Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Loves, and Letters of America's First Postmodern President

by Jack Cashill

  On October 9, 2008, Lifson ran my first extended piece. In 3,700 words, I was able to present most of what I had learned to date: the publishing history, the lack of any prior quality work by Obama, the parallels in imagery and style, and the state of existing science. Although other publications would shy from the subject, Lifson had no qualms. Living in Berkeley, California, as a near hermit, he did not worry about being snubbed at Georgetown cocktail parties. His gut told him that Obama was “an obvious phony, a con man.” The evidence seemed to confirm his gut. In presenting the wealth of evidence then available, I summarized the state of the inquiry:

  Shy of a confession by those involved, I will not be able to prove conclusively that Obama did not write this book. As shall be seen, however, there are only two real possibilities: one is that Obama experienced a near miraculous turnaround in his literary abilities; the second is that he had major editorial help, up to and including a ghostwriter. The weight of the evidence overwhelmingly favors the latter conclusion and strongly suggests who that ghostwriter is.

  David Remnick cannot control his elitist imp in discussing what happened next. “Cashill’s assertions might well have remained a mere twinkling in the Web’s farthest lunatic orbit had it not been for the fact that more powerful voices hoped to give his theory wider currency.” None would be more powerful than that of Limbaugh, a man who haunts the liberal imagination the way Kong did Skull Island.

  Having done talk radio for a few years in Kansas City—at a station that had once fired Limbaugh—I have a healthy appreciation for the job Limbaugh does, and no one does it better. Although an obvious partisan, Limbaugh is analytically astute, authoritative, and very rarely wrong. I listen whenever I get the chance.

  On October 10 of that year, at noontime, I had touched down from my “lunatic orbit” to moderate a meeting of corporate attorneys in my part-time role as executive editor of Ingram’s, a regional business magazine. The meeting was intense. We were discussing the end of the financial world as we knew it, and the role of the attorney in sorting through the rubble.

  During a break in the action, I checked my voice messages only to discover my inbox was full. This was unprecedented. I feared something had happened to one of my children. The first voice mail explained it all: “Are you listening? Rush is talking about you.” (Point of interest: anyone who says “Limbaugh” is not a fan.) I could not tune in. I had to get back to my meeting.

  Later, I listened to the podcast. Limbaugh was playing audio excerpts from Dreams and commenting on them. The one that triggered my name was this: “A steady attack on the White race, the constant recitation of black people’s brutal experience in this country served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal responsibility….”

  “Stop the tape,” said Rush. “What is this? Ballast? He doesn’t talk this way. You know, there are stories out there, he may not have written this book. There’s a guy named Jack Cashill….”

  Observes Remnick, whose chief hobby seems to be imputing racism to people who live west of Tenth Avenue, “This may not have been Limbaugh’s most racist insinuation of the campaign.” He cites others he liked less, but he concludes that our collective “libel about Obama’s memoir—the denial of literacy, the denial of authorship—had a particularly ugly pedigree.”

  If asked, I would have traced the “denial of authorship” pedigree to the publication of Friedrich August Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum in 1795. The brave Mr. Wolf challenged, with good cause, Homer’s unique authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey and, in so doing, shook the literary world to its core. So unsettled was Elizabeth Barrett Browning by the challenge to this “literary divinity” that she wrote a poem about that “kissing Judas/Wolf.”

  An 1852 entry by an anonymous author in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal took on the most divinely inspired author of them all. Titled “Who Wrote Shakespeare,” the article opened a spanking new literary territory, and critics as diverse as Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, and Helen Keller rushed in as though it were Oklahoma circa 1889. To this day, investigators continue to question the authorship of the plays that bear Shakespeare’s name, but not one such investigator—and there are thousands—makes a case for Bacon or Oxford or whomever nearly as convincing as I had made for Bill Ayers’s role in Dreams by October 2008.

