Worldmaking (84 page)

—WALT ROSTOW

In the fall of 2002, John Mearsheimer, a well-known professor of international relations at the University of Chicago, pulled out of an antiwar rally scheduled to take place in Chicago's Federal Plaza. To replace him, the organizers invited a young state senator named Barack Obama, who was scholarly, a fluent speaker, Chicago based, and available. Though the event was billed as an “antiwar rally,” suggesting a dovish unity of purpose, the ambitious Obama sensed an opportunity to present his foreign-policy views to a national audience. It was a potential breakthrough moment in his fledgling political career, though it was also fraught with danger. High-profile Democrats such as Hillary Clinton and John Kerry had supported the Bush administration's response to the 9/11 attacks, including the president's move toward war against Iraq. Opposing the mainstream of his party and a popular incumbent wartime president was not the safest course for a politician with national aspirations to take.

Obama spoke after the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the nation's best-known African American political figure and a stalwart of the left of the Democratic Party. Here was a chance to lambast Bush's rush to war
and
present an alternative paradigm of what a black Democratic politician might sound like. Reverend Jackson's rhetorical prowess certainly made him a hard act to follow. “This is a rally to stop a war from occurring,” Jackson declared. He invited his audience to look into the sky and count to ten. When the time elapsed, and the crowd lowered their gaze, Jackson explained: “I just diverted your attention away from the rally. That's what George Bush is doing. The sky is not falling and we're not threatened by Saddam Hussein.”
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Yet while Jackson's antiwar views were theatrically rendered, they were also predictable. On the eve of a major welcome-home parade in 1991, Jackson had characterized the first Gulf War as a costly failure waged by “public school children and foreign technology,” the latter a quaintly protectionist reference to the Japanese computer components used in American munitions. “It's right to love the troops,” Jackson said. “But the moral way is to love the troops when they are no longer troops.”
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In the tradition of Charles Beard, Jackson viewed war as a distraction from the essential job of correcting the grievous societal problems that scarred the United States. Americans came first, Jackson reasoned.

Barack Obama viewed America and the world differently, as his first sentence made clear: “Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an antiwar rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances.” Indeed, Obama devoted the next eight sentences of his speech to explaining precisely why some wars were necessary. “The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in history,” Obama said, “and yet it was only through the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of multitudes, that we could … drive the scourge of slavery from our soil.” His grandfather (a white Kansan) “signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton's army … He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil … After September 11…,” Obama continued, “I supported this administration's pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such tragedy from happening again.”

What made the proposed war with Iraq so ill conceived, in Obama's view, was its passionate “ideological” nature and its disregard of the apparent facts of the matter: “that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States or to his neighbors … and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.” For Obama, launching a war against Saddam Hussein was “a dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics … What I am opposed to,” he said, “is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.”
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It was a good line, but the applause that met Obama's speech was less effusive than the acclaim that met Jackson's more “passionate” address.

It is interesting to compare the attributes Obama extolled—reason and principle—to those he impugned: passion, ideology, and politics. It was a speech that reveled in cold, hard thinking informed by reason and evidence, that decried the consequences of following theories and ideologies unshackled from historical precedent. He name-checked Paul Wolfowitz for a reason. Obama abhorred the grandiose utopianism that he and his allies embodied, preferring policies that test and probe, reaping incremental progress, rather than those that seek to unveil or validate universal truths. The world is uncertain and constantly evolving. Framing policies informed by modesty and provisionality is the best way to avoid needless conflict driven by skewed threat perception and grand, unattainable ambitions.

This intellectual method has a name: pragmatism—a word often misinterpreted to solely mean excessive compromise in pursuit of any given goal. In his classic book
Pragmatism
, William James observed that “at the outset, at least, it stands for no particular results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method …
The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.
”
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The Harvard-based intellectual historian James Kloppenberg argues persuasively that Obama's worldview and diplomatic method are informed by Jamesian pragmatism, writing admiringly that it is “a philosophy for skeptics, a philosophy for those committed to democratic debate and the critical assessment of the results of political decisions, not for true believers convinced they know the right course of action in advance of inquiry and experimentation. Pragmatism stands for openmindedness and ongoing debate.”
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The aftermath of the Second Iraq War rendered otiose grand Wilsonian thinking about America's ability to bend nations, regions, and indeed history to its will. The rise to power of Barack Obama, and America's diminished geopolitical circumstances, vitalized America's principal contribution to world philosophy as a guide to foreign policy.

*   *   *

Barack Hussein Obama was born on August 5, 1961, in Hawaii. His father, Barack Obama Sr., was Kenyan, and his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was from Kansas. But they shared many traits, including a restless yearning for varied intellectual and geographical experience. The couple had met in a Russian class at the University of Hawaii in 1960 and had married just a few months before their son's birth. This exotic mixed parentage would have caused a stir had Barack been born in, say, Wichita. But as the biographer David Maraniss notes, during the week of Obama's birth in Honolulu's Kapi'olani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital, the other newborns were named Arakawa, Caberto, Kamealoha, Chun, Wong, Camara, Walker, Kawazoe, and Simpson.
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To be mixed race, or
Hapa
, in Hawaii was unexceptional—a scenario that remained constant through Obama's peripatetic childhood. His parents divorced in 1964, following Barack Sr.'s departure for graduate school at Harvard, and Ann met and married an Indonesian graduate student named Lolo Soetoro in 1965. The family relocated to Indonesia in 1967, and from the age of six to ten Barack lived in Jakarta—joined by a half sister, Maya Soetoro—and attended Indonesian-language schools. The world's most populous nation was similar to Hawaii in its ethnic heterogeneity. It was only when Barack finished his schooling in Indonesia and Hawaii and attended college in California and later New York City that he truly began experiencing racial discrimination, his hand forced by the dismal realities of the mainland.

