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

by Jack Cashill

Laughing loud, the blood rushing from his face

  To mine, as he grows small,

  A spot in my brain, something

  That may be squeezed out, like a

  Watermelon seed between

  Two fingers.

  Pop takes another shot, neat,

  Points out the same amber

  Stain on his shorts that I’ve got on mine, and

  Makes me smell his smell, coming

  From me; he switches channels, recites an old poem

  He wrote before his mother died,

  Stands, shouts, and asks

  For a hug, as I shink [sic] my

  Arms barely reaching around

  His thick, oily neck, and his broad back; ‘cause

  I see my face, framed within

  Pop’s black-framed glasses

  And know he’s laughing too.

  Batton describes this poem as “an autobiographical evocation of a moment” between a young Obama and “his maternal grandfather, with whom Barack lived for many years of his youth.” That grandfather would be Stanley Armour Dunham. Born in Wichita in 1918, Dunham had a rough go of it as a kid. His mother committed suicide when he was eight and his father abandoned the family soon afterward. Sent to live with his grandparents in nearby El Dorado, Dunham rebelled, punched out his principal, skipped town, rode the rails, then returned home and settled down to marry high school senior Madelyn Payne in 1940. From the outset, Madelyn was the proper member of the family, the rooted one, and, ultimately, its primary breadwinner.

  In the month following Pearl Harbor, Dunham enlisted in the army. Before heading overseas, he shared a moment or two with Madelyn. Their daughter, the cruelly named Stanley Ann Dunham (henceforth “Ann”), was born as a result in November 1942. (This was the same year, as it happens, that mother figure Bernardine Dohrn was born in Wisconsin.) For no reason anyone quite knows, the little family moved to the Seattle area in 1955 and remained there until their abrupt departure for Hawaii in the summer of 1960, immediately after Ann had completed her senior year of high school.

  As the Seattle Times reported in 2008, Ann was something of a teen beatnik. At her high school, she felt most at home in “anarchy alley,” a wing of Mercer Island High where the school’s most progressive teachers held forth. She attended a Unitarian church affectionately known as “the little Red church on the hill” and hung out in Seattle’s coffee shops talking jazz, foreign films, and liberal politics. By all accounts, Ann did not want to leave for Hawaii.

  Obama romanticizes the move in Dreams. As he tells it, the manager of the furniture company where “Gramps” worked as a salesman informed him about a new store opening in Hawaii. Inspired by the “limitless” business prospects there, the restless Dunham proceeded to “rush home that same day and talk my grandmother into selling their house and packing up yet again, to embark on the final leg of their journey, west, toward the setting sun.”

  Dunham never did achieve much in Hawaii. At some point he switched from selling furniture to selling insurance and relied increasingly on Madelyn to keep the family afloat. Young Barry moved into their modest, two-bedroom apartment when he was ten and remained there—save for a few years nearby with his mother and sister—until leaving for college.

  In his original article, Batton considers Dunham “a natural choice for the subject of a poem.” Batton cites the line from Dreams in which Obama writes that his grandfather “had come to consider himself as something of a free thinker—a bohemian, even. He wrote poetry on occasion, listened to jazz.” Virtually all reviewers of consequence seem to have accepted Batton’s analysis. Rebecca Mead, for instance, writing in the New Yorker, unhesitatingly describes the poem as a “loving if slightly jaded portrait of Obama’s maternal grandfather.” Remnick makes the same point. “‘Pop,’” he says as though a given, “clearly reflects Obama’s relationship with his grandfather Stanley Dunham.” I could find no mainstream publication that even suggests otherwise.

  This interpretation, if a bit lazy, is not unreasonable. “I can still picture Gramps leaning back in his old stuffed chair after dinner,” writes Obama in Dreams, “sipping whiskey and cleaning his teeth with the cellophane from his cigarette pack.” The orthodox read of “Pop,” however, leaves a basic question unanswered. It caught Wilkie’s eye, and it should have caught everyone’s: if the poem really is about Stanley Dunham, why didn’t Obama simply call it “Gramps”? If I were to write about the man I knew as “Gramps,” I might not necessarily call the poem “Gramps,” but I surely would not call it “Pop.” That latter title, after all, has obvious implications.

  Those implications find support in some of the poem’s more provocative lines, particularly the references to Obama looking and smelling like the old man. Although I confess to having little patience with poems that require more work than a sudoku grid, especially ones that don’t rhyme, the boy in the poem does seem to be confronting the older man with his paternity, especially given that he calls him “Pop.” Wilkie’s original question to me was this: is it possible that Stanley Dunham was actually Obama’s father?

  Wilkie was not implying incest, but rather that the loose-living Dunham hooked up with a black woman somewhere, and that Dunham accepted responsibility for the offspring. A few bits of evidence argue for this. One is the poem in question. The second is the fact that Stanley happily took the boy in and treated him like a son. A third, although I would count it as pure gaffe, is Obama’s claim “My father served in World War II.” The fourth is the fact that Obama strongly resembles the young Stanley Dunham. The likeness is powerful and undeniable. “You know,” Stanley’s brother Ralph has said of Obama, “he looks exactly like Stanley. He looks exactly like my brother, only he’s dark.”

  Occam reminds his followers that when challenging accepted wisdom, they pose an alternative with fewer unnecessary variables and, ideally, no loose ends. The case for Gramps as father, however, collapses when assessing Ann’s behavior. If there is a logic to Barack Sr. serving as proxy father, there is none for Ann’s accepting the full burden of parenthood especially, as shall be seen, in the first year of young Barry’s life.

  The case is further weakened by the line in the poem “he switches channels, recites an old poem / He wrote before his mother died.” Although Obama credits Gramps with a little poetic dabbling, he was more of a dirty limerick kind of guy than a real poet. More to the point, Dunham’s mother died when he was eight years old. Obama knows this. He says so in Dreams. Dunham would not have read a poem he wrote “before his mother died.” Besides, it is not unusual for a male to look more like his grandfather than his father.

  In sum, Gramps did not sire Obama. Nor did Obama write this poem about Gramps. That so many critics have assumed he did testifies to the shallowness of their enterprise. To his credit, Wilkie accepted this verdict and kept on working his way through the enigma that is Barack Obama.

  BARACK SR.

  In assessing the origins of “Pop,” I finally came to see what others had seen before me: namely that there were holes in the standard campaign story wide enough to drive a truck through—unless, of course, you were Barack Sr., who had a fatal weakness for driving not through things but into them.

  The day after Obama was elected president, the Guardian summarized his “incredible” story. This was what the campaign disseminated and what is still widely believed.

  He was a son of the Luo tribe who, when not in school, had herded his father’s goats; she was the daughter of white Protestant prairie folk from the American heartland. And yet they fell in love. They married and in 1961 they had a child, who would also be called Barack Hussein Obama. The marriage did not last. Obama Sr took up a scholarship in Harvard—alone—and eventually went back to Africa.

  Essential to the story are the notions of love and marriage. “My parents shared not only an improbable love,” said Obama famously in his 2004 convention keynote, “they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation.” If the “love” is s
uspect, so then is the “faith” in America. So too is the equally improbable ascent of Barack Obama.

  In Dreams, Ann Dunham tells the now college-age Obama the story of her love for his father and their eventual split; her chin trembles as she speaks. Yes, Barack Sr. had previously bonded with a woman in Kenya, but they had separated and since this had been a mere “village wedding” there was no legal document showing divorce. He had wanted to take Ann and Barry back to Kenya after finishing his studies, but grandfather Hussein was sending threatening letters saying he did not want “Obama blood sullied by a white woman,” and Toot had become hysterical worrying that Mau-Maus would chop off Ann’s head.

  Despite the familial resistance, the marriage “might have worked out.” When, however, Harvard offered Barack Sr. a fellowship to finish his Ph.D., he anguished his way to acceptance. “How can I refuse the best education?” he lamented. “It wasn’t your father’s fault that he left, you know,” Ann tells Obama. “I divorced him.”

