As Bruce Orenstein told the Daily Calumet, “If Waste Management gets ahold of that property, out the window goes any protection for the community.” The real issue was not the fate of the O’Brien Locks acreage, whose future looked preordained, but who on the Southeast Side would control whatever community trust fund would receive the $20 or $25 million that Waste Management was clearly willing to pay. Only Hegewisch News editor and community activist Vi Czachorski gave readers a clear understanding of what was happening. “Montes wants a landfill at the O’Brien Locks,” directly across the Calumet River from Hegewisch, and in exchange, she gets “a trust that UNO would operate” rather than Jim Fitch and other traditional Vrdolyak loyalists. But UNO’s Alinskyite “ambush” not only infuriated Fitch’s nascent coalition, it also angered the trio of hardcore landfill opponents—Jim Landing, Marian Byrnes, and Hazel Johnson—who had been reconsidering their own position. Within a week, they were picketing outside Chicago’s City Hall, clear evidence that Bruce and Barack’s strategy of blowing up Fitch’s negotiations had torpedoed any prospect of achieving a community-wide consensus.
For Barack, all this tussling created a fundamental personal tension. He had made clear to John McKnight that he rejected the confrontational politics of the Alinsky tradition, even though he had just helped lead an action that was so pugnacious it had made even the hard-bitten Orenstein nervous. It unquestionably was the “most confrontive meeting he had ever been involved in,” Bruce acknowledged, and “left to his own devices, I don’t think he would have designed an action like that.” True enough. What then accounted for so stark a contradiction?69
A weekend or two after the South Chicago ambush, Barack took Sheila to see a movie that had debuted the Friday before the Fitch action: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, an adaptation of Czech writer Milan Kundera’s 1984 novel. Set in Czechoslovakia in the years leading up to the Prague Spring of 1968, the film featured three leading characters: Tomas, a young doctor, his partner Tereza, and his additional lover Sabina. The movie was not necessarily loyal to the spirit of Kundera’s book, and, at almost three hours’ length, it had not been praised in prominent reviews in the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times. The Tribune’s critic wrote that “the film has no vision and no life,” and warned that it “is likely to be incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t read the novel.”
Vincent Canby’s Times review was more revealing. Tomas, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, lived a compartmentalized life, with “one part of his mind” analyzing something while another “part that’s outside it criticizes” the first. Tereza, played by Juliette Binoche, “falls profoundly in love with” Tomas “without knowing anything about him.” In turn, “Tomas is drawn against his will into commitment to Tereza,” yet with Sabina, played by Lena Olin, he indulges in “a passion for … sex that excludes serious emotional commitment … while always remaining a little detached.” Tomas “remains committed to Tereza, though still unfaithful.” The film conveyed “an accumulating heaviness” accentuated by its “immense length.”
Almost a quarter century later, Sheila Jager described the film as an indelible memory, explaining that it could offer “some insight into our relationship…. Although Barack did not fool around (not that I know of), I remember being powerfully moved by that film when we saw it together because Tomas and Tereza’s relationship seemed to so uncannily mirror the dynamics of our own—Tomas’s ‘neurosis’ like Barack’s ‘calling.’ ” She believed that perhaps was “why I reacted so hard when I saw that film. Because it was mirroring reality in an eerie sort of way, and I somehow understood what was happening even if I was unaware of what was going on. I remember feeling so trapped and suffocated back then, just like poor Tereza and her cheating husband. I’ll never forget that feeling of desperation, and wondering what I was going to do. I remember him telling me how he wished he could take me to the countryside and live with me,” just as Tomas does with Tereza, “but he couldn’t do that, no matter how much he loved me,” because his destiny inescapably must trump love. “I always knew that I couldn’t marry him,” yet in those early months of 1988, Sheila never doubted Barack, in part because something happened between them, something Barack subsequently never spoke about.
Barack was also close with the almost thirty-year-old Mary Ellen Montes—Lena—and he told her too about the vision of his future that otherwise he had only shared with Sheila. “He wanted to be the president,” Lena explained. “He used to say that his goal was to be the president of the United States.” Their ambitions were mutual. “By the time I met Barack, I was thinking about politics as well, with aspirations of being the mayor.” Lena told him, “I could see myself being the mayor of the city of Chicago. That’s where I’d want to end it, and his thing was oh no, he wanted to go on to be the president.” While Barack had told Mike Kruglik and Sokoni Karanja that being mayor of Chicago was his ultimate goal, Lena firmly declared, “That’s not what he’s telling me.”
Lena understood their similar trajectories. “You start to feel and realize your potential, so as you’re growing in this arena, why wouldn’t you think about those things? … That’s why I thought about the mayor,” and for Barack “it’s because of what he realized as he’s growing in the public arena and realizing his potential.” She knew that getting a law degree was “absolutely” his first step toward electoral politics. Across those months, “our conversations—they were real. They were genuine, sincere conversations about ourselves and what we wanted to do, what we were doing, what we were thinking of.” Lena knew Barack lived with someone. “I hear of her,” Lena explained. “Asian woman.” No, “I never met her…. I remember him saying she was Asian.” What did Barack tell Lena about that relationship? “He gave the impression that they lived together more because of convenience—they both needed a place to stay.”
Barack’s diminution of his life with Sheila to Lena was reminiscent of how he had characterized it to Phil Boerner eighteen months earlier: “winter’s fast approaching, and it is nice to have someone to come home to,” given his “mortal fear of Chicago winters.” After years of distancing himself from his mother, Barack’s identification as African American—not international, not hapa, not biracial—was now complete. This transformation had been immensely aided by his exposure to and ease with strong black women like Loretta Augustine, Marlene Dillard, Aletha Strong Gibson, and Yvonne Lloyd, but this success came at a high price, one visible only in the light of the distance, the unknowable distance, that was always impenetrably there. That distance, that lightness, would extend well beyond 1988.70
Two days after the action against Jim Fitch, a remarkable, substantive victory was announced by attorney Tom Geoghegan: Navistar, the renamed International Harvester, would pay $14.8 million to Frank Lumpkin and twenty-seven hundred other surviving former Wisconsin steelworkers. The largest individual payment would be $17,200, though Frank, with a better-protected pension, would receive only $4,000.
No one in Chicago doubted that Frank deserved the most credit for this achievement, and the ex-workers approved the settlement in an overwhelming vote of 583 to 75. But Frank was never someone to pat himself on the back. “It is a victory of sorts,” he told the Daily Cal. “It was the best we could get, and that’s the way everyone who voted for it felt. But we appreciate the feeling that the little guy has won and that giants can fall.” Tribune business editor Richard Longworth wrote a wonderful tribute to Frank, describing him as “an amazing man … who is probably as close to a saint as Chicago has these days.” Tom Geoghegan is “the only other real hero,” a commendation underscored when James B. Moran, the federal judge handling the Wisconsin litigation, publicly praised Tom’s “dedication,” “professionalism,” and “modesty in seeking fees.” Frank also represented the last of a dying breed: at South Works hardly seven hundred men were still working, and Republic LTV was down to 640. Maury Richards would soon be reelected as Local 1033’s president, but even as dedicated a steelworker as Maury was beginning to wonder what his next career would be.71
By mid-February, UNO, hoping to take the lead in Chicago’s