A Series of Fortunate Events

In the middle of his second year, Obama surprised his classmates by entering the race for law review president, a job that involves appointing other editors, mediating disagreements and influencing the careers of the nation's legal scholars by accepting or rejecting articles. Obama had not been expected to run. He had spent the summer working at Sidley Austin in Chicago, where he met Michelle Robinson, a Princeton-educated attorney, also a graduate of Harvard Law, whom he would marry. He made it clear he wanted to go back to Chicago, where he had found the community he had missed growing up. Traditionally, the president of the law review uses the job as a springboard to a top-level legal or academic position: Among the ranks are former U.S. attorney general Elliot Richardson and feminist law professor Susan Estrich.

Obama portrays his decision to compete as having been almost impulsive. "It was probably one of those moments where I said, What the heck," he says. "I was an older student, 27 [when he started]. Most of my peers at the law review were a couple of years younger than I was. I thought I could apply some common sense and management skills to the job. I was already investing a lot of time in the law review, and my attitude was: Why not try to run the law review?"

The 1990 election, which took place in a house on campus, was a daylong ritual with all the secrecy and silliness of any Ivy League selection process. Those editors who were running went into the kitchen and began cooking breakfast for the people debating their merits: third-year editors and those second-years who weren't running. There would be rounds of polling to winnow the ranks, and if you lost -- were voted off the island -- you left the kitchen and joined the voters.

Voting went on for hours. Obama stayed in, but so did several other liberal candidates. After the last conservative fell, the right-wingers had to decide which liberal would be palatable. They saw Obama as the one most likely to listen and include them in decisions. "He was not perceived as a zealot," says Berenson. "Conservatives felt that he respected them on a personal level and would take seriously what they had to say, and their points of view -- even if he didn't always, or ever, agree with them -- would be treated with some measure of respect."

They were right. Just below the presidency, there are important masthead positions that auger well for later life, and Obama bestowed a number on conservatives. At the time, Spurell was so incensed at his failure to promote more black editors that she complained to the Los Angeles Times that Obama was no different from white editors who had come before. "I personally thought I deserved a spot. My work was, I thought, extremely excellent," says Spurell, who now works as a public defender in Abingdon, Va. But Obama's approach -- she believes now -- was more effective. "As you can probably tell, I wasn't that popular a personality. So I don't blame him in the least for not picking me for the position I thought I should have." She adds that she feels the same "rush of pride" for him now that she felt when he won the law review presidency.

"The president of the law review is regarded as the most intellectually savvy person on campus," she says. "And for that to go to a black person -- I feel so moved to have known him. All the same things that made me frustrated with him," such as his chumminess with Federalist Society members, "are the things that got him so far."

There are judges and blue-chip law partners who wait to see who is elected president of the Harvard Law Review and call immediately to offer clerkships and jobs. For Obama, the inquiries were even more numerous because of the publicity around the first African American president. There were national newspaper articles and a book contract to write his life story.

Abner Mikva, a Chicago lawyer and former congressman who was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, made an inquiry. When word came back that Obama was not interested, Mikva assumed he wanted to clerk for a black judge. But Obama simply didn't want to clerk at all. Instead, he wrote his memoir, took a job with Judson Miner's civil rights practice, worked on a voter registration drive and began making political contacts.

"I think he saw himself with a political career even before I knew him," says Newton Minow, who had heard about Obama from his daughter Martha and met him the summer Obama worked at Sidley Austin. "He was at the firm for only one summer, and when we offered him a job to come back, he came in to see me and told me he was going to go into politics. I think he had that in mind very early."

There was one impediment to a political career: In 1992, Obama married Michelle, who wasn't "gung-ho on the political bandwagon," reports her brother, Craig Robinson. "We as a family were extremely cynical about politics and politicians." Michelle Obama confirms this description, saying that when she was dating Barack, "we didn't talk about politics specifically."

But Obama didn't keep his interests secret. Early in the relationship, Michelle, who was notoriously picky about her boyfriends, asked Craig, now the men's basketball coach at Brown University, to take Obama out on the ball court to get a sense of his character. Obama passed that test -- he wasn't a ball hog or a hotshot -- and was invited to a family event, where Craig pulled him aside and asked about his plans.

"He said, 'I think I'd like to teach at some point in time, and maybe run for public office,'" recalls Robinson, who assumed Obama meant he'd like to run for city alderman. "He said no -- at some point he'd like to run for the U.S. Senate. And then he said, 'Possibly even run for president at some point.' And I was like, 'Okay, but don't say that to my Aunt Gracie.' I was protecting him from saying something that might embarrass him."