Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama

Two fingers.

Pop takes another shot, neat,

Points out the same amber

Stain on his shorts that I’ve got on mine, and

Makes me smell his smell, coming

From me; he switches channels, recites an old poem

He wrote before his mother died,

Stands, shouts, and asks

For a hug, as I shrink, my

Arms barely reaching around

His thick, oily neck, and his broad back; ’cause

I see my face, framed within

Pop’s black-framed glasses

And know he’s laughing too.

David James can remember Obama “reading that or an early version of that,” and particularly the “amber stain” reference to urine, because of “how powerful an image it was.” But James thought the poem seemed “dispassionate” because it was “neither sentimental nor cruel.” Margot Mifflin, no doubt with “Underground” in mind, noted that Obama’s “previous poems had been more abstract and fanciful,” but “Pop” made a stronger impression because of its “honest ambivalence and because it was so unabashedly personal, especially coming from someone who tended to be reserved.” Mifflin was also impressed that “it wasn’t sentimental. It had an edge of darkness to it, and that made it genuine.”

Alex McNear and her colleagues accepted both of Barack’s poems for Feast’s inaugural issue. When the fifty-page magazine arrived on campus in May, a review in the student newspaper described it as a “most outstanding collegiate example of writing talent” and said copies “should be sent to other colleges.” McNear and her contributors appreciated that praise, and over a quarter century later, Feast would be discovered by a new generation of readers who sought to understand Obama’s poems. Given both the title and the reference to “black-framed glasses,” most commentators presumed that Obama had written about his grandfather, Stan Dunham, not Frank Marshall Davis. But hostile critics focused on how the subject “recites an old poem he wrote before his mother died” and noted that Stan’s mother had killed herself when he was eight years old, yet Barack would forcefully reject the Davis hypothesis. “This is about my grandfather.”

Alex McNear was one of two Occidental women whom male students immediately remembered three decades later. The list of men who actively sought her attention included 1980 graduate Andy Roth, who was in Eagle Rock through February 1981; Phil Boerner, who invited Alex to brunch multiple times; and Feast cofounder Tom Grauman, who found her “a magnetic force” before shifting his gaze to Caroline Boss. But interest in Alex ranged far wider. One upperclassman imagined she was “the most beautiful lesbian I ever knew,” and Susan Keselenko recalled that “everybody had a crush on Alex.”

McNear was unaware of the full degree of interest in her, but she was curious about one fellow sophomore she got to know in the Cooler during spring 1981. To Alex, Barack was “intriguing and interesting and smart and attractive,” and they spoke regularly as the school year wound down. Some friends believed the interest was mutual. “I thought he was pursuing her,” recalled Margot Mifflin, Occidental’s other unforgettable woman. She and the dashing Hasan Chandoo had been a steady couple the entire year, but that did not lessen Margot’s own “magnetism,” Tom Grauman noted. “It’s hard to forget Margot,” said Paul Anderson. “She had a way about her that was captivating.” Chandoo too was a compelling presence. When one classmate compared Hasan to the singer Freddie Mercury, Margot coolly suggested the handsome actor Omar Sharif instead. But perhaps Tom Grauman’s most striking photograph from that spring captures an enchanting Margot addressing a slightly blurred Barack. In contrast, a survey publicized in the student newspaper reported that 32 percent of Oxy women and 17 percent of men admitted that they had never had sex.

Oxy’s black students remained politically marginalized despite the almost nonstop efforts of Earl Chew, who by April was trying to get support for a Black Theme House dormitory. Only nine African American students turned out for Ujima’s annual photo, and when a five-page Black Student Directory was distributed during winter term, one perplexed undergraduate sent a letter to the student paper that asked, “Why does the Oxy black community need their own directory; don’t they know who they are?” Whoever compiled it did not know Obama well, because it spelled his given name as “Barrack.”

Oxy president Gilman announced there would be no further discussion of divestment, yet the controversy continued to percolate even years later. In May Earl Chew, along with Becky Rivera, ran successfully for top student government positions, but Chew’s close girlfriend from that year later said she had no memory of Barack working with them at all.

