Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents

by Cormac O'Brien

“I know how hard it is for you to put food on your families.”

  “Keep good relations with the Grecians.”

  “There is madmen in the world, and there are terror.”

  “My education message will resignate among all parents.”

  “There’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.”

  “There’s no doubt in my mind that we should allow the world’s worst leaders to hold America hostage, to threaten our peace, to threaten our friends and allies with the world’s worst weapons.”

  “I promise you I will listen to what has been said here, even though I wasn’t here.”

  “Do you have blacks, too?” (to the president of Brazil).

  44 BARACK OBAMA

  August 4, 1961–

  ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Leo

  TERM OF PRESIDENCY: 2009–

  PARTY: Democrat

  AGE UPON TAKING OFFICE: 47

  VICE PRESIDENT: Joe Biden

  RAN AGAINST: John McCain

  HEIGHT: 6′2″

  NICKNAMES: “Barry,” “’Bama,” “Obamber,” “Obambi”

  SOUND BITE: “Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states. I think one left to go.”

  Barack Obama entered the White House less than five years removed from life as an obscure state senator and law school professor in Illinois. Obama’s presidential triumph seems even more amazing when one considers the glass ceilings he had to smash through on the way. He is the first black man to become U.S. president, the first Oval Office occupant born outside the continental United States, and the first U.S. commander in chief born to an African Muslim.

  Fortunately for Barack Obama, “bowling” is entirely absent from the official presidential job description.

  His swift, steep ascent to the Oval Office came largely on the wings of his extraordinary public speaking skills. Obama’s successful political career may ultimately provide further evidence for the old maxim: Hot air rises.

  Barack Obama Jr. was born in Hawaii to Ann Dunham, a white woman from Kansas who had met and married Barack Obama Sr. while studying at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The couple separated when Junior was two years old and later divorced. Obama Sr. had been born in a small Kenyan village (where, as a boy, he had helped support his family by herding goats) and returned to his home country after the divorce, seeing his son only once before dying in a 1982 car accident.

  Ann Dunham then married a second college classmate, Lolo Soetoro. In 1967, Ann and Barack Jr. joined Soetoro in his native Indonesia, where the young Obama attended grade school, returning to Hawaii at age ten to live with his mother’s parents and attend Punahou, a prestigious private preparatory school. During his teens, Obama stumbled in the footsteps of his White House predecessor, George W. Bush, by abusing alcohol and drugs. (Though, unlike Bush, he did manage to kick his bad habits before middle age.) After graduating from Punahou in 1979, Obama moved to the U.S. mainland to attend Occidental College in Los Angeles, then transferred to Columbia University in New York.

  Obama’s background and meandering youth taught him early the value of communication and getting along with people from varied cultures. He later said it also made him acutely aware of tensions between people of different races and economic classes.

  Moving to Chicago in 1985, Obama took a job with Developing Communities Project, a Catholic church group dedicated to helping low-income families. There he found a new father figure in the Reverand Jeremiah Wright, who convinced him to join his Trinity United Church of Christ and become a practicing Christian. (Obama’s father and step-father had been nonpracticing Muslims.) Wright, who often denounced U.S. foreign and domestic policy during his sermons, once preached to his congregation that the lyrics of “God Bless America” should be changed to “God Damn America,” to account for the nation’s inhumane actions. Videos replayed during the 2008 presidential campaign showing Wright’s controversial sermons raised questions about Obama’s patriotism, causing the candidate to resign from Trinity United Church of Christ and renounce Wright. Well, sort of. Obama often has trouble taking a firm stand, even when it comes to renouncing someone.

  Obama is often portrayed as an outsider by opponents and supporters alike. Yet, when he left behind his community organizing job in 1988 to enroll in Harvard Law School, he was taking a decidedly inside track. Harvard had previously produced eighteen U.S. Supreme Court justices and seven U.S. presidents. In 1990, Obama received national publicity for his selection as the first African American editor of the Harvard Law Review. After graduating with honors the next year, he returned to Chicago to join the prestigious law firm Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland and to teach at the University of Chicago Law School. He also took time to organize voter registration drives that helped Bill Clinton get elected president in 1992. Sixteen years later, Clinton returned the favor with public attacks against Obama during the latter’s battle with the former president’s wife, Hillary, for the Democratic presidential nomination.

