The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  During her senior year at Augusta High, Madelyn met Stanley Dunham and they married in secret. Madelyn told her parents that she was married only after she had a diploma in hand. No one in the family approved of the marriage. Charles Payne, Madelyn's younger brother, said their parents were "shocked" when they learned that their daughter had married Stanley Dunham and hardly thought he was an "appropriate choice."

  Some of Madelyn's friends didn't much like Stanley, either. He seemed too loud and cocky. "Stan was a smart-aleck. He was really king of the castle," Pummill said. "He looked like a greasy spoon, with his dark hair slicked down with something. None of the other fellas in Augusta did that then." He also had unconventional tastes: he wrote poetry and listened to jazz records. He was sarcastic, much louder than Madelyn.

  The couple moved to California for a while, but after Pearl Harbor they returned to Kansas and Stanley enlisted in the Army. He was inducted on January 15, 1942, at Fort Leavenworth. "He was really gung-ho," his brother Ralph said. "He didn't have to go, because he was married. He could have held off."

  The Dunhams' daughter, Stanley Ann, was born at Fort Leavenworth, in November, 1942.

  In October, 1943, after a year stationed at various U.S. bases, Dunham sailed for England on the H.M.S. Mauritania. He was an Army supply sergeant, and on D-Day he was serving at an Allied airfield near Southampton called Stoney Cross with the 1830th Ordnance Supply and Maintenance Company, which helped support the Ninth Air Force before it set out for Normandy. To guard against German aerial attack, the company dug foxholes at Stoney Cross, but the retaliation never came. Dunham helped put together a celebration at a local gym. Six weeks after D-Day, the company, with about seventy-five men, landed at Omaha Beach, in Normandy, and worked at Allied airfields across France: in Cricqueville, Saint-Jean-de-Daye, Saint-Dizier, and others. In February, 1945, Dunham's unit was attached to George Patton's Third Army for three months. Dunham's record was solid. "Sgt. Dunham has been doing a good job as Special Service noncom," his commanding officer, First Lieutenant Frederick Maloof, recorded in one of his weekly reports, from September, 1944. The company documents, uncovered by Nancy Benac of the Associated Press, also record the daily activities of Dunham and his men--the hikes, the lectures on tactics and weapons, the drills, the lectures on "sex morality," and, in October, 1944, a talk on "What to Expect When Stationed in Germany." On April 7, 1945, just as the German Army was disintegrating and three weeks before Hitler's suicide, Dunham was transferred to Tidworth, England, where he was to train as a reinforcement for American infantry; soon afterward, he was transferred back to the States. Like many soldiers returning from Europe, Dunham waited anxiously to see if he would be shipped off to the war in the Pacific, but, with the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the call never came.

  Madelyn Dunham, even with a baby at home and her husband fighting in Europe, worked full-time, taking a job at the Boeing assembly line in Wichita, one of the most famous munitions projects of the war. Henry (Hap) Arnold, a five-star general who had learned his flying at the Wright Brothers school and then went on to command the U.S. Air Force during the war, designed an aerial strategy that called for a huge output of heavy bombers. Designers came up with what was known as the Superfortress, a plane instrumental in the bombing of Pacific targets. The rapid design and construction plan was known as the Battle of Kansas--sometimes the Battle of Wichita. Women like Madelyn Dunham were called on to work long, sometimes double, shifts, to keep the assembly line in Wichita running at the pace that Hap Arnold demanded.

