Barack Obama: A Childhood of Loss and Love

Sept. 26, 2008 — -- It was 1990 when a third-year student, who had rocketed to the top at Harvard Law School, presided over a rally. He was a man making a mark.

"Well I had had about 5,000 law students by the time I met Barack Obama, the most impressive student I'd ever worked with," said Laurence Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School. "And now that I've had another 5,000 in the years since, so that remains true. I wrote his name on my desk calendar, which I don't very often do."

Obama took out student loans to pay his tuition and went on to graduate magna cum laude, earning a coveted spot on the Harvard Law Review, where a fierce political tug of war over vision and values was going on between conservatives and liberals.

Finding Common Ground

Brad Berenson, a conservative Republican, said he wanted Obama to become president of the review because he had an unusual gift for finding common ground.

"I've worked at the Supreme Court, I've worked at the White House and I've never seen politics as personal or bitter as those on the Harvard Review," he said.

"The conservatives, as a whole in the end voted for Barack," Berenson said. "I think because they trusted him more to be fair and to be respectful to points of view different from his."

When Obama won that position, a ceiling shattered at the 173-year-old cathedral of American learning. At 28 years old, he appeared on local television, saying there was more that had to be done.

"For a lot of kids, the doors that have been opened to me aren't open to them," he said then.

"He had no interest in learning law just as a kind of intellectual exercise," Tribe said. "He needed to learn law to help people. He wanted to understand how the Constitution worked."

Back then Obama was already showing his signature combination of confidence and mystery.

"You do not get to be the Democratic nominee for president of the United Stated at age 46, now 47, if you do not have an enormous amount of self-confidence," Jon Meacham of Newsweek magazine said. "And that had to come from somewhere. Where'd it come from?"