First Person

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n February, Columbia’s Incite Institute opened the Obama Presidency Oral History archive to the public. The product of nearly seven years’ work, it contains more than 450 interviews with administration officials as well as activists, organizers and everyday people who interacted with President Barack Obama in meaningful ways. The result is a rich and insightful record of the 44th President’s two terms in office. Readers of this magazine, of course, also know him as a member of the Class of 1983.

We were curious, however, about the other College alumni in the archive. Who contributed recollections, and what roles did they play in Obama’s story? We found five, noted here as they were then: Eric H. Holder Jr. ’73, LAW’76, United States attorney general; Julius Genachowski ’85, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission; Sharon Block ’87, principal deputy assistant secretary for policy to the U.S. Secretary of Labor; Michael Leiter ’91, director of the National Counterterrorism Center; and Ben Jealous ’94, president of the NAACP.

Each person provides a different window on the period; reading their transcripts is an exercise in time travel that can quickly while away an afternoon. But these firsthand accounts are so much more than what happened and when. By their very nature, they are shaped by individual perspective, combined with anecdote, infused with personality and given more dimension by interviewees sharing details about their career and family backgrounds. We hear about major events and policy priorities but also the everyday click and hum of government gears turning; the struggles as well as the successes; why the work mattered and how it looks from today’s vantage point.

In selecting highlights for this feature, we strove for ones that reflected on Obama’s presidency or involved him directly. There was much that was difficult to leave out. We encourage you to visit the digital archive to engage with the transcripts and video in full: obamaoralhistory.columbia.edu.

These excerpts have been condensed and edited for clarity.

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Eric H. Holder Jr. ’73, LAW’76

Eric H. Holder Jr. ’73, LAW’76 served as U.S. Attorney General from 2009 to 2015; he was the first Black AG and the third-longest serving. A champion of criminal justice reform and voting rights, in 2017 he founded Columbia’s Eric H. Holder Jr. Initiative for Civil and Political Rights.

Reflecting on what drew him and Obama together, Holder told the archive it was the “desire to challenge things and to base policy on truth — on facts — as opposed to slight modifications of the status quo or a fear of offending entrenched interests.” He added: “I thought his Secret Service name, Renegade, captured who he is in a lot of ways. He is that Zen Hawaiian guy. I’m the volatile New Yorker. But he’s also a person who’s not afraid to push things. … I saw in him the possibility that we could get beyond what was, to me at least, our stale politics and move into a different space.”

On the 2008 presidential campaign:

I was really surprised by the receptivity that people in Iowa had to his candidacy [during the primaries]. I thought there was the possibility that he could win. But for me it was — I don’t know if we’d call it a labor of love, but it was a labor of belief. I was really surprised that by the time I had finished that two-, three-day tour in Iowa that there was a buzz there. I remember coming back and talking to him and to senior adviser Valerie Jarrett and saying, “This could actually happen.” [Laughs] He kind of looked at me, like, “Yes, Eric, this is kind of why we’re doing this.” …

If people are looking at this 100 years from now, I hope they will somehow be able to understand how America tapped into that notion of hope and change. There was a spirit. It was a hard campaign, won by a pretty substantial margin. But there was a feeling of optimism, a positive fervor for Barack, for the campaign, and for what this could mean — what it could mean for the nation. I was in Grant Park that night. Huge numbers of people, a multiracial, multigenerational crowd. That was consistent with what we saw during the campaign. America had the chance at that point to move to fundamentally a better place.

On his and Obama’s success with criminal justice reform, a shared priority even before Obama’s election:

Consistent with what Barack and I talked about when we first met, [we wanted] a criminal justice system that was more fair, and would not be made more fair at the expense of public safety. I think we were pretty successful at that. At the end of the Obama administration, we had for the first time in 40 years a reduction in the federal prison population and a reduction in the crime rate. That was, I think, as a result of the policies that we put in place at the Justice Department, supported by the President, because I brought him along as we were considering these things. …

I think we opened up the space for people to have conversations about the way in which law enforcement conducted itself, interacted with communities that they were supposed to serve. That space didn’t exist before. By having the attorney general and the President say that reform is needed, changes need to be made, evidence-based changes — we had certainly had an impact on the 15, 20 consent decrees [legally binding settlements that mandate conduct changes, often used in government regulation or reform] that we entered — and so there’s real substantive change in those police departments.

