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

by Jack Cashill

  Despite the fact that he was writing a lengthy biographical piece on the next president three months before the election, and at the Washington Post no less, Maraniss made a hash of it. “But as Botkin and others later remembered it,” he writes, “something happened in Cambridge, and Stanley Ann returned to Seattle. They saw her a few more times, and they thought she even tried to enroll in classes at the University of Washington, before she packed up and returned to Hawaii.”

  Here virtually every fact is wrong. Her friends saw Ann in 1961 a year before Barack Sr. went to Harvard. They saw her only once, and she did enroll at the University of Washington. Maraniss seems to have interpreted their comments to fit his preconceptions, and Remnick built upon the mistakes of Maraniss and others.

  Maraniss, however, is a solid reporter. In his defense, it is possible that Botkin and Box misled him. There is ample evidence that the Obama camp was attempting, with some success, to shape the testimony of Obama’s friends, if not silence them outright. Don Wilkie, for one, is convinced that Obama operatives got to Botkin and Box when they realized the problems with “the story” and had them reread Dreams to refresh their memories. He has a good case. In Dreams, Ann explains the breakup to her son:

  “Then you were born and we agreed that the three of us would return to Kenya after he finished his studies. But your grandfather Hussein was still writing to your father, threatening to have his student visa revoked. By this time Toot had become hysterical—she had read about the Mau-Mau rebellion in Kenya a few years earlier, which the Western press really played up—and she was sure that I would have my head chopped off and you would be taken away.”

  In her interview with Remnick nearly fifty years after she last saw Ann, Botkin manages to cite the exact excuses for the breakup that Ann had offered in Dreams:

  “Barack Sr.’s father wrote and said, Don’t bring your white wife and that half-breed child, they will not be welcome. There were Mau-Mau uprisings, they were beheading white women and doing unspeakable things. Ann’s parents were very worried when they heard that.”

  “It seems like there are two groups of people in Obama’s past,” Mr. Southwest observes wryly. “Those who decline to comment or aren’t allowed to talk and those who talk freely and glowingly and usually with amazing detail even after many years.”

  The two friends in question fall into the latter category. Although their stories challenge the accepted chronology, they do not seriously threaten the master narrative. Yes, of course, Ann loved Barack Sr. She told us so in letters. No, she was just visiting Washington on her way to see her husband. Yes, the baby was a newborn, precisely “three weeks old” according to Botkin. Yes, it was a shame when the marriage fell apart. Wilkie may be on to something. The official story held through the election. When bloggers sensed that something was wrong, they may have gone after the wrong something, an African birth. From the Obama perspective, a Maui birth or a Seattle birth would have been almost as problematic. Either would have punctured the “improbable love” balloon.

  Ann was staying with a friend of the family when she visited Botkin and Box. Where she lived those next few months is uncertain. The fact that she is listed in the 1961–62 Polk Directory for Seattle makes one wonder whether she had arrived in Washington earlier in 1961, possibly before Obama was born. She was not enrolled at the University of Hawaii that spring 1961 semester, and at that time in Hawaii one could register a live birth “at home” through a notarized mail order form. That registration would automatically trigger the birth announcement in the two relevant papers.

  If Botkin and Box were being straightforward in their interviews, they may not have known whether Ann was spinning face-saving stories or whether she had herself been deluded by the stories Barack Sr. had spun. In his conversation with Botkin, Leahy had gotten the sense that Barack Sr. had not been present for the birth, and he certainly did not prevent Ann from fleeing with the baby immediately afterward. Her departure for Washington would have required preparation and parental support. The evidence suggests that if there had ever been a marriage, it had collapsed by the time of Obama’s birth.

  In reconstructing this story, I am reminded again why I so distrust the media, especially on the question of Obama. Leahy had broken a major story months before the election, a story that put a lie to the carefully crafted Obama mythology, and the media refused to notice. This stunning oversight raises a fundamental question: why are we to trust the narrative that the mainstream collective has contrived about the year leading up to Obama’s birth?

  In researching that critical year, one quickly sees that much of this narrative depends on two less-than-reliable sources: Obama himself and a chatty Hawaii Democratic congressman and now Hawaii governor, Neil Abercrombie. Of the Dunhams, only Madelyn was alive in 2004, and she did not survive the 2008 campaign.

