FROM NYTIMES
Seeking Identity, Shaping a Nation’s
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
THE BRIDGE
The Life and Rise of Barack Obama
By David Remnick
Illustrated. 656 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $29.95.
“The Bridge,” the title of David Remnick’s incisive new book on Barack Obama, refers to the bridge in Selma, Ala., where civil rights demonstrators were violently attacked by state troopers on March 7, 1965, in a bloody clash that would galvanize the nation and help lead to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. It refers to the observation made by one of the leaders of that march, John Lewis, that “Barack Obama is what comes at the end of that bridge in Selma” — an observation Congressman Lewis made nearly 44 years later, on the eve of Mr. Obama’s inauguration. And it refers to the hope voiced by many of the president’s supporters that he would be a bridge between the races, between red states and blue states, between conservatives and liberals, between the generations who remember the bitter days of segregation and those who have grown up in a new, increasingly multicultural America.
By now, Mr. Obama’s story has been told many times — by journalists and the authors of several biographies and campaign books, and most memorably by the president himself, who in the days before he became a politician wrote a remarkably eloquent and searching memoir (“Dreams From My Father”) about his youth, his struggle to come to terms with his absent father, and his groping efforts to forge an identity of his own.
But if the outlines of the story told in “The Bridge” are highly familiar, Mr. Remnick — the editor of The New Yorker and the author of a thoughtful 2008 article in that magazine, “The Joshua Generation: Race and the Campaign of Barack Obama,” from which this book apparently springs — has filled in those broad outlines with insight and nuance. He’s used interviews with many of the formative figures in the president’s life to add details to the narrative of his political and sentimental education — in particular, his relationships with his self-destructive father and his romantic, sometimes naïve mother. Writing with emotional precision and a sure knowledge of politics, Mr. Remnick situates Mr. Obama’s career firmly within a historical context. He puts Mr. Obama’s life and political philosophy in perspective with the civil rights movement that shaped his imagination, as well as the power politics of Chicago, and the politics of race as it has been played out, often nastily, on the state and national stages.
Like many reporters, Mr. Remnick describes Mr. Obama in these pages as cool, charismatic, slightly detached: an autodidact with a lawyer’s analytical intelligence and a novelist’s empathetic temperament; an idealist who is also a pragmatist; a politician inclined to be methodical and cautious in his decision making. Like Ryan Lizza (in a 2007 article in The New Republic) and Richard Wolffe (in his 2009 book, “Renegade”), Mr. Remnick also places considerable emphasis on the role that community organizing had in shaping Mr. Obama’s approach to politics — experience that ratified the future president’s inclination to listen and engage other people. It’s an inclination that would be reinforced further by his time at Harvard Law School and the University of Chicago, politically diverse, often contentious places, where his impulse was to try to reconcile or synthesize opposing views. Perhaps it’s also an inclination that explains why he made such a concerted effort last year to try to get Republican support on a health care bill.
“Once, at a debate over affirmative action with the staff of the Harvard Law Review,” Mr. Remnick writes, “Obama spoke as if he were threading together the various arguments in the room, weighing their relative strengths, never judging or dismissing a point of view. ‘If anyone had walked by, they would have assumed he was a professor,’ Thomas J. Perrelli, a friend of Obama’s who went on to work in his Justice Department, said. ‘He was leading the discussion, but he wasn’t trying to impose his own perspective on it. He was much more mediating.’ ”
Elsewhere in this volume Mr. Remnick describes Mr. Obama as a son who aspired to be calm, rooted and responsible in all the ways that his volatile and unreliable father was not, and as an avid student who craved mentors he could learn from, like the constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe at Harvard and Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois. He notes that Mr. Obama was a quick learner, who was not much of a speaker at first (“he was stentorian, professorial, self-serious — a cake with no leavening”), and who could “change styles without relinquishing his genuineness,” subtly shifting “accent and cadences depending on the audience.”
Explicating the theme of self-creation that runs through “Dreams From My Father,” Mr. Remnick gives an acute, often moving reading of that book. “In high school,” he writes, “Barry eventually stopped writing letters to his father. His effort to understand himself was a lonely one. Touchingly, awkwardly, he was giving himself instruction on how to be black.”
Step by step, as Mr. Obama grew up with his white grandparents in Hawaii, Mr. Remnick goes on, “he began immersing himself in an African-American culture that seemed to live thousands of miles from where he was.” Mr. Remnick adds, “He listened to Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, Grover Washington and Miles Davis; he watched ‘Soul Train’ and Richard Pryor on television. On his own he read Richard Wright’s ‘Native Son,’ the poems of Langston Hughes, ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X,’ ‘The Souls of Black Folk,’ the essays of James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man.’ ”
The observations Mr. Remnick has gathered in these pages from people who knew Mr. Obama in his formative years shed some light on his burgeoning ambition, although they do not really explain how this young, rootless outsider acquired the self-confidence that fueled his ascent in national politics. Abner J. Mikva, a former federal judge who was close to Mr. Obama in Chicago, for instance, is quoted in this book talking about how Mr. Obama in the early 1990s might have been more serene and less needy than Bill Clinton, but was just as immodest in his ambition, confiding his hopes of running for office:
“I thought, this guy has more chutzpah than Dick Tracy,” Mr. Mikva says. “You don’t just show up in Chicago and plant your flag.”
As for the community organizer Jerry Kellman, whom Mr. Remnick says “may well have played the most influential role in Obama’s life outside of his family,” he recalls that the young man, who wanted to take on the Sisyphean task of organizing on the South Side of Chicago, was “very focused and disciplined, monkish not in the sense of being a celibate but of holing up and reading.”
Mr. Kellman recalls that Mr. Obama had been inspired by the civil rights movement, and that since that era was past, community organizing was “as close as he could get.” At the same time, Mr. Kellman suggests, the young Mr. Obama was thinking about becoming a novelist and was looking not only for experience and a sense of community, but also for material.
The later parts of “The Bridge” focus on the story lines involving race in the 2008 presidential campaign (most pointedly on Mr. Obama’s relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright), and they also serve up historical asides about matters like the role played by slaves in building the White House and Frederick Douglass’s 1863 visit there with Lincoln.
Some readers may object that these chapters have the effect of defining Mr. Obama largely through the prism of race. This is something that the president, at times, and others, like Colin L. Powell, have resisted, arguing, in Mr. Powell’s words, that the junior Senator from Illinois ran for president “as an American who is black, not as a black American.”
Mr. Remnick, however, argues that “race is at the core of Obama’s story,” and Mr. Obama wrote at length in “Dreams” about his search for identity as an African-American and has also spoken of standing on the shoulders of the civil rights giants who made possible his own story.
“For Obama,” Mr. Remnick concludes, “the black freedom struggle defines not just the African-American experience, but the American experience itself” — the story, as Mr. Obama has observed, that “we as African-Americans are American, and that our story is America’s story, and that by perfecting our rights we perfect the Union.”
Seeking Identity, Shaping a Nation’s
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
THE BRIDGE
The Life and Rise of Barack Obama
By David Remnick
Illustrated. 656 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $29.95.
“The Bridge,” the title of David Remnick’s incisive new book on Barack Obama, refers to the bridge in Selma, Ala., where civil rights demonstrators were violently attacked by state troopers on March 7, 1965, in a bloody clash that would galvanize the nation and help lead to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. It refers to the observation made by one of the leaders of that march, John Lewis, that “Barack Obama is what comes at the end of that bridge in Selma” — an observation Congressman Lewis made nearly 44 years later, on the eve of Mr. Obama’s inauguration. And it refers to the hope voiced by many of the president’s supporters that he would be a bridge between the races, between red states and blue states, between conservatives and liberals, between the generations who remember the bitter days of segregation and those who have grown up in a new, increasingly multicultural America.
By now, Mr. Obama’s story has been told many times — by journalists and the authors of several biographies and campaign books, and most memorably by the president himself, who in the days before he became a politician wrote a remarkably eloquent and searching memoir (“Dreams From My Father”) about his youth, his struggle to come to terms with his absent father, and his groping efforts to forge an identity of his own.
But if the outlines of the story told in “The Bridge” are highly familiar, Mr. Remnick — the editor of The New Yorker and the author of a thoughtful 2008 article in that magazine, “The Joshua Generation: Race and the Campaign of Barack Obama,” from which this book apparently springs — has filled in those broad outlines with insight and nuance. He’s used interviews with many of the formative figures in the president’s life to add details to the narrative of his political and sentimental education — in particular, his relationships with his self-destructive father and his romantic, sometimes naïve mother. Writing with emotional precision and a sure knowledge of politics, Mr. Remnick situates Mr. Obama’s career firmly within a historical context. He puts Mr. Obama’s life and political philosophy in perspective with the civil rights movement that shaped his imagination, as well as the power politics of Chicago, and the politics of race as it has been played out, often nastily, on the state and national stages.
Like many reporters, Mr. Remnick describes Mr. Obama in these pages as cool, charismatic, slightly detached: an autodidact with a lawyer’s analytical intelligence and a novelist’s empathetic temperament; an idealist who is also a pragmatist; a politician inclined to be methodical and cautious in his decision making. Like Ryan Lizza (in a 2007 article in The New Republic) and Richard Wolffe (in his 2009 book, “Renegade”), Mr. Remnick also places considerable emphasis on the role that community organizing had in shaping Mr. Obama’s approach to politics — experience that ratified the future president’s inclination to listen and engage other people. It’s an inclination that would be reinforced further by his time at Harvard Law School and the University of Chicago, politically diverse, often contentious places, where his impulse was to try to reconcile or synthesize opposing views. Perhaps it’s also an inclination that explains why he made such a concerted effort last year to try to get Republican support on a health care bill.
“Once, at a debate over affirmative action with the staff of the Harvard Law Review,” Mr. Remnick writes, “Obama spoke as if he were threading together the various arguments in the room, weighing their relative strengths, never judging or dismissing a point of view. ‘If anyone had walked by, they would have assumed he was a professor,’ Thomas J. Perrelli, a friend of Obama’s who went on to work in his Justice Department, said. ‘He was leading the discussion, but he wasn’t trying to impose his own perspective on it. He was much more mediating.’ ”
Elsewhere in this volume Mr. Remnick describes Mr. Obama as a son who aspired to be calm, rooted and responsible in all the ways that his volatile and unreliable father was not, and as an avid student who craved mentors he could learn from, like the constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe at Harvard and Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois. He notes that Mr. Obama was a quick learner, who was not much of a speaker at first (“he was stentorian, professorial, self-serious — a cake with no leavening”), and who could “change styles without relinquishing his genuineness,” subtly shifting “accent and cadences depending on the audience.”
Explicating the theme of self-creation that runs through “Dreams From My Father,” Mr. Remnick gives an acute, often moving reading of that book. “In high school,” he writes, “Barry eventually stopped writing letters to his father. His effort to understand himself was a lonely one. Touchingly, awkwardly, he was giving himself instruction on how to be black.”
Step by step, as Mr. Obama grew up with his white grandparents in Hawaii, Mr. Remnick goes on, “he began immersing himself in an African-American culture that seemed to live thousands of miles from where he was.” Mr. Remnick adds, “He listened to Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, Grover Washington and Miles Davis; he watched ‘Soul Train’ and Richard Pryor on television. On his own he read Richard Wright’s ‘Native Son,’ the poems of Langston Hughes, ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X,’ ‘The Souls of Black Folk,’ the essays of James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man.’ ”
The observations Mr. Remnick has gathered in these pages from people who knew Mr. Obama in his formative years shed some light on his burgeoning ambition, although they do not really explain how this young, rootless outsider acquired the self-confidence that fueled his ascent in national politics. Abner J. Mikva, a former federal judge who was close to Mr. Obama in Chicago, for instance, is quoted in this book talking about how Mr. Obama in the early 1990s might have been more serene and less needy than Bill Clinton, but was just as immodest in his ambition, confiding his hopes of running for office:
“I thought, this guy has more chutzpah than Dick Tracy,” Mr. Mikva says. “You don’t just show up in Chicago and plant your flag.”
As for the community organizer Jerry Kellman, whom Mr. Remnick says “may well have played the most influential role in Obama’s life outside of his family,” he recalls that the young man, who wanted to take on the Sisyphean task of organizing on the South Side of Chicago, was “very focused and disciplined, monkish not in the sense of being a celibate but of holing up and reading.”
Mr. Kellman recalls that Mr. Obama had been inspired by the civil rights movement, and that since that era was past, community organizing was “as close as he could get.” At the same time, Mr. Kellman suggests, the young Mr. Obama was thinking about becoming a novelist and was looking not only for experience and a sense of community, but also for material.
The later parts of “The Bridge” focus on the story lines involving race in the 2008 presidential campaign (most pointedly on Mr. Obama’s relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright), and they also serve up historical asides about matters like the role played by slaves in building the White House and Frederick Douglass’s 1863 visit there with Lincoln.
Some readers may object that these chapters have the effect of defining Mr. Obama largely through the prism of race. This is something that the president, at times, and others, like Colin L. Powell, have resisted, arguing, in Mr. Powell’s words, that the junior Senator from Illinois ran for president “as an American who is black, not as a black American.”
Mr. Remnick, however, argues that “race is at the core of Obama’s story,” and Mr. Obama wrote at length in “Dreams” about his search for identity as an African-American and has also spoken of standing on the shoulders of the civil rights giants who made possible his own story.
“For Obama,” Mr. Remnick concludes, “the black freedom struggle defines not just the African-American experience, but the American experience itself” — the story, as Mr. Obama has observed, that “we as African-Americans are American, and that our story is America’s story, and that by perfecting our rights we perfect the Union.”
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