Instead Barack and Hasan channeled their energies into a newly created Oxy chapter of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. CISPES had been founded six months earlier to oppose U.S. aid to El Salvador’s military government, whose violent death squads had assassinated Roman Catholic archbishop Oscar Romero while he was offering mass in March 1980. CISPES supported El Salvador’s left-wing opposition, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), whose ties to the Salvadoran Communist Party had led the FBI to investigate CISPES even before Barack and Hasan helped start Oxy’s chapter in early March 1981.

One of Barack’s favorite professors, Carlos Alan Egan, had prompted the student interest in El Salvador, and on Saturday, April 18, Barack, Hasan, and Paul Anderson drove to MacArthur Park in L.A.’s Westlake neighborhood for a CISPES event led by actors Ed Asner and Mike Farrell. The short march and ensuing rally attracted a crowd of three thousand as well as counterprotesters from Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. “We were walking around and absorbing it all,” Anderson remembers, and particular enjoyed “exchanging barbs” and “verbally going back and forth” with the hostile Moonies. Scores of banners and signs made for a colorful event. “Long Live the Revolutionary Democratic Front,” an FMLN ally, read one; “U.S. Out of El Salvador” demanded another.

With Egan’s assistance, Barack, Paul, and Hasan helped organize a mid-May symposium on El Salvador that drew seven prominent speakers to Oxy, including Sister Patricia Krommer, one of the most prominent U.S. supporters of the Salvadoran left. Several academics, a U.S. State Department officer, and a refugee doctor whom Paul would remember as “actually an El Salvadoran revolutionary” were also on the panel. The event drew a crowd of more than three hundred—a larger number than attended the February divestment rally—and the Oxy paper devoted a front-page photo and a lengthy story to the symposium. Paul recalls several right-wing hecklers showing up, and the student organizers “had to have them extracted.” Multiple off-campus CISPES events took place during late May and early June, with flyers for all of them distributed on the Oxy campus by student CISPES supporters.

Hasan also organized a Sunday forum featuring former Pakistani Supreme Court justice Ghulam Safdar Shah, who had opposed the military dictatorship’s execution of former president Bhutto and been forced from office in late 1980, plus prominent politician Afzal Bangash, who had founded Pakistan’s most militant Marxist party in 1968 but was living in exile following Zia-ul-Haq’s 1979 military coup. This event too was a success, attracting an audience of more than two hundred, and Barack and Hasan’s friend Chris Welton wrote a front-page account of it for Oxy’s newspaper.

That same week, Oxy students were angered when they learned that the Political Science faculty had refused to reappoint Lawrence Goldyn, the department’s most popular professor. Goldyn denounced the senior faculty’s conduct as “completely unethical and certainly unprofessional,” but he was also aware of the effect he had had on countless Oxy students. Speaking with Susan Keselenko for a long, two-page profile in the year’s final issue of the newspaper, Goldyn said that “frankly I think I’ve probably had as much or more impact on straight people at this school than I have on gay people.”

Goldyn believed he had had “a rather profound effect on a lot of people, but there’s no way of measuring that or knowing that,” at least not for years to come. Many students have “studied with me, gotten close to me, and really been supportive of and loyal to me. I can’t tell you how much respect I have for people like this.” Notwithstanding that realization, Goldyn would abandon political science after this and enter medical school, earning his M.D. from Tufts University in 1988 and becoming an internal medicine/HIV specialist in Northern California. Thirty-three years after his dismissal from Oxy, one former student would thank and laud him in one of Washington’s most august settings.

Obama’s belief in his potential as a serious writer suffered a painful blow when Tom Grauman told him a short story about driving a car had been voted down for publication in Feast’s second issue on the grounds that it needed more work. Obama was livid. Caroline Boss appreciated how Barack took pride in “his writing and he was trying to hone that as an actual craft,” especially after taking David James’s seminar. But to be told by Grauman that his story had been rejected was more than he could bear. “We had a fairly frank argument about it,” indeed “a shouting match,” Grauman recounted years later. “I just said it wasn’t done,” and “I didn’t want to finish it for him.” Obama “was peeved” and “you could see that his feelings were hurt,” in part because Feast “was a social thing as well as a literary thing,” and “he felt he deserved to be a part of this group.”