  When Stanley Dunham came home from Europe, he briefly tried going to Berkeley on the G.I. Bill, but, as his grandson put it, "the classroom couldn't contain his ambitions, his restlessness." He was nearly as restless as he had been as a teenager riding the rails. He still had a need to keep moving, but now he did it wearing proper clothes and with a wife and daughter in tow. Barack Obama writes about the way Stanley Dunham infected Madelyn, his grandmother, a home-economics major "fresh out of high school and tired of respectability," with "the great peripatetic itch" to escape the "dust-ridden plains, where big plans mean a job as a bank manager and entertainment means an ice-cream soda and a Sunday matinee, where fear and lack of imagination choke your dreams." They moved constantly: from Kansas to Berkeley and Ponca City, Oklahoma; from Wichita Falls, Texas, to El Dorado, Kansas, and, in 1955, to the state of Washington. In Ponca City, Francine Pummill recalled, Madelyn had a miscarriage and a hysterectomy. The Dunhams' daughter remained an only child.

  Even as a small girl, Stanley Ann Dunham proved witty and curious. She was unapologetic about her odd name, a relic of her father's initial disappointment at failing to sire a son. During her childhood and adolescence, as the family moved from state to state, she introduced herself to new friends, saying, "Hi, I'm Stanley. My dad wanted a boy." It would take a while before friends started calling her Ann. (I'll do it hereafter, though, to avoid confusion.)

  Stan Dunham became a furniture salesman. He enjoyed his job. Friends who worked with him over the years said that as a salesman, he could "charm the legs off a couch." "He was a good salesman, very sharp," Bob Casey, who worked with him at J. G. Paris's furniture store in Ponca City, said. "He was a forward-thinker, one of the first to incorporate room design and a decorating approach to the sale of furniture."

  When, in 1955, the family moved to Seattle, Stanley found work selling furniture downtown, first at Standard-Grunbaum at the corner of Second Avenue and Pine Street, and, a few years later, at Doces Majestic Furniture. In the meantime, Madelyn worked as an escrow officer in the nearby town of Bellevue. The post-war Eisenhower-era boom was well under way. Builders were expanding the suburbs, which meant that new homeowners were taking out loans and buying furniture. In their first year in Seattle, the Dunhams lived at an apartment on Thirty-ninth Avenue N.E. and Ann went to eighth grade at the Eckstein Middle School. But the Dunhams decided that they could do better and rented an apartment at the new Shorewood development on Mercer Island, an island in Lake Washington connected to the city by a mile-long floating bridge. Many years later, after the tech boom and the rise of Microsoft, executives built mansions on Mercer Island, but in the fifties it was a middle-class, if expanding, suburb of Seattle. On the island, the Dunhams had a view of the Cascades, and, more important, their apartment was close to a new, and well-regarded, high school where they intended to send their daughter.

  The culture at Mercer Island High School was, for most kids, one of sock-hops, basketball games, pep rallies, sleepover parties, Elvis records. But those were not the limits of Ann's frame of reference. An intelligent, even intellectual girl, she had budding bohemian tastes: a love of jazz, an Adlai Stevenson for President button, afternoons at the Encore coffee shop in the University District, foreign films at the Ridgemont theater, on Greenwood Avenue, in Seattle. Ann's crowd was not socially fast, but they were engaged, political, liberal, hungry to read and learn about the world. The first signs of a civil-rights movement, the first discussions about equal rights for women, one of her closest friends, Susan Botkin, said, were what "shaped our values for the future." At school, Ann and her friends took honors courses from a couple of progressive teachers, Jim Wichterman and Val Foubert, who outraged some of the parents by teaching things like the essays of Karl Marx, Margaret Mead's anthropological work on culture and homosexuality, William Whyte's The Organization Man, and David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd. (Ann's friends jokingly dubbed the length of hallway between those two classrooms Anarchy Alley.) Wichterman, especially, drew the wrath of some parents when he had the class talk about God--and theories of His nonexistence. "This was the Eisenhower era--that was really unusual," another friend, Chip Wall, recalled. Wichterman said that when parents came to the school in an effort to fire him, Foubert, and another teacher, Clara Hayward, they referred to the group as The Mothers' March. Ann Dunham, Wichterman recalled, was a studious young woman who was "not your typical high-school student. She just wasn't all that int
erested in the things high-school students take an interest in, like who's dating whom and things like that."

