The Other Barack (29 page)

Zeituni, however, has had a hard time keeping out of the news. When British reporters went searching in the final weeks of Obama's presidential
campaign for the Aunt Zeituni, they found her living in a squat brick public housing complex in South Boston. A blunt and outspoken woman, Zeituni, fifty-nine, worked as a computer programmer for Kenya Breweries in the late 1980s before moving in 2000 to the United States. When the press learned that her request for political asylum had been denied and she had been ordered deported, her case instantly became a cause célèbre, igniting the issue of illegal immigration. During much of President Obama's first year in office, Zeituni, even by her own description, was seen as a political liability as she put the immigration laws to the test in her own battle to remain in the United States. Since her nephew's election, the dramatic Zeituni has made two colorful court appearances in Boston, each trailed by a platoon of suited lawyers and dozens of reporters to whom she exclaimed periodically, “Praise God.” In the spring of 2010 an immigration judge astonished some observers by granting her political asylum, which enables her to apply for a green card and, ultimately, citizenship.
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Like Omar, Zeituni looked up to her big brother. The second child of Hussein Onyango and Mama Sarah, Zeituni was one of several family members who lived for short periods with him in Nairobi in the 1960s. In
Dreams
she says that Barack was her favorite dance partner when they were young and describes the many dance contests they entered together. In a brief interview Zeituni added that she was deeply indebted to the elder Barack for helping her throughout her life and in particular for buying her a cherished pair of shoes as a child.
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DURING THE YEARS that Obama Sr. attended Harvard he lived largely like any other student. He dutifully attended classes and bent over his textbooks late into the night. But Obama was also a man of Africa, and he had certain personal appetites that he made little effort to curb. One of them was for women. The gang holding court back at Littauer Center saw virtually nothing of this side of Obama; indeed, many do not recall him at all. But those who knew him more intimately saw a man who often drank heavily and aggressively pursued a succession of young women. And Harvard administrators soon noticed it too.

To Obama, women were there to be taken. Raised in a polygamous culture, he believed that a man should necessarily have multiple women as a measure of his virility and mastery of the world. His own father, Hussein
Onyango, had at least four wives and countless other women in his life, and most Luo men traditionally had at least a few. So integral a part of the culture is this practice that a man's wives traditionally live on the same compound together, with the first wife having the highest status and overseeing the others. In fact, if Obama had married only his first wife Kezia and never married or had children with another woman, this would have been the subject of some note back home.

However, Obama's relentless pursuit of women—and sometimes more than one at a time—was something more than cultural habit. It was as if he had to engage sexually with any eligible women whom he encountered. Obama, to be sure, could be devastatingly charming and attentive to the women who wound up as his wives—when he chose to. But with a certain category of women he knew less well, he made no pretense of being interested in them for any reason other than their bodies, and he made not the slightest apology for it. It was an attitude that some American women found astonishing. Ellen Frost, who experienced Obama's charm firsthand, describes his aggressive come-on to women as a kind of compulsion. “As Obama saw it, it was natural for a man to collect many women. That was the natural order of things,” said Frost. “In fact, he was very proud of his ability with women. You'd watch him at parties. He liked to dance and he was a very physical dancer. He'd dance in a very suggestive way, no subtlety. It was as though he gained some power in the conquest. He did not bother to come on intellectually to women. He used suggestive, provocative language, I would say overtly sexual. I liked Barack and found him interesting but I did not like it when he did that. It was a kind of God's gift to women thing.”

One of the African students on campus while Obama was at Harvard was a Nigerian named Chukwuma Azikiwe. The son of the first president of Nigeria following independence, Azikiwe was an undergraduate in the class of 1963 and later earned an MBA at the Harvard Business School. Obama's earnest working habits impressed Azikiwe, but he was taken aback to find that when Obama was not at his books, he often imbibed heavily. Once, Azikiwe encountered an inebriated Obama aggressively propositioning a very uncomfortable young woman in a doorway and called him off. Another time, he ran into him at a party moments before Obama, again well into his cups, got into a fist fight with another guest.
Azikiwe began to avoid Obama when he saw him on campus. Obama, Azikiwe concluded in an interview, “was an unguided ballistic missile.”

Over the course of his four marriages, Obama was selective about who he told about his wives and children and who he did not. Prodded by Frost's amiable questioning, Obama revealed that he had a son in Hawaii of whom he was very proud. But when he mentioned to Azinna Nwafor that he might be visiting Hawaii, he said he was going “because the weather is quite good there” and made no mention of a son. For the women he dated, such erratic revelations were, to put it mildly, problematic. Some became furious when they learned that not only was he married, but married to two women at once.

Nwafor recalls a Saturday evening when he was a sophomore and studying in his room when he suddenly heard a loud banging on his window. It was Obama's girlfriend at the time, a Radcliffe undergraduate, weeping and begging to be let in. As Nwafor consoled the young woman, who had apparently just learned that Obama was married, Obama himself abruptly appeared and snapped at Nwafor to leave her alone. “He was very angry with me, as he thought I was trying to take his girlfriend,” Nwafor sighed. “But I never did that. I never had difficulty getting my own girlfriends. It was interesting that someone who was capable of having multiple affairs could jump to that conclusion. We didn't see each other much after that.”

Back in Honolulu, Ann Dunham was also growing annoyed with Obama's dating habits. It wasn't that she wanted him back. By the end of 1963 Dunham had resigned herself to the fact that Obama would not be returning to her side nor would they be going to Africa together when he completed his studies. When he had left, however, Obama had agreed to send financial support for their son. But pressed by the burden of providing for his visiting family as well as by the genuine costs of being a student, Obama never provided as he had promised. When Dunham gleaned from his occasional letters that he was dating other women in Cambridge and presumably spending money on those dates, her seemingly inexhaustible patience at last ran out. In the beginning of 1964 she began divorce proceedings, and by the spring of that year the unlikely union that had been sealed on the sun-kissed island of Maui came to an end. Obama signed a postal notice indicating that he had received the
certified divorce documents in Cambridge, but he did not make an appearance in the Honolulu courtroom where the divorce was finalized.