But Obama had more important things to consider. Sometime before Oxy’s spring term exams ended on June 9, he and Phil Boerner learned they had each been admitted to Columbia University. Boerner’s Oxy GPA was a less than robust 3.25, or a high B, but Columbia College—the men’s undergraduate portion of the larger university that also included all-female Barnard College—had received only 450 transfer applications that spring, and accepted sixty-seven. Columbia admissions officials were unhappy about the quality of those applicants as well as the quantity. Dean Arnold Collery believed they had not attracted stronger applicants because “we’re not housing them,” instead leaving them to fend for themselves in Manhattan’s rental apartment market. Assistant Dean of Admissions Robert Boatti also cited the limited financial aid as well as Columbia’s policy of requiring all transfers to take core courses that other students had completed as freshmen and sophomores. As a result, a majority of transfer students came from the New York area, many from community colleges. Those who had been accepted had GPAs of about 3.0 and combined SAT scores of 1,100, Boatti said, while entering freshmen averaged well over 1,200.

Boerner and Obama were excited by their acceptances. Eric Moore heard the news and tried unsuccessfully to persuade Barack to stay at Oxy. Sim Heninger, who had seen so much of “Barry” in Haines Annex almost two years earlier, spoke with him in the Cooler one day at the end of spring term and was struck by how “polished and funny” Barack now was. He had changed “very swiftly,” Sim thought, from the emotionally fragile youngster who had almost come apart in front of Heninger in October 1979. “He was a different person by the time he left,” Heninger said. Kent Goss, who had played basketball with Barry during fall 1979, saw the same thing. “He was different. He was more serious … there was a shift somewhere in those two years.”

Alex McNear sensed something similar. “I think he had like a broader vision of something…. He thought there was going to be a different kind of opportunity” at Columbia. Caroline Boss would remember Obama saying “very directly … ‘I don’t know what it is, but I feel I have a destiny, and I feel I have a purpose. I feel I have something that is being asked of me to do; I just don’t know what it is, and I need to … go someplace that challenges me, that forces me to focus and that gives me a sense of direction and personal identity, some kind of avenue to ask myself good questions,’ ” so that “ ‘I will be prepared … I need to be prepared so that if the moment comes, I’m ready for it.’ ”

When spring term exams ended on June 9, Hasan and Barack hosted a graduation party for all their friends and friends of friends before everyone left for the summer. Margot and her roommate Dina Silva, plus Dina’s boyfriend Chuck Jensvold, were there. Caroline Boss brought her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend John Drew, who was spending the summer in D.C. working at Gar Alperovitz’s National Center for Economic Alternatives, just two years after its failure to win a reopening of Youngstown’s Campbell Works. The next Saturday, Barack and Imad Husain went to Paul Carpenter’s family home for his younger brother’s birthday party, and Barack told friends he and Hasan were leaving L.A. the next Thursday, June 18.

After stopping in Honolulu to see Stan and Madelyn, they continued westward, with Barack heading to Jakarta to spend a good part of the summer with his mother and sister Maya before meeting up with both Hasan and Wahid Hamid in Karachi, Pakistan. From Pakistan, Obama would fly to France, and then to London, before arriving in New York City for Columbia’s fall semester. Carpenter told Phil Boerner that “knowing O’Bama, he will reach the shores of the ‘empire state’ at the last possible moment if not later.”

In Honolulu, Hasan was struck by how “very small” Barack’s grandparents’ apartment was. Madelyn Dunham was pleased to see her grandson and later told an interviewer “he seemed to have gotten some purpose in life during those two years at Occidental.” Barack ran into Keith Kakugawa and his two young sons. Keith remembered that Barack “told me he was leaving Oxy and going to Columbia.” From there, Barack headed to Indonesia.