  Ann was getting some ideas about what she would like to do with her life. She told Susan Botkin that she wanted to study anthropology, possibly even make a career of it. "I had to look up what anthropology was in the dictionary when she told me that!" Botkin said.

  Although Ann's parents had church-going Republican backgrounds, the atmosphere at home was, by the standards of the time and Mercer Island, liberal and secular. The Dunhams sometimes attended the East Shore Unitarian Church, which was jokingly known around town as "the Little Red Church on the Hill." But religion was hardly paramount in the Dunham household. Ann usually spoke of herself as an atheist.

  The family was also in the minority when it came to politics. "There weren't too many families who were Democrats in our community," Marylyn Prosser Pauley, a friend of Ann's, said. "There were a few of us, though, and we felt a kinship about that. Stanley's family and my family were on the Adlai Stevenson side of things."

  There was one disturbing local issue--an outgrowth of McCarthyism--that haunted Mercer Island. In 1955, the House Subcommittee on Un-American Activities summoned John Stenhouse, the chairman of the Mercer Island school board, to testify. Stenhouse was one of the most popular men in town: friendly, intelligent, civic-minded. In 1951, he had moved to Mercer Island with his family (including a daughter whom Ann came to know well) and gone to work for Prudential Insurance. But, four years later, investigators started showing up at his house, and at his neighbors' houses, to ask questions. "I remember two F.B.I. agents coming to our garden to talk to my mother," Marylyn Prosser Pauley said. "My mother was literally kneeling over her gardening when they came on her. They were polite but they were clearly there to ferret out how bad a Communist Jack Stenhouse must have been. Those were the times."

  Stenhouse was born in Chungking, China. His father was a trader, and he worked in the family business until the family left China, for Los Angeles, on the eve of the Second World War. During the war, he became a machinist in a weapons factory. His union was the United Auto Workers. Stenhouse began to join left-wing discussion groups. He signed a Communist Party card, attended a few more meetings, and then quit the Party, in 1946. "The changing time was impressing itself on me," he told Time in 1955, "and I felt those people were going off on entirely the wrong track, excusing the Soviet Union and criticizing the U.S."

  But Stenhouse paid a humiliating price for his brief encounter with the Party, becoming the focus of small-town gossip and outrage. When the story of the House investigation broke, three of his four fellow school board members demanded that he resign the chairmanship. A town meeting was called, at the Mercer Crest School, and two hundred and fifty people from town gathered to debate the fate of John Stenhouse.

  "Let's rise on our hind legs and throw him out!" one said.

  And yet most of the people at the meeting, including the county spokesman for the Young Republicans, said that, while Stenhouse had made a mistake, he had also confessed to it and ought to be allowed to stay on the board. "I realize I made a mistake," he said at the meeting. "I believe we have the power to show people throughout the world that we have a better way than the Communists." "At the time it was a subject that we girls talked about only among our liberal friends," Marylyn Prosser Pauley said. "This was the first time that we all realized that our government wasn't always all for the good. We had been so idealistic about our wonderful government and our wonderful country until then. It was quite a wake-up call."

  "There were times when my father really suffered from all of this," Ann's friend Iona Stenhouse recalled. "I applied for the Peace Corps after I graduated from the University of Washington, in 1965, and was accepted, but when I went for training I was delayed. My security clearance hadn't come through and my father knew why."

  Ann was liberal, but she was hardly at the ramparts. She wore pleated skirts and twinsets, joined the French and biology clubs, and worked on the high-school yearbook. "She was a rebel in that she made decisions and she played that through and accepted the consequences when she ran afoul of her parents," Susan Botkin said.

  "We were critiquing America in those days in the same way we are today: the press is dumbed down, education is dumbed down, people don't know anything about geography or the rest of the world," Ann's classmate Chip Wall, a retired teacher, said. "She was not a standard-issue girl. You don't start out life as a girl with a name like 'Stanley' without some sense you are not ordinary."

