Rising Star

by David Garrow

  Just a few weeks later, Stanley, his wife, and his daughter all arrived in Berkeley, where he began taking classes at the University of California. But academic work was not Dunham’s forte. His older brother Ralph, who was working on a Ph.D. at Berkeley, remembered that Stan could not cope with the foreign language requirement. Madelyn’s younger brother Charles heard from his sister that Stanley was more interested in reading murder mysteries than doing his course work, and he expected Madelyn to write his term papers for him. “What can you do when your wife won’t support you in getting an education?” Stan later told Charles.

  Madelyn was unhappy with their situation, and in mid-1947, Stanley, Madelyn, and four-year-old Ann drove eastward with Ralph Dunham. Following a July 4 stopover at Yellowstone National Park, Ralph dropped the young family off in Kansas, inscribing a copy of C. S. Forester’s Poo-Poo and the Dragons for his niece: “To Stanley Ann Dunham / As a going away present from her Uncle Ralph / Summer of 1947.” More than sixty-five years later that volume and Ann’s other childhood books would lie well preserved in a box in Honolulu.

  Stanley enrolled in several classes at Wichita State University, but within months, he had taken a sales job at the Jay Paris Furniture Store in Ponca City, Oklahoma, two hours south of Wichita. One colleague later remembered Stan as a successful, first-rate salesman, knowledgeable about both furniture and his customers. He was also remembered as “a smart guy who liked to tell you how smart he was.” In Ponca City, Madelyn initially stayed home before realizing that she had to have a job. “The evening cocktail hour gets earlier every day. If I don’t work, I’ll turn into an alcoholic.”

  Ann began first grade at Ponca City’s Jefferson Elementary School in September 1948, and in 1950, she transferred to another for third grade after the family moved to a different home. Then, in the spring of 1951, Stanley moved the family more than 250 miles southwest, to Vernon, Texas, when he took a new furniture store job, and Ann completed third grade there, as well as all of fourth, fifth, and sixth, before the peripatetic family again moved, this time back to El Dorado, Kansas. Stanley worked first at a Farm & Home store, then got a better job at Hellum’s Furniture in Wichita, while Ann attended seventh grade in El Dorado.6

  During the summer of 1955, the Dunhams moved yet again, this time all the way westward to Seattle, where Stanley had a job at the huge Standard-Grunbaum Furniture store. They moved into an apartment northeast of the University of Washington’s campus, and Ann walked to nearby Eckstein Middle School for eighth grade. The next summer they moved to Mercer Island in Lake Washington, southeast of downtown Seattle, and Ann began ninth grade at the brand-new Mercer Island High School. They rented a nice apartment in Shorewood, and sometime in 1957 Stan changed jobs once more, working at Doces Majestic Furniture.

  Throughout high school, Ann went by her given name of Stanley, or Stannie. She made a good number of friends and was taught by some outspokenly progressive teachers. One friend later recalled that Stanley showed little interest in clothes or boys; instead, she and her friends would take a long bus ride to the lively “UDub” campus neighborhood, an unusual expedition for Mercer Island teenagers. At home, tensions about money sometimes brought on loud arguments between Stan and Madelyn, who had found a job as an escrow officer at a bank in nearby Bellevue. Stanley also had a strained relationship with her father, and one high school friend said she “hated her father at the time that I knew her.”

  Sometime during her senior year, she and a male classmate set off on a nonromantic road trip that took them as far south as Berkeley, California, before anguished parents and law enforcement officials located them there. Stan Dunham flew down and drove them back to Seattle. Also during her senior year, Stannie saw a much-heralded foreign film, Black Orpheus, which was French director Marcel Camus’s adaptation of the famous Greek legend, set in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She would still recall the movie a quarter century later, and she may have been especially struck by the film’s male lead, black Brazilian actor Breno Mello.

  Toward the end of Stannie’s senior year, Stan heard about a job opportunity that was even farther west than Seattle—in Honolulu. Albert “Bob” Pratt, who operated Isle Wide furniture distributors, was adding a retail outlet, and he hired Stan Dunham to run it. The rental home where Pratt’s family lived, at 6085 Kalanianaole Highway, had a backyard cottage, and Stan relocated there sometime before Stannie’s high school graduation. On the day after commencement in June 1960, she and her mother flew to Honolulu.

  Stannie had not wanted to move to Hawaii, especially given her great attraction to UDub in Seattle, but she was still five months shy of her eighteenth birthday. So, in September 1960, she enrolled as a freshman at the University of Hawaii, taking a philosophy course and perhaps others in addition to Russian 101.7

  How Stanley Ann Dunham’s relationship with Barack Obama commenced and developed remains deeply shrouded in long-unasked and now-unanswerable questions. A quarter century after she became pregnant, her son, temporarily back in Honolulu, would write to his girlfriend that “one block from where I sit, the apartment house where I was conceived still stands.” By early 1961, Barack Obama Sr. was living in apartment 15 at 1704 Punahou Street, just across the street from Punahou School, and while literary license shrank three or four blocks to one, that is where Ann Dunham said her pregnancy originated in November 1960.

  When the final exam for that Russian 101 course took place on January 28, 1961, Ann Dunham as well as her parents knew she was almost three months pregnant. According to later documents—no contemporary one has ever been located—on Thursday, February 2, 1961, Ann and Barack took a brief interisland flight from Honolulu to Maui and were married in the small county seat of Wailuku, with no relatives or friends present. Obama’s closest confidante, his younger sister Zeituni Onyango, recounted her older brother’s version of what had occurred: “the father of Ann said that they have to marry.” Stanley Dunham insisted that his pregnant daughter get married rather than give birth to a bastard. But why did they go to the time and expense of flying from Honolulu to Maui? Stanley and Madelyn likely did not want any potentially embarrassing questions arising at either Isle-Wide furniture or at the Bank of Hawaii, where Madelyn had been hired as an escrow officer. They knew that marriages on Oahu were regularly listed in both of Honolulu’s daily newspapers, but ones occurring in the outer islands were not.8

  Ann Dunham Obama did not register for spring classes at the University of Hawaii. In contrast, Obama was honored with a Phi Kappa Phi certificate for his freshman-year grade point average and then a few weeks later was named to the Dean’s List because of his fall 1960 GPA. A young English professor, writing to AAI in support of Obama’s request for scholarship assistance for his sophomore year, reported that “Obama has done an exemplary job of getting along with people” and called him “a genuinely enlightened twentieth-century man.” Obama’s friends Neil Abercrombie and Andy Zane were leading local racial equality efforts, and when a national governors’ conference brought outspoken segregationist governor John Patterson of Alabama to Honolulu in June 1961, he was greeted at the airport by about two dozen picketers holding signs proclaiming “Welcome to the Land of Miscegenation.” The lone black participant certainly represented the truth of that slogan, and he told a reporter that “Hawaii gives them an example where races live together,” but he asked “not to be identified” other than as a UH student.9

  But in that student’s own personal context, the races actually did not live together. During her pregnancy, Ann continued to reside with her parents at 6085 Kalanianaole Highway, and Obama remained in his apartment on Punahou Street. When UH’s foreign-student adviser, Mrs. Sumie McCabe, learned of Obama’s new marriage some two months after it occurred, she immediately called the Honolulu office of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to tell the INS about his changed circumstances. INS agent Lyle Dahlin memorialized McCabe’s call in a memo that went into Obama’s file, noting that “the problem is that wh
en he arrived in the U.S. the subject had a wife in Kenya.” McCabe said Obama “is very intelligent,” but he “has been running around with several girls since he first arrived here and last summer she cautioned him about his playboy ways. Subject replied that he would ‘try’ to stay away from the girls. Subject got his USC [U.S. citizen] wife ‘Hapei’ and although they were married, they do not live together, and Miss Dunham is making arrangements with the Salvation Army to give the baby away. Subject told Mrs. McCabe that in Kenya all that is necessary to be divorced is to tell the wife that she is divorced and that constitutes a legal divorce. Subject claims to have been divorced from his wife in Kenya in this method.”

