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- THIS IS NOT to say that I’m unanchored in my faith. There are some things that I’m
- absolutely sure about—the Golden Rule, the need to battle cruelty in all its forms, the
- value of love and charity, humility and grace.
- Those beliefs were driven home two years ago when I flew down to Birmingham,
- Alabama, to deliver a speech at the city’s Civil Rights Institute. The institute is right
- across the street from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the site where, in 1963, four
- young children—Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Denise
- McNair—lost their lives when a bomb planted by white supremacists exploded during
- Sunday school, and before my talk I took the opportunity to visit the church. The young
- pastor and several deacons greeted me at the door and showed me the still-visible scar
- along the wall where the bomb went off. I saw the clock at the back of the church, still
- frozen at 10:22 a.m. I studied the portraits of the four little girls.
- After the tour, the pastor, deacons, and I held hands and said a prayer in the sanctuary.
- Then they left me to sit in one of the pews and gather my thoughts. What must it have
- been like for those parents forty years ago, I wondered, knowing that their precious
- daughters had been snatched away by violence at once so casual and so vicious? How
- could they endure the anguish unless they were certain that some purpose lay behind
- their children’s murders, that some meaning could be found in immeasurable loss?
- Those parents would have seen the mourners pour in from all across the nation, would
- have read the condolences from across the globe, would have watched as Lyndon
- Johnson announced on national television that the time had come to overcome, would
- have seen Congress finally pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Friends and strangers
- alike would have assured them that their daughters had not died in vain—that they had
- awakened the conscience of a nation and helped liberate a people; that the bomb had
- burst a dam to let justice roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.
- And yet would even that knowledge be enough to console your grief, to keep you from
- madness and eternal rage—unless you also knew that your child had gone on to a better
- place?
- My thoughts turned to my mother and her final days, after cancer had spread through
- her body and it was clear that there was no coming back. She had admitted to me during
- the course of her illness that she was not ready to die; the suddenness of it all had taken
- her by surprise, as if the physical world she loved so much had turned on her, betrayed
- her. And although she fought valiantly, endured the pain and chemotherapy with grace
- and good humor to the very end, more than once I saw fear flash across her eyes. More
- than fear of pain or fear of the unknown, it was the sheer loneliness of death that
- frightened her, I think—the notion that on this final journey, on this last adventure, she
- would have no one to fully share her experiences with, no one who could marvel with
- her at the body’s capacity to inflict pain on itself, or laugh at the stark absurdity of life
- once one’s hair starts falling out and one’s salivary glands shut down.
- I carried such thoughts with me as I left the church and made my speech. Later that
- night, back home in Chicago, I sat at the dinner table, watching Malia and Sasha as they
- laughed and bickered and resisted their string beans before their mother chased them up
- the stairs and to their baths. Alone in the kitchen washing the dishes, I imagined my two
- girls growing up, and I felt the ache that every parent must feel at one time or another,
- that desire to snatch up each moment of your child’s presence and never let go—to
- preserve every gesture, to lock in for all eternity the sight of their curls or the feel of
- their fingers clasped around yours. I thought of Sasha asking me once what happened
- when we die—“I don’t want to die, Daddy,” she had added matter-of-factly—and I had
- hugged her and said, “You’ve got a long, long way before you have to worry about
- that,” which had seemed to satisfy her. I wondered whether I should have told her the
- truth, that I wasn’t sure what happens when we die, any more than I was sure of where
- the soul resides or what existed before the Big Bang. Walking up the stairs, though, I
- knew what I hoped for—that my mother was together in some way with those four little
- girls, capable in some fashion of embracing them, of finding joy in their spirits.
- I know that tucking in my daughters that night, I grasped a little bit of heaven.
- Chapter Seven
- Race
- THE FUNERAL WAS held in a big church, a gleaming, geometric structure spread
- out over ten well-manicured acres. Reputedly, it had cost $35 million to build, and
- every dollar showed—there was a banquet hall, a conference center, a 1,200-car parking
- lot, a state-of-the-art sound system, and a TV production facility with digital editing
- equipment.
- Inside the church sanctuary, some four thousand mourners had already gathered, most
- of them African American, many of them professionals of one sort or another: doctors,
- lawyers, accountants, educators, and real estate brokers. On the stage, senators,
- governors, and captains of industry mingled with black leaders like Jesse Jackson, John
- Lewis, Al Sharpton, and T. D. Jakes. Outside, under a bright October sun, thousands
- more stood along the quiet streets: elderly couples, solitary men, young women with
- strollers, some waving to the motorcades that occasionally passed, others standing in
- quiet contemplation, all of them waiting to pay their final respects to the diminutive,
- gray-haired woman who lay in the casket within.
- The choir sang; the pastor said an opening prayer. Former President Bill Clinton rose to
- speak, and began to describe what it had been like for him as a white Southern boy to
- ride in segregated buses, how the civil rights movement that Rosa Parks helped spark
- had liberated him and his white neighbors from their own bigotry. Clinton’s ease with
- his black audience, their almost giddy affection for him, spoke of reconciliation, of
- forgiveness, a partial mending of the past’s grievous wounds.
- In many ways, seeing a man who was both the former leader of the free world and a son
- of the South acknowledge the debt he owed a black seamstress was a fitting tribute to
- the legacy of Rosa Parks. Indeed, the magnificent church, the multitude of black elected
- officials, the evident prosperity of so many of those in attendance, and my own presence
- onstage as a United States senator—all of it could be traced to that December day in
- 1955 when, with quiet determination and unruffled dignity, Mrs. Parks had refused to
- surrender her seat on a bus. In honoring Rosa Parks, we honored others as well, the
- thousands of women and men and children across the South whose names were absent
- from the history books, whose stories had been lost in the slow eddies of time, but
- whose courage and grace had helped liberate a people.
- And yet, as I sat and listened to the former President and the procession of speakers that
- followed, my mind kept wandering back to the scenes of devastation that had dominated
- the news just two months earlier, when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and
- New Orleans was submerged. I recalled images of teenage mothers weeping or cursing
- in front of the New Orleans Superdome, their listless infants hoisted to their hips, and
- old women in wheelchairs, heads lolled back from the heat, their withered legs exposed
- under soiled dresses. I thought about the news footage of a solitary body someone had
- laid beside a wall, motionless beneath the flimsy dignity of a blanket; and the scenes of
- shirtless young men in sagging pants, their legs churning through the dark waters, their
- arms draped with whatever goods they had managed to grab from nearby stores, the
- spark of chaos in their eyes.
- I had been out of the country when the hurricane first hit the Gulf, on my way back
- from a trip to Russia. One week after the initial tragedy, though, I traveled to Houston,
- joining Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as George H. W. Bush and his wife, Barbara, as
- they announced fund-raising efforts on behalf of the hurricane’s victims and visited
- with some of the twenty-five thousand evacuees who were now sheltered in the Houston
- Astrodome and adjoining Reliant Center.
- The city of Houston had done an impressive job setting up emergency facilities to
- accommodate so many people, working with the Red Cross and FEMA to provide them
- with food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. But as we walked along the rows of cots
- that now lined the Reliant Center, shaking hands, playing with children, listening to
- people’s stories, it was obvious that many of Katrina’s survivors had been abandoned
- long before the hurricane struck. They were the faces of any inner-city neighborhood in
- any American city, the faces of black poverty—the jobless and almost jobless, the sick
- and soon to be sick, the frail and the elderly. A young mother talked about handing off
- her children to a bus full of strangers. Old men quietly described the houses they had
- lost and the absence of any insurance or family to fall back on. A group of young men
- insisted that the levees had been blown up by those who wished to rid New Orleans of
- black people. One tall, gaunt woman, looking haggard in an Astros T-shirt two sizes too
- big, clutched my arm and pulled me toward her.
- “We didn’t have nothin’ before the storm,” she whispered. “Now we got less than
- nothin’.”
- In the days that followed, I returned to Washington and worked the phones, trying to
- secure relief supplies and contributions. In Senate Democratic Caucus meetings, my
- colleagues and I discussed possible legislation. I appeared on the Sunday morning news
- shows, rejecting the notion that the Administration had acted slowly because Katrina’s
- victims were black—“the incompetence was color-blind,” I said—but insisting that the
- Administration’s inadequate planning showed a degree of remove from, and
- indifference toward, the problems of inner-city poverty that had to be addressed. Late
- one afternoon we joined Republican senators in what the Bush Administration deemed a
- classified briefing on the federal response. Almost the entire Cabinet was there, along
- with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and for an hour Secretaries Chertoff, Rumsfeld,
- and the rest bristled with confidence—and displayed not the slightest bit of remorse—as
- they recited the number of evacuations made, military rations distributed, National
- Guard troops deployed. A few nights later, we watched President Bush in that eerie,
- floodlit square, acknowledging the legacy of racial injustice that the tragedy had helped
- expose and proclaiming that New Orleans would rise again.
- And now, sitting at the funeral of Rosa Parks, nearly two months after the storm, after
- the outrage and shame that Americans across the country had felt during the crisis, after
- the speeches and emails and memos and caucus meetings, after television specials and
- essays and extended newspaper coverage, it felt as if nothing had happened. Cars
- remained on rooftops. Bodies were still being discovered. Stories drifted back from the
- Gulf that the big contractors were landing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of
- contracts, circumventing prevailing wage and affirmative action laws, hiring illegal
- immigrants to keep their costs down. The sense that the nation had reached a
- transformative moment—that it had had its conscience stirred out of a long slumber and
- would launch a renewed war on poverty—had quickly died away.
- Instead, we sat in church, eulogizing Rosa Parks, reminiscing about past victories,
- entombed in nostalgia. Already, legislation was moving to place a statue of Mrs. Parks
- under the Capitol dome. There would be a commemorative stamp bearing her likeness,
- and countless streets, schools, and libraries across America would no doubt bear her
- name. I wondered what Rosa Parks would make of all of this—whether stamps or
- statues could summon her spirit, or whether honoring her memory demanded something
- more.
- I thought about what that woman in Houston had whispered to me, and wondered how
- we might be judged, in those days after the levee broke.
- WHEN I MEET people for the first time, they sometimes quote back to me a line in my
- speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that seemed to strike a chord:
- “There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian
- America—there’s the United States of America.” For them, it seems to capture a vision
- of America finally freed from the past of Jim Crow and slavery, Japanese internment
- camps and Mexican braceros, workplace tensions and cultural conflict—an America
- that fulfills Dr. King’s promise that we be judged not by the color of our skin but by the
- content of our character.
- In a sense I have no choice but to believe in this vision of America. As the child of a
- black man and a white woman, someone who was born in the racial melting pot of
- Hawaii, with a sister who’s half Indonesian but who’s usually mistaken for Mexican or
- Puerto Rican, and a brother-in-law and niece of Chinese descent, with some blood
- relatives who resemble Margaret Thatcher and others who could pass for Bernie Mac,
- so that family get-togethers over Christmas take on the appearance of a UN General
- Assembly meeting, I’ve never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of
- race, or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe.
- Moreover, I believe that part of America’s genius has always been its ability to absorb
- newcomers, to forge a national identity out of the disparate lot that arrived on our
- shores. In this we’ve been aided by a Constitution that—despite being marred by the
- original sin of slavery—has at its very core the idea of equal citizenship under the law;
- and an economic system that, more than any other, has offered opportunity to all
- comers, regardless of status or title or rank. Of course, racism and nativist sentiments
- have repeatedly undermined these ideals; the powerful and the privileged have often
- exploited or stirred prejudice to further their own ends. But in the hands of reformers,
- from Tubman to Douglass to Chavez to King, these ideals of equality have gradually
- shaped how we understand ourselves and allowed us to form a multicultural nation the
- likes of which exists nowhere else on earth.
- Finally, those lines in my speech describe the demographic realities of America’s future.
- Already, Texas, California, New Mexico, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia are
- majority minority. Twelve other states have populations that are more than a third
- Latino, black, and/or Asian. Latino Americans now number forty-two million and are
- the fastest-growing demographic group, accounting for almost half of the nation’s
- population growth between 2004 and 2005; the Asian American population, though far
- smaller, has experienced a similar surge and is expected to increase by more than 200
- percent over the next forty-five years. Shortly after 2050, experts project, America will
- no longer be a majority white country—with consequences for our economics, our
- politics, and our culture that we cannot fully anticipate.
- Still, when I hear commentators interpreting my speech to mean that we have arrived at
- a “postracial politics” or that we already live in a color-blind society, I have to offer a
- word of caution. To say that we are one people is not to suggest that race no longer
- matters—that the fight for equality has been won, or that the problems that minorities
- face in this country today are largely self-inflicted. We know the statistics: On almost
- every single socioeconomic indicator, from infant mortality to life expectancy to
- employment to home ownership, black and Latino Americans in particular continue to
- lag far behind their white counterparts. In corporate boardrooms across America,
- minorities are grossly underrepresented; in the United States Senate, there are only three
- Latinos and two Asian members (both from Hawaii), and as I write today I am the
- chamber’s sole African American. To suggest that our racial attitudes play no part in
- these disparities is to turn a blind eye to both our history and our experience—and to
- relieve ourselves of the responsibility to make things right.
- Moreover, while my own upbringing hardly typifies the African American experience—
- and although, largely through luck and circumstance, I now occupy a position that
- insulates me from most of the bumps and bruises that the average black man must
- endure—I can recite the usual litany of petty slights that during my forty-five years have
- been directed my way: security guards tailing me as I shop in department stores, white
- couples who toss me their car keys as I stand outside a restaurant waiting for the valet,
- police cars pulling me over for no apparent reason. I know what it’s like to have people
- tell me I can’t do something because of my color, and I know the bitter swill of
- swallowed-back anger. I know as well that Michelle and I must be continually vigilant
- against some of the debilitating story lines that our daughters may absorb—from TV
- and music and friends and the streets—about who the world thinks they are, and what
- the world imagines they should be.
- To think clearly about race, then, requires us to see the world on a split screen—to
- maintain in our sights the kind of America that we want while looking squarely at
- America as it is, to acknowledge the sins of our past and the challenges of the present
- without becoming trapped in cynicism or despair. I have witnessed a profound shift in
- race relations in my lifetime. I have felt it as surely as one feels a change in the
- temperature. When I hear some in the black community deny those changes, I think it
- not only dishonors those who struggled on our behalf but also robs us of our agency to
- complete the work they began. But as much as I insist that things have gotten better, I
- am mindful of this truth as well: Better isn’t good enough.
- MY CAMPAIGN for the U.S. Senate indicates some of the changes that have taken
- place in both the white and black communities of Illinois over the past twenty-five
- years. By the time I ran, Illinois already had a history of blacks elected to statewide
- office, including a black state comptroller and attorney general (Roland Burris), a
- United States senator (Carol Moseley Braun), and a sitting secretary of state, Jesse
- White, who had been the state’s leading vote-getter only two years earlier. Because of
- the pioneering success of these public officials, my own campaign was no longer a
- novelty—I might not have been favored to win, but the fact of my race didn’t foreclose
- the possibility.
- Moreover, the types of voters who ultimately gravitated to my campaign defied the
- conventional wisdom. On the day I announced my candidacy for the U.S. Senate, for
- example, three of my white state senate colleagues showed up to endorse me. They
- weren’t what we in Chicago call “Lakefront Liberals”—the so-called Volvo-driving,
- latte-sipping, white-wine-drinking Democrats that Republicans love to poke fun at and
- might be expected to embrace a lost cause such as mine. Instead, they were three
- middle-aged, working-class guys—Terry Link of Lake County, Denny Jacobs of the
- Quad Cities, and Larry Walsh of Will County—all of whom represented mostly white,
- mostly working-class or suburban communities outside Chicago.
- It helped that these men knew me well; the four of us had served together in Springfield
- during the previous seven years and had maintained a weekly poker game whenever we
- were in session. It also helped that each of them prided himself on his independence,
- and was therefore willing to stick with me despite pressure from more favored white
- candidates.
- But it wasn’t just our personal relationships that led them to support me (although the
- strength of my friendships with these men—all of whom grew up in neighborhoods and
- at a time in which hostility toward blacks was hardly unusual—itself said something
- about the evolution of race relations). Senators Link, Jacobs, and Walsh are hard-nosed,
- experienced politicians; they had no interest in backing losers or putting their own
- positions at risk. The fact was, they all thought that I’d “sell” in their districts—once
- their constituents met me and could get past the name.
- They didn’t make such a judgment blind. For seven years they had watched me interact
- with their constituents, in the state capitol or on visits to their districts. They had seen
- white mothers hand me their children for pictures and watched white World War II vets
- shake my hand after I addressed their convention. They sensed what I’d come to know
- from a lifetime of experience: that whatever preconceived notions white Americans may
- continue to hold, the overwhelming majority of them these days are able—if given the
- time—to look beyond race in making their judgments of people.
- This isn’t to say that prejudice has vanished. None of us—black, white, Latino, or
- Asian—is immune to the stereotypes that our culture continues to feed us, especially
- stereotypes about black criminality, black intelligence, or the black work ethic. In
- general, members of every minority group continue to be measured largely by the
- degree of our assimilation—how closely speech patterns, dress, or demeanor conform to
- the dominant white culture—and the more that a minority strays from these external
- markers, the more he or she is subject to negative assumptions. If an internalization of
- antidiscrimination norms over the past three decades—not to mention basic decency—
- prevents most whites from consciously acting on such stereotypes in their daily
- interactions with persons of other races, it’s unrealistic to believe that these stereotypes
- don’t have some cumulative impact on the often snap decisions of who’s hired and
- who’s promoted, on who’s arrested and who’s prosecuted, on how you feel about the
- customer who just walked into your store or about the demographics of your children’s
- school.
- I maintain, however, that in today’s America such prejudices are far more loosely held
- than they once were—and hence are subject to refutation. A black teenage boy walking
- down the street may elicit fear in a white couple, but if he turns out to be their son’s
- friend from school he may be invited over for dinner. A black man may have trouble
- catching a cab late at night, but if he is a capable software engineer Microsoft will have
- no qualms about hiring him.
- I cannot prove these assertions; surveys of racial attitudes are notoriously unreliable.
- And even if I’m right, it’s cold comfort to many minorities. After all, spending one’s
- days refuting stereotypes can be a wearying business. It’s the added weight that many
- minorities, especially African Americans, so often describe in their daily round—the
- feeling that as a group we have no store of goodwill in America’s accounts, that as
- individuals we must prove ourselves anew each day, that we will rarely get the benefit
- of the doubt and will have little margin for error. Making a way through such a world
- requires the black child to fight off the additional hesitation that she may feel when she
- stands at the threshold of a mostly white classroom on the first day of school; it requires
- the Latina woman to fight off self-doubt as she prepares for a job interview at a mostly
- white company.
- Most of all, it requires fighting off the temptation to stop making the effort. Few
- minorities can isolate themselves entirely from white society—certainly not in the way
- that whites can successfully avoid contact with members of other races. But it is
- possible for minorities to pull down the shutters psychologically, to protect themselves
- by assuming the worst. “Why should I have to make the effort to disabuse whites of
- their ignorance about us?” I’ve had some blacks tell me. “We’ve been trying for three
- hundred years, and it hasn’t worked yet.”
- To which I suggest that the alternative is surrender—to what has been instead of what
- might be.
- One of the things I value most in representing Illinois is the way it has disrupted my
- own assumptions about racial attitudes. During my Senate campaign, for example, I
- traveled with Illinois’s senior senator, Dick Durbin, on a thirty-nine-city tour of
- southern Illinois. One of our scheduled stops was a town called Cairo, at the very
- southern tip of the state, where the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers meet, a town made
- famous during the late sixties and early seventies as the site of some of the worst racial
- conflict anywhere outside of the Deep South. Dick had first visited Cairo during this
- period, when as a young attorney working for then Lieutenant Governor Paul Simon, he
- had been sent to investigate what might be done to lessen the tensions there. As we
- drove down to Cairo, Dick recalled that visit: how, upon his arrival, he’d been warned
- not to use the telephone in his motel room because the switchboard operator was a
- member of the White Citizens Council; how white store owners had closed their
- businesses rather than succumb to boycotters’ demands to hire blacks; how black
- residents told him of their efforts to integrate the schools, their fear and frustration, the
- stories of lynching and jailhouse suicides, shootings and riots.
- By the time we pulled into Cairo, I didn’t know what to expect. Although it was
- midday, the town felt abandoned, a handful of stores open along the main road, a few
- elderly couples coming out of what appeared to be a health clinic. Turning a corner, we
- arrived at a large parking lot, where a crowd of a couple of hundred were milling about.
- A quarter of them were black, almost all the rest white.
- They were all wearing blue buttons that read OBAMA FOR U.S. SENATE.
- Ed Smith, a big, hearty guy who was the Midwest regional manager of the Laborers’
- International Union and who’d grown up in Cairo, strode up to our van with a big grin
- on his face.
- “Welcome,” he said, shaking our hands as we got off the bus. “Hope you’re hungry,
- ’cause we got a barbecue going and my mom’s cooking.”
- I don’t presume to know exactly what was in the minds of the white people in the crowd
- that day. Most were my age and older and so would at least have remembered, if not
- been a direct part of, those grimmer days thirty years before. No doubt many of them
- were there because Ed Smith, one of the most powerful men in the region, wanted them
- to be there; others may have been there for the food, or just to see the spectacle of a U.S.
- senator and a candidate for the Senate campaign in their town.
- I do know that the barbecue was terrific, the conversation spirited, the people seemingly
- glad to see us. For an hour or so we ate, took pictures, and listened to people’s concerns.
- We discussed what might be done to restart the area’s economy and get more money
- into the schools; we heard about sons and daughters on their way to Iraq and the need to
- tear down an old hospital that had become a blight on downtown. And by the time we
- left, I felt a relationship had been established between me and the people I’d met—
- nothing transformative, but perhaps enough to weaken some of our biases and reinforce
- some of our better impulses. In other words, a quotient of trust had been built.
- Of course, such trust between the races is often tentative. It can wither without a
- sustaining effort. It may last only so long as minorities remain quiescent, silent to
- injustice; it can be blown asunder by a few well-timed negative ads featuring white
- workers displaced by affirmative action, or the news of a police shooting of an unarmed
- black or Latino youth.
- But I also believe that moments like the one in Cairo ripple from their immediate point:
- that people of all races carry these moments into their homes and places of worship; that
- such moments shade a conversation with their children or their coworkers and can wear
- down, in slow, steady waves, the hatred and suspicion that isolation breeds.
- Recently, I was back in southern Illinois, driving with one of my downstate field
- directors, a young white man named Robert Stephan, after a long day of speeches and
- appearances in the area. It was a beautiful spring night, the broad waters and dusky
- banks of the Mississippi shimmering under a full, low-flung moon. The waters
- reminded me of Cairo and all the other towns up and down the river, the settlements that
- had risen and fallen with the barge traffic and the often sad, tough, cruel histories that
- had been deposited there at the confluence of the free and enslaved, the world of Huck
- and the world of Jim.
- I mentioned to Robert the progress we’d made on tearing down the old hospital in
- Cairo—our office had started meeting with the state health department and local
- officials—and told him about my first visit to the town. Because Robert had grown up
- in the southern part of the state, we soon found ourselves talking about the racial
- attitudes of his friends and neighbors. Just the previous week, he said, a few local guys
- with some influence had invited him to join them at a small social club in Alton, a
- couple of blocks from the house where he’d been raised. Robert had never been to the
- place, but it seemed nice enough. The food had been served, the group was making
- some small talk, when Robert noticed that of the fifty or so people in the room not a
- single person was black. Since Alton’s population is about a quarter African American,
- Robert thought this odd, and asked the men about it.
- It’s a private club, one of them said.
- At first, Robert didn’t understand—had no blacks tried to join? When they said nothing,
- he said, It’s 2006, for God’s sake.
- The men shrugged. It’s always been that way, they told him. No blacks allowed.
- Which is when Robert dropped his napkin on his plate, said good night, and left.
- I suppose I could spend time brooding over those men in the club, file it as evidence
- that white people still maintain a simmering hostility toward those who look like me.
- But I don’t want to confer on such bigotry a power it no longer possesses.
- I choose to think about Robert instead, and the small but difficult gesture he made. If a
- young man like Robert can make the effort to cross the currents of habit and fear in
- order to do what he knows is right, then I want to be sure that I’m there to meet him on
- the other side and help him onto shore.
- MY ELECTION WASN’T just aided by the evolving racial attitudes of Illinois’s white
- voters. It reflected changes in Illinois’s African American community as well.
- One measure of these changes could be seen in the types of early support my campaign
- received. Of the first $500,000 that I raised during the primary, close to half came from
- black businesses and professionals. It was a black-owned radio station, WVON, that
- first began to mention my campaign on the Chicago airwaves, and a black-owned
- weekly newsmagazine, N’Digo, that first featured me on its cover. One of the first times
- I needed a corporate jet for the campaign, it was a black friend who lent me his.
- Such capacity simply did not exist a generation ago. Although Chicago has always had
- one of the more vibrant black business communities in the country, in the sixties and
- seventies only a handful of self-made men—John Johnson, the founder of Ebony and
- Jet; George Johnson, the founder of Johnson Products; Ed Gardner, the founder of Soft
- Sheen; and Al Johnson, the first black in the country to own a GM franchise—would
- have been considered wealthy by the standards of white America.
- Today not only is the city filled with black doctors, dentists, lawyers, accountants, and
- other professionals, but blacks also occupy some of the highest management positions
- in corporate Chicago. Blacks own restaurant chains, investment banks, PR agencies,
- real estate investment trusts, and architectural firms. They can afford to live in
- neighborhoods of their choosing and send their children to the best private schools.
- They are actively recruited to join civic boards and generously support all manner of
- charities.
- Statistically, the number of African Americans who occupy the top fifth of the income
- ladder remains relatively small. Moreover, every black professional and businessperson
- in Chicago can tell you stories of the roadblocks they still experience on account of
- race. Few African American entrepreneurs have either the inherited wealth or the angel
- investors to help launch their businesses or cushion them from a sudden economic
- downturn. Few doubt that if they were white they would be further along in reaching
- their goals.
- And yet you won’t hear these men and women use race as a crutch or point to
- discrimination as an excuse for failure. In fact, what characterizes this new generation
- of black professionals is their rejection of any limits to what they can achieve. When a
- friend who had been the number one bond salesman at Merrill Lynch’s Chicago office
- decided to start his own investment bank, his goal wasn’t to grow it into the top black
- firm—he wanted it to become the top firm, period. When another friend decided to
- leave an executive position at General Motors to start his own parking service company
- in partnership with Hyatt, his mother thought he was crazy. “She couldn’t imagine
- anything better than having a management job at GM,” he told me, “because those jobs
- were unattainable for her generation. But I knew I wanted to build something of my
- own.”
- That simple notion—that one isn’t confined in one’s dreams—is so central to our
- understanding of America that it seems almost commonplace. But in black America, the
- idea represents a radical break from the past, a severing of the psychological shackles of
- slavery and Jim Crow. It is perhaps the most important legacy of the civil rights
- movement, a gift from those leaders like John Lewis and Rosa Parks who marched,
- rallied, and endured threats, arrests, and beatings to widen the doors of freedom. And it
- is also a testament to that generation of African American mothers and fathers whose
- heroism was less dramatic but no less important: parents who worked all their lives in
- jobs that were too small for them, without complaint, scrimping and saving to buy a
- small home; parents who did without so that their children could take dance classes or
- the school-sponsored field trip; parents who coached Little League games and baked
- birthday cakes and badgered teachers to make sure that their children weren’t tracked
- into the less challenging programs; parents who dragged their children to church every
- Sunday, whupped their children’s behinds when they got out of line, and looked out for
- all the children on the block during long summer days and into the night. Parents who
- pushed their children to achieve and fortified them with a love that could withstand
- whatever the larger society might throw at them.
- It is through this quintessentially American path of upward mobility that the black
- middle class has grown fourfold in a generation, and that the black poverty rate was cut
- in half. Through a similar process of hard work and commitment to family, Latinos
- have seen comparable gains: From 1979 to 1999, the number of Latino families
- considered middle class has grown by more than 70 percent. In their hopes and
- expectations, these black and Latino workers are largely indistinguishable from their
- white counterparts. They are the people who make our economy run and our democracy
- flourish—the teachers, mechanics, nurses, computer technicians, assembly-line workers,
- bus drivers, postal workers, store managers, plumbers, and repairmen who constitute
- America’s vital heart.
- And yet, for all the progress that’s been made in the past four decades, a stubborn gap
- remains between the living standards of black, Latino, and white workers. The average
- black wage is 75 percent of the average white wage; the average Latino wage is 71
- percent of the average white wage. Black median net worth is about $6,000, and Latino
- median net worth is about $8,000, compared to $88,000 for whites. When laid off from
- their job or confronted with a family emergency, blacks and Latinos have less savings to
- draw on, and parents are less able to lend their children a helping hand. Even middle-
- class blacks and Latinos pay more for insurance, are less likely to own their own homes,
- and suffer poorer health than Americans as a whole. More minorities may be living the
- American dream, but their hold on that dream remains tenuous.
- How we close this persistent gap—and how much of a role government should play in
- achieving that goal—remains one of the central controversies of American politics. But
- there should be some strategies we can all agree on. We might start with completing the
- unfinished business of the civil rights movement—namely, enforcing nondiscrimination
- laws in such basic areas as employment, housing, and education. Anyone who thinks
- that such enforcement is no longer needed should pay a visit to one of the suburban
- office parks in their area and count the number of blacks employed there, even in the
- relatively unskilled jobs, or stop by a local trade union hall and inquire as to the number
- of blacks in the apprenticeship program, or read recent studies showing that real estate
- brokers continue to steer prospective black homeowners away from predominantly
- white neighborhoods. Unless you live in a state without many black residents, I think
- you’ll agree that something’s amiss.
- Under recent Republican Administrations, such enforcement of civil rights laws has
- been tepid at best, and under the current Administration, it’s been essentially
- nonexistent—unless one counts the eagerness of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights
- Division to label university scholarship or educational enrichment programs targeted at
- minority students as “reverse discrimination,” no matter how underrepresented minority
- students may be in a particular institution or field, and no matter how incidental the
- program’s impact on white students.
- This should be a source of concern across the political spectrum, even to those who
- oppose affirmative action. Affirmative action programs, when properly structured, can
- open up opportunities otherwise closed to qualified minorities without diminishing
- opportunities for white students. Given the dearth of black and Latino Ph.D. candidates
- in mathematics and the physical sciences, for example, a modest scholarship program
- for minorities interested in getting advanced degrees in these fields (a recent target of a
- Justice Department inquiry) won’t keep white students out of such programs, but can
- broaden the pool of talent that America will need for all of us to prosper in a
- technology-based economy. Moreover, as a lawyer who’s worked on civil rights cases, I
- can say that where there’s strong evidence of prolonged and systematic discrimination
- by large corporations, trade unions, or branches of municipal government, goals and
- timetables for minority hiring may be the only meaningful remedy available.
- Many Americans disagree with me on this as a matter of principle, arguing that our
- institutions should never take race into account, even if it is to help victims of past
- discrimination. Fair enough—I understand their arguments, and don’t expect the debate
- to be settled anytime soon. But that shouldn’t stop us from at least making sure that
- when two equally qualified people—one minority and one white—apply for a job,
- house, or loan, and the white person is consistently preferred, then the government,
- through its prosecutors and through its courts, should step in to make things right.
- We should also agree that the responsibility to close the gap can’t come from
- government alone; minorities, individually and collectively, have responsibilities as
- well. Many of the social or cultural factors that negatively affect black people, for
- example, simply mirror in exaggerated form problems that afflict America as a whole:
- too much television (the average black household has the television on more than eleven
- hours per day), too much consumption of poisons (blacks smoke more and eat more fast
- food), and a lack of emphasis on educational achievement.
- Then there’s the collapse of the two-parent black household, a phenomenon that is
- occurring at such an alarming rate when compared to the rest of American society that
- what was once a difference in degree has become a difference in kind, a phenomenon
- that reflects a casualness toward sex and child rearing among black men that renders
- black children more vulnerable—and for which there is simply no excuse.
- Taken together, these factors impede progress. Moreover, although government action
- can help change behavior (encouraging supermarket chains with fresh produce to locate
- in black neighborhoods, to take just one small example, would go a long way toward
- changing people’s eating habits), a transformation in attitudes has to begin in the home,
- and in neighborhoods, and in places of worship. Community-based institutions,
- particularly the historically black church, have to help families reinvigorate in young
- people a reverence for educational achievement, encourage healthier lifestyles, and
- reenergize traditional social norms surrounding the joys and obligations of fatherhood.
- Ultimately, though, the most important tool to close the gap between minority and white
- workers may have little to do with race at all. These days, what ails working-class and
- middle-class blacks and Latinos is not fundamentally different from what ails their
- white counterparts: downsizing, outsourcing, automation, wage stagnation, the
- dismantling of employer-based health-care and pension plans, and schools that fail to
- teach young people the skills they need to compete in a global economy. (Blacks in
- particular have been vulnerable to these trends, since they are more reliant on blue-
- collar manufacturing jobs and are less likely to live in suburban communities where
- new jobs are being generated.) And what would help minority workers are the same
- things that would help white workers: the opportunity to earn a living wage, the
- education and training that lead to such jobs, labor laws and tax laws that restore some
- balance to the distribution of the nation’s wealth, and health-care, child care, and
- retirement systems that working people can count on.
- This pattern—of a rising tide lifting minority boats—has certainly held true in the past.
- The progress made by the previous generation of Latinos and African Americans
- occurred primarily because the same ladders of opportunity that built the white middle
- class were for the first time made available to minorities as well. They benefited, as all
- people did, from an economy that was growing and a government interested in investing
- in its people. Not only did tight labor markets, access to capital, and programs like Pell
- Grants and Perkins Loans benefit blacks directly; growing incomes and a sense of
- security among whites made them less resistant to minority claims for equality.
- The same formula holds true today. As recently as 1999, the black unemployment rate
- fell to record lows and black income rose to record highs not because of a surge in
- affirmative action hiring or a sudden change in the black work ethic but because the
- economy was booming and government took a few modest measures—like the
- expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit—to spread the wealth around. If you want
- to know the secret of Bill Clinton’s popularity among African Americans, you need
- look no further than these statistics.
- But these same statistics should also force those of us interested in racial equality to
- conduct an honest accounting of the costs and benefits of our current strategies. Even as
- we continue to defend affirmative action as a useful, if limited, tool to expand
- opportunity to underrepresented minorities, we should consider spending a lot more of
- our political capital convincing America to make the investments needed to ensure that
- all children perform at grade level and graduate from high school—a goal that, if met,
- would do more than affirmative action to help those black and Latino children who need
- it the most. Similarly, we should support targeted programs to eliminate existing health
- disparities between minorities and whites (some evidence suggests that even when
- income and levels of insurance are factored out, minorities may still be receiving worse
- care), but a plan for universal health-care coverage would do more to eliminate health
- disparities between whites and minorities than any race-specific programs we might
- design.
- An emphasis on universal, as opposed to race-specific, programs isn’t just good policy;
- it’s also good politics. I remember once sitting with one of my Democratic colleagues in
- the Illinois state senate as we listened to another fellow senator—an African American
- whom I’ll call John Doe who represented a largely inner-city district—launch into a
- lengthy and passionate peroration on why the elimination of a certain program was a
- case of blatant racism. After a few minutes, the white senator (who had one of the
- chamber’s more liberal voting records) turned to me and said, “You know what the
- problem is with John? Whenever I hear him, he makes me feel more white.”
- In defense of my black colleague, I pointed out that it’s not always easy for a black
- politician to gauge the right tone to take—too angry? not angry enough?—when
- discussing the enormous hardships facing his or her constituents. Still, my white
- colleague’s comment was instructive. Rightly or wrongly, white guilt has largely
- exhausted itself in America; even the most fair-minded of whites, those who would
- genuinely like to see racial inequality ended and poverty relieved, tend to push back
- against suggestions of racial victimization—or race-specific claims based on the history
- of race discrimination in this country.
- Some of this has to do with the success of conservatives in fanning the politics of
- resentment—by wildly overstating, for example, the adverse effects of affirmative
- action on white workers. But mainly it’s a matter of simple self-interest. Most white
- Americans figure that they haven’t engaged in discrimination themselves and have
- plenty of their own problems to worry about. They also know that with a national debt
- approaching $9 trillion and annual deficits of almost $300 billion, the country has
- precious few resources to help them with those problems.
- As a result, proposals that solely benefit minorities and dissect Americans into “us” and
- “them” may generate a few short-term concessions when the costs to whites aren’t too
- high, but they can’t serve as the basis for the kinds of sustained, broad-based political
- coalitions needed to transform America. On the other hand, universal appeals around
- strategies that help all Americans (schools that teach, jobs that pay, health care for
- everyone who needs it, a government that helps out after a flood), along with measures
- that ensure our laws apply equally to everyone and hence uphold broadly held American
- ideals (like better enforcement of existing civil rights laws), can serve as the basis for
- such coalitions—even if such strategies disproportionately help minorities.
- Such a shift in emphasis is not easy: Old habits die hard, and there is always a fear on
- the part of many minorities that unless racial discrimination, past and present, stays on
- the front burner, white America will be let off the hook and hard-fought gains may be
- reversed. I understand these fears—nowhere is it ordained that history moves in a
- straight line, and during difficult economic times it is possible that the imperatives of
- racial equality get shunted aside.
- Still, when I look at what past generations of minorities have had to overcome, I am
- optimistic about the ability of this next generation to continue their advance into the
- economic mainstream. For most of our recent history, the rungs on the opportunity
- ladder may have been more slippery for blacks; the admittance of Latinos into
- firehouses and corporate suites may have been grudging. But despite all that, the
- combination of economic growth, government investment in broad-based programs to
- encourage upward mobility, and a modest commitment to enforce the simple principle
- of nondiscrimination was sufficient to pull the large majority of blacks and Latinos into
- the socioeconomic mainstream within a generation.
- We need to remind ourselves of this achievement. What’s remarkable is not the number
- of minorities who have failed to climb into the middle class but the number who
- succeeded against the odds; not the anger and bitterness that parents of color have
- transmitted to their children but the degree to which such emotions have ebbed. That
- knowledge gives us something to build on. It tells us that more progress can be made.
- IF UNIVERSAL STRATEGIES that target the challenges facing all Americans can go
- a long way toward closing the gap between blacks, Latinos, and whites, there are two
- aspects of race relations in America that require special attention—issues that fan the
- flames of racial conflict and undermine the progress that’s been made. With respect to
- the African American community, the issue is the deteriorating condition of the inner-
- city poor. With respect to Latinos, it is the problem of undocumented workers and the
- political firestorm surrounding immigration.
- One of my favorite restaurants in Chicago is a place called MacArthur’s. It’s away from
- the Loop, on the west end of the West Side on Madison Street, a simple, brightly lit
- space with booths of blond wood that seat maybe a hundred people. On any day of the
- week, about that many people can be found lining up—families, teenagers, groups of
- matronly women and elderly men—all waiting their turn, cafeteria-style, for plates
- filled with fried chicken, catfish, hoppin’ John, collard greens, meatloaf, cornbread, and
- other soul-food standards. As these folks will tell you, it’s well worth the wait.
- The restaurant’s owner, Mac Alexander, is a big, barrel-chested man in his early sixties,
- with thinning gray hair, a mustache, and a slight squint behind his glasses that gives him
- a pensive, professorial air. He’s an army vet, born in Lexington, Mississippi, who lost
- his left leg in Vietnam; after his convalescence, he and his wife moved to Chicago,
- where he took business courses while working in a warehouse. In 1972, he opened
- Mac’s Records, and helped found the Westside Business Improvement Association,
- pledging to fix up what he calls his “little corner of the world.”
- By any measure he has succeeded. His record store grew; he opened up the restaurant
- and hired local residents to work there; he started buying and rehabbing run-down
- buildings and renting them out. It’s because of the efforts of men and women like Mac
- that the view along Madison Street is not as grim as the West Side’s reputation might
- suggest. There are clothing stores and pharmacies and what seems like a church on
- every block. Off the main thoroughfare you will find the same small bungalows—with
- neatly trimmed lawns and carefully tended flower beds—that make up many of
- Chicago’s neighborhoods.
- But travel a few blocks farther in any direction and you will also experience a different
- side of Mac’s world: the throngs of young men on corners casting furtive glances up
- and down the street; the sound of sirens blending with the periodic thump of car stereos
- turned up full blast; the dark, boarded-up buildings and hastily scrawled gang signs; the
- rubbish everywhere, swirling in winter winds. Recently, the Chicago Police Department
- installed permanent cameras and flashing lights atop the lampposts of Madison, bathing
- each block in a perpetual blue glow. The folks who live along Madison didn’t complain;
- flashing blue lights are a familiar enough sight. They’re just one more reminder of what
- everybody knows—that the community’s immune system has broken down almost
- entirely, weakened by drugs and gunfire and despair; that despite the best efforts of
- folks like Mac, a virus has taken hold, and a people is wasting away.
- “Crime’s nothing new on the West Side,” Mac told me one afternoon as we walked to
- look at one of his buildings. “I mean, back in the seventies, the police didn’t really take
- the idea of looking after black neighborhoods seriously. As long as trouble didn’t spill
- out into the white neighborhoods, they didn’t care. First store I opened, on Lake and
- Damen, I must’ve had eight, nine break-ins in a row.
- “The police are more responsive now,” Mac said. “The commander out here, he’s a
- good brother, does the best he can. But he’s just as overwhelmed as everybody else.
- See, these kids out here, they just don’t care. Police don’t scare ’em, jail doesn’t scare
- ’em—more than half of the young guys out here already got a record. If the police pick
- up ten guys standing on a corner, another ten’ll take their place in an hour.
- “That’s the thing that’s changed…the attitude of these kids. You can’t blame them,
- really, because most of them have nothing at home. Their mothers can’t tell them
- nothing—a lot of these women are still children themselves. Father’s in jail. Nobody
- around to guide the kids, keep them in school, teach them respect. So these boys just
- raise themselves, basically, on the streets. That’s all they know. The gang, that’s their
- family. They don’t see any jobs out here except the drug trade. Don’t get me wrong,
- we’ve still got a lot of good families around here…not a lot of money necessarily, but
- doing their best to keep their kids out of trouble. But they’re just too outnumbered. The
- longer they stay, the more they feel their kids are at risk. So the minute they get a
- chance, they move out. And that just leaves things worse.”
- Mac shook his head. “I don’t know. I keep thinking we can turn things around. But I’ll
- be honest with you, Barack—it’s hard not to feel sometimes like the situation is
- hopeless. Hard—and getting harder.”
- I hear a lot of such sentiments in the African American community these days, a frank
- acknowledgment that conditions in the heart of the inner city are spinning out of
- control. Sometimes the conversation will center on statistics—the infant mortality rate
- (on par with Malaysia among poor black Americans), or black male unemployment
- (estimated at more than a third in some Chicago neighborhoods), or the number of black
- men who can expect to go through the criminal justice system at some point in their
- lives (one in three nationally).
- But more often the conversation focuses on personal stories, offered as evidence of a
- fundamental breakdown within a portion of our community and voiced with a mixture
- of sadness and incredulity. A teacher will talk about what it’s like to have an eight-year-
- old shout obscenities and threaten her with bodily harm. A public defender will describe
- a fifteen-year-old’s harrowing rap sheet or the nonchalance with which his clients
- predict they will not live to see their thirtieth year. A pediatrician will describe the
- teenage parents who don’t think there’s anything wrong with feeding their toddlers
- potato chips for breakfast, or who admit to having left their five- or six-year-old alone at
- home.
- These are the stories of those who didn’t make it out of history’s confinement, of the
- neighborhoods within the black community that house the poorest of the poor, serving
- as repositories for all the scars of slavery and violence of Jim Crow, the internalized
- rage and the forced ignorance, the shame of men who could not protect their women or
- support their families, the children who grew up being told they wouldn’t amount to
- anything and had no one there to undo the damage.
- There was a time, of course, when such deep intergenerational poverty could still shock
- a nation—when the publication of Michael Harrington’s The Other America or Bobby
- Kennedy’s visits to the Mississippi Delta could inspire outrage and a call to action. Not
- anymore. Today the images of the so-called underclass are ubiquitous, a permanent
- fixture in American popular culture—in film and TV, where they’re the foil of choice
- for the forces of law and order; in rap music and videos, where the gangsta life is
- glorified and mimicked by white and black teenagers alike (although white teenagers, at
- least, are aware that theirs is just a pose); and on the nightly news, where the
- depredation to be found in the inner city always makes for good copy. Rather than
- evoke our sympathy, our familiarity with the lives of the black poor has bred spasms of
- fear and outright contempt. But mostly it’s bred indifference. Black men filling our
- prisons, black children unable to read or caught in a gangland shooting, the black
- homeless sleeping on grates and in the parks of our nation’s capital—we take these
- things for granted, as part of the natural order, a tragic situation, perhaps, but not one for
- which we are culpable, and certainly not something subject to change.
- This concept of a black underclass—separate, apart, alien in its behavior and in its
- values—has also played a central role in modern American politics. It was partly on
- behalf of fixing the black ghetto that Johnson’s War on Poverty was launched, and it
- was on the basis of that war’s failures, both real and perceived, that conservatives turned
- much of the country against the very concept of the welfare state. A cottage industry
- grew within conservative think tanks, arguing not only that cultural pathologies—rather
- than racism or structural inequalities built into our economy—were responsible for
- black poverty but also that government programs like welfare, coupled with liberal
- judges who coddled criminals, actually made these pathologies worse. On television,
- images of innocent children with distended bellies were replaced with those of black
- looters and muggers; news reports focused less on the black maid struggling to make
- ends meet and more on the “welfare queen” who had babies just to collect a check.
- What was needed, conservatives argued, was a stern dose of discipline—more police,
- more prisons, more personal responsibility, and an end to welfare. If such strategies
- could not transform the black ghetto, at least they would contain it and keep
- hardworking taxpayers from throwing good money after bad.
- That conservatives won over white public opinion should come as no surprise. Their
- arguments tapped into a distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor
- that has a long and varied history in America, an argument that has often been racially
- or ethnically tinged and that has gained greater currency during those periods—like the
- seventies and eighties—when economic times are tough. The response of liberal policy
- makers and civil rights leaders didn’t help; in their urgency to avoid blaming the victims
- of historical racism, they tended to downplay or ignore evidence that entrenched
- behavioral patterns among the black poor really were contributing to intergenerational
- poverty. (Most famously, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was accused of racism in the early
- sixties when he raised alarms about the rise of out-of-wedlock births among the black
- poor.) This willingness to dismiss the role that values played in shaping the economic
- success of a community strained credulity and alienated working-class whites—
- particularly since some of the most liberal policy makers lived lives far removed from
- urban disorder.
- The truth is that such rising frustration with conditions in the inner city was hardly
- restricted to whites. In most black neighborhoods, law-abiding, hardworking residents
- have been demanding more aggressive police protection for years, since they are far
- more likely to be victims of crime. In private—around kitchen tables, in barbershops,
- and after church—black folks can often be heard bemoaning the eroding work ethic,
- inadequate parenting, and declining sexual mores with a fervor that would make the
- Heritage Foundation proud.
- In that sense, black attitudes regarding the sources of chronic poverty are far more
- conservative than black politics would care to admit. What you won’t hear, though, are
- blacks using such terms as “predator” in describing a young gang member, or
- “underclass” in describing mothers on welfare—language that divides the world
- between those who are worthy of our concern and those who are not. For black
- Americans, such separation from the poor is never an option, and not just because the
- color of our skin—and the conclusions the larger society draws from our color—makes
- all of us only as free, only as respected, as the least of us.
- It’s also because blacks know the back story to the inner city’s dysfunction. Most blacks
- who grew up in Chicago remember the collective story of the great migration from the
- South, how after arriving in the North blacks were forced into ghettos because of racial
- steering and restrictive covenants and stacked up in public housing, where the schools
- were substandard and the parks were underfunded and police protection was nonexistent
- and the drug trade was tolerated. They remember how the plum patronage jobs were
- reserved for other immigrant groups and the blue-collar jobs that black folks relied on
- evaporated, so that families that had been intact began to crack under the pressure and
- ordinary children slipped through those cracks, until a tipping point was reached and
- what had once been the sad exception somehow became the rule. They know what
- drove that homeless man to drink because he is their uncle. That hardened criminal—
- they remember when he was a little boy, so full of life and capable of love, for he is
- their cousin.
- In other words, African Americans understand that culture matters but that culture is
- shaped by circumstance. We know that many in the inner city are trapped by their own
- self-destructive behaviors but that those behaviors are not innate. And because of that
- knowledge, the black community remains convinced that if America finds its will to do
- so, then circumstances for those trapped in the inner city can be changed, individual
- attitudes among the poor will change in kind, and the damage can gradually be undone,
- if not for this generation then at least for the next.
- Such wisdom might help us move beyond ideological bickering and serve as the basis
- of a renewed effort to tackle the problems of inner-city poverty. We could begin by
- acknowledging that perhaps the single biggest thing we could do to reduce such poverty
- is to encourage teenage girls to finish high school and avoid having children out of
- wedlock. In this effort, school- and community-based programs that have a proven track
- record of reducing teen pregnancy need to be expanded, but parents, clergy, and
- community leaders also need to speak out more consistently on the issue.
- We should also acknowledge that conservatives—and Bill Clinton—were right about
- welfare as it was previously structured: By detaching income from work, and by making
- no demands on welfare recipients other than a tolerance for intrusive bureaucracy and
- an assurance that no man lived in the same house as the mother of his children, the old
- AFDC program sapped people of their initiative and eroded their self-respect. Any
- strategy to reduce intergenerational poverty has to be centered on work, not welfare—
- not only because work provides independence and income but also because work
- provides order, structure, dignity, and opportunities for growth in people’s lives.
- But we also need to admit that work alone does not ensure that people can rise out of
- poverty. Across America, welfare reform has sharply reduced the number of people on
- the public dole; it has also swelled the ranks of the working poor, with women churning
- in and out of the labor market, locked into jobs that don’t pay a living wage, forced
- every day to scramble for adequate child care, affordable housing, and accessible health
- care, only to find themselves at the end of each month wondering how they can stretch
- the last few dollars that they have left to cover the food bill, the gas bill, and the baby’s
- new coat.
- Strategies like an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit that help all low-wage workers
- can make an enormous difference in the lives of these women and their children. But if
- we’re serious about breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty, then many of these
- women will need some extra help with the basics that those living outside the inner city
- often take for granted. They need more police and more effective policing in their
- neighborhoods, to provide them and their children some semblance of personal security.
- They need access to community-based health centers that emphasize prevention—
- including reproductive health care, nutritional counseling, and in some cases treatment
- for substance abuse. They need a radical transformation of the schools their children
- attend, and access to affordable child care that will allow them to hold a full-time job or
- pursue their education.
- And in many cases they need help learning to be effective parents. By the time many
- inner-city children reach the school system, they’re already behind—unable to identify
- basic numbers, colors, or the letters in the alphabet, unaccustomed to sitting still or
- participating in a structured environment, and often burdened by undiagnosed health
- problems. They’re unprepared not because they’re unloved but because their mothers
- don’t know how to provide what they need. Well-structured government programs—
- prenatal counseling, access to regular pediatric care, parenting programs, and quality
- early-childhood-education programs—have a proven ability to help fill the void.
- Finally, we need to tackle the nexus of unemployment and crime in the inner city so that
- the men who live there can begin fulfilling their responsibilities. The conventional
- wisdom is that most unemployed inner-city men could find jobs if they really wanted to
- work; that they inevitably prefer drug dealing, with its attendant risks but potential
- profits, to the low-paying jobs that their lack of skills warrants. In fact, economists
- who’ve studied the issue—and the young men whose fates are at stake—will tell you
- that the costs and benefits of the street life don’t match the popular mythology: At the
- bottom or even the middle ranks of the industry, drug dealing is a minimum-wage
- affair. For many inner-city men, what prevents gainful employment is not simply the
- absence of motivation to get off the streets but the absence of a job history or any
- marketable skills—and, increasingly, the stigma of a prison record.
- Ask Mac, who has made it part of his mission to provide young men in his
- neighborhood a second chance. Ninety-five percent of his male employees are ex-
- felons, including one of his best cooks, who has been in and out of prison for the past
- twenty years for various drug offenses and one count of armed robbery. Mac starts them
- out at eight dollars an hour and tops them out at fifteen dollars an hour. He has no
- shortage of applicants. Mac’s the first one to admit that some of the guys come in with
- issues—they aren’t used to getting to work on time, and a lot of them aren’t used to
- taking orders from a supervisor—and his turnover can be high. But by not accepting
- excuses from the young men he employs (“I tell them I got a business to run, and if they
- don’t want the job I got other folks who do”), he finds that most are quick to adapt.
- Over time they become accustomed to the rhythms of ordinary life: sticking to
- schedules, working as part of a team, carrying their weight. They start talking about
- getting their GEDs, maybe enrolling in the local community college.
- They begin to aspire to something better.
- It would be nice if there were thousands of Macs out there, and if the market alone
- could generate opportunities for all the inner-city men who need them. But most
- employers aren’t willing to take a chance on ex-felons, and those who are willing are
- often prevented from doing so. In Illinois, for example, ex-felons are prohibited from
- working not only in schools, nursing homes, and hospitals—restrictions that sensibly
- reflect our unwillingness to compromise the safety of our children or aging parents—
- but some are also prohibited from working as barbers and nail technicians.
- Government could kick-start a transformation of circumstances for these men by
- working with private-sector contractors to hire and train ex-felons on projects that can
- benefit the community as a whole: insulating homes and offices to make them energy-
- efficient, perhaps, or laying the broadband lines needed to thrust entire communities
- into the Internet age. Such programs would cost money, of course—although, given the
- annual cost of incarcerating an inmate, any drop in recidivism would help the program
- pay for itself. Not all of the hard-core unemployed would prefer entry-level jobs to life
- on the streets, and no program to help ex-felons will eliminate the need to lock up
- hardened criminals, those whose habits of violence are too deeply entrenched.
- Still, we can assume that with lawful work available for young men now in the drug
- trade, crime in many communities would drop; that as a consequence more employers
- would locate businesses in these neighborhoods and a self-sustaining economy would
- begin to take root; and that over the course of ten or fifteen years norms would begin to
- change, young men and women would begin to imagine a future for themselves,
- marriage rates would rise, and children would have a more stable world in which to
- grow up.