  "We could see Stanley, with her good grades and intelligence, going to college, but not marrying and having a baby right away," Maxine Box, another friend from Mercer Island, said.

  In Ann's senior year of high school, her father announced that he wanted to move the family yet again--this time to the newest and farthest edge of the American imperium, Hawaii. They would move, he said, a few days after Ann's high-school graduation, in June, 1960. He had heard that speculators and contractors were beginning to build apartment buildings and houses in every mossy crenellation of Oahu. Hotels were sprouting, the military bases sprawling; rows of tract houses were going up. It was another land of promise, especially for a furniture salesman.

  Ann was not pleased. She wanted to stay on the mainland for college--she had already been accepted at the University of Washington and the University of Chicago--but the Dunhams said no, they would not allow their daughter, their only child, to live thousands of miles away. And so she reluctantly applied to, and was accepted at, the University of Hawaii.

  Father and daughter had a complicated relationship by this time. Ann could not abide her father's rough manners and sometimes explosive temper, and Stanley was still intent on reining in his headstrong daughter. Through the prism of time and recollection, Barack, Jr., saw the family's move to Hawaii as part of Stanley's desire to "obliterate the past," to remake the world. Despite the differences between father and daughter, they shared that restlessness--a kind of patrimony.

  Most of the eighty-one members of the 1959 airlift class from Kenya came together on a single charter flight from Nairobi to New York, with fuelling stops along the way. Because the plane was full, Obama took a different flight. "But he certainly is considered part of that contingent," Cora Weiss, the executive director of the program, said. "Hawaii was off the beaten path--statehood had just happened--but they took him. And we wrote checks for his tuition, books, and clothes."

  Within weeks of arriving in Honolulu, Obama came to see Hawaii as a refuge from Kenya's tensions and hardships, a remote enclave of racial understanding. The local press took a keen interest in the arrival of a black African who had come there to study. Interviewed by the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Obama described his background as a Luo growing up in western Kenya and how, as a young man in Nairobi, he had learned about Hawaii's atmosphere of racial tolerance "in an American magazine." (The struggles of native Hawaiians seemed lost on him.) He said that he had enough money to stay for a year and then, after getting a background in business administration, he would return home to help build a stable, independent Kenya.

  Obama was welcomed as an emissary from a distant world. He was invited to speak about "the African situation" in front of church groups and other community organizations. Like Tom Mboya, Obama told those audiences that he feared that tribal divisions were the greatest threat to an independent Kenya. He was not always patient with the fact-starved opinions of others. When a Honolulu paper published what he thought was a wrong-headed editorial on the Congo, he wrote a stern letter suggesting that "maybe you needed more first hand information."

  And yet Obama was almost always inclined to be the pleasantly surprised new arrival. "When I first came here, I expected to find a lot of Hawaiians all dressed in native clothing and I expected native dancing and that sort of thing," he said, "but I was surprised to find such a mixture of races."

  The Hawaiian Islands, which had become the fiftieth American state in August, 1959, had a remarkably vari
ous population of native Hawaiians, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Samoans, Okinawans, Portuguese, and whites from the mainland of various origins. There were few blacks in evidence at the University of Hawaii, or anywhere else on the islands. The black population was under one per cent, mostly soldiers and sailors living on various bases.

  Coincidentally, with statehood, came the arrival at Honolulu airport of the first passenger jets. Until then, it had been a thirteen-hour flight by propeller plane from Los Angeles or San Francisco--far too tedious and grueling a trip for most tourists. The five-hour flight from the mainland transformed Hawaii into an accessible paradise for Americans and, eventually, Japanese and other Asians. And with the rise of mass tourism came a demand for hotels, resorts, shopping centers, freeways, high-rise apartment buildings. Until statehood, the Republican Party, the party of the white plantation-owning elite, had dominated the Hawaiian territory. But as returning Asian veterans got their education under the G.I. Bill, they moved into the mainstream and built up the Democratic Party.