The Other Barack (24 page)

Then there was the incident at the Hayes Bickford cafeteria in Harvard Square, a popular student eatery fondly known as “The Bick.” Uchenna C. Nwosu, a Harvard undergraduate from Nigeria along with a Nigerian graduate student from M.I.T. had just sat down to eat when they noticed that their tray was dirty. When they asked the manager for another tray he declared, “You don't get such good things in your home country.” The students persisted, saying they were entitled to good service as members of the public, to which the manager retorted, “You don't belong to the public.” Making matters worse, when Nwosu called the police, the officers asked no questions but promptly charged the African students with trespassing and disturbing the peace and jailed them overnight. Although Harvard provided a lawyer to defend them and the two students were ultimately acquitted, the incident left a deep impression on the young men.
¹²
Nwosu, who went on to become a doctor of obstetrics and gynecology at East Tennessee State University, ultimately wrote a memoir that describes his years at Harvard
.
“You know, I was not from Mars. Civil rights matters were on television all the time, so I knew what was going on,” said Nwosu. “But being put in jail for no good reason and standing up all night, it was very upsetting.”

By the spring of 1963 black students at Harvard realized they had much in common with each other and came together to form a club of their own on campus in an effort to promote mutual understanding and provide themselves a voice. The idea, as one student described it to the
Crimson
, was to end the “artificial alienation” between African and Negro students that many felt was largely fostered by whites who saw the two groups as largely unrelated.
¹³
But the plan ran into trouble immediately.

The proposed Association of African and Afro-American Students (AAAAS) was to be open only to African and Afro-American students currently enrolled at Harvard and Radcliffe. The University found this membership clause discriminatory and refused to recognize the group unless it reworded the clause, and students, both black and white, hotly debated the issue. After months of wrangling the Association agreed to remove the offending language from its membership clause and received official sanction, prompting a collective sigh of relief. The change, however, had little effect on the group's intent to exclude whites. Organizers had deliberately worded the new clause to stipulate that membership was to be “open to Harvard and Radcliffe students and shall be by invitation
only,” meaning they could let in whomever they wanted. But the struggle between the AAAAS and Harvard was not over. Weeks later the Association was again admonished when, in January 1964, it tried to institute a sliding scale for admission to hear its first speaker, James Baldwin, the African American author of the influential
Notes of a Native Son
and
The Fire Next Time
. The Association proposed a charge of 50 cents for members of civil rights organizations and residents of the depressed neighborhoods of Roxbury and Dorchester, and $1 for all others. But the University insisted on a single charge for all.
¹⁴

Obama stayed aloof from much of these civil rights doings on campus. As a graduate student he had little time for extracurricular activities. Although many African undergraduates routinely flocked to the speeches of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. and leapt into the Association fray, graduate students were more circumspect in their political activities for fear that engagement might create problems around their routine applications to the Immigration and Naturalization Service for an extension of their stay. Obama was supported by three fellowships, one for $1,500 from Harvard and two for $1,000 each from the Laubach Literacy Fund and the Phelps Stokes Fund, and he would have been mindful not to offend his supporters through any engagement in potentially controversial activities.
¹⁵
“We were on student visas and we did not want to attract attention. We had come to study, not play politics and that would have been the interpretation if we had been involved,” said Sylvester E. Ugoh, a Nigerian graduate student in economics in the early 1960s. “But we were very interested in what was going on and we read everything that was written. We read it all.”

Although Harvard's traditions and intellectual reach clearly impressed Obama, it was not an environment he found easy to embrace. By then he had been away from Africa for three years, he must have found the fiercely competitive landscape and the predominantly WASP culture on campus challenging at best. Like the acclaimed African American scholar and civil rights activist W. E. B. DuBois, who arrived at Harvard in 1888, Obama chose to hold himself apart from the white-dominated mainstream. As DuBois wrote in his memoir, “I was in Harvard, but not of it, and realized all the irony of my singing ‘Fair Harvard.' I sang it because I liked the music, and not from any pride in the Pilgrims.”
¹⁶

Obama instead largely kept company with the African students on campus, among whom he found the conversation, not to mention the music, more to his liking. One of a loose-knit group of African students who socialized together on weekends, Obama attended gatherings in students' apartments and at the International Student Association on Garden Street in Harvard Square, a few blocks away from the Cambridge Common, which often hosted live bands and drew foreign students from other campuses in Boston. Few among the group could afford the prices at the pubs and restaurants off campus, so they created their own alternatives.

Those lucky enough to have a friend with a car would also head to New York on summer weekends to meet up with other African students from around the country, members of the Kenya Students Union, at International House on Riverside Drive. The students, many of whom would not return home for several years while they pursued their education, eagerly traded political news, talked soccer, and swapped the latest music from their native country.

There was much to discuss about the situation back home. The colonial forces were in retreat, and the liberated African nations at long last claimed their own governments and institutions. Almost all French and Belgian former colonies became independent in 1960, including the giant Congo, followed by Nigeria, and in the following years Tanzania and Uganda. Finally, on December 12, 1963, Kenya triumphantly raised her brilliant new flag of black, red, and green stripes with the traditional African shield and spears set in the center, thus ending more than sixty years of colonial rule. Even as much of America was consumed with grief over the assassination of President Kennedy three weeks earlier, the African students celebrated with parties and impassioned speeches. On a hot summer night or two at the West End Bar on Broadway, Obama could be found tossing down a few whiskeys over a spirited assessment of Kenya's first president, Jomo Kenyatta. “Most Kenyans at the table talked about the positions they wanted to hold when they got back, but Obama was a bit more of an intellectual,” recalls Fred Okatcha, a Kenyan who attended Yale University and got his PhD in educational psychology from Michigan State University before returning to teach psychology at Kenyatta University in Nairobi. “I did not know him to be critical of Kenyatta, but he was very forthright.”

As a Kenyan enrolled in graduate economic studies, Obama was keenly aware of the jockeying already beginning among the handful of his countrymen passing through Cambridge and with whom he would compete head-on upon their return to Nairobi, armed with their dueling Harvard diplomas. Hilary Ng'weno, who received a BA from Harvard the year before Obama arrived, would become one of Kenya's most prominent political journalists and would document the nation's impending political turmoil in the pages of his
Weekly Review
. Philip Ndegwa, a soft-spoken Kikuyu who attended Harvard's Graduate School of Public Administration for one year starting in the fall of 1962—although he did not get a degree—would go shoulder to shoulder with Obama for the job of planning officer in the Ministry of Economic Planning and Development in 1964. Ndegwa would become one of Kenya's most accomplished economists and would serve as permanent secretary in several ministries, a highly regarded leader for decades on the Kenyan scene. There was also Washington Jalang'o Okumu, who graduated from Harvard College in 1962, another Kenyan graduate student in economics who would become an international mediator of note, but long before that he would be Obama's chief competitor for an economist's job in the country's new tourism development office in the late 1960s. For each of the Kenyans, Harvard would add an incomparable luster to their résumé that family members back in their villages would revere but, for the most part, could not begin to comprehend. “Barack was from Harvard. He was the big voice from Harvard and he let you know that,” said Peter Aringo, a close friend of Obama's and a six-term member of the Kenyan Parliament. “Harvard was a big thing here. Who here could begin to imagine going to Harvard?”

With some intuition of what lay ahead, Obama immersed himself in his studies in earnest with a focus on the development economics that he hoped would prepare him for a career with either the United Nations or the Kenyan government. In a way, his timing could not have been better. Obama arrived at the imposing gray fortress of the Littauer Center at a time when the field of economics was undergoing a seismic transition that would change the practice forever, transforming its core from one focused primarily on institutions, empirical measurement, and social-historical context to a much more abstract field rooted in a mathematically defined model of equilibrium.

In the same way that John Maynard Keynes's book
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
had revolutionized economics two decades earlier and established the bedrock of modern macroeconomic thought, the postwar introduction of sophisticated and complex mathematical models into the field was radically changing not only what economists did but also how they thought. In place of narrative construction based on observed realities, mathematical models and the logic of formulae were the new modus operandi. Transfixed by the success of physics in the natural sciences, these new economists believed economic production and exchange could potentially be modeled with an analogous exactness. And by the late 1950s, with computers growing in size, number, and computational speed, the time it took to do complex data analysis fell from days or even weeks to mere hours. Never mind that you had to write the computer program yourself—it was a heady time to be entering the field. Being a young economist in the early 1960s, as Obama's classmate Roger Noll described it, “was like being the first person walking in the peach orchard and all the fruit is hanging low. This was a whole new way of doing business and if you could embrace it as a twenty-five-year-old economist, you could do something that no one else could do.”

All you had to do was figure out the math. For Obama, his training occurred at a time when he could make practical use of instruction in linear programming and econometric techniques that would help redefine the field rather than focus on the older style practices that were quickly growing obsolete. On the down side, some of what was being taught was so new and so dependent on relatively advanced math that many students who had not been well versed in the field in general and differential calculus or complex regression analysis in particular floundered.

Not only was the subject matter itself singularly taxing, Obama's classmates included a formidable group of brainiacs who would go on to make major contributions to the field. They were white, male, and angling for No. 1, even if they would not openly admit it. Among the thirty-five graduate students who entered the PhD program with Obama in 1962 were Lester Thurow, who would be the first to complete the program and go on to become one of the nation's best-known economists, a prolific author, and eventually the dean of MIT's Sloan School of Management; Sam Bowles, the son of Chester Bowles, who served as the undersecretary of
state in the Kennedy Administration and a rigorous critic of free market economic theory from professorial posts first at Harvard and then the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; and Richard Zeckhauser, who for a few summers was one of the youngest “whiz kids” summoned by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to critique military strategy and later a noted pioneer in policy analysis. Obama, clearly, was no longer the smartest guy in the room. If a few of his classmates privately suspected that the Africans on campus were second-rate students, however, they did not show it. “There was a feeling they weren't particularly good, I don't know why,” recalled Lars Gunnarsson Sandberg, a graduate student in economics and later a professor of economics emeritus at Ohio State University. “There was a lot of snobbery, but it was intellectual snobbery. There were hot shots from all the schools in the country. We thought we were God's gift to the world.”

Under the chairmanship of John Dunlop, an avuncular and politically connected labor economist famed for his bow ties, the economics department was a microcosm of Harvard's legendary decentralization. Professors zealously pursued their own endeavors, many of which took them outside the university, all the while keeping a benign eye on their students. Some students formed close relationships with a particular faculty member. Wassily Leontief, the prominent Russian economist whose input-output analysis would later win him the Nobel Prize, would occasionally take a favored student fly-fishing on the Charles River, despite its polluted waters.
¹⁷
So too the silver-haired economic historian, Alexander Gerschenkron, who kept a rifle by the couch in his office, would reward a student who piqued his interest with a glass of the Dry Sack sherry or Remy Martin cognac he kept on a silvery tray on his desk.
¹⁸
But, more commonly, students struggled to get time with their prominent and often quite preoccupied professors.