  Obama’s political career had been relatively quiet and undistinguished until his announcement to run for president. He had served eight years as a state legislator in Illinois, lost a bid to become the Democratic nominee for a U.S. House of Representatives race in 2000, and won a seat in the U.S. Senate in 2004. His Senate win came only after the spectacular fall of early favorite, Republican Jack Ryan, who had withdrawn from the race after the release of embarrassing documents detailing his divorce from actress Jeri Ryan (the buxom alien Seven of Nine on the Star Trek: Voyager TV series). During the legal proceedings, Jeri accused Jack of forcing her to go to sex clubs and urging her to have sex in public. At first, Obama demanded that Ryan release the divorce records but then changed his position, saying that Ryan’s private life should not be a campaign issue—though he did so only after a judge had already ordered that records to be released. Less than three months from the election, Illinois Republicans were forced to enlist Alan Keyes to run in Ryan’s place. Keyes, a Maryland resident, scrambled just to acquire legal residency in the state in time to get on the ballot. Obama won the election easily.

  Then he took the quantum leap into national political prominence with his well-received keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Yet, many were surprised in 2007 when he announced his decision to try to become the party’s presidential nominee. Despite entering the chamber with great fanfare, Obama had few accomplishments to show for his little more than two years of Senate service. Fellow senator and former First Lady Hillary Clinton had long before emerged as such a clear frontrunner that many prominent Democrats had simply decided not to run against her.

  Few gave Obama any chance, and many felt he would hurt his future by challenging Clinton. At times, Obama even questioned his own viability as a national political figure, telling a New Hampshire crowd, “The fact that my fifteen minutes of fame has extended a little longer than fifteen minutes is somewhat surprising to me and completely baffling to my wife.”

  But although Hillary Clinton had a huge campaign bank account, endorsements from top Democrats and powerful interest groups, and a fifteen-year head start, Obama had his mouth. Lauded for his inspiring, poetic rhetoric, he mesmerized voters on the campaign trail with his talk of “the audacity of hope” and “change we can believe in.” Throughout the campaign, Obama drew large, enthusiastic crowds more fitting for a rock concert than a political candidate’s speech. His greatest rhetorical gift seemed to be his ability to say very little, but to say it in a particularly thoughtful and stirring manner. Pundits had difficulty offering analyses in anything other than emotional terms because Obama’s interviews and speeches contained so little substance. If he did take a stand on an issue—the war in Iraq, off-shore drilling, free trade, unions, campaign finance reform, health care, immigration, even whether he was running for president—he was a
lmost certain to take up an opposing position during a subsequent speech. Pressed by a reporter at a 2008 campaign stop in Pennsylvania to clarify his position on a key foreign policy issue, Obama responded, “Can’t I just eat my waffle?”

  Later on the campaign trail, Obama traveled to a Pennsylvania bowling alley to be videotaped playing a game popular with the white, working-class males he was having trouble winning over for the state’s upcoming presidential primary. He rolled a gutter ball in his first frame and went on to bowl a 37, a score that would disappoint a clumsy child. Pundits, Clinton supporters, Republicans, radio talk show hosts, and late-night comedians all mocked Obama’s hapless display, and Pennsylvania’s bowling class voted overwhelmingly in favor of his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

  Gutter balls proved to be the least of Obama’s problems. He was criticized during a debate for serving on a board with Bill Ayers, the radical activist who cofounded the Weatherman group, an organization that achieved notoriety in the early 1970s for planting a bomb in the U.S. Capitol. He was also attacked for accepting campaign contributions from shady real estate developer Antoin “Tony” Rezko, who in 2008 was convicted on several counts of fraud, bribery, and money-laundering. Granted, these were merely “guilt by association” accusations: Obama was eight years old when Ayers was plotting the overthrow of the establishment, and the senator had no connection to the crimes that got Rezko convicted. But during a presidential campaign, the presence of such associates in a candidate’s recent past did more than take the Obama machine into rough waters; they threatened to blow a hole in it below the waterline.

