Whatever the differences and tensions between them, whatever the doubts and anxieties they had been entertaining about their marriage—none of this mattered now. As Barack would later remember, “My world narrowed to a single point, and…I was not interested in anything or anybody outside the four walls of that hospital room—not my work, not my schedule, not my future.” Michelle later described the three days of waiting as “a nightmare—the kind of thing you hope and pray will never happen to a child of yours. Any other parent would understand how desperate we felt, and how it brought us closer together.”
At the end of the third day, the doctors told Michelle and Barack that Sasha had turned a corner. The antibiotics had worked and the meningitis was in full retreat; their baby was out of danger. Barack and Michelle, who, Barack said, in previous months had had “little time for conversation, much less romance,” reacted to the news with a tearful embrace. “Thank God,” he said, reaching out to shake the doctor’s hand. “Thank God.”
For the next several weeks, Michelle stayed home from work so that she, along with her mother, Marian, could keep a watchful eye on Sasha while she made a complete recovery.
As if he needed another soul-jarring reminder of the fragility of life, Barack—and the rest of the civilized world—got it on the morning of September 11, 2001. Obama was driving to a state legislative hearing in Chicago when he heard the news that a plane had slammed into one of the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center. He assumed at first, as did millions of Americans, that it was merely a tragic accident. It was not until later, when he walked into his legislative meeting in the State of Illinois Building on North LaSalle Street, that he was told that the first plane was in fact an airliner and that another passenger jet had subsequently struck the second tower. No sooner had he arrived than he, along with everyone else, was ordered to evacuate the building immediately.
Barack telephoned Michelle at home, where she was watching the terrifying events unfold on television. “Oh my God,” she said. “Are you seeing this? You don’t have any friends working there, do you?”
In fact, Barack, who had spent five years in New York—first as an undergraduate at Columbia University and then as a research associate at a small publisher of financial newsletters—really had no idea if any of his old friends were near the World Trade Center that day. He began working the phones, tracking down his college buddies and coworkers to make sure they were safe.
While Michelle tried in vain to grasp the sheer magnitude of the destruction, Barack focused on the quotidian tasks that each of the victims went through that day—how they got up, drank their coffees, and kissed their spouses good-bye before heading to work, completely unaware of the horror that awaited them. It was the notion that no one is really safe, that anything can happen in an instant, that weighed most heavily on Barack.
When he got home that evening, Barack hugged Michelle and Malia, then picked up Sasha and cradled her in his arms. Along with Sasha’s meningitis scare, this latest reminder of life’s fragile nature brought the Obamas closer together than they had been in years. “How can we argue about all this small stuff?” Michelle asked her husband. “We have so much to be thankful for.”
The lesson was short-lived. As was the case in most households not directly touched by the tragedy of 9/11, the petty concerns of everyday existence soon resumed their place at center stage in the lives of the Obamas.
Things had clearly reached a crisis point in the Obama marriage. Barack believed that his political commitments required him to spend long periods away from home. Those absences seemed likely to grow even longer, since he was not about to give up a burning ambition to achieve higher office. Michelle’s criticisms were “unfair” and “shortsighted,” he repeatedly claimed. And even though they faced financial pressures, his job teaching at the University of Chicago Law School made it possible for them to keep up the mortgage payments on their modest but comfortable condo not far from the university campus, at 5450 S.E. View Park. “We have a good life and I’m trying to make it even better,” he argued. “How can she find fault with that?”
No matter. Michelle refused to budge. Out of what she would later describe to one friend as “a state of desperation,” Michelle delivered an ultimatum to her husband: If Barack couldn’t find a way to pursue his political dreams and at the same time make more time for his family, then he would have to choose between the two. “That’s the way it’s got to be,” she said. “I’m not doing this by myself.”
Long before Michelle met Barack, his character had, in fact, been shaped by two strong women. Now, as he stood at a crossroads in his married life, wondering whether he would have to give up politics for the woman he loved, Barack’s thoughts drifted back to his childhood in Honolulu—and the young woman with long dark hair whose real name was Stanley but who called herself Ann.
“Barry!” He could hear his Kansas-born mother’s flat midwestern twang as clearly as if she were standing in front of him. “You are a responsible young man. You know what you’ve got to do.” Then, just as clearly, he could see his mother kneel down to kiss her little boy, wipe the tears from her eyes, pick up the suitcase that always seemed to be waiting by the front door—and leave. Again.
I’ve got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I’ve got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher.
—Barack
Because of his childhood, he was the ultimate outsider.
—Jerry Kellman, an early mentor of Barack’s
I inhaled. That was the point.
—Barack
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On the surface, they seemed about as well suited to each other as two people could possibly be. Both were young, tall, athletic, and toothsomely attractive. They exuded a confidence that bordered on cockiness. They were witty, direct, scrupulously well mannered, and hardworking. They were devoted to their families and unerringly loyal to their friends. They were both products of the Ivy League (he earned his bachelor’s degree at Columbia University, she earned hers at Princeton) and even went to the same law school—Harvard.
Yet their backgrounds could scarcely have been more different. Where Michelle Robinson and her older brother, Craig, grew up in the same South Side Chicago apartment their mother lived in for over thirty years, biracial Barack experienced a rootless childhood that left him wondering who he really was—and where he really belonged. It was precisely that thirst for stability that led Barack to the supremely grounded Michelle.
The restlessness that defined Barack’s early life stretched back at least two generations—to his white grandfather, Stanley Armour Dunham, the man he would affectionately call “Gramps.” The son of a roustabout who worked the oil rigs in and around El Dorado, Kansas, eight-year-old Stanley came home from school one day to discover his mother’s body hanging from a shower rod—a suicide that everyone in town chalked up to her husband’s rampant infidelity.
Whether it was the shock of finding his mother’s body or the mere fact that he had inherited his father’s wild streak, Stanley was soon branded incorrigible. Expelled from high school after striking the principal, Dunham spent the late 1930s as a self-styled hobo, riding the rails from Detroit to San Francisco.
It was back on home turf in the oil boomtown of Augusta, Kansas, that Stanley, then twenty-two, met eighteen-year-old Madelyn Payne, the restless, fresh-faced daughter of a Standard Oil office manager and a former schoolteacher. Madelyn’s parents were straitlaced Methodists who disapproved of drinking, smoking, card-playing, and dancing. Not that that kept Madelyn from sneaking off whenever she could to hear Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and Tommy Dorsey play at Wichita’s Blue Moon Dance Hall. “All the big bands came,” recalled Madelyn’s classmate Nina Parry. “It was wonderful—and nobody had more fun than Madelyn.”
Madelyn, who boasted to anyone who would listen that she counted a full-blooded Cherokee among her ancestors (not to mention several slave owners as well as Confederate President Jefferson Davis), was instantly sm
itten with the lanky young drifter from the proverbial wrong side of the tracks. Her parents, understandably, felt otherwise.
A few weeks before she graduated from Augusta High School, Madelyn and Stanley sneaked off during the spring weekend of the annual junior-senior banquet and secretly married. Madelyn continued to live at home. On the day she was handed her diploma, she sprang the news on her unsuspecting parents.
For the next eighteen months, the newlyweds managed to scrape by until the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor led Stanley, like most of his male contemporaries, to enlist. Before Stanley shipped out to the European theater, he was stationed at Fort Leavenworth. It was there, on November 29, 1942, that Madelyn gave birth to a baby girl.
The new father made no effort to conceal his profound disappointment. He had wanted a son, and was convinced right up until the end of his wife’s pregnancy that a son was what he was getting. Clearly unwilling to concede defeat, he persuaded Madelyn to go ahead with plans to name the newest member of the Dunham family after him. The name on her birth certificate: Stanley Ann Dunham.
While Stanley was stationed overseas, Madelyn took a job on the production line at Boeing’s B-29 plant in Wichita. As soon as he was discharged from the service in 1945, Stanley did what millions of other veterans did at the time: he decided to enroll in college on the GI Bill. The Dunhams headed to the West Coast, where Stanley attended the University of California at Berkeley for six months before dropping out. Guided by Stanley’s insatiable wanderlust, the Dunhams returned to Kansas. There he found a job managing a furniture store on El Dorado’s dusty Main Street, while Madelyn helped make ends meet by working as a cashier in a local restaurant. Soon they were on the move again—first to Texas, where they bounced from one dusty hamlet to another.
It was in one of those Texas towns that Stanley Ann experienced racial hatred firsthand. One afternoon, she and a young black girl were playing in the Dunhams’ backyard when a mob of local schoolchildren approached, hurling rocks and racial epithets. Madelyn chased them off, and when her husband called the children’s parents the next day to protest, he came to the sobering realization that the rock-throwing youngsters were just aping their parents’ prejudices. Black children and white children, he was told pointedly, were not to play together.
The Dunhams returned to Kansas, where—despite the markedly less racist atmosphere—little Stanley still had to withstand the inevitable teasing over her name as she moved from one school to the next. The Dunhams’ only child was studious and—perhaps because the constant relocating made her feel like a perennial outsider—something of a loner. More apt to spend her time reading than seeking new friends, Stanley Ann withdrew into her own solitary world. Whatever anxieties she may have been experiencing manifested themselves in a childhood case of asthma.
Stanley Ann had not yet turned thirteen when, in 1955, the Dunhams packed up and moved again—this time to Seattle, where the Boeing-dominated local economy was in the midst of a postwar boom. As soon as they arrived, Stanley landed a job as a salesman at Standard-Grunbaum Furniture at the corner of Second Avenue and Pine Street. The store’s groan-producing slogan: “First in Furniture, Second at Pine.”
The Dunhams moved into an apartment in Seattle’s Columbia City neighborhood and enrolled Stanley Ann in Eckstein Junior High School. The next year they moved to Mercer Island, situated in the middle of Lake Washington just opposite Seattle. On Mercer Island, they rented Unit 219 of Shorewood Apartments, a sprawling new complex for upwardly mobile families. Determined to stay in the workforce, Madelyn started commuting to nearby Bellevue to work as an escrow officer at a small bank.
Even before she boarded a school bus on the first day of school, Stanley Ann made an impression on her fellow Mercer Island High students. “I know, I know,” she told classmate Elaine Johnson after they met while waiting for the bus. “It’s a boy’s name, and no, I don’t like it. I mean, would you like to be called Stanley? But my dad wanted a boy and he got me. And the name Stanley made him feel better, I guess.”
In fact, Stanley Ann made no secret about the resentment she harbored toward her overbearing father. Stanley senior could be scathing in his criticism of his daughter; he berated her for being too timid, for not excelling at sports, for getting a single B on her report card even when the rest of her grades were all As. “He was hard on her,” remembered Stanley Ann’s friend Maxine Box. “He picked on her.” As a result, she developed a nervous habit that set her apart from the other girls: Stanley Ann “cracked her knuckles,” recalled Box, “and I mean constantly.”
Stanley Dunham, whose temper was described by friends and family members alike as “explosive” and “violent,” did more than merely pick on his daughter. Given to explosive outbursts, he was “a door slammer, a yeller, and a thrower,” a neighbor said. Worse, “there were bruises on Stanley Ann’s arm from where he grabbed her. He would slap her when she talked back. But a lot of us kids got punished that way back then, well into our teens.”
Whenever she could, Madelyn, who had turned quiet and serious as she shouldered more of the financial responsibilities for the household, protected her daughter from Dunham’s stinging words. Still, Stanley Ann learned to defend herself—at least from the verbal abuse her father routinely dished out. “He had a sarcastic sense of humor,” recalled Box, “and she could give it right back—and then some.”
“Stannie,” as she soon became known to her tight circle of friends, soon gained a reputation as a superb student. “She was very intellectual and above all of us,” said Box, “not just thinking about boys and clothes.” She also possessed a cutting wit. “She had a really ironic sense of humor—sort of downbeat—and she was a great observer,” remembered another classmate, Iona Stenhouse. “There was an arched eyebrow or a smile on her face about the immaturity of us all. I felt at times that Stanley thought we were a bit of a provincial group.”
Not that Stannie’s high school years weren’t filled with the sleepovers, sock hops, poodle sweaters, and football games that were staples of an adolescence lived in 1950s America. She listened to the Kingston Trio and Ricky Nelson and watched American Bandstand, but she also discussed jazz and beat poetry with like-minded friends at Seattle coffeehouses like the Encore and Cafe Allegro, and caught foreign films at the city’s only art house, the Ridgemont.
Stanley Ann “never dated the crew-cut white boys,” said her friend Susan Blake. “She had a worldview, even as a young girl.” Another pal, Chip Wall, agreed that Stanley Ann “was not a standard-issue girl. You don’t start out life as a girl with a name like Stanley without some sense you are not ordinary.”
Mercer Island High School itself was anything but ordinary. The year before Stanley Ann enrolled there, John Stenhouse, then chairman of the Mercer Island School Board, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had been a member of the Communist Party. At the same time, teachers Jim Wichterman and Val Foubert routinely ruffled feathers by challenging their students to question authority and societal norms. While English teacher Foubert assigned such controversial texts as Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, and Margaret Mead’s writings on homosexuality, philosophy teacher Wichterman led classroom discussions on Camus, Sartre, Kierkegaard, and Karl Marx. The hallway connecting Foubert’s and Wichterman’s classrooms was dubbed “Anarchy Alley.”
“I had them read The Communist Manifesto,” Wichterman recalled, “and the parents went nuts. They didn’t want any discussions about sex, religion, or politics.” As for Stanley Ann, Wichterman remembered that “she’d question anything: What’s so good about democracy? What’s so good about capitalism? What’s wrong with communism? She had an inquiring mind.” Fellow student Jill Burton-Dascher agreed: “Stannie was intellectually way more mature than we were and a little bit ahead of her time, in an off-center way.”
The Dunhams were not part of the inevitable campaign to have Wichterman and Fou
bert fired. At a time when the overwhelming majority of their neighbors supported Dwight Eisenhower’s election to a second presidential term in 1956, they backed Democrat Adlai Stevenson. “If you were concerned about something going wrong in the world, Stanley would know about it first,” Chip Wall said. “She was a fellow traveler…. We were liberals before we knew what liberals were.” Box agreed: “We were all questioners. It was the feeling of the whole school. We were on the debate team. We knew about current events.”
The chain-smoking, whiskey-drinking, bridge-playing Dunhams also turned their backs on their midwestern Methodist and Baptist upbringings. By the time Stanley Ann was sixteen, the family was attending Sunday services at the East Shore Unitarian Church in Bellevue. At the height of the McCarthy era, its congregation was so outspokenly left-leaning that East Shore Unitarian soon became known throughout the region as “the Little Red Church on the Hill.”
Although Stanley Ann and her father both delighted in ruffling establishment feathers, they were not close. “He was always welcoming to the kids,” Box said, “but he embarrassed Stanley because he tried too hard” to impress her friends. Indeed, Stanley Dunham was more than faintly reminiscent of the Willy Loman character in Death of a Salesman, and while his brand of backslapping affability—replete with knowing winks and off-color jokes—may have seemed merely entertaining to strangers, it left his daughter feeling nothing less than mortified.
Stanley senior “always tried to get a rise out of people,” agreed schoolmate Susan Blake. “It seemed like every time her father opened his mouth, she would roll her eyes.”
The tensions between the two Stanleys often erupted into full-blown arguments in front of her friends. “He would belittle her with incredibly sarcastic remarks, and she would snap back right on the spot—she always stood up for herself,” said Box. “But it was awkward for the rest of us to have to watch. Stannie’s mother was very no-nonsense and would tell them both to grow up and stop being silly—she was sort of the mediator—but there was a lot of tension in that family. I wouldn’t have wanted to grow up dealing with a father who was as egocentric as Stannie’s was.”
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