The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  Obama's cheerful first impressions of multicultural Hawaii were the impressions of many sociologists, too. Since the nineteen-twenties, scholars have been referring to Hawaii as a kind of racial Eden. There were no laws against marriage between the races or ethnic groups as there were in so many American states. (It wasn't until the case of Loving v. Virginia, in 1967, that state mandates criminalizing intermarriage--some of the oldest laws in the history of American jurisprudence--were finally ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.) Scholars could be as misty-eyed as poets or politicians when they envisioned the Hawaiian future. The sociologist Romanzo Adams wrote in The Peoples of Hawaii (1925) that there was "abundant evidence that the peoples of Hawaii are in a process of becoming one people. After a time the terms now commonly used to designate the various groups according to the country of birth or ancestry will be forgotten. There will be no Portuguese, no Chinese, no Japanese--only American." Lawrence Fuchs, writing four decades later, in his social history Hawaii Pono, lauded Hawaii's "revolutionary message of equality." This was 1961. While the American mainland was undergoing a nonviolent revolution against Jim Crow racial laws in the South, Hawaii exuded a forward-looking, laid-back multiculturalism popularized as the "aloha spirit." Sociologists and scholars of race relations, such as Robert Park, Herbert Blumer, and E. Franklin Frazier, attended conferences or went on sabbatical leaves to come to Hawaii to study the racial situation.

  Obama lived at a Y.M.C.A. near campus and fell easily into a range of friendships with fellow students and Honolulu bohemians, among them Neil Abercrombie, a native of Buffalo who went to Honolulu as a graduate student in sociology and stayed in Hawaii, eventually becoming a Democratic congressman; Andrew (Pake) Zane, a Chinese-American student and traveler who eventually settled down to run an antiques and collectibles store near Waikiki; and Chet Gorman, who became a prominent anthropologist and archeologist studying Southeast Asia.

  In those days, the university was small, the atmosphere casual. You could rent a cottage for fifty dollars a month. Neil Abercrombie, who had come straight from the frozen campus of Union College, in Schenectady, New York, thought he had arrived in heaven. At night, the stars came out, "as if God had hurled them across the sky," and the smell of flowers was so rich as you walked down the street that "you thought the very atmosphere was perfumed."

  One day after class, Abercrombie recalled, he headed for lunch to the university snack bar, a simple wooden building with benches, picnic tables, and cheap food, "and as everyone is talking this black guy, a popolo, comes in." Popolo--Hawaiian for the black nightshade, a weed with dark berries--was not quite as bad as "nigger," but, said with a certain intonation, it was bad enough and certainly carried the connotation of separateness, of otherness. "So here was this coal-black guy, and there was this absolutely dynamic aura about him," Abercrombie went on. "A big smile. Easy to meet. Incredibly smart. And he was exotic in the land of the exotic. He was somebody new. In this world of the incredible spectrum of color and eye shapes and physiognomy, he stood out from even that melange. And he had this electric vitality. We were what passed for the academic free-spirit world--drinking beer and eating pizza and talking through the night about politics and ideas. Drugs and marijuana and the Beatles--all that came later. It was jazz artists and folk artists--Jimmy Reed and Leadbelly and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. And so Barack immediately got immersed in this little world of ours. He became part of us, our unlikely crowd."

  Obama's new friends knew him as "Bear-ick"--not "Buh-rock"--and they were impressed by the great rumble of his voice, his elegant pipe, his black-rimmed glasses, and the way he held forth, hour after hour, over dollar-fifty pitchers of beer at local dives like George's Inn and the Stardust Lounge. They'd talk sometimes about cultural things, about the Beat poets and Jack Kerouac, about the latest albums they'd heard, but usually Obama steered the conversation to politics, particularly to the anti-colonial wave in Africa. No one minded when he held forth. Everyone found him wonderfully intelligent and spectacularly self-absorbed. "Everything was oratory with him, that huge James Earl Jones voice," Abercrombie said. With enough beer in him, Obama could cross into the slightly insufferable zone. His ego was outsized. And yet he never ceased to fascinate his friends. He was never dull. If he raised the subject of a book, he'd read it, absorbed it.