  Nevertheless, Obama persevered, narrowly defeating Clinton for the Democratic nomination, then besting Republican John McCain in the general election. He triumphed, more than anything, due to his curiously compelling rhetoric. Lingering questions about what it all really meant will be answered by his presidency. Maybe.

  ANOTHER TRIUMPH FOR THE LEFT

  Obama is just the sixth confirmed left-hander to serve as U.S. president (not counting the ambidextrous James Garfield), and the fourth to occupy the White House since 1981, following Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush Sr., and Ronald Reagan. If lefty Al Gore had beaten George W. Bush Jr. in 2000, America would have had a run of five straight southpaw presidents.

  WORKING-CLASS NERO

  Obama’s bowling inadequacies may not be the only reason he has had trouble connecting with some middle-class voters. Much has been made of his efforts to help working families in the 1980s, when he was a community organizer in Chicago. But his first job out of college was with the Business International Corporation, a New York firm dedicated to helping American businesses establish themselves as profitable multinational corporations—the kind that have recently been blamed for exporting millions of American jobs overseas.

  Despite the job losses others may have been experiencing, Obama’s wife, Michelle, managed to find a lucrative gig, pulling in more than $250,000 a year working for a corporate hospital. She and Obama own a home in Illinois valued at $1.5+ million in a neighborhood insulated from most Americans’ economic woes. Obama himself seemed immune to their pain. ”You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for twenty-five years and nothing’s replaced them,” he told a group of wealthy California supporters in 2008. “And it’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or antitrade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

  After these comments were made public during the Democratic primary campaign, it was no surprise that Obama’s standing plummeted among small-town, working-class people. His difficulties understanding them came despite revelations that his half-brother George has lived for years in a hut in a Kenyan shanty town, surviving on less than a dollar a month.

  GOOD LUCK CHARMS

  Many politicians have good luck charms, and Obama carries a couple as well. He has a lucky poker chip as well as an American eagle pin that was placed in his hand by a Native American voter at a campaign stop.

  Sex Symbol

  Obama proved particularly popular among young women, drawing thousands to his campaign events to cheer and causing some to literally swoon as he spoke. But he had little luck attracting this sought-after demographic as a young man searching for a partner. Obama’s wife, Michelle, turned him down the first several times he asked her out while she was supervising him as a summer intern at a Chicago law firm. She believed he was not particularly charming or attractive and later described him as “a slob.” She began to warm to her future husband’s advances after—what else—hearing him deliver a speech to a local community group. Works every time.

  Michelle has had difficulties warming up to some of her husband’s aspects, though. She revealed that, at home, he neglects to pick up his dirty socks and won’t unclog the toilet. She also says that the couple’s two young daughters refuse to snuggle in bed with their parents because their father is “too snorey and stinky.”

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  Brallier, Jess, and Sally Chabert. Presidential Wit and Wisdom: Maxims, Mottoes, Sound Bites, Speeches, and Asides—Memorable Quotes from America’s Presidents. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.

  Brands, H. W. TR: The Last Romantic. New York: BasicBooks, 1997.

  Brinkley, Alan, and Davis Dyer, eds. The Reader’s Companion to the American Presidency. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

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  INDEX

  NOTE: Page numbers in bold refer to illustrations.

  A

  Adams, Abigail, 13, 34, 36

  Adams, John, 10–14, 11, 39, 126

  Adams, John Quincy, 27, 31, 34–39, 35, 44

  Adams, Louisa Catherine, 25

  Adams, Samuel, 41

  adultery accusations

  G. H. W. Bush, 255

  Cleveland, 131–32

  Clinton, 258, 259–60, 261–62

  Eisenhower, 202

  Garfield, 118–19

  Hamilton, 40

  Harding, 2, 166, 167

  Jefferson, 19–21

  L. Johnson, 220

  Kennedy, 2, 211–13

  E. Roosevelt, 176, 189–90