Six months earlier, Ann had left USAID contractor Development Alternatives for a two-year stint as a program officer in the Ford Foundation’s regional office in Jakarta. That job came with a comfortable Ford-owned home at Jalan Daksa I/14 in the lush South Jakarta neighborhood of Kebayoran Baru, a considerable step upward from the two houses Barry had lived in with her when she was married to Lolo. The Ford salary gave Ann enough to send ten-year-old Maya to the Jakarta International School, and Ford appears to have paid for Barack’s summer 1981 plane fares after Ann requested that her educational travel for dependent children benefits be used for that purpose.

Ann knew her son needed a place to stay when he arrived in Manhattan in late August, and she heard from a fellow expatriate about an apartment for sublet at 142 West 109th Street, just a few blocks south of Columbia’s campus. Barack spent most of July living with his mother and sister, and he later wrote that he “spent the summer brooding over a misspent youth.” Then he flew to Karachi, where Hasan and Wahid met him at the airport. He stayed for a few days at the Chandoo family’s Karachi home, then for a week or more at Hamid’s before the trio and several relatives set out on a road trip that took them northeastward to Sindh province’s second-largest city, Hyderabad, and then well north to Larkana in interior Sindh. They visited a high school friend of Wahid’s whose famous family, the Talpurs, had played a major role in Sindh’s earlier history and whose feudal lands were still worked by peasants. Barack met one such older man of African ancestry, and traditional hospitality also led to a partridge hunting outing for the visitors.

Obama then flew westward from Karachi. How much time he spent in either France or London is unrecorded, and in subsequent years, he did not write about his three weeks in Pakistan nor did he often mention the visit when recounting his life experiences. But no later than August 24, Barack Obama arrived in New York City for the first time, having just turned twenty years old—five years younger than his father had been when he first arrived there twenty-two Augusts earlier.

Obama later wrote that he “spent my first night in Manhattan curled up in an alleyway” off Amsterdam Avenue after no one was present at 142 West 109th Street’s apartment 3E when he arrived a little after 10:00 P.M. He did not have enough money for a hotel room, and while he did have Hasan’s friend Sohale Siddiqi’s phone number, Sohale worked nights at a restaurant. After waiting futilely on the building’s front stoop for two hours, he “crawled through a fence” to an alleyway. “I found a dry spot, propped my luggage beneath me, and fell asleep…. In the morning, I woke up to find a white hen pecking at the garbage near my feet.”

In the morning, Barack called Sohale, who told him to take a cab to his building on the Upper East Side. Sohale remembered Obama arriving “totally disheveled,” and after breakfast at a nearby coffee shop, Obama crashed on Siddiqi’s couch. Within a day or two, Barack gained access to the two-bedroom apartment on 109th, and he immediately invited Phil Boerner, who was still searching for housing, to share it with him: $180 a month per person. Phil arrived on Saturday, August 29, two days before Columbia’s orientation, and his top priority was retrieving a bed from family friends. Phil and Emmett Bassett, a sixty-year-old African American medical school professor, got the bed to 109th Street on top of Bassett’s station wagon. Phil remembers “Barack and I huffing and puffing up the stairs to get half the bed” up to their third-floor apartment; in contrast, “Emmett just grabbed the mattress with one arm and hauled it up no problem.” The next weekend, Phil and Barack spent Labor Day weekend at the Bassetts’ country home in the Catskills. Phil said later that Emmett “was the most impressive person I’ve ever met,” but years later Bassett could not recall Obama at all.

That weekend was a welcome respite from both the sorry state of apartment 3E and the strictures Columbia imposed upon junior transfers. On 109th Street, the downstairs buzzer did not work, forcing visitors to shout their arrival from the sidewalk, as Phil had discovered when he first arrived. The apartment door featured at least five locks, perhaps not a bad idea, as the unit next door was vacant and burned out. The four-room apartment was a railway flat: the front door opened into the kitchen, which led first to Barack’s bedroom, then Phil’s, and lastly their living room. With no interior hallway, there was no privacy whatsoever. The bathroom had a tub, but no shower, and hot water was a rare treat. Hot showers could be taken at Columbia’s gym—phys ed was another requirement—and once the weather turned cold, keeping coats on indoors and taking refuge in sleeping bags could partially compensate for the usually stone cold radiators.

