The question that interests me is: Why all this bluster? Why would the White House accuse me of being a birther when I specifically said in my book that Obama was born in Hawaii, not Kenya? Why raise the race issue when I clearly say that, both for Obama and for me, race is not the issue? I wondered what was going on here—not just with Obama, but also with people who seemed oddly resistant to hearing Obama’s own story. It was partly to answer those questions that I embarked on my journey to Kenya, tracing the path that Obama himself took, talking to people who knew him and his father, seeking to understand the truth about this elusive man in the Oval Office. My trip proved very illuminating. I was also helped in my quest to understand Obama’s roots by new information that has become available about Obama’s parents, teachers, and mentors. This new information and my own travels in Obama’s footsteps have only strengthened my thesis. But they have also modified the story by making it more complex, more textured, and in many ways more riveting.
Let’s begin with Colin Powell’s question: Why even focus on Obama’s background? The same issue was raised in a different way by
Newsweek
writer Jonathan Alter. Interviewing me on C-SPAN, Alter argued that it’s un-American, yes un-American, to trace the formation of presidents to their flawed parents. Ronald Reagan’s father was an alcoholic, Alter fumed, but we don’t trace Reagan’s character or views to his father. Yes, I responded, but Ronald Reagan didn’t write a book called
Dreams from My Father
! It was Obama, long before me, who drew the close connection between father and son. Obama’s autobiography wasn’t a youthful escapade that he has subsequently repudiated; he first published the book in 1995 when he was thirty-four years old, then republished it in 2004 when he was a newly elected U.S. senator and addressed the Democratic Convention. The book was circulated as a campaign document in the 2008 presidential election. Besides, a large part of Obama’s signature appeal is that he is different; he has a multicultural background. This defined him even when he ran for president of the
Harvard Law Review
; around that time, a Harvard humor magazine parodied Obama saying, “I was born in Oslo, Norway, the son of a Volvo factory worker and part-time ice-fisherman. My mother was a backup singer for Abba.”
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The humor magazine didn’t know the half of it. Here is a case where truth is more bizarre than fiction. Obama’s actual background includes a pet ape and a transvestite nanny. He has relatives who, in keeping with Luo tribal custom, have their six front teeth removed; a father who has four wives and eight known children—none of which he looked after—and a mother who sent him to America at the age of ten while she lived the rest of her life as a bohemian academic in Indonesia. He has a half-brother who lives in a Nairobi slum, and an aunt who sells coal on the street. Most of his African relatives in the United States seem to have come here illegally, and his uncle was recently in trouble with the law. Yes, there is a great deal of “diversity” here, but there is also cruelty and abandonment and pain, and we have to understand that pain if we want to see how Obama’s identity was traumatically forged. So the story I tell in this book is a multicultural story, but it is not simply a celebration of difference. Rather, it takes multiculturalism seriously and operates on the premise that if multiculturalism defines Obama’s unique identity, there can be no reasonable objection to going beyond the Kumbaya rhetoric and actually examining Obama’s own background, much of it set forth in his own words.
Everyone who knew Barack Obama Sr. testifies to how much the son resembles the father. They have “the same tall frame and gait,” remarks Olara Otunnu, a longtime associate of Barack Sr. Otunnu also notes a similar “charisma, supreme confidence, and eloquence.” Barack Sr.’s first wife Kezia told an African newspaper, “When I look at my stepson, he reminds me of his father. They share very many characteristics. Like father, like son, I would say.” Obama’s autobiography quotes his aunt Zeituni telling young Obama, “You sound just like your father, Barry.” Obama’s sister, upon meeting him, immediately compared him to their father. “You have the same mouth.” She saw something that Barack Jr. wrote and observed, “The handwriting was startlingly similar to that of my father.” When they go out, she tells her half-brother, “Agh, Barack! I see you’re bossy like the Old Man as well . . . . It must be in the blood.” George Saitoti, a former vice president of Kenya, recalls the Barack Sr. he knew as a young man. “He sounded just like President Obama does now.” Neil Abercrombie, a longtime pal of Barack Sr. and now governor of Hawaii, is not reluctant to admit that “Barack Obama is carrying out his father’s dream.” And Obama’s granny Sarah told
Newsweek
in 2008, “I look at him and I see all the same things. He has taken everything from his father. The son is realizing everything the father wanted . . . . The dreams of the father are still alive in the son.”