  On the off chance that Remnick had spotted a latent bias in my attribution research, I went back and checked Hoodwinked. In the book, I document roughly a score of major literary and intellectual frauds in 20th century America. I calculated their ethnic mix and found that three of my subjects were black—almost precisely their percentage in the population. I also covered prominent white women like Margaret Mead and Rachel Carson, the ersatz Indian Ward Churchill, the aforementioned Palestinian wannabe Edward Said, the bisexual Alfred Kinsey, and a bunch of presumably heterosexual white guys. Is there not some kind of diversity award for such multicultural debunking?

  The literary fraud that sheds the most light on what Obama can expect, if ever busted, was the brainchild of another black icon, the late Alex Haley. When Roots: The Saga of an American Family was first published in 1976, it sold millions of copies and won Haley a special nonfiction Pulitzer Prize. The Roots miniseries attracted more viewers than any series before or since. Obama knows the book well and identifies with it. “Would this trip to Kenya finally fill that emptiness?” he wonders in Dreams about his upcoming “pilgrimage” to Africa. “The folks back in Chicago thought so. It’ll be just like Roots, Will had said at my going-away party.”

  Although rarely discussed, Roots gave progressives an entertaining way to instruct their less enlightened brethren in the quiet horrors of American culture. Haley makes his protagonist, the young enslaved Kunta Kinte, a Muslim. Kinte, predictably, sees Christianity as crude and hypocritical. Coming of age during the revolutionary period in Virginia, he sees the American founding as inherently fraudulent as well.

  The real fraud, alas, was Haley’s. He had ripped off huge chunks of his book from a novel titled The African, written by a white guy, Harold Courlander. In 1978, Courlander sued Haley in U.S. district court in New York for copyright infringement. Midway through the trial, not wanting to attract undue attention, the judge counseled the dissembling Haley to settle with Courlander or face a perjury charge. Haley did just that to the tune of $650,000, or more than $2 million by today’s standards.

  The media paid as little attention to the settlement as they would to the black dead at Waco. In the press, only the Washington Post gave the case any ink of note, and even then it used a local hook—“Bethesda Author Settles ‘Roots’ Suit for $500,000”—to justify its coverage. No one in the media dared to explore the dark heart of the scandal: namely that the author of a Pulitzer Prize–winning work of “nonfiction” plagiarized from a fictional one.

  In 1993, literary detective Philip Nobile thought he had busted the fraud wide open in a deeply researched Village Voice exposé. “There was no Kunta Kinte,” says Nobile bluntly, and he proved as much in compelling detail. Although the European media gave his research huge play, Nobile was either shunned or ignored in the United States. I would not have heard about his work had I not been in Ireland at the time. Despite the lawsuit and Nobile’s efforts, Roots remains a staple in history classes across America. And the Pulitzer remains in Haley’s trophy case.

  In a quirky historical footnote, John F. Kennedy, Jr., helped with the Post article cited above. As it happens, his father had also been involved in a dustup not unlike Haley’s or Obama’s, specifically in regard to the book for which he won the 1956 Pulitzer Prize, Profiles in Courage. Soon after the award, Kennedy was accused of having had more than a little help in the writing of the book. Short of libeling the accusers as racist, Kennedy supporters reacted to this charge with much the same dumb fury Obama supporters would fifty years later.

  One particular accuser, however, had a little more clout than I. That would be the legendary muckraker Drew Pearson. He also had a more formidabl
e platform, namely Mike Wallace’s show on ABC. As is evident, the media took their responsibilities to the truth more seriously back in the day.

  Understanding full well what a “fraud” label would do to JFK’s presidential ambitions, the Kennedys used the servile family retainer Ted Sorensen to force a retraction from Pearson and Wallace. Under oath, Sorensen would testify, “I did not write the book for Senator Kennedy.” Had the presumed collaborator on Profiles been a figure of comparable disrepute to Bill Ayers—say, Alger Hiss or Julius Rosenberg—Sorensen’s prevarications could not have dampened what would surely have been a media firestorm.

