The front of Monday’s New York Times presented some truly groundbreaking journalism: President Obama likes to read. Chief book critic and Obama idolizer Michiko Kakutani’s long farewell piece was plotted to make the departing president look like a thoughtful intellectual: “How Reading Nourished Obama During the White House Years.”
It’s the sequel, awaited by no one, to her front-page report from January 2009 featuring then president-elect Obama on the eve of his inauguration, where she credited him for his "love of fiction and poetry” that “imbued him with a tragic sense of history and a sense of the ambiguities of the human condition," as opposed to departing president George W. Bush's "prescriptive" reading that merely provided a black-and-white "Manichean view of the world."
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Kakutani wrote on Monday:
Not since Lincoln has there been a president fundamentally shaped -- in his life, convictions and outlook on the world -- by reading and writing as Barack Obama.
Last Friday, seven days before his departure from the White House, Mr. Obama sat down in the Oval Office and talked about the indispensable role that books have played during his presidency and throughout his life -- from his peripatetic and sometimes lonely boyhood, when “these worlds that were portable” provided companionship, to his youth when they helped him to figure out who he was, what he thought and what was important.
Here’s Obama, above it all:
During his eight years in the White House -- in a noisy era of information overload, extreme partisanship and knee-jerk reactions -- books were a sustaining source of ideas and inspiration, and gave him a renewed appreciation for the complexities and ambiguities of the human condition.
It’s no wonder some think the president is arrogant, with these kind of comparisons being made on the front of the nation’s most distinguished newspaper.
Like Lincoln, Mr. Obama taught himself how to write, and for him, too, words became a way to define himself, and to communicate his ideas and ideals to the world. In fact, there is a clear, shining line connecting Lincoln and King, and President Obama. In speeches like the ones delivered in Charleston and Selma, he has followed in their footsteps, putting his mastery of language in the service of a sweeping historical vision, which, like theirs, situates our current struggles with race and injustice in a historical continuum that traces how far we’ve come and how far we have yet to go....
Mr. Obama’s long view of history and the optimism (combined with a stirring reminder of the hard work required by democracy) that he articulated in his farewell speech last week are part of a hard-won faith, grounded in his reading, in his knowledge of history (and its unexpected zigs and zags), and his embrace of artists like Shakespeare who saw the human situation entire: its follies, cruelties and mad blunders, but also its resilience, decencies and acts of grace. The playwright’s tragedies, he says, have been “foundational for me in understanding how certain patterns repeat themselves and play themselves out between human beings.”
In his searching 1995 book “Dreams From My Father,” Mr. Obama recalls how reading was a crucial tool in sorting out what he believed, dating back to his teenage years, when he immersed himself in works by Baldwin, Ellison, Hughes, Wright, DuBois and Malcolm X in an effort “to raise myself to be a black man in America.” Later, during his last two years in college, he spent a focused period of deep self-reflection and study, methodically reading philosophers from St. Augustine to Nietzsche, Emerson to Sartre to Niebuhr, to strip down and test his own beliefs.
To this day, reading has remained an essential part of his daily life. He recently gave his daughter Malia a Kindle filled with books he wanted to share with her (including “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” “The Golden Notebook” and “The Woman Warrior”). And most every night in the White House, he would read for an hour or so late at night — reading that was deep and ecumenical, ranging from contemporary literary fiction (the last novel he read was Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad”) to classic novels to groundbreaking works of nonfiction like Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow” and Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Sixth Extinction.”
....
Mr. Obama taught himself to write as a young man by keeping a journal and writing short stories when he was a community organizer in Chicago -- working on them after he came home from work and drawing upon the stories of the people he met. Many of the tales were about older people, and were informed by a sense of disappointment and loss: “There is not a lot of Jack Kerouac open-road, young kid on the make discovering stuff,” he says. “It’s more melancholy and reflective.”
That experience underscored the power of empathy....
This lesson would become a cornerstone of the president’s vision of an America where shared concerns -- simple dreams of a decent job, a secure future for one’s children -- might bridge differences and divisions. After all, many people saw their own stories in his -- an American story, as he said in his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention possible “in no other country on Earth.”
In today’s polarized environment, where the internet has let people increasingly retreat to their own silos (talking only to like-minded folks, who amplify their certainties and biases), the president sees novels and other art (like the musical “Hamilton”) as providing a kind of bridge that might span usual divides and “a reminder of the truths under the surface of what we argue about every day.”
Obama is one of the last politicians to lecture on the perils of polarization, given his refusal to negotiate with Republicans or even acknowledge their ideas (“I won”), but Kakutani ignored that detail.
An Obama book is surely not far behind, she promised (threatened?):
Mr. Obama entered office as a writer, and he will soon return to a private life as a writer, planning to work on his memoirs, which will draw on journals he’s kept in the White House (“but not with the sort of discipline that I would have hoped for”). He has a writer’s sensibility -- an ability to be in the moment while standing apart as an observer, a novelist’s eye and ear for detail, and a precise but elastic voice capable of moving easily between the lyrical and the vernacular and the profound.