More broadly than that, the announcement of the Smart on Crime initiative in 2013 — that ushered in a new way of thinking about law enforcement and its interaction with various communities. It also put a different spin on the war on drugs. We were questioning, what’s the impact? Are people being treated fairly? When you take people who need to be held accountable out of their communities for inappropriately long periods of time, what’s the effect on those communities? That kind of dialogue, those kinds of examinations were new.

And we did it not fearing that we would be labeled soft on crime. That’s arsenic to a politician. I always prefaced everything with the notion that my responsibility is to keep the American people safe, whether it’s in regard to domestic crime or international terrorism — that gave us the space.

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Julius Genachowski ’85

Julius Genachowski ’85 was chair of the Federal Communications Commission from 2009 to 2013. Significantly, he oversaw the development and implementation of the National Broadband Plan, which aimed to make broadband more equitable and give all Americans the ability to access wired and wireless high-speed internet. He was also Obama’s classmate at Harvard Law, where they bonded over both being children of immigrants.

“We found much more similarity in our backgrounds than we did difference,” Genachowski told the archive. “In both cases, we came from families where the United States had given them a chance to succeed — who were given a chance, in part because of education, to come to the U.S. to study, and to stay if they wanted to. And I think we both grew up feeling a little bit outside the mainstream of what ‘America’ was. … We shared this sense of gratitude and appreciation and wonder that here we were at Harvard Law School, because I think that we had both grown up thinking that Harvard Law School was for people who were not like us.”

On his time working with Obama on the Harvard Law Review; Obama was elected its president in February 1990:

I was happy to be a big supporter of his at the time [laughs]. It was fun to be involved in his very first campaign for president of anything. And he won for many reasons. I think his brilliance and leadership skills were widely appreciated by the members of the Law Review at the time, and also his ability to engage with people with different philosophies or points of view. He didn’t pretend that he was something that he wasn’t, but he could talk to you very substantively about your views, where you really disagreed, where you agreed, and argue in a serious, strong, but respectful way about issues. And in arguing, he argued with high integrity. He argued with facts. He argued with logic. Looking back, I think those were some of the early ingredients of his leadership abilities. Whether you agreed with him or not, you appreciated his curiosity. He did want to know what people who disagreed with him thought and why they thought it. And he told you what he thought and why he thought it.

On communicating the importance and stakes of the National Broadband Plan, which addressed affordability and challenges in rural access:

It was always a challenge to take [what] can be technical and geeky issues and try to convert them into things that people understand. I don’t know that we got that done perfectly well, but when you’re talking about broadband and education, and you can actually talk about the differences between a student who has a fast connection to their school’s website, or to do their homework or their research, and a student who has no connectivity or a really slow connection. People get that. Or you talk about remote medicine, and you talk about the difference between your doctor being able to communicate with another doctor and transferring video images or X-ray images quickly, or not; or someone in a rural area being able to consult with a professional in an urban area.

So we did our best to try to draw the link between the technology issues and the real-world effects on people. If we couldn’t do that, then we were focusing on the wrong things. If we couldn’t explain why this would be important, why it would create jobs, why it would make people’s lives better, then we were probably focusing on the wrong things.

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Sharon Block ’87

Sharon Block ’87 held several positions during the Obama administration. She was deputy assistant secretary for congressional and intergovernmental affairs in the U.S. Department of Labor from 2009 to 2011, then served on the National Labor Relations Board, which enforces U.S. labor law. From 2013 to 2017, she was principal deputy assistant secretary for policy to U.S. Secretary of Labor Tom Perez. “Most adults spend most of their adult life at work. So if you’re not treated fairly, if you don’t have dignity on the job, it’s impossible to have a good life,” Block said, recalling how she came to her area of expertise. “That just made labor law seem really important to me.”

On becoming principal deputy assistant secretary for policy to Perez during Obama’s second term:

We had all this work that we wanted to do that we hadn’t been able to do during Obama’s first term, and Tom was just totally committed to going big or going home. It was very exciting. He didn’t know the department, really, had never worked there. And so he just sort of brought me along on the ride in whatever we were doing. I saw my role as working with the chief of staff, but really to be a gatekeeper in terms of making as many decisions as possible. And I felt very empowered that way. To make the judgment about what he had to make a decision about, because it was just such a torrent of work that everything couldn’t go to him. Every agency thinks that their stuff is the most important thing, and that the secretary absolutely would be disappointed if they didn’t get to be part of the decision. And you just can’t function that way.

The President was also in a totally different place — I believe the Obama of the second term was freed from the constraints of trying to stop the economy from going off a cliff and reelection, to be more of his true self. So he was an amazing supporter of this much more progressive agenda that we wanted to move.

On the Obama administration’s resolving tensions with the labor movement following the passage in 2015 of the Trade-Promotion Authority (the TPA empowered the President to negotiate reciprocal trade agreements with foreign countries):

TPA passed, so they started to move to discussing the Trans-Pacific Partnership [a proposed trade agreement among 12 Pacific Rim countries]. Labor knew where everything was heading. There was so much still to do with the administration. The President decided, and we had recommended, that he do a meeting with labor leaders, with union presidents, because he hadn’t talked to them for so long. That was really a turning point.

We had a dozen union presidents come in. So I staffed him for that. It was amazing. I mean, it was so fraught; we were so scared. We didn’t know how the labor leaders would react. You can ask people to set the context; like, “This is your opportunity to talk about everything else. Obviously we can’t tell you that you can’t talk about trade, because that’s not how things work. But it won’t be a great use of your time if you do.” But we didn’t know. We did these amazing memos for the President of everybody’s issues and, aside from trade, what everybody was interested in. It was just a huge amount of work getting ready for something like that; talking to everybody, doing the seating chart.

The President came in, and he sat down, and he put his notes aside, and he just said, “I know this has been a rough patch in our relationship. You know how important labor is to me. You’re the core of my support.” He talked about the upcoming summit [2015 White House Summit on Workers Voice]. He said, “I think you all know, but I’m really excited, looking forward to this, want you all to be involved. This is a big deal. And now I just want to hear from you.”

So they each went around, and they talked. He never looked at a note. Clearly he had read the notes, because he knew the background. But he just engaged with each one of them on their issues, and totally gave off this aura, like, “You have my full attention. You have as much time as this needs to take. I’m here. I’m listening.” It was great. I think that really made a difference, like they really felt heard. It gave them a point in time to pivot. So they’re talking to the President again.

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Michael Leiter ’91

Michael Leiter ’91 was the director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) from 2007 to 2011, bridging the Bush and Obama administrations. As he told the archive, he viewed his job as apolitical; for a time during the transition, he was unsure he’d be asked to continue. “I’m not sure anyone knew if I was a Republican or a Democrat or a Bushie or an Obama, and I liked it that way,” Leiter said. “That’s not how I define myself.”

On delivering a 2008 intelligence briefing to President-Elect Obama, alongside CIA director Michael Hayden and FBI director Robert Mueller III:

The preparation is quite intense. It’s the first time you’re spending time with a guy who may or may not be your boss but definitely is going to be the President. But what we really spent the most time on — I did this with about two or three of my leadership team whom I really trusted — was sort of saying: “I’ve got 20 minutes. What is it that the next President of the United States really needs to know? What is the filter through which we want him to look at the terrorism challenge we face?” …

At the end of the briefing, Obama very nicely said, “You guys have just told me everything that you’re doing really well. What are we not doing so well on?” Very fair question.

My answer was, we’re very, very good at finding the bad guys. We’re very good at arresting or killing the bad guys. We are terrible at keeping people from becoming bad guys in the first place. We don’t really understand the radicalization process well. The government isn’t organized to address it. We don’t have programs to slow down the radicalization, so we face a real messaging problem.

I was later told that that’s when the President thought, “Oh, this guy is not an idiot,” because he leaned over and he said very forcefully and very directly, “Believe me. We are changing the message to the world on this.” And it was clear that even if he had not thought about this from a terrorism-specific perspective, it is something that he deeply thought of in the post-9-11 era, how he wanted to message to the world as the President of the United States.

On his and the NCTC’s role in the decision to conduct the raid that killed Osama bin Laden:

The debate back and forth was interesting, but I think certainly the two most important things I and NCTC did was the presentation to the Red Team [a group authorized to independently assess evidence and challenge thinking in high-stakes situations], and my writing the analysis on what we thought al-Qaeda’s reaction would be to bin Laden if we killed him. Which of course now we look back on and nothing happened, so how hard could it have been? But at the time, we were actually really worried about global attacks against embassies and homegrown extremists.

