Playing Bridge

So argumentative were students that Charnes, a senior law review editor, recalls a heated discussion one morning over whether it was elitist to bring editors bagels and muffins.

Higgins recalls Obama walking in during another argument.

He summoned one editor to a meeting and began climbing the stairs to his cramped second-floor office. The editor made no move to follow and kept arguing. Obama paused.

“Upstairs, now,” he said firmly. He kept walking. The editor sheepishly followed.

Obama rarely raised his voice.

“In law school and on law review, most people like to talk a lot and exercise their mouths more than their ears,” Charnes says. “And Barack was just the opposite. He was very judicious in expressing his opinions and views.”

Kenny Smith, a year ahead of Obama, joined him for pickup basketball games on Fridays in the law school gym. Though the games were physical, Obama was unflappable. Smith says it was a quality that helped him get along with students of all stripes.

“He was sort of a bridge person for various camps because the law school was very, very divided,” recalls Smith, now 43 and an assistant U.S. attorney in Charlotte. “He seemed to have almost an ‘old soul.’ … He just had a practical wisdom and always seemed grounded and comfortable in his own skin.”

After a game, they sometimes stopped for pizza and talked about their futures. While others foresaw lucrative careers, Obama, who’d come to Harvard after three years as a community organizer, wanted to return to Chicago.

“A lot of people, quite frankly, thought he was crazy,” says Smith. “For him to take the more principled approach rather than the pragmatic approach was remarkable.”

Spurning other offers, Obama went back to his adopted hometown and led a voter-registration drive before going to work for a firm specializing in civil rights and discrimination cases.