- What would that be worth to all of us—an America in which crime has fallen, more
- children are cared for, cities are reborn, and the biases, fear, and discord that black
- poverty feeds are slowly drained away? Would it be worth what we’ve spent in the past
- year in Iraq? Would it be worth relinquishing demands for estate tax repeal? It’s hard to
- quantify the benefits of such changes—precisely because the benefits would be
- immeasurable.
- IF THE PROBLEMS of inner-city poverty arise from our failure to face up to an often
- tragic past, the challenges of immigration spark fears of an uncertain future. The
- demographics of America are changing inexorably and at lightning speed, and the
- claims of new immigrants won’t fit neatly into the black-and-white paradigm of
- discrimination and resistance and guilt and recrimination. Indeed, even black and white
- newcomers—from Ghana and Ukraine, Somalia and Romania—arrive on these shores
- unburdened by the racial dynamics of an earlier era.
- During the campaign, I would see firsthand the faces of this new America—in the
- Indian markets along Devon Avenue, in the sparkling new mosque in the southwest
- suburbs, in an Armenian wedding and a Filipino ball, in the meetings of the Korean
- American Leadership Council and the Nigerian Engineers Association. Everywhere I
- went, I found immigrants anchoring themselves to whatever housing and work they
- could find, washing dishes or driving cabs or toiling in their cousin’s dry cleaners,
- saving money and building businesses and revitalizing dying neighborhoods, until they
- moved to the suburbs and raised children with accents that betrayed not the land of their
- parents but their Chicago birth certificates, teenagers who listened to rap and shopped at
- the mall and planned for futures as doctors and lawyers and engineers and even
- politicians.
- Across the country, this classic immigrant story is playing itself out, the story of
- ambition and adaptation, hard work and education, assimilation and upward mobility.
- Today’s immigrants, however, are living out this story in hyperdrive. As beneficiaries
- of a nation more tolerant and more worldly than the one immigrants faced generations
- ago, a nation that has come to revere its immigrant myth, they are more confident in
- their place here, more assertive of their rights. As a senator, I receive countless
- invitations to address these newest Americans, where I am often quizzed on my foreign
- policy views—where do I stand on Cyprus, say, or the future of Taiwan? They may
- have policy concerns specific to fields in which their ethnic groups are heavily
- represented—Indian American pharmacists might complain about Medicare
- reimbursements, Korean small-business owners might lobby for changes in the tax
- code.
- But mostly they want affirmation that they, too, are Americans. Whenever I appear
- before immigrant audiences, I can count on some good-natured ribbing from my staff
- after my speech; according to them, my remarks always follow a three-part structure: “I
- am your friend,” “[Fill in the home country] has been a cradle of civilization,” and “You
- embody the American dream.” They’re right, my message is simple, for what I’ve come
- to understand is that my mere presence before these newly minted Americans serves
- notice that they matter, that they are voters critical to my success and full-fledged
- citizens deserving of respect.
- Of course, not all my conversations in immigrant communities follow this easy pattern.
- In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example,
- have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard
- stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging. They have
- been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly;
- they need specific assurances that their citizenship really means something, that
- America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War
- II, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.
- It’s in my meetings with the Latino community, though, in neighborhoods like Pilsen
- and Little Village, towns like Cicero and Aurora, that I’m forced to reflect on the
- meaning of America, the meaning of citizenship, and my sometimes conflicted feelings
- about all the changes that are taking place.
- Of course, the presence of Latinos in Illinois—Puerto Ricans, Colombians, Salvadorans,
- Cubans, and most of all Mexicans—dates back generations, when agricultural workers
- began making their way north and joined ethnic groups in factory jobs throughout the
- region. Like other immigrants, they assimilated into the culture, although like African
- Americans, their upward mobility was often hampered by racial bias. Perhaps for that
- reason, black and Latino political and civil rights leaders often made common cause. In
- 1983, Latino support was critical in the election of Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold
- Washington. That support was reciprocated, as Washington helped elect a generation of
- young, progressive Latinos to the Chicago city council and the Illinois state legislature.
- Indeed, until their numbers finally justified their own organization, Latino state
- legislators were official members of the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus.
- It was against this backdrop, shortly after my arrival in Chicago, that my own ties to the
- Latino community were formed. As a young organizer, I often worked with Latino
- leaders on issues that affected both black and brown residents, from failing schools to
- illegal dumping to unimmunized children. My interest went beyond politics; I would
- come to love the Mexican and Puerto Rican sections of the city—the sounds of salsa
- and merengue pulsing out of apartments on hot summer nights, the solemnity of Mass in
- churches once filled with Poles and Italians and Irish, the frantic, happy chatter of
- soccer matches in the park, the cool humor of the men behind the counter at the
- sandwich shop, the elderly women who would grasp my hand and laugh at my pathetic
- efforts at Spanish. I made lifelong friends and allies in those neighborhoods; in my
- mind, at least, the fates of black and brown were to be perpetually intertwined, the
- cornerstone of a coalition that could help America live up to its promise.
- By the time I returned from law school, though, tensions between blacks and Latinos in
- Chicago had started to surface. Between 1990 and 2000, the Spanish-speaking
- population in Chicago rose by 38 percent, and with this surge in population the Latino
- community was no longer content to serve as junior partner in any black-brown
- coalition. After Harold Washington died, a new cohort of Latino elected officials,
- affiliated with Richard M. Daley and remnants of the old Chicago political machine,
- came onto the scene, men and women less interested in high-minded principles and
- rainbow coalitions than in translating growing political power into contracts and jobs.
- As black businesses and commercial strips struggled, Latino businesses thrived, helped
- in part by financial ties to home countries and by a customer base held captive by
- language barriers. Everywhere, it seemed, Mexican and Central American workers
- came to dominate low-wage work that had once gone to blacks—as waiters and
- busboys, as hotel maids and as bellmen—and made inroads in the construction trades
- that had long excluded black labor. Blacks began to grumble and feel threatened; they
- wondered if once again they were about to be passed over by those who’d just arrived.
- I shouldn’t exaggerate the schism. Because both communities share a host of
- challenges, from soaring high school dropout rates to inadequate health insurance,
- blacks and Latinos continue to find common cause in their politics. As frustrated as
- blacks may get whenever they pass a construction site in a black neighborhood and see
- nothing but Mexican workers, I rarely hear them blame the workers themselves; usually
- they reserve their wrath for the contractors who hire them. When pressed, many blacks
- will express a grudging admiration for Latino immigrants—for their strong work ethic
- and commitment to family, their willingness to start at the bottom and make the most of
- what little they have.
- Still, there’s no denying that many blacks share the same anxieties as many whites
- about the wave of illegal immigration flooding our Southern border—a sense that
- what’s happening now is fundamentally different from what has gone on before. Not all
- these fears are irrational. The number of immigrants added to the labor force every year
- is of a magnitude not seen in this country for over a century. If this huge influx of
- mostly low-skill workers provides some benefits to the economy as a whole—especially
- by keeping our workforce young, in contrast to an increasingly geriatric Europe and
- Japan—it also threatens to depress further the wages of blue-collar Americans and put
- strains on an already overburdened safety net. Other fears of native-born Americans are
- disturbingly familiar, echoing the xenophobia once directed at Italians, Irish, and Slavs
- fresh off the boat—fears that Latinos are inherently too different, in culture and in
- temperament, to assimilate fully into the American way of life; fears that, with the
- demographic changes now taking place, Latinos will wrest control away from those
- accustomed to wielding political power.
- For most Americans, though, concerns over illegal immigration go deeper than worries
- about economic displacement and are more subtle than simple racism. In the past,
- immigration occurred on America’s terms; the welcome mat could be extended
- selectively, on the basis of the immigrant’s skills or color or the needs of industry. The
- laborer, whether Chinese or Russian or Greek, found himself a stranger in a strange
- land, severed from his home country, subject to often harsh constraints, forced to adapt
- to rules not of his own making.
- Today it seems those terms no longer apply. Immigrants are entering as a result of a
- porous border rather than any systematic government policy; Mexico’s proximity, as
- well as the desperate poverty of so many of its people, suggests the possibility that
- border crossing cannot even be slowed, much less stopped. Satellites, calling cards, and
- wire transfers, as well as the sheer size of the burgeoning Latino market, make it easier
- for today’s immigrant to maintain linguistic and cultural ties to the land of his or her
- birth (the Spanish-language Univision now boasts the highest-rated newscast in
- Chicago). Native-born Americans suspect that it is they, and not the immigrant, who are
- being forced to adapt. In this way, the immigration debate comes to signify not a loss of
- jobs but a loss of sovereignty, just one more example—like September 11, avian flu,
- computer viruses, and factories moving to China—that America seems unable to control
- its own destiny.
- IT WAS IN this volatile atmosphere—with strong passions on both sides of the
- debate—that the U.S. Senate considered a comprehensive immigration reform bill in the
- spring of 2006. With hundreds of thousands of immigrants protesting in the streets and a
- group of self-proclaimed vigilantes called the Minutemen rushing to defend the
- Southern border, the political stakes were high for Democrats, Republicans, and the
- President.
- Under the leadership of Ted Kennedy and John McCain, the Senate crafted a
- compromise bill with three major components. The bill provided much tougher border
- security and, through an amendment I wrote with Chuck Grassley, made it significantly
- more difficult for employers to hire workers here illegally. The bill also recognized the
- difficulty of deporting twelve million undocumented immigrants and instead created a
- long, eleven-year process under which many of them could earn their citizenship.
- Finally, the bill included a guest worker program that would allow two hundred
- thousand foreign workers to enter the country for temporary employment.
- On balance, I thought the legislation was worth supporting. Still, the guest worker
- provision of the bill troubled me; it was essentially a sop to big business, a means for
- them to employ immigrants without granting them citizenship rights—indeed, a means
- for business to gain the benefits of outsourcing without having to locate their operations
- overseas. To address this problem, I succeeded in including language requiring that any
- job first be offered to U.S. workers, and that employers not undercut American wages
- by paying guest workers less than they would pay U.S. workers. The idea was to ensure
- that businesses turned to temporary foreign workers only when there was a labor
- shortage.
- It was plainly an amendment designed to help American workers, which is why all the
- unions vigorously supported it. But no sooner had the provision been included in the bill
- than some conservatives, both inside and outside of the Senate, began attacking me for
- supposedly “requiring that foreign workers get paid more than U.S. workers.”
- On the floor of the Senate one day, I caught up with one of my Republican colleagues
- who had leveled this charge at me. I explained that the bill would actually protect U.S.
- workers, since employers would have no incentive to hire guest workers if they had to
- pay the same wages they paid U.S. workers. The Republican colleague, who had been
- quite vocal in his opposition to any bill that would legalize the status of undocumented
- immigrants, shook his head.
- “My small business guys are still going to hire immigrants,” he said. “All your
- amendment does is make them pay more for their help.”
- “But why would they hire immigrants over U.S. workers if they cost the same?” I asked
- him.
- He smiled. “’Cause let’s face it, Barack. These Mexicans are just willing to work harder
- than Americans do.”
- That the opponents of the immigration bill could make such statements privately, while
- publicly pretending to stand up for American workers, indicates the degree of cynicism
- and hypocrisy that permeates the immigration debate. But with the public in a sour
- mood, their fears and anxieties fed daily by Lou Dobbs and talk radio hosts around the
- country, I can’t say I’m surprised that the compromise bill has been stalled in the House
- ever since it passed out of the Senate.
- And if I’m honest with myself, I must admit that I’m not entirely immune to such
- nativist sentiments. When I see Mexican flags waved at proimmigration demonstrations,
- I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to
- communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.
- Once, as the immigration debate began to heat up in the Capitol, a group of activists
- visited my office, asking that I sponsor a private relief bill that would legalize the status
- of thirty Mexican nationals who had been deported, leaving behind spouses or children
- with legal resident status. One of my staffers, Danny Sepulveda, a young man of
- Chilean descent, took the meeting, and explained to the group that although I was
- sympathetic to their plight and was one of the chief sponsors of the Senate immigration
- bill, I didn’t feel comfortable, as a matter of principle, sponsoring legislation that would
- select thirty people out of the millions in similar situations for a special dispensation.
- Some in the group became agitated; they suggested that I didn’t care about immigrant
- families and immigrant children, that I cared more about borders than about justice. One
- activist accused Danny of having forgotten where he came from—of not really being
- Latino.
- When I heard what had happened, I was both angry and frustrated. I wanted to call the
- group and explain that American citizenship is a privilege and not a right; that without
- meaningful borders and respect for the law, the very things that brought them to
- America, the opportunities and protections afforded those who live in this country,
- would surely erode; and that anyway, I didn’t put up with people abusing my staff—
- especially one who was championing their cause.
- It was Danny who talked me out of the call, sensibly suggesting that it might be
- counterproductive. Several weeks later, on a Saturday morning, I attended a
- naturalization workshop at St. Pius Church in Pilsen, sponsored by Congressman Luis
- Gutierrez, the Service Employees International Union, and several of the immigrants’
- rights groups that had visited my office. About a thousand people had lined up outside
- the church, including young families, elderly couples, and women with strollers; inside,
- people sat silently in wooden pews, clutching the small American flags that the
- organizers had passed out, waiting to be called by one of the volunteers who would help
- them manage the start of what would be a years-long process to become citizens.
- As I wandered down the aisle, some people smiled and waved; others nodded
- tentatively as I offered my hand and introduced myself. I met a Mexican woman who
- spoke no English but whose son was in Iraq; I recognized a young Colombian man who
- worked as a valet at a local restaurant and learned that he was studying accounting at the
- local community college. At one point a young girl, seven or eight, came up to me, her
- parents standing behind her, and asked me for an autograph; she was studying
- government in school, she said, and would show it to her class.
- I asked her what her name was. She said her name was Cristina and that she was in the
- third grade. I told her parents they should be proud of her. And as I watched Cristina
- translate my words into Spanish for them, I was reminded that America has nothing to
- fear from these newcomers, that they have come here for the same reason that families
- came here 150 years ago—all those who fled Europe’s famines and wars and unyielding
- hierarchies, all those who may not have had the right legal documents or connections or
- unique skills to offer but who carried with them a hope for a better life.
- We have a right and duty to protect our borders. We can insist to those already here that
- with citizenship come obligations—to a common language, common loyalties, a
- common purpose, a common destiny. But ultimately the danger to our way of life is not
- that we will be overrun by those who do not look like us or do not yet speak our
- language. The danger will come if we fail to recognize the humanity of Cristina and her
- family—if we withhold from them the rights and opportunities that we take for granted,
- and tolerate the hypocrisy of a servant class in our midst; or more broadly, if we stand
- idly by as America continues to become increasingly unequal, an inequality that tracks
- racial lines and therefore feeds racial strife and which, as the country becomes more
- black and brown, neither our democracy nor our economy can long withstand.
- That’s not the future I want for Cristina, I said to myself as I watched her and her family
- wave good-bye. That’s not the future I want for my daughters. Their America will be
- more dizzying in its diversity, its culture more polyglot. My daughters will learn
- Spanish and be the better for it. Cristina will learn about Rosa Parks and understand that
- the life of a black seamstress speaks to her own. The issues my girls and Cristina
- confront may lack the stark moral clarity of a segregated bus, but in one form or another
- their generation will surely be tested—just as Mrs. Parks was tested and the Freedom
- Riders were tested, just as we are all tested—by those voices that would divide us and
- have us turn on each other.
- And when they are tested in that way, I hope Cristina and my daughters will have all
- read about the history of this country and will recognize they have been given
- something precious.
- America is big enough to accommodate all their dreams.
- Chapter Eight
- The World Beyond Our Borders
- INDONESIA IS A nation of islands—more than seventeen thousand in all, spread
- along the equator between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, between Australia and the
- South China Sea. Most Indonesians are of Malay stock and live on the larger islands of
- Java, Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and Bali. On the far eastern islands like Ambon
- and the Indonesian portion of New Guinea the people are, in varying degrees, of
- Melanesian ancestry. Indonesia’s climate is tropical, and its rain forests were once
- teeming with exotic species like the orangutan and the Sumatran tiger. Today, those rain
- forests are rapidly dwindling, victim to logging, mining, and the cultivation of rice, tea,
- coffee, and palm oil. Deprived of their natural habitat, orangutans are now an
- endangered species; no more than a few hundred Sumatran tigers remain in the wild.
- With more than 240 million people, Indonesia’s population ranks fourth in the world,
- behind China, India, and the United States. More than seven hundred ethnic groups
- reside within the country’s borders, and more than 742 languages are spoken there.
- Almost 90 percent of Indonesia’s population practice Islam, making it the world’s
- largest Muslim nation. Indonesia is OPEC’s only Asian member, although as a
- consequence of aging infrastructure, depleted reserves, and high domestic consumption
- it is now a net importer of crude oil. The national language is Bahasa Indonesia. The
- capital is Jakarta. The currency is the rupiah.
- Most Americans can’t locate Indonesia on a map.
- This fact is puzzling to Indonesians, since for the past sixty years the fate of their nation
- has been directly tied to U.S. foreign policy. Ruled by a succession of sultanates and
- often-splintering kingdoms for most of its history, the archipelago became a Dutch
- colony—the Dutch East Indies—in the 1600s, a status that would last for more than
- three centuries. But in the lead-up to World War II, the Dutch East Indies’ ample oil
- reserves became a prime target of Japanese expansion; having thrown its lot in with the
- Axis powers and facing a U.S.-imposed oil embargo, Japan needed fuel for its military
- and industry. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan moved swiftly to take over the
- Dutch colony, an occupation that would last for the duration of the war.
- With the Japanese surrender in 1945, a budding Indonesian nationalist movement
- declared the country’s independence. The Dutch had other ideas, and attempted to
- reclaim their former territory. Four bloody years of war ensued. Eventually the Dutch
- bowed to mounting international pressure (the U.S. government, already concerned with
- the spread of communism under the banner of anticolonialism, threatened the
- Netherlands with a cutoff of Marshall Plan funds) and recognized Indonesia’s
- sovereignty. The principal leader of the independence movement, a charismatic,
- flamboyant figure named Sukarno, became Indonesia’s first president.
- Sukarno proved to be a major disappointment to Washington. Along with Nehru of
- India and Nasser of Egypt, he helped found the nonaligned movement, an effort by
- nations newly liberated from colonial rule to navigate an independent path between the
- West and the Soviet bloc. Indonesia’s Communist Party, although never formally in
- power, grew in size and influence. Sukarno himself ramped up the anti-Western
- rhetoric, nationalizing key industries, rejecting U.S. aid, and strengthening ties with the
- Soviets and China. With U.S. forces knee-deep in Vietnam and the domino theory still a
- central tenet of U.S. foreign policy, the CIA began providing covert support to various
- insurgencies inside Indonesia, and cultivated close links with Indonesia’s military
- officers, many of whom had been trained in the United States. In 1965, under the
- leadership of General Suharto, the military moved against Sukarno, and under
- emergency powers began a massive purge of communists and their sympathizers.
- According to estimates, between 500,000 and one million people were slaughtered
- during the purge, with 750,000 others imprisoned or forced into exile.
- It was two years after the purge began, in 1967, the same year that Suharto assumed the
- presidency, that my mother and I arrived in Jakarta, a consequence of her remarriage to
- an Indonesian student whom she’d met at the University of Hawaii. I was six at the
- time, my mother twenty-four. In later years my mother would insist that had she known
- what had transpired in the preceding months, we never would have made the trip. But
- she didn’t know—the full story of the coup and the purge was slow to appear in
- American newspapers. Indonesians didn’t talk about it either. My stepfather, who had
- seen his student visa revoked while still in Hawaii and had been conscripted into the
- Indonesian army a few months before our arrival, refused to talk politics with my
- mother, advising her that some things were best forgotten.
- And in fact, forgetting the past was easy to do in Indonesia. Jakarta was still a sleepy
- backwater in those days, with few buildings over four or five stories high, cycle
- rickshaws outnumbering cars, the city center and wealthier sections of town—with their
- colonial elegance and lush, well-tended lawns—quickly giving way to clots of small
- villages with unpaved roads and open sewers, dusty markets, and shanties of mud and
- brick and plywood and corrugated iron that tumbled down gentle banks to murky rivers
- where families bathed and washed laundry like pilgrims in the Ganges.
- Our family was not well off in those early years; the Indonesian army didn’t pay its
- lieutenants much. We lived in a modest house on the outskirts of town, without air-
- conditioning, refrigeration, or flush toilets. We had no car—my stepfather rode a
- motorcycle, while my mother took the local jitney service every morning to the U.S.
- embassy, where she worked as an English teacher. Without the money to go to the
- international school that most expatriate children attended, I went to local Indonesian
- schools and ran the streets with the children of farmers, servants, tailors, and clerks.
- As a boy of seven or eight, none of this concerned me much. I remember those years as
- a joyous time, full of adventure and mystery—days of chasing down chickens and
- running from water buffalo, nights of shadow puppets and ghost stories and street
- vendors bringing delectable sweets to our door. As it was, I knew that relative to our
- neighbors we were doing fine—unlike many, we always had enough to eat.
- And perhaps more than that, I understood, even at a young age, that my family’s status
- was determined not only by our wealth but by our ties to the West. My mother might
- scowl at the attitudes she heard from other Americans in Jakarta, their condescension
- toward Indonesians, their unwillingness to learn anything about the country that was
- hosting them—but given the exchange rate, she was glad to be getting paid in dollars
- rather than the rupiahs her Indonesian colleagues at the embassy were paid. We might
- live as Indonesians lived—but every so often my mother would take me to the
- American Club, where I could jump in the pool and watch cartoons and sip Coca-Cola
- to my heart’s content. Sometimes, when my Indonesian friends came to our house, I
- would show them books of photographs, of Disneyland or the Empire State Building,
- that my grandmother had sent me; sometimes we would thumb through the Sears
- Roebuck catalog and marvel at the treasures on display. All this, I knew, was part of my
- heritage and set me apart, for my mother and I were citizens of the United States,
- beneficiaries of its power, safe and secure under the blanket of its protection.
- The scope of that power was hard to miss. The U.S. military conducted joint exercises
- with the Indonesian military and training programs for its officers. President Suharto
- turned to a cadre of American economists to design Indonesia’s development plan,
- based on free-market principles and foreign investment. American development
- consultants formed a steady line outside government ministries, helping to manage the
- massive influx of foreign assistance from the U.S. Agency for International
- Development and the World Bank. And although corruption permeated every level of
- government—even the smallest interaction with a policeman or bureaucrat involved a
- bribe, and just about every commodity or product coming in and out of the country,
- from oil to wheat to automobiles, went through companies controlled by the president,
- his family, or members of the ruling junta—enough of the oil wealth and foreign aid
- was plowed back into schools, roads, and other infrastructure that Indonesia’s general
- population saw its living standards rise dramatically; between 1967 and 1997, per capita
- income would go from $50 to $4,600 a year. As far as the United States was concerned,
- Indonesia had become a model of stability, a reliable supplier of raw materials and
- importer of Western goods, a stalwart ally and bulwark against communism.
- I would stay in Indonesia long enough to see some of this newfound prosperity
- firsthand. Released from the army, my stepfather began working for an American oil
- company. We moved to a bigger house and got a car and a driver, a refrigerator, and a
- television set. But in 1971 my mother—concerned for my education and perhaps
- anticipating her own growing distance from my stepfather—sent me to live with my
- grandparents in Hawaii. A year later she and my sister would join me. My mother’s ties
- to Indonesia would never diminish; for the next twenty years she would travel back and
- forth, working for international agencies for six or twelve months at a time as a
- specialist in women’s development issues, designing programs to help village women
- start their own businesses or bring their produce to market. But while during my teenage
- years I would return to Indonesia three or four times on short visits, my life and
- attention gradually turned elsewhere.
- What I know of Indonesia’s subsequent history, then, I know mainly through books,
- newspapers, and the stories my mother told me. For twenty-five years, in fits and starts,
- Indonesia’s economy continued to grow. Jakarta became a metropolis of almost nine
- million souls, with skyscrapers, slums, smog, and nightmare traffic. Men and women
- left the countryside to join the ranks of wage labor in manufacturing plants built by
- foreign investment, making sneakers for Nike and shirts for the Gap. Bali became the
- resort of choice for surfers and rock stars, with five-star hotels, Internet connections,
- and a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. By the early nineties, Indonesia was
- considered an “Asian tiger,” the next great success story of a globalizing world.
- Even the darker aspects of Indonesian life—its politics and human rights record—
- showed signs of improvement. When it came to sheer brutality, the post-1967 Suharto
- regime never reached the levels of Iraq under Saddam Hussein; with his subdued, placid
- style, the Indonesian president would never attract the attention that more demonstrative
- strongmen like Pinochet or the Shah of Iran did. By any measure, though, Suharto’s rule
- was harshly repressive. Arrests and torture of dissidents were common, a free press
- nonexistent, elections a mere formality. When ethnically based secessionist movements
- sprang up in areas like Aceh, the army targeted not just guerrillas but civilians for swift
- retribution—murder, rape, villages set afire. And throughout the seventies and eighties,
- all this was done with the knowledge, if not outright approval, of U.S. administrations.
- But with the end of the Cold War, Washington’s attitudes began to change. The State
- Department began pressuring Indonesia to curb its human rights abuses. In 1992, after
- Indonesian military units massacred peaceful demonstrators in Dili, East Timor,
- Congress terminated military aid to the Indonesian government. By 1996, Indonesian
- reformists had begun taking to the streets, openly talking about corruption in high
- offices, the military’s excesses, and the need for free and fair elections.
- Then, in 1997, the bottom fell out. A run on currencies and securities throughout Asia
- engulfed an Indonesian economy already corroded by decades of corruption. The
- rupiah’s value fell 85 percent in a matter of months. Indonesian companies that had
- borrowed in dollars saw their balance sheets collapse. In exchange for a $43 billion
- bailout, the Western-dominated International Monetary Fund, or IMF, insisted on a
- series of austerity measures (cutting government subsidies, raising interest rates) that
- would lead the price of such staples as rice and kerosene to nearly double. By the time
- the crisis was over, Indonesia’s economy had contracted almost 14 percent. Riots and
- demonstrations grew so severe that Suharto was finally forced to resign, and in 1998 the
- country’s first free elections were held, with some forty-eight parties vying for seats and
- some ninety-three million people casting their votes.
- On the surface, at least, Indonesia has survived the twin shocks of financial meltdown
- and democratization. The stock market is booming, and a second national election went
- off without major incident, leading to a peaceful transfer of power. If corruption
- remains endemic and the military remains a potent force, there’s been an explosion of
- independent newspapers and political parties to channel discontent.
- On the other hand, democracy hasn’t brought a return to prosperity. Per capita income is
- nearly 22 percent less than it was in 1997. The gap between rich and poor, always
- cavernous, appears to have worsened. The average Indonesian’s sense of deprivation is
- amplified by the Internet and satellite TV, which beam in images of the unattainable
- riches of London, New York, Hong Kong, and Paris in exquisite detail. And anti-
- American sentiment, almost nonexistent during the Suharto years, is now widespread,
- thanks in part to perceptions that New York speculators and the IMF purposely
- triggered the Asian financial crisis. In a 2003 poll, most Indonesians had a higher
- opinion of Osama bin Laden than they did of George W. Bush.
