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A Review by Joan Shaw
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama
by David Remnick

Obama at Entrepreneur Meeting AP photo -- click ro browse
Helen,

I wonder if you'd glance over this review I've written of David Remnick's The Bridge. It's a wonderful book, have you read it yet? It came out just this month.

Recall the march in Selma On March 7, 1965. The day that acquired its name, "Bloody Sunday," from what happened there. John Lewis, now Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives, wrote about it in his book, Walking With The Wind, He remembers it well – he was nearly killed there. What the Southern Christian Leadership Conference wanted to do with this march, see, was  make the strongly anti-civil rights and anti-voting rights city of Selma a test case for voting rights.     

But then something happened. At a voting rights rally in a nearby town, a young army veteran and voting rights protester (he had tried to register five times) was shot twice in the stomach while trying to protect his mother in a police riot trying to break up a voting rights teach-in. He died a few days later. The plan for the march was modified to include this young man's casket. They would carry this casket from Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma to Montgomery, the capital of Alabama. They intended to place the casket on the steps of the capitol and ask for not only civil rights, but justice from Alabama's segregationist Governor George Wallace. A group of 600 men, women, and children accompanied the casket and they started off, somber and silent, as befits a funeral procession, and headed down Highway 80 for the Edmund Pettus Bridge out of Selma.

At the crest of this arching bridge they were brought to a halt by a sea of police uniforms and an enormous number of vigilantes recruited from around the area. All were armed with clubs and whips, their faces covered with gas masks. They meant business; one of the vigilantes even had a hose wrapped in barbed wire. The marchers were ordered to go back where they came from and were given two minutes to do it. The young leaders were left with a quandry – if they turned around to leave they'd be pursued by the armed crowd. Obviously they couldn't go forward. So they spread the word to drop to their knees and pray. This is when the police and the vigilantes  advanced and, in full view of journalists and photographers with cameras rolling, laid into the marchers. John Lewis, then twenty-five years old and at the head of the marchers, was hit continually with a club. The first blow to his head is what fractured his skull.

According to a historical note at the Library of Congress site, "Today in History," when ABC TV interrupted its documentary, Judgment in Nuremberg, to run footage of the bloody scene, "a powerful metaphor was presented to the nation." The result was a furor, an outpouring of outrage. It became the impetus for thousands of supporters to flood into the south to help fight for African American voting rights. Letters, telephone calls, and telegrams beseiged Washington for redress. Demonstrations erupted in some eighty cities across the nation.

Soon after, President Lyndon Johnson addressed the nation before a joint session of congress proposing The Voting Rights Act of 1965. Meanwhile, Judge Frank Johnson, Jr, ruled that the demonstrators must be allowed to march. One death was that of a northern minister, in Selma to join with the protestors, shot to death by a vigilante, the first of many deaths in this bleak period of our nation's history.

David Remnick, author of The Bridge, goes into much greater detail on this and other shattering events in the movement that followed. He writes of the heroic people who put their very lives in danger to further its goals. And the eventual transformative  inaugruation of the first African-American president of the United States.  The Edmund Pettus was The Bridge of David Remnick's book title and as John Lewis, the last living hero of Bloody Sunday, says, "Barack Obama is what comes at the end of that bridge in Selma."

The Joshua Generation

In a May 3, 2010 piece in The New Yorker, Mr Remnick discussed the Joshua Generation and included part of this discussion in a different form in The Bridge. When Obama spoke from the pulpit of Brown Chapel on the fortieth anniversary of the march from Selma', wrote Remnick, "he paid tribute to the'Moses generation' – to Martin Luther King and John Lewis, to Anna Cooper and the Reverend Joseph Lowery – the men and women of the movement, who marched and suffered, in ways unimaginalable to people today, for the African American cause but who “didn’t cross over the river to see the Promised Land.”

Then he addressed the Joshua Generation who did cross over, leaving Moses behind. "What's called of us?" he asked of the Joshua Generation. "Life had improved for African-Americans, but "we shouldn't forget that better is not good enough."

Remember, this was during Obama's campaign for the presidency, when there was talk of his not being black enough, not suffering enough, not committed enough to the country's African American citizens. He had not battled especially for African American rights, some of the older blacks pointed out, and some disapproved of him for that. During his campaign he had not emphasized his race, but instead emphasized the need to lift up all Americans, especially the poor, especially the children, especially the middle class that was fast disappearing.  He was not a patriarch, nor was he a prophet, but as Remnick pointed out, Obama was instead the prophesied. The Prophesied. What a wonderful choice of words.

"I'm here because somebody marched," he said from the pulpit.  "I'm here because you all sacrificed for me." As Remnick put it, Obama was, in point of fact, the culmination of that march and those sacrifices.  

Barack and Others

The thing I enjoyed most about this book was the succinct sketches of those family members and political colleagues and friends, and even political enemies, that most influenced Obama. He begins at the beginning, of course, when he was a child of a white single mother and the grandchild of two white grandparents, describes the problems and anxieties of his Kenyan father, Barack Obama Senior, with both candor and sympathy, and describes his Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, with the same care. He offers sketches of those who accompanied and influenced Obama through his adolescence, his college and university years, and, ultimately, his political years in Illinois and on into the White House.

In 2000, for, instance, he decided to run for U.S. Congress, rashly it turned out, against a particularly popular black incumbent, Bobby Rush, in a district on the south side of Chicago that was 90% black. We think of Obama now as a  consummate campaigner, holding his audiences captive in his hands. But when he first embarked on his campaigns, the debates, the press conferences, he was earnest but awkward, his answers complicated and too long. It took him some hard years to learn how to handle crowds, sometimes hostile crowds. He hadn't yet shed his university professor's skin.

His crushing and humiliating defeat by Bobby Rush  –  and it was crushing and humiliating  –  could have sent him back to teaching or nonprofit organizing, as it did to others falling flat on their faces after an ambitious run in a hopeless race. But, as Dan Shomon, a former UPI reporter and eventual legislative aide to Obama, pointed out, politics completed Obama as a person and "ultimately, if it hadn't been for that (congressional) race, there would be no Barack Obama. That was boot camp." Publicly, as the (now famously) unflappable Barack Obama put it to a group of his supporters, "I can tell you now that winning is better than losing."

On the the Nomination and Election

Mr. Remnick goes from there through Barack Obama's political life, giving us short sketches of the people most influential to him as he traveled from Illinois to Washington, DC.  When the primaries were over, Obama had won the nomination with the help of multiple super delegate endorsements. Hilary Clinton conceded on June 7, and pledged her full support to nominee Obama and vowed to do her utmost to get him elected.

One of the most astounding facts in this election was that Obama became the first African American to be nominated for President by a major politcal party. But even better, he won a good percentage of the white vote, especially among the younger demographic but also among the older whites. His acceptance speech attracted a minimum of 84,000 people to the Pepsi Center in Denver.  He won election as president with 297 electoral votes against John McCain's 146. Just before midnight Eastern Time, on November 5, President-elect Barack Obama gave his victory speech before of crowd of 150,000 cheering and weeping people. It was a heady time.

Through a broad grassroots movement and a new method of campaigning by courting and mobilizing activists, donations, and voters through the Internet,  first created by Howard Dean, the Obama capaign amassed a war chest that amounted to $532,946,511 (compared to McCain's $379,006,485). Most impressive was Obama's support from a record-breaking number of individual email donors.

As I watched the tears of joy after Obama's election, I felt an additional and equal feeling of grief at how quickly this euphoria will dissipate as President Obama faces a desk full of trouble and the anger of his supporters who often had their own, narrow agendas and little patience with the President's pragmatism and compromise that was the hallmark of both his campaign and his  governing style.

Then there were two wars, an economy in near collapse, unemployment at its highest since The Great Depression, Global Climate Change, an enormous national debt. So dissipate it did, that euphoria. This president's first year would try anyone's soul, with attacks from both the left and the right, yet Obama continued to breast every wave of problems with his usual even tempered and considered attention, though it couldn't have been easy.  As he told David Remnick in an interview at the White House, the euphoria of electing the first African-American president lasted about one day.

Mark Halperin (not necessarily an Obama cheerleader) wrote in a recent column of his in Time magazineof the legislative chances of Democrats in Congress in the 2010 elections and the influence on them of Obama's success or failure  Halperin wrote,"[B]y Election Day 2010, Obama will have soundly achieved many of his chief campaign promises while running a highly competent, scandal-free government. Not bad for a guy whose opponents (in both parties) for the White House suggested that he was too green in national life to know how to do the job – and whose presidency began in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis that demanded urgent attention and commanded much of his focus."
President Obama comforts a grandmother
Meanwhile, President Barack Obama goes about his presidential duties, not only among the leaders of the world, leaders of industry, and United States lawmakers, but among regular citizens like, for instance, the grieving family members who had lost husbands, sons, and grandsons in the Massey mine explosiion in West Virginia. To the left, the President comforts a grandmother who is speaking to him about her grandson, one of the 29 victims for whom Obama had just given the eulogy. He had ended his eulogy  with what needs to be done in the mining industry and why:

 "Our task, here on Earth, is to save lives from being lost in another such tragedy; to do what we must do, individually and collectively, to assure safe conditions underground, to treat our miners like they treat each other – like a family. Because we are all family and we are all Americans. And we have to lean on one another, and look out for one another, and love one another, and pray for one another."


I would like to hear your reaction to this book, Helen.

The best to you and yours, Joan
David Remnick