During a dinner at the Blackstone Hotel, he was handed the plaque by Senator Paul Simon, every do-gooder’s favorite political Boy Scout and a man who would one day play a big role in making Obama a United States senator.
Winning the Harvard Law Review presidency may have been the most important election of Obama’s life. It provided him with a golden ticket to Chicago’s upper class, preparing the way for all his later achievements. Had Obama simply been a black Harvard Law grad—or a white Law Review president—he wouldn’t have been offered so much publicity, so much money, and so many jobs, from journalists, publishers, law firms, and political donors. But as the first black man to hold the world’s most prestigious law school post, Obama was a blue-chip prospect, especially in Chicago, which is used to losing its brightest law students to New York and Washington. The Law Review presidency scored him a fellowship at the University of Chicago, where he taught until his election to the U.S. Senate and where he finally met Judge Abner Mikva, who became his first political mentor.
Obama’s great-uncle Charles Payne was a librarian at the U of C. Payne, the brother of Obama’s grandmother Madelyn Dunham, boasted to a law librarian that his nephew was the first African-American president of the Law Review. The law librarian passed the intelligence on to Douglas Baird, chairman of the law school’s Appointment Committee. Baird was perplexed, because Payne was a WASP.
“Sorry, you must be mistaken,” he told the librarian. “I know Charles Payne, and he may have a nephew who’s the president of the Harvard Law Review, but he doesn’t have a nephew who is the first black to hold that position.”
Shortly after, Baird received a visit from Michael McConnell, a colleague who would one day be named a federal judge by George W. Bush. McConnell had just published an article in the Harvard Law Review and raved about this kid named Obama who’d done a brilliant job editing it.
“He should be on our radar screen,” McConnell suggested. “He might be interested in teaching law.”
Baird dialed the same Cambridge phone number that so many other lawyers were calling that spring and got Obama on the line.
“I’m not interested in teaching law,” Obama told Baird. “I’ve got a contract to write a book on voting rights. That’s going to occupy most of my first year after law school.”
(After the New York Times published an article about Obama’s Law Review presidency, a literary agent landed him a $125,000 contract with Simon and Schuster. Due to the demands of law school, Obama was unable to finish the project. He later took a more modest advance from Times Books, for the book that became Dreams from My Father.)
“Why don’t you write the book here?” Baird suggested. “We’ll make you a law and government fellow. We can pay you a token salary and give you an office with a word processor.”
If Obama did decide to teach law, Baird calculated, he’d already be on the U of C campus. And as every attorney knows, possession is nine-tenths of the law.
Obama accepted Baird’s offer and hunkered down to work inside the law school, a six-story glass building with an inch-deep fountain in the courtyard. Its boxy frame and dark reflective windows rhyme not at all with the Oxonian courtyards on the main campus, built in the early twentieth century with John D. Rockefeller’s fortune. After Obama had been at the school about a month, he returned to Baird’s office and told him the book had taken an unexpected turn.
“It’s really less a book about voting rights than it is my autobiography,” he reported.
Baird was a little surprised—Obama seemed awfully young to be writing an autobiography—but he wanted to indulge his prize catch.
“That’s not a problem,” Baird said. “You should write the book you’re going to write.”
In the fall of 1992, as Obama was winding up Project Vote! and typing away on Dreams from My Father, Baird prevailed on him to teach a seminar called “Current Issues in Racism and the Law.” The assignment came with a new title, lecturer in law, which Baird hoped would be the first step toward a professorship.
U of C is one of American academia’s most expensive gigs. It’s not quite the Ivy League, but your bank account can’t tell the difference. At that time, both the faculty and the student body were 90 percent white. Obama’s fifteen-student seminar drew a disproportionate number of African-Americans and Latinos. Not only