- All of which underscores perhaps the most profound shift in Indonesia—the growth of
- militant, fundamentalist Islam in the country. Traditionally, Indonesians practiced a
- tolerant, almost syncretic brand of the faith, infused with the Buddhist, Hindu, and
- animist traditions of earlier periods. Under the watchful eye of an explicitly secular
- Suharto government, alcohol was permitted, non-Muslims practiced their faith free from
- persecution, and women—sporting skirts or sarongs as they rode buses or scooters on
- the way to work—possessed all the rights that men possessed. Today, Islamic parties
- make up one of the largest political blocs, with many calling for the imposition of
- sharia, or Islamic law. Seeded by funds from the Middle East, Wahhabist clerics,
- schools, and mosques now dot the countryside. Many Indonesian women have adopted
- the head coverings so familiar in the Muslim countries of North Africa and the Persian
- Gulf; Islamic militants and self-proclaimed “vice squads” have attacked churches,
- nightclubs, casinos, and brothels. In 2002, an explosion in a Bali nightclub killed more
- than two hundred people; similar suicide bombings followed in Jakarta in 2004 and Bali
- in 2005. Members of Jemaah Islamiah, a militant Islamic organization with links to Al
- Qaeda, were tried for the bombings; while three of those connected to the bombings
- received death sentences, the spiritual leader of the group, Abu Bakar Bashir, was
- released after a twenty-six-month prison term.
- It was on a beach just a few miles from the site of those bombings that I stayed the last
- time I visited Bali. When I think of that island, and all of Indonesia, I’m haunted by
- memories—the feel of packed mud under bare feet as I wander through paddy fields;
- the sight of day breaking behind volcanic peaks; the muezzin’s call at night and the
- smell of wood smoke; the dickering at the fruit stands alongside the road; the frenzied
- sound of a gamelan orchestra, the musicians’ faces lit by fire. I would like to take
- Michelle and the girls to share that piece of my life, to climb the thousand-year-old
- Hindu ruins of Prambanan or swim in a river high in Balinese hills.
- But my plans for such a trip keep getting delayed. I’m chronically busy, and traveling
- with young children is always difficult. And, too, perhaps I am worried about what I
- will find there—that the land of my childhood will no longer match my memories. As
- much as the world has shrunk, with its direct flights and cell phone coverage and CNN
- and Internet cafés, Indonesia feels more distant now than it did thirty years ago.
- I fear it’s becoming a land of strangers.
- IN THE FIELD of international affairs, it’s dangerous to extrapolate from the
- experiences of a single country. In its history, geography, culture, and conflicts, each
- nation is unique. And yet in many ways Indonesia serves as a useful metaphor for the
- world beyond our borders—a world in which globalization and sectarianism, poverty
- and plenty, modernity and antiquity constantly collide.
- Indonesia also provides a handy record of U.S. foreign policy over the past fifty years.
- In broad outline at least, it’s all there: our role in liberating former colonies and creating
- international institutions to help manage the post–World War II order; our tendency to
- view nations and conflicts through the prism of the Cold War; our tireless promotion of
- American-style capitalism and multinational corporations; the tolerance and occasional
- encouragement of tyranny, corruption, and environmental degradation when it served
- our interests; our optimism once the Cold War ended that Big Macs and the Internet
- would lead to the end of historical conflicts; the growing economic power of Asia and
- the growing resentment of the United States as the world’s sole superpower; the
- realization that in the short term, at least, democratization might lay bare, rather than
- alleviate, ethnic hatreds and religious divisions—and that the wonders of globalization
- might also facilitate economic volatility, the spread of pandemics, and terrorism.
- In other words, our record is mixed—not just in Indonesia but across the globe. At
- times, American foreign policy has been farsighted, simultaneously serving our national
- interests, our ideals, and the interests of other nations. At other times American policies
- have been misguided, based on false assumptions that ignore the legitimate aspirations
- of other peoples, undermine our own credibility, and make for a more dangerous world.
- Such ambiguity shouldn’t be surprising, for American foreign policy has always been a
- jumble of warring impulses. In the earliest days of the Republic, a policy of isolationism
- often prevailed—a wariness of foreign intrigues that befitted a nation just emerging
- from a war of independence. “Why,” George Washington asked in his famous Farewell
- Address, “by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our
- peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or
- caprice?” Washington’s view was reinforced by what he called America’s “detached
- and distant situation,” a geographic separation that would permit the new nation to
- “defy material injury from external annoyance.”
- Moreover, while America’s revolutionary origins and republican form of government
- might make it sympathetic toward those seeking freedom elsewhere, America’s early
- leaders cautioned against idealistic attempts to export our way of life; according to John
- Quincy Adams, America should not go “abroad in search of monsters to destroy” nor
- “become the dictatress of the world.” Providence had charged America with the task of
- making a new world, not reforming the old; protected by an ocean and with the bounty
- of a continent, America could best serve the cause of freedom by concentrating on its
- own development, becoming a beacon of hope for other nations and people around the
- globe.
- But if suspicion of foreign entanglements is stamped into our DNA, then so is the
- impulse to expand—geographically, commercially, and ideologically. Thomas Jefferson
- expressed early on the inevitability of expansion beyond the boundaries of the original
- thirteen states, and his timetable for such expansion was greatly accelerated with the
- Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark expedition. The same John Quincy Adams
- who warned against U.S. adventurism abroad became a tireless advocate of continental
- expansion and served as the chief architect of the Monroe Doctrine—a warning to
- European powers to keep out of the Western Hemisphere. As American soldiers and
- settlers moved steadily west and southwest, successive administrations described the
- annexation of territory in terms of “manifest destiny”—the conviction that such
- expansion was preordained, part of God’s plan to extend what Andrew Jackson called
- “the area of freedom” across the continent.
- Of course, manifest destiny also meant bloody and violent conquest—of Native
- American tribes forcibly removed from their lands and of the Mexican army defending
- its territory. It was a conquest that, like slavery, contradicted America’s founding
- principles and tended to be justified in explicitly racist terms, a conquest that American
- mythology has always had difficulty fully absorbing but that other countries recognized
- for what it was—an exercise in raw power.
- With the end of the Civil War and the consolidation of what’s now the continental
- United States, that power could not be denied. Intent on expanding markets for its
- goods, securing raw materials for its industry, and keeping sea lanes open for its
- commerce, the nation turned its attention overseas. Hawaii was annexed, giving
- America a foothold in the Pacific. The Spanish-American War delivered Puerto Rico,
- Guam, and the Philippines into U.S. control; when some members of the Senate
- objected to the military occupation of an archipelago seven thousand miles away—an
- occupation that would involve thousands of U.S. troops crushing a Philippine
- independence movement—one senator argued that the acquisition would provide the
- United States with access to the China market and mean “a vast trade and wealth and
- power.” America would never pursue the systematic colonization practiced by European
- nations, but it shed all inhibitions about meddling in the affairs of countries it deemed
- strategically important. Theodore Roosevelt, for example, added a corollary to the
- Monroe Doctrine, declaring that the United States would intervene in any Latin
- American or Caribbean country whose government it deemed not to America’s liking.
- “The United States of America has not the option as to whether it will or it will not play
- a great part in the world,” Roosevelt would argue. “It must play a great part. All that it
- can decide is whether it will play that part well or badly.”
- By the start of the twentieth century, then, the motives that drove U.S. foreign policy
- seemed barely distinguishable from those of the other great powers, driven by
- realpolitik and commercial interests. Isolationist sentiment in the population at large
- remained strong, particularly when it came to conflicts in Europe, and when vital U.S.
- interests did not seem directly at stake. But technology and trade were shrinking the
- globe; determining which interests were vital and which ones were not became
- increasingly difficult. During World War I, Woodrow Wilson avoided American
- involvement until the repeated sinking of American vessels by German U-boats and the
- imminent collapse of the European continent made neutrality untenable. When the war
- was over, America had emerged as the world’s dominant power—but a power whose
- prosperity Wilson now understood to be linked to peace and prosperity in faraway
- lands.
- It was in an effort to address this new reality that Wilson sought to reinterpret the idea
- of America’s manifest destiny. Making “the world safe for democracy” didn’t just
- involve winning a war, he argued; it was in America’s interest to encourage the self-
- determination of all peoples and provide the world a legal framework that could help
- avoid future conflicts. As part of the Treaty of Versailles, which detailed the terms of
- German surrender, Wilson proposed a League of Nations to mediate conflicts between
- nations, along with an international court and a set of international laws that would bind
- not just the weak but also the strong. “This is the time of all others when Democracy
- should prove its purity and its spiritual power to prevail,” Wilson said. “It is surely the
- manifest destiny of the United States to lead in the attempt to make this spirit prevail.”
- Wilson’s proposals were initially greeted with enthusiasm in the United States and
- around the world. The U.S. Senate, however, was less impressed. Republican Senate
- Leader Henry Cabot Lodge considered the League of Nations—and the very concept of
- international law—as an encroachment on American sovereignty, a foolish constraint on
- America’s ability to impose its will around the world. Aided by traditional isolationists
- in both parties (many of whom had opposed American entry into World War I), as well
- as Wilson’s stubborn unwillingness to compromise, the Senate refused to ratify U.S.
- membership in the League.
- For the next twenty years, America turned resolutely inward—reducing its army and
- navy, refusing to join the World Court, standing idly by as Italy, Japan, and Nazi
- Germany built up their military machines. The Senate became a hotbed of isolationism,
- passing a Neutrality Act that prevented the United States from lending assistance to
- countries invaded by the Axis powers, and repeatedly ignoring the President’s appeals
- as Hitler’s armies marched across Europe. Not until the bombing of Pearl Harbor would
- America realize its terrible mistake. “There is no such thing as security for any nation—
- or any individual—in a world ruled by the principles of gangsterism,” FDR would say
- in his national address after the attack. “We cannot measure our safety in terms of miles
- on any map any more.”
- In the aftermath of World War II, the United States would have a chance to apply these
- lessons to its foreign policy. With Europe and Japan in ruins, the Soviet Union bled
- white by its battles on the Eastern Front but already signaling its intentions to spread its
- brand of totalitarian communism as far as it could, America faced a choice. There were
- those on the right who argued that only a unilateral foreign policy and an immediate
- invasion of the Soviet Union could disable the emerging communist threat. And
- although isolationism of the sort that prevailed in the thirties was now thoroughly
- discredited, there were those on the left who downplayed Soviet aggression, arguing
- that given Soviet losses and the country’s critical role in the Allied victory, Stalin
- should be accommodated.
- America took neither path. Instead, the postwar leadership of President Truman, Dean
- Acheson, George Marshall, and George Kennan crafted the architecture of a new,
- postwar order that married Wilson’s idealism to hardheaded realism, an acceptance of
- America’s power with a humility regarding America’s ability to control events around
- the world. Yes, these men argued, the world is a dangerous place, and the Soviet threat
- is real; America needed to maintain its military dominance and be prepared to use force
- in defense of its interests across the globe. But even the power of the United States was
- finite—and because the battle against communism was also a battle of ideas, a test of
- what system might best serve the hopes and dreams of billions of people around the
- world, military might alone could not ensure America’s long-term prosperity or
- security.
- What America needed, then, were stable allies—allies that shared the ideals of freedom,
- democracy, and the rule of law, and that saw themselves as having a stake in a market-
- based economic system. Such alliances, both military and economic, entered into freely
- and maintained by mutual consent, would be more lasting—and stir less resentment—
- than any collection of vassal states American imperialism might secure. Likewise, it
- was in America’s interest to work with other countries to build up international
- institutions and promote international norms. Not because of a naive assumption that
- international laws and treaties alone would end conflicts among nations or eliminate the
- need for American military action, but because the more international norms were
- reinforced and the more America signaled a willingness to show restraint in the exercise
- of its power, the fewer the number of conflicts that would arise—and the more
- legitimate our actions would appear in the eyes of the world when we did have to move
- militarily.
- In less than a decade, the infrastructure of a new world order was in place. There was a
- U.S. policy of containment with respect to communist expansion, backed not just by
- U.S. troops but also by security agreements with NATO and Japan; the Marshall Plan to
- rebuild war-shattered economies; the Bretton Woods agreement to provide stability to
- the world’s financial markets and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade to
- establish rules governing world commerce; U.S. support for the independence of former
- European colonies; the IMF and World Bank to help integrate these newly independent
- nations into the world economy; and the United Nations to provide a forum for
- collective security and international cooperation.
- Sixty years later, we can see the results of this massive postwar undertaking: a
- successful outcome to the Cold War, an avoidance of nuclear catastrophe, the effective
- end of conflict between the world’s great military powers, and an era of unprecedented
- economic growth at home and abroad.
- It’s a remarkable achievement, perhaps the Greatest Generation’s greatest gift to us after
- the victory over fascism. But like any system built by man, it had its flaws and
- contradictions; it could fall victim to the distortions of politics, the sins of hubris, the
- corrupting effects of fear. Because of the enormity of the Soviet threat, and the shock of
- communist takeovers in China and North Korea, American policy makers came to view
- nationalist movements, ethnic struggles, reform efforts, or left-leaning policies
- anywhere in the world through the lens of the Cold War—potential threats they felt
- outweighed our professed commitment to freedom and democracy. For decades we
- would tolerate and even aid thieves like Mobutu, thugs like Noriega, so long as they
- opposed communism. Occasionally U.S. covert operations would engineer the removal
- of democratically elected leaders in countries like Iran—with seismic repercussions that
- haunt us to this day.
- America’s policy of containment also involved an enormous military buildup, matching
- and then exceeding the Soviet and Chinese arsenals. Over time, the “iron triangle” of
- the Pentagon, defense contractors, and congressmen with large defense expenditures in
- their districts amassed great power in shaping U.S. foreign policy. And although the
- threat of nuclear war would preclude direct military confrontation with our superpower
- rivals, U.S policy makers increasingly viewed problems elsewhere in the world through
- a military lens rather than a diplomatic one.
- Most important, the postwar system over time suffered from too much politics and not
- enough deliberation and domestic consensus building. One of America’s strengths
- immediately following the war was a degree of domestic consensus surrounding foreign
- policy. There might have been fierce differences between Republicans and Democrats,
- but politics usually ended at the water’s edge; professionals, whether in the White
- House, the Pentagon, the State Department, or the CIA, were expected to make
- decisions based on facts and sound judgment, not ideology or electioneering. Moreover,
- that consensus extended to the public at large; programs like the Marshall Plan, which
- involved a massive investment of U.S. funds, could not have gone forward without the
- American people’s basic trust in their government, as well as a reciprocal faith on the
- part of government officials that the American people could be trusted with the facts
- that went into decisions that spent their tax dollars or sent their sons to war.
- As the Cold War wore on, the key elements in this consensus began to erode. Politicians
- discovered that they could get votes by being tougher on communism than their
- opponents. Democrats were assailed for “losing China.” McCarthyism destroyed careers
- and crushed dissent. Kennedy would blame Republicans for a “missile gap” that didn’t
- exist on his way to beating Nixon, who himself had made a career of Red-baiting his
- opponents. Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson would all find their judgment
- clouded by fear that they would be tagged as “soft on communism.” The Cold War
- techniques of secrecy, snooping, and misinformation, used against foreign governments
- and foreign populations, became tools of domestic politics, a means to harass critics,
- build support for questionable policies, or cover up blunders. The very ideals that we
- had promised to export overseas were being betrayed at home.
- All these trends came to a head in Vietnam. The disastrous consequences of that
- conflict—for our credibility and prestige abroad, for our armed forces (which would
- take a generation to recover), and most of all for those who fought—have been amply
- documented. But perhaps the biggest casualty of that war was the bond of trust between
- the American people and their government—and between Americans themselves. As a
- consequence of a more aggressive press corps and the images of body bags flooding
- into living rooms, Americans began to realize that the best and the brightest in
- Washington didn’t always know what they were doing—and didn’t always tell the truth.
- Increasingly, many on the left voiced opposition not only to the Vietnam War but also
- to the broader aims of American foreign policy. In their view, President Johnson,
- General Westmoreland, the CIA, the “military-industrial complex,” and international
- institutions like the World Bank were all manifestations of American arrogance,
- jingoism, racism, capitalism, and imperialism. Those on the right responded in kind,
- laying responsibility not only for the loss of Vietnam but also for the decline of
- America’s standing in the world squarely on the “blame America first” crowd—the
- protesters, the hippies, Jane Fonda, the Ivy League intellectuals and liberal media who
- denigrated patriotism, embraced a relativistic worldview, and undermined American
- resolve to confront godless communism.
- Admittedly, these were caricatures, promoted by activists and political consultants.
- Many Americans remained somewhere in the middle, still supportive of America’s
- efforts to defeat communism but skeptical of U.S. policies that might involve large
- numbers of American casualties. Throughout the seventies and eighties, one could find
- Democratic hawks and Republican doves; in Congress, there were men like Mark
- Hatfield of Oregon and Sam Nunn of Georgia who sought to perpetuate the tradition of
- a bipartisan foreign policy. But the caricatures were what shaped public impressions
- during election time, as Republicans increasingly portrayed Democrats as weak on
- defense, and those suspicious of military and covert action abroad increasingly made the
- Democratic Party their political home.
- It was against this backdrop—an era of division rather than an era of consensus—that
- most Americans alive today formed whatever views they may have on foreign policy.
- These were the years of Nixon and Kissinger, whose foreign policies were tactically
- brilliant but were overshadowed by domestic policies and a Cambodian bombing
- campaign that were morally rudderless. They were the years of Jimmy Carter, a
- Democrat who—with his emphasis on human rights—seemed prepared to once again
- align moral concerns with a strong defense, until oil shocks, the humiliation of the
- Iranian hostage crisis, and the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan made him seem
- naive and ineffective.
- Looming perhaps largest of all was Ronald Reagan, whose clarity about communism
- seemed matched by his blindness regarding other sources of misery in the world. I
- personally came of age during the Reagan presidency—I was studying international
- affairs at Columbia, and later working as a community organizer in Chicago—and like
- many Democrats in those days I bemoaned the effect of Reagan’s policies toward the
- Third World: his administration’s support for the apartheid regime of South Africa, the
- funding of El Salvador’s death squads, the invasion of tiny, hapless Grenada. The more
- I studied nuclear arms policy, the more I found Star Wars to be ill conceived; the chasm
- between Reagan’s soaring rhetoric and the tawdry Iran-Contra deal left me speechless.
- But at times, in arguments with some of my friends on the left, I would find myself in
- the curious position of defending aspects of Reagan’s worldview. I didn’t understand
- why, for example, progressives should be less concerned about oppression behind the
- Iron Curtain than they were about brutality in Chile. I couldn’t be persuaded that U.S.
- multinationals and international terms of trade were single-handedly responsible for
- poverty around the world; nobody forced corrupt leaders in Third World countries to
- steal from their people. I might have arguments with the size of Reagan’s military
- buildup, but given the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, staying ahead of the Soviets
- militarily seemed a sensible thing to do. Pride in our country, respect for our armed
- services, a healthy appreciation for the dangers beyond our borders, an insistence that
- there was no easy equivalence between East and West—in all this I had no quarrel with
- Reagan. And when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, I had to give the old man his
- due, even if I never gave him my vote.
- Many people—including many Democrats—did give Reagan their vote, leading
- Republicans to argue that his presidency restored America’s foreign policy consensus.
- Of course, that consensus was never really tested; Reagan’s war against communism
- was mainly carried out through proxies and deficit spending, not the deployment of U.S.
- troops. As it was, the end of the Cold War made Reagan’s formula seem ill suited to a
- new world. George H. W. Bush’s return to a more traditional, “realist” foreign policy
- would result in a steady management of the Soviet Union’s dissolution and an able
- handling of the first Gulf War. But with the American public’s attention focused on the
- domestic economy, his skill in building international coalitions or judiciously projecting
- American power did nothing to salvage his presidency.
- By the time Bill Clinton came into office, conventional wisdom suggested that
- America’s post–Cold War foreign policy would be more a matter of trade than tanks,
- protecting American copyrights rather than American lives. Clinton himself understood
- that globalization involved not only new economic challenges but also new security
- challenges. In addition to promoting free trade and bolstering the international financial
- system, his administration would work to end long-festering conflicts in the Balkans
- and Northern Ireland and advance democratization in Eastern Europe, Latin America,
- Africa, and the former Soviet Union. But in the eyes of the public, at least, foreign
- policy in the nineties lacked any overarching theme or grand imperatives. U.S. military
- action in particular seemed entirely a matter of choice, not necessity—the product of our
- desire to slap down rogue states, perhaps; or a function of humanitarian calculations
- regarding the moral obligations we owed to Somalis, Haitians, Bosnians, or other
- unlucky souls.
- Then came September 11—and Americans felt their world turned upside down.
- IN JANUARY 2006, I boarded a C-130 military cargo plane and took off for my first
- trip into Iraq. Two of my colleagues on the trip—Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana and
- Congressman Harold Ford, Jr. of Tennessee—had made the trip before, and they
- warned me that the landings in Baghdad could be a bit uncomfortable: To evade
- potential hostile fire, military flights in and out of Iraq’s capital city engaged in a series
- of sometimes stomach-turning maneuvers. As our plane cruised through the hazy
- morning, though, it was hard to feel concerned. Strapped into canvas seats, most of my
- fellow passengers had fallen asleep, their heads bobbing against the orange webbing
- that ran down the center of the fuselage. One of the crew appeared to be playing a video
- game; another placidly thumbed through our flight plans.
- It had been four and a half years since I’d first heard reports of a plane hitting the World
- Trade Center. I had been in Chicago at the time, driving to a state legislative hearing
- downtown. The reports on my car radio were sketchy, and I assumed that there must
- have been an accident, a small prop plane perhaps veering off course. By the time I
- arrived at my meeting, the second plane had already hit, and we were told to evacuate
- the State of Illinois Building. Up and down the streets, people gathered, staring at the
- sky and at the Sears Tower. Later, in my law office, a group of us sat motionless as the
- nightmare images unfolded across the TV screen—a plane, dark as a shadow, vanishing
- into glass and steel; men and women clinging to windowsills, then letting go; the shouts
- and sobs from below and finally the rolling clouds of dust blotting out the sun.
- I spent the next several weeks as most Americans did—calling friends in New York and
- D.C., sending donations, listening to the President’s speech, mourning the dead. And for
- me, as for most of us, the effect of September 11 felt profoundly personal. It wasn’t just
- the magnitude of the destruction that affected me, or the memories of the five years I’d
- spent in New York—memories of streets and sights now reduced to rubble. Rather, it
- was the intimacy of imagining those ordinary acts that 9/11’s victims must have
- performed in the hours before they were killed, the daily routines that constitute life in
- our modern world—the boarding of a plane, the jostling as we exit a commuter train,
- grabbing coffee and the morning paper at a newsstand, making small talk on the
- elevator. For most Americans, such routines represented a victory of order over chaos,
- the concrete expression of our belief that so long as we exercised, wore seat belts, had a
- job with benefits, and avoided certain neighborhoods, our safety was ensured, our
- families protected.
- Now chaos had come to our doorstep. As a consequence, we would have to act
- differently, understand the world differently. We would have to answer the call of a
- nation. Within a week of the attacks, I watched the Senate vote 98–0 and the House vote
- 420–1 to give the President the authority to “use all necessary and appropriate force
- against those nations, organizations or persons” behind the attacks. Interest in the armed
- services and applications to join the CIA soared, as young people across America
- resolved to serve their country. Nor were we alone. In Paris, Le Monde ran the banner
- headline “Nous sommes tous Américains” (“We are all Americans”). In Cairo, local
- mosques offered prayers of sympathy. For the first time since its founding in 1949,
- NATO invoked Article 5 of its charter, agreeing that the armed attack on one of its
- members “shall be considered an attack against them all.” With justice at our backs and
- the world by our side, we drove the Taliban government out of Kabul in just over a
- month; Al Qaeda operatives fled or were captured or killed.
- It was a good start by the Administration, I thought—steady, measured, and
- accomplished with minimal casualties (only later would we discover the degree to
- which our failure to put sufficient military pressure on Al Qaeda forces at Tora Bora
- may have led to bin Laden’s escape). And so, along with the rest of the world, I waited
- with anticipation for what I assumed would follow: the enunciation of a U.S. foreign
- policy for the twenty-first century, one that would not only adapt our military planning,
- intelligence operations, and homeland defenses to the threat of terrorist networks but
- build a new international consensus around the challenges of transnational threats.
- This new blueprint never arrived. Instead what we got was an assortment of outdated
- policies from eras gone by, dusted off, slapped together, and with new labels affixed.
- Reagan’s “Evil Empire” was now “the Axis of Evil.” Theodore Roosevelt’s version of
- the Monroe Doctrine—the notion that we could preemptively remove governments not
- to our liking—was now the Bush Doctrine, only extended beyond the Western
- Hemisphere to span the globe. Manifest destiny was back in fashion; all that was
- needed, according to Bush, was American firepower, American resolve, and a “coalition
- of the willing.”
- Perhaps worst of all, the Bush Administration resuscitated a brand of politics not seen
- since the end of the Cold War. As the ouster of Saddam Hussein became the test case
- for Bush’s doctrine of preventive war, those who questioned the Administration’s
- rationale for invasion were accused of being “soft on terrorism” or “un-American.”
- Instead of an honest accounting of this military campaign’s pros and cons, the
- Administration initiated a public relations offensive: shading intelligence reports to
- support its case, grossly understating both the costs and the manpower requirements of
- military action, raising the specter of mushroom clouds.
- The PR strategy worked; by the fall of 2002, a majority of Americans were convinced
- that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, and at least 66 percent
- believed (falsely) that the Iraqi leader had been personally involved in the 9/11 attacks.
- Support for an invasion of Iraq—and Bush’s approval rating—hovered around 60
- percent. With an eye on the midterm elections, Republicans stepped up the attacks and
- pushed for a vote authorizing the use of force against Saddam Hussein. And on October
- 11, 2002, twenty-eight of the Senate’s fifty Democrats joined all but one Republican in
- handing to Bush the power he wanted.
- I was disappointed in that vote, although sympathetic to the pressures Democrats were
- under. I had felt some of those same pressures myself. By the fall of 2002, I had already
- decided to run for the U.S. Senate and knew that possible war with Iraq would loom
- large in any campaign. When a group of Chicago activists asked if I would speak at a
- large antiwar rally planned for October, a number of my friends warned me against
- taking so public a position on such a volatile issue. Not only was the idea of an invasion
- increasingly popular, but on the merits I didn’t consider the case against war to be cut-
- and-dried. Like most analysts, I assumed that Saddam had chemical and biological
- weapons and coveted nuclear arms. I believed that he had repeatedly flouted UN
- resolutions and weapons inspectors and that such behavior had to have consequences.
- That Saddam butchered his own people was undisputed; I had no doubt that the world,
- and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.
- What I sensed, though, was that the threat Saddam posed was not imminent, the
- Administration’s rationales for war were flimsy and ideologically driven, and the war in
- Afghanistan was far from complete. And I was certain that by choosing precipitous,
- unilateral military action over the hard slog of diplomacy, coercive inspections, and
- smart sanctions, America was missing an opportunity to build a broad base of support
- for its policies.
- And so I made the speech. To the two thousand people gathered in Chicago’s Federal
- Plaza, I explained that unlike some of the people in the crowd, I didn’t oppose all
- wars—that my grandfather had signed up for the war the day after Pearl Harbor was
- bombed and had fought in Patton’s army. I also said that “after witnessing the carnage
- and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this Administration’s pledge to hunt
- down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance” and
- would “willingly take up arms myself to prevent such tragedy from happening again.”
- What I could not support was “a dumb war, a rash war, a war based not on reason but
- on passion, not on principle but on politics.” And I said:
- I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of
- undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know
- that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international
- support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather
- than the best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al
- Qaeda.
- The speech was well received; activists began circulating the text on the Internet, and I
- established a reputation for speaking my mind on hard issues—a reputation that would
- carry me through a tough Democratic primary. But I had no way of knowing at the time
- whether my assessment of the situation in Iraq was correct. When the invasion was
- finally launched and U.S. forces marched unimpeded through Baghdad, when I saw
- Saddam’s statue topple and watched the President stand atop the U.S.S. Abraham
- Lincoln, a banner behind him proclaiming “Mission Accomplished,” I began to suspect
- that I might have been wrong—and was relieved to see the low number of American
- casualties involved.
- And now, three years later—as the number of American deaths passed two thousand
- and the number of wounded passed sixteen thousand; after $250 billion in direct
- spending and hundreds of billions more in future years to pay off the resulting debt and
- care for disabled veterans; after two Iraqi national elections, one Iraqi constitutional
- referendum, and tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths; after watching anti-American
- sentiment rise to record levels around the world and Afghanistan begin to slip back into
- chaos—I was flying into Baghdad as a member of the Senate, partially responsible for
- trying to figure out just what to do with this mess.
- The landing at Baghdad International Airport turned out not to be so bad—although I
- was thankful that we couldn’t see out the windows as the C-130 bucked and banked and
- dipped its way down. Our escort officer from the State Department was there to greet
- us, along with an assortment of military personnel with rifles slung over their shoulders.
- After getting our security briefing, recording our blood types, and being fitted for
- helmets and Kevlar vests, we boarded two Black Hawk helicopters and headed for the
- Green Zone, flying low, passing over miles of mostly muddy, barren fields crisscrossed
- by narrow roads and punctuated by small groves of date trees and squat concrete
- shelters, many of them seemingly empty, some bulldozed down to their foundations.
- Eventually Baghdad came into view, a sand-colored metropolis set in a circular pattern,
- the Tigris River cutting a broad, murky swath down its center. Even from the air the city
- looked worn and battered, the traffic on the streets intermittent—although almost every
- rooftop was cluttered with satellite dishes, which along with cell phone service had been
- touted by U.S. officials as one of the successes of the reconstruction.
- I would spend only a day and a half in Iraq, most of it in the Green Zone, a ten-mile-
- wide area of central Baghdad that had once been the heart of Saddam Hussein’s
- government but was now a U.S.-controlled compound, surrounded along its perimeter
- by blast walls and barbed wire. Reconstruction teams briefed us about the difficulty of
- maintaining electrical power and oil production in the face of insurgent sabotage;
- intelligence officers described the growing threat of sectarian militias and their
- infiltration of Iraqi security forces. Later, we met with members of the Iraqi Election
- Commission, who spoke with enthusiasm about the high turnout during the recent
- election, and for an hour we listened to U.S. Ambassador Khalilzad, a shrewd, elegant
- man with world-weary eyes, explain the delicate shuttle diplomacy in which he was
- now engaged, to bring Shi’ite, Sunni, and Kurdish factions into some sort of workable
- unity government.
- In the afternoon we had an opportunity to have lunch with some of the troops in the
- huge mess hall just off the swimming pool of what had once been Saddam’s presidential
- palace. They were a mix of regular forces, reservists, and National Guard units, from
- big cities and small towns, blacks and whites and Latinos, many of them on their second
- or third tour of duty. They spoke with pride as they told us what their units had
- accomplished—building schools, protecting electrical facilities, leading newly trained
- Iraqi soldiers on patrol, maintaining supply lines to those in far-flung regions of the
- country. Again and again, I was asked the same question: Why did the U.S. press only
- report on bombings and killings? There was progress being made, they insisted—I
- needed to let the folks back home know that their work was not in vain.
- It was easy, talking to these men and women, to understand their frustration, for all the
- Americans I met in Iraq, whether military or civilian, impressed me with their
- dedication, their skill, and their frank acknowledgment not only of the mistakes that had
- been made but also of the difficulties of the task that still lay ahead. Indeed, the entire
- enterprise in Iraq bespoke American ingenuity, wealth, and technical know-how;
- standing inside the Green Zone or any of the large operating bases in Iraq and Kuwait,
- one could only marvel at the ability of our government to essentially erect entire cities
- within hostile territory, self-contained communities with their own power and sewage
- systems, computer lines and wireless networks, basketball courts and ice cream stands.
- More than that, one was reminded of that unique quality of American optimism that
- everywhere was on display—the absence of cynicism despite the danger, sacrifice, and
- seemingly interminable setbacks, the insistence that at the end of the day our actions
- would result in a better life for a nation of people we barely knew.
- And yet, three conversations during the course of my visit would remind me of just how
- quixotic our efforts in Iraq still seemed—how, with all the American blood, treasure,
- and the best of intentions, the house we were building might be resting on quicksand.
- The first conversation took place in the early evening, when our delegation held a press
- conference with a group of foreign correspondents stationed in Baghdad. After the
- Q&A session, I asked the reporters if they’d stay for an informal, off-the-record
- conversation. I was interested, I said, in getting some sense of life outside the Green
- Zone. They were happy to oblige, but insisted they could only stay for forty-five
- minutes—it was getting late, and like most residents of Baghdad, they generally
- avoided traveling once the sun went down.
- As a group, they were young, mostly in their twenties and early thirties, all of them
- dressed casually enough that they could pass for college students. Their faces, though,
- showed the stresses they were under—sixty journalists had already been killed in Iraq
- by that time. Indeed, at the start of our conversation they apologized for being
- somewhat distracted; they had just received word that one of their colleagues, a reporter
- with the Christian Science Monitor named Jill Carroll, had been abducted, her driver
- found killed on the side of a road. Now they were all working their contacts, trying to
- track down her whereabouts. Such violence wasn’t unusual in Baghdad these days, they
- said, although Iraqis overwhelmingly bore the brunt of it. Fighting between Shi’ites and
- Sunnis had become widespread, less strategic, less comprehensible, more frightening.
- None of them thought that the elections would bring about significant improvement in
- the security situation. I asked them if they thought a U.S. troop withdrawal might ease
- tensions, expecting them to answer in the affirmative. Instead, they shook their heads.
- “My best guess is the country would collapse into civil war within weeks,” one of the
- reporters told me. “One hundred, maybe two hundred thousand dead. We’re the only
- thing holding this place together.”
- That night, our delegation accompanied Ambassador Khalilzad for dinner at the home
- of Iraqi interim President Jalal Tala-bani. Security was tight as our convoy wound its
- way past a maze of barricades out of the Green Zone; outside, our route was lined with
- U.S. troops at one-block intervals, and we were instructed to keep our vests and helmets
- on for the duration of the drive.
- After ten minutes we arrived at a large villa, where we were greeted by the president
- and several members of the Iraqi interim government. They were all heavyset men,
- most in their fifties or sixties, with broad smiles but eyes that betrayed no emotion. I
- recognized only one of the ministers—Mr. Ahmed Chalabi, the Western-educated
- Shi’ite who, as a leader of the exile group the Iraqi National Congress, had reportedly
- fed U.S. intelligence agencies and Bush policy makers some of the prewar information
- on which the decision to invade was made—information for which Chalabi’s group had
- received millions of dollars, and that had turned out to be bogus. Since then Chalabi had
- fallen out with his U.S. patrons; there were reports that he had steered U.S. classified
- information to the Iranians, and that Jordan still had a warrant out for his arrest after
- he’d been convicted in absentia on thirty-one charges of embezzlement, theft, misuse of
- depositor funds, and currency speculation. But he appeared to have landed on his feet;
- immaculately dressed, accompanied by his grown daughter, he was now the interim
- government’s acting oil minister.
- I didn’t speak much to Chalabi during dinner. Instead I was seated next to the former
- interim finance minister. He seemed impressive, speaking knowledgeably about Iraq’s
- economy, its need to improve transparency and strengthen its legal framework to attract
- foreign investment. At the end of the evening, I mentioned my favorable impression to
- one of the embassy staff.
- “He’s smart, no doubt about it,” the staffer said. “Of course, he’s also one of the leaders
- of the SCIRI Party. They control the Ministry of the Interior, which controls the police.
- And the police, well…there have been problems with militia infiltration. Accusations
- that they’re grabbing Sunni leaders, bodies found the next morning, that kind of
- thing…” The staffer’s voice trailed off, and he shrugged. “We work with what we
- have.”
- I had difficulty sleeping that night; instead, I watched the Redskins game, piped in live
- via satellite to the pool house once reserved for Saddam and his guests. Several times I
- muted the TV and heard mortar fire pierce the silence. The following morning, we took
- a Black Hawk to the Marine base in Fallujah, out in the arid, western portion of Iraq
- called Anbar Province. Some of the fiercest fighting against the insurgency had taken
- place in Sunni-dominated Anbar, and the atmosphere in the camp was considerably
- grimmer than in the Green Zone; just the previous day, five Marines on patrol had been
- killed by roadside bombs or small-arms fire. The troops here looked rawer as well, most
- of them in their early twenties, many still with pimples and the unformed bodies of
- teenagers.
- The general in charge of the camp had arranged a briefing, and we listened as the
- camp’s senior officers explained the dilemma facing U.S. forces: With improved
- capabilities, they were arresting more and more insurgent leaders each day, but like
- street gangs back in Chicago, for every insurgent they arrested, there seemed to be two
- ready to take his place. Economics, and not just politics, seemed to be feeding the
- insurgency—the central government had been neglecting Anbar, and male
- unemployment hovered around 70 percent.
- “For two or three dollars, you can pay some kid to plant a bomb,” one of the officers
- said. “That’s a lot of money out here.”
- By the end of the briefing, a light fog had rolled in, delaying our flight to Kirkuk. While
- waiting, my foreign policy staffer, Mark Lippert, wandered off to chat with one of the
- unit’s senior officers, while I struck up a conversation with one of the majors
- responsible for counterinsurgency strategy in the region. He was a soft-spoken man,
- short and with glasses; it was easy to imagine him as a high school math teacher. In fact,
- it turned out that before joining the Marines he had spent several years in the
- Philippines as a member of the Peace Corps. Many of the lessons he had learned there
- needed to be applied to the military’s work in Iraq, he told me. He didn’t have anywhere
- near the number of Arabic-speakers needed to build trust with the local population. We
- needed to improve cultural sensitivity within U.S. forces, develop long-term
- relationships with local leaders, and couple security forces to reconstruction teams, so
- that Iraqis could see concrete benefits from U.S. efforts. All this would take time, he
- said, but he could already see changes for the better as the military adopted these
- practices throughout the country.
- Our escort officer signaled that the chopper was ready to take off. I wished the major
- luck and headed for the van. Mark came up beside me, and I asked him what he’d
- learned from his conversation with the senior officer.
- “I asked him what he thought we needed to do to best deal with the situation.”
- “What did he say?”
- “Leave.”
- THE STORY OF America’s involvement in Iraq will be analyzed and debated for many
- years to come—indeed, it’s a story that’s still being written. At the moment, the
- situation there has deteriorated to the point where it appears that a low-grade civil war
- has begun, and while I believe that all Americans—regardless of their views on the
- original decision to invade—have an interest in seeing a decent outcome in Iraq, I
- cannot honestly say that I am optimistic about Iraq’s short-term prospects.
- I do know that at this stage it will be politics—the calculations of those hard,
- unsentimental men with whom I had dinner—and not the application of American force
- that determines what happens in Iraq. I believe as well that our strategic goals at this
- point should be well defined: achieving some semblance of stability in Iraq, ensuring
- that those in power in Iraq are not hostile to the United States, and preventing Iraq from
- becoming a base for terrorist activity. In pursuit of these goals, I believe it is in the
- interest of both Americans and Iraqis to begin a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops by the
- end of 2006, although how quickly a complete withdrawal can be accomplished is a
- matter of imperfect judgment, based on a series of best guesses—about the ability of the
- Iraqi government to deliver even basic security and services to its people, the degree to
- which our presence drives the insurgency, and the odds that in the absence of U.S.
- troops Iraq would descend into all-out civil war. When battle-hardened Marine officers
- suggest we pull out and skeptical foreign correspondents suggest that we stay, there are
- no easy answers to be had.
- Still, it’s not too early to draw some conclusions from our actions in Iraq. For our
- difficulties there don’t just arise as a result of bad execution. They reflect a failure of
- conception. The fact is, close to five years after 9/11 and fifteen years after the breakup
- of the Soviet Union, the United States still lacks a coherent national security policy.
- Instead of guiding principles, we have what appear to be a series of ad hoc decisions,
- with dubious results. Why invade Iraq and not North Korea or Burma? Why intervene
- in Bosnia and not Darfur? Are our goals in Iran regime change, the dismantling of all
- Iranian nuclear capability, the prevention of nuclear proliferation, or all three? Are we
- committed to use force wherever there’s a despotic regime that’s terrorizing its
- people—and if so, how long do we stay to ensure democracy takes root? How do we
- treat countries like China that are liberalizing economically but not politically? Do we
- work through the United Nations on all issues or only when the UN is willing to ratify
- decisions we’ve already made?
- Perhaps someone inside the White House has clear answers to these questions. But our
- allies—and for that matter our enemies—certainly don’t know what those answers are.
- More important, neither do the American people. Without a well-articulated strategy
- that the public supports and the world understands, America will lack the legitimacy—
- and ultimately the power—it needs to make the world safer than it is today. We need a
- revised foreign policy framework that matches the boldness and scope of Truman’s
- post–World War II policies—one that addresses both the challenges and the
- opportunities of a new millennium, one that guides our use of force and expresses our
- deepest ideals and commitments.
- I don’t presume to have this grand strategy in my hip pocket. But I know what I believe,
- and I’d suggest a few things that the American people should be able to agree on,
- starting points for a new consensus.
- To begin with, we should understand that any return to isolationism—or a foreign
- policy approach that denies the occasional need to deploy U.S. troops—will not work.
- The impulse to withdraw from the world remains a strong undercurrent in both parties,
- particularly when U.S. casualties are at stake. After the bodies of U.S. soldiers were
- dragged through the streets of Mogadishu in 1993, for example, Republicans accused
- President Clinton of squandering U.S. forces on ill-conceived missions; it was partly
- because of the experience in Somalia that candidate George W. Bush vowed in the 2000
- election never again to expend American military resources on “nation building.”
- Understandably, the Bush Administration’s actions in Iraq have produced a much
- bigger backlash. According to a Pew Research Center poll, almost five years after the
- 9/11 attacks, 46 percent of Americans have concluded that the United States should
- “mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they
- can on their own.”
- The reaction has been particularly severe among liberals, who see in Iraq a repeat of the
- mistakes America made in Vietnam. Frustration with Iraq and the questionable tactics
- the Administration used to make its case for the war has even led many on the left to
- downplay the threat posed by terrorists and nuclear proliferators; according to a January
- 2005 poll, self-identified conservatives were 29 points more likely than liberals to
- identify destroying Al Qaeda as one of their top foreign policy goals, and 26 points
- more likely to mention denying nuclear weapons to hostile groups or nations. The top
- three foreign policy objectives among liberals, on the other hand, were withdrawing
- troops from Iraq, stopping the spread of AIDS, and working more closely with our
- allies.
- The objectives favored by liberals have merit. But they hardly constitute a coherent
- national security policy. It’s useful to remind ourselves, then, that Osama bin Laden is
- not Ho Chi Minh, and that the threats facing the United States today are real, multiple,
- and potentially devastating. Our recent policies have made matters worse, but if we
- pulled out of Iraq tomorrow, the United States would still be a target, given its dominant
- position in the existing international order. Of course, conservatives are just as
- misguided if they think we can simply eliminate “the evildoers” and then let the world
- fend for itself. Globalization makes our economy, our health, and our security all
- captive to events on the other side of the world. And no other nation on earth has a
- greater capacity to shape that global system, or to build consensus around a new set of
- international rules that expand the zones of freedom, personal safety, and economic
- well-being. Like it or not, if we want to make America more secure, we are going to
- have to help make the world more secure.
- The second thing we need to recognize is that the security environment we face today is
- fundamentally different from the one that existed fifty, twenty-five, or even ten years
- ago. When Truman, Acheson, Kennan, and Marshall sat down to design the architecture
- of the post–World War II order, their frame of reference was the competition between
- the great powers that had dominated the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In that
- world, America’s greatest threats came from expansionist states like Nazi Germany or
- Soviet Russia, which could deploy large armies and powerful arsenals to invade key
- territories, restrict our access to critical resources, and dictate the terms of world trade.
- That world no longer exists. The integration of Germany and Japan into a world system
- of liberal democracies and free-market economies effectively eliminated the threat of
- great-power conflicts inside the free world. The advent of nuclear weapons and “mutual
- assured destruction” rendered the risk of war between the United States and the Soviet
- Union fairly remote even before the Berlin Wall fell. Today, the world’s most powerful
- nations (including, to an ever-increasing extent, China)—and, just as important, the vast
- majority of the people who live within these nations—are largely committed to a
- common set of international rules governing trade, economic policy, and the legal and
- diplomatic resolution of disputes, even if broader notions of liberty and democracy
- aren’t widely observed within their own borders.
- The growing threat, then, comes primarily from those parts of the world on the margins
- of the global economy where the international “rules of the road” have not taken hold—
- the realm of weak or failing states, arbitrary rule, corruption, and chronic violence;
- lands in which an overwhelming majority of the population is poor, uneducated, and cut
- off from the global information grid; places where the rulers fear globalization will
- loosen their hold on power, undermine traditional cultures, or displace indigenous
- institutions.
- In the past, there was the perception that America could perhaps safely ignore nations
- and individuals in these disconnected regions. They might be hostile to our worldview,
- nationalize a U.S. business, cause a spike in commodity prices, fall into the Soviet or
- Communist Chinese orbit, or even attack U.S. embassies or military personnel
- overseas—but they could not strike us where we live. September 11 showed that’s no
- longer the case. The very interconnectivity that increasingly binds the world together
- has empowered those who would tear that world down. Terrorist networks can spread
- their doctrines in the blink of an eye; they can probe the world economic system’s
- weakest links, knowing that an attack in London or Tokyo will reverberate in New York
- or Hong Kong; weapons and technology that were once the exclusive province of
- nation-states can now be purchased on the black market, or their designs downloaded
- off the Internet; the free travel of people and goods across borders, the lifeblood of the
- global economy, can be exploited for murderous ends.
- If nation-states no longer have a monopoly on mass violence; if in fact nation-states are
- increasingly less likely to launch a direct attack on us, since they have a fixed address to
- which we can deliver a response; if instead the fastest-growing threats are
- transnational—terrorist networks intent on repelling or disrupting the forces of
- globalization, potential pandemic disease like avian flu, or catastrophic changes in the
- earth’s climate—then how should our national security strategy adapt?
- For starters, our defense spending and the force structure of our military should reflect
- the new reality. Since the outset of the Cold War, our ability to deter nation-to-nation
- aggression has to a large extent underwritten security for every country that commits
- itself to international rules and norms. With the only blue-water navy that patrols the
- entire globe, it is our ships that keep the sea lanes clear. And it is our nuclear umbrella
- that prevented Europe and Japan from entering the arms race during the Cold War, and
- that—until recently, at least—has led most countries to conclude that nukes aren’t worth
- the trouble. So long as Russia and China retain their own large military forces and
- haven’t fully rid themselves of the instinct to throw their weight around—and so long as
- a handful of rogue states are willing to attack other sovereign nations, as Saddam
- attacked Kuwait in 1991—there will be times when we must again play the role of the
- world’s reluctant sheriff. This will not change—nor should it.
- On the other hand, it’s time we acknowledge that a defense budget and force structure
- built principally around the prospect of World War III makes little strategic sense. The
- U.S. military and defense budget in 2005 topped $522 billion—more than that of the
- next thirty countries combined. The United States’ GDP is greater than that of the two
- largest countries and fastest-growing economies—China and India—combined. We
- need to maintain a strategic force posture that allows us to manage threats posed by
- rogue nations like North Korea and Iran and to meet the challenges presented by
- potential rivals like China. Indeed, given the depletion of our forces after the wars in
- Iraq and Afghanistan, we will probably need a somewhat higher budget in the
- immediate future just to restore readiness and replace equipment.
- But our most complex military challenge will not be staying ahead of China (just as our
- biggest challenge with China may well be economic rather than military). More likely,
- that challenge will involve putting boots on the ground in the ungoverned or hostile
- regions where terrorists thrive. That requires a smarter balance between what we spend
- on fancy hardware and what we spend on our men and women in uniform. That should
- mean growing the size of our armed forces to maintain reasonable rotation schedules,
- keeping our troops properly equipped, and training them in the language,
- reconstruction, intelligence-gathering, and peacekeeping skills they’ll need to succeed
- in increasingly complex and difficult missions.
- A change in the makeup of our military won’t be enough, though. In coping with the
- asymmetrical threats that we’ll face in the future—from terrorist networks and the
- handful of states that support them—the structure of our armed forces will ultimately
- matter less than how we decide to use those forces. The United States won the Cold
- War not simply because it outgunned the Soviet Union but because American values
- held sway in the court of international public opinion, which included those who lived
- within communist regimes. Even more than was true during the Cold War, the struggle
- against Islamic-based terrorism will be not simply a military campaign but a battle for
- public opinion in the Islamic world, among our allies, and in the United States. Osama
- bin Laden understands that he cannot defeat or even incapacitate the United States in a
- conventional war. What he and his allies can do is inflict enough pain to provoke a
- reaction of the sort we’ve seen in Iraq—a botched and ill-advised U.S. military
- incursion into a Muslim country, which in turn spurs on insurgencies based on religious
- sentiment and nationalist pride, which in turn necessitates a lengthy and difficult U.S.
- occupation, which in turn leads to an escalating death toll on the part of U.S. troops and
- the local civilian population. All of this fans anti-American sentiment among Muslims,
- increases the pool of potential terrorist recruits, and prompts the American public to
- question not only the war but also those policies that project us into the Islamic world in
- the first place.
- That’s the plan for winning a war from a cave, and so far, at least, we are playing to
- script. To change that script, we’ll need to make sure that any exercise of American
- military power helps rather than hinders our broader goals: to incapacitate the
- destructive potential of terrorist networks and win this global battle of ideas.
- What does this mean in practical terms? We should start with the premise that the
- United States, like all sovereign nations, has the unilateral right to defend itself against
- attack. As such, our campaign to take out Al Qaeda base camps and the Taliban regime
- that harbored them was entirely justified—and was viewed as legitimate even in most
- Islamic countries. It may be preferable to have the support of our allies in such military
- campaigns, but our immediate safety can’t be held hostage to the desire for international
- consensus; if we have to go it alone, then the American people stand ready to pay any
- price and bear any burden to protect our country.
- I would also argue that we have the right to take unilateral military action to eliminate
- an imminent threat to our security—so long as an imminent threat is understood to be a
- nation, group, or individual that is actively preparing to strike U.S. targets (or allies with
- which the United States has mutual defense agreements), and has or will have the means
- to do so in the immediate future. Al Qaeda qualifies under this standard, and we can and
- should carry out preemptive strikes against them wherever we can. Iraq under Saddam
- Hussein did not meet this standard, which is why our invasion was such a strategic
- blunder. If we are going to act unilaterally, then we had better have the goods on our
- targets.
- Once we get beyond matters of self-defense, though, I’m convinced that it will almost
- always be in our strategic interest to act multilaterally rather than unilaterally when we
- use force around the world. By this, I do not mean that the UN Security Council—a
- body that in its structure and rules too often appears frozen in a Cold War–era time
- warp—should have a veto over our actions. Nor do I mean that we round up the United
- Kingdom and Togo and then do what we please. Acting multilaterally means doing
- what George H. W. Bush and his team did in the first Gulf War—engaging in the hard
- diplomatic work of obtaining most of the world’s support for our actions, and making
- sure our actions serve to further recognize international norms.
- Why conduct ourselves in this way? Because nobody benefits more than we do from the
- observance of international “rules of the road.” We can’t win converts to those rules if
- we act as if they apply to everyone but us. When the world’s sole superpower willingly
- restrains its power and abides by internationally agreed-upon standards of conduct, it
- sends a message that these are rules worth following, and robs terrorists and dictators of
- the argument that these rules are simply tools of American imperialism.
- Obtaining global buy-in also allows the United States to carry a lighter load when
- military action is required and enhances the chances for success. Given the
- comparatively modest defense budgets of most of our allies, sharing the military burden
- may in some cases prove a bit of an illusion, but in the Balkans and Afghanistan, our
- NATO partners have indeed shouldered their share of the risks and costs. Additionally,
- for the types of conflicts in which we’re most likely to find ourselves engaged, the
- initial military operation will often be less complex and costly than the work that
- follows—training local police forces, restoring electricity and water services, building a
- working judicial system, fostering an independent media, setting up a public health
- infrastructure, and planning elections. Allies can help pay the freight and provide
- expertise for these critical efforts, as they have in the Balkans and Afghanistan, but they
- are far more likely to do so if our actions have gained international support on the front
- end. In military parlance, legitimacy is a “force multiplier.”
- Just as important, the painstaking process of building coalitions forces us to listen to
- other points of view and therefore look before we leap. When we’re not defending
- ourselves against a direct and imminent threat, we will often have the benefit of time;
- our military power becomes just one tool among many (albeit an extraordinarily
- important one) to influence events and advance our interests in the world—interests in
- maintaining access to key energy sources, keeping financial markets stable, seeing
- international boundaries respected, and preventing genocide. In pursuit of those
- interests, we should be engaging in some hardheaded analysis of the costs and benefits
- of the use of force compared to the other tools of influence at our disposal.
- Is cheap oil worth the costs—in blood and treasure—of war? Will our military
- intervention in a particular ethnic dispute lead to a permanent political settlement or an
- indefinite commitment of U.S. forces? Can our dispute with a country be settled
- diplomatically or through a coordinated series of sanctions? If we hope to win the
- broader battle of ideas, then world opinion must enter into this calculus. And while it
- may be frustrating at times to hear anti-American posturing from European allies that
- enjoy the blanket of our protection, or to hear speeches in the UN General Assembly
- designed to obfuscate, distract, or excuse inaction, it’s just possible that beneath all the
- rhetoric are perspectives that can illuminate the situation and help us make better
- strategic decisions.
- Finally, by engaging our allies, we give them joint ownership over the difficult,
- methodical, vital, and necessarily collaborative work of limiting the terrorists’ capacity
- to inflict harm. That work includes shutting down terrorist financial networks and
- sharing intelligence to hunt down terrorist suspects and infiltrate their cells; our
- continued failure to effectively coordinate intelligence gathering even among various
- U.S. agencies, as well as our continued lack of effective human intelligence capacity, is
- inexcusable. Most important, we need to join forces to keep weapons of mass
- destruction out of terrorist hands.
