SEATTLE -- I've read a lot of political novels in my life, and a few great ones ("All the King's Men"). But I had this thought over and over while reading "The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama," David Remnick's superb new life-thus-far of President Obama: No one, but no one, could have made this story up.
By now, most of the world is familiar with Obama's amazing trajectory; his upbringing as the son of an absent Kenyan father and a free-spirited Kansan mother; his rise from indifferent student at Occidental College to president of the Harvard Law Review; his meteoric political career, aided by smarts, even-temperedness and a knack for timing. Obama has told the story himself in two autobiographical books.
But Remnick, whose day job is editor of The New Yorker magazine, is a master blender of history, reporting and narrative, and in "The Bridge" (Knopf), he drives home the stunning, surprising nature of this saga by interweaving Obama's rise with the history of the civil-rights movement.
In Remnick's book, the story begins March 7, 1965, when civil-rights leader John Lewis and a crowd of freedom marchers tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. It ends on Inauguration Day 2008, when Obama wrote this note to U.S. Rep. Lewis: "Because of you, John - Barack Obama."
Remnick answered questions from his office at The New Yorker:
Q: Do you remember the first time you heard about Obama?
I do. Around the office, somebody mentioned that there was a guy with a funny name, running for the Senate, and we were looking for election stories to do that weren't presidential elections. The more I heard about him from the writer, Bill Finnegan, the more it became obvious that it would be a great piece (titled "The Candidate," it ran in The New Yorker in May 2004). And there was even mention of him running for president (then). I became completely incredulous.
Q: What are the problems and challenges of writing about a sitting president? Some of them are obvious. To write a history of a president who's long out of office - people are relieved of the bonds of obligation and discretion and circumstances. You are privy to documents and archives that you wouldn't necessarily have access to in early circumstances - presidential libraries, witnesses. I benefited enormously from the previous reporting on Obama, but I was surprised to an extent by the amount of on-the-record (interviews) I could get, after the campaign and during the first year of the presidency.
Q: How many times did you interview him for the book?
I sat down with him twice. I have to say that I was thrilled to meet him, not in a gaga sense, but in a journalistic sense.
Q: In your book, reading excerpts of Obama's own words from letters and passages from his two books, I was struck with his personal eloquence and way with words. Did that make your job easier? It made it both easier and harder. If you're thinking about writing a book about Barack Obama, you're confronted with someone who's already written his own story ... Obama's was not a long record of policy innovation or government service; the books ("Dreams from My Father" and "The Audacity of Hope") played a larger part in creating this thing called Barack Obama. It shaped his own story. How much is true, how much is myth? That is rich territory for someone like me.
