Barry was a focused, dedicated student and an earnest, sincere person, but he wasn’t too serious to talk about the fun stuff. We’d hang out and talk about what was happening in class and who was dating whom. He goofed around with the rest of us. He was engaging and perhaps even charismatic, but I wasn’t aware of him being a playboy.
He was friends with women who were impressive feminists as well as people who were more socially focused. He straddled groups: the arts/literary crowd, which tended to stick together, and the political activist crowd, likewise. He belonged to both.
I was also at the rally where he gave his first speech, an anti-apartheid rally at Occidental. He was hunched over the mike, it was too low for him.
He was nervous and he was rushing a little. I recall him saying something like: ‘Occidental should spend less time investing in South Africa and more time on
multicultural education.’ That was impressive because you think of multiculturalism as a 1990s phenomenon, and here he was in the early 1980s, thinking about the need for that in an educational sense.
I met Barack at a coffee shop on Lexington Avenue, New York. He was a year out of Columbia and he’d just quit a job working as a journalist for a business publication. One of his preoccupations was being a novelist and he had taken the journalism job to facilitate that. So he’d applied to work for my group as a community organizer in the poor South Side of Chicago.
We socialized together. He would come over for dinner at our house and we played tennis together. He was neat for a young man. He couldn’t afford to take his shirt to the laundry but it always looked neatly pressed.
His apartment was also very neat, almost monastic, without much furniture and filled with books. He was very thin, skinnier than he is now. Women would regularly invite him home to dinner to try to fatten him up, but it didn’t work.
If his style of poker is like how he’ll run the White House I’ll sleep well at night. He is very conscious of the odds. If he thought he had a chance of winning he’d stay in the game; if he thought not he’d fold straight away. He read and played the field very well. He was serious at it. Barack’s golf game was terrible at first, that’s probably the nicest way to say it. I’m an avid golfer. He hated losing to me. He’s so competitive and his frustration got so bad that he went out and took lessons. His game improved a lot but I still beat him.