- One of the best examples of such collaboration was pioneered in the nineties by
- Republican Senator Dick Lugar of Indiana and former Democratic Senator Sam Nunn
- of Georgia, two men who understood the need to nurture coalitions before crises strike,
- and who applied this knowledge to the critical problem of nuclear proliferation. The
- premise of what came to be known as the Nunn-Lugar program was simple: After the
- fall of the Soviet Union, the biggest threat to the United States—aside from an
- accidental launch—wasn’t a first strike ordered by Gorbachev or Yeltsin, but the
- migration of nuclear material or know-how into the hands of terrorists and rogue states,
- a possible result of Russia’s economic tailspin, corruption in the military, the
- impoverishment of Russian scientists, and security and control systems that had fallen
- into disrepair. Under Nunn-Lugar, America basically provided the resources to fix up
- those systems, and although the program caused some consternation to those
- accustomed to Cold War thinking, it has proven to be one of the most important
- investments we could have made to protect ourselves from catastrophe.
- In August 2005, I traveled with Senator Lugar to see some of this handiwork. It was my
- first trip to Russia and Ukraine, and I couldn’t have had a better guide than Dick, a
- remarkably fit seventy-three-year-old with a gentle, imperturbable manner and an
- inscrutable smile that served him well during the often interminable meetings we held
- with foreign officials. Together we visited the nuclear facilities of Saratov, where
- Russian generals pointed with pride to the new fencing and security systems that had
- been recently completed; afterward, they served us a lunch of borscht, vodka, potato
- stew, and a deeply troubling fish Jell-O mold. In Perm, at a site where SS-24 and SS-25
- tactical missiles were being dismantled, we walked through the center of eight-foot-high
- empty missile casings and gazed in silence at the massive, sleek, still-active missiles
- that were now warehoused safely but had once been aimed at the cities of Europe.
- And in a quiet, residential neighborhood of Kiev, we received a tour of the Ukraine’s
- version of the Centers for Disease Control, a modest three-story facility that looked like
- a high school science lab. At one point during our tour, after seeing windows open for
- lack of air-conditioning and metal strips crudely bolted to door jambs to keep out mice,
- we were guided to a small freezer secured by nothing more than a seal of string. A
- middle-aged woman in a lab coat and surgical mask pulled a few test tubes from the
- freezer, waving them around a foot from my face and saying something in Ukrainian.
- “That is anthrax,” the translator explained, pointing to the vial in the woman’s right
- hand. “That one,” he said, pointing to the one in the left hand, “is the plague.”
- I looked behind me and noticed Lugar standing toward the back of the room.
- “You don’t want a closer look, Dick?” I asked, taking a few steps back myself.
- “Been there, done that,” he said with a smile.
- There were moments during our travels when we were reminded of the old Cold War
- days. At the airport in Perm, for example, a border officer in his early twenties detained
- us for three hours because we wouldn’t let him search our plane, leading our staffs to
- fire off telephone calls to the U.S. embassy and Russia’s foreign affairs ministry in
- Moscow. And yet most of what we heard and saw—the Calvin Klein store and Maserati
- showroom in Red Square Mall; the motorcade of SUVs that pulled up in front of a
- restaurant, driven by burly men with ill-fitting suits who once might have rushed to
- open the door for Kremlin officials but were now on the security detail of one of
- Russia’s billionaire oligarchs; the throngs of sullen teenagers in T-shirts and low-riding
- jeans, sharing cigarettes and the music on their iPods as they wandered Kiev’s graceful
- boulevards—underscored the seemingly irreversible process of economic, if not
- political, integration between East and West.
- That was part of the reason, I sensed, why Lugar and I were greeted so warmly at these
- various military installations. Our presence not only promised money for security
- systems and fencing and monitors and the like; it also indicated to the men and women
- who worked in these facilities that they still in fact mattered. They had made careers,
- had been honored, for perfecting the tools of war. Now they found themselves presiding
- over remnants of the past, their institutions barely relevant to nations whose people had
- shifted their main attention to turning a quick buck.
- Certainly that’s how it felt in Donetsk, an industrial town in the southeastern portion of
- Ukraine where we stopped to visit an installation for the destruction of conventional
- weapons. The facility was nestled in the country, accessed by a series of narrow roads
- occasionally crowded with goats. The director of the facility, a rotund, cheerful man
- who reminded me of a Chicago ward superintendent, led us through a series of dark
- warehouse-like structures in various states of disrepair, where rows of workers nimbly
- dismantled an assortment of land mines and tank ordnance, and empty shell casings
- were piled loosely into mounds that rose to my shoulders. They needed U.S. help, the
- director explained, because Ukraine lacked the money to deal with all the weapons left
- over from the Cold War and Afghanistan—at the pace they were going, securing and
- disabling these weapons might take sixty years. In the meantime weapons would remain
- scattered across the country, often in shacks without padlocks, exposed to the elements,
- not just ammunition but high-grade explosives and shoulder-to-air missiles—tools of
- destruction that might find their way into the hands of warlords in Somalia, Tamil
- fighters in Sri Lanka, insurgents in Iraq.
- As he spoke, our group entered another building, where women wearing surgical masks
- stood at a table removing hexogen—a military-grade explosive—from various
- munitions and placing it into bags. In another room, I happened upon a pair of men in
- their undershirts, smoking next to a wheezing old boiler, flicking their ashes into an
- open gutter filled with orange-tinted water. One of our team called me over and showed
- me a yellowing poster taped to the wall. It was a relic of the Afghan war, we were told:
- instructions on how to hide explosives in toys, to be left in villages and carried home by
- unsuspecting children.
- A testament, I thought, to the madness of men.
- A record of how empires destroy themselves.
- THERE’S A FINAL dimension to U.S. foreign policy that must be discussed—the
- portion that has less to do with avoiding war than promoting peace. The year I was
- born, President Kennedy stated in his inaugural address: “To those peoples in the huts
- and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge
- our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required—not
- because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because
- it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few
- who are rich.” Forty-five years later, that mass misery still exists. If we are to fulfill
- Kennedy’s promise—and serve our long-term security interests—then we will have to
- go beyond a more prudent use of military force. We will have to align our policies to
- help reduce the spheres of insecurity, poverty, and violence around the world, and give
- more people a stake in the global order that has served us so well.
- Of course, there are those who would argue with my starting premise—that any global
- system built in America’s image can alleviate misery in poorer countries. For these
- critics, America’s notion of what the international system should be—free trade, open
- markets, the unfettered flow of information, the rule of law, democratic elections, and
- the like—is simply an expression of American imperialism, designed to exploit the
- cheap labor and natural resources of other countries and infect non-Western cultures
- with decadent beliefs. Rather than conform to America’s rules, the argument goes, other
- countries should resist America’s efforts to expand its hegemony; instead, they should
- follow their own path to development, taking their lead from left-leaning populists like
- Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, or turning to more traditional principles of social
- organization, like Islamic law.
- I don’t dismiss these critics out of hand. America and its Western partners did design
- the current international system, after all; it is our way of doing things—our accounting
- standards, our language, our dollar, our copyright laws, our technology, and our popular
- culture—to which the world has had to adapt over the past fifty years. If overall the
- international system has produced great prosperity in the world’s most developed
- countries, it has also left many people behind—a fact that Western policy makers have
- often ignored and occasionally made worse.
- Ultimately, though, I believe critics are wrong to think that the world’s poor will benefit
- by rejecting the ideals of free markets and liberal democracy. When human rights
- activists from various countries come to my office and talk about being jailed or
- tortured for their beliefs, they are not acting as agents of American power. When my
- cousin in Kenya complains that it’s impossible to find work unless he’s paid a bribe to
- some official in the ruling party, he hasn’t been brainwashed by Western ideas. Who
- doubts that, if given the choice, most of the people in North Korea would prefer living
- in South Korea, or that many in Cuba wouldn’t mind giving Miami a try?
- No person, in any culture, likes to be bullied. No person likes living in fear because his
- or her ideas are different. Nobody likes being poor or hungry, and nobody likes to live
- under an economic system in which the fruits of his or her labor go perpetually
- unrewarded. The system of free markets and liberal democracy that now characterizes
- most of the developed world may be flawed; it may all too often reflect the interests of
- the powerful over the powerless. But that system is constantly subject to change and
- improvement—and it is precisely in this openness to change that market-based liberal
- democracies offer people around the world their best chance at a better life.
- Our challenge, then, is to make sure that U.S. policies move the international system in
- the direction of greater equity, justice, and prosperity—that the rules we promote serve
- both our interests and the interests of a struggling world. In doing so, we might keep a
- few basic principles in mind. First, we should be skeptical of those who believe we can
- single-handedly liberate other people from tyranny. I agree with George W. Bush when
- in his second inaugural address he proclaimed a universal desire to be free. But there are
- few examples in history in which the freedom men and women crave is delivered
- through outside intervention. In almost every successful social movement of the last
- century, from Gandhi’s campaign against British rule to the Solidarity movement in
- Poland to the antiapartheid movement in South Africa, democracy was the result of a
- local awakening.
- We can inspire and invite other people to assert their freedoms; we can use international
- forums and agreements to set standards for others to follow; we can provide funding to
- fledgling democracies to help institutionalize fair election systems, train independent
- journalists, and seed the habits of civic participation; we can speak out on behalf of
- local leaders whose rights are violated; and we can apply economic and diplomatic
- pressure to those who repeatedly violate the rights of their own people.
- But when we seek to impose democracy with the barrel of a gun, funnel money to
- parties whose economic policies are deemed friendlier to Washington, or fall under the
- sway of exiles like Chalabi whose ambitions aren’t matched by any discernible local
- support, we aren’t just setting ourselves up for failure. We are helping oppressive
- regimes paint democratic activists as tools of foreign powers and retarding the
- possibility that genuine, homegrown democracy will ever emerge.
- A corollary to this is that freedom means more than elections. In 1941, FDR said he
- looked forward to a world founded upon four essential freedoms: freedom of speech,
- freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Our own experience
- tells us that those last two freedoms—freedom from want and freedom from fear—are
- prerequisites for all others. For half of the world’s population, roughly three billion
- people around the world living on less than two dollars a day, an election is at best a
- means, not an end; a starting point, not deliverance. These people are looking less for an
- “electocracy” than for the basic elements that for most of us define a decent life—food,
- shelter, electricity, basic health care, education for their children, and the ability to make
- their way through life without having to endure corruption, violence, or arbitrary power.
- If we want to win the hearts and minds of people in Caracas, Jakarta, Nairobi, or
- Tehran, dispersing ballot boxes will not be enough. We’ll have to make sure that the
- international rules we’re promoting enhance, rather than impede, people’s sense of
- material and personal security.
- That may require that we look in the mirror. For example, the United States and other
- developed countries constantly demand that developing countries eliminate trade
- barriers that protect them from competition, even as we steadfastly protect our own
- constituencies from exports that could help lift poor countries out of poverty. In our zeal
- to protect the patents of American drug companies, we’ve discouraged the ability of
- countries like Brazil to produce generic AIDS drugs that could save millions of lives.
- Under the leadership of Washington, the International Monetary Fund, designed after
- World War II to serve as a lender of last resort, has repeatedly forced countries in the
- midst of financial crisis like Indonesia to go through painful readjustments (sharply
- raising interest rates, cutting government social spending, eliminating subsidies to key
- industries) that cause enormous hardship to their people—harsh medicine that we
- Americans would have difficulty administering to ourselves.
- Another branch of the international financial system, the World Bank, has a reputation
- for funding large, expensive projects that benefit high-priced consultants and well-
- connected local elites but do little for ordinary citizens—although it’s these ordinary
- citizens who are left holding the bag when the loans come due. Indeed, countries that
- have successfully developed under the current international system have at times
- ignored Washington’s rigid economic prescriptions by protecting nascent industries and
- engaging in aggressive industrial policies. The IMF and World Bank need to recognize
- that there is no single, cookie-cutter formula for each and every country’s development.
- There is nothing wrong, of course, with a policy of “tough love” when it comes to
- providing development assistance to poor countries. Too many poor countries are
- hampered by archaic, even feudal, property and banking laws; in the past, too many
- foreign aid programs simply engorged local elites, the money siphoned off into Swiss
- bank accounts. Indeed, for far too long international aid policies have ignored the
- critical role that the rule of law and principles of transparency play in any nation’s
- development. In an era in which international financial transactions hinge on reliable,
- enforceable contracts, one might expect that the boom in global business would have
- given rise to vast legal reforms. But in fact countries like India, Nigeria, and China have
- developed two legal systems—one for foreigners and elites, and one for ordinary people
- trying to get ahead.
- As for countries like Somalia, Sierra Leone, or the Congo, well, they have barely any
- law whatsoever. There are times when considering the plight of Africa—the millions
- racked by AIDS, the constant droughts and famines, the dictatorships, the pervasive
- corruption, the brutality of twelve-year-old guerrillas who know nothing but war
- wielding machetes or AK-47s—I find myself plunged into cynicism and despair. Until
- I’m reminded that a mosquito net that prevents malaria cost three dollars; that a
- voluntary HIV testing program in Uganda has made substantial inroads in the rate of
- new infections at a cost of three or four dollars per test; that only modest attention—an
- international show of force or the creation of civilian protection zones—might have
- stopped the slaughter in Rwanda; and that onetime hard cases like Mozambique have
- made significant steps toward reform.
- FDR was certainly right when he said, “As a nation we may take pride in the fact that
- we are softhearted; but we cannot afford to be soft-headed.” We should not expect to
- help Africa if Africa ultimately proves unwilling to help itself. But there are positive
- trends in Africa often hidden in the news of despair. Democracy is spreading. In many
- places economies are growing. We need to build on these glimmers of hope and help
- those committed leaders and citizens throughout Africa build the better future they, like
- we, so desperately desire.
- Moreover, we fool ourselves in thinking that, in the words of one commentator, “we
- must learn to watch others die with equanimity,” and not expect consequences. Disorder
- breeds disorder; callousness toward others tends to spread among ourselves. And if
- moral claims are insufficient for us to act as a continent implodes, there are certainly
- instrumental reasons why the United States and its allies should care about failed states
- that don’t control their territories, can’t combat epidemics, and are numbed by civil war
- and atrocity. It was in such a state of lawlessness that the Taliban took hold of
- Afghanistan. It was in Sudan, site of today’s slow-rolling genocide, that bin Laden set
- up camp for several years. It’s in the misery of some unnamed slum that the next killer
- virus will emerge.
- Of course, whether in Africa or elsewhere, we can’t expect to tackle such dire problems
- alone. For that reason, we should be spending more time and money trying to strengthen
- the capacity of international institutions so that they can do some of this work for us.
- Instead, we’ve been doing the opposite. For years, conservatives in the United States
- have been making political hay over problems at the UN: the hypocrisy of resolutions
- singling out Israel for condemnation, the Kafkaesque election of nations like Zimbabwe
- and Libya to the UN Commission on Human Rights, and most recently the kickbacks
- that plagued the oil-for-food program.
- These critics are right. For every UN agency like UNICEF that functions well, there are
- other agencies that seem to do nothing more than hold conferences, produce reports, and
- provide sinecures for third-rate international civil servants. But these failures aren’t an
- argument for reducing our involvement in international organizations, nor are they an
- excuse for U.S. unilateralism. The more effective UN peacekeeping forces are in
- handling civil wars and sectarian conflicts, the less global policing we have to do in
- areas that we’d like to see stabilized. The more credible the information that the
- International Atomic Energy Agency provides, the more likely we are to mobilize allies
- against the efforts of rogue states to obtain nuclear weapons. The greater the capacity of
- the World Health Organization, the less likely we are to have to deal with a flu
- pandemic in our own country. No country has a bigger stake than we do in
- strengthening international institutions—which is why we pushed for their creation in
- the first place, and why we need to take the lead in improving them.
- Finally, for those who chafe at the prospect of working with our allies to solve the
- pressing global challenges we face, let me suggest at least one area where we can act
- unilaterally and improve our standing in the world—by perfecting our own democracy
- and leading by example. When we continue to spend tens of billions of dollars on
- weapons systems of dubious value but are unwilling to spend the money to protect
- highly vulnerable chemical plants in major urban centers, it becomes more difficult to
- get other countries to safeguard their nuclear power plants. When we detain suspects
- indefinitely without trial or ship them off in the dead of night to countries where we
- know they’ll be tortured, we weaken our ability to press for human rights and the rule of
- law in despotic regimes. When we, the richest country on earth and the consumer of 25
- percent of the world’s fossil fuels, can’t bring ourselves to raise fuel-efficiency
- standards by even a small fraction so as to weaken our dependence on Saudi oil fields
- and slow global warming, we should expect to have a hard time convincing China not to
- deal with oil suppliers like Iran or Sudan—and shouldn’t count on much cooperation in
- getting them to address environmental problems that visit our shores.
- This unwillingness to make hard choices and live up to our own ideals doesn’t just
- undermine U.S. credibility in the eyes of the world. It undermines the U.S.
- government’s credibility with the American people. Ultimately, it is how we manage
- that most precious resource—the American people, and the system of self-government
- we inherited from our Founders—that will determine the success of any foreign policy.
- The world out there is dangerous and complex; the work of remaking it will be long and
- hard, and will require some sacrifice. Such sacrifice comes about because the American
- people understand fully the choices before them; it is born of the confidence we have in
- our democracy. FDR understood this when he said, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, that
- “[t]his Government will put its trust in the stamina of the American people.” Truman
- understood this, which is why he worked with Dean Acheson to establish the
- Committee for the Marshall Plan, made up of CEOs, academics, labor leaders,
- clergymen, and others who could stump for the plan across the country. It seems as if
- this is a lesson that America’s leadership needs to relearn.
- I wonder, sometimes, whether men and women in fact are capable of learning from
- history—whether we progress from one stage to the next in an upward course or
- whether we just ride the cycles of boom and bust, war and peace, ascent and decline. On
- the same trip that took me to Baghdad, I spent a week traveling through Israel and the
- West Bank, meeting with officials from both sides, mapping in my own mind the site of
- so much strife. I talked to Jews who’d lost parents in the Holocaust and brothers in
- suicide bombings; I heard Palestinians talk of the indignities of checkpoints and
- reminisce about the land they had lost. I flew by helicopter across the line separating the
- two peoples and found myself unable to distinguish Jewish towns from Arab towns, all
- of them like fragile outposts against the green and stony hills. From the promenade
- above Jerusalem, I looked down at the Old City, the Dome of the Rock, the Western
- Wall, and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, considered the two thousand years of war
- and rumors of war that this small plot of land had come to represent, and pondered the
- possible futility of believing that this conflict might somehow end in our time, or that
- America, for all its power, might have any lasting say over the course of the world.
- I don’t linger on such thoughts, though—they are the thoughts of an old man. As
- difficult as the work may seem, I believe we have an obligation to engage in efforts to
- bring about peace in the Middle East, not only for the benefit of the people of the
- region, but for the safety and security of our own children as well.
- And perhaps the world’s fate depends not just on the events of its battlefields; perhaps it
- depends just as much on the work we do in those quiet places that require a helping
- hand. I remember seeing the news reports of the tsunami that hit East Asia in 2004—the
- towns of Indonesia’s western coast flattened, the thousands of people washed out to sea.
- And then, in the weeks that followed, I watched with pride as Americans sent more than
- a billion dollars in private relief aid and as U.S. warships delivered thousands of troops
- to assist in relief and reconstruction. According to newspaper reports, 65 percent of
- Indonesians surveyed said that this assistance had given them a more favorable view of
- the United States. I am not naive enough to believe that one episode in the wake of
- catastrophe can erase decades of mistrust.
- But it’s a start.
- Chapter Nine
- Family
- BY THE START of my second year in the Senate, my life had settled into a
- manageable rhythm. I would leave Chicago Monday night or early Tuesday morning,
- depending on the Senate’s voting schedule. Other than daily trips to the Senate gym and
- the rare lunch or dinner with a friend, the next three days would be consumed by a
- predictable series of tasks—committee markups, votes, caucus lunches, floor
- statements, speeches, photos with interns, evening fund-raisers, returning phone calls,
- writing correspondence, reviewing legislation, drafting op-eds, recording podcasts,
- receiving policy briefings, hosting constituent coffees, and attending an endless series of
- meetings. On Thursday afternoon, we would get word from the cloakroom as to when
- the last vote would be, and at the appointed hour I’d line up in the well of the Senate
- alongside my colleagues to cast my vote, before trotting down the Capitol steps in hopes
- of catching a flight that would get me home before the girls went to bed.
- Despite the hectic schedule, I found the work fascinating, if occasionally frustrating.
- Contrary to popular perceptions, only about two dozen significant bills come up for a
- roll-call vote on the Senate floor every year, and almost none of those are sponsored by
- a member of the minority party. As a result, most of my major initiatives—the
- formation of public school innovation districts, a plan to help U.S. automakers pay for
- their retiree health-care costs in exchange for increased fuel economy standards, an
- expansion of the Pell Grant program to help low-income students meet rising college
- tuition costs—languished in committee.
- On the other hand, thanks to great work by my staff, I managed to get a respectable
- number of amendments passed. We helped provide funds for homeless veterans. We
- provided tax credits to gas stations for installing E85 fuel pumps. We obtained funding
- to help the World Health Organization monitor and respond to a potential avian flu
- pandemic. We got an amendment out of the Senate eliminating no-bid contracts in the
- post-Katrina reconstruction, so more money would actually end up in the hands of the
- tragedy’s victims. None of these amendments would transform the country, but I took
- satisfaction in knowing that each of them helped some people in a modest way or
- nudged the law in a direction that might prove to be more economical, more
- responsible, or more just.
- One day in February I found myself in particularly good spirits, having just completed a
- hearing on legislation that Dick Lugar and I were sponsoring aimed at restricting
- weapons proliferation and the black-market arms trade. Because Dick was not only the
- Senate’s leading expert on proliferation issues but also the chairman of the Senate
- Foreign Relations Committee, prospects for the bill seemed promising. Wanting to
- share the good news, I called Michelle from my D.C. office and started explaining the
- significance of the bill—how shoulder-to-air missiles could threaten commercial air
- travel if they fell into the wrong hands, how small-arms stockpiles left over from the
- Cold War continued to feed conflict across the globe. Michelle cut me off.
- “We have ants.”
- “Huh?”
- “I found ants in the kitchen. And in the bathroom upstairs.”
- “Okay…”
- “I need you to buy some ant traps on your way home tomorrow. I’d get them myself,
- but I’ve got to take the girls to their doctor’s appointment after school. Can you do that
- for me?”
- “Right. Ant traps.”
- “Ant traps. Don’t forget, okay, honey? And buy more than one. Listen, I need to go into
- a meeting. Love you.”
- I hung up the receiver, wondering if Ted Kennedy or John McCain bought ant traps on
- the way home from work.
- MOST PEOPLE WHO meet my wife quickly conclude that she is remarkable. They are
- right about this—she is smart, funny, and thoroughly charming. She is also very
- beautiful, although not in a way that men find intimidating or women find off-putting; it
- is the lived-in beauty of the mother and busy professional rather than the touched-up
- image we see on the cover of glossy magazines. Often, after hearing her speak at some
- function or working with her on a project, people will approach me and say something
- to the effect of “You know I think the world of you, Barack, but your wife…wow!” I
- nod, knowing that if I ever had to run against her for public office, she would beat me
- without much difficulty.
- Fortunately for me, Michelle would never go into politics. “I don’t have the patience,”
- she says to people who ask. As is always the case, she is telling the truth.
- I met Michelle in the summer of 1988, while we were both working at Sidley & Austin,
- a large corporate law firm based in Chicago. Although she is three years younger than
- me, Michelle was already a practicing lawyer, having attended Harvard Law straight out
- of college. I had just finished my first year at law school and had been hired as a
- summer associate.
- It was a difficult, transitional period in my life. I had enrolled in law school after three
- years of work as a community organizer, and although I enjoyed my studies, I still
- harbored doubts about my decision. Privately, I worried that it represented the
- abandonment of my youthful ideals, a concession to the hard realities of money and
- power—the world as it is rather than the world as it should be.
- The idea of working at a corporate law firm, so near and yet so far removed from the
- poor neighborhoods where my friends were still laboring, only worsened these fears.
- But with student loans rapidly mounting, I was in no position to turn down the three
- months of salary Sidley was offering. And so, having sublet the cheapest apartment I
- could find, having purchased the first three suits ever to appear in my closet and a new
- pair of shoes that turned out to be a half size too small and would absolutely cripple me
- for the next nine weeks, I arrived at the firm one drizzly morning in early June and was
- directed to the office of the young attorney who’d been assigned to serve as my summer
- advisor.
- I don’t remember the details of that first conversation with Michelle. I remember that
- she was tall—almost my height in heels—and lovely, with a friendly, professional
- manner that matched her tailored suit and blouse. She explained how work was assigned
- at the firm, the nature of the various practice groups, and how to log our billable hours.
- After showing me my office and giving me a tour of the library, she handed me off to
- one of the partners and told me that she would meet me for lunch.
- Later Michelle would tell me that she had been pleasantly surprised when I walked into
- her office; the drugstore snapshot that I’d sent in for the firm directory made my nose
- look a little big (even more enormous than usual, she might say), and she had been
- skeptical when the secretaries who’d seen me during my interview told her I was cute:
- “I figured that they were just impressed with any black man with a suit and a job.” But
- if Michelle was impressed, she certainly didn’t tip her hand when we went to lunch. I
- did learn that she had grown up on the South Side, in a small bungalow just north of the
- neighborhoods where I had organized. Her father was a pump operator for the city; her
- mother had been a housewife until the kids were grown, and now worked as a secretary
- at a bank. She had attended Bryn Mawr Public Elementary School, gotten into Whitney
- Young Magnet School, and followed her brother to Princeton, where he had been a star
- on the basketball team. At Sidley she was part of the intellectual property group and
- specialized in entertainment law; at some point, she said, she might have to consider
- moving to Los Angeles or New York to pursue her career.
- Oh, Michelle was full of plans that day, on the fast track, with no time, she told me, for
- distractions—especially men. But she knew how to laugh, brightly and easily, and I
- noticed she didn’t seem in too much of a hurry to get back to the office. And there was
- something else, a glimmer that danced across her round, dark eyes whenever I looked at
- her, the slightest hint of uncertainty, as if, deep inside, she knew how fragile things
- really were, and that if she ever let go, even for a moment, all her plans might quickly
- unravel. That touched me somehow, that trace of vulnerability. I wanted to know that
- part of her.
- For the next several weeks, we saw each other every day, in the law library or the
- cafeteria or at one of the many outings that law firms organize for their summer
- associates to convince them that their life in the law will not be endless hours of poring
- through documents. She took me to one or two parties, tactfully overlooking my limited
- wardrobe, and even tried to set me up with a couple of her friends. Still, she refused to
- go out on a proper date. It wasn’t appropriate, she said, since she was my advisor.
- “That’s a poor excuse,” I told her. “Come on, what advice are you giving me? You’re
- showing me how the copy machine works. You’re telling me what restaurants to try. I
- don’t think the partners will consider one date a serious breach of firm policy.”
- She shook her head. “Sorry.”
- “Okay, I’ll quit. How’s that? You’re my advisor. Tell me who I have to talk to.”
- Eventually I wore her down. After a firm picnic, she drove me back to my apartment,
- and I offered to buy her an ice cream cone at the Baskin-Robbins across the street. We
- sat on the curb and ate our cones in the sticky afternoon heat, and I told her about
- working at Baskin-Robbins when I was a teenager and how it was hard to look cool in a
- brown apron and cap. She told me that for a span of two or three years as a child, she
- had refused to eat anything except peanut butter and jelly. I said that I’d like to meet her
- family. She said that she would like that.
- I asked if I could kiss her. It tasted of chocolate.
- We spent the rest of the summer together. I told her about organizing, and living in
- Indonesia, and what it was like to bodysurf. She told me about her childhood friends,
- and a trip to Paris she’d taken in high school, and her favorite Stevie Wonder songs.
- But it wasn’t until I met Michelle’s family that I began to understand her. It turned out
- that visiting the Robinson household was like dropping in on the set of Leave It to
- Beaver. There was Frasier, the kindly, good-humored father, who never missed a day of
- work or any of his son’s ball games. There was Marian, the pretty, sensible mother who
- baked birthday cakes, kept order in the house, and had volunteered at school to make
- sure her children were behaving and that the teachers were doing what they were
- supposed to be doing. There was Craig, the basketball-star brother, tall and friendly and
- courteous and funny, working as an investment banker but dreaming of going into
- coaching someday. And there were uncles and aunts and cousins everywhere, stopping
- by to sit around the kitchen table and eat until they burst and tell wild stories and listen
- to Grandpa’s old jazz collection and laugh deep into the night.
- All that was missing was the dog. Marian didn’t want a dog tearing up the house.
- What made this vision of domestic bliss all the more impressive was the fact that the
- Robinsons had had to overcome hardships that one rarely saw on prime-time TV. There
- were the usual issues of race, of course: the limited opportunities available to Michelle’s
- parents growing up in Chicago during the fifties and sixties; the racial steering and
- panic peddling that had driven white families away from their neighborhood; the extra
- energy required from black parents to compensate for smaller incomes and more violent
- streets and underfunded playgrounds and indifferent schools.
- But there was a more specific tragedy at the center of the Robinson household. At the
- age of thirty, in the prime of his life, Michelle’s father had been diagnosed with multiple
- sclerosis. For the next twenty-five years, as his condition steadily deteriorated, he had
- carried out his responsibilities to his family without a trace of self-pity, giving himself
- an extra hour every morning to get to work, struggling with every physical act from
- driving a car to buttoning his shirt, smiling and joking as he labored—at first with a
- limp and eventually with the aid of two canes, his balding head beading with sweat—
- across a field to watch his son play, or across the living room to give his daughter a kiss.
- After we were married, Michelle would help me understand the hidden toll that her
- father’s illness had taken on her family; how heavy a burden Michelle’s mother had
- been forced to carry; how carefully circumscribed their lives together had been, with
- even the smallest outing carefully planned to avoid problems or awkwardness; how
- terrifyingly random life seemed beneath the smiles and laughter.
- But back then I saw only the joy of the Robinson house. For someone like me, who had
- barely known his father, who had spent much of his life traveling from place to place,
- his bloodlines scattered to the four winds, the home that Frasier and Marian Robinson
- had built for themselves and their children stirred a longing for stability and a sense of
- place that I had not realized was there. Just as Michelle perhaps saw in me a life of
- adventure, risk, travel to exotic lands—a wider horizon than she had previously allowed
- herself.
- Six months after Michelle and I met, her father died suddenly of complications after a
- kidney operation. I flew back to Chicago and stood at his gravesite, Michelle’s head on
- my shoulder. As the casket was lowered, I promised Frasier Robinson that I would take
- care of his girl. I realized that in some unspoken, still tentative way, she and I were
- already becoming a family.
- THERE’S A LOT of talk these days about the decline of the American family. Social
- conservatives claim that the traditional family is under assault from Hollywood movies
- and gay pride parades. Liberals point to the economic factors—from stagnating wages
- to inadequate day care—that have put families under increasing duress. Our popular
- culture feeds the alarm, with tales of women consigned to permanent singlehood, men
- unwilling to make lasting commitments, and teens engaged in endless sexual escapades.
- Nothing seems settled, as it was in the past; our roles and relationships all feel up for
- grabs.
- Given this hand-wringing, it may be helpful to step back and remind ourselves that the
- institution of marriage isn’t disappearing anytime soon. While it’s true that marriage
- rates have declined steadily since the 1950s, some of the decline is a result of more
- Americans delaying marriage to pursue an education or establish a career; by the age of
- forty-five, 89 percent of women and 83 percent of men will have tied the knot at least
- once. Married couples continue to head 67 percent of American families, and the vast
- majority of Americans still consider marriage to be the best foundation for personal
- intimacy, economic stability, and child rearing.
- Still, there’s no denying that the nature of the family has changed over the last fifty
- years. Although divorce rates have declined by 21 percent since their peak in the late
- seventies and early eighties, half of all first marriages still end in divorce. Compared to
- our grandparents, we’re more tolerant of premarital sex, more likely to cohabit, and
- more likely to live alone. We’re also far more likely to be raising children in
- nontraditional households; 60 percent of all divorces involve children, 33 percent of all
- children are born out of wedlock, and 34 percent of children don’t live with their
- biological fathers.
- These trends are particularly acute in the African American community, where it’s fair
- to say that the nuclear family is on the verge of collapse. Since 1950, the marriage rate
- for black women has plummeted from 62 percent to 36 percent. Between 1960 and
- 1995, the number of African American children living with two married parents
- dropped by more than half; today 54 percent of all African American children live in
- single-parent households, compared to about 23 percent of all white children.
- For adults, at least, the effect of these changes is a mixed bag. Research suggests that on
- average, married couples live healthier, wealthier, and happier lives, but no one claims
- that men and women benefit from being trapped in bad or abusive marriages. Certainly
- the decision of increasing numbers of Americans to delay marriage makes sense; not
- only does today’s information economy demand more time in school, but studies show
- that couples who wait until their late twenties or thirties to get married are more likely
- to stay married than those who marry young.
- Whatever the effect on adults, though, these trends haven’t been so good for our
- children. Many single moms—including the one who raised me—do a heroic job on
- behalf of their kids. Still, children living with single mothers are five times more likely
- to be poor than children in two-parent households. Children in single-parent homes are
- also more likely to drop out of school and become teen parents, even when income is
- factored out. And the evidence suggests that on average, children who live with both
- their biological mother and father do better than those who live in stepfamilies or with
- cohabiting partners.
- In light of these facts, policies that strengthen marriage for those who choose it and that
- discourage unintended births outside of marriage are sensible goals to pursue. For
- example, most people agree that neither federal welfare programs nor the tax code
- should penalize married couples; those aspects of welfare reform enacted under Clinton
- and those elements of the Bush tax plan that reduced the marriage penalty enjoy strong
- bipartisan support.
- The same goes for teen pregnancy prevention. Everyone agrees that teen pregnancies
- place both mother and child at risk for all sorts of problems. Since 1990, the teen
- pregnancy rate has dropped by 28 percent, an unadulterated piece of good news. But
- teens still account for almost a quarter of out-of-wedlock births, and teen mothers are
- more likely to have additional out-of-wedlock births as they get older. Community-
- based programs that have a proven track record in preventing unwanted pregnancies—
- both by encouraging abstinence and by promoting the proper use of contraception—
- deserve broad support.
- Finally, preliminary research shows that marriage education workshops can make a real
- difference in helping married couples stay together and in encouraging unmarried
- couples who are living together to form a more lasting bond. Expanding access to such
- services to low-income couples, perhaps in concert with job training and placement,
- medical coverage, and other services already available, should be something everybody
- can agree on.
- But for many social conservatives, these commonsense approaches don’t go far enough.
- They want a return to a bygone era, in which sexuality outside of marriage was subject
- to both punishment and shame, obtaining a divorce was far more difficult, and marriage
- offered not merely personal fulfillment but also well-defined social roles for men and
- for women. In their view, any government policy that appears to reward or even express
- neutrality toward what they consider to be immoral behavior—whether providing birth
- control to young people, abortion services to women, welfare support for unwed
- mothers, or legal recognition of same-sex unions—inherently devalues the marital bond.
- Such policies take us one step closer, the argument goes, to a brave new world in which
- gender differences have been erased, sex is purely recreational, marriage is disposable,
- motherhood is an inconvenience, and civilization itself rests on shifting sands.
- I understand the impulse to restore a sense of order to a culture that’s constantly in flux.
- And I certainly appreciate the desire of parents to shield their children from values they
- consider unwholesome; it’s a feeling I often share when I listen to the lyrics of songs on
- the radio.
- But all in all, I have little sympathy for those who would enlist the government in the
- task of enforcing sexual morality. Like most Americans, I consider decisions about sex,
- marriage, divorce, and childbearing to be highly personal—at the very core of our
- system of individual liberty. Where such personal decisions raise the prospect of
- significant harm to others—as is true with child abuse, incest, bigamy, domestic
- violence, or failure to pay child support—society has a right and duty to step in. (Those
- who believe in the personhood of the fetus would put abortion in this category.) Beyond
- that, I have no interest in seeing the president, Congress, or a government bureaucracy
- regulating what goes on in America’s bedrooms.
- Moreover, I don’t believe we strengthen the family by bullying or coercing people into
- the relationships we think are best for them—or by punishing those who fail to meet our
- standards of sexual propriety. I want to encourage young people to show more
- reverence toward sex and intimacy, and I applaud parents, congregations, and
- community programs that transmit that message. But I’m not willing to consign a
- teenage girl to a lifetime of struggle because of lack of access to birth control. I want
- couples to understand the value of commitment and the sacrifices marriage entails. But
- I’m not willing to use the force of law to keep couples together regardless of their
- personal circumstances.
- Perhaps I just find the ways of the human heart too various, and my own life too
- imperfect, to believe myself qualified to serve as anyone’s moral arbiter. I do know that
- in our fourteen years of marriage, Michelle and I have never had an argument as a result
- of what other people are doing in their personal lives.
- What we have argued about—repeatedly—is how to balance work and family in a way
- that’s equitable to Michelle and good for our children. We’re not alone in this. In the
- sixties and early seventies, the household Michelle grew up in was the norm—more
- than 70 percent of families had Mom at home and relied on Dad as the sole
- breadwinner.
- Today those numbers are reversed. Seventy percent of families with children are headed
- by two working parents or a single working parent. The result has been what my policy
- director and work-family expert Karen Kornbluh calls “the juggler family,” in which
- parents struggle to pay the bills, look after their children, maintain a household, and
- maintain their relationship. Keeping all these balls in the air takes its toll on family life.
- As Karen explained when she was director of the Work and Family Program at the New
- America Foundation and testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Children and
- Families:
- Americans today have 22 fewer hours a week to spend with their kids than they did in
- 1969. Millions of children are left in unlicensed day care every day—or at home alone
- with the TV as a babysitter. Employed mothers lose almost an hour of sleep a day in
- their attempt to make it all add up. Recent data show that parents with school age
- children show high signs of stress—stress that has an impact on their productivity and
- work—when they have inflexible jobs and unstable after-school care.
- Sound familiar?
- Many social conservatives suggest that this flood of women out of the home and into
- the workplace is a direct consequence of feminist ideology, and hence can be reversed if
- women will just come to their senses and return to their traditional homemaking roles.
- It’s true that ideas about equality for women have played a critical role in the
- transformation of the workplace; in the minds of most Americans, the opportunity for
- women to pursue careers, achieve economic independence, and realize their talents on
- an equal footing with men has been one of the great achievements of modern life.
- But for the average American woman, the decision to work isn’t simply a matter of
- changing attitudes. It’s a matter of making ends meet.
- Consider the facts. Over the last thirty years, the average earnings of American men
- have grown less than 1 percent after being adjusted for inflation. Meanwhile, the cost of
- everything, from housing to health care to education, has steadily risen. What has kept a
- large swath of American families from falling out of the middle class has been Mom’s
- paycheck. In their book The Two-Income Trap, Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi
- point out that the additional income mothers bring home isn’t going to luxury items.
- Instead, almost all of it goes to purchase what families believe to be investments in their
- children’s future—preschool education, college tuition, and most of all, homes in safe
- neighborhoods with good public schools. In fact, between these fixed costs and the
- added expenses of a working mother (particularly day care and a second car), the
- average two-income family has less discretionary income—and is less financially
- secure—than its single-earner counterpart thirty years ago.
- So is it possible for the average family to return to life on a single income? Not when
- every other family on the block is earning two incomes and bidding up the prices of
- homes, schools, and college tuition. Warren and Tyagi show that an average single-
- earner family today that tried to maintain a middle-class lifestyle would have 60 percent
- less discretionary income than its 1970s counterpart. In other words, for most families,
- having Mom stay at home means living in a less-safe neighborhood and enrolling their
- children in a less-competitive school.
- That’s not a choice most Americans are willing to make. Instead they do the best they
- can under the circumstances, knowing that the type of household they grew up in—the
- type of household in which Frasier and Marian Robinson raised their kids—has become
- much, much harder to sustain.
- BOTH MEN AND women have had to adjust to these new realities. But it’s hard to
- argue with Michelle when she insists that the burdens of the modern family fall more
- heavily on the woman.
- For the first few years of our marriage, Michelle and I went through the usual
- adjustments all couples go through: learning to read each other’s moods, accepting the
- quirks and habits of a stranger underfoot. Michelle liked to wake up early and could
- barely keep her eyes open after ten o’clock. I was a night owl and could be a bit grumpy
- (mean, Michelle would say) within the first half hour or so of getting out of bed. Partly
- because I was still working on my first book, and perhaps because I had lived much of
- my life as an only child, I would often spend the evening holed up in my office in the
- back of our railroad apartment; what I considered normal often left Michelle feeling
- lonely. I invariably left the butter out after breakfast and forgot to twist the little tie
- around the bread bag; Michelle could rack up parking tickets like nobody’s business.
- Mostly, though, those early years were full of ordinary pleasures—going to movies,
- having dinner with friends, catching the occasional concert. We were both working
- hard: I was practicing law at a small civil rights firm and had started teaching at the
- University of Chicago Law School, while Michelle had decided to leave her law
- practice, first to work in Chicago’s Department of Planning and then to run the Chicago
- arm of a national service program called Public Allies. Our time together got squeezed
- even more when I ran for the state legislature, but despite my lengthy absences and her
- general dislike of politics, Michelle supported the decision; “I know it’s something that
- you want to do,” she would tell me. On the nights that I was in Springfield, we’d talk
- and laugh over the phone, sharing the humor and frustrations of our days apart, and I
- would fall asleep content in the knowledge of our love.
- Then Malia was born, a Fourth of July baby, so calm and so beautiful, with big,
- hypnotic eyes that seemed to read the world the moment they opened. Malia’s arrival
- came at an ideal time for both of us: Because I was out of session and didn’t have to
- teach during the summer, I was able to spend every evening at home; meanwhile,
- Michelle had decided to accept a part-time job at the University of Chicago so she could
- spend more time with the baby, and the new job didn’t start until October. For three
- magical months the two of us fussed and fretted over our new baby, checking the crib to
- make sure she was breathing, coaxing smiles from her, singing her songs, and taking so
- many pictures that we started to wonder if we were damaging her eyes. Suddenly our
- different biorhythms came in handy: While Michelle got some well-earned sleep, I
- would stay up until one or two in the morning, changing diapers, heating breast milk,
- feeling my daughter’s soft breath against my chest as I rocked her to sleep, guessing at
- her infant dreams.
- But when fall came—when my classes started back up, the legislature went back into
- session, and Michelle went back to work—the strains in our relationship began to show.
- I was often gone for three days at a stretch, and even when I was back in Chicago, I
- might have evening meetings to attend, or papers to grade, or briefs to write. Michelle
- found that a part-time job had a funny way of expanding. We found a wonderful in-
- home babysitter to look after Malia while we were at work, but with a full-time
- employee suddenly on our payroll, money got tight.
- Tired and stressed, we had little time for conversation, much less romance. When I
- launched my ill-fated congressional run, Michelle put up no pretense of being happy
- with the decision. My failure to clean up the kitchen suddenly became less endearing.
- Leaning down to kiss Michelle good-bye in the morning, all I would get was a peck on
- the cheek. By the time Sasha was born—just as beautiful, and almost as calm as her
- sister—my wife’s anger toward me seemed barely contained.
- “You only think about yourself,” she would tell me. “I never thought I’d have to raise a
- family alone.”
- I was stung by such accusations; I thought she was being unfair. After all, it wasn’t as if
- I went carousing with the boys every night. I made few demands of Michelle—I didn’t
- expect her to darn my socks or have dinner waiting for me when I got home. Whenever
- I could, I pitched in with the kids. All I asked for in return was a little tenderness.
- Instead, I found myself subjected to endless negotiations about every detail of managing
- the house, long lists of things that I needed to do or had forgotten to do, and a generally
- sour attitude. I reminded Michelle that compared to most families, we were incredibly
- lucky. I reminded her as well that for all my flaws, I loved her and the girls more than
- anything else. My love should be enough, I thought. As far as I was concerned, she had
- nothing to complain about.
- It was only upon reflection, after the trials of those years had passed and the kids had
- started school, that I began to appreciate what Michelle had been going through at the
- time, the struggles so typical of today’s working mother. For no matter how liberated I
- liked to see myself as—no matter how much I told myself that Michelle and I were
- equal partners, and that her dreams and ambitions were as important as my own—the
- fact was that when children showed up, it was Michelle and not I who was expected to
- make the necessary adjustments. Sure, I helped, but it was always on my terms, on my
- schedule. Meanwhile, she was the one who had to put her career on hold. She was the
- one who had to make sure that the kids were fed and bathed every night. If Malia or
- Sasha got sick or the babysitter failed to show up, it was she who, more often than not,
- had to get on the phone to cancel a meeting at work.
- It wasn’t just the constant scrambling between her work and the children that made
- Michelle’s situation so tough. It was also the fact that from her perspective she wasn’t
- doing either job well. This was not true, of course; her employers loved her, and
- everyone remarked on what a good mother she was. But I came to see that in her own
- mind, two visions of herself were at war with each other—the desire to be the woman
- her mother had been, solid, dependable, making a home and always there for her kids;
- and the desire to excel in her profession, to make her mark on the world and realize all
- those plans she’d had on the very first day that we met.
- In the end, I credit Michelle’s strength—her willingness to manage these tensions and
- make sacrifices on behalf of myself and the girls—with carrying us through the difficult
- times. But we also had resources at our disposal that many American families don’t
- have. For starters, Michelle’s and my status as professionals meant that we could
- rework our schedules to handle an emergency (or just take a day off) without risk of
- losing our jobs. Fifty-seven percent of American workers don’t have that luxury;
- indeed, most of them can’t take a day off to look after a child without losing pay or
- using vacation days. For parents who do try to make their own schedules, flexibility
- often means accepting part-time or temporary work with no career ladder and few or no
- benefits.
- Michelle and I also had enough income to cover all the services that help ease the
- pressures of two-earner parenthood: reliable child care, extra babysitting whenever we
- needed it, take-out dinners when we had neither the time nor the energy to cook,
- someone to come in and clean the house once a week, and private preschool and
- summer day camp once the kids were old enough. For most American families, such
- help is financially out of reach. The cost of day care is especially prohibitive; the United
- States is practically alone among Western nations in not providing government-
- subsidized, high-quality day-care services to all its workers.
- Finally, Michelle and I had my mother-in-law, who lives only fifteen minutes away
- from us, in the same house in which Michelle was raised. Marian is in her late sixties
- but looks ten years younger, and last year, when Michelle went back to full-time work,
- Marian decided to cut her hours at the bank so she could pick up the girls from school
- and look after them every afternoon. For many American families, such help is simply
- unavailable; in fact, for many families, the situation is reversed—someone in the family
- has to provide care for an aging parent on top of other family responsibilities.
- Of course, it’s not possible for the federal government to guarantee each family a
- wonderful, healthy, semiretired mother-in-law who happens to live close by. But if
- we’re serious about family values, then we can put policies in place that make the
- juggling of work and parenting a little bit easier. We could start by making high-quality
- day care affordable for every family that needs it. In contrast to most European
- countries, day care in the United States is a haphazard affair. Improved day-care
- licensing and training, an expansion of the federal and state child tax credits, and
- sliding-scale subsidies to families that need them all could provide both middle-class
- and low-income parents some peace of mind during the workday—and benefit
- employers through reduced absenteeism.
- It’s also time to redesign our schools—not just for the sake of working parents, but also
- to help prepare our children for a more competitive world. Countless studies confirm
- the educational benefits of strong preschool programs, which is why even families who
- have a parent at home often seek them out. The same goes for longer school days,
- summer school, and after-school programs. Providing all kids access to these benefits
- would cost money, but as part of broader school reform efforts, it’s a cost that we as a
- society should be willing to bear.
- Most of all, we need to work with employers to increase the flexibility of work
- schedules. The Clinton Administration took a step in this direction with the Family and
- Medical Leave Act (FMLA), but because it requires only unpaid leave and applies only
- to companies with more than fifty employees, most American workers aren’t able to
- take advantage of it. And although all other wealthy nations but one provide some form
- of paid parental leave, the business community’s resistance to mandated paid leave has
- been fierce, in part because of concerns over how it would affect small businesses.
- With a little creativity, we should be able to break this impasse. California has recently
- initiated paid leave through its disability insurance fund, thereby making sure that the
- costs aren’t borne by employers alone.
- We can also give parents flexibility to meet their day-to-day needs. Already, many
- larger companies offer formal flextime programs and report higher employee morale
- and less employee turnover as a result. Great Britain has come up with a novel approach
- to the problem—as part of a highly popular “Work-Life Balance Campaign,” parents
- with children under the age of six have the right to file a written request with employers
- for a change in their schedule. Employers aren’t required to grant the request, but they
- are required to meet with the employee to consider it; so far, one-quarter of all eligible
- British parents have successfully negotiated more family-friendly hours without a drop
- in productivity. With a combination of such innovative policy making, technical
- assistance, and greater public awareness, government can help businesses to do right by
- their employees at nominal expense.
- Of course, none of these policies need discourage families from deciding to keep a
- parent at home, regardless of the financial sacrifices. For some families, that may mean
- doing without certain material comforts. For others, it may mean home schooling or a
- move to a community where the cost of living is lower. For some families, it may be the
- father who stays at home—although for most families it will still be the mother who
- serves as the primary caregiver.
- Whatever the case may be, such decisions should be honored. If there’s one thing that
- social conservatives have been right about, it’s that our modern culture sometimes fails
- to fully appreciate the extraordinary emotional and financial contributions—the
- sacrifices and just plain hard work—of the stay-at-home mom. Where social
- conservatives have been wrong is in insisting that this traditional role is innate—the best
- or only model of motherhood. I want my daughters to have a choice as to what’s best
- for them and their families. Whether they will have such choices will depend not just on
- their own efforts and attitudes. As Michelle has taught me, it will also depend on men—
- and American society—respecting and accommodating the choices they make.
- “HI, DADDY.”
- “Hey, sweetie-pie.”
- It’s Friday afternoon and I’m home early to look after the girls while Michelle goes to
- the hairdresser. I gather up Malia in a hug and notice a blond girl in our kitchen, peering
- at me through a pair of oversized glasses.
- “Who’s this?” I ask, setting Malia back on the floor.
- “This is Sam. She’s over for a playdate.”
- “Hi, Sam.” I offer Sam my hand, and she considers it for a moment before shaking it
- loosely. Malia rolls her eyes.
- “Listen, Daddy…you don’t shake hands with kids.”
- “You don’t?”
- “No,” Malia says. “Not even teenagers shake hands. You may not have noticed, but this
- is the twenty-first century.” Malia looks at Sam, who represses a smirk.
- “So what do you do in the twenty-first century?”
- “You just say ‘hey.’ Sometimes you wave. That’s pretty much it.”
- “I see. I hope I didn’t embarrass you.”
- Malia smiles. “That’s okay, Daddy. You didn’t know, because you’re used to shaking
- hands with grown-ups.”
- “That’s true. Where’s your sister?”
- “She’s upstairs.”
- I walk upstairs to find Sasha standing in her underwear and a pink top. She pulls me
- down for a hug and then tells me she can’t find any shorts. I check in the closet and find
- a pair of blue shorts sitting right on top of her chest of drawers.
- “What are these?”
- Sasha frowns but reluctantly takes the shorts from me and pulls them on. After a few
- minutes, she climbs into my lap.
- “These shorts aren’t comfortable, Daddy.”
- We go back into Sasha’s closet, open the drawer again, and find another pair of shorts,
- also blue. “How about these?” I ask.
- Sasha frowns again. Standing there, she looks like a three-foot version of her mother.
- Malia and Sam walk in to observe the stand-off.
- “Sasha doesn’t like either of those shorts,” Malia explains.
- I turn to Sasha and ask her why. She looks up at me warily, taking my measure.
- “Pink and blue don’t go together,” she says finally.
- Malia and Sam giggle. I try to look as stern as Michelle might look in such
- circumstances and tell Sasha to put on the shorts. She does what I say, but I realize she’s
- just indulging me.
- When it comes to my daughters, no one is buying my tough-guy routine.
- Like many men today, I grew up without a father in the house. My mother and father
- divorced when I was only two years old, and for most of my life I knew him only
- through the letters he sent and the stories my mother and grandparents told. There were
- men in my life—a stepfather with whom we lived for four years, and my grandfather,
- who along with my grandmother helped raise me the rest of the time—and both were
- good men who treated me with affection. But my relationships with them were
- necessarily partial, incomplete. In the case of my stepfather, this was a result of limited
- duration and his natural reserve. And as close as I was to my grandfather, he was both
- too old and too troubled to provide me with much direction.
- It was women, then, who provided the ballast in my life—my grandmother, whose
- dogged practicality kept the family afloat, and my mother, whose love and clarity of
- spirit kept my sister’s and my world centered. Because of them I never wanted for
- anything important. From them I would absorb the values that guide me to this day.
- Still, as I got older I came to recognize how hard it had been for my mother and
- grandmother to raise us without a strong male presence in the house. I felt as well the
- mark that a father’s absence can leave on a child. I determined that my father’s
- irresponsibility toward his children, my stepfather’s remoteness, and my grandfather’s
- failures would all become object lessons for me, and that my own children would have a
- father they could count on.
- In the most basic sense, I’ve succeeded. My marriage is intact and my family is
- provided for. I attend parent-teacher conferences and dance recitals, and my daughters
- bask in my adoration. And yet, of all the areas of my life, it is in my capacities as a
- husband and father that I entertain the most doubt.
- I realize I’m not alone in this; at some level I’m just going through the same conflicting
- emotions that other fathers experience as they navigate an economy in flux and
- changing social norms. Even as it becomes less and less attainable, the image of the
- 1950s father—supporting his family with a nine-to-five job, sitting down for the dinner
- that his wife prepares every night, coaching Little League, and handling power tools—
- hovers over the culture no less powerfully than the image of the stay-at-home mom. For
- many men today, the inability to be their family’s sole breadwinner is a source of
- frustration and even shame; one doesn’t have to be an economic determinist to believe
- that high unemployment and low wages contribute to the lack of parental involvement
- and low marriage rates among African American men.
- For working men, no less than for working women, the terms of employment have
- changed. Whether a high-paid professional or a worker on the assembly line, fathers are
- expected to put in longer hours on the job than they did in the past. And these more
- demanding work schedules are occurring precisely at the time when fathers are
- expected—and in many cases want—to be more actively involved in the lives of their
- children than their own fathers may have been in theirs.
