The Other Barack

by Sally Jacobs

  In the afternoons Obama was often a common sight outside Hemenway Hall, standing under the long arms of the sweeping bayur tree. Usually he was in deep debate about the prospects for the Pan-Africanism movement or the latest news from the emerging civil rights front or the proposed campus expansion. His ubiquitous pipe was used more for theatrical point than something to actually smoke.

  A curiosity to the larger community as well, Obama was invited to speak on the situation in Africa at several downtown locations, including local churches, the NAACP, and clubs such as Rotary and Kiwanis. And when the Star-Bulletin wrote an editorial predicting mass violence in the aftermath of the Belgian colonial government’s withdrawal from the Congo, Obama wrote a stinging response. In his letter to the editor he objected to the writer’s description of the Belgian colonials as being both efficient and sympathetic, saying that he had seen with his own eyes “how the Africans there were whipped and put to jail for as petty offenses as walking on the wrong side of the street. It struck me that maybe you needed more first-hand information before you spoke about their efficiency and sympathy.”10

  Even UH administrators, eager to attract students from farther reaches of the globe, drew him out. Only two months after he arrived Obama was one of a handful of foreign students invited to discuss a proposed international program to be called the East-West Center with university president Laurence H. Snyder. A photograph of Obama, dressed in crisp, white Oxford shirt and a dark bow tie, sharing cocktails with Snyder and other faculty members, was featured on the front page of Ka Leo.11

  Though Obama’s worldly ways and his polished shoes set him apart from the rank and file on the UH campus, he nonetheless found a gang he could call his own. They were more varied than the candidates in the Ka Palapala beauty contest. First came Peter Gilpin, California iconoclast, renaissance man, and jazz aficionado. Owner of a collection of blues and jazz records that held them all in awe, he was their cultural guide. Neil Abercrombie was the politician of the group, a refugee from the bitter Schenectady winters where he had been an undergraduate. Fondly known as No-Neck Neil for his muscular physique, he alternately circulated petitions and worked as a sociology teaching assistant. Andy Zane was the local boy. Born to Chinese parents on Maui, he was a freshman with a burning desire to travel around the world. Somewhat surprised to find himself hanging out with some up-and-coming haoles, Zane would soon change his first name to Pake, Hawaiian for Chinese. There were a few others, like Abercrombie’s younger brother, Hal, who came to Honolulu with his wife and enrolled at UH for a year, and Kimo Gerald, a Hilo native studying psychology and looking for a reason to drop out. Each of them found something different in Obama in the year or two they knew him. But Abercrombie and Zane would forge much longer-term relationships with him and would follow him to Kenya years later, when they would find him a very different man.

  The Stardust Cocktail Lounge on South Beretania Street was their hangout, their home, “their union hall,” as Zane dubbed it. A small working-class bar west of the campus, they had chosen it largely because of the generous pupu platters, an assorted appetizer tray that might include spareribs, Chinese eggrolls, and wontons. For students on a budget, as most of them were, pupus could serve as their primary meal of the day. “We’d go to class at nine and then head for the Stardust,” explained Zane. “If you got there before 10 a.m., the pupus were for free. And then people would drift in and out all day, depending on your schedule. We had lunch there, we did our homework there, and then we might wind up having pitchers of beer at midnight.”

  Sometimes they branched out to the George’s Inn, a beloved local restaurant nearby, or the Forbidden City, a popular nightclub famous for its striptease and topless go-go dancers. But by far the more popular alternate retreat was Gilpin’s apartment, where they listened to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and the best of the Delta bluesmen. One of the guys who had a car would pick up Obama at Atherton House and drive him to Gilpin’s. They ate pizza and talked, and then talked some more. “We were all, ‘counter-culture people’: we hated authoritarian personalities of any sort and were anti-war and anti-A&H Bombs,” as Gilpin described the group in an e-mail. “We actively worked against these horrors. We read Kafka, Nathaniel West, Bertrand Russell, John Dos Passos & many others. ... We were also students of Daruma and Dogen, Zen masters.”

  For the group, Obama was many things: a provocateur, a source of entertainment, and a living, breathing manifestation of the struggle against imperialism that had landed in their lap. Obama’s tales of the African bush and his lyrical accent mesmerized Zane in particular, for they gave a face to the wanderlust that had long simmered within him. He wrote Obama’s address in his address book and vowed to go to Kenya to visit him, and a decade later he would do just that. “Meeting Obama, it was like here is someone I can go visit on the other side of the world,” said Zane, who sells antiques at the Antique Alley cooperative in Honolulu. “It made my dream seem real. This was a place I could actually go to.”

  Abercrombie understood Obama the best. Deeply engaged with the unfolding social questions of the day, Abercrombie was drawn as much to Obama’s political ambition as his connection to the seismic events unfolding on the other side of the globe. At the forefront of a host of campus issues and a well-known figure with his long, dark beard and thick black glasses, Abercrombie would go on to represent Hawaii in the U.S. Congress for two decades and was elected governor of Hawaii in 2010. Often he and Obama stayed up late at night discussing how things would work in a postcolonial world and assessing the similarities between the budding civil rights movement in the United States and the quest for independence in Africa.

