “to a great extent, stalled,” primarily because Vrdolyak’s city council majority kept the mayor largely “on the defensive.”
When the bribery scandal broke, Washington’s administration was already besieged. Yet a federal appeals court ruling in August 1984 that black and Hispanic voters were so underrepresented by the city’s existing ward map that the Voting Rights Act was being violated seemed to provide an opening for Washington, because new elections could overturn Vrdolyak’s 29–21 council majority. In June 1985, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the appellate finding, and the case was sent to a district judge who instructed the opposing lawyers to redraw seven wards, all of which were represented by Washington opponents. On December 30, the court ordered new elections in those wards to be held on March 18. In the interim, Washington announced that Judson H. Miner, the forty-four-year-old civil rights lawyer who had litigated the redistricting challenge, would be his new corporation counsel.13
But on the Far South Side, the fate of LTV Republic’s East Side steel mill was still in question. In early January, a front-page Wall Street Journal story described the company’s prospects as “dim at best,” and a week later Crain’s Chicago Business published a long report that the Daily Calumet said “sent shock waves through the Southeast Side.” Jerry Kellman told the local paper that LTV should put the mill up for sale, but Maury Richards said that the 1033 union understood that the East Side facility was “losing between $5 million and $8 million every month.”
In mid-January Obama attended a three-day training event in Milwaukee for minority organizers sponsored by the Campaign for Human Development and the Industrial Areas Foundation. Soon after he returned, Chicago headlines confirmed Jerry and Maury’s fears: