Michelle Obama (7 page)

The most important part of her three years at Harvard was not in the classroom. She worked at a legal aid office that was run by the students. Poor clients who couldn't afford a lawyer to handle conflicts with a landlord or a divorce or a problem collecting money that was owed could go to the students for help. If the dispute had to go to court, an experienced lawyer might help, but otherwise the law students managed their own work. It was perfect for Michelle. She spent a lot of time at the legal aid center. Colleagues remember her as serious about her work, and good at it, but also fun to have in the office.

Having gone to Harvard, it was hard to resist the obvious next step. She took a job at a large Chicago law firm, Sidley & Austin. At the time, her father, who had been working for the city for decades, was making $40,000. Her starting salary at age twenty-four was $65,000.

But despite her interest in and need for a good income, her desire for interesting work was hard to fulfill at Sidley.

Her bosses tried, even though some of them believed she was too demanding. Unfortunately, large firms use young lawyers for the less interesting parts of legal work. Sidley also didn't handle cases that were as satisfying to her as working for the legal aid clients had been.

Then one day a colleague came into her office with a videotape. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting had just bought a new television show, and they needed a Sidley lawyer to work on the copyright and merchandise rights. Michelle found a conference room with a videotape player and pushed the cassette into the slot. When she pushed the
PLAY
button, a purple dinosaur danced across the screen and began to sing. Her new client was Barney. Work had just become a little more interesting.

Another of her assignments was to mentor a summer associate. Large law firms try to recruit top law school students to join their firms after graduation by bringing them to a grown-up version of summer camp. The summer associates are given a taste of legal work during the day, and in the evening—if they're interning at a competitive firm—they're treated to barbeques and baseball games and party cruises.

Some of Michelle's coworkers had met a particular summer associate during the interview process and somehow sensed that there'd be an attraction between him and Michelle. He was from Harvard Law, they said. He was older than the usual summer associates, because he hadn't gone to law school right after college. Sidley had taken him as a summer associate even though he had only finished his first year of law school. That was unusual. Apparently he was brilliant: His professors at Harvard were already talking about his future. The senior lawyers at Sidley were delighted that they'd snagged him. Just from the photo he'd sent in for the firm's directory there was a lot of giggling in the hallways about him being cute.

Michelle shook her head at all of it. "I had dated a lot of brothers who had this kind of reputation coming in," she told Obama biographer David Mendell. "I figured he was one of these smooth brothers who could talk straight and impress people." Michelle, who had always been about hard work, was skeptical that her colleagues even knew what to look for. "I figured that they were just impressed with any black man with a suit and a job," she later said.

They were impressed by more than that.

Because she was going to be this new associate's mentor, Michelle looked for his picture in the directory Sidley was preparing. Not bad, she thought. But she quickly imagined a defect: His nose was too big.

That was typical of Michelle at the time. She had an instinct for self-defense. When she did date, she ended it before it could get serious. It was always the man's fault, she imagined. He fell short in some way.
Too much this, not enough that. Her brother began to pity them as soon as he met them. "There would be no reason for me to dislike any of my sister's boyfriends," he told the
Providence Journal.
"It was always more you sort of felt sorry for them because you knew it was just a matter of time before they were getting fired." Not much time, in fact. "She fired 'em fast," Craig said. There was always a reason, though it doesn't seem like the reason was always serious. "They'd do something and she'd say, 'That's it.'"

Michelle's explanation was that none of these boyfriends were as good as her father. She was waiting for someone who met the standard set by him. Her friends and family figured she'd be waiting a long time.

There was more to it, as there usually is. Sometimes her father's example was an excuse. When she was being tough on her boyfriends she was being tough on herself. She was trying to avoid making a mistake. Her perfectionist streak was coming out again. Like all perfectionists, a part of her worried that one wrong decision would mess up everything she'd accomplished. Anything that wasn't exactly right was totally wrong.

She also didn't want to get distracted by a boyfriend. As much as she wanted a family—and she wanted one a lot—she had worked hard to become a lawyer at Sidley, and there was more she wanted to do professionally.

All this gave her a hard shell. "My parents weren't very optimistic that I was going to find anybody who would put up with me," she told reporter Holly Yeager.

Then the summer associate who was supposedly a big deal arrived at the firm. Barack walked into her office and introduced himself.

Okay,
she thought.
His nose isn't so big.
She was already starting to soften.

He was also tall, she noticed. She liked that. Michelle is 5'11" in bare feet, and she wears heels that make her taller. Barack is 6'2".
He's actually not bad looking,
she thought.

Barack's first impression of her: "Lovely." As he recalled it in his memoir
The Audacity of Hope,
Michelle had "a friendly, professional manner that matched her tailored suit and blouse."

Michelle was already playing it cool. She had her reasons, and at least one of them made sense: She was supposed to be his mentor at the firm. It wasn't the same as being his boss, but it was a professional relationship. She didn't think it was right to mix that with a personal relationship. Less reasonable: They were both African American. "I thought, 'Now how would that look?'" she told David Mendell. "Here we are, the only two black people here, and we are dating? I'm thinking that looks pretty tacky."

They actually weren't the only two African Americans at the firm, though there weren't many in their positions. She was right that people would have noticed. But why did she suddenly care so much about what other people thought about her personal life? What was behind that vague word, "tacky," that she used to dismiss the idea? That was not a word she'd have used to describe any other two African Americans who were dating. She wouldn't even have thought it if Barack had been dating someone else at the firm.

It may have been something more than her usual instinct to stay free from relationships. Professionally, she was still a rarity: a female African American graduate of Harvard Law. She knew from experience that to be effective she needed to keep clients and colleagues focused on the part of her that was a lawyer. This was something her white female colleagues also had to do. For Michelle it went double.

Barack didn't give up asking for a date. Michelle resisted, but not because she wasn't interested. She made a "proclamation" to her mother: "I'm not worrying about dating ... I'm going to focus on me." Right.

She tried to deflect him by setting him up with her friends. He wasn't interested. She wasn't very disappointed.

Having fooled herself, Michelle thought she was doing a good job of hiding her feelings from everyone. But one of her colleagues, Mary Carragher, told biographer Liza Mundy that the courtship looked a little different from the outside. A few times Carragher would go to Michelle's office in the late afternoon and see Barack inside, sitting on the corner of Michelle's desk while he and Michelle were having a conversation that obviously wasn't about business. From the doorway, she could see that Michelle, usually so focused, had finally encountered a distraction she liked.
You know what,
Carragher would think before knocking,
I'm going back to my office.
After each of these conversations, Carragher told Mundy, Michelle would mention to Carragher something new she'd just learned about Barack. "She had all these little facts about him," Carragher said. She remembered Michelle's amazement when telling Carragher, "I can't believe he's got a
white grandmother from Kansas!
"

"She was falling hard," Carragher told Mundy, "But always cool." In his memoir
The Audacity of Hope,
Barack recalled that it was hard to melt the ice. He was only at Sidley for the summer, so he didn't think much of Michelle's excuse that she was his adviser. "Come on," he said to her. "What advice are you giving me? You're showing me how the copy machine works. You're telling me which restaurants to try. I don't think the partners will consider one date a serious breach of firm policy." When she kept refusing, he said, "OK, I'll quit [the firm]. How's that? You're my adviser. Tell me who I have to talk to."

The more interested Michelle became, the more careful she was. He was going back to Massachusetts at the end of the summer to finish law school, right? Then no, thank you. But she could resist only so much. "Eventually, I wore her down," Barack wrote. "After a firm picnic, she drove me back to my apartment and I offered to buy her an ice cream at the Baskin-Robbins store across the street." It turned into an unplanned date. "We sat on the curb and ate our ice creams in the sticky afternoon heat, and I told her about working at Baskin-Robbins when I was a teenager and how it was hard to look cool in a brown apron and cap. She told me that for a span of two or three years as a child, she had refused to eat anything except peanut butter and jelly. I asked if I could kiss her."

There were secret dates afterward—and at least one that wasn't secret. They bumped into a colleague at a movie theater. Michelle was embarrassed. But with friends outside of the law firm, she could finally open up. She called a friend from Harvard Law School, Verna Williams, to give her the news. "Guess what?" Michelle said. "I've got this great guy in my life. His name is Barack." She told Williams how it had happened, and she mentioned all the details about Barack that fascinated her. "It was clear she was pretty crazy about him." Williams remembered.

With her family, Michelle didn't gush about Barack. She didn't share with them the things she had learned about his family, and his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia, and his reputation at Harvard Law School. Almost shyly, she brought him to her parents' house for a family dinner. She was also setting him up to be tested. She wasn't going to sell him to her family beforehand. He had to present himself. Of course, if they didn't like him, that would be the end.

But her family had been through this before, so they had sympathy for Barack. "First impression was that he was smart, easygoing, good sense of humor," Craig remembered. "I thought, 'Too bad he won't be around for long.'" As he recalls, his parents felt the same way. "We gave it a month, tops. Not because there was anything wrong with him ... but we knew he was going to do something wrong, and then it was going to be too bad for him."

They weren't worried that Michelle might lose something special. Barack's unusual background and his education might have interested them, but Barack didn't talk about himself. They had no idea he had a white mother, and they wouldn't know for a long time. It wasn't a secret. He just never mentioned it. They didn't hear that he planned to run for a prestigious position at Harvard Law School, editor of the
Harvard Law Review,
which surely would have interested all of them. So Michelle's family, who assumed they'd never see him again, didn't take any special interest in him. Final verdict after the dinner? "He was just another one who wasn't going to make it."

Then, about a month after the dinner, Craig got a call from Michelle. She wanted a favor. It was about Barack. Craig was surprised Barack was still around. But what did she want?

"My father and I had a theory that you can really tell what somebody's personality is like by playing basketball with him," Craig remembered. Is he generous with his passes? Does he take the shot when it's his? Is he a show-off? Does he lie about fouling or being fouled? Can you trust him to keep score? Michelle wanted Craig to invite Barack to play basketball and then give her his opinion of Barack's character.

Craig's first thought was, "Oh, no, she's going to make me be the bad guy." But he went along with it. He invited Barack to an informal game.

Barack got some credit just for showing up. After starring for Princeton, Craig had been drafted in the fourth round by the Philadelphia 76ers and then had played professionally in Europe. Pickup games with Craig were serious. Craig was also 6'6" to Barack's 6'2", and Craig ran with other big players. Many years later, in 2001, when Michael Jordan was preparing for a possible comeback with the Washington Wizards, Craig was one of the players chosen for secret practice games to tune up the superstar. Craig was almost forty years old then. When he played Barack, he was closer to twenty-seven. Barack hadn't played organized basketball since high school. He was pretty good then—though maybe not as good as he imagined at the time.

They met at a school. Barack and Craig were on the same team. Craig saw that Barack was left-handed, and knew how to pick spots on the court where that was an advantage.
Okay,
Craig thought.
Smart.
Barack couldn't easily drive to basket against Craig's bigger friends, but he had an outside shot.
That took some practice.
Just as Michelle had hoped, Craig got a sense of Barack's character. "I was happy to report back he was a good guy on the court," Robinson told the
Providence Journal
many years later, when millions more people were wondering what personality traits Barack had revealed that day. "He was confident without being cocky. He was intense. He wanted to win. If he thought a call needed to be argued, he'd argue, but mostly he just played with a lot of integrity. And he didn't just pass the ball to me because I was Michelle's brother."