Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama
The definitive account of Barack Obama’s life before he became the 44th president of the United States – the formative years, confluence of forces, and influential figures who helped shaped an extraordinary leader and his rise – from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of ‘Bearing the Cross’.Barack Obama's keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention instantly catapulted the little-known state senator from Illinois into the national spotlight. Three months later, Obama would win election to the U.S. Senate; four years later he would make history as America’s first black president. Now, at the end of his second presidential term, David J. Garrow delivers the most compelling and comprehensive Obama biography – as epic in vision and rigorous in detail as Robert Caro’s ‘The Power Broker’.Moving around the globe, from Hawaii to Indonesia to the American Northeast and Midwest, ‘Rising Star’ meticulously unpacks Obama’s life, from his tumultuous upbringing in Honolulu and Jakarta, to his formative time as a community organizer on Chicago’s South Side, working in some of the roughest neighborhoods, to Cambridge, where he excelled at Harvard Law School, and finally back to Chicago, where he pursued his political destiny. In voluminous detail, drawn from more than 1,000 interviews and encyclopedic documentary research, Garrow reveals as never before the ambition, the dreams, and the all-too-human struggles of an iconic president in a sure to be news-making biography that will stand as the most authoritative account of Obama’s pre-presidential life for decades to come.
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William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017
Copyright © 2017 by David J. Garrow
David J. Garrow asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Cover photograph © 1990 John Goodman
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008229375
Ebook Edition © May 2017 ISBN: 9780008229382
Version: 2018-05-24
For Darleen, who endured
Praise for Rising Star:
‘Phenomenal . . . one of the most impressive and important books of the year. It’s a masterwork of historical and journalistic research, Robert Caro-like in its exhaustiveness, and easily the most authoritative account of Obama’s pre-presidential life we’ve seen or are likely ever to see. It’s also a terrific read’
Politico
‘Revealing . . . Probing . . . [Garrow] tells us how Obama lived, and explores the calculations he made in the decades leading up to his winning the presidency’
Washington Post
‘Impressive . . . [A] deeply reported work of biography . . . Garrow made the inspired decision to open the book on the economically ravaged South Side of Chicago in 1980 – five years before Obama showed up as a novice community organizer – thus giving us a sidewalk-level view of the joblessness, environmental degradation and failing schools that formed day-to-day reality. We see right away what our hero is up against in his altruistic quest to “create change” . . . The depth of detail allows the reader to see familiar parts of this story with fresh eyes’
New York Times Book Review
‘[Contains] intriguing insight into the growing pains of a 20-something who would go on to become the leader of the free world’
Time
‘A tour de force . . . An epic triumph of personal and political biography’
New York Journal of Books
‘The authoritative biography of Barack Obama’s pre-presidential years . . . Illuminating . . . Impressively researched . . . Readers will be richly rewarded’
Library Journal
‘A convincing and exceptionally detailed portrait . . . Political history buffs will be fascinated’
Publishers Weekly
‘Garrow is a demon for research . . . Eminently solid . . . Consistently readable – an impressive work’
Kirkus Reviews
CONTENTS
Copyright
Chapter One
THE END OF THE WORLD AS THEY KNEW IT: CHICAGO’S FAR SOUTH SIDE
MARCH 1980–JULY 1985
Chapter Two A PLACE IN THE WORLD: HONOLULU, SEATTLE, HONOLULU, JAKARTA, AND HONOLULU AUGUST 1961–SEPTEMBER 1979
Chapter Three SEARCHING FOR HOME: EAGLE ROCK, MANHATTAN, BROOKLYN, AND HERMITAGE, PA SEPTEMBER 1979–JULY 1985
Chapter Four TRANSFORMATION AND IDENTITY: ROSELAND, HYDE PARK, AND KENYA AUGUST 1985–AUGUST 1988
Chapter Five EMERGENCE AND ACHIEVEMENT: HARVARD LAW SCHOOL SEPTEMBER 1988–MAY 1991
Chapter Six BUILDING A FUTURE: CHICAGO JUNE 1991–AUGUST 1995
Chapter Seven INTO THE ARENA: CHICAGO AND SPRINGFIELD SEPTEMBER 1995–SEPTEMBER 1999
Chapter Eight FAILURE AND RECOVERY: CHICAGO AND SPRINGFIELD OCTOBER 1999–JANUARY 2003
Chapter Nine CALCULATION, COINCIDENCE, CORONATION: ILLINOIS AND BOSTON JANUARY 2003–NOVEMBER 2004
Chapter Ten DISAPPOINTMENT AND DESTINY: THE U.S. SENATE NOVEMBER 2004–FEBRUARY 2007
Epilogue THE PRESIDENT DID NOT ATTEND, AS HE WAS GOLFING
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by David J. Garrow
THE END OF THE WORLD AS THEY KNEW IT
CHICAGO’S FAR SOUTH SIDE
MARCH 1980–JULY 1985
Frank Lumpkin never forgot the first phone call that afternoon. Although he was off work that Friday with a broken foot, he had stopped by the pay office at Wisconsin Steel, where he’d labored for more than thirty years, to pick up checks totaling $8,084.57, money he was due in back vacation pay. He still had thirteen weeks of vacation coming, accumulated over five years, and he was about to take a long-planned trip to Africa. But March 28—“Black Friday,” as it would be called—was about to become absolutely unforgettable.
Wisconsin Steel’s hulking metal sheds stretched south and a bit eastward from the intersection of Torrence Avenue and East 106th Street in a neighborhood that most residents called Irondale, even if Chicago city maps labeled it South Deering. William Deering was a long-forgotten industrialist who had cofounded International Harvester Company in 1902; Wisconsin’s oldest corporate ancestor, Brown’s Mill, dated from 1875 and had been South Chicago’s first steel plant. Six years later, Andrew Carnegie opened a larger mill just north from where the Calumet River flowed into Lake Michigan, and by the dawn of the twentieth century the southwestern crescent of that lakeshore, stretching from the Calumet eastward across the Indiana state line to Gary and Burns Harbor, had become the most dense concentration of steel mills in the world.
