David Remnick Takes Imus Over "The Bridge"

David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, came in second place in the Imus Book Awards in 1994, the year he won the slightly less coveted Pulitzer Prize for his book Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. His latest tome is The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, and he told Imus, “It’s the unlikeliest story.”

“I think he’s really interesting, I thought so going in,” Remnick said. “I don’t think he’s interesting just because he’s the first African-American president.”

Though that feat is staggering in a country that for centuries has elected only white, Anglo-Saxon, male presidents, with the exception of 1,000 days of John F. Kennedy.

He was raised in Hawaii by his white grandparents and white mother, but Obama always self-identified as an African-American, despite spending just ten days outside his infancy with his African-American father.

“We know the frame of the story, but the idea is to figure out how hard it must have been for him to grow up where he grew up,” said Remnick. “Hawaii prides itself on multiculturalism—there are Asians of all kinds, and Polynesians—it’s a real patchwork quilt, except for one thing: there aren’t any African-Americans except for on American military bases.”

Obama learned what he could about his identity through television, music, and books. Once he was old enough, he fled Hawaii for places like Los Angeles, New York City, and ultimately Chicago, where he felt most at home.

Had Obama not succeeded politically, Remnick speculated he’d still be meandering about Chicago, teaching some law, writing a book here and there. “That would have been his life,” he said. “But he got the political bug, and didn’t quite let go.”

Remnick is still a bit shocked at Obama’s trajectory. As a kid, he read a book called The Man, in which an African-American becomes President only because everybody else in the government is killed in an explosion at the Capitol.

“It was like a fantasy not so very long ago,” said Remnick, who felt now was the time to write The Bridge.

“I wanted to try to understand him while he’s still in office with three years to go, or seven years to go,” Remnick said about Obama. “Because to understand who’s here, and what’s the character behind these decisions and these politics, and how much did he change, and how much did he not change, and what formed him seemed like a fascinating project for a writer and for a journalist, and also for a reader.”

Remnick has interviewed Obama a few times, and likes him. “What’s he going to do, yell at me?” he asked Imus.

No, no. That only happens here. Though not today.

“Charles and I love you,” Imus gushed, then corrected himself. “We love your writing. It’s not a sexual thing.”

-Julie Kanfer