The Other Barack (23 page)

One cannot help but wonder how the two Obama men might have regarded each other. Did Obama the younger dwell much on his elusive father during his years at Harvard? During the long hours that he toiled over legal articles on the third floor of Gannett, did he peer through the window at Littauer and imagine his father loping up the granite stairs, his books held close to his pressed white shirt? How deeply did he resent that his father had chosen Littauer and all that it represented—Harvard, career, his own future in Kenya—over his infant son in Hawaii? The subject clearly weighed heavily on his mind, for during the busy months after his election as president of the law review, Obama signed a contract to write his memoir,
Dreams from My Father
, a heartfelt rumination on his relationship with his absent father and his painful discovery of all that he was not. That a twenty-nine-year-old Harvard student felt his life even worthy of a memoir suggests a robust measure of self-confidence, one reminiscent of that exhibited by a certain young Kenyan in his twenties as he interviewed for a seat on the airlift to the United States.

And what about Obama Sr.? What would he have said to the slender young man in tattered blue jeans and leather jacket, his very American second son? Would he have indulged in a rare moment of paternal pride or admonished his namesake to work harder at his studies, as he had done decades earlier? Or would he have cringed in remorse at the decision he had made as an equally ambitious young man himself to abandon his small family in Hawaii in order to pursue his own dream? Perhaps he would have tried to explain the many years that they had been apart.

For both young men, their time at Harvard was a richly formative period: for the son, the law; for the father, the critical shift in economic thinking underway that would make him of singular value on his return to Kenya. For both, their Harvard pedigree would ultimately become an aspect central to their identity, although in sharply contrasting ways.

On his arrival in Cambridge in the fall of 1962, Obama must surely have thrilled at the sight of the venerable ivy-shrouded brick buildings that flank Harvard Yard, feeling the weight of more than three centuries of academic ritual. For a man instilled with a deep reverence for the power of the mind and the practical virtues of an education, a man who had walked miles as a child just to get to a tin-roofed schoolhouse where he had had to share the tattered and dusty primers, Harvard must have felt other-worldly. This was no second-rate state university where students stepped around chicken poop in their flips-flops. This was the epicenter of learning in America—some would say the world—a monument to the potential of the human mind. But as Obama pointedly noted, even Harvard wasn't perfect.

“I find Harvard a very stimulating place at least intellectually,” he wrote in December to Sylvia Baldwin, a friend in Hawaii who had hosted a number of international students for meals with her family in her home. “It sort of reminds me of Cambridge University, but rather artificially. Nonetheless, I do think this is a very good institution and I will stay here at least for two years to three years depending on when I am able to finish my dissertation.”
¹

Obama's years on the Charles River would coincide with a momentous period not only in American political life but also in that of the University as well. In 1962 the aroma of the placid 1950s still lingered heavily. Students still wore ties at meals and women were forbidden in upperclassmen's dorm rooms after midnight.
²
But the issues that would so luridly dominate the later part of the decade—civil rights, drugs, the women's movement—were already beginning to percolate. Harvard psychology lecturer Timothy Leary and assistant professor Richard Alpert, who would soon be known as Ram Dass, openly promoted the use of hallucinatory drugs like LSD and psilocybin to students, saying they were no more harmful than “psychoanalysis or a four year enrollment at Harvard College,” until the college sent them packing in 1963.
³

Harvard and Radcliffe students were becoming closely attuned to burgeoning issues of race. They picketed Howard Johnson's restaurants throughout Boston in protest of the chain's segregation policies in the South and contested the complete absence of any tenured black professors at their own schools. Black nationalist Malcolm X would draw increasingly large crowds during three visits to the campus between 1961 and
1964 and had already prompted soul searching among the handful of black students there. Weeks after Obama arrived, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the future of integration at the Harvard Law School and urged Negroes to take a greater role of leadership in the fight for equality. If necessary, he said, the Negro should be prepared to die in their quest for fair treatment, but to “die quietly.”
⁴

But the biggest news on campus early in the decade was a Harvard man named Jack. Just one year earlier John F. Kennedy, Harvard class of 1940 and one of a host of Kennedy family members to boast a Harvard degree, had reached heights barely imaginable even at University Hall when he claimed the U.S. presidency. A resident of Winthrop House and a member of the varsity swim team during his student days, Kennedy had richly marbled ties to the school. As Kennedy assembled the team that would march into the New Frontier behind him, he cherry-picked from Harvard's ranks.

On the stately quadrangle that runs from Grays to Holworthy Halls in Harvard Yard, the mood was ecstatic. In the weeks after the election, speculation on who would be summoned to Washington, DC, and for what post was widespread and in some cases the subject of a wager or two. In the end more than fifty Harvardians would get the call, including the brilliant and charismatic McGeorge Bundy, who left his post as the dean of arts and sciences to become National Security Adviser; the eloquent John Kenneth Galbraith, who set off from the Economics Department to become envoy to India; and the erudite Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who became a special assistant in the White House as well as resident historian. No less than four Harvard men assumed positions in the president's Cabinet.
⁵
The raid on Harvard prompted much commentary in the media, such as the
New York Times
columnist James Reston's notorious quip that soon there “will be nothing left at Harvard but Radcliffe.”
⁶

The campus newspaper, the
Harvard Crimson
, kept breathless watch of the comings and goings of key players during the two and a half years that Kennedy was president and took close note of the doings of other Kennedy family members as well. When newly elected Senator Edward Kennedy (class of '54) gave his first speech in Washington, DC, it was front-page news. So too when the undergraduate humor magazine, the
Harvard Lampoon
, voted Caroline Kennedy “Little Girl of the Year” in 1963, the news appeared on page one. And during the spring of that same
year the paper exulted in the announcement that the university's Board of Overseers, of which Kennedy was a member, would hold its spring meeting in Washington, DC, and would dine at the White House—for the president's convenience, of course.
⁷

Much has been written about the intimate—some would say incestuous—relationship between Harvard University and the Kennedy administration. But Richard Norton Smith summed up the relationship perhaps most succinctly when he wrote in his book
The Harvard Century
that “Under John Kennedy, the University sometimes imagined itself to be the fourth branch of government, an impression JFK did little to dispel.”
⁸
It was an intoxicating example of how academic brilliance could position a person next to the ultimate seat of power, and as such it held a magnetic allure for Barack Obama. Indeed, he applied himself to his studies at Harvard with greater determination than ever before, confident that the same kind of elevation that Kennedy had offered his contemporaries would be proffered to him once he returned to Kenya and Tom Mboya's potent inner circle. Destiny, it seemed, had determined that Obama should join the elect.

Obama arrived at Harvard at a time when the campus was swathed as never before in a self-confidence bordering on hubris. Part of that was due also to significant changes in the cast of the student body that had occurred in recent years. Harvard had worked hard since World War II to broaden its mandate so that by the early 1960s it was no longer the parochial arena of the Brahmin gentry alone but instead home to a much broader swath of backgrounds and intellectual potential. As the pool of applicants knocking at Harvard's door steadily grew, the number of Harvard alumnae offspring admitted had declined, to the consternation of the school's admissions officers. Increasingly, the school had its pick. The result was a more sophisticated and academically talented pool of candidates. To say that the students who ultimately selected were supremely self-assured, many of whom were prize winners, Merit Scholars, or just plain-old first in their class, doesn't begin to do them justice. As Smith describes the students of the time: “Their view of Harvard's significance roughly matched their own self-estimate, and neither was notably modest.... At their best, they were remorseless in their precocity, stimulating in their company, and challenging in their conversation. At worst,
they were neurotic, opinionated grade hounds. Onlookers noted a syndrome called ‘Valedictorian's Ego,' wherein over-achievers were thrown together, forced into mortal combat to justify their well-worn halos.”
⁹
In short, they were a lot like Obama.

In most other respects the first-year graduate student from Kenya was a curiosity, just as he had been in Hawaii. Part of it was due to his dark skin. Although Harvard had steadily increased its international community, most students from overseas were from Europe or Asia. In 1962 there were a total of 81 African students enrolled school-wide, of which one dozen were in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
¹⁰
Blacks accounted for only about 1 percent of the 13,668 students, which, added to the African students, made for a total of just over 200 black faces on campus.
¹¹
Because they were so small in number, Harvard's black students, whether foreign or homegrown, invariably knew one another. So when Azinna Nwafor, class of '64 and a native of Nigeria, saw a lean black man in horn rims whom he did not know striding in front of Leverett House that fall, he promptly introduced himself. “Obama walked with confidence,” noted Nwafor, who went on to become an assistant professor of what was then called Afro-American studies at Harvard. “Like, this is someone who is very sure of himself. He held his head high and his shoulders back. It was quite unlike how we saw African Americans at the time who walked around looking so defeated.”

Soon afterward Nwafor invited Obama and a few other African students to his dorm room and the conversation immediately turned into a passionate debate over the relative merits of Hegel and Marx. Obama, as the eldest student among the group, dominated the discussion. But Nwafor, a math major, was bored. He showed one of the other students where he kept the drinks and headed out for a walk. “I came back three hours later and they had just left,” Nwafor recalls, erupting into laughter.

Although black students on campus found common cause on a host of fronts, they also faced a number of cultural hurdles. Many black students had been raised not as African Americans but as American Negroes, as they were still called in some quarters. Not only had their parents discouraged them from embracing their African roots but in some cases advised them to disdain their ethnic lineage entirely. To them, Africa was the past, a place of unwashed feet and barbaric habits. To the astonishment of some
African students, hair straightening was still practiced among some black Americans, and the question of how best to uncoil nappy hair was a common one. It would not be until a couple of years later that many African Americans embraced their African heritage, and the untamed Afro hairstyle became a popular means of defining black identity.

In fact, for many African students the state of black America in the early1960s came as something of a shock. Not only did many of the African students come from prominent political families, but like Obama, they had been among the highest academic achievers in their country and they carried themselves with great pride. That African Americans were routinely treated as second-class citizens and in some cases appeared to regard themselves as such was difficult for the Africans to grasp. And when the African students actually found themselves the victims of racial discrimination—when time after time an apartment said to be available over the phone was suddenly no longer available when they showed up in person to take a look at it—some were tempted to head for home.

Obama himself was the subject of some pointed racial hostility, although he likely never knew it. When he first arrived in Cambridge, Obama lived on the edge of campus on the first floor of one of New England's less appealing architectural standbys known as a “triple decker,” a three-story wooden apartment building with one unit stacked on top of another. Within months he moved to a spacious third-floor apartment a short distance from the Charles River on the top floor of a home owned by Reverend Arthur J. Metaxas, the priest at the nearby Saints Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Church and a Harvard chaplain. Harvard president Nathan Pusey himself had asked Metaxas if he were able to put up some African students. But when Obama and his roommate, a graduate student from Nigeria, moved into the Metaxas's house on Magazine Street, a neighbor marched to the front door and strenuously objected. “They said we had
ruined
the neighborhood,” recalled his wife Georgia Metaxas. “They were very annoyed at us for renting to these black boys, and I don't think they ever talked to us again. But my husband being a priest and all we did not think that way. Those boys were from a good college and I respected that. Whenever we made cookies, I would send some up to them.”