A Series of Fortunate Events

And so it was that Barack Obama loaded up an old Honda and drove to Chicago, a place that was not an obvious launching pad for a young man with zero ties to the city. There was a deeply rooted black community, but most black politicians -- like most white ones -- came from political families, ward organizations, or both. And there was terrible racial tension.

"The divide in Chicago between black and white was incredibly hostile," says Judson Miner, a white civil rights attorney who would later hire Obama. Not long before, however, Harold Washington had taken on the fabled Daley machine, and beaten it to become the city's first black mayor. It was a watershed moment. While he didn't get many white votes the first time, Washington was a charismatic figure who taught voters, as Miner puts it, "that an African American could run Chicago, and it wouldn't fall apart."

Obama also came to Chicago without traditional African American credentials. He didn't belong to a church, and he had to work to win the trust of South Side leaders, many of whom were Baptist and Pentecostal ministers. But Obama was polite and winning, willing to work with pastors, separatists and grandmothers alike. He was a good listener, and Kellman set out to make him better.

"We did training in listening skills," Kellman says. "You spend time as an organizer going from one person to another doing interviews. You're listening for story, because story communicates more about a person than simply facts. When people share their story, they get a different sense of themselves, and you get a different sense of them. Barack did that very well. One of the remarkable things is how well he listens to people who are opposed to him."

But three years of listening was enough for Obama, who began applying to law schools. Kellman thinks his father's legacy was coming into play. By then, Obama had met some Kenyan half-siblings who told him more about his father, a finance minister who had suffered major career setbacks, taken several wives and died in a car accident in 1982, when Obama was 21. During a trip to Harvard for a conference on the black church, Kellman says, Obama did a lot of reflecting on his father.

"His dad was not practical, not effective personally. His personal life was a wreck -- also his career in Kenya -- and Barack did not want to follow that," says Kellman, recalling that Obama "talked about wanting to make a difference and be effective." Kellman perceived a new interest in politics: "My sense is that Barack's dream was to come back and possibly become mayor of Chicago."

Obama's take on that period is different. He says that it never occurred to him to try to follow in Harold Washington's footsteps. "I was, like many people, impressed by the degree to which he could mobilize the community and push for change," Obama says. But after Washington died from a heart attack at his city hall office in 1987, Obama became disillusioned by the splintering of the coalition that had supported Washington. At that point, Obama says, "I was somewhat disdainful of politics. I was much more interested in mobilizing people to hold politicians accountable."

This would quickly change. Whatever he thought going in, it was at Harvard Law School that Obama's political skills -- and aspirations -- would emerge rather dramatically. All that South Side dispute mediation prepared him well to operate in a more elite but equally factionalized atmosphere.

In 1988, Harvard, like Chicago, was a bitterly divided place politically: It was a liberal campus, mostly, but there was a hardy body of conservatives who belonged to the campus chapter of the Federalist Society. "The conservatives were a small and beleaguered minority, which made us all the more vocal," says one of them, Brad Berenson, a former associate counsel to President George W. Bush who is now a lawyer in the Washington office of Sidley Austin. There were fights over legal issues -- habeas corpus, the First Amendment -- but most of all, Berenson says, there were "tremendous fights over tenure decisions for women and minorities."

These were professional arguers, the most career-driven young people imaginable: Many of them belonged to what Martha Minow, a professor at the law school, calls "a very large diverse group of people who think rather well of themselves and who are already jockeying for power not only within the institution, but who are ambitious about the future." In this cauldron of careerism, Minow says, Obama stood out because he was not an obvious climber and because "he had then, as he has now, a sense of individuals having obligations to the community, which is not something people [at Harvard Law] usually talk about." Like others, she was struck by his ability to entertain the ideas of opponents. "He spoke with a kind of ability to rise above the conversation and summarize it and reframe it. There was a maturity he brought to the discussion."

But he was also among the most driven in his class. In his first year, he entered the competition for the law review, one of the country's premier scholarly law journals and, for the students who select, edit and write articles, a ticket to a high-powered legal or academic career. To become an editor of the law review was grueling: If you were impossibly smart, you might qualify through grades, but most editors were selected through an exhausting multi-day writing process, their output judged by the current editors. There was also a highly secretive process by which a few students were chosen based at least in part on race. Obama, says one classmate, was never suspected of making law review because of his race.

The fact that these suspicions existed at all says much about the tenor of the time. "That was the most race-conscious time of my life," says Christine Spurell, who, as an African American, found it a "very charged, very hostile atmosphere." She participated in protests calling for more black women faculty members, whereas Obama -- who speaks in favor of affirmative action in his second book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, but dislikes conflict and confrontation -- was not the type to mount the barricades. "He wasn't out there going to the mat on any issue," says Spurell, who recalls that she and Obama argued incessantly, like siblings. "I would say he had all your standard liberal views in law school, but he did not shout them from the rooftops."