BARACK OBAMA

Barack Obama served as the forty-fourth president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. Born in Hawaii, he studied at Occidental College and Columbia University before attending Harvard Law School, where he was the first African American to become editor of the Law Review. He served in the Illinois state legislature and the United States Senate. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, Michelle, and his daughters, Malia and Sasha.

After Hurricane Katrina shattered New Orleans, then Senator Barack Obama presented the RFK Human Rights Award to lower ninth ward community organizer Stephen Bradberry, and spoke about the influence Bobby Kennedy had on his life. A few years later, in the White House, he again presented the award, now to two of Zimbabwe’s leading dissidents, women who had been imprisoned over fifty times simply for demanding basic rights. I interviewed former President Obama at the Seeds and Chips Expo in Milan, Italy, where he addressed the future of food and technology. The frenzied hope inspired by Obama’s 2008 campaign echoed the spirit of optimism and unity of Daddy’s presidential bid.

Barack Obama: When your father passed away I was seven, so I was too young to experience directly the incredible inspiration he brought to the country. I could only see it then through my mother and my grandparents; I think they felt differently about themselves and about America when they heard him speak. It wasn’t until I was older and I became a student of history and politics that I understood the role he played in getting an entire generation to reexamine some of its fundamental assumptions about race, poverty, and our responsibilities to our fellow men. The politics I tried to practice drew from the work he did and the example he set. For me personally what was most important was watching the trajectory of his career. Because I think that for young people getting involved in politics sometimes there’s the sense that you come in and you’re a finished product—you know exactly who you are and what you believe and you just get started on that. My experience has been that in fact you grow as you have more experiences and see new things. As much as any of our great public figures, Bobby Kennedy grew before our eyes—he came in as attorney general and a key adviser to the president, and that was both an institutional role and a familiar role. By the time he was running in 1968, you had a sense of somebody who had really gone inward and examined himself, and asked, “What are the things that are most important to me?” and as a result of that became more willing to risk taking positions that were hard, that challenged the status quo in ways that very few politicians were willing to do. With each step in that process he was more willing to dig deeper and push harder against the inequities that he saw around him; in this he’s an extraordinary example of not just how public officials should live but how we should all live.

This progression was an example to me when I first got involved in politics. I was inspired by the civil rights movement, I was inspired by your father’s campaign, but I think there’s a tendency to operate with a great deal of caution. You’re worried about making mistakes. You’re worried about making a gaffe or seeming unsophisticated in how you approach a particular issue or problem. As I became more practiced in dealing with some of the biggest issues, I was able to overcome those fears and do a better job of acting on what I believed was right. Later on, by the time I was president, I was willing to talk about issues not from any consideration of how my words would play but out of a real need to speak as truthfully and honestly as possible.

Kerry Kennedy: Can you point to an example?

BO: America is divided around the cultural meaning of guns. There’s a rural-urban split, there’s a regional split. I’m respectful of the traditions around gun ownership, but after Newtown, where twenty children were killed, and when I looked at my hometown of Chicago, where there’s so much gun violence, it became very important to me to name this as a source of incredible pain and violence, particularly among our youth. It’s always difficult to talk about the intersection of race and criminal justice, in part because no politician wants to look like he or she is soft on crime. We all want to be safe and we all appreciate the incredible pain that victims of crime suffer. Yet if you look at everything from the application of drug laws to the death penalty, the biases in the system are… they can’t be denied. When I was president, I decided it was important for me to speak out about this, even though I knew it was always going to cause a backlash. Bobby Kennedy, as well as anybody, understood that at some point, if you’re going to stay engaged in politics and not simply be complicit in our problems, if you really want to bring about solutions, you have to take a controversial position. I think back to his example whenever I face taking a stand that might be unpopular.

KK: Robert Kennedy said in 1968 that in forty years we could have an African American president. At that time people thought it was impossible. What’s your prediction about forty years from now?

BO: Well, I think if you just look at the demographics of the country, we will see presidents from all sorts of backgrounds. I think that’s inevitable. We will have a woman president—that is inevitable.

KK: I hope it won’t be forty—

BO: Right, I hope it won’t take forty years to do it.