Cody Delistraty
Longreads, May 9, 2017
“I believe Barack’s time in Springfield, essentially eight years as a state legislator, is phenomenally important and absolutely essential to understanding the sort of politician he became.”
There are few subjects in contemporary history who deserve a 1,400-page biography, but Barack Obama’s ascendance to the presidency merits every word. Deeply researched over nine years — with over a thousand interviews and many never-before-seen documents — David J. Garrow’s Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama covers 44’s life to date: his youth in Hawaii and Indonesia, community organizing in Illinois, his impressive work as a Harvard Law student, and his pursuit of politics as a profession in Chicago. All the while, Garrow shows, Obama was both being shaped and thoughtfully crafting himself, turning himself from the bright, jocular kid at Punahou School in Hawaii into one of the most revolutionary, exciting presidents of the modern era.
Garrow is a Professor of Law and History, and a Distinguished Faculty Scholar at the University of Pittsburgh. He holds a Ph.D. from Duke University, and has written several nonfiction books, including Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for Bearing the Cross.
His latest book has already been compared to Robert Caro’s history of Lyndon Johnson, but Garrow’s Obama biography seems to go even further: two hundred pages of footnotes, conversations with seemingly every vital person in Obama’s life, and a nonpartisan perspective that will no doubt open the floodgates of interpretation.
I spoke with Garrow recently, and it’s clear he’s a born interviewer; he began asking me questions about my own life, until, finally, I steered us toward a wide-ranging, exceptionally in-depth conversation in which we discussed Obama’s coming-of-age, influences, formative experiences, shifting personality, the significance of friends and family, and how he eventually understood his own legacy and the arc of his grand personality.
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What catalyzed this huge, 1,400-page project?
When Obama first won the Iowa caucuses in early ’08, I was embarrassed that I knew nothing about him, so I bought a cheap U.K. paperback copy of Dreams from My Father and read it. Throughout 2008, I kept reading the campaign biographical journalism and was consistently underwhelmed, but only after he was inaugurated did I go to Chicago to see the community organizing mentors. At that point, I was still thinking just about the community organizer period. But the first of those folks I saw, Greg Galluzzo, said off the cuff to me, “Oh, you should go see Mary-Ann Wilson, who is a tax lawyer who did the pro bono 501C3 incorporations for all their community groups.” I went to see her. She’s got this manila folder of all these documents that Barack typed up in 1986, including a list of every one who was in his community group. … [To read the full article, click here]