  "He had a lot to say," Pake Zane said. "Barack was an impressive fellow. He was the blackest man I had ever met in my life, with that mesmerizing low voice. He spoke with a Kenyan British accent, with a slight touch of Oxford arrogance. But he was real smart. He liked jazz music, dancing, and drinking beer. I could listen to him for hours. And did."

  Obama told his friends that Kenya would soon be independent and that Jomo Kenyatta would be its leader, but he feared the inevitable rise of a coterie of hustlers in the leadership. "He was afraid that Tom Mboya would not be accepted, not only because he was a Luo but also because he was brilliant and eclectic and could talk to white people and was not intimidated by them," Abercrombie recalled. "He told us that Mboya was so self-confident that he didn't need to prove himself the tough black revolutionary. But Barack feared that meant he would be perceived as a rival. He knew there was trouble ahead."

  Obama also informed his new friends that he had much to offer his country--and that everyone back home would surely recognize that. "Beneath the braggadocio," Abercrombie said, "he feared that he would be overlooked, ignored. He couldn't bring himself to finesse people. He had to tell them exactly what he thought and what he thought of them. He had to offend them. When he got back to Kenya, he behaved in the exact opposite way his son would one day. Maybe it's not fair to be an armchair psychoanalyst, but it's not outrageous to think that a lot of the way Barack, the son, is today--cool, rooted, polite, always listening--is a way of not being like his father."

  In that first year of his studies at Hawaii, Obama took a Russian-language course and met a younger student, an intelligent girl, slightly plump, with large brown eyes, a pointed chin, and chalk-white skin. ("She was no beach bunny, that's for sure," Abercrombie recalled. "Ann was Kansas white.") Ann Dunham was seventeen. They struck up an acquaintance. One day Obama asked her to meet him at one o'clock in the afternoon near the main library. She agreed. She waited awhile and, because it was a sunny day, she lay down on one of the benches. "An hour later," she told her son, "he shows up with a couple of his friends. I woke up and the three of them were standing over me, and I heard your father saying, serious as can be, 'You see, gentlemen, I told you that she was a fine girl, and that she would wait for me.'"

  Not long afterward, Ann wrote to her friend Susan Botkin, telling her that she was adjusting well to Hawaii, enjoying her classes, and dating a Kenyan man whom she'd met in her Russian class. At first, Botkin said, "I was more interested that she was taking Russian than dating a Kenyan, to tell you the truth."

  Obama began bringing Ann to his evenings out with Neil Abercrombie and his other friends, though she was shy about talking in front of the others. Obama didn't seem to care much, as he tended to dominate any discussion and treated women in a way that one could politely call traditional. "She was so young and quiet, almost ephemeral in those days," Abercrombie said. "But he was the dominant voice in every conversation he was in. She was a girl. He was the center of the universe. She was listening and learning."

  As a grown man, Barack Obama, Jr., wrote skeptically not only about his father but about his mother's youthful romanticism. He is not entirely easy on his teenaged mother, but ultimately reconciled to her innocence and good intentions--and her love for him. Ann was a romantic idealist about nearly everything, including race and her own possibilities. She "was that girl with the movie of beautiful black people in her head, flattered by my father's attention, confused and alone, trying to break out of the grip of her own parents' lives," he wrote. "The innocence she carried that day, waiting for my father, had been tinged with misconceptions, her own needs, but it was a guileless need, one without self-conscious
ness, and perhaps that's how any love begins." A fascinating moment of a son judging his mother in her youth as he imagines it, struggling to see her clearly: until the final phrase, he is part censorious, part sympathetic.

  Ann's lover was not so guileless. He failed to tell her that he had a wife in Kenya with a son and another child on the way. (Nor did he tell his friends.) He lied to Ann, telling her he was divorced. In the years that followed, he carried on overlapping relationships and marriages. If Obama felt any guilt about his cavalier attitude toward his wives and children, he concealed it. Kezia told a Kenyan reporter that she did not object to her husband taking a second wife, that it was not out of keeping with Luo customs, and that "he used to send me gifts, money, and clothes through the post office. Many people envied me."

  By December, Ann was pregnant, and, in early February, telling no one, she and Barack flew to the island of Maui and got married.

  "At Christmastime, she said she was in love with the African, and that her folks were dealing with it reasonably well," Susan Botkin recalled. "In the spring, she said she was married to the African and expecting a baby, and that her parents were coping reasonably well." Until then, Ann had seemed more interested in almost anything other than having, and rearing, a child. "It was such a surprise to me, because I had little brothers, and she would look at them and say, 'Aren't they cute--won't they go away?'" Botkin said. "She was never particularly interested in them. It was fascinating to me that she opted for matrimony and motherhood early in life. She was head over heels in love with this man."

  Ann's parents found Obama smooth, smart, even charming, but not entirely familiar or trustworthy. (Toward the end of her life, Madelyn Dunham said of Obama, Sr., "He was straaaaange.") Although the Dunhams thought of themselves as tolerant, they had a hard time adjusting to the thought of their daughter married so young to anyone, much less to an African with a murky past and an uncertain future. "Stan worked hard at accepting Barack, Sr.," Abercrombie said, "and he had an instinctive reaction that life would be hard for Barack, Jr. But he came to adore that child like nothing else."

  "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," Stanley Kramer's popular film about the marriage of a brilliant black doctor to an idealistic young white woman and the reaction of the girl's parents, did not come out until 1967. But, after it did, Stanley Dunham had no compunction about likening his initial reaction to his new son-in-law to Spencer Tracy's shock at encountering Sidney Poitier. He was suspicious, angry, confused, protective, and bewildered by the difference between what he thought he believed about race and what he actually felt. Stanley Dunham, who died in 1992, did not live to enjoy the prescience of one particular detail of Kramer's film. In one scene, Tracy wonders how the young couple plan to rear their biracial children. Poitier says of his fiancee, "She feels that every single one of our children will be President of the United States. And they'll have colorful administrations." As for himself: "Frankly, I think your daughter is a bit optimistic. I'd settle for Secretary of State."

  It sounds very much like the boundless idealism and sense of promise that Ann Dunham carried around in her head. It was a racial idealism uncomplicated by all the trials and historical turns to come--the assassinations, the rise of Black Power, the lure of separatism. "She was very much of the early Dr. King era," her son has said. "She believed that people were all basically the same under their skin, that bigotry of any sort was wrong, and that the goal was then to treat everybody as unique individuals."

  The family news from Kenya was not particularly welcoming, either. Hussein Onyango Obama wrote a barbed letter to his son saying that he deeply disapproved of the marriage, not because it meant a second wife but because a mzungu, a white woman, would sully the Obama bloodlines. "What can you say when your son announces he's going to marry a mzungu?" Sarah Ogwel recalled.

  Barack Hussein Obama, Jr., was born at 7:24 P.M. on August 4, 1961, at Kapi'olani Medical Center, in Honolulu, not far from Waikiki. On the birth certificate, the mother's race is listed as "Caucasian," the father's as "African."

  Ann dropped out of school to care for her infant son. She never expected to be in such a traditionally domestic spot so soon: home alone with Barack, Jr., while Barack, Sr., was in classes, studying at the library, out drinking with his friends. Yet her friends don't recall her being resentful or depressed. As a young mother, and later, too, when she matured into an accomplished anthropologist, based in Indonesia and other countries, she was a take-life-as-it-comes optimist. The last thing on her mind was what people might say as they saw her, a white woman, walking down the street holding a black child. Alice Dewey, an anthropologist at the university who became Ann's academic mentor and one of her closest friends, said, "They say she was so 'unusual,' but growing up in Hawaii it doesn't seem that unusual that she would have married an African. It's not breaking the rules in Hawaii. It didn't seem totally strange. If she had been growing up in Kansas, it would have been mind-boggling. In Hawaii, there's that mixture, a meeting point of different cultures."