  That Obama had decided to become an economist was due only in part to his particular love of the field and his considerable aptitude. He was equally inclined to the profession because he believed that it would cast him as a catalyst in the unfolding drama of Kenya’s independence, a Big Man in the tableau of movers and shakers just then coming to the fore. As an economist, someone knowledgeable about the philosophy of finance, econometrics, and foreign trade, he would be invaluable to an emerging country. It would be his hand that would help shape not only the country’s financial underpinnings but also its very ideological framework.

  Obama’s passion for his country was visceral, and he readily launched into a discussion of events unfolding in Africa at any opportunity. In his discussions with Abercrombie, he described his particular interest in the concept of property and his conviction that the African notion of communalism could be squared with private ownership in a capitalist society. Ghanian president Kwame Nkrumah espoused some of the same themes in his writing about African socialism and his commitment to preserving traditional humanist values. Like him, Obama intuitively understood the value of Africa’s traditions as well as the economic vulnerability his country would face as an independent nation.

  Obama was fiercely passionate about Kenya in part because the Kenya of his moment was about men and women like him. Twenty-five years earlier he would likely have spent his life as a low-level administrator under colonial domination or, if he was lucky, as a teacher. But coming of age at the singular moment that he did opened a door to a completely different kind of a life for him. And he was not going to let anything get in his way. “He talked about ambition, his ambition for independence in Africa in general, and his own personal ambition to participate in the emerging nationalism in Kenya. He saw himself a key element,” said Abercrombie. “He was not obsessed, but it was the central focus of his life. He was full of such energy and purpose. We all had such high hopes for him, hopes that people like Barack would be the next leaders of Africa. He seemed completely capable of it.”

  But Obama also worried about the challenges of independence. From a budding economist’s point of view, he well understood the difficulties of trying to wean the country from foreign capital and economic dependence. He also appreciated the challenge of trying to blend aspects of a capitalist economy with some of the mo
re communal African traditions that he valued. Tribalism was also high on his list of concerns. Kenyatta’s Kikuyu supporters were already a powerful and tight-knit group. Although some political differences among the country’s different ethnic groups had been put aside in the determined drive toward independence, Obama predicted in his late-night conversations with Abercrombie that when the choke hold of British control—which had long suppressed those factions—was removed, the old tribal rivalries would reappear. In this, Obama was prophetic.

  At a time when many linked Africa’s rejection of colonialism to American blacks’ escalating demand for equal treatment, Obama’s passion was infectious. But he was also conversant on a range of other issues as well. Abercrombie, for one, admired Obama’s intellectual reach. “He was brilliant,” he said. “He did not have to cultivate the image. His grasp of the subject matter was total, and part of the reason for that was his willingness to get the information. He was an absolute bear for work.”

  Africa was Obama’s singular burning focus, but he understood that America’s own evolving political situation had global implications. Aware that as a foreign student—and a highly visible one at that—his activities did not go unnoticed, he often declined to get involved in some of the more public events in which his friends were engaged. But Obama could not resist taking to the podium on occasion. In May 1962, for example, he addressed a Mother’s Day peace rally in Ala Moana Park, declaring that, “Anything which relieves military spending will help us. ... Peace will release great resources.”

  On the subject of civil rights, Obama’s engagement was complete. He was a voracious reader of newspapers and would pepper other students about the history of repression of blacks in the United States. The idea of protest, so resonant of his own country’s ongoing drama, appealed to him. And despite his general caution about engaging in political events, he at times jumped in. When Alabama governor John M. Patterson, an avowed enemy of integration, arrived in Honolulu for the National Governors’ Conference in the summer of 1961, Obama was among a surging crowd demonstrating at the airport. He later participated in a picket at Patterson’s hotel. “This was the first real civil rights demonstration in Hawaii,” said Hal Abercrombie. “There were Chinese, Japanese, haoles, and Barack there. He was the only black person. He was surrounding the governor’s car with everyone else calling for an end to segregation.”

  Obama’s participation came at a price. Few could measure up to his level of commitment, and he treated with respect only the small inner circle of those who did. He had no patience for other people’s shortcomings and grew visibly exasperated with those he perceived as having lesser abilities than his own. If he was not interested in what someone else was saying, he would talk right over them. And if he felt their point was not well articulated, he bluntly told them so. If others were not so intimidated by his verbal onslaught and jabbing pipe, they might have given it right back to him. “He did not lack for a sense of self-importance. We forgave him for that because he was so genuine. But he was a very daunting personality,” sighed Abercrombie. “He just could not contain his irritation with people who were not as facile as he, and he did not hesitate to say so.”