To provide her son with educational stability while she pursued a travel-heavy career as a research anthropologist, Ann enrolled Obama at the elite Punahou School in Hawaii, one of the best-performing schools in the United States. Barack—or Barry, as he was then known—was academically accomplished, although he also devoted a fair amount of time to playing basketball and smoking marijuana. After graduating from Punahou in 1979, Obama moved to Pasadena, California, and enrolled at Occidental College (or “Oxy”), a highly regarded liberal arts college, where he worked harder and played less basketball, having failed to make the team. Obama's college friend Phil Boerner recalled the range of topics that he and Barry discussed:

 … the CIA, El Salvador … whatever news was in the
L.A. Times
, Jimi Hendrix, Euro-communism, socialism … Marcuse's “An Essay on Liberation,” Voltaire's
Candide
, how to bring change in the world, the right wing's control of the media, totalitarianism, Alexander Haig, poetry, James Joyce, Kafka, the Enlightenment, enlightened despotism of the eighteenth century … Frederick II, Richard C. Allen, the Soviet Union, gigantic traffic jams in L.A., arts of the avant-garde … the rise of apathy in America.
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If Boerner's recollections are accurate, then Obama's conversational tastes showed admirable range and heft.

After two years at a gilded college in the privileged environs of southern California—not dissimilar to Punahou in a cultural and climatic sense—Obama decided to transfer to Columbia University. His move to New York City was motivated by many factors, one of which was simply to find “a bigger pond to swim in.”
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But there was more to it than that. Oxy was small and parochial, inhabiting something of a bubble in a part of Los Angeles that was already detached from the everyday. And its total student body of sixteen hundred included only seventy-five African Americans, “and you could count the black faculty members on two fingers,” a classmate recalled. “I was concerned with urban issues,” Obama said, “and I wanted to be around more black folks in big cities.”
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He moved from Pasadena to Morningside Heights with his friend Phil Boerner and shared an apartment at 142 West 109th Street. Obama walked the city as often as he could, drinking in New York's myriad cultural attractions: a Sunday service at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, where he “was lifted by the gospel choir's sweet, sorrowful song,” a conference on political ideology at Cooper Union, African cultural fairs in Brooklyn, a speech delivered by Jesse Jackson in Harlem. Obama went off the radar during his time at Columbia—few professors remembered him well—flying low to the ground of the world's greatest city.

In a manner reminiscent of Kennan at Princeton, Obama recalled in 2011 that during his two years at Columbia he was “deep inside my own head … in a way that in retrospect I don't think was really healthy.” In a letter to his girlfriend Alexandra McNear in the fall of 1982, Obama confessed “large dollops of envy” for his Pakistani friends heading toward a career in business and his Hawaiian friends who were “moving toward the mainstream.” Obama's mixed racial heritage, the absence of a stable family home, and financial insecurity placed strains on him. “Caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me,” he wrote to McNear, “in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me … The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions [and all the] classes; make them mine, me theirs.”
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Obama read, walked, observed, listened, wrote. His sensibilities were literary; notions of self, identity, and alienation were constants in his tangled thoughts. As he recalls in his memoir
Dreams from My Father
, “I spent a year walking from one end of Manhattan to the other. Like a tourist, I watched the range of human possibility on display, trying to trace out my future in the lives of the people I saw, looking for some opening through which I could reenter.”
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Obama's reading habits corresponded with this inquisitive, identity-seeking voice. Like all students at Columbia, Obama studied Literature Humanities (or Lit-Hum), a great books course that required students to read up to five hundred pages of philosophy a week—from Plato, Locke, and Hume to Camus, Sartre, and Marcuse. A fellow student recalled that he “was really involved in the discussions … It was a fairly serious discussion about philosophy.” Obama took a course with Edward Said but never warmed to the professor or the literary theory he taught. Boerner recalled that he and Obama would “rather read Shakespeare's plays than the criticism. Said was more interested in the literary theory, which didn't appeal to Barack or me.” Obama later described Said as “a flake,” a jibe that placed him in interesting company.
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Allan Bloom, for example, would have enthusiastically agreed.

But Obama also read texts that would not have figured in Bloom's literary canon: Ralph Ellison's
Invisible Man
, Richard Wright's
Native Son
, W.E.B. Du Bois's
The Souls of Black Folks
, the poetry of Langston Hughes, Malcolm X's autobiography. In
Dreams from My Father
, Obama recalls the impact each made on him:

In every page of every book, in Bigger Thomas and invisible men, I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed able to deflect. Even [Du Bois's] learning and Baldwin's love and Langston's humor eventually succumbed to its corrosive force, each man finally forced to doubt art's redemptive power … Only Malcolm X's autobiography seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will.
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