by Janny Scott
The campus was changing. At the outset, Ann may well have felt herself to be a fish out of water, but the university was positioning itself in the world in ways that would set the course of her life for the future. In April 1959, a month after Congress voted in favor of statehood, Lyndon B. Johnson, the United States Senate majority leader, who had worked closely with Hawaii’s territorial delegate on statehood, called for establishing in Hawaii an international center of cultural and technical interchange between East and West. For too many years, he said, “we have neglected the simple things that would break down the barriers between ourselves and people who should be our friends.” The president of the University of Hawai‘i went to Washington to help make the case for locating the center on campus. The progress of the proposal became regular front-page news at the school. Professors, politicians, students, and journalists weighed in. “I can see the bright young men from the small towns all over Asia and the bright young men of the United States interested in Asian affairs studying together on the same campus,” said William J. Lederer, coauthor of The Ugly American, the novel about the parochialism of American officialdom in Southeast Asia, which had become a huge bestseller in 1958. Edward R. Murrow of CBS News, passing through Hawaii, called the proposed center “one of the most exciting educational projects I’ve heard of in many a long year.”
The summer Ann arrived in Hawaii, Congress appropriated $10 million to set up the East-West Center, an institution that more than any would go on, over the next twenty-five years, to influence the direction of her life. An advance team set off for Bangkok, Rangoon, Saigon, Calcutta, Dhaka, Kathmandu, Karachi, Colombo, and points beyond, touring twenty countries that might be encouraged to send students. I. M. Pei, the Chinese-born American architect, agreed to design a complex of five buildings on twenty-one acres at the eastern end of the University of Hawai‘i campus. The center’s emphasis would be the exchange of ideas, information, and beliefs through cooperative study, training, and research. Theory and practice would be combined, preparing leaders, current and future, to confront real-life problems. Grant recipients, chosen jointly by the center and the participating countries, would receive a full scholarship, covering tuition, housing, textbooks, travel, and field study. In the fall of 1960, the first two students arrived—a professor-poet from Pakistan and a graduate student in soil science from Ceylon. The center’s first American student, a graduate student in philosophy, set off in the fall of 1961 on a three-month trip to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Burma, East Pakistan, Ceylon, India, and Hong Kong to research a thesis comparing Buddhism and Western thought. By September 1962, there were 250 grant recipients enrolled at the university. The center’s international advisers included Ralph J. Bunche, undersecretary of the United Nations; the vice chancellor of Punjab University; and an undersecretary of state for agriculture in Thailand. At the groundbreaking in the spring of 1961, Johnson, newly elected as vice president of the United States, arrived in a white convertible. “The purpose of this East-West Center is not for West to teach East or East to study the West,” he said at the dedication. “The purpose here is to bring together two proud and honorable cultures, and to fuse a new strength—a new strength for freedom that will last through eternity.”
Even for students not directly involved, the center quickly became one of the most interesting and exciting things on campus during Ann’s undergraduate years. It more than tripled the number of international students enrolled at the university and brought in millions of dollars in federal money. It influenced course offerings in fields ranging from Asian studies and American studies to tropical agriculture and language studies. Hindi, Sanskrit, and Javanese entered the curriculum in 1961. The center attracted speakers like Dick Gregory and Gloria Steinem. There were weekly discussions of topical issues, such as civil rights, internationalism, and the conflict between India and Pakistan, with panels of students and scholars from the countries involved. “Some of the most politically active students the university had were on East-West Center grants,” said Jeannette “Benji” Bennington, who worked for the center from 1962 until her retirement in 2004. Its open-air cafeteria, on the ground floor of Pei’s Jefferson Hall, became a magnet for students from all over the campus. The grant recipients were strongly encouraged to mix. “We said, ‘If we see a whole table of you and you’re all Korean, we’re going to say something to you,’” said Bennington, whose first job, as a resident assistant in an East-West Center dorm, entailed helping students acclimate. “‘The reason you’re here is to learn about other peoples and nations, so you should always be mixing.’ And you did! If you were an American, you were usually trying to explain idioms to about six different nationalities. It was a very enriching type of experience to go down there.”
In that climate, international students were a source of fascination. They were invited to speak in schools, march in the Aloha Week parade, share Thanksgiving dinner with Duke Kahanamoku. Bill Collier, a veterinarian’s son from a family of Indiana farmers, who would later work with Ann in Indonesia, had discovered the University of Hawai‘i in the late 1950s in a magazine in a library in Huron, South Dakota. He was in his third year at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology at the time and had exhausted his interest in surveying and math. Look magazine published a photo spread of the multiethnic beauty queens at the University of Hawai‘i. “What the hell?” Collier thought. “I’m going.” He enrolled as an undergraduate, studied Indonesian, and became vice president of the international students’ association and eventually an East-West Center grantee. He spent his study tour in Thailand, Malaysia, and British Borneo, married a Chinese woman, and moved to Indonesia in 1968. “I was fascinated by all kinds of different nationalities,” he told me when I met him in Jakarta in January 2009. “I even participated in this beauty-queen contest. They have a big dance afterward, they’re all in different costumes. I must have been dressed as a haole and been square-dancing.”
