US journalist Dan Morain’s 2020 biography charted how the daughter of two immigrants in segregated California became the woman standing by Joe Biden’s side. He spoke with Cheryl Pearl Sucher about the book, which is now essential reading for anyone curious about the woman who could now face off against Republican Donald Trump in November’s presidential contest.
It has been nearly 50 years since Brooklyn-born Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman in Congress, ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, and nearly 40 years since Geraldine Ferraro, a popular Congresswoman from Queens, was chosen by Jimmy Carter’s former vice-president, Walter Mondale, to run alongside him on the Democratic presidential ticket.
Twelve years ago, John McCain plucked the former beauty contest winner and Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, to run with him on the Republican ticket, and it seems only yesterday that probably the most experienced politician to ever run for the office of President, Hillary Clinton, was unable to shatter the glass ceiling at her campaign headquarters in Manhattan’s Javits Center on election night, November 8, 2016, when she was defeated by the Republican outlier, New York real estate developer and reality television star, Donald Trump.
All these accomplished women valiantly tried to attain the highest elected political positions in the US but they all failed until Kamala Devi Harris, the former San Francisco district attorney, California Attorney-General and senator, was sworn in on January 20, 2021 as the first African-American, Southeast-Asian and female vice-president of the United States.
What is it about Harris that allowed her to succeed where so many of her accomplished forbears failed? Now that she is the first in the order of succession to take the place of President Joe Biden, who, at 78, is the oldest man to ever attain that office, how will she influence his leadership and affect national policy as he attempts to heal a nation ravaged by Covid and traumatised by raging political divisions and the provocations of Trump?
This is the question Dan Morain, a veteran reporter who has covered the California judicial and political beats for over 40 years, attempts to answer in Kamala’s Way, which is neither a salacious exposé nor an obsequious hagiography - but a fascinating account of Harris’ path to the pinnacle of American politics.
Kamala’s Way is a California story, meaning it could only have happened in California, Morain tells the Listener. With its population of 40 million and shifting demographics (currently 63% of the state’s population is non-white,) it was the Golden State’s political and demographic diversity that attracted Harris’ immigrant parents to study at University of California, Berkeley, during the height of the civil-rights era and the growing free-speech movement.
In 1958, aged 19, Harris’ mother, Shyamala Gopalan, graduated from a small New Delhi University with a bachelor’s in home science and traveled to Berkeley to study for a PhD in nutrition and endocrinology. In the autumn of 1962, she attended a gathering of black students where the featured speaker was Jamaican-born Donald Jasper Harris, who was studying for his PhD in economics. She charmed him, and they married in 1963. Kamala Devi was born in 1964 and her younger sister, Maya Lakshmi, in 1966. Shyamala has said that she gave her daughters names from Indian mythology because “a culture that worships goddesses produces strong women”.
In the mid-to-late 60s, Shyamala and Donald Harris were active in the civil rights movement. Their daughters “got a stroller’s eye view of people getting into what the civil rights activist and Congressman John Lewis called “good trouble”. Though Shyamala imported her Indian heritage to her daughters and even flew them across the world to meet their grandparents, she was also aware that she was raising two black girls in the US, and so took them to Thursday evening gatherings at Rainbow Sign, a black cultural centre in Berkeley whose guests included the poet Maya Angelou, Shirley Chisholm and the musician and civil rights icon, Nina Simone.
After earning his PhD in 1966, Harris, a non-conformist economic thinker with left-wing leanings, took positions wherever they were offered, first at the University of Champagne-Urbana in Illinois then at the University of Wisconsin, where he was given a tenured professorship. Shyamala remained with their girls in the Bay Area. To be closer to his family, Harris accepted a post at Stanford and his popularity with students was such that he became the first tenured African-American economics professor at this home of the conservative Hoover Institution.
About this time, the marriage unravelled. The couple separated in 1969 and their divorce was finalised in 1973. In a 2018 essay, Donald Harris “lamented that close contact with Maya and Kamala came to an abrupt halt after a contentious custody battle”. Though the final divorce decree gave Shyamala physical custody, Donald was “entitled to take the girls on alternating weekends and for 60 days in the summer”, and so he brought them on summer holidays to Jamaica to meet his large family and learn about his own cultural heritage. On weekends, the girls would visit him in Palo Alto.
“The neighbors’ kids were not allowed to play with us because we were black,” Harris said on the campaign trail, famously adding that even liberal Berkeley waited nearly two decades before carrying out the Supreme Court’s 1954 mandate to desegregate public schools. Her elementary-school class was only the second to be integrated, a fact that she employed when delivering what she believed would be the knockout punch to Biden’s candidacy during the first major televised Democratic presidential debate of the 2020 campaign.
Standing beside Biden on stage, she pivoted towards him and began chastising him for boasting about his ability to work with two infamous segregationist senators. Taking a deep, emotional breath, she said, “There was a little girl in California who was a part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day, and that little girl was me.”
There was stunned silence in the auditorium as Biden, the father of her good friend, the late Delaware Attorney-General Beau Biden, whose death from brain cancer had stymied his father’s run for 2016 nomination, backpedalled as he tried to contradict her powerful admission. In truth, Biden was a leading opponent of busing in the Senate during the 1970s and 1980s, but he momentarily withered into irrelevance beneath the force of Kamala’s accusation.
When I ask Morain what he thought of that moment, he chuckles and says it was “Kamala’s way”. “She had to hit him with that knockout punch because she knew that if she had any chance to win the nomination, she had to weaken Biden to the point that she could capture the extremely important black South Carolina vote.” Harris was right, for it was the support of black South Carolinans that revived Biden’s flagging candidacy and ultimately led to his being elected president.
In the 70s, Shyamala Gopalan moved with her girls to Montreal to do research at McGill University. Kamala and Maya couldn’t speak French and were the “California girls” who relied on one another at Westmount High School, where they ultimately blended in with teenagers from both the wealthier and poorer neighbourhoods.
But the girls’ relationship with their father waned. The fact that Donald Harris, 82, is still alive, a distinguished emeritus professor at Stanford but living in Washington, DC, only steps from Kamala Harris’ Vice-Presidential residence, is one of the book’s surprises. Friends say that Kamala and Donald are now on good terms, though a New York Times article noted that in her acceptance speech for the VP nomination, Harris thanked almost her entire family but not her father.
Harris returned from Montreal to study at the historic black college, Howard University, in Washington DC, and named for a Civil War hero who fought to ensure that the four million people freed from slavery would have the right to marry, own land, earn a living, vote and get an education. In her memoir, The Truths We Hold, Harris reminisces that at Howard “we would dance on Friday nights and protest on Saturday mornings… The beauty … was that students were told they we were young, gifted and black, and … shouldn’t let anything get in the way of our success!”
She graduated with a degree in political science and economics and, in 1987, returned to San Francisco to study law, reuniting with Maya and their mother, who had obtained a research position at Berkeley. At 17, Maya had become pregnant with her daughter, Meena, who was then raised by this unique village of women and Maya’s future husband, Tony West, who had met Maya in law school.
Harris’ political ascent began only when she became deputy district attorney of Alameda County. One of her supervisors, Nancy O’Malley, remarked that Harris “was energetic, willing to take tough cases, laser focused, driven to be successful”. She earned a reputation for toughness prosecuting cases of gang violence, drug trafficking and sexual abuse.
In 1994, Harris’ life took a turn. She became involved with Willie Brown, the powerful Speaker of the California State Assembly, 30 years her senior. She was outed by the political gossip columnist, Herb Cain, who wrote that at Brown’s elaborate 60th birthday party, Clint Eastwood spilled champagne on Harris, Brown’s new steady. Brown’s long reign as “Ayatollah of the Assembly” was about to end due to a corruption charge, but not before he gave Harris a BMW, travelled with her to Paris and flew with her on Donald Trump’s private jet from Boston to New York because the real estate developer wanted to discuss a Los Angeles hotel project that ultimately did not materialise.
In 1995, Brown decided to run for mayor. Before leaving the state assembly, he put Harris on the State Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and California Medical Assistance Commission, giving her nearly $100,000 a year on top of her Oakland prosecutor’s salary.
It was this appointment which first brought Harris to Morain’s attention. Brown held his mayoral victory celebration at a union hall on Fisherman’s Wharf. As the results came in, Harris presented him with a baseball cap emblazoned with the word MAYOR in gold letters. Herb Caen then ran a column describing Harris as the “new-first-lady-in-waiting”. But it was not to be. Years before, Brown had started to live separately from his wife, Blanche, the mother of his children. He made no secret of his active social life. The problem was the pair never divorced. When that became apparent, Brown and Harris split. Kamala moved on and began to make her own way.
She makes no mention of Brown in her autobiography, though in 2019, Brown still spoke of her, telling a radio interviewer that he was not as committed to the relationship as she was. “It was a real love affair: I loved me and she loved me.”
In Morain’s telling, that was the last painful public mistake about her private life that Kamala Harris would willingly make. She closed ranks and devoted her energies and talents to her political ambitions. Her circle of close confidantes included Maya, who had risen to the forefront of criminal justice restructuring by becoming a leader at the American Civil Liberties Union, and Maya’s husband Tony West, who would become a US Associate Attorney General and, more recently, general counsel for Uber.
