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He is the first to admit that his opportunities were opened by others. "I was clearly helped at a variety of stages of my life because people gave me a chance to perform." His high school debate coach, Eva Doupe, arranged the scholarship that sent him to debate camp his sophomore year and once spent an hour persuading the football coach that Raines should miss a game in favor of a crucial out-of-town debate tournament.
One of the teachers Raines impressed at Harvard was the future Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who hired Raines as a summer intern when Moynihan was appointed to the new post of urban-affairs adviser by Richard Nixon. At 20, Raines found himself briefing the President and most of his Cabinet on campus unrest two weeks before a nationwide antiwar moratorium. Raines' own experiences as a protester five months earlier may have provided his first taste of how inhospitable the "vital center" can be. He led a demonstration against both the militant students who occupied a university building and the administration' that decided to respond by calling in 400 policemen. Both sides condemned him. Raines later told the Washington Post, "Unless someone took the initiative, this was going to turn into a confrontation between the administration and the radicals and we would see the institution torn apart." It's hard to imagine better training for the job he has now.
for as long as anyone can remember, it seemed that raines was destined to do something big in politics. he and steve pruzan, his high school debate partner, would talk seriously about the day raines might become the first black president. in 1977 a congressional seat opened up and pruzan began organizing a raines campaign. instead, raines took a job in the carter white house that included his first stint at OMB. when carter lost, raines went to work, making millions of dollars, first as a partner doing municipal finance at the manhattan investment house lazard freres. when the travel for that job became too much for a man with a young family, he accepted an offer to become vice chairman of the federal national mortgage association, known as fannie mae, the nation's largest investor in home mortgages. his family's rocky beginnings, he says, "have a way of focusing your attention on making sure that you'll be economically successful, because you remember when you weren't." yet economic security has never insulated raines from the realities of race he has downplayed so skillfully in his professional life. even now, he says, if he goes shopping in casual clothes, "1 out of 3 times there'll be a store detective watching me."