  Abercrombie knew Barack Sr. back in the day at the University of Hawaii. “[Barack Sr.] was an intellectual in every sense of the word,” Abercrombie gushed to the Washington Post in 2007. “He was the sun, and the other planets revolved around him.” Sound like a pattern developing here? A member of the House’s progressive caucus, Abercrombie has been talking excitedly about the relationship for years, playing John the Baptist to Obama’s Jesus.

  “Little Barry, that’s what we called him,” Abercrombie told the Chicago Tribune, while “recalling his days with Obama Sr. and his future wife, Ann Dunham, at the University of Hawaii.” If Obama was born on August 4, 1961, however, there could not have been many such days with the loving couple and little Barry. Ann was in Seattle two weeks later. Even before she returned in late summer or fall 1962, Barack Sr. had left for Harvard for good.

  Citing Abercrombie as a source, a 2007 Hawaii TV news report claimed that Ann “became estranged from her husband, Barack Obama Sr., after his departure for Harvard.” I don’t know about Hawaii, but in Missouri if you flee from your husband with baby in tow two weeks after his birth, that qualifies as “estrangement.”

  According to divorce papers filed in 1964, Barack Sr. and Ann married in Wailuku, Maui, on February 2, 1961. But one has to wonder whether it was a marriage in anything but name or whether there was a marriage at all. Obama himself writes in Dreams, “In fact, how and when the marriage occurred remains a bit murky, a bill of particulars that I’ve never quite had the courage to explore.” The fact that one page of the divorce records is missing does not help clarify matters.

  No one attended the wedding, not Abercrombie, not Ann’s parents. In fact, no one in Barack Sr.’s clique seemed to know there was a relationship, let alone a wedding. Neil’s brother, Hal, never saw Ann and Barack Sr. together. Another clique member, Pake Zane, who had distinct memories of Barack Sr., could not recall Ann at all. When Neil Abercrombie and Zane visited their friend in Nairobi in 1968, Barack Sr. shocked them by never once inquiring about his putative wife and six-year-old son.

  The seventeen-year-old Ann had met the twenty-four-year-old Barack Sr. in Russian class at the University of Hawaii. Why they were studying Russian is a question for another day. In 1960, people like Lee Harvey Oswald studied Russian. Barack Sr. was his ideological kin. A month before he left Hawaii, he had spoken along with former Communist Party USA head Jack Hall at a “Mother’s Peace Rally.”

  In Dreams, Ann provides only the sketchiest detail of their first date—he came an hour late and with friends—and nothing more. Botkin claims to have received a letter or two from Ann in which she spoke about Barack Sr., but beyond this, there is no evidence of a relationship, and the only evidence for the marriage is the divorce papers, which are real and have been posted online.

  One reason people marry in a county other than their own—Maui County, for instance—is to keep the announcement of the marriage license out of the local paper. By claiming a Maui wedding, and perhaps even attaining a Maui license, the Dunhams could have assured the baby an identity without drawing attention to the relationship.

  Leahy, for one, does not believe th
e couple ever got married. If Obama had, in fact, been born out of wedlock, that would not have affected his eligibility for higher office, but it would have surely deglamorized him. “Barry Dunham” does not exactly tease the imagination. “It’s the exotic name,” argues Leahy, “that succinctly captures the unusual life narrative Obama has been publicly promoting for over thirteen years.”

  Whatever his contribution, Barack Sr. lent young Barry a name, an identity, and a romantic story line. Obama’s mother and grandparents sustained this narrative throughout Obama’s childhood. Until made permanently “not available” by the Obama campaign, “Toot,” Madelyn Dunham, confirmed the story but without enthusiasm. Wrote Mendell of his interview with Madelyn, “Madelyn did appear to hold back some in our interview.” Perhaps more than we know.

  As related in Dreams and reported in any number of sources, Obama’s African relatives have accepted Obama as one of their own. And yet there is even less clarity on the Kenyan side. As the story is told, Barack Sr. had children with at least four different women, two of them American, and he occasionally circled back to the first of the four, Kezia. Ruth, an American, was forced to raise Kezia’s two oldest children, just as the woman Obama knows as “Granny,” the family storyteller, was forced to raise Barack Sr. as her own. In another time and place, the Obamas would have had their own reality TV show.

  Questions linger about the paternity of most of these offspring. In Dreams, Obama’s contrarian aunt Sarah would tell her nephew that “the children who claim to be Obama’s are not Obama’s.” Young Barry must have had doubts about his own perch in the family tree. On the occasion of his father’s death, lawyers contacted anyone who might have claim to the estate. “Unlike my mum,” Obama tells his sister Auma in Dreams, “Ruth has all the documents needed to prove who Mark’s father was.” Ruth obviously could produce a marriage license and a birth certificate for her son, Mark. Ann Dunham apparently could not. As I was beginning to see, the search for those documents was a legitimate one.

  UNKNOWN BLACK MALE

  One of the signs my camera crew recorded in the 2009 March for Life read simply and pointedly, “Obama, your mother chose life.” Yes, she did. In pre-Roe 1961, only the depraved, the desperate, and/or the wealthy did otherwise. Ann chose not only to bear the baby, but also to keep him, a doubly brave move in 1961 in light of his interracial parentage.

  In roughly the same year that Ann Dunham found herself with child, the Wisconsin niece of one of my neighbors showed up on my New Jersey block for a sojourn of several months. I was just old enough to figure out what was going on, and the girl was still young enough to feel more comfortable talking to me than to her aunt. Strange nieces showed up in a lot of neighborhoods back then. We sent a few of our own packing as well. Before the moral emancipation of the late 1960s, sufficient shame accompanied out-of-wedlock births to make relocation a likely option.

  Given these understandings, serious people have questioned whether the adventurous Ann might not have coupled with a young “negro” she had met at one of the hip Seattle coffeehouses that she frequented. Ann never dated “the crew-cut white boys,” affirmed friend Susan Botkin. If a black guy had impregnated Ann, this would explain the family’s abrupt departure to Hawaii, the one state in the union where a mixed-race baby could grow up almost unnoticed. It certainly explains the move to Hawaii better than the illusory rationale Obama offers in Dreams.

  This scenario makes sense of any number of details, including Stanley Dunham’s sudden eagerness to move without promotion to Hawaii; Madelyn’s willingness to quit her job as an escrow officer in nearby Bellevue, Washington; Ann’s angry resistance to the move; her poor performance in her limited first-semester courses at the University of Hawaii; her failure to enroll for the second semester; and, most of all, her otherwise inexplicable return to Washington in August 1961—if not earlier.

  True, to make this scenario work, we have to add one major variable, but it is a plausible one. Imagine Ann coming home from class one day in Hawaii in fall 1960 in one of her all-concealing muumuus—she had written Botkin that muumuus were worn on campus—and telling her father that there was this charming, larger-than-life Kenyan in her class. The scheming Stanley asks her to invite him over for dinner.

  Stanley befriends Barack Sr. and enlists him in his plot. He explains that a boy named Barack, the legitimate son of a Kenyan, could move through American life more seamlessly than a boy named, say, Johnny, the illegitimate son of an American black. It may not have been fair, but it was true. He tells Barack Sr. that he can make it worth his while. Ann understands. Madelyn is dubious about all of this—she is paying the bills—but she plays along.

  As to Barack Sr., he has to contribute nothing to the proceedings but his name. No marriage announcement will appear in the Honolulu papers. Ann will leave in time for the fall semester at the University of Washington—perhaps months before—and she will not return until he leaves for graduate school. The address she provides for the birth announcement is eight miles from the university, so she will not embarrass him by hanging around campus.

  In January 1961, Ann leaves for an extended stay at a home for unwed mothers in, say, Maui. Barack Sr. flies in briefly to apply for a marriage license and perhaps even to formalize the charade with a discreet ceremony. The baby is born in a Maui clinic in February. Soon afterward, Ann returns to Honolulu.

  In August, ten months after she first meets Barack Sr., she or her mother fills out a mail order registry of birth, as was legal, claiming that the baby was born at home on August 4. This information automatically finds its way into a weekly release of birth announcements to the two local newspapers. The famed “certificate of live birth” that the Obama camp posted online in 2008 lists no hospital and cites Barack Sr.’s “race” as “African,” all the better to reinforce the baby’s distinctive identity.

  This charade, if it happened as described, would help explain why Barack Sr. blithely blew off his new family when he headed for Harvard less than a year after the announced birth date. Apparently he rejected an opportunity to take both wife and child to New York and began dating as soon as he arrived at Harvard. Barack Sr.’s cooperation would also put Stanley Dunham’s affection for him in perspective.

  A group photo taken at the time of his departure for Harvard in 1962 shows not only Stanley’s stunning resemblance to the future president, but also his inexplicable fondness for a black man who allegedly knocked up his seventeen-year-old daughter and is now abandoning her and his grandson. Of the eighteen adults in the photo, it is Stanley who stands next to the multi-leied Barack Sr. Both are smiling broadly. Neither Madelyn nor Ann is in the picture.

  This photo is not an anomaly. In Dreams, Gramps speaks so respectfully of his prodigal son-in-law that the knowing reader has to question the credibility of the narrative. “Your dad could handle just about any situation, and that made everybody like him,” says Gramps at the end of a jovial storytelling session about the absentee dad. Even the young Obama gets the sense that the tales being told to him about his father are “apocryphal.” Whether or not Barack Sr. fathered the child, what seems undeniable is that the Dunhams made an elaborate effort to enshrine him in the family lore.

  Some who believe Obama was born in Kenya have argued that the Kenyan exile was part of the deal and they cite any number of Ken yans who claim Obama was born there. From Occam’s perspective, however, this wrinkle adds still one more major variable to an already burdened theory.

  For all of its explanatory power, the unknown-black-male scenario runs aground—or at least seems to—on Susan Botkin’s testimony. She remembers the baby being about three weeks old. She also recalls, as mentioned, that Ann arrived in Washington as soon as the doctor gave her clearance to travel. These comments argue for an August birth.

  In my conversations with Don Wilkie, however, he wondered whether these details were too perfect, too precise. How likely is it, he asked, that someone would describe a baby as “three weeks old” mo
re than forty-five years after the fact? Just a little suspicious, he wondered whether the Obama camp had gotten to Botkin and asked her to conform to its timeline. A more likely explanation is that by the time anyone asked Botkin about Ann, Obama was a celebrity. Botkin knew when he was reportedly born, knew roughly when Ann had visited, and did the math.

  Leahy, however, had talked to both Botkin and Box early on and sensed no guile from either. Both reported that Ann seemed happy and proud. This happiness is more easily explained if Ann had returned to find her lost love than if she were fleeing a failed marriage. In either case, neither Botkin nor Box saw Ann again. They did not know she had enrolled at the University of Washington. Having worked hard to create an identity for her baby, Ann may not have wanted them to see the reality.

  A third high school friend, Barbara Cannon Rusk, caught up with Ann and little Barry in the summer of 1962. They were still in Washington a year after her arrival. “I recall her being melancholy at the time,” Rusk told Leahy. “I had a sense that something wasn’t right in her marriage. It was all very mysterious.” Soon afterward, in all scenarios, a defeated Ann Dunham returned to Honolulu with one-year-old Barry.

  Although hypothetical, the unknown-black-male explanation solves so many plot problems and leaves so few holes I can’t quite bring myself to dismiss it. The same cannot be said for the “Malcolm X as father” theory. This theory got a fair amount of cyber ink, most of it playful on the right, and patronizing in the irony-free zones of the left. “So if you thought the paranoid theories about Obama couldn’t get any crazier, clearly you were wrong.” So wrote Alex Koppelman in Salon in a too-typical, too-solemn slam of a clearly mischievous piece on Malcolm X, this one in Pam Geller’s blog Atlas Shrugs.

  In truth, if Malcolm X had gone anywhere near Seattle in 1960, he would not have dallied with Ann Dunham. Malcolm may have been the least likely candidate of any race to sire Obama. From the time he entered prison until the time he married Betty Sanders twelve years later, he did not touch a woman “because of Mr. Muhammad’s influence upon me.” He presumed the same principled restraint from his fellow Black Muslims, especially from honcho Elijah Muhammad. When he learned otherwise and protested vigorously, Muhammad put a fatwa on his head that his goons eventually carried out.