In 1998, Kamala drove across the Oakland Bay Bridge to work for the new San Francisco district attorney, Terence Hallinan, the “radical” son of an iconic figure of the Bay Area left. One of Hallinan’s first acts as San Francisco DA was to fire 14 prosecutors (including 26-year-old Kimberly Guilfoyle, who later became a campaign adviser to Trump).
Harris was soon recruited to the office by Hallinan’s chief of staff, Richard Iglehart, and she quickly rose to chief assistant of the career criminal division. Harris supported Hallinan’s 1999 re-election, but in January 2000, Governor Gray Davis appointed her boss, Iglehart, to a superior court judgeship.
“Rather than promote Harris to be his second-in-command, Hallinan hired Darell Salomon, a lawyer with no prosecutorial experience,” Morain writers. “Salomon rehired Kimberly Guilfoyle, who in Morain’s breathless telling, “had become San Francisco supervisor Gavin Newsom’s girlfriend then Mayor Newsom’s wife, then in a weird twist of fate, Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend and one of Donald Trump’s keenest fundraisers”.
Harris left the San Francisco DA’s office and focused on building financial and political support as well as name recognition. Her transition to electoral politics was messy, starting in 2003 with a brutal but winning campaign to unseat her onetime boss, Hallinan. “She survived a good old-fashioned San Francisco political bloodletting,” said Eric Jaye, a San Francisco campaign strategist.
As district attorney, Harris was quickly consumed by a political firestorm. Three days after the 2004 murder of San Francisco Police Officer Isaac Espinoza, Harris infuriated police by announcing she would not seek the death penalty.
Top Democrats took sides against her. Senator Dianne Feinstein told mourners at Espinoza’s memorial that the case warranted the death penalty, then suggested outside the church that she never would have backed Harris had she known she opposed capital punishment.
It took years for Harris to restore alliances within law enforcement. But her ability to remain steadfast even under fierce political pressure enforced her image as an unflappable, incorruptible public servant. In that role, she capably prosecuted career criminals, racketeers and sexual predators but also initiated a small programme called “Back on Track”, an alternative to incarceration for first-time non-violent offenders.
She also created environmental crimes and hate crimes units, surrounding herself with capable people and demanding their best, frequently reminding herself of her mother’s familiar axiom, “You might be the first to do something, but you will not be the last.”
Morain contends that Harris launched herself onto the national stage like a two-stage jet-propelled rocket. The first was fired when she came out strong and early in support of Senator Barack Obama’s candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination when California was still powerfully behind Senator Hillary Clinton. The second stage was when she announced her desire to run for California Attorney-General - or AG, which is also the California acronym for “Another Governor”.
Harris, 46 at the time, was running as “the female Barack Obama” against popular, white 63-year-old Republican LA County district attorney Steve Cooley, a police reservist and career prosecutor. The Republican strategists were the first to acknowledge Harris’ potential and invested a great deal of energy and money into the race, which was so close it was not decided until weeks after Election Day. Harris won by a margin of less than 1%.
Once in office, Harris demonstrated her political independence by rejecting pressure from the Obama administration to settle a nationwide lawsuit against mortgage lenders for unfair practices. Instead, she pressed California’s case and in 2012 won a judgment five times higher than that originally offered. Her refusal to defend Proposition 8 (2008), which banned same sex marriage in the state, helped lead to it being overturned in 2013. Harris’s book, Smart on Crime (2009; cowritten with Joan O’C Hamilton), was considered a model for dealing with the problem of criminal recidivism.
In 2016, Harris ran as the Democratic candidate for a vacant California Senate seat. Harris defeated her Republican opponent in a landslide, winning 54 out of 58 counties. As a new senator, she was taken under the wing of her former political critic, Senator Dianne Feinstein, who instructed her on what committees to vie for, and how to make her presence felt in an intransigent Senate with its intransigent Republican majority.
Senator Harris quickly made an impression on the Senate Judiciary Committee as the skillful questioner of former Attorney-General Jeff Sessions and Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh over their knowledge of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US election. Her star was rising.
When I ask Morain how his perception of Harris has changed over time, he answers that he no longer believes she is overly cautious and ducks issues, but that strategic perseverance underlines her decisions as she continues on what he describes as her “laser-focused career path”.
Asked how she will influence Biden’s political decision making and policy stances, Morain laughs and says, “She isn’t a potted plant who will stand in the corner and do nothing. She will speak her mind to Biden in private, doing all she can to help him succeed, for President Biden’s successes will reflect on her and certainly influence her own political future.”
Strategic perseverance, thoughtful study, careful reason: all are “Kamala’s Way”.
Kamala’s Way, by Dan Morain (Simon & Shuster, $37.99)
This article was originally published in the NZ Listener’s February 20, 2021 edition.