  In his 2008 book, Counselor, Sorensen would finally admit what he had been leaking since the book was first published, that, yes, he “did a first draft of most chapters.” He had also received half the book’s royalties before being bought out of his contract. Still uneasy more than fifty years later about his testimony before Pearson, Sorensen insists, “I took my oath seriously.” He convinces no one, including himself.

  Sorensen sums up his sophistry with a question meant to be rhetorical: “Is the author the person who did much of the research and helped choose the words in many of the sentences, or is the author the person who decided the substance, structure, and the theme of the book?” Sorry, Ted, Pulitzers usually go to the guy who put the words on the page. That would not be JFK.

  Andersen reports that Obama, unaware of JFK’s chicanery, hoped to launch his own political career with a book just like Profiles in Courage. He may have succeeded in ways he did not anticipate. In an even quirkier footnote, Ted Sorensen helped Obama with some of his speeches.

  Although Remnick would take me to the progressive woodshed for my “libel” of Obama, he and those others who scolded me in 2008 never acknowledged my frequent caveats about the limits of my knowledge or accepted the challenge to prove or disprove my theory. “In that this remains something of a work in progress,” I wrote in the October 9 article that sparked Limbaugh’s interest, “I am willing to test my hypothesis against any standard of proof and appreciate any and all good leads.”

  To his credit, Remnick understands just how newsworthy that revelation should have been. “This was a charge,” he writes of the fraud accusation, “that if ever proved true, or believed to be true among enough voters, could have been the end of the candidacy.”

  Four weeks before the election I was confident enough in my thesis to submit it to any test. If proved right, it would have undermined the foundational myth of Obama as genius, confirmed his intimate relationship with an unrepentant terrorist, and, perhaps most damningly, established this still-untested candidate as a liar of consequence. In short, it could have turned the election. I waited for some news operation with more resources and credibility to put my theory to the test. And I waited, and I waited, and I waited.

  CHANNELING BILLY

  In mid-October 2008, I began to receive emails from a fellow named Ryan Geiser. They were sharp, literate, and on the money. Ryan had been plumbing not just Fugitive Days but Ayers’s other books, most notably the 1993 To Teach and the 1997 A Kind and Just Parent.

  Geiser would send me emails that began thus: “I’ve been busy with work and kids lately, but I did have a little time this weekend to glance over some of Ayer’s [sic] work. The similarities seem to me to be inarguable.” He would then casually make an observation about some parallel stunning enough to build an article around.

  A week after the Joe the Plumber incident, I asked him if I could give him public credit for his good work. He demurred. “With the left wing media more than happy to attack the messenger rather than analyze the message,” he wrote, “there is no reason to give them anything other than the facts to focus on.”

  When I asked him if I could at least share his credentials with the audience to help me win over critics, he suggested that those critics would not be impressed. His simple bio, however, reminded me what a great country this really is: “My name is Ryan Geiser, I am 39 years old. Married to Shari Geiser, 3 kids, Christian 11, Peyton (a girl) 8, and Jacob 1½. I own a construction company with 20–25 employees. We live in Kearney, Nebraska.” In the past month, when not busy with work and family, he had done more meaningful research than most literary critics do in a lifetime.

  I contacted Geiser in the course of writing this book, and he consented to let me tell his story. He represents the kind of American the left fails to understand and thus deeply underestimates. Geiser grew up in the tiny town of Arnold, in central Nebraska, population 630 when last calculated. “Be our ambassador,” asks the town’s modest economic development website. “Spread the word. Ask the kids to come live back home. Tell the pharmacist; the nearly-but-not-quite-ready-to-retire attorney; the baker; the artist seeking nature’s inspiration; the young man who dreams of horses, cows, and corn; the woman wanting a safe and healthy place for herself or her children—tell ‘em all about Arnold.”

