In the fall of 1988, however, Obama left the city to go off to law school. My best guess, though, is that it was in that 86-88 time frame that Obama likely met up with the Ayers family. I will explain why I believe that in a minute. Interestingly, after his first year in law school Obama returned in the summer of 1989 to work as a summer associate at the prestigious Chicago law firm of Sidley & Austin. This in and of itself is a bit unusual. Very few top tier law students work for big law firms during their first summer. The big law firms discourage it because if you work for them in the first summer you are likely to work for a second firm the following year and then the firms have to compete to get you.
So, why or how did Obama - at that point not yet the prominent first black president of the Harvard Law Review (that would happen the following year) - end up at Sidley?
Sidley had been long time outside counsel to Commonwealth Edison. The senior Sidley partner who was Comm Ed’s key outside counsel, Howard Trienens, was a member of the board of trustees of Northwestern alongside Tom Ayers (and Sidley partner Newton Minow, too). It turns out, Bernardine Dohrn worked at Sidley also. She was hired there in the late 80s, because of the intervention of her father-in-law Tom Ayers, even though she was (and is) not a member of any state bar.
Dohrn was not admitted in either NY or Illinois because of her past jail time for refusing to testify about the murderous 1981 Brinks robbery in which her former Weather Underground (now recast as the “Revolutionary Armed Task Force”) “comrades,” including Kathy Boudin (biological mother of Chesa Boudin, who was raised by Ayers and Dohrn) participated. She was finally paroled after serving 22 years of a plea bargained single 20-to-life sentence for her role in the robbery where a guard was shot and killed and two police officers were killed. The father of Chesa Boudin, David Gilbert, was sentenced to 75-to-life, with no chance of parole, after a trial in which he refused to participate. Chesa is the co-author of a recent apologia for the regime of Venezuelan “left” strong man, Hugo Chavez.
Trienens recently explained his unusual decision to hire Dohrn, who had never practice 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... http://globallabor.blogspot.com/2008/04/who-sent-obama.html
Being an attorney, knowing how much it costs to get thru school, i keep coming back to the question, how did this essentially penniless yahoo ever pay for all that high priced education? I think he learned early and often on how to scam us taxpayers to pay his way, all under the guise of taking care of the poor. When will the poor ever learn that they are nothing more than a stepping stone in the path of these jackals.