When Barry Became Barack

Obama wanted a clean slate. "Going to New York was really a significant break. It's when I left a lot of stuff behind," he says. "I think there was a lot of stuff going on in me. By the end of that year at Occidental, I think I was starting to work it through, and I think part of the attraction of transferring was, it's hard to remake yourself around people who have known you for a long time." It was when he got to New York that, as he recalls it, he began to ask people to call him Barack: "It was not some assertion of my African roots … not a racial assertion. It was much more of an assertion that I was coming of age. An assertion of being comfortable with the fact that I was different and that I didn't need to try to fit in in a certain way."

He stopped drinking and partying, leading what he calls "a hermetic existence" for two years. "When I look back on it, it was a pretty grim and humorless time that I went through," he recalls. "I literally went to class, came home, read books, took long walks, wrote." Politics was a passion, but he was disillusioned by radicals who claimed to have all the answers. At one point after graduation, he went "in search of some inspiration" to hear Kwame Toure (the former Stokely Carmichael) speak at Columbia. A thin young woman stood up to question Toure's push to establish economic ties between Africa and Harlem: was that practical, given the difficult state of African economies? Toure cut her off, calling her brainwashed, and others shouted her down. "It was like a bad dream," Obama wrote later.

Obama kept detailed journals in New York. It was good practice. "Writing journals during those two years gave me not only the raw material for the book, but also taught me to shape a narrative in ways that would work," he says. When he later became a community organizer in Chicago, part of his job was storytelling. "His job largely consisted of interviewing community members and creating a narrative out of their experiences, the problems the community faced," says his boss at that time, Gerald Kellman. Eventually, even Chicago would seem too small a stage. He told Kellman "he did not feel there would be large-scale change brought about by organizing." Large-scale change was what Obama was aiming for.

He lost touch with many of his old Oxy friends. Eric Moore says he had no contact with Obama for about 15 years. Then on a visit to Chicago, Moore was walking through a park when he saw a fund-raising table with an OBAMA placard. He walked up to the woman behind the table and asked if she was promoting "Barack Obama." She said yes, and he left his card with her in hopes she'd pass it along to his old friend. The two reconnected after that. "He was so genuine and unchanged," Moore says. "That's what he is every time I see him, except that now he doesn't wear the flip-flops." Moore says that he's amazed that his friend is on the possible verge of becoming president. "It's not like he came from a family like the Kennedys or the Bushes," Moore says. "He's a self-made man."

Few have willed their self-creation in quite the same way. The absence of his father taught Obama the importance of stories. These tales helped him make sense of who he was. (At least two acquaintances in his postgraduation years thought he was on a track to become a writer.) Stories made the murkier aspects of life coherent, or at least gave him confidence—that he could author his own life story, and thus become a master of the tale and not a victim. As a teenager, he had been skeptical of some family yarns, thinking they had been burnished a little too bright. He was at an age then when kids distinguish between fairy tales and truth, when they often become disillusioned with their parents.

One story that stuck with him concerned his father. It's the only such story about his father—told by his white relatives—that dealt explicitly with race. It goes like this: