Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  Then he shifted gears. “A steady flow of visitors camped in our living room for two weeks or so, and I had a chance to catch up with friends and play host.” Hasan and his cousin Ahmed were among them, and Barack told Alex that “Hasan will be marrying” soon and taking over the family business. With “old friends receding into the structures pre-conscribed for them,” relationships became “more reserved” and “the idealistic chatter of college is diplomatically ignored.”

  Barack had also heard from Greg Orme in Oregon, who had a new car, a television, and a hot tub. “I must admit large dollops of envy for both groups, my American friends consuming their life in the comfortable mainstream, foreign friends in the international business world. Caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me, in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me. The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions, classes, make them mine, me theirs. Taken separately, they’re unacceptable and untenable.”

  Obama’s statement that he felt isolated was unsurprising given his life over the previous twelve months, nor were his remarks about Hasan and Greg. He did not respond to what Alex had written to him about herself, “since I spent so much of my mental energy with you and now need to refuel” and return to Butler Library. “I trust you know that I miss you, that my concern for you is as wide as the air, my confidence in you as deep as the sea, my love rich and plentiful. Please comfort me with another letter when you get a chance. My regards to everyone. Love, Barack.”

  A postscript said he was enclosing a New York Times book review from two weeks earlier of Becoming a Heroine by Rachel Brownstein, which he thought would interest her, as well as an excerpt from W. B. Yeats’s 1928 poem The Tower about “a woman won or lost.” He asked Alex, “Who is the ‘woman’ for you?”29

  Back in Butler Library, Barack studied for Gerald Feinberg’s first physics exam on October 12. Students had to answer two out of three questions: “(1) Discuss the present atomic theory of the structure of ordinary matter . . . (2) Describe the photon theory of light . . . (3) Discuss how some of the estimates of the number of various subatomic particles . . . are obtained. Your discussion need not be precise on numbers. . . .”

  In early November, Columbia’s Coalition for a Free South Africa hosted the prominent white anti-apartheid activist Donald Woods, and Obama may have been among the large crowd. Two weeks later Columbia’s student newspaper published another front-page article reporting how “this is not an easy place to go through as a minority student.” One black senior complained that white students presume the admissions standards for black undergraduates were lower and that “we can’t do the work”; another commented that Columbia’s core curriculum ignored African Americans and “doesn’t prepare you for the real world.”

  Alex McNear wrote to Barack in mid-November, and he quickly replied. “You speak with force, Alex, calm and confident, and I’m frankly amazed, not by the brimming talent, not by the thoughts in themselves but by the sureness of the words.” Admitting that “mixed in with those feelings are bits and pieces of envy, uncertainty, some intimidation,” he confessed that “the prejudiced, frightened male makes its atavistic appearance.” Writing cryptically about what he termed “the habits and grooves of separate existence,” he declared that “we will talk long and deep, Alex, and see what we can make of all this.”

  Rereading his letter a quarter century later, McNear noted Obama’s “formalism,” and wondered “were mine very formal” as well? “I just wonder where the tone came from.” Barack also wrote, “I think you may have caught me being a fool in my last letter,” and he referred to a conversation they had had outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “When we spoke in front of the Met, I insisted that I made choices, that I wasn’t kind out of necessity, because it can certainly be argued that I’m compelled by my past to be that way, that no choice is involved . . . and my insistence arises from my fear of emasculation, that if I can’t be cruel any longer, then I must not be a man.” Citing “the past of my ancestors,” Obama wrote, “I see that in a real sense my gravestone is already planted, the feeble eulogic etchings overgrown with moss, blurred and forgotten.”

  Barack went on that “this cordoning off of individuals into compartments is something I fight every day,” and said that Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway expressed his point better than he could. After some musings about birth and death, Barack asserted that “the betrayal lies in separation,” that “we feel betrayed by this act of separation,” and that “because the initial act of separation has traditionally been from the mother, men’s retaliation is indeed towards women.”

  Alex understood that “he’s clearly enjoying writing: writing it out, toying it out, figuring it out.” Barack continued that “some choose to escape the pain by limiting their interaction with the world. They abstract themselves . . . which is perhaps the most tolerable option.” He quoted Friedrich Nietzsche’s statement that “in all desire to know there is a drop of cruelty” before acknowledging that “I’m running out of steam and the thoughts are becoming blurred.” Yet he had two points for subsequent discussion: one, “I see that I have been made a man, and physically, in life, I choose to accept that contingency.” Second, “there is a reason why western man has been able to subjugate women and the dark races, Alex; the ideology they present is backed by a very real power. We will speak of this too.”

  Rereading that passage, McNear observed how “very professorial” Obama sounded. Barack then added, “I’ve never tried to put down so comprehensively my views. They come out muddled and incomplete, and I wish I could explain more fully.” To that, Alex would wonder “maybe . . . that was as close as he could get to intimacy.”

  Finally Obama concluded by returning to the real world a month hence, after Columbia’s exams ended. “I arrive in L.A. on December 23rd, and expect to be at Wahid’s apartment that evening. I’ll call you upon arrival . . . see you then. Love, Barack.”30

  Three or four days after Barack mailed that letter to Alex, Sohale answered their phone on East 94th Street and an unfamiliar, foreign-sounding woman asked for Barack. It was Kezia Obama’s sister Silpa Obonyo, known throughout the family as Aunt Jane, a Nairobi telephone operator able to make international calls. She had just phoned Auma Obama, now a twenty-two-year-old student in Germany and no longer using “Rita,” and her reason for calling Barack was the same as for dialing Heidelberg: Barack Obama Sr. was dead at age forty-eight.

  He had died in the early-morning hours of Wednesday, November 24, when the vehicle he was driving had gone off Elgon Road and struck a large tree stump. Drunken driving had indeed finally killed him. “The body had to be wedged out of the car,” the Nairobi Times reported. The crash site was in Upper Hill, the Nairobi neighborhood where Obama had been living with twenty-two-year-old Jael Atieno, who six months earlier had given birth to George Hussein Obama.

  Barack later wrote, “I felt no pain, only the vague sense of an opportunity lost,” and he called his mother in Jakarta, then his uncle Omar Onyango in Massachusetts. A year earlier Barack and his father had corresponded about his visiting Kenya to meet his relatives there once he graduated from Columbia, but now that idea was on hold.

  The Nairobi paper said Obama Sr. “leaves four wives and several children,” and the eleven years that had passed since he last saw his second-eldest son in Honolulu in 1971 had been no happier than the seven that had preceded it. Soon after Obama returned to Nairobi in early 1972, Ruth divorced him, but she did not take her two sons and actually leave him until later that year after Obama put a knife to her neck and struck the youngest boy, David Opiyo. Unemployed and still drinking heavily, Obama was able to secure a job offer from the World Bank for a post in the Ivory Coast, but when his sister Zeituni took him to the Nairobi airport, government officials turned him away and canceled his passport. “He left the airport crying, angry, and frustrated,” Zeituni recalled. Some months later, in mid-1973, yet another
drunken car crash left him with two badly broken legs and a shattered kneecap. Obama remained hospitalized for six months, sometimes “in real pain,” Zeituni remembered. His teenage daughter Auma was repeatedly “sent home from school” due to unpaid fees and bounced checks. She and her older brother Roy, alone without a mother or stepmother after Ruth left with Mark and David, relied upon Zeituni for their survival. She “regularly brought us something to eat,” Auma remembered.

  Not long after Obama left the hospital, his old Honolulu friend Andy “Pake” Zane and his partner Jane visited Nairobi and were astonished at Obama’s condition. “He was a broken spirit,” just “a shell” of the man Zane and Neil Abercrombie had visited in 1968. “Why do you have a limp?” Zane asked. Obama replied, “They tried to kill me,” asserting that the conspirators behind Tom Mboya’s 1969 assassination tried to rub out a possible witness. “He was very depressed,” Zane remembered, and “he got very drunk and very angry” each night they saw him. By then he had been evicted from the council house at 16A Woodley Estate for nonpayment of rent and had a roof over his head only thanks to his friend Sebastian Peter Okoda, who allowed Obama to join him in his flat at Dolphin Court for more than a year.

  On November 25, 1975, Obama’s father, Hussein Onyango Obama, died at age eighty. Barack Sr. attended the funeral accompanied by his then-girlfriend, Akinyi Nyaugenya. Sometime soon after, Obama’s old friend Mwai Kibaki, now Kenya’s minister of finance, hired him into a post there. His drinking was as heavy as ever, and colleagues often saw him headed to a bar before noontime. “I can’t stand it anymore. Let’s get a drink.” Once Obama received a large cash travel advance a day before his scheduled departure on a business trip, but before the night was out, he had spent the entire sum treating colleagues, including Okoda, to rounds of drinks at a fancy Nairobi bar.

  One Kenyan academic who had first met Barack Sr. in the U.S. found his deterioration sad. “Before, he was everyone’s role model. With that big beautiful voice, we all wanted to be like him. Later, everybody was asking what happened.” A younger female government colleague knew that Obama was “disillusioned and discouraged and depressed” but mentioned to him her desire to get a Ph.D. She was astonished at his response: “It’s useless doing a Ph.D. What do you want a Ph.D. for? It’s just academic.” Obama “was very, very strong about that: ‘Don’t do a Ph.D.’”

  By mid-1980, the forty-six-year-old Obama was living with Jael Atieno, a friend of his younger sister Marsat who was the same age as his daughter Auma. Obama had visited Auma in Europe two years before his death, but “I didn’t want to see him,” she recounted. He “appeared broken” and “seemed defeated.” Auma felt “betrayed by my father, blaming him for not holding the family together.” When Aunt Jane telephoned her in November 1982, “I scarcely felt anything for him.”

  Ruth Baker Obama Ndesandjo had remarried to a stable and reliable man, Simeon Ndesandjo, and in April 1980, she had opened a preschool, the Madari Kindergarten. She learned of Obama’s death from that November 30 newspaper story. “I was not surprised, because he had been heading that way for a long time,” Ruth said. She told her son Mark more than once that his father had been “a brilliant man, but a social failure.”

  Zeituni Onyango, the person to whom Barack Obama Sr. was closest and who loved him most profoundly, understood more deeply than anyone the immense tragedy and lost promise of his life. Despite Barack’s remarkable intelligence, he had ended up living a “miserable life” that was “ruined by alcohol.” Yet even in his last days, one thing had never changed since his unwilling 1964 return to Nairobi without the Ph.D. from Harvard that had been his dream. Even though almost none of his friends ever heard him mention a son in the U.S., “Barack’s picture was always next to his bed,” according to Zeituni.31

  In later years, the younger Barack’s comments about his father’s death would vary considerably. Sometimes he incorrectly said he began using the name Barack instead of Barry at that time, rather than almost two years earlier. On other occasions, he mused that he had been motivated by his father’s death. “I think it’s at that point where I got disciplined, and I got serious,” but the few people who knew Barack well during his first fifteen months in Manhattan—Phil, Sohale, and Alex—had all witnessed that transformation take hold many months earlier.

  Obama also later wrote that “my fierce ambitions might have been fueled by my father . . . by my resentments and anger toward him,” but in 1982 those who knew him well did not see evidence of any fierce ambitions. Obama’s belief that in some ways he had raised himself would not be questioned by anyone from Punahou or Occidental who had noticed the absence of his birth parents in his life, but his most acute and accurate comments about the father he saw for only a few weeks when he was ten years old acknowledged how “I didn’t know him well enough to be angry at him as a father. Mostly I feel a certain sadness for him, and the way that his life ended up unfulfilled, despite his enormous talents.” In time he realized that “I was probably lucky not to have been living in his house as I was growing up.”32

  After Aunt Jane’s telephone call, Barack said little about his father’s death. “I had no clue,” Sohale Siddiqi recalls. “Not a word from” Barack referenced it. “I never heard about his father from him. I would hear about” Stanley Dunham in particular. “He brought up his grandparents plenty,” and Sohale remembers an off-color note Stan had sent his grandson along with a jogger’s wristband, suggesting there were multiple appendages upon which he might wear it.