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Obama himself repeatedly affirms his father’s enduring influence. He told the
Washington Post
that thoughts of his father “bubble up at different moments, at any course of the day or week. I think about him often.” Recalling his youth, Obama told a reporter, “The stories I heard about my father painted him as larger than life, which also meant I felt I had something to live up to.” On another occasion Obama confided to journalist David Mendell, “Every man is trying to live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his mistakes. In my case, both things might be true.” Throughout his growing years, Obama writes in his autobiography, “My father’s voice had . . . remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval.... You must help in your people’s struggle. Wake up, black man!” In his other book,
The Audacity of Hope
, Obama says, “My fierce ambitions might have been fueled by my father—by my knowledge of his achievements and failures, by my unspoken desire to somehow earn his love, and by my resentments and anger toward him. ”
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So Obama closely resembles his father and was deeply influenced by him. That seems well established, yet critics point out that Obama hardly knew his father. Their interaction was limited to a month-long visit to Hawaii by Barack Sr. when Obama was ten years old. Therefore, how could he have been strongly influenced by an absentee parent? Actually, Obama’s interaction with his dad was not limited to a single encounter. Obama himself reports that he and his father regularly exchanged letters over a period of years. In one letter that Obama quotes, his father tells him that “the important thing is that you know your people, and also that you know where you belong.”
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Moreover, Obama says that despite the distance between them he maintained a strong emotional attachment to the man. Of his father, he writes, “Even in his absence his strong image had given me some bulwark on which to grow up, an image to live up to, or disappoint.”
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We may ask, however, how such an attachment is possible. In the course of filming my Obama documentary, I raised the question with psychologist Paul Vitz, who has studied absentee fathers. Vitz noted that absentee fathers often have a very powerful impact on their children, especially their sons. Sometimes the impact is negative. In the inner city, for instance, young men grow up hating the fathers who abandoned them. They turn to gangs to find “family” and substitute father figures. Having written about civil rights, I knew about this literature. Yet Vitz told me something I hadn’t thought of. During World War II, he said, there were hundreds of thousands of absentee fathers. They were in Europe or the Pacific, battling the Nazis and the Japanese. And in those situations the mother typically placed a photograph of the absentee dad on the mantel, and the kids grew up revering their fathers who were away fighting for freedom. Vitz remarked that those absentee fathers were positive role models, even in their absence, and in some cases because of their absence. In reality they may have been uninspiring fellows. But the real dads weren’t around to dispel the myth. Like the beloved in Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” they were forever lovely and forever fair. Even today the grown-up sons of World War II veterans remember their absentee fathers as the Greatest Generation.
In Obama’s case, as with the sons of the World War II soldiers, the influence of the father was largely transmitted by the mother. We’ll learn more about Obama’s mom in the next chapter. She is the real author of the myth of Barack Obama Sr. She did her best to give her son a carefully edited portrait of her former husband. She also strenuously defended his character and his ideological principles, even blaming herself for his decision to abandon her and their newborn son. Barack Obama Jr. swallowed the story, and by his own account it sustained him while he grew up between the ages of ten and seventeen without either parent. But ultimately the son found out the truth about his dad, and the truth hit him very hard.
The truth was delivered to him, while he was a student at Columbia, by his half-sister Auma. She asked Obama, in effect: Why are you idolizing a man who was a chronic alcoholic and wife-abuser, who never looked after any of his wives or children? Auma told Obama how her father would come drunk into her room, wake her up, and rave and rant about everything from the evils of the white man to how he had been denied his rightful leading place in independent Kenya. Here is Obama’s reaction: “All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own. The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader . . . . He had never been present to foil the image. [Now] I felt as if my world had been turned on its head; as if I had woken up to find a blue sun in the yellow sky, or heard animals speaking like men.”
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Around the same time, young Obama had a dream about his father that left a vivid impression. Obama writes of his father, “I met him one night, in a cold cell, in a chamber of my dreams.” In Obama’s dream, his father is in prison, and he has come alone to visit him. His father is “before me, with only a cloth wrapped around his waist.” Barack Sr. looks weary and ashen. The prison guard steps aside, and the two of them embrace. “I began to weep,” Obama writes, “and felt ashamed, but could not stop myself.” Obama tries to talk to his father, but he “stared away from me, into the wall. An implacable sadness spread across his face.” Obama writes, “I whispered to him that we might leave together.” But his father “shook his head, and told me it would be best if I left.” In Obama’s account, he awoke from the dream “still weeping.”
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This dream, together with Auma’s revelations, convince young Obama to go to Africa and learn himself about the man he never really knew.
We will rejoin Obama in Africa as he “finds” his father. But in the meantime, let’s ask what is actually known about Barack Obama Sr. What kind of a man was he? Although he came from a poor background, he was a very stylish guy. He cultivated a British accent, and at the University of Hawaii he called himself “Bear-ick,” not “Barack.” He wore black-rimmed glasses and smoked Benson and Hedges cigarettes and also occasionally a pipe. His shoes were shined like glass, and later in life, when he could afford it, he wore silk suits, drove a green Mercedes, and employed house servants. When he returned to Kenya from America, he insisted on being called “Doctor Obama,” even though he never completed a doctoral degree. He frequently corrected American students and later Kenyans on the proper British spelling and pronunciation of words, and reprimanded Kenyan bureaucrats who spoke in Swahili. He was gregarious and social and loved to order double shots of Johnnie Walker Black. Beer, he said, was a child’s drink. Most of all he had a magnetic personality and was a great talker. When he spoke, according to Neil Abercrombie, who knew him in Hawaii, “He was the sun, and the other planets revolved around him.” While Obama directly experienced his father’s magnetism only once, during his father’s visit to Hawaii when Obama was ten, he was clearly aware of his father’s persuasive influence on others. “It fascinated me, this strange power of his,” Obama writes in his autobiography. “I often felt mute before him.” Young Obama consciously sought to emulate his father; he wanted for himself his father’s charismatic power.
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While the persuasive power of Obama Sr. is undeniable, it was also based on very dubious foundations. Obama Sr. was a confirmed liar who often tried to look more important than he was. Even today many people believe that Obama Sr. was one of Kenya’s “best and the brightest,” who was selected to come on the famous Airlift to America, study at a major university here, and then return to lead his country. In fact, Obama Sr. took the competitive exam for the Airlift and failed. He needed a first-division score and he got only a third-division score. Robert Stephens, the cultural affairs officer at the U.S. Information Service, interviewed Obama and remembers him as a liar. “He really prevaricated about his school record,” Stephens says. But Stephens had Obama’s poor grades in front of him. “He was a very good talker and he tried to talk me out of it, but there was nothing I could do. He just did not have the grades.”
Yet Obama Sr. was not done talking. He got on the Airlift by sweet-talking two missionary women into raising the money for him. One of the women was unmarried, and Barack Sr. charmed her by taking her out dancing a lot. “When I heard later that he’d made it to America another way,” Stephens says, “I was pretty surprised.” In America, Obama lied to young Ann Dunham; he didn’t tell her he had a wife back in Kenya. They were married in 1961, and a few months later their son, Barack Jr., was born at Kapi’olani Hospital in Honolulu. We know Obama was born in America for three good reasons: first, Obama did finally release his birth certificate; second, two local newspapers published notices of his birth at the time; third, the young couple had no money and could not have afforded to go back to Kenya, have the baby, and then return to the United States. So the birther allegation is unconvincing.