  In June, 1962, Obama, Sr., graduated from the University of Hawaii Phi Beta Kappa. He had a choice between staying in Hawaii for graduate school, going to graduate school at the New School, in New York, on a full scholarship, with a stipend capable of supporting the three of them--or going to Harvard. For him, the choice was easy: "How can I refuse the best education?" Ambition always came before anything else, particularly women and children. He informed Ann that he was going to Cambridge to be a graduate student in econometrics. The Honolulu Advertiser marked his departure, in late June, without mentioning Ann or Barack, Jr. Obama promised his wife that he would retrieve the family when the time was right, but he was no more truthful about that than he had been about his first marriage.

  "Stanley was disappointed that Barack had left his daughter, but not too disappointed," Neil Abercrombie said. "He figured that the marriage was going to fail sooner or later and so it might as well not go on so long that it would hurt Little Barry, as he always called him. If he was going to play the father figure in the boy's life, he felt, he might as well start."

  That fall, Ann went with the baby to Cambridge briefly to visit her husband, but the trip was a failure and she returned to Hawaii. Barack, Sr., did not see Ann or their son again for nearly a decade and he did not advertise the fact that he had a family in Hawaii. He used to meet Frederick Okatcha, a friend from the airlift, in New York, at the West End bar, near Columbia, and they talked about almost everything--politics, economics, tribal problems, and nepotism in Kenya, and the way they would help shape the new Nairobi when they returned. "The one thing Obama never talked about was his family," Okatcha, who was studying psychology at Yale, said. "I didn't even know he had married. I never knew he had a son. Not then, anyway."

  Ann Dunham was twenty years old, and a single mother. All the early promises of adventure now seemed unlikely. "It was sad to me when her marriage disintegrated," her old friend Susan Botkin said. "I was so impressed by how relaxed and calm she was when she had Barack--she was excited about going to Africa--and how in love she was, how her husband was going to take a serious role in government. It was a great disappointment to her that Barack, Sr.,'s father wrote and said, Don't bring your white wife and your 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."

  According to the registrar at the University of Washington, Ann registered for an extension course in the winter of 1961 and enrolled as a regular student in the spring of 1962. She moved to Seattle with Barack, Jr., rented an apartment at the Villa Ria development in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, and reconnected with some of her old high-school friends. One thing Ann's friends noticed was that she was not at all reluctant to show off her baby. When she wasn't studying, she pushed Barack around the streets of Seattle in a stroller--a somewhat startling sight for some. "It was very different at that time for a black man and a
white woman to marry," Ann's friend Maxine Box said. "She was not shy about the fact that she'd married a black man at all."

  But trying to keep up with her studies and taking care of Barack was difficult, and, after a year, she decided to return to Honolulu, move in with her parents, and go to the University of Hawaii. To help make this work, she applied for, and received, food stamps for several months.

  There was little word from Cambridge. Barack, Sr., was studying econometrics, drinking with a new set of friends, and soon had a girlfriend to add to his two marriages. "But by then Ann was under no illusions," Neil Abercrombie said. "He was a man of his time from a very patriarchal society."

  Stanley Dunham, who had struggled with the idea of his daughter marrying so young and to such a complicated man, now became a doting grandfather, taking the boy to the beach, playing with him in the park. "Stanley loved that boy," Abercrombie recalled. "In the absence of his father, there was not a kinder, more understanding man than Stanley Dunham. He was loving and generous."

  In January, 1964, Ann filed for divorce, citing "grievous mental suffering." In Cambridge, Obama signed the papers without protest.

  Ann may have been wounded by Barack's abandonment, but she certainly had no hesitation about, once again, dating a man of color. A couple of years after Obama left for Harvard and then returned home to Kenya (with yet another woman, an American teacher named Ruth Nidesand, whom he had met in Cambridge), she began dating an Indonesian geologist, Lolo Soetoro, who was studying at the University of Hawaii. Lolo was a more modest, less aggressively ambitious man than Obama, and Ann's parents were far more at ease with him.