Read Online Michelle Obama by David Colbert - Free Book Online

legal aid office that was run by the students. Poor clients who couldn't afford a lawyer to handle conflicts with a landlord or a divorce or a problem collecting money that was owed could go to the students for help. If the dispute had to go to court, an experienced lawyer might help, but otherwise the law students managed their own work. It was perfect for Michelle. She spent a lot of time at the legal aid center. Colleagues remember her as serious about her work, and good at it, but also fun to have in the office.
PURPLE POWER
    Having gone to Harvard, it was hard to resist the obvious next step. She took a job at a large Chicago law firm, Sidley & Austin. At the time, her father, who had been working for the city for decades, was making $40,000. Her starting salary at age twenty-four was $65,000.
    But despite her interest in and need for a good income, her desire for interesting work was hard to fulfill at Sidley.
    Her bosses tried, even though some of them believed she was too demanding. Unfortunately, large firms use young lawyers for the less interesting parts of legal work. Sidley also didn't handle cases that were as satisfying to her as working for the legal aid clients had been.
    Then one day a colleague came into her office with a videotape. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting had just bought a new television show, and they needed a Sidley lawyer to work on the copyright and merchandise rights. Michelle found a conference room with a videotape player and pushed the cassette into the slot. When she pushed the PLAY button, a purple dinosaur danced across the screen and began to sing. Her new client was Barney. Work had just become a little more interesting.
    Another of her assignments was to mentor a summer associate. Large law firms try to recruit top law school students to join their firms after graduation by bringing them to a grown-up version of summer camp. The summer associates are given a taste of legal work during the day, and in the evening—if they're interning at a competitive firm—they're treated to barbeques and baseball games and party cruises.
    Some of Michelle's coworkers had met a particular summer associate during the interview process and somehow sensed that there'd be an attraction between him and Michelle. He was from Harvard Law, they said. He was older than the usual summer associates, because he hadn't gone to law school right after college. Sidley had taken him as a summer associate even though he had only finished his first year of law school. That was unusual. Apparently he was brilliant: His professors at Harvard were already talking about his future. The senior lawyers at Sidley were delighted that they'd snagged him. Just from the photo he'd sent in for the firm's directory there was a lot of giggling in the hallways about him being cute.
    Michelle shook her head at all of it. "I had dated a lot of brothers who had this kind of reputation coming in," she told Obama biographer David Mendell. "I figured he was one of these smooth brothers who could talk straight and impress people." Michelle, who had always been about hard work, was skeptical that her colleagues even knew what to look for. "I figured that they were just impressed with any black man with a suit and a job," she later said.
    They were impressed by more than that.

6. "HIS NAME IS BARACK"
    Because she was going to be this new associate's mentor, Michelle looked for his picture in the directory Sidley was preparing. Not bad, she thought. But she quickly imagined a defect: His nose was too big.
    That was typical of Michelle at the time. She had an instinct for self-defense. When she did date, she ended it before it could get serious. It was always the man's fault, she imagined. He fell short in some way.
Too much this, not enough that. Her brother began to pity them as soon as he met them. "There would be no reason for me to dislike any of my sister's boyfriends," he told the
Providence Journal.
"It was always more