In the years to come Dunham confided to her closer friends that Obama had greatly upset her during his days in Cambridge when he had chosen to spend the little extra money he had on women rather than his young son. “She mentioned that he had girlfriends in Boston but she did not mind because she knew that in African society men often had more than one girl,” said Alice G. Dewey, the chairperson of Dunham's doctoral committee at the University of Hawaii and later an anthropology professor emeritus. “But it did bother her that he was spending the money on them that he should have spent on Barry [Barack Jr.]. Somewhere along the way, ‘This made sense,' shifted to ‘Hey, you said you'd send me money,' to ‘This is not going to work.' She figured Barry was a responsibility of Barack's that he was not living up to and it increasingly annoyed her.”

A few months before the divorce became final in 1964, immigration authorities once again grew alarmed at Obama's interactions with women just as they had been during his Hawaii days. This time, Obama was dating a young Kenyan woman who had been brought to the United States under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and was attending high school in Sudbury, Massachusetts. The girl was not only doing poorly in school but had also taken an unauthorized trip to London, which greatly disturbed UU officials. Obama, who was believed to be her boyfriend, was frantically trying to get her reinstated at school, according to his “A” file. In a memo describing the situation to J. A. Hamilton, then district director of Immigration and Naturalization Service's Boston office, Immigrant Inspector K. D. MacDonald concluded, “Obama is considered by [redacted by federal authorities] to be a slippery character.”
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Aware of Obama's track record in Hawaii, Hamilton was apparently troubled by Obama's involvement with yet another young woman who was having difficulties.

Concerned about the incident, immigration officials decided to look into Obama's status at Harvard. They also decided to hold up on his routine request for an extension of his stay, just for the moment. Officials contacted Harvard's International Office, but far from gaining clarity through their conversations with the staff there, more clouds began to gather. Obama had told immigration authorities he was married to someone in
Hawaii and intended to get a divorce. But Harvard officials, prompted by the INS call, had done a little digging into the matter and were concerned that Obama was married to two women; they just weren't sure if that made him a bigamist or a typical Luo. As immigration inspector M. F. McKeon wrote in a memo, “Harvard thinks he's married to someone in Kenya and someone in Honolulu, but that possibly he belongs to a tribe where multiple marriages are O.K.” Harvard, which had apparently never before probed Obama's statement that he was married, as it had seen no need to, was distinctly not happy. David D. Henry, the director of Harvard's International Office, told INS that he would talk to Obama about his marital situation, but he would not do so until after Obama had taken his exams, according to the INS memo, “in case he might get upset and use that as an excuse for not passing. Harvard will call us with the results of the interview.”
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Two days later Harvard's International Office was beside itself. After talking to some of Obama's acquaintances, the office now believed Obama was married to a third person, this one a woman in Cambridge whom he had been known to be dating. The school administrators were wrong; Obama was indeed dating someone, but they were not married. They also found that Obama had financial problems. Although Harvard had already signed off on the necessary immigration forms indicating that it expected Obama would be a full-time student the following year and would complete his dissertation, Henry was now considering whether Harvard wanted Obama back the next year at all.

The more Henry looked into Obama's personal record, the more disturbed he became. Henry was a Harvard man, a rock-jawed member of the class of 1941 and the former director of the school's admissions office. Four years earlier he had founded the African Scholarship Program of American Universities, which brought some of Africa's brightest students to the United States on full scholarship. Henry, a former prep school teacher, had a lot riding on the African students in the United States and he was apparently not inclined to tolerate Obama's behavior, never mind that Obama's actions would have seemed largely acceptable to many of his fellow Luos back home. They were not acceptable to David Henry in Boston. Three weeks after immigration officials contacted Harvard, Henry called them back and said that Obama would not
be returning to Harvard. Henry explained that he had talked to the chairman of the economics department and one of the school's deans, and he learned that Obama had passed his general exams and was entitled to stay to complete his thesis. “However, they are going to try and cook something up to ease him out,” M. F. McKeon wrote in an internal memo. “All three (Harvard administrators) will have to agree on this, however. They are planning on telling him that they will not give him any money and that he had better return to Kenya and prepare his thesis at home.” Henry told McKeon that it would take about a month to “get all the details settled.” But he made it clear that “Harvard does not plan on having Obama registered as a full time student during the academic year 1964–1965.”
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The letter that Henry sent Obama on May 27, 1964, got right to the point. Although Harvard had provided scholarship money for Obama during his first two years, it would no longer do so. Henry wrote that “neither the Department of Economics nor the Graduate School of Arts, Letters, and Sciences has any further funds to support you in Cambridge.... We have, therefore, come to the conclusion that you should terminate your stay in the United States and return to Kenya to carry on your research and the writing of your thesis.”
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The letter was copied to R. H. Phelps, Associate Dean of the Graduate School, and John Dunlop, chairman of the Economics Department, the two men apparently complicit in the decision.

Obama was furious. With Harvard's withdrawal of support, the INS decided not to grant him an extension of his stay. Instead, Obama was abruptly informed that he must leave the country within thirty days. Frantic, Obama called the INS office and demanded he be told the specific reason for the denial of his request for an extension. An immigration officer told him firmly that the matter had been thoroughly reviewed and that his application had been denied based on Henry's letter. Despite Obama's repeated request for more information, the officer told him “that the decision made in his case was FINAL,” according to an internal memo.
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Obama called repeatedly, but he was unable to get anyone to explain what had happened.