92 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographyguard was shot and killed and two police officers were killed. ... Trienens recently explained his
unusual decision to hire Dohrn, who had never practiced law and had graduated from law school
(before going on her bombing spree 17 years before in 1967) to The Chicago Tribune saying, “[W]e
sometimes hire friends.” I can only speculate, but it is possible that Tom Ayers introduced Obama
to Sidley. That might have happened if Obama had met up with Bill and Tom and John Ayers prior
to attending law school when Obama’s DCP group was supporting the reform act passed in 1988.
Or it might have been Dohrn who introduced Obama to the law firm. Dohrn’s CV indicates that she
left Sidley sometime in 1988 for public interest work prior to starting a position at Northwestern
(again, hired there by some accounts because of the influence of Tom Ayers and his Sidley counsel
Howard Trienens). Obama and Dohrn would likely not have been at the firm at the same time,
although if Obama and Dohrn met before Obama left to attend Harvard Law School, she might have
discussed the firm with him and introduced him to lawyers there. My best guess, though, is that it
would have been Tom Ayers who introduced Obama to Sidley and that would have helped him get
the attention of someone like Newton Minow. And that would have come in very handy later in
Obama’s career as Kaufman suggests. (Recently I heard from Nell Minow, daughter of Newton
Minow, who tells me her sister Martha, a Harvard law professor, had Obama as a student at HLS
and that she called her father to tell him about Obama. While Nell contends on the basis of this
anecdote that her family met and supported Obama before he met Bill Ayers, she was unable to
provide me any evidence of when in fact Obama met Ayers, either Bill or Tom.) In any case the
summer of 1989 was eventful for Obama as he did meet his future wife, Michelle, there, already a
lawyer and working as a Sidley associate. Michelle was Obama’s first supervisor or mentor there.
Obama went back to Harvard in the fall of 1989 where, of course, he became president of the law
review in the spring of 1990. After graduation in 1991 he went back to Chicago to run a voter
registration campaign (which would turn out to be an important step in his career).’ (Steve
Diamond, ‘Who “sent” Obama?’ globallabor.blogspot.com, April 22, 2008)
AFTER LAW SCHOOL: BUILDING A RESUME FOR A POLITICAL CAREER
After law school, Obama returned to Chicago to work as a civil rights lawyer, joining the firm of
Miner, Barnhill & Galland, an unsavory enterprise to which we will return later... He became a
modest adjunct lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, while helping to organize a voter
registration drive during Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. Abner Mikva, a five-term
congressman from Illinois who was at that time Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals
for the D.C. circuit, tried to recruit Obama as his law clerk, a position that might have been a
stepping stone to clerking on the Supreme Court, but Obama declined the offer. David B. Wilkins,
the Kirkland and Ellis professor of law, said he advised Obama in 1991 to become a Supreme Court
Clerk. “Obama knew there was honor in pursuing that post,” Wilkins said, but Obama quickly
added that it was not for him. “He said that he wanted to write a book about his life and his father,
go back to Chicago, get back into the community, and run for office there. He knew exactly what he
wanted and went about getting it done,” Wilkins said. More accurately, Obama’s Trilateral case
officers knew what the next steps for their young protégé and asset needed to be.
“He could have gone to the most opulent of law firms,” said David Axelrod, the Chicago
machine hack who is now Obama’s campaign boss gushed. “After Harvard, Obama could have
done anything he wanted.” Axelrod’s specialty has long been to help black candidates get white
votes with a utopian litany of messianic platitudes; he also got Deval Patrick elected as Governor of
Massachusetts. Obama served as an associate attorney with Miner, Barnhill & Galland from 1993 to
- During this time, he says he represented community organizers, discrimination claims, and