Ann next married an Indonesian national named Lolo Soetoro. She eventually began pursuing a Ph.D. in anthropology that required frequent fieldwork in Indonesia, and Barack spent four years of his childhood there, in the world’s most populous Muslim nation. Because his mother wanted Barack to have the best possible bite at the American Dream, she left him in Hawaii for much of his adolescence in the care of his maternal grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, who fed him a poly-cultural diet of sashimi and Jell-O with grapes, and got him admission and a scholarship to the prestigious Punahou School, in Honolulu. He arrived there in fifth grade as a round-faced boy with baby fat, and left the lanky figure of today.
Yet Obama had to grapple with the reality of life as one of only three black students in an elite high school of 1,200. The yearbooks show him as a respectable contributor but not a star. A friend once scrawled his funny-sounding last name in wet concrete outside the cafeteria, as a goof that might get him into mild trouble. (School officials point it out proudly these days, the way presidents point out the holes from Ike’s golf spikes in the Oval Office floor.) By diligent effort, constant practice, and a mean jump shot, he made the second string of the state-champion basketball team in his senior year, earning a slot that might have gone to a younger, more promising player. He went to college for two years in the West Coast sprawl of Los Angeles—at Occidental—and for two years in the dominant East Coast metropolis of New York, where he transferred to attend Columbia.
After weeks of rooting around in his past, in Chicago, in Springfield, in Honolulu, I went to see Obama in his Senate office. He had just returned from the Senate floor to a sparely decorated inner sanctum, notable for a large, bright, almost child-like painting of Thurgood Marshall. After exchanging pleasantries (we have a connection: my sister-in-law, Betsy Myers, a former Clinton-administration official, was chief operating officer of Obama’s campaign; she took the job after I received this assignment, and we have not talked about her new boss since), Obama sat down and put a foot up on the coffee table. Our conversation ranged from Indonesia to Illinois, but my first question was simple: when did he realize that he had an ambition that might be ever so slightly audacious?
“There was a fundamental rupture in my life between Occidental and Columbia, where I just became more serious,” Obama said. While he was in New York, his father died, giving the son “a sense of urgency about my own life.” He added, “Now, that doesn’t mean at that point I somehow instantly had these grand ambitions for political office. But I do think it was at that point in my life—those two years when I was in New York—where I made a decision that I wanted to, I wanted to make my mark.”
He began making that mark in Chicago, the capital of the American black diaspora. Obama arrived not knowing anyone, but ended up finding his life’s work, a deep Christian faith, and the woman who would become his wife and the mother of his two young daughters. Chicago remains his home today. In his work in Chicago, he not only explored his identity as a black American but determined to get the law degree that he believed would best prepare him for a career in public life. Since then, Obama has never veered from the course he set. He became the president of the Harvard Law Review not because he had the best grades (though he had good ones) but because he won the trust of both conservative and liberal factions in an arena in which the arguments were passionate because the stakes were so small. He spurned a sure path to a Supreme Court clerkship, opting instead for a small civil-rights practice, part-time teaching of constitutional law at the University of Chicago, and a contract for Dreams from My Father, his gripping memoir, which was published to general praise in 1995 but then sank from sight for almost a decade.
One of the clearest-eyed grandees of the Chicago establishment, Newton Minow has long seen something special in Obama. Minow played key roles in the two presidential campaigns of Adlai E. Stevenson, then went on to become John F. Kennedy’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, famously pronouncing television programming “a vast wasteland” in 1961, a few months before Obama was born. At 81, sitting in his law office at Sidley Austin, in the Loop, above a stretch of street christened Honorary Newton N. Minow Way, Minow is talking about the young man his daughter Martha, a professor at Harvard Law School, recommended for a summer associate’s job two decades ago. At Minow’s firm Obama fell in love with a young lawyer, Michelle Robinson, who would become his wife. Minow acknowledges that he initially opposed two of Obama’s earlier runs for office—his unsuccessful congressional-primary race against the Democratic incumbent, Bobby Rush, in 2000 (the only election for office Obama has lost so far), and his campaign for the Senate, in 2004—and says he asked Obama both times, “Are you nuts?”
Minow opposed Obama’s decision to run for the presidency too, until he caught the senator on C-span during a book-promotion tour in Iowa in late 2006. The formal program was over, but the cameras lingered, capturing Obama’s interaction with the crowd.
“I adored Jack Kennedy,” Minow explains, “and I saw the 21st-century version of Jack Kennedy in my mind. He is astonishing. I think the fundamental point is the country wants a different kind of politics.” He adds, “I also believe the race issue and the gender issue are yesterday, particularly with young people.” One-upping Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous summary of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s gifts, Minow, a former Supreme Court clerk, says, “I believe as the country sees Barack, gets to know him, they will see the same thing I see: really a combination of a first-class mind and a first-class temperament, all in the same person.”
Dreams from His Mother
Obama owes much of that mind, and that temperament—his spine, his audacity, his empathy—to a person about whom the public knows very little: Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother, who died of ovarian cancer in 1995 at the age of 52. In the preface to the paperback edition of Dreams from My Father, which was first published in hardcover the year his mother died, Obama writes that, if he had known how her life would be cut short, he might have produced a very different book, and he dedicated The Audacity of Hope to his mother and to her mother, Madelyn Dunham, “the women who raised me.”
“I don’t think there’s any question,” Obama said of his mother when we spoke, “she was the most positive influence in my life.”
I went to meet Alice Dewey, a granddaughter of the philosopher John Dewey and an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii, who was the chairman of Ann Dunham’s Ph.D.-thesis committee and became a close friend over many years. “For him, he needed to write the book about his father,” she said of Obama. “But when he says, ‘Who am I?,’ then Ann is a very important part of that.” We were sitting in her cluttered cubby of an office on the campus in Manoa, in the hills above Honolulu. “She was the most hardworking person I maybe ever have met,” Dewey told me. “And did it without seeming to. She was cheerful, down to earth. She absolutely was the kind of person you wanted on your side in any situation, from a barroom brawl to an academic argument, and she was always there for the little guy, particularly the little woman.” For most of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, she shuttled between Hawaii and Indonesia, doing academic research and paying the bills by teaching English or working for nonprofit organizations such as the Ford Foundation.
Her boldest step of all may have been marrying Barack’s father, a fellow undergraduate at the University of Hawaii, whom she had met in a Russian-language class. Obama has acknowledged that the precise circumstances of their marriage are a bit cloudy, even to him; it would turn out that his father was already tribally married to another woman, in Africa, and after he left Barack and his mother to pursue graduate studies at Harvard on a scholarship, he would marry and divorce another American woman, and then father a child by a second African woman.
