When Michelle Met Barack

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Chronicling the Obamas

Twenty years ago in Chicago, two bright young attorneys met and joined forces.

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Far from resistant, Carragher says, "she was falling hard." But Michelle, who declined to be interviewed for this article or the book it is adapted from, was careful to maintain her professional demeanor. When Carragher saw them interact, "she was not falling all over him. She was very cool."

The romance with Barack was just one way that Michelle's three years at Sidley Austin were, for her, pivotal.

Like Barack, Michelle also had spent a summer at Sidley before graduating from Harvard. One of the most prestigious firms in Chicago, Sidley was located in what is now called Chase Tower, a skyscraper famous for its distinctive, swooping profile, in the heart of the Loop, or downtown district.

The firm's offices were just 10 miles from the neighborhood where Michelle had grown up. But the social and economic distance was much farther. Michelle came from the city's South Side, raised in a working-class neighborhood called South Shore that had gone from being all-white to all-black during the turbulent 1960s and '70s. Her father, Fraser Robinson, was employed by the city to tend boilers at a water treatment plant. He made just enough money for her mother, Marian, to be able to stay home with Michelle and her older brother, Craig.

A driven, focused student, Michelle had propelled herself into the Ivy League and, as a summer associate at Sidley, was starting to reap the benefits. Along with 60 or so other law students, she spent the summer of 1987 being courted by the firm's highly paid partners -- going to baseball games, lunches and happy hours. Her stint there led to a full-time job offer and a stark choice: Work as an associate at a big-name law firm earning about $65,000 a year, or look for something more public service-oriented but likely to be less lucrative.

Michelle would have been well qualified for a career in public service law. At Harvard, she had devoted hundreds of hours of her time to the law school's legal aid bureau, which was essentially a student-run law firm. She and other students who worked there spent at least 20 hours a week helping poor people with civil cases, a major time commitment on top of their studies. They did their work in Gannett House, a white-porticoed Greek Revival structure that is the oldest surviving Harvard Law School building.

A few years later, Barack Obama would also spend untold hours in Gannett House, whose upper floor contained the offices of the Harvard Law Review. During his second year, he served as an editor of the law review, a much sought-after position, and then survived an even more grueling competition and was elected the law review's first African American president, a signal achievement that would attract national media attention. The law review was a steppingstone to any number of prominent careers, including Supreme Court clerkships.

In contrast to her future husband, Michelle toiled in the lower part of the building, which housed the well regarded but less effete legal aid bureau. "There was a little bit of an upstairs-downstairs element to it," recalls Dave Jones, who was in Michelle's class and would go on to become a member of the California State Assembly. "There wasn't a whole lot of interaction when I was there between law review and legal aid bureau members, other than we would see them pass through the front door and go upstairs, while we were meeting with poor clients down in the basement."

The bureau was multiracial, and its students were public-minded. They were helping people who needed a lawyer and could not afford one. "We handled landlord-tenant disputes; we handled public benefit disputes; we ran a pro se divorce clinic that empowered women to handle their own small, uncontested divorce matters," says Ronald Torbert, who worked alongside Michelle and was president of the bureau during his third year.

The students could appear in court on behalf of their clients, doing trial work under the supervision of a licensed attorney. When not in the courtroom, they were on their own, unbossed, exercising their own discretion. Torbert calls the work "the most fun and the most memorable thing I did in my three years at Harvard."

It must have been equally satisfying for Michelle, who had arrived at Harvard in 1985 after four uncomfortable years at Princeton University. In her senior thesis, she described the frosty reception she'd received on the New Jersey campus, where affirmative action admissions policies were under attack and where many African American students felt marginalized.

"My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'Blackness' than ever before," Michelle wrote in her thesis, "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community." "I have found that at Princeton no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong."