The sentimental narrative of Barack Obama is that his election in 2008 was the end, somehow, of the most painful of all American struggles. Nothing has ended, of course, and questions of race—cultural, legal, penal, educational, social—remain despite all the evident promise and progress since the civil-rights movement. De-facto segregation, for example, persists in countless neighborhoods and schools, and Chicago, Obama’s chosen city, is rated the most segregated city in America. And yet his election had undeniable historical meaning. It is preposterously early for definitive, scholarly biographies. My hope was to write a piece of biographical journalism that, through interviews with his contemporaries and certain historical actors, examined Obama’s life before his Presidency and some of the currents that helped to form him.
In this effort, I had the help of two extraordinary people: Katherine Stirling and Christopher Jennings. I am grateful to them both for their care, intelligence, and hard work.
Katherine Stirling carried out innumerable tasks, all necessary to a work of this sort: setting up interviews, running down contacts and source materials, and transcribing interviews. She also read the manuscript and made enormously helpful suggestions all along the way.
Chris Jennings checked the manuscript and saved me from missteps of fact, large and small—a complicated job for a long magazine piece, an immeasurably more difficult one when the author has a maddening tendency to revise a book-length manuscript until the final bell.
I want to express my thanks to my sources, the great majority of whom spoke to me on the record. While it is often problematic for friends, family members, colleagues, rivals, enemies, and acquaintances of a sitting President to talk freely to a reporter, I was gratified to discover that so many people were willing to do so and did not insist on diving automatically into the waters of deep background. These sources are quoted liberally throughout the text. There were, of course, some sources, particularly in government and in the Presidential campaign, who did ask to speak anonymously. Where I have quoted or relied on published interviews, articles, and books, I have provided the source information in the endnotes.
My gratitude for interviews to: Neil Abercrombie; Mark Alexander; Susan Arterian; Gha-is Askia; Eli Attie; Loretta Augustine-Herron; David Axelrod; William Ayers; Ashley Baia; Michael Baron; Cornell Belcher; Derrick Bell; Brad Berenson; Jeff Berkowitz; Mary Bernstein; Timuel Black; Robert Blackwell, Jr.; Rod Blagojevich; Mark Blumenthal; Philip Boerner; Roger Boesche; Julian Bond; John Bonifaz; Caroline Boss; Susan Botkin; Maxine Box; Bishop Arthur Brazier; Marvin Bressler; David Brooks; Rosellen Brown; Will Burns; Jill Burton-Dascher; Cassandra Butts.
Mary Beth Cahill; Geoffrey Canada; Paul Carpenter; Bob Casey; Jim Cauley; Lou Celi; Hasan Chandoo; Bill Clinton; James Clyburn; David William Cohen; Steve Coll; Susan Coll; Jack Corrigan; John Corrigan; Jeffrey Cox; Allison Davis; Jarvis DeBerry; Alice Dewey; David Dinkins; Alan and Lois Dobry; Gary and Kendra Duncan; Anita Dunn; Christopher Edley, Jr.; Joella Edwards; Pal Eldredge; Lolis Elie; David Ellen; Richard Epstein; Virginia Dashner Ewalt.
Jonathan Favreau; Andrew Feldstein; Henry Ferris; Thomas L. Friedman; Greg Galluzzo; Marshall Ganz; Tom Geoghegan; Pete Giangreco; Mack Gilkeson; Robin Givhan; David Goldberg; Lawrence Goldyn; Mariko Gordon; Kent Goss; Anton Gunn; Wahid Hamid; Melissa Harris-Lacewell; Carol Anne Harwell; Lisa Hay; George Haywood; Rickey Hendon; Eileen Hershenov; Louis Hook; Patrick Hughes; Blair Hull; Charlayne Hunter-Gault; Dennis Hutchinson.
Lisa Jack; Jesse Jackson, Sr.; Denny Jacobs; T. D. Jakes; Valerie Jarrett; Benjamin Jealous; Emil Jones, Jr.; Ben Joravsky; Vernon Jordan; Elena Kagan; Dan Kahan; John Kass; Marilyn Katz; Jerry Kellman; Cliff Kelley; Randall Kennedy; Al Kindle; Michael Klonsky; Mike Kruglik; Eric Kusunoki.
Cathy Lazere; John Lewis; Kimberly Lightford; Terry Link; Anne Marie Lipinski; Mark Lippert; Ronald Loui; Alvin Love; Joseph Lowery; Kenneth Mack; Chris MacLachlin; Susan Mboya; Salil Mehra; David Mendell; Margot Mifflin; Abner Mikva; Judson Miner; Martha Minow; Newton Minow; Ivory Mitchell; Eric Moore; Pat Moore; Mark Morial; Bob Moses; Salim Muwakkil.
Martin Nesbitt; Eric Newhall; Sandy Newman; Salim al Nurridin; Martha Nussbaum; Barack Obama; Philip Ochieng; Charles Ogletree; Frederick Okatcha; Bruce Orenstein; Peter Osnos; Olara Otunnu; John Owens; Mansasseh Oyucho; Clarence Page; Edward (Buzz) Palmer; Marylyn Prosser Pauley; Charles Payne; Mark Penn; Tony Peterson; Earl Martin Phalen; Wendell Pierce; David Plouffe; Jeremiah Posedel; Richard Posner; Colin Powell; Toni Preckwinkle; John Presta; Francine Pummel.
Linda Randle; Kwame Raoul; Vicky Rideout; Rebecca Rivera; Byron Rodriguez; John Rogers; Donald Rose; Brian Ross; Pete Rouse; Bobby Rush; Mark Salter; Bettylu Saltzman; Chris Sautter; John Schmidt; Bobby Seale; Al Sharpton; Michael Sheehan; Dan Shomon; Sephira Shuttlesworth; Tavis Smiley; Jerome Smith; Rik Smith; Maya Soetoro-Ng; Daniel Sokol; Bronwen Solyon; Aaron Sorkin; Christine Spurell (Lee); Robert Starks; Iona Stenhouse; Geoffrey Stone; Ken Sulzer; Mona Sutphen.
Larry Tavares; Elizabeth Taylor; Studs Terkel; Don Terry; Laurence Tribe; Donne Trotter; Scott Turow; Roberto Mangabeira Unger; C. T. Vivian; Nicholas von Hoffman; Chip Wall; Maria Warren; Dawna Weatherly-Williams; Lois Weisberg; Cora Weiss; Cornel West; Robin West; Jim Wichterman; David B. Wilkins; Roger Wilkins; Jeremiah Wright; Quentin Young; Fareed Zakaria; Andrew (Pake) Zane; Eric Zorn; Mary Zurbuchen; Hank De Zutter.
I also would like to thank the scholars with whom I consulted during my reporting on matters ranging from Hawaiian history to the black church. Some are also quoted in the text. They include Danielle Allen; William Andrews; Mahzarin Banaji; Lawrence Bobo; David Bositis; Taylor Branch; Adam Cohen; David William Cohen; Gavan Daws; Michael Dawson; Alice Dewey; Caroline Elkins; Eric Foner; Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; Eddie Glaude, Jr.; Doris Kearns Goodwin; William J. Grimshaw; Lani Guinier; Jill Lepore; David Levering Lewis; Glenn Loury; John McWhorter; Tali Mendelberg; Orlando Patterson; Jonathan Reider; Dick Simpson; Werner Sollors; Robert Stepto; Elizabeth Taylor; Ronald Walters; Sean Wilentz; and William Julius Wilson.
Anyone who writes about Barack Obama’s life owes a debt to the many reporters and writers who have covered him. Two standout reporters, David Mendell and Jeff Zeleny, both former Chicago Tribune staff writers, have provided, with their countless stories, a wealth of invaluable information. I also have reason to be grateful to Kim Barker, David Jackson, John Kass, Ray Long, Evan Osnos, Clarence Page, Kirsten Scharnberg, Don Terry, Jim Warren, and Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune; Scott Fornek, the late Steve Neal, Lynn Sweet, and Laura Washington of the Chicago Sun-Times; Hank De Zutter, Ben Joravsky, and Ted Kleine of the Chicago Reader; David Bernstein, David Brooks, Carol Felsenthal, and Grant Pick of Chicago magazine; Matt Bai, Jo Becker, Christopher Drew, Jodi Kantor, Serge F. Kovaleski, Janny Scott, and Jeff Zeleny (encore) of the New York Times; Edmund Sanders of the Los Angeles Times; Jackie Calmes of the Wall Street Journal; my colleagues Lauren Collins, William Finnegan, David Grann, Ryan Lizza, and Larissa MacFarquhar of The New Yorker; John Heilemann of New York; Zadie Smith and Garry Wills of the New York Review of Books; Salim Muwakkil of In These Times; Todd Purdum of Vanity Fair; Scott Helman, Sasha Issenberg, Sally Jacobs, Derrick Z. Jackson, Michael Levenson, and Jonathan Saltzman of the Boston Globe; Joshua Green and Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic; Joe Klein and Amanda Ripley of Time; Jonathan Alter, Jon Meacham, Richard Wolffe, and Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek; Michelle Cottle, Franklin Foer, Ryan Lizza, and Noam Scheiber of The New Republic; Eric Alterman and Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Nation; Benjamin Wallace-Wells of Rolling Stone; Ben Smith of Politico; Dan Balz, Robin Givhan, David Maraniss, Kevin Merida, Liza Mundy, and Peter Slevin of the Washington Post; and Nancy Benac of the Associated Press. The coverage of Barack Obama and the 2008 campaign by National Public Radio (particularly by Michele Norris), Slate, Real Clear Politics, The Root, Salon, and many other Web sites proved extremely useful. No student of Barack Obama and South Side politics can do without the Chicago Defender, the Hyde Park Herald, or the broadcasts of WVON.
To ask friends to read a book-length manuscript, or some portion of it, and to ask them for their thoughts, arguments, and corrections is to ask an enormous favor. I am grateful to those who did just that: Richard Brody, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Henry Finder, Jeffrey Frank, Ann Goldstein, Hendrik Hertzberg, Nicholas Lemann, George Packer, Peter Slevin, and Dorothy Wickenden. Thanks to Whitney Johnson for helping me with the photographs. I am especially grateful to my colleagues and friends at The New Yorker and to Si Newhouse, who has supported the magazine with consistency, determination, and grace.
My thanks to Knopf’s commander-in-chief, Sonny Mehta, who took me in and led me to my wonderful editor, Dan Frank. Thanks, as well, to Chip Kidd, Katherine Hourigan, Lydia Buechler, Pat Johnson, Tony Chirico, Karen Mugler, George Wen, Kate Norris, and Paul Bogaards, at Knopf. My agent, Kathy Robbins, has watched out for me for many years, and so has my friend and assistant Brenda Phipps. I would also like to thank Eric Lewis, Michael Specter, Pam McCarthy, Lisa Hughes, Wendy Belzberg, Strauss Zelnick, Robert Glick, and Alexa Cassanos, as well as Barbara Remnick, Richard, Will, and Talia Remnick, Lisa Fernandez, the Feins in their multitude, and Pat Burnett and Deta McDaniel.
Finally, love and gratitude to my patient and loving family—Esther, Alex, Noah, and Natasha—and we all, in turn, extend our thanks to those who have helped Natasha over the years. My sons, Alex and Noah, were deeply encouraging. This book is dedicated to Esther Fein. For me, there is no life without her.