by Jack Cashill
For those who insist on a celebrity father for Obama, Seattle served up a much better candidate than Malcolm X. In 1960, a fellow named “Johnny” was making his reputation in Seattle’s club scene as a left-handed guitarist with a local band known as the Rocking Kings. Two days older than Ann, this tall, thin young black man was not at all abashed about dating white women. Indeed, he was allegedly thrown out of high school for holding a white girl’s hand. After Ann left for Hawaii, Johnny joined the army. He caused enough trouble to get himself quickly booted. Ann was living in Seattle at the time, but instead of returning home, Johnny decided to try his luck in Nashville. In the spirit of mischief, I have to ask whether this was the reason Ann seemed so down in the summer of 1962.
Of course, as you may have guessed, Johnny decided to use the stage name “Jimi” and changed the spelling of his last name from “Hendricks” to “Hendrix.” In a further Paul-is-dead kind of twist, Obama cites as his personal marker for 1967 the fact that “Jimi Hendrix performed at Monterey.” At a Labor Day festival in Milwaukee in 2010, Obama said of his critics, “They talk about me like a dog.” Bloggers were quick to note that this line was lifted verbatim from Hendrix’s song “Stone Free.” In Dreams, he also names a friend in Chicago “Johnny.” And, of course, Obama, like Hendrix, is left-handed. I can envision the mirthless Huffington headline now, “Whack job from Web’s farthest lunatic orbit says Hendrix Obama’s father!” The weird thing is that the imagined tale of Ann and Jimi is only slightly less credible than the tale as told of Ann and Barack Sr. Weird too is that Obama can remember the year of Monterey but not the year he met Michelle, the year his half brother died, the year he first visited Africa, or the year his parents married.
FRANK
I would guess that not one Obama voter out of one hundred could identify the late Frank Marshall Davis, and I doubt if one media person out of a thousand has read his memoir, Livin’ the Blues. This is unfortunate on any number of levels. For one, his book captures the ebb and flow of 20th century black American life as well as any ever written. For another, no individual influenced the young Obama more than Davis did. This combination should have made him a staple of the multicultural canon and a pinup in every reporter’s cubicle, but it did neither.
Like Boo Radley, Davis remains in the shadows for one reason: the media fear what the light would do to him. For all of Davis’s gifts, and they are many, his lifelong flirtation with darkness makes him a little too creepy for his own display case in the Barack Obama presidential library. That darkness flavors the poem “Pop,” the title character of which, as shall be seen, is clearly Davis himself. Less clear are two issues of equal import: Who wrote the poem? And how literally are we to take its title?
As mentioned, the critics who have reviewed “Pop” have failed to identify the subject of the poem and ducked the implication of its title. They prefer “Pop” to be a musing, a benign one at that, about “Gramps,” Stanley Dunham. At least a few have seen in these cryptic verses an early flowering of the decency that progressives see as their birthright. Writes poet Ian McMillan in the Guardian, “There’s a humanity in the poem, a sense of family values and shared cultural concerns that give us a hint of the Democrat to come.” McMillan’s review reminds me why I distrust poetry almost as much as I do the people who critique it.
Frank Marshall Davis was not dependably a Democrat. In fact, he campaigned for Republican presidential candidates Alf Landon and Wendell Willkie—no relation to Don—before veering hard to the left. By 1948, he had moved well beyond Democrat Harry Truman, whose devious Marshall Plan, Davis argues, was “aimed directly at the Soviets.” In the latter half of his fifteen years in Chicago, that left turn would lead him to the barricades on any number of hot political fronts. When not protesting, he served as executive editor of the Associated Negro Press. At night he wrote poetry and haunted the city’s jazz clubs. His progressive politics and his exceptional poetry had made him many friends in Chicago’s white community as well as in the black.
And then, in 1948, two years after his marriage to Helen Canfield, a white socialite eighteen years his junior, Davis left his job and growing reputation behind and headed for Hawaii. In Livin’ the Blues, he credits an article in a women’s magazine for the inspiration to leave. Helen read it wistfully, shared her thoughts with Davis, and he promptly “suggested we investigate.”
Writing in the era of Watergate, after the death of J. Edgar Hoover, Davis felt safe in acknowledging that his friend Paul Robeson “enthusiastically supported the idea” and that union honcho Harry Bridges greased the skids for him in Hawaii. To understand Davis’s elusive politics, one does well to understand theirs, especially Robeson’s, whose political evolution mirrors Davis’s own.
About Bridges, head of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), there can be no doubt. A Soviet hard-liner, he hewed to the party line through the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact when it was hard and through the war when it was easy. After the war, when Stalin declared America the glavni vrag, the “main enemy,” Bridges hung in with Team Stalin.
So did Robeson. The media-educational complex, however, has so successfully airbrushed his reputation that today public schools named “Paul Robeson” dot the landscape. If educators don’t know or don’t care about Robeson’s background, historians are beginning to. Among them is the Greek-born British author Tim Tzouliadis. His 2008 bestseller, The Forsaken, should be read by every school board member anywhere who thinks “Robeson” might make a good name for a middle school.
When Robeson first visited the Soviet Union in 1934, he found a community of more than two thousand Americans, black and white, already in place. Although many of these were political activists, most were ordinary laborers and craftsmen lured during the Depression by the promise of steady work. At the time, they were the toast of the Soviet Union.
By 1937, when Robeson returned to Russia for a lengthy concert tour, Stalin had unleashed his famously paranoid “Terror” against all suspected intriguers. He was no longer killing kulaks in the middle of nowhere but Americans in the heart of Russia. Robeson pretended not to notice. His son Pauli, then ten, could see what his father refused to: the parents of his school chums were being arrested and assassinated. In his memoirs, Pauli lamented how his father had turned his back even on his closest black friends now marooned in the Soviet Union. By 1949, almost all of the Americans had been incarcerated or liquidated in the Terror along with several million Russians and other foreign nationals. That did not stop Robeson from returning to the Soviet Union that year to entertain.
By the time Stalin died in 1953, no adult with an active brain wave could have failed to understand the depths of his depravity, none but the winner of the 1952 Stalin Peace Prize, Paul Robeson. “Yes, through his deep humanity, by his wise understanding, he leaves a rich and monumental heritage,” Robeson eulogized his beloved Uncle Joe. “He leaves tens of millions all over the earth bowed in heart-aching grief.” Stalin had left tens of millions under the earth as well.
Robeson’s involvement colors Davis’s Hawaii venture, which could not have been as whimsical as Davis makes it sound. In leaving Chicago, Davis abandoned his life’s great passion—jazz. He dedicates page after page of his memoir to jazz: the records he collects, the concerts he attends, the dances he frequents, the classes he teaches, the radio show he hosts, the performers he meets. In Hawaii, all of this goes by the wayside save for the records. In his memoir post-1948, he talks about jazz not at all.
Davis jokes that he “launched his invasion of Hawaii” by leaving Chicago on December 7, 1948, the seventh anniversary of Pearl Harbor. He arrived with a massive ILWU strike imminent. Within months of his arrival, the union virtually shut Hawaii down. “The 178-day strike gnawed at the island’s lifelines,” observed the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on the occasion of the strike’s fiftieth anniversary, “forcing small businesses into bankruptcy, causing food shortages and in the end, making the ILWU one of the Territory�
��s major powers.” Davis cheered on the strikers through a weekly column in the progressive, ILWU-funded newspaper, the Honolulu Record, a post he had gotten through Bridges.
One has to wonder whether the Party made Davis an offer he could not refuse. For all of Hawaii’s charms, the then forty-two-year-old walked away from a life of rising prominence as poet and editor to work as a self-employed paper wholesaler and part-time columnist. “I do not recommend any black settling in Hawaii,” Davis would write years later, “unless he has special skills, a sizeable bank account, or an assured monthly income from outside sources.” Unless propaganda was his special skill or the Party was subsidizing him, Davis would have had none of the above.
In Chicago and in Hawaii, the FBI kept a nineteen-year watch on Davis and amassed a file that runs six hundred pages as posted online. At least one cooperating informant met with Davis “on Communist Party matters” for a period of several years and collected Davis’s Party dues. These were the Korean War years in the early 1950s. By this time, the dewy-eyed idealists had long since fled the CPUSA, a wholly owned Soviet subsidiary.
When Stanley Dunham first met Davis is uncertain. There is ample evidence that Dunham’s politics listed leftward, but unlike Davis, he had little to offer any cause, let alone the KGB. Investigator Cliff Kincaid submitted a request to the FBI to see if the Bureau had kept a file on Dunham. “Records which may be responsive to your Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) were destroyed on May 01, 1997,” responded the FBI cryptically in March 2010. Reading into the text of the letter, it seems likely that Dunham’s name was listed in the FBI’s “main index record,” but that proves little.
The case for Davis as “Pop” does not depend on the nature of the liaison between Davis and Stanley Dunham or on its date of initiation. There is a variety of evidence including a 1987 interview with Davis recorded by the University of Hawaii for a documentary on his life. Watching it, one can visualize “Pop”: the drinking, the smoking, the glasses, the twitches, the roaming eyes, the thick neck and broad back. “I could see Frank sitting in his overstuffed chair,” Obama remembers in Dreams, “a book of poetry in his lap, his reading glasses slipping down his nose.”
As to the sharing of sage advice, that description fits Davis better than it does Dunham. “I was intrigued by old Frank,” Obama writes in Dreams, “with his books and whiskey breath and the hint of hard-earned knowledge behind the hooded eyes.” More conclusively still, “Pop” does something that Davis would naturally do but that Dunham would not: he “recites an old poem / He wrote before his mother died.”
The first time the reader meets Davis in Dreams, he is referred to as “a poet named Frank.” Obama remembers, “[Davis] would read us his poetry whenever we stopped by his house, sharing whiskey with Gramps out of an emptied jelly jar.” On one occasion in Dreams, the teenage Obama stops by alone and Davis pours him his own shot. To close the case, Dunham’s mother died when he was eight. Davis’s mother died when he was twenty and had already established himself at Kansas State as a poet of promise.
Toby Harnden of the Telegraph credibly traces the first meeting of boy and man to the fall of 1970, when young Barry was nine. Obama admittedly spent the summer of 1970 in Hawaii, but he was supposed to have been in Indonesia in the fall. Then again, he was also believed to have lived full-time in Indonesia the year before until photos of him as a third grader at Noelani Elementary in Honolulu surfaced after the election. Mystery surrounds the man.
Maya Soetoro-Ng, Obama’s half sister, would describe Davis as her brother’s “point of connection, a bridge … to the larger African-American experience.” Dreams’ treatment of Davis testifies to his importance in the boy’s life. On nine separate occasions in Dreams, Obama refers to “Frank.” Other than public figures like Jeremiah Wright and members of the Obama family, no one else is called by his or her real name.
Not many Chicagoans would understand who “Frank” was, but some of those who did still mattered. One was Vernon Jarrett. As a young journalist, he and Davis had worked together in a communist front, the Citizens’ Committee to Aid Packinghouse Workers. By the time Obama arrived in Chicago, Jarrett, at that point a syndicated columnist, was a proven kingmaker. “He stoked the political embers in Chicago that led to the 1983 election of the city’s first African American mayor, Harold Washington,” wrote the Washington Post of Jarrett in its 2004 obituary. His daughter-in-law, Valerie Jarrett, would become Obama’s closest adviser.
Obama wanted black Chicago to know his connectedness, but he was savvy enough to omit Davis’s last name, as well as any reference to his politics. Had Obama written this book with the presidency in mind, he would likely have eliminated all references to Davis—and Wright too, for that matter.
For whatever reason, Obama introduced “Frank” to the world, and he deserves his day in court. Of the two charges he stands accused of, let me start with the most salient, paternity. What follows is unproven but not ungrounded. The evidence that ties Ann Dunham to Davis in 1960 is a series of nude photos of a young woman who looks strikingly like Ann. Figuring their authenticity easier to disprove than prove, I turned to that venerable fact checker, Snopes.com. Some on the right have accused Snopes of shilling for Democratic causes. A comparable service, TruthOrFiction.com, investigated this claim and cleared Snopes, finding “no discernible pattern of bias or deception, nor any evidence of advocacy for or against.”
I do not believe this for a minute. In its assessment of the Ayers-Obama relationship, for instance, Snopes—which is really no more than California couple David and Barbara Mikkelson—concludes that the two “aren’t (and never were) close.” As proof, the Mikkelsons cite statements by Ayers, the Obama camp, and the mainstream media. That’s it. A weak defense is one thing. A fraudulent defense is another. It suggests a hidden truth, and such is the case with Ann Dunham.
The Mikkelsons give the Dunham-as-nude-model rumor a big, fat “False.” Although conceding that the photos are genuine and not retouched, they dismiss them as “pictures of late 1950’s pinup model Marcy Moore, who just happened to bear a vague facial resemblance to a young Ann Dunham.” This is bunkum. On facial features alone, the Mikkelsons should have ruled out the much prettier Moore, but it is not the face that betrays intent. Moore’s all-pro body has useful mass in places the perky amateur body of the Dunham look-alike does not. Moore even gets her own featured spot in a wonderfully trashy reference service called “Boobpedia, the Encyclopedia of big boobs.” The Mikkelsons had to see the difference. Their site provides a photo of Moore.
The woman in the nude photos looks not vaguely like the young Ann Dunham. She looks stunningly like her, right down to the long Dunham chin, the petite mouth, and the arched eyebrows. The timing is also perfect. Seen on the table in one photo is the Stan Kenton LP Cuban Fire, a jazz album, this version of which was released in 1960, the year Ann arrived in Hawaii.
Unlike Marcy Moore’s professionally lit pinup shots, the photos in question are as amateurish as the model. The decorations clearly suggest Christmas, and yet the woman has a tan line. In her letters back to Seattle, Ann had enthused about wearing shorts to class, and the tan begins where the shorts would have ended. The young woman’s hair is sufficiently short that her earlobes show just as Ann’s do in her high school graduation photo. Tarted up as she is, the woman in the photos looks older than Ann as a high school senior, but her body looks appropriately young.
To close a case, all evidence finally has to point in the same direction. If this is Ann, the photo could have been taken only in December 1960, before she let her hair grow. If this is Ann, she could not have been more than about a month or so pregnant at the time. If this is Ann, the timing undoes the “unknown black male” on the mainland theory. If this is Ann, the intimacy of the photos makes the photographer a suspect in the Obama paternity mystery.
It should not surprise to learn that Frank Marshall Davis was an avid photographer. When he was thirty and living in Chicago, a neighbor who w
orked for an optical firm started supplying Davis with purloined photography magazines, cameras, and darkroom equipment. “I was hooked,” recalls Davis in Livin’ the Blues. “As I gained confidence behind the lens,” he adds, “I turned to nudes.” He photographed single women, married women, black women, white women. “I was amazed,” he writes, “at the number of gals eager to strip and stand unclothed before the all-seeing eye of the camera.”
Davis’s passion for nude photography complemented his sideline as a pornographer. In 1968, he chronicled his sexual adventures in a book titled Sex Rebel: Black under the pseudonym “Bob Greene.” There is no doubt he wrote the book. In his memoir, when approached in a San Francisco bookstore by a savvy reader who inferred his authorship from the text, Davis owned up. Writes he coyly, “I could not then truthfully deny that this book, which came out in 1968 as a Greenleaf Classic, was mine.” The editor of Livin’ the Blues, John Edgar Tidwell, confirms the same.
In Sex Rebel, the Davis persona, the narrator, insists that the book’s adventures are all “taken from actual experiences.” His sexual preferences in the relatively discreet Livin’ the Blues largely correlate with those in Sex Rebel, as do many of his life experiences, but Sex Rebel is a novel, not an autobiography—a good thing, as the book documents his seduction of a thirteen-year-old girl. The girl’s name, by the way, is Anne.