  Growing up, Geiser lived in a home that had very little in the way of resources. His mother, however, insisted that he read, and Geiser obliged her. He did well in school and won a Regents scholarship that allowed him to attend the University of Nebraska. Stretched for money after his first year, Geiser could not resist the lure of an $18-an-hour construction job that took him across the country. Although he regrets not finishing his education, he was able to save enough to start his own construction business, settle down, and raise a family. Today he does most of his reading on the Internet, mostly at news and financial sites, although he has recently found time to reread all 1,368 pages of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

  When Geiser read my first article on WND, he checked Ayers’s vita, saw that Ayers had written other books, and ordered them through Amazon. “I wanted to see if there is any truth to what you were saying,” he told me. Geiser was blown away by what he found. He felt like one of the first guys into the river at Sutter’s Mill. There were exposed nuggets everywhere. “It’s the most fun I’ve ever had doing research,” said Geiser. What made it fun was that virtually every distinctive word or story he found in one of Ayers’s books he could find a parallel for in Dreams. And this he was doing with highlighter and hard copies.

  Although critics would accuse me of being “obsessed” with Obama, I too was doing my research on the side. No one was paying me for what I was doing. That fall, I was editing my business magazine and working on any number of projects, most notably the preproduction for the documentary Thine Eyes, which we would shoot in January, on the subject of the annual March for Life. One Saturday, as I was busily digging away, my wife reminded me that the city leaf collectors were coming on Monday, and that there was much bagging left to do. “Joan,” I said, “I am busy trying to save Western civilization.” The funny thing is that I meant it, but I still had to bag the leaves.

  What Geiser and I worked out that frenzied October were a series of parallel stories and experiences, any one of which should have spurred the media to at least look at what I was writing. For those unmoved by authorship studies, timelines, parallel themes, matching metaphors, Ayers’s role as neighborhood editor, or Obama’s overnight transformation from struggling hack to literary superstar, Obama’s apparent channeling of the thoughts and experiences of Bill Ayers should have been, at the least, legitimate grounds for discussion.

  In his 1993 book, To Teach, for instance, Ayers tells the story of an adventurous teacher who would take her students out to the streets of New York to learn interesting life lessons about the culture and history of the city. As Ayers tells it, the students were fascinated by the Hudson River nearby and asked to see it. When they got to the river’s edge, one student said, “Look, the river is flowing up.” A second student said, “No, it has to flow south-down.” Upon further research, the teacher discovered “that the Hudson River is a tidal river, that it flows both north and south, and they had visited the exact spot where the tide stops its northward push.”

  In his 1995 Dreams, Obama shares a jarringly similar story from his own brief N
ew York sojourn. As Obama tells it, he takes an unlikely detour to the exact spot on the parallel East River where the north-flowing tide meets the south-flowing river. There, improbably, a young black boy approaches this strange man and asks, “You know why sometimes the river runs that way and then sometimes it goes this way?” Obama tells the boy it “had to do with the tides.” The seeming indecisiveness of this tidal river is used here as a metaphor for Obama’s own. Immediately afterward, he chooses to drift no more and lights out for Chicago.

  In his 1997 book, A Kind and Just Parent, Ayers tells of a useful reading assignment from the 1992 book The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas, by black author Reginald McKnight. The passage in question deals with the travails of a boy named “Clint.” The first black student in a newly integrated school, Clint tries to distance himself from Marvin, the only other black boy in the school.

  “Can you believe that guy?” Clint tells a white student. “He’s like a pig or something. Makes me sick.” Upon reflection, Clint thinks, “I was ashamed. Ashamed for not defending Marvin and ashamed that Marvin even existed.”

  In Dreams, Obama reflects on his own first days as a ten-year-old at his Hawaiian prep school, a transition complicated by the presence of “Coretta,” the only other black student in the class. When the other students accuse Obama of having a girlfriend, Obama shoves Coretta and insists that she leave him alone. Although “his act of betrayal” buys him a reprieve from the other students, Obama, like Clint, understands that he “had been tested and found wanting.”

  In fact, there was a little black girl at Punahou whom Remnick identifies as “Joella Edwards.” The difference, Remnick admits without reflection, is that “Barry never rejected Joella.” Au contraire, as Joella gushes, “He was my knight in shining armor.” As with the story of the unhappily bleached black people, these little racial melodramas smack of willful contrivance.