I have long thought it was a high point for NCTC, more because of what NCTC represented than any specific outcome. It was a critically important mission. The organization of NCTC wasn’t responsible for that intelligence, but the organization of NCTC embodied making sure all the information came together and then challenged it, so no one got so absorbed with their own operations. …

I’ll of course always remember the last main meeting, discussing with the President what to do. We talked about everything, and then I presented the Red-Team analysis. Then the President forced everybody at the table to say what they thought and why they thought it. He didn’t have to do that, and I thought it was great. I thought it was brilliant presidential decision making. He kind of said, “What do you think and how confident are you?” People started saying, “I’m 80 percent confident, I’m 50 percent confident.”

It came back around to me at the end, and I said, “Mr. President, I think all these percentages are precision for the sake of accuracy. I think it’s sort of 50-50 about whether it’s him, but even if I take the lowest likelihood from the Red Team, which was 40 percent likely it’s him, that is still 38 percent higher likelihood than we’ve had for the past 10 years. In that sense, I think we have to go, and we have to strike.”

I was not necessarily supportive of the one strike. I thought there was a different option that would have been good, but that is in my view the role I played. Of course, President Obama didn’t make a decision [in that moment], and he also famously said, “Yes, it’s 50-50, but we’ve got to decide.” Obviously, the right decision was made.

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Ben Jealous ’94

At 35, Ben Jealous ’94 was the youngest person ever appointed president of the NAACP, a position he held from 2008 to 2013. But even before leading the organization, Jealous organized on behalf of Obama, co-founding a political action committee, Vote Hope, that was a critical force during the 2008 presidential primary season. The focus on voting carried through his tenure with the NAACP, which registered close to 375,000 voters and mobilized 1.2 million new and unlikely voters for the 2012 presidential election. “What we understood in our bones at the NAACP is the only thing harder than electing the first Black President would be to reelect the first Black President,” Jealous told the archive.

On his efforts with Vote Hope during the primary season:

Our strategy was to get into Southern states on average six weeks before the campaign did. We were able to get in and to advertise on Black radio, advertise in Black newspapers, six weeks ahead. We geared everything basically toward churchgoing Black women. That was our core demographic. We ran big ads. We ran big ads of Obama in the pulpit with a window that appeared to be a massive cross behind him, because they were attacking him for being a Muslim.

All of our ads were bio ads just so people had the real story, that this was a man who went to church, who had a beautiful family, who stood up to the establishment, who fought to stop the police from torturing people in our communities, who had courage. … We felt like farmers — we had been out there planting seeds long before the campaign — “long” in presidential. In life, six weeks is nothing. When you’re running a campaign, primary, six weeks is everything. We had planted seeds that the campaign wasn’t able to plant, in the hearts and heads of voters in the Black community in states that were going to decide the outcome of the primary, and state after state after state after state. As organizers, we knew Jesse Jackson had great crowds when he ran for President. We knew Al Sharpton had great crowds. Shirley Chisholm had great crowds. Organizers, we’re focused on how many votes are actually going to show up.

For us, even more than the media, it was having all the organizers in the Black churches. It was organizing Black church ladies. Our shirts said, “Obama, oh yes” [laughter]. We played heavy into the culture of the Deep South. I had cut my teeth organizing Mississippi. We’re going to meet people exactly where they are, “Obama, oh yes, baby” [laughter]. We had been on a mission as a community to break the color barrier at the White House since before all of us were born. That’s what the founding of the NAACP was about. This had been a building movement throughout American history for centuries. Winning that first election for us was as much about moving the lid off of the aspirations of our children as it was any candidate. We were so relieved to finally have a candidate who could go all the way, no matter what.

On the role of the NAACP during the Obama presidency:

On the day Obama was inaugurated, 48 percent of Black America was in poverty. We were dealing with the recession. I said to our team, “We will stay focused on the greatest civil rights challenges of our times. We will put all of our energy into the ones that also stand at the nexus of ending poverty.” That was our mindset. That’s why I was talking about mass incarceration, because we had 48 percent of Black America stuck at the bottom in poverty for 40 years after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and we had to address that with urgency.

We also understood that there was a certain historical inertia to keep half of Black America, a whole lot of white folks, and a whole lot of folks of every color in between, trapped at the bottom of the economy and locked out from the American dream. We knew that we would have to push hard on the President on those issues — where there was a hard lobby pushing in the other direction — to help back him up, to help steel his spine. That was our posture. We felt like there wasn’t any organization that was more proud of the President. There wasn’t any organization that had sacrificed more to make his victory possible across the decades before, the century before. And there also wasn’t any greater responsibility for the NAACP than ensuring that the arc of the moral universe in America kept getting bent in the right direction.