Many years later, after Ann’s death, her family and friends would choose the Japanese garden at the East-West Center for a memorial service celebrating her life. Laid out in 1963 on a sloping stretch of land behind Jefferson Hall and in the shadow of Wa‘ahila Ridge, the garden was intended to provide a window into Japanese culture. Like nearly everything at the center, it was a joint project—conceived by a vice chancellor, paid for by Japanese corporations and individuals, designed by a landscape architect in Tokyo, and constructed by a nursery and landscaping firm in Honolulu. There were lawns, privet hedges, paths, steps, much of it under a canopy of monkeypod trees. A stream, diverted from a Mānoa stream, wound through the garden’s three levels. Formosan koa, strawberry guava, mondo, yeddo hawthorn, red bottlebrush, walking iris, juniper, and rose-flowered jatropha graced the garden, along with a coral shower tree planted by the Japanese crown prince. The stream was said to represent a river, a Japanese symbol of life—beginning in turmoil, steadying through adulthood, slowing to “a tranquil and majestic old age.” Benji Bennington told me that the crown prince stocked the stream with dozens of koi, which were kept from disappearing downstream by a pair of underwater gates. Dropped into the long, winding stream, most of the fish simply swam in circles, following one another and oblivious to their surroundings, Bennington remembered. But, she added, “every once in a while, one fish would flit off and go look and see what else was in the stream.”
When the semester started in late September 1960, it seems reasonable to imagine that Ann was still in a certain amount of emotional turmoil. At an age at which her friends were heading out into the world, she had been steered by her parents, over her objections, to an island several thousand miles out in the Pacific. She was enrolled in a commuter school where students had few options but to live at home. Torn from the first group of close friends she had ever made, she was alone again and an outsider. “Gramps’s relationship with my mother was already strained by the time they reached Hawaii,” Obama writes, attributing the strain to “his instability and often-violent
temper” and her shame at his “ham-fisted manners.” Charles Payne remembered that Madelyn stayed behind for a time on Mercer Island, to close things out, as he put it. “What was the relationship of Ann and Stanley in that period, without Madelyn to mediate, I don’t know,” he said.
Shortly after the start of the semester, Ann encountered the first African student to enroll at the University of Hawai‘i, Barack Hussein Obama. “We often say that Mom met her husbands at the East-West Center,” Maya once said, while conceding that it was not strictly true. Obama was not on an East-West Center grant, and the center had not yet been built. But the family myth contained a kind of truth: Wherever Ann and Obama met, it was in a moment suffused with the spirit in which the center was born. One friend said he remembered Ann saying she had met Obama in the university library. According to the younger Obama, they met in a Russian language class; when they made a plan to meet later in front of the university library, the elder Obama arrived an hour late and found Ann asleep on a bench. Then the man from Kenya awakened the girl from Kansas, literally and figuratively. Renske Heringa, a Dutch anthropologist and friend of Ann’s in the early 1980s, said Ann told her that the meeting on the bench was her first encounter with Obama. “She remembered it as a very romantic and beautiful thing,” Heringa said. “She was completely not out to ‘do the right thing’ or behave the way people expected.” To Heringa, the story illustrated a quintessential quality of Ann’s—a willingness to “just be herself in the world. This whole story about her meeting Barack Senior shows enormous trust—to just leave yourself open to the world when you’re sleeping.”
Obama, charismatic and sharp, had arrived at the University of Hawai‘i one month after the declaration of statehood. He had been flown to the United States with eighty other young Kenyans by Tom Mboya, a Kenyan nationalist who had raised money from Americans to educate a new generation of leaders in anticipation of Kenyan independence. He had attended British schools in Kenya, he told a reporter from the student newspaper shortly after he arrived in Hawaii. Then he had taken British correspondence courses while working for two years as a clerk in Nairobi. He had received “invitations to campus” from the University of Hawai‘i, San Francisco State College in California, and Morgan State College in Baltimore, the article in the student newspaper said. But he had read about Hawaii in The Saturday Evening Post and was attracted by the climate, the allure of the islands, and the state’s reputation for racial tolerance. He enrolled as an undergraduate in the College of Business Administration and moved into Charles H. Atherton House, a YMCA branch near the campus used to house students. To his surprise, he discovered that Honolulu was not “the skyscraper metropolis of the Pacific” and Hawaiians were not “all dressed in native clothing” and engaged in native dancing. The cost of living was three times as high as he had expected. In an interview in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, he said his money would last only two semesters, after which he would have to find a scholarship or a part-time job. The Americans he encountered evidently had their own misconceptions. Kenya was not a “teeming tropical jungle,” Obama informed one reporter. Topographically, it was more like the Great Plains. He delivered a short lecture on the country’s natural history, economy, and politics. “Many people have asked me, ‘Are the people of Kenya ready for self-government?’” he was quoted as saying. “And to these people I say, ‘Nobody is competent enough to judge whether a country is fit to rule itself or not.’ If the people cannot rule themselves, let them misrule themselves. They should be provided with the opportunity.”