  The INS was powerless to take any action absent a criminal conviction for bigamy, but Dahlin recommended that Obama be “closely questioned” before he was approved for another extension of his student residency visa and that “denial be considered.” If Ann were to petition on his behalf, “make sure an investigation is conducted as to the bona-fide[s] of the marriage.” Subsequent documents in Obama’s own hand would soon demonstrate that he in no way really considered himself divorced from Kezia. He had grown up in a family and ethnic culture where multiple wives were the norm, and he was not telling the truth about that to McCabe. There are no documents or anyone’s recollections to support Obama’s claim that Ann Dunham intended to give birth to their child and then put it up for adoption. Obama’s closest relative, his sister Zeituni, dismissed the possibility out of hand when the memo first came to light decades later: “no African especially in Kenya would think of giving his child away.”

  So when Dr. David A. Sinclair delivered Barack Hussein Obama II at 7:24 P.M. on Friday, August 4, 1961, at Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital on Punahou Street, just three blocks south from where the child had been conceived, the Salvation Army was not called. Instead, Madelyn and Stan each called their siblings with the news. Madelyn’s younger brother Charles recounted her description of the new baby: “He’s not black like his father, he’s not white. More like coffee with cream.” Ralph Dunham remembered Stan calling him from the hospital and Madelyn getting on the phone too. Stan’s younger sister Virginia Dunham Goeldner recalled him phoning her too and, fifty years later, expressed astonishment that some of her longtime neighbors in Maumelle, Arkansas, doubted the fact of her grandnephew’s birth. “Why did Stanley call and say he was born and why were they over at the hospital? Why did he bother to call” on that Friday night?

  The birth occurred exactly two years to the day, and indeed almost exactly to the hour, since Barack Hussein Obama had boarded his flight at Nairobi Embakasi. On Monday, Ann Dunham Obama signed her son’s Hawaii State Department of Health birth certificate, and it was signed on Tuesday by Dr. Sinclair and the local registrar of births. Five days later, on August 13, the Honolulu Advertiser’s listing of “Births, Marriages, Deaths” on page B6 included in the first category “Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama, 6085 Kalanianaole Hwy., son, Aug. 4.” The next day’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin carried the same listing on page 24, with copy editors at that paper spelling out “Highway” and “August” in full. The birth certificate only contained the address for “Usual Residence of Mother”; there was no request for an address following “Full Name of Father,” so the newspapers presumed that the newborn’s parents lived together.10

  Less than four weeks after his son’s birth, Barack Hussein Obama applied for and quickly received a routine one-year extension of his student residency visa. Lee Zeigler, newly arrived from Stanford University, had replaced Sumie McCabe as UH’s foreign student adviser, and a different INS agent, William T. Wood II, not Lyle Dahlin, reviewed and approved Obama’s application. Obama said he had received $1,000 in scholarship support via the African-American Institute, but again requested to work for up to twenty-five hours a week to meet the balance of his expenses. He also indicated that sometime subsequent to March 1961 he had moved from Punahou Street to 1482 Alencastre Street, well east of UH’s campus. Barack listed Ann S. Dunham as his spouse, and Agent Wood’s summary memo noted, “They have one child born Honolulu on 8/4/61—Barack Obama II, child living with mother (she lives with her parents & subject lives at 1482 Alencastre St.).” But Wood noted something else too: “U.S.C. spouse to go to Wash. State University next semester.”

  Sometime soon after Wood wrote that memo, Ann and her weeks-old son flew from Honolulu to Seattle: not so she could attend WSU, in far southeastern Washington State, but to enroll at her beloved UDub, which she had wanted to attend a year earlier. Ann and baby Barack stayed briefly with a family friend on Mercer Island before settling into an apartment at 516 Thirteenth Avenue East in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, well south of the university. According to her UDub transcript, she registered for two evening courses, Anthropology 100: Introduction to the Study of Man and Political Science 201: Modern Government. Classes began in late September.

  But why did Ann Dunham Obama take her newborn and leave her husband, parents, and Honolulu for the familiar confines of Seattle? She clearly preferred UDub and its environs over UH, but she told half a dozen old high school friends, as well as a woman who also lived at 516 Thirteenth Avenue East and babysat young Barack while Ann attended classes, that she loved her husband. But the young couple never chose to live together at any time following the onset of Ann’s pregnancy, and Ann relocated herself a long airplane flight away as soon as her son was old enough to travel. None of the direct participants—Ann, Obama, Madelyn, and Stan—ever offered a clear explanation that has survived in anyone’s recollections a half century later.

  Obama had taken to calling his son’s mother Anna, not Ann, and she seems to have adopted this as well, according to both the 1961–62 Polk City Directory for Seattle, which lists “Obama Anna Mrs. studt” and her neighboring babysitter, Alaskan native Mary Toutonghi, who also remembered her as Anna. Ann did well in her fall courses, earning an A in anthropology and a B in political science; she did even better in the winter term that ran from late December 1961 through mid-March 1962, getting As in both Philosophy 120: Introduction to Logic and, interestingly, History 478: History of Southern Africa. Mary Toutonghi babysat regularly during those months on the evenings Ann attended classes, and years later she would recall infant Barack as “very curious and very alert,” “very happy and a good size.” In March Ann enrolled in three regular daytime courses, obtaining Bs in Chinese Civilization and History of Modern Philosophy but changing English Political and Social History to just an audit.11

  With Ann in Seattle, Obama launched into his senior year at UH. Only Neil Abercrombie was aware of Obama’s relationship with Dunham or that he had fathered a child in Honolulu. One new graduate student, Robert Ruenitz, would later admit that “for any of us to say that we knew Obama well would be difficult. He was a private man with academic achievement his foremost goal.” Another 1961 grad student, Cambodia native Naranhkiri Tith, debated nuclear arms with Obama at a widely publicized campus symposium. Obama labeled the issue not a “balance of power” but a “balance of terror” and asserted that most U.S. foreign aid took the form of weapons and other military assistance. Tith and other graduate students also partied regularly with Obama, who “loved to drink” to the point of becoming “totally drunk” at repeated parties. “He also was a womanizer,” Tith recounted years later.

  Even so, Obama’s academic success continued apace. In mid-January he addressed the NAACP’s Honolulu branch on “Changes in Africa Today,” and in early February, he was featured prominently in a “Dear Friend” fund-raising appeal distributed by Bill Scheinman and Tom Mboya’s African-American Students Foundation. Sent in the name of Ruth Bunche, whose diplomat husband Ralph in 1950 had been the first African American ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize, the letter briefly profiled two young men “of whom we are especially proud” out of more than five hundred African students who were then studying in the U.S. One was completing a graduate degree in engineering at Columbia University; the other was Obama, “an h
onor student of the University of Hawaii where he will complete a four year course in three years.” The letter predicted Obama would soon qualify for the national academic honor society, Phi Beta Kappa, and in late April he was elected to membership.

  With graduation only a month away, Obama was also a featured speaker at a large Mother’s Day event organized by the Hawaii Peace Rally Committee to oppose nuclear weapons. The afternoon event drew hundreds to Ala Moana Beach Park. Liberal Democratic state legislators Tom Gill and Patsy Mink were joined on the speakers’ platform by four clergymen and several UH professors. The crowd included powerful International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) director Jack Hall, and conservative counterprotesters from the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) who waved signs advocating continued U.S. nuclear weapons testing.

  Speaking to the crowd, Obama denounced “foreign aid which is directed toward military conquest or the acquisition of bases.” Speaking as an African, “anything which relieves military spending will help us,” and if peace were to replace nuclear confrontation, “we will be able to receive your aid with an open mind and without suspicion.”12

  In early May 1962, Betty Mooney Kirk, who had married and relocated to her husband’s hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, wrote to Tom Mboya in Nairobi to seek his help in finding someone to sponsor Obama for graduate school, “preferably at Harvard.” She enclosed a copy of Barack’s résumé, which she had prepared, and it stated that Obama already had applied to and been accepted for graduate study at Harvard, Yale, the University of Michigan, and the University of California at Berkeley. Harvard alone had offered financial aid, in the limited amount of $1,500, but Betty hoped Tom could find further assistance because Barack “has the opportunity and the brains.” Mboya replied with congratulations, but according to Betty was “not very hopeful” about locating available funding.