Barack had learned to cook one or two chicken dishes from Oxy’s Pakistanis, but in stark contrast to daily life back on Glenarm, Phil and Barack hosted parties only when someone from Oxy like Paul Carpenter and his girlfriend Beth Kahn visited them. Sometime in September, Earl Chew and a friend came to stay for several nights, but “spent most of their time at a porn theater,” Phil remembered. Chew would not complete his senior year at Oxy and next surfaced eleven years later when he was arrested on a charge of attempted murder outside a Santa Monica reggae club. Jailed for six months before being convicted, Chew pled guilty to misdemeanor assault after his initial conviction was overturned. He was last known to have disappeared from an L.A. halfway house in 2007, three decades after his graduation from Philips Exeter and his arrival at Oxy.

Registration and the start of classes was not any more welcoming for Barack and Phil than their living conditions on 109th Street. Columbia required them to take a full year of both Humanities and Contemporary Civilization plus a semester apiece of art and music. Two semesters of physical education were reduced to one if you passed a swimming test. A foreign language was mandatory; Barack enrolled in an intermediate Spanish class. In all of those courses his classmates were almost entirely freshmen and sophomores. Additional requirements included two natural science courses plus whatever was necessary for a departmental major.

Columbia would accept up to sixty transfer credits from Oxy toward the 124 needed to graduate, and Phil and Barack each met with assistant dean Frank Ayala to determine which of their Oxy courses satisfied Columbia’s many requirements. Tuition was $3,350 per semester, and with other fees, the cost of a full year was $8,620, independent of food, lodging, and books. Obama may have received some financial aid in the form of federal Pell Grant assistance, and he may have taken out a modest amount of student loans.

A series of headlines in the Columbia Spectator, the excellent student newspaper, told the story of life for the Columbia undergraduate: “Alienation Is Common for Minority Students,” “Students Label CU Life Depressing,” “Striking Tenants Demand Front-Door Locks.” The second of those stories described “the crime and poverty surrounding the school and the immensity of the university bureaucracy.” One classmate later said, “Columbia was a very isolating place,” and another rued “a culture at the college and in the city that wasn’t exactly nurturing.” Several years later Obama wrote to Boerner, “I am still amazed when I think of what we put up with there” on 109th Street. Living in Manhattan and going to Columbia was nothing at all like that glowing account the Oxy student newspaper had offered up eight months earlier.

Luckily there were interesting events to attend. One flyer advertised “A Forum on South Africa—Including the Film The Rising Tide,” with speakers such as David Ndaba, the nom de guerre for Dr. Sam Gulabe, the African National Congress’s representative to the United Nations. Boerner said he and Barack attended that forum, but not a mid-November speech by black Georgia state legislator Julian Bond. The two apartment mates often ate breakfast at Tom’s Restaurant on Broadway at 112th Street, and they sometimes had dinner at nearby Empire Szechuan. Drugs were no part of the depressing scene at 142 W. 109th, but they would go drink beer at the venerable West End bar on Broadway or with Phil’s cousin Peregrine “Pern” Beckman, a Columbia sophomore, at his nearby apartment. To Pern, Phil’s friend seemed “diffident,” a “shy kid who spoke when spoken to” while “nursing a beer.”

Looming over their daily lives was how unlivable their dire apartment was, especially as winter closed in. They could let their sublease expire on December 7 and simply remain until fall exams concluded on December 23; given New York’s arcane housing code, they could receive no punishment for that brief time. They began searching without success for a place to live in January. Phil had family friends in Brooklyn Heights where he could stay, but they still had no solution for both of them when Phil left to spend Christmas with his parents at their home in London.

Columbia’s winter break extended from Christmas Eve until spring registration on January 20. Obama spent most of that time in Los Angeles, seeing Wahid Hamid and Paul Carpenter and encountering old friends like Alex McNear when he visited Occidental, whose winter term started two weeks before Columbia’s spring semester. Obama returned to New York on January 15 and slept on the floor of a friend named Ron on the Upper East Side while he again searched for an apartment. At registration, Barack ran into Pern, who gave him Phil’s number in Brooklyn, and when Barack called two nights later, he told Phil he had found only a $250-per-month one-person studio just south of 106th Street that he could soon move into as a sublet.