- But if the gap between the idea of parenthood in my head and the compromised reality
- that I live isn’t unique, that doesn’t relieve my sense that I’m not always giving my
- family all that I could. Last Father’s Day, I was invited to speak to the members of
- Salem Baptist Church on the South Side of Chicago. I didn’t have a prepared text, but I
- took as my theme “what it takes to be a full-grown man.” I suggested that it was time
- that men in general and black men in particular put away their excuses for not being
- there for their families. I reminded the men in the audience that being a father meant
- more than bearing a child; that even those of us who were physically present in the
- home are often emotionally absent; that precisely because many of us didn’t have
- fathers in the house we have to redouble our efforts to break the cycle; and that if we
- want to pass on high expectations to our children, we have to have higher expectations
- for ourselves.
- Thinking back on what I said, I ask myself sometimes how well I’m living up to my
- own exhortations. After all, unlike many of the men to whom I was speaking that day, I
- don’t have to take on two jobs or the night shift in a valiant attempt to put food on the
- table. I could find a job that allowed me to be home every night. Or I could find a job
- that paid more money, a job in which long hours might at least be justified by some
- measurable benefit to my family—the ability of Michelle to cut back her hours, say, or a
- fat trust fund for the kids.
- Instead, I have chosen a life with a ridiculous schedule, a life that requires me to be
- gone from Michelle and the girls for long stretches of time and that exposes Michelle to
- all sorts of stress. I may tell myself that in some larger sense I am in politics for Malia
- and Sasha, that the work I do will make the world a better place for them. But such
- rationalizations seem feeble and painfully abstract when I’m missing one of the girls’
- school potlucks because of a vote, or calling Michelle to tell her that session’s been
- extended and we need to postpone our vacation. Indeed, my recent success in politics
- does little to assuage the guilt; as Michelle told me once, only half joking, seeing your
- dad’s picture in the paper may be kind of neat the first time it happens, but when it
- happens all the time it’s probably kind of embarrassing.
- And so I do my best to answer the accusation that floats around in my mind—that I am
- selfish, that I do what I do to feed my own ego or fill a void in my heart. When I’m not
- out of town, I try to be home for dinner, to hear from Malia and Sasha about their day,
- to read to them and tuck them into bed. I try not to schedule appearances on Sundays,
- and in the summers I’ll use the day to take the girls to the zoo or the pool; in the winters
- we might visit a museum or the aquarium. I scold my daughters gently when they
- misbehave, and try to limit their intake of both television and junk food. In all this I am
- encouraged by Michelle, although there are times when I get the sense that I’m
- encroaching on her space—that by my absences I may have forfeited certain rights to
- interfere in the world she has built.
- As for the girls, they seem to be thriving despite my frequent disappearances. Mostly
- this is a testimony to Michelle’s parenting skills; she seems to have a perfect touch
- when it comes to Malia and Sasha, an ability to set firm boundaries without being
- stifling. She’s also made sure that my election to the Senate hasn’t altered the girls’
- routines very much, although what passes for a normal middle-class childhood in
- America these days seems to have changed as much as has parenting. Gone are the days
- when parents just sent their child outside or to the park and told him or her to be back
- before dinner. Today, with news of abductions and an apparent suspicion of anything
- spontaneous or even a tiny bit slothful, the schedules of children seem to rival those of
- their parents. There are playdates, ballet classes, gymnastics classes, tennis lessons,
- piano lessons, soccer leagues, and what seem like weekly birthday parties. I told Malia
- once that during the entire time that I was growing up, I attended exactly two birthday
- parties, both of which involved five or six kids, cone hats, and a cake. She looked at me
- the way I used to look at my grandfather when he told stories of the Depression—with a
- mixture of fascination and incredulity.
- It is left to Michelle to coordinate all the children’s activities, which she does with a
- general’s efficiency. When I can, I volunteer to help, which Michelle appreciates,
- although she is careful to limit my responsibilities. The day before Sasha’s birthday
- party this past June, I was told to procure twenty balloons, enough cheese pizza to feed
- twenty kids, and ice. This seemed manageable, so when Michelle told me that she was
- going to get goody bags to hand out at the end of the party, I suggested that I do that as
- well. She laughed.
- “You can’t handle goody bags,” she said. “Let me explain the goody bag thing. You
- have to go into the party store and choose the bags. Then you have to choose what to
- put in the bags, and what is in the boys’ bags has to be different from what is in the
- girls’ bags. You’d walk in there and wander around the aisles for an hour, and then your
- head would explode.”
- Feeling less confident, I got on the Internet. I found a place that sold balloons near the
- gymnastics studio where the party would be held, and a pizza place that promised
- delivery at 3:45 p.m. By the time the guests showed up the next day, the balloons were
- in place and the juice boxes were on ice. I sat with the other parents, catching up and
- watching twenty or so five-year-olds run and jump and bounce on the equipment like a
- band of merry elves. I had a slight scare when at 3:50 the pizzas had not yet arrived, but
- the delivery person got there ten minutes before the children were scheduled to eat.
- Michelle’s brother, Craig, knowing the pressure I was under, gave me a high five.
- Michelle looked up from putting pizza on paper plates and smiled.
- As a grand finale, after all the pizza was eaten and the juice boxes drunk, after we had
- sung “Happy Birthday” and eaten some cake, the gymnastics instructor gathered all the
- kids around an old, multicolored parachute and told Sasha to sit at its center. On the
- count of three, Sasha was hoisted up into the air and back down again, then up for a
- second time, and then for a third. And each time she rose above the billowing sail, she
- laughed and laughed with a look of pure joy.
- I wonder if Sasha will remember that moment when she is grown. Probably not; it
- seems as if I can retrieve only the barest fragments of memory from when I was five.
- But I suspect that the happiness she felt on that parachute registers permanently in her;
- that such moments accumulate and embed themselves in a child’s character, becoming a
- part of their soul. Sometimes, when I listen to Michelle talk about her father, I hear the
- echo of such joy in her, the love and respect that Frasier Robinson earned not through
- fame or spectacular deeds but through small, daily, ordinary acts—a love he earned by
- being there. And I ask myself whether my daughters will be able to speak of me in that
- same way.
- As it is, the window for making such memories rapidly closes. Already Malia seems to
- be moving into a different phase; she’s more curious about boys and relationships, more
- self-conscious about what she wears. She’s always been older than her years, uncannily
- wise. Once, when she was just six years old and we were taking a walk together along
- the lake, she asked me out of the blue if our family was rich. I told her that we weren’t
- really rich, but that we had a lot more than most people. I asked her why she wanted to
- know.
- “Well…I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve decided I don’t want to be really, really
- rich. I think I want a simple life.”
- Her words were so unexpected that I laughed. She looked up at me and smiled, but her
- eyes told me she’d meant what she said.
- I often think of that conversation. I ask myself what Malia makes of my not-so-simple
- life. Certainly she notices that other fathers attend her team’s soccer games more often
- than I do. If this upsets her, she doesn’t let it show, for Malia tends to be protective of
- other people’s feelings, trying to see the best in every situation. Still, it gives me small
- comfort to think that my eight-year-old daughter loves me enough to overlook my
- shortcomings.
- I was able to get to one of Malia’s games recently, when session ended early for the
- week. It was a fine summer afternoon, and the several fields were full of families when I
- arrived, blacks and whites and Latinos and Asians from all over the city, women sitting
- on lawn chairs, men practicing kicks with their sons, grandparents helping babies to
- stand. I spotted Michelle and sat down on the grass beside her, and Sasha came to sit in
- my lap. Malia was already out on the field, part of a swarm of players surrounding the
- ball, and although soccer’s not her natural sport—she’s a head taller than some of her
- friends, and her feet haven’t yet caught up to her height—she plays with an enthusiasm
- and competitiveness that makes us cheer loudly. At halftime, Malia came over to where
- we were sitting.
- “How you feeling, sport?” I asked her.
- “Great!” She took a swig of water. “Daddy, I have a question.”
- “Shoot.”
- “Can we get a dog?”
- “What does your mother say?”
- “She told me to ask you. I think I’m wearing her down.”
- I looked at Michelle, who smiled and offered a shrug.
- “How about we talk it over after the game?” I said.
- “Okay.” Malia took another sip of water and kissed me on the cheek. “I’m glad you’re
- home,” she said.
- Before I could answer, she had turned around and started back out onto the field. And
- for an instant, in the glow of the late afternoon, I thought I saw my older daughter as the
- woman she would become, as if with each step she were growing taller, her shape
- filling out, her long legs carrying her into a life of her own.
- I squeezed Sasha a little tighter in my lap. Perhaps sensing what I was feeling, Michelle
- took my hand. And I remembered a quote Michelle had given to a reporter during the
- campaign, when he’d asked her what it was like being a political wife.
- “It’s hard,” Michelle had said. Then, according to the reporter, she had added with a sly
- smile, “And that’s why Barack is such a grateful man.”
- As usual, my wife is right.
- Epilogue
- MY SWEARING IN to the U.S. Senate in January 2005 completed a process that
- had begun the day I announced my candidacy two years earlier—the exchange of a
- relatively anonymous life for a very public one.
- To be sure, many things have remained constant. Our family still makes its home in
- Chicago. I still go to the same Hyde Park barbershop to get my hair cut, Michelle and I
- have the same friends over to our house as we did before the election, and our daughters
- still run through the same playgrounds.
- Still, there’s no doubt that the world has changed profoundly for me, in ways that I
- don’t always care to admit. My words, my actions, my travel plans, and my tax returns
- all end up in the morning papers or on the nightly news broadcast. My daughters have to
- endure the interruptions of well-meaning strangers whenever their father takes them to
- the zoo. Even outside of Chicago, it’s becoming harder to walk unnoticed through
- airports.
- As a rule, I find it difficult to take all this attention very seriously. After all, there are
- days when I still walk out of the house with a suit jacket that doesn’t match my suit
- pants. My thoughts are so much less tidy, my days so much less organized than the
- image of me that now projects itself into the world, that it makes for occasional comic
- moments. I remember the day before I was sworn in, my staff and I decided we should
- hold a press conference in our office. At the time, I was ranked ninety-ninth in seniority,
- and all the reporters were crammed into a tiny transition office in the basement of the
- Dirksen Office Building, across the hall from the Senate supply store. It was my first
- day in the building; I had not taken a single vote, had not introduced a single bill—
- indeed I had not even sat down at my desk when a very earnest reporter raised his hand
- and asked, “Senator Obama, what is your place in history?”
- Even some of the other reporters had to laugh.
- Some of the hyperbole can be traced back to my speech at the 2004 Democratic
- Convention in Boston, the point at which I first gained national attention. In fact, the
- process by which I was selected as the keynote speaker remains something of a mystery
- to me. I had met John Kerry for the first time after the Illinois primary, when I spoke at
- his fund-raiser and accompanied him to a campaign event highlighting the importance
- of job-training programs. A few weeks later, we got word that the Kerry people wanted
- me to speak at the convention, although it was not yet clear in what capacity. One
- afternoon, as I drove back from Springfield to Chicago for an evening campaign event,
- Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill called to deliver the news. After I hung up, I
- turned to my driver, Mike Signator.
- “I guess this is pretty big,” I said.
- Mike nodded. “You could say that.”
- I had only been to one previous Democratic convention, the 2000 Convention in Los
- Angeles. I hadn’t planned to attend that convention; I was just coming off my defeat in
- the Democratic primary for the Illinois First Congressional District seat, and was
- determined to spend most of the summer catching up on work at the law practice that
- I’d left unattended during the campaign (a neglect that had left me more or less broke),
- as well as make up for lost time with a wife and daughter who had seen far too little of
- me during the previous six months.
- At the last minute, though, several friends and supporters who were planning to go
- insisted that I join them. You need to make national contacts, they told me, for when
- you run again—and anyway, it will be fun. Although they didn’t say this at the time, I
- suspect they saw a trip to the convention as a bit of useful therapy for me, on the theory
- that the best thing to do after getting thrown off a horse is to get back on right away.
- Eventually I relented and booked a flight to L.A. When I landed, I took the shuttle to
- Hertz Rent A Car, handed the woman behind the counter my American Express card,
- and began looking at the map for directions to a cheap hotel that I’d found near Venice
- Beach. After a few minutes the Hertz woman came back with a look of embarrassment
- on her face.
- “I’m sorry, Mr. Obama, but your card’s been rejected.”
- “That can’t be right. Can you try again?”
- “I tried twice, sir. Maybe you should call American Express.”
- After half an hour on the phone, a kindhearted supervisor at American Express
- authorized the car rental. But the episode served as an omen of things to come. Not
- being a delegate, I couldn’t secure a floor pass; according to the Illinois Party chairman,
- he was already inundated with requests, and the best he could do was give me a pass
- that allowed entry only onto the convention site. I ended up watching most of the
- speeches on various television screens scattered around the Staples Center, occasionally
- following friends or acquaintances into skyboxes where it was clear I didn’t belong. By
- Tuesday night, I realized that my presence was serving neither me nor the Democratic
- Party any apparent purpose, and by Wednesday morning I was on the first flight back to
- Chicago.
- Given the distance between my previous role as a convention gate-crasher and my
- newfound role as convention keynoter, I had some cause to worry that my appearance in
- Boston might not go very well. But perhaps because by that time I had become
- accustomed to outlandish things happening in my campaign, I didn’t feel particularly
- nervous. A few days after the call from Ms. Cahill, I was back in my hotel room in
- Springfield, making notes for a rough draft of the speech while watching a basketball
- game. I thought about the themes that I’d sounded during the campaign—the
- willingness of people to work hard if given the chance, the need for government to help
- provide a foundation for opportunity, the belief that Americans felt a sense of mutual
- obligation toward one another. I made a list of the issues I might touch on—health care,
- education, the war in Iraq.
- But most of all, I thought about the voices of all the people I’d met on the campaign
- trail. I remembered Tim Wheeler and his wife in Galesburg, trying to figure out how to
- get their teenage son the liver transplant he needed. I remembered a young man in East
- Moline named Seamus Ahern who was on his way to Iraq—the desire he had to serve
- his country, the look of pride and apprehension on the face of his father. I remembered a
- young black woman I’d met in East St. Louis whose name I never would catch, but who
- told me of her efforts to attend college even though no one in her family had ever
- graduated from high school.
- It wasn’t just the struggles of these men and women that had moved me. Rather, it was
- their determination, their self-reliance, a relentless optimism in the face of hardship. It
- brought to mind a phrase that my pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., had once used in
- a sermon.
- The audacity of hope.
- That was the best of the American spirit, I thought—having the audacity to believe
- despite all the evidence to the contrary that we could restore a sense of community to a
- nation torn by conflict; the gall to believe that despite personal setbacks, the loss of a
- job or an illness in the family or a childhood mired in poverty, we had some control—
- and therefore responsibility—over our own fate.
- It was that audacity, I thought, that joined us as one people. It was that pervasive spirit
- of hope that tied my own family’s story to the larger American story, and my own story
- to those of the voters I sought to represent.
- I turned off the basketball game and started to write.
- A FEW WEEKS later, I arrived in Boston, caught three hours’ sleep, and traveled from
- my hotel to the Fleet Center for my first appearance on Meet the Press. Toward the end
- of the segment, Tim Russert put up on the screen an excerpt from a 1996 interview with
- the Cleveland Plain-Dealer that I had forgotten about entirely, in which the reporter had
- asked me—as someone just getting into politics as a candidate for the Illinois state
- senate—what I thought about the Democratic Convention in Chicago.
- The convention’s for sale, right…. You’ve got these $10,000-a-plate dinners, Golden
- Circle Clubs. I think when the average voter looks at that, they rightly feel they’ve been
- locked out of the process. They can’t attend a $10,000 breakfast. They know that those
- who can are going to get the kind of access they can’t imagine.
- After the quote was removed from the screen, Russert turned to me. “A hundred and
- fifty donors gave $40 million to this convention,” he said. “It’s worse than Chicago,
- using your standards. Are you offended by that, and what message does that send the
- average voter?”
- I replied that politics and money were a problem for both parties, but that John Kerry’s
- voting record, and my own, indicated that we voted for what was best for the country. I
- said that a convention wouldn’t change that, although I did suggest that the more
- Democrats could encourage participation from people who felt locked out of the
- process, the more we stayed true to our origins as the party of the average Joe, the
- stronger we would be as a party.
- Privately, I thought my original 1996 quote was better.
- There was a time when political conventions captured the urgency and drama of
- politics—when nominations were determined by floor managers and head counts and
- side deals and arm-twisting, when passions or miscalculation might result in a second or
- third or fourth round of balloting. But that time passed long ago. With the advent of
- binding primaries, the much-needed end to the dominance of party bosses and
- backroom deals in smoke-filled rooms, today’s convention is bereft of surprises. Rather,
- it serves as a weeklong infomercial for the party and its nominee—as well as a means of
- rewarding the party faithful and major contributors with four days of food, drink,
- entertainment, and shoptalk.
- I spent most of the first three days at the convention fulfilling my role in this pageant. I
- spoke to rooms full of major Democratic donors and had breakfast with delegates from
- across the fifty states. I practiced my speech in front of a video monitor, did a walk-
- through of how it would be staged, received instruction on where to stand, where to
- wave, and how to best use the microphones. My communications director, Robert
- Gibbs, and I trotted up and down the stairs of the Fleet Center, giving interviews that
- were sometimes only two minutes apart, to ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and
- NPR, at each stop emphasizing the talking points that the Kerry-Edwards team had
- provided, each word of which had been undoubtedly tested in a battalion of polls and a
- panoply of focus groups.
- Given the breakneck pace of my days, I didn’t have much time to worry about how my
- speech would go over. It wasn’t until Tuesday night, after my staff and Michelle had
- debated for half an hour over what tie I should wear (we finally settled on the tie that
- Robert Gibbs was wearing), after we had ridden over to the Fleet Center and heard
- strangers shout “Good luck!” and “Give ’em hell, Obama!,” after we had visited with a
- very gracious and funny Teresa Heinz Kerry in her hotel room, until finally it was just
- Michelle and me sitting backstage and watching the broadcast, that I started to feel just
- a tad bit nervous. I mentioned to Michelle that my stomach was feeling a little grumbly.
- She hugged me tight, looked into my eyes, and said, “Just don’t screw it up, buddy!”
- We both laughed. Just then, one of the production managers came into the hold room
- and told me it was time to take my position offstage. Standing behind the black curtain,
- listening to Dick Durbin introduce me, I thought about my mother and father and
- grandfather and what it might have been like for them to be in the audience. I thought
- about my grandmother in Hawaii, watching the convention on TV because her back was
- too deteriorated for her to travel. I thought about all the volunteers and supporters back
- in Illinois who had worked so hard on my behalf.
- Lord, let me tell their stories right, I said to myself. Then I walked onto the stage.
- I WOULD BE lying if I said that the positive reaction to my speech at the Boston
- convention—the letters I received, the crowds who showed up to rallies once we got
- back to Illinois—wasn’t personally gratifying. After all, I got into politics to have some
- influence on the public debate, because I thought I had something to say about the
- direction we need to go as a country.
- Still, the torrent of publicity that followed the speech reinforces my sense of how
- fleeting fame is, contingent as it is on a thousand different matters of chance, of events
- breaking this way rather than that. I know that I am not so much smarter than the man I
- was six years ago, when I was temporarily stranded at LAX. My views on health care or
- education or foreign policy are not so much more refined than they were when I labored
- in obscurity as a community organizer. If I am wiser, it is mainly because I have
- traveled a little further down the path I have chosen for myself, the path of politics, and
- have gotten a glimpse of where it may lead, for good and for ill.
- I remember a conversation I had almost twenty years ago with a friend of mine, an older
- man who had been active in the civil rights efforts in Chicago in the sixties and was
- teaching urban studies at Northwestern University. I had just decided, after three years
- of organizing, to attend law school; because he was one of the few academics I knew, I
- had asked him if he would be willing to give me a recommendation.
- He said he would be happy to write me the recommendation, but first wanted to know
- what I intended to do with a law degree. I mentioned my interest in a civil rights
- practice, and that at some point I might try my hand at running for office. He nodded his
- head and asked whether I had considered what might be involved in taking such a path,
- what I would be willing to do to make the Law Review, or make partner, or get elected
- to that first office and then move up the ranks. As a rule, both law and politics required
- compromise, he said; not just on issues, but on more fundamental things—your values
- and ideals. He wasn’t saying that to dissuade me, he said. It was just a fact. It was
- because of his unwillingness to compromise that, although he had been approached
- many times in his youth to enter politics, he had always declined.
- “It’s not that compromise is inherently wrong,” he said to me. “I just didn’t find it
- satisfying. And the one thing I’ve discovered as I get older is that you have to do what is
- satisfying to you. In fact that’s one of the advantages of old age, I suppose, that you’ve
- finally learned what matters to you. It’s hard to know that at twenty-six. And the
- problem is that nobody else can answer that question for you. You can only figure it out
- on your own.”
- Twenty years later, I think back on that conversation and appreciate my friend’s words
- more than I did at the time. For I am getting to an age where I have a sense of what
- satisfies me, and although I am perhaps more tolerant of compromise on the issues than
- my friend was, I know that my satisfaction is not to be found in the glare of television
- cameras or the applause of the crowd. Instead, it seems to come more often now from
- knowing that in some demonstrable way I’ve been able to help people live their lives
- with some measure of dignity. I think about what Benjamin Franklin wrote to his
- mother, explaining why he had devoted so much of his time to public service: “I would
- rather have it said, He lived usefully, than, He died rich.”
- That’s what satisfies me now, I think—being useful to my family and the people who
- elected me, leaving behind a legacy that will make our children’s lives more hopeful
- than our own. Sometimes, working in Washington, I feel I am meeting that goal. At
- other times, it seems as if the goal recedes from me, and all the activity I engage in—the
- hearings and speeches and press conferences and position papers—are an exercise in
- vanity, useful to no one.
- When I find myself in such moods, I like to take a run along the Mall. Usually I go in
- the early evening, especially in the summer and fall, when the air in Washington is
- warm and still and the leaves on the trees barely rustle. After dark, not many people are
- out—perhaps a few couples taking a walk, or homeless men on benches, organizing
- their possessions. Most of the time I stop at the Washington Monument, but sometimes
- I push on, across the street to the National World War II Memorial, then along the
- Reflecting Pool to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, then up the stairs of the Lincoln
- Memorial.
- At night, the great shrine is lit but often empty. Standing between marble columns, I
- read the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address. I look out over the
- Reflecting Pool, imagining the crowd stilled by Dr. King’s mighty cadence, and then
- beyond that, to the floodlit obelisk and shining Capitol dome.
- And in that place, I think about America and those who built it. This nation’s founders,
- who somehow rose above petty ambitions and narrow calculations to imagine a nation
- unfurling across a continent. And those like Lincoln and King, who ultimately laid
- down their lives in the service of perfecting an imperfect union. And all the faceless,
- nameless men and women, slaves and soldiers and tailors and butchers, constructing
- lives for themselves and their children and grandchildren, brick by brick, rail by rail,
- calloused hand by calloused hand, to fill in the landscape of our collective dreams.
- It is that process I wish to be a part of.
- My heart is filled with love for this country.
- Acknowledgments
- THIS BOOK WOULD have not been possible without the extraordinary support of a
- number of people.
- I have to begin with my wife, Michelle. Being married to a senator is bad enough; being
- married to a senator who is also writing a book requires the patience of Job. Not only
- did Michelle provide emotional support throughout the writing process, but she helped
- me arrive at many of the ideas that are reflected in the book. With each passing day, I
- understand more fully just how lucky I am to have Michelle in my life, and can only
- hope that my boundless love for her offers some consolation for my constant
- preoccupations.
- I want to express as well my gratitude to my editor, Rachel Klayman. Even before I had
- won my Senate primary race, it was Rachel who brought my first book, Dreams from
- My Father, to the attention of Crown Publishers, long after it had gone out of print. It
- was Rachel who championed my proposal to write this book. And it has been Rachel
- who’s been my constant partner in what’s been the frequently difficult but always
- exhilarating effort of bringing this book to completion. At each stage of the editorial
- process, she’s been insightful, meticulous, and unflagging in her enthusiasm. Often
- she’s understood what I was trying to accomplish with the book before I did, and has
- gently but firmly brought me into line whenever I strayed from my own voice and
- slipped into jargon, cant, or false sentiment. Moreover, she’s been incredibly patient
- with my unforgiving Senate schedule and periodic bouts of writer’s block; more than
- once, she’s had to sacrifice sleep, weekends, or vacation time with her family in order to
- see the project through.
- In sum, she’s been an ideal editor—and become a valued friend.
- Of course, Rachel could not have done what she did without the full support of my
- publishers at the Crown Publishing Group, Jenny Frost and Steve Ross. If publishing
- involves the intersection of art and commerce, Jenny and Steve have consistently erred
- on the side of making this book as good as it could possibly be. Their faith in this book
- has led them to go the extra mile time and time again, and for that I am tremendously
- grateful.
- That same spirit has characterized all the people at Crown who’ve worked so hard on
- behalf of this book. Amy Boorstein has been tireless in managing the production
- process despite very tight deadlines. Tina Constable and Christine Aronson have been
- vigorous advocates of the book and have deftly scheduled (and rescheduled) events
- around the demands of my Senate work. Jill Flaxman has worked diligently with the
- Random House sales force and with booksellers to help the book make its way into the
- hands of readers. Jacob Bronstein has produced—for the second time—an outstanding
- audio version of the book in less than ideal circumstances. To all of them I offer my
- heartfelt thanks, as I do to the other members of the Crown team: Lucinda Bartley,
- Whitney Cookman, Lauren Dong, Laura Duffy, Skip Dye, Leta Evanthes, Kristin Kiser,
- Donna Passannante, Philip Patrick, Stan Redfern, Barbara Sturman, Don Weisberg, and
- many others.
- Several good friends, including David Axelrod, Cassandra Butts, Forrest Claypool,
- Julius Genachowski, Scott Gration, Robert Fisher, Michael Froman, Donald Gips, John
- Kupper, Anthony Lake, Susan Rice, Gene Sperling, Cass Sunstein, and Jim Wallis took
- the time to read the manuscript and provided me with invaluable suggestions. Samantha
- Power deserves special mention for her extraordinary generosity; despite being in the
- middle of writing her own book, she combed over each chapter as if it were hers,
- providing me with a steady flow of useful comments even as she cheered me up
- whenever my spirits or energy were flagging.
- A number of my Senate staff, including Pete Rouse, Karen Kornbluh, Mike
- Strautmanis, Jon Favreau, Mark Lippert, Joshua DuBois, and especially Robert Gibbs
- and Chris Lu, read the manuscript on their own time and provided me with editorial
- suggestions, policy recommendations, reminders, and corrections. Thanks to all of them
- for literally going beyond the call of duty.
- A former staffer, Madhuri Kommareddi, devoted the summer before she entered Yale
- Law School to fact-check the entire manuscript. Her talent and energy leave me
- breathless. Thanks as well to Hillary Schrenell, who volunteered to help Madhuri with a
- number of research items in the foreign policy chapter.
- Finally, I want to thank my agent, Bob Barnett of Williams and Connolly, for his
- friendship, skill, and support. It’s made a world of difference.
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- BARACK OBAMA is the junior U.S. Senator from Illinois. He began his career as a
- community organizer in some of Chicago’s poorest communities and then attended
- Harvard Law School, where he was elected the first African American president of the
- Harvard Law Review. In 1992, he directed Illinois Project VOTE, which registered
- 150,000 new voters. From 1997 to 2004, he served as a three-term state senator from
- Chicago’s South Side. In addition to his legislative duties, he has been a senior lecturer
- in constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School, practiced civil rights
- law, and served on the board of directors of various charitable organizations.
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