  Sometime in early December, Keith Kakugawa was in New York for several days and managed to meet up with Barack for lunch near Columbia and then one night for dinner. Obama told Keith that “his dad had just died in a car wreck.” When Barack arrived in Los Angeles just before Christmas and began seeing Alex McNear almost daily, Alex too remembers him telling her about his father’s death, but, she says, “it was not an emotional telling.” In a letter to Phil Boerner, Obama described his three weeks of winter vacation in Los Angeles. Other than when he was with Alex, Barack stayed with Wahid. He told Phil that his days there were “standard fare—good relaxation with the Paki crowd, dinners with Alex, lunches with Jensvold, tennis with Imad, and pipe tokes with Carpenter. They all seem to be doing well enough and have themselves set up in big cushy apartments. The whole process was like a spiral back in time; nothing had changed except my perceptions, it seemed.” Barack’s close friend Mike Ramos had moved from Honolulu to Orange County six months earlier, and he remembers driving up to Pasadena and eating curry with Barack and the Pakistani trio of Wahid, Imad, and Asad.

  Other than this unrevealing reference in his letter to Phil, the extent of Barack and Alex’s relationship was kept entirely private, with all of their time together involving just the two of them and not any of Barack’s other friends. “No one really knew that we were having a relationship,” Alex later explained. Barack “seemed to be incapable of bringing a relationship into the rest of his world,” and their quiet dinners often featured long conversations about Alex’s immersion in French literary theory and especially its focus on the concept of difference. “I’m really much more interested in how people are similar,” Alex remembers Barack saying in response to one such discussion. Alex recalls writing in her diary at that time, “I realized how much I loved him, and that he was like my closest friend,” but she also expressed doubts that their relationship could blossom. Barack seemed “very controlling” and “so self-conscious.” On January 17, they had a final dinner before Barack flew back to New York City for his final semester as an undergraduate.33

  Barack was still taking Spanish, and the spring semester of his yearlong political science senior seminar would have fewer class meetings in lieu of students writing a paper due at the end of the term after multiple one-on-one consultations with Michael Baron. But in addition, Barack was able to choose three upper-level elective classes. One was a seminar taught by a young English professor whom Pern Beckman had recommended as a “reall
y cool guy.” Lennard “Len” Davis’s first book, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel, a revision of his 1976 Columbia Ph.D. dissertation under Edward Said, was just being published by Columbia University Press. The Columbia catalog said Davis’s seminar Ideology and the Novel would examine “the nature of ideology in Marxist and sociological thought.” Theoretical readings included works by Raymond Williams and Louis Althusser as well as Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Novels to be read started with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and moved on to Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855) and Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854). Only about twelve students enrolled in the seminar, and years later Davis readily volunteered that “it was definitely a Marxist course.” His purpose, Davis explained, was to make students realize that while any individual novelist “felt free to improvise and create,” nonetheless the surrounding “culture and its ideology would ultimately determine the novelist’s innovations.”

  Davis devoted a chapter of his new book to analyzing Robinson Crusoe, and in teaching Defoe’s novel, he asked students what “overt ideological statements” they could detect in Robinson Crusoe. An erudite and well-spoken teacher, Davis eventually answered his own question by saying “it’s a philosophy of stasis . . . you reconcile yourself to the world as it is . . . in a giant way it is against change . . . it’s essentially an ideology that reconciles you to middle-class life.” That was one illustration of the overarching argument Davis offered in his book: in those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English novels, “the novel’s fictionality is a ploy to mask the genuine ideological, reportorial, commentative function of the novel.” At bottom “the inherent confusion in any factual fiction” would give rise to “the later nineteenth-century assumption that literature is a more penetrating depiction of life than life.” Four years later, in his second book, Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction, Davis singled out the “particularly wonderful” 1983 seminar on Ideology and the Novel in helping him advance and distill his analysis.34