  Few experienced the force of that personality more fully than a musicologist visiting from the university from South Africa. The man, who was white, was scheduled to address the students over the course of days, but Obama and another student had a different agenda. On the first night, when the man approached the podium in Orvis Auditorium, Obama leapt to his feet before the other man could open his mouth. What right did the white South African government have to deprive Africans of citizenship? When the man attempted to answer, the other student, strategically positioned on the opposite side of the auditorium, would jump to his feet and fire off more aggressive questions at the musicologist. On and on it went. Their verbal battering made it virtually impossible for the man to respond, and finally he surrendered and walked off the stage. Some students joined in the questioning and applauded when the speaker left. But a few in the audience, even those who were opposed to apartheid, were left feeling ambivalent about the ambush. “It just went on and on and the poor guy finally gave up,” recalled Kimo Gerald, now the house manager at Carnegie Hall in New York. “I had mixed feelings at the time because his delivery and body language sent the message to me that he was not an apologist for apartheid. But here he was forced in his position to represent the South African government in Hawaii.”

  Another place that regarded Obama with some consternation was the university’s international student office. Administrators there repeatedly asked Obama to come into the office and complete some routine paperwork in his file, but he never showed up. His record was incomplete and vague, and the university could not fathom why. They were also becoming concerned about reports of Obama’s dating habits; the international student office was the first to raise the questions about his womanizing and uncertain marital status. Every time he was asked about his family, Obama had a different answer depending on what served him the best. Sometimes he had a wife in Kenya, sometimes he did not. When he met his second wife, he claimed to have divorced the first. Later, he decided he had not. Mostly, he tried not to answer the question. Even so, such questions would dog him throughout his stay and would eventually culminate in disastrous results.

  Immigration officials struggled to get to the truth of the matter. Sumi McCabe, UH’s foreign student adviser, brought the issue to their attention during Obama’s second summer in Hawaii, when she reported that Obama “has been running around with several girls since he first arrived here,” according to a 1961 memo written by Lyle H. Dahling, an administrator with the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Honolulu office.

  Dahling’s memo is one of dozens of communications regarding Obama that the INS maintained in his alien file, known internally as an “A” file. Although Obama was likely unaware of it, such files are kept on any non–U.S. citizen in the country who has ongoing communication with federal immigration agencies. The correspondence includes Obama’s applications to extend his period of admission to the country, requests for permission to work, as well as numerous related school documents and memos. McCabe told Dahling in an April 1961 phone conversation that during the previous year she had “cautioned him about his playboy ways. Subject [Obama] replied that he would ‘try’ to stay away from the girls,” according to Dahling’s memo.12

  He didn’t try very hard. Early on, Obama gained a reputation as a party man who liked his whiskey straight up. Although he worked diligently, he was also a regular at gatherings at Atherton House and the Pacific House, another hangout popular with international students. Obama would grab a guitar and entertain the crowd by crooning his favorite Kenyan lullabies. And at private gatherings, he would drink. By his early twenties Obama already had a legendary capacity for his beloved Johnnie Walker, and he would regularly down half a dozen drinks as his jokes grew increasingly raucous and his come-ons to women more overt. At such moments no one had the faintest idea that he was married with two small children back at home. “He was a real ladies’ man,” recalled Dorothy Heckman Gregor, a graduate student at the time. “He was always ready to engage you as a woman beyond the normal conversation, you know, to take it one step further. Today you’d call it ‘coming on.’ Part of the attraction was his intellect. He was just a really smart guy. But he was also a very good conversationalist. Women were really attracted to him.”

  In the fall of 1959 Juditha Clark Murashige was fresh back from several months at a work-study program in Tanganyika and Kenya, and she immediately noticed a striking African man walking across the UH campus. When the attractive freshman with the cascade of blonde hair approached him, Obama leapt to his favorite topic and the two had a series of coffee dates over the next few months. One night they ventured down to Waikiki beach and dropped into Don the Beachcomber’s, a trendy nightclub soon to become a tourist hot spot. They did not sit long. As the throbbing music grew louder, Obama spun aro
und on his toes and twirled Murashige across the dance floor, her hair streaming behind her. Watching as their bodies glided toward one another, almost pressing together before they swung apart again, patrons at the bar grew silent. An ambitious African student was one thing, but a sweaty black man handling a pale co-ed in public was something else entirely. “This was a fairly upper-crust kind of crowd, and we were laughing and having fun,” recalled Murashige. “People were watching us, of course, and that made it even more fun. I think some people didn’t know what to think.”

  Although Obama cultivated an active social life, he devoted much of his energy to his work. Early on, he decided he would try to complete his coursework as swiftly as he could, partly to hasten his return to Kenya but also to reduce his tuition. By his second semester Obama was already running out of money and took a job that paid $5 a day as a dishwasher at the Ink Blot Coffee Shop downtown. During his first summer he worked for the Dole Corporation doing odd jobs for $1.33 an hour.13 Money would be a perennial problem throughout his years in the United States, and Obama was constantly under pressure to come up with the following year’s tuition.