On Sunday afternoon, January 24, the day before Columbia’s spring classes began, Barack and Ron went to visit Phil where he was staying, at 11 Cranberry Street in Brooklyn Heights. They drank beer and ate bagels while watching the San Francisco 49ers defeat the Cincinnati Bengals 26–21 in Super Bowl XVI. On Monday Barack was again saddled with Columbia’s core courses and another semester of Spanish. That Friday night, Phil met up with Barack at Columbia; the two then headed downtown on the subway to rendezvous with Ron and his girlfriend at a Lower East Side bar before having dinner at the well-known Odessa restaurant on Avenue A, just across from Tompkins Square Park. Then Barack and Phil headed back to Morningside Heights, and Boerner spent the night on Obama’s floor rather than take the subway back to Brooklyn after midnight. The next Friday Barack and Phil ate an early Chinese dinner before taking the subway to Phil’s place and polishing off a bottle of wine while watching the New Jersey Nets play the Philadelphia 76ers. Barack still occasionally played pickup basketball in Columbia’s Dodge gym; a female graduate student years later remembered him playing pickup soccer on the lawn in front of Columbia’s imposing Butler Library.

But Barack’s life during those early months of 1982 was radically different from his daily routine one year earlier. At Oxy, living with Hasan was an almost nonstop party with a band of close friends. Rallies, protests, and political events occurred almost weekly, and the days were filled with energetic debates and conversations in the Cooler. Now, in dreary Morningside Heights, Obama faced a daily schedule of core classes and perhaps a once-a-week meet-up with Phil to have dinner, drink beer, or watch a game. A quarter century later, Obama remembered that time as just “an intense period of study…. I spent a lot of time in the library. I didn’t socialize that much. I was like a monk.” He started keeping a journal, less a diary than a descriptive collection of city scenes and characters that caught his eye. In retrospect, he believed it was an “extremely important” period “when I grew as much as I have ever grown intellectually. But it was a very internal growth,” one that left him “painfully alone and really not focused on anything, except maybe thinking a lot.” He had been “comfortable in my solitude, the safest place I knew.”

“It was a pretty grim and humorless time that I went through,” Obama remembered, an “ascetic” and “hermetic existence … I literally went to class, came home, read books, took long walks,” and wrote in his journal. “It’s hard to say what exactly prompted” such a stark change from his attitude toward life both at Oxy and back in Hawaii, Obama told the journalist David Remnick. Yet he gained “a seriousness of purpose that I had lacked before.”

Spring exams ended by the middle of May, and sometime soon after that, Obama lost both his studio apartment and his security deposit when the actual leaseholder informed him that his sublet was invalid. Thus sometime in early or mid-summer 1982, Barack moved in with Sohale Siddiqi in a two-bedroom apartment at 339 East 94th Street, just west of First Avenue. Siddiqi managed to score the lease on the $450-a-month sixth-floor walk-up by exaggerating his own income, and though Barack was now living on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, their immediate neighborhood was anything but fashionable. Sohale recalled that it was “a scary street,” with a corner gas station “patrolled by this Doberman Pinscher with a beer bottle in his mouth.” Their own building was “a hovel … the hallways were dingy. Everything was beat up and gray and dimly lit. The front door didn’t lock completely.” Up in 6A, “you would enter through a kitchen, which would lead into a living room on one side and a bathroom on the other.” The wooden floors “were all warped … with big gaps between the planks.” One bedroom “was really a closet with a window.” A friendly footrace was used to determine who got the decent bedroom, and Obama, now a regular runner, won. As on 109th Street, “there was never hot water when you wanted it,” but in contrast the heat was always on, “so we used to have our windows wide open, just to cool down.” Outside Barack’s bedroom window was a fire escape, which Sohale said served as “our balcony.” All in all, it was just “a horrid place.”