by Sally Jacobs
As Obama sought to tailor his résumé for the college admissions staff, his ever-changing marital status changed yet again. Suddenly, Kezia was back in the picture. Obama described his family on his résumé as “a wife and two children in Kenya.” He made no mention of Dunham or Barack Jr., nor would he ever tell the Kirks about his Hawaiian family. If Obama was going to be competitive on the Ivy League circuit, claiming a proper African family would be a better bet than an interracial one of questionable legitimacy.
With talented Africans much sought after on campuses across the country, Obama, now twenty-five, was in the catbird seat—as long as no one probed his marital status. He submitted applications to Harvard, Yale, the University of California at Berkeley, and the New School in New York, and he sought financial assistance from them all. When his letters returned, he again had a choice. The New School offered a complete scholarship, including not only tuition and board but also a campus job that would enable him to support Dunham and his son. Harvard offered a scholarship too, but only enough to cover tuition.
There was no discussion. Barack Obama never entertained the possibility of compromise. If he had, he might have considered enrolling at a highly competitive school in New York that would have enabled him to keep his small family together. But Obama was meant for the best, and that meant Harvard. With only tuition covered, Dunham and the baby would be excluded. Years later Dunham would describe the moment to her son. “Barack was such a stubborn bastard, he had to go to Harvard. ‘How can I refuse the best education?’ he told me,” Dunham said to Obama Jr. “That’s all he could think about, proving that he was the best.”32
Even before he left Hawaii, Obama was looking homeward. In a letter he wrote to Tom Mboya weeks before he headed to the mainland, Obama said he planned to write his dissertation on the economics of underdeveloped areas and hoped to complete his PhD in two years. Although he had enjoyed his stay in Hawaii, he added, “I will be accelerating my coming home as much as I can.” Obama reminded Mboya that his wife was living in Nairobi and added, “I would really appreciate any help that you can give her.”33
Mboya was irked. Although he was pleased with Obama’s achievement and was keeping his eye on his maturation as an economist in hopes of putting him to work in the government upon his return, he was also annoyed with Obama’s request. He did not feel that Obama was taking sufficient responsibility for supporting his wife and children in Kenya. Whether Mboya was aware of Obama’s family in Hawaii is unclear. Mboya considered himself a family-oriented man, and he was concerned about Kezia and the children. He wrote back chiding Obama for “not taking better care of his family,” said Susan Mboya, Tom Mboya’s daughter. “It was all very well to further your career, but only if you know how to take care of your responsibilities.”
Prodded by Mboya’s words, Obama did not alter his plans, but instead he took steps to make sure that Kezia and his two children were being properly taken care of. For this he turned to Helen Roberts, the Palo Alto woman who had worked closely with Betty Mooney at the Literacy Center in Nairobi and had returned to Kenya earlier in the year. Obama had already asked Roberts if she would help Kezia find a school she might attend in Nairobi and keep an eye on his small family. Roberts, a straightlaced Methodist who had taken a number of students under her wing, promptly took action.
Within a month Kezia was in Nairobi taking courses at the Church Army school six hours a day and two hours at night while her children stayed behind in Kogelo with Obama’s parents. Although working as a volunteer at the literacy center and dependent upon the small social security check that was virtually her sole source of income, Roberts took it upon herself to buy Kezia some sorely needed glasses and several bolts of material with which to make clothes. Impressed by Kezia’s desire to improve herself, Roberts wrote to a fellow literacy worker named Alice Sanderson in May that she was prepared to support Kezia as long as she was in Nairobi. “I got her material for three dresses and will keep her supplied with necessary funds while I am here,” Roberts wrote. “She is learning fast and is very anxious to be a suitable wife for Barack when he returns.”34
By July Kezia had become settled in her urban life and was beginning to think about bringing her children to the city as well. But Roberts was concerned about not only who would support them but also where they would live. “Then the children will also be my responsibility and their transportation and room, etc.,” Roberts wrote her friend. “I don’t know what they’ll do after I leave. I hope Barack can get enough work to look after them once he gets started in school again. Kezia is very nice and does many things for herself. She can make her own clothes and those for the children, she can knit too.... So I think Barack will notice quite a difference in her when he at last returns.”35
But Obama was not pleased with his children’s living arrangements. He did not want the children living with his parents and wrote to Kezia saying so. Nor did his and Kezia’s family members feel that living alone in Nairobi with the children was safe. Although Kezia’s brother was living in the city, he did not have enough room for her to move in. As no one seemed quite sure where she should go, Kezia returned to Kendu Bay to be with her children during their school vacation. When both children became sick at the end of the month, Roberts gave Kezia more money for their medical care. But she also wrote a stern letter to Obama suggesting that he should be ready “to make some sacrifice for his family,” as she wrote Sanderson. “Barack has never even seen the little girl but he must have known about it before he left Kenya.”36
Obama urged Kezia to remain with her parents in Kendu Bay, and in the end she stayed alternately at both their parents’ homes. But by late August Obama had already turned his attention elsewhere. The bird was ready to fly again. Barack, otenga piny kiborne, as his old Alego neighbors liked to say in their own variation of Hussein Onyango’s pakruok: For Barack, the bush hawk, no distance is too far.
As he headed east toward Cambridge, leaving in his wake two young families who had no idea whether he would be sending them support, Obama made several stops to visit friends and see some of the country along the way. He paused to catch up with Hal Abercrombie, Neil’s brother and one of the original Stardust gang, who lived with his wife, Shirley, in San Francisco. Obama wanted to take the couple out for an elegant dinner, and he chose the Blue Fox, a city landmark renowned for its extensive wine cellar and haute cuisine. They were going to celebrate their good fortune of being young and at large in one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. And they would toast Obama’s departure to Cambridge the following day, thus launching the next chapter of his educational career.
But things did not turn out exactly as they had planned. As the threesome stepped onto the restaurant’s plush red carpet, the maître d’ took a close look at the young blonde couple and their black companion. Although there were several empty tables in the front of the restaurant, the maître d’ directed them to a table in the rear just a few feet from the kitchen door and largely obscured from the rest of the room, apparently in an effort to conceal their dark-skinned guest.
The three of them sat in stunned silence for a moment, unable to quite believe what had just happened to them. They decided to ask for a different table and waited for their server to return. And then they waited some more. Not only were they exiled to the rear of the restaurant, no one, it seemed, was in any hurry to take their order. “We all knew it was race, even in San Francisco,” said Abercrombie. “And Obama was livid. I don’t think anything like that had ever happened to him before.”
Hawaii was already feeling far away. The spirit of aloha, it seemed, did not travel far.
6
THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNIVERSITY
The worn asphalt paths that wind about the campus of Harvard University have felt the tread of generations of aspiring students, some of whom have gone on to greatness and glory, some of whom have not. Two of the men who have walked briskly along those vaunted avenues, supremely confident that they would be
among the former category, were both named Barack Hussein Obama.
The first to arrive found a home in the