The Obama Center's A-list opening, or, The art of having famous friends

Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune on Jun 18, 2026

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CHICAGO — If you have been anywhere near the Obama Presidential Center this week, anywhere at all near Jackson Park and Stony Island Avenue, leading up to the opening ceremonies on Thursday, you have seen the checkpoints, the concrete barricades, the imposing fences, the dark SUVs certain to be bulletproof. You have noticed the security.

That’s because, Barack and Michelle Obama aside, Bono and the Edge were also coming to Hyde Park, and Stevie Wonder, and Bruce Springsteen, and Questlove, and John Legend, and Marc Anthony, and Eddie Vedder, and Christina Aguilera, and, oh right, three former presidents, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Joe Biden, with former first ladies. OK, look, a decade after leaving office, Obama can still pull an A-list.

That subtext was barely sub.

Notably missing were the celebrities in attendance at the UFC fight at the White House last weekend. Other no-shows were Kid Rock and Milli Vanilli, slated for that now-scrapped July 4 concert in Washington, D.C.

The good news, Chicago, is that meant empty seats for Stephen Colbert, Dave Chappelle, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Tyler Perry, Oprah Winfrey, George Lucas and David Letterman, all of whom attended the ceremony. Alongside Gayle King and LL Cool J and Mark Hamill and Jon Batiste and Quinta Brunson. And that’s before we get to the names not recognized from stage and screen — Tom Ricketts, Dick Durbin, J.B. Pritzker, Brandon Johnson, Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom, Angela Merkel, Kamala Harris, Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi.

This thing was so star-studded that before it even began, The Roots was the opening act, launching at the end of a rousing set into Bob Marley’s activist anthem “Get Up, Stand Up,” providing a soundtrack to what was certainly the funkiest arrival of dignitaries ever.

Jennifer Hudson, who grew up in Englewood, sang the National Anthem.

Valerie Jarrett, CEO of the Obama Foundation, threatened to sing “Amazing Grace.”

Colbert wore a tan suit, a not-quite-inside joke about Barack Obama’s infamous tan suit (not found in the museum). He sat beside Letterman, who also wore a tan coat. If you were keeping score: Martin Nesbitt, Obama Foundation board chair, tried the joke, too.

If you weren’t invited — and don’t feel bad, even President Donald Trump wasn’t invited — you could watch the festivities on a giant screen erected on the nearby Midway Plaisance.

The Obama Foundation was expecting 14,000 to do so.

You see, one metric of a sitting or former president’s popularity is the quality of their famous friends. Reagan palled around with John Wayne. JFK was close to Frank Sinatra. Sammy Davis Jr. socialized with Nixon. Ted Danson was friendly with Clinton. FDR considered Orson Welles a chum, and Truman and Jack Benny shared a taste in music. Lincoln was a sorta friend of P.T. Barnum, and Calvin Coolidge hung with Louis B. Mayer. If Eisenhower could have DM’d, Bob Hope’s phone would have been poppin’.

Barack Obama remains, according to Gallup polls, our most popular living president.

That’s why, spread before the central building of the Obama Center’s sprawling campus, you could find Billie Jean King, and Dwyane Wade, and Conan O’Brien, and Chrissy Teigen, and Isaiah Thomas. Oh, and Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the former Weather Underground leaders whom Sarah Palin once accused Obama of “palling around” with.

They all got to hear Aguilera, in a giant gown that seemed to flow the length of the stage, do a slow burn on Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World”; and Evanston’s Eddie Vedder playing a song with young musicians (“Better Believe”) written for the occasion; and John Legend pay homage to the South Side’s Donny Hathaway with an stirring “Someday We’ll All Be Free,” followed by a song from Common, Calumet Heights-raised, celebrating Chicago.

The live feed for the ceremony, with an eye on retaining the museum’s focus on everyday stories, cut at times to actress Marsai Martin, interviewing everyday people on the Midway. But we get to see everyday people every day and — hey, look, Hillary Clinton, huddled beneath sunglasses and a sunhat and a huge silk scarf; and wow, right over there, Bono and the Edge, precisely half of U2, “representing the Irish in Chicago.”

For the finale, once Obama had spoken, Bruce Springsteen, strumming an acoustic guitar, played “Land of Hope & Dreams,” a rewrite of West Side-native Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready”; then he introduced Stevie Wonder, who did “All I Do,” segueing into Obama-favorite “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” before ending with an all-star jam — Springsteen, Vedder, Hudson, Common, Legend, The Roots — of “Higher Ground.”

So, not exactly Kid Rock, but you can’t get everything.

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