Obama impressed men as well as women. “The tall, well built African,” as the student reporter described him, had a powerful presence. Even amid the racial and ethnic diversity of Hawaii, his coloring stood out. Pake Zane, who became a friend of Obama’s at the university and later visited him in Kenya, knew Tongans, Fijians, and Samoans whom he thought of as dark, but he had never seen skin as black as Obama’s. Charming, sociable, and loquacious, Obama talked politics and drank beer with a group of graduate students and intellectuals of vaguely bohemian leanings, who included Pake Zane; Chet Gorman, later known for his work as an archaeologist at Ban Chiang and Spirit Cave in Thailand; and Neil Abercrombie, who went on to represent Hawaii’s First District in Congress for ten terms before being elected governor in November 2010. Obama was ambitious and opinionated, and some said he was brilliant. “He was one of the brightest Kenyans I dealt with,” said Richard Hook, who worked with Obama years later in Kenya. “He had a very quick mind—a good numerical mind.” He had the kind of personality that commanded attention. When he spoke, people listened. He was one of a few hundred students whose names appeared on the dean’s list published in the campus newspaper, and, when he left, he was described as “a straight-A student.” Bill Collier, who, like Obama, was studying economics, noticed that their economic-development professor fell uncharacteristically silent and respectful when Obama spoke in class. To Americans, his accent suggested Oxbridge, and his booming baritone brought to mind Paul Robeson. His voice was seductive, almost hypnotic. “He had the most charismatic voice and accent I’ve ever heard in my life,” Pake Zane said. “The most mellow, deep voice with slightly African articulation and maybe a flavor of Oxford. No matter what you were doing in the room, if you heard this voice, you would turn around.” It was, Hook said, Obama’s “instrument of choice.”
Not everyone was charmed. Some found Obama arrogant, egotistical, and overbearing. Mark Wimbush, born and reared in Kenya with a Scottish mother and an English father, arrived at the University of Hawai‘i the same month as Ann Dunham, after getting an undergraduate degree from Oxford. He and Obama became acquaintances, if not quite friends. “We were the ugly colonialists,” he told me, referring to the attitude of some black Kenyans toward white Kenyans like him. “Part of the tension between Barack and me might have been that fact.” They both followed the news from Kenya enthusiastically. Independence was coming, the country was preparing for transition, and Obama kept Wimbush filled in. “I’m sure he envisioned being a big shot in the Kenyan government,” Wimbush said. “That’s probably why he was studying politics and economics—in preparation for taking a cabinet position.” Wimbush found him “almost a domineering man. He was certainly not a wallflower in any way. He was an impressive person, but it wasn’t always a favorable impression.” In political discussions, they were often on opposite sides. “He would tend to put forward his views and not spend any time listening to anybody else’s, because he didn’t think they were worth listening to, unless they agreed with his,” Wimbush said. Judy Ware, a family friend of the Dunhams who recalled meeting Obama with Ann sometime later in Port Angeles, Washington, said, “I remember that he was very outgoing and friendly, and that he was flirtatious, and that made me uncomfortable. He was just a little bit intimidating to me. He was too close in my personal space.” She added, “I thought he was a little bit almost aggressive in his way of meeting and being around women.”
Obama was twenty-four years old and Ann was seventeen when they met in the fall of 1960. Though he apparently omitted to mention it initially, Obama was a married man, with a wife and child in Kenya and a second child on the way. Ann had never had a boyfriend, as far as her closest friends knew. She was “a young virgin” when she and Obama met, according to Kadi Warner, a graduate-school friend to whom Ann told the story some years later. “She was totally enthralled by him,” Warner said. “Every time she described him, she talked about his brilliance.” He was older, more worldly, a well-known figure on campus. He was striking and exotic. Ann, transplanted to a campus where three out of every four students were from Hawaii, was in some ways more of an outsider and more off balance than he. He courted her, and she was attracted to him. Whether she had access to birth control is not known, but it is not likely to have been easy. And as Warner put it, “I doubt he was the sort of man who would have carried a condom in his wallet.”
In Dreams from My Father, written when the younger Obama was in his earl
y thirties, he pieces together a version of his parents’ story from fragments he was told as a child. At the same time, he describes many of the stories he was told about his father as “compact, apocryphal,” and allows for the likelihood that important details were intentionally or unintentionally missing. “Even in the abridged version that my mother and grandparents offered, there were many things I didn’t understand,” he writes. He gives his account of his parents’ fleeting coming together and breaking apart in language and cadences reminiscent of those of folktales or myths. His father “worked with unsurpassed concentration,” and “his friends were legion,” as the younger Obama tells it. In a Russian language course, “he met an awkward, shy American girl, only eighteen, and they fell in love.” Her parents were won over “by his charm and intellect.” He married the girl, “and she bore them a son, to whom he bequeathed his name.” He won a scholarship to do graduate work at Harvard, without money to take his family with him, Obama writes. The couple separated, and “he returned to Africa to fulfill his promise to the continent. The mother and child stayed behind, but the bond of love survived the distances. . . .” Though Obama was writing at a time when his mother and grandmother were alive and well, and available for consultation, he offers little in the way of an alternative version. It appears that parts of the account he was told were wrong.