  In September 2009, President Obama was poised to address the nation’s schoolchildren writ large, an innovation that struck many on the right as a wee bit Big Brotherly. Team Obama responded to the protest by feinting back to the center, if not the right, in the actual speech. Afterward, the media scolded the right for its misplaced anxiety and persisted in seeing Obama as a centrist and not as a crafty fake-out artist.

  In the talk, Obama asked America’s students to take personal responsibility. That was all well enough. Missed in the media hubbub, however, was his take on why this could be difficult for some students. “I get it,” he told the kiddies. “I know what that’s like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother.” In Dreams, Obama made the same claim. “He had left Hawaii back in 1963,” he wrote of Barack Sr., “when I was only two years old.” When he wrote this in Dreams, he probably knew better. By 2009, he certainly knew better, but so invested was he in the story, and so useful had it been in his rise, that he continued to dissemble, even before millions of schoolchildren.

  In his research, Don Wilkie unearthed a letter written by Barack Sr. to his Kenyan mentor, Tom Mboya, on the 29th of May, 1962. In the letter, he told Mboya that he was leaving “this June” for Harvard. This would have been two months shy of young Barry’s first birthday. It gets worse. “You know my wife is in Nairobi there,” he continues, “and I would really appreciate any help you may give her.” This was no “village wedding.” He had met Kezia in Nairobi and married her in that capital city. The couple had two children by 1962. Not surprisingly, Barack Sr. does not mention Ann or Barry in the letter.

  Barack Sr.’s departure for Harvard and a grand tour of mainland universities en route was actually reported by the Honolulu Advertiser on June 22, 1962. Washington Post ace reporter David Maraniss observes, “The story did not mention that he had a wife and an infant son.” Obama himself noticed this oversight years later when he discovered the article “folded away among my birth certificate and old vaccination forms.” He writes in Dreams, “No mention is made of my mother or me, and I’m left to wonder whether the omission was intentional on my father’s part, in anticipation of his long departure.”

  This one passage raises a few other questions. If Obama had access to his own birth certificate, why did he not simply produce it when it became a subject of controversy? If Obama had read the article in question, would he not have seen the date and realized that his putative father had left Hawaii before his first birthday? And finally, if the grandparents saved the article about this seemingly deadbeat dad, might they have had a reason to be more favorably disposed to Barack Sr. than circumstances would suggest?

  Frank Marshall Davis makes a throwaway observation in his memoir, Livin’ the Blues, that might have some bearing on Barack Sr.’s motivation to abscond. Davis observes that in Hawaii’s relaxed racial environment African exchange students “wreaked havoc among co-eds at the university.” Then he specifically cites a “student from Kenya” who quit the islands “leaving two pregnant blondes.” Writing about ten years after Barack Sr.’s departure, Davis may or may not be alluding to Obama, but he has no reason to exaggerate the temptations.

  The address on the letter to Mboya is 1482 Alencastre Street in Honolulu. This is a new address in Obama lore. The August 1961 birth announcement had placed the happy young couple, “Mr. and Mrs. Barack Obama,” at 6085 Kalaniana’ole Highway, where they presumably shared their improbable love before Harvard drew Barack Sr. away. In fact, it is doubtful that Ann and Barack Sr. ever lived together.

  An innocent post-election article in the Honolulu Advertiser about Obama’s boyhood homes notes that at the time of Obama’s birth, Barack Sr. “also had a residence at 625 11th Avenue in Kaimuki.” Like all of his other known residences, this one was within walking distance of the campus. The Kalaniana’ole address is eight miles away. It was the home at the time of Stanley and Madelyn.

  Baby Obama did not stay there long in any case. As my WND colleague Jerome Corsi reported in August 2009, a month before Obama’s speech to the schoolkids, “Stanley Ann Dunham Obama” enrolled for two night classes at the University of Washington at Seattle that began on August 19, 1961—Anthropology 100, “Introduction to the Study of Man,” and Political Science 201, “Modern Government.” This was just fifteen days after the listed date of Obama’s birth. She would attend class at the university through the winter and spring semesters.

  Corsi was confirming the earlier research of conservative activist Michael Patrick Leahy, who self-published a book, What Does Barack Obama Believe?, in the summer of 2008. From the remove of, say, the Washington Post offices or those of the New Yorker, it would have been easy to dismiss Leahy, but he was doing the legwork the media were not doing. He interviewed Ann Dunham’s high school friends and fixed her in Washington long before anyone else had. If credentials matter, Leahy has a B.A. from Harvard and an MBA from Stanford. He writes well and researches carefully. Corsi, for that matter, has a Harvard Ph.D. as well.

  The apolitical Washington state historical blog HistoryLink now confirms Ann’s presence in August 1961, identifies her Capitol Hill apartment in Seattle, names the courses she took, and documents an extended stay by Ann and little Obama into the summer of 1962. The 1961–62 Polk Directory confirms an “Obama Anna Mrs studt” at this Thirteenth Avenue address.

  Somehow, this information escaped the four book-length biographies I consulted (including one by the New York Times), several long-form magazine and newspaper bios including Maraniss’s comprehensive August 2008 article, the official campaign biography, and Obama himself in Dreams. Not one of these accounts places Ann and/or Obama anywhere other than Hawaii during Obama’s first two years. This is not an incidental detail. Their exile to Washington means no less than that the famed multicultural marriage, the rock on which Obama built his political career, was so much Silly Putty, as malleable as the occasion demanded.

  Remnick was the first of the orthodox scribes to break the silence with the spring 2010 publication of The Bridge. He mentions the Washington exile casually as if to suggest that it was common knowledge. He buffers the news further by claiming that Ann took “extension courses” in the fall and implies that she did not arrive until the winter. As Corsi reported, however, “The university confirmed Dunham’s classes starting in the fall of 1961 were night classes.” For added cover, Remnick quotes at length Ann’s high school friend Susan Blake Botkin to the effect that “it was sad to me when her marriage disintegrated.”

  “After a year,” writes Remnick imprecisely of Ann’s comings and goings, “she decided to return to Honolulu, move in with her parents, and go to the University of Hawaii.” Given that Barack Sr. had left Hawaii in June 1962, this timeline suggests that he may never have seen little Barry as a baby. Remnick claims otherwise. As he tells it, in the fall of 1962 Ann and Barry went to visit Barack Sr. at Harvard, “but the trip was a failure, and she returned to Hawaii.”

  Again Remnick attemp
ts to shore up this crumbling mythology, but the facts pound up against it. In his Washington Post piece, Maraniss calls the Harvard trip “an unresolved part of the story.” The only evidence for Ann’s trip to Harvard is the testimony of Botkin. “She was on her way from her mother’s house to Boston to be with her husband,” Botkin reportedly tells Maraniss. “[She said] he had transferred to grad school and she was going to join him.”

  Earlier interviews with Botkin, one of which has been posted on the Internet, yield a much clearer picture. In these, Ann had come to visit “briefly” with Barry at Botkin’s family home. She placed the time as “a late August afternoon … when Barry was just a few weeks old.” In the interview, she did not give the impression of being deceptive. As she told the Seattle Times in April 2008, Ann was excited about her husband’s plans to return not to Harvard but to Kenya.

  Botkin said the same to Leahy, who interviewed her early in the summer of 2008. Here too Botkin adds a clarifying detail: “She left [Hawaii] just as soon as she had clearance from her doctor to travel with her new baby.” Maraniss failed to make the same connection and puts the visit a year later. As Botkin acknowledged in several interviews, she never saw her friend again. This visit at Botkin’s mother’s house had to be in 1961, a year before Barack Sr. left for Harvard.

  A week or two after the Botkin visit, Ann stopped by to see another high school friend, Maxine Box. Box relates essentially the same story Botkin had. “Ann was only a year out of high school and was already married with a child,” she tells Leahy. The baby was brand-new. “She was on her way to join her husband,” she adds, “but I don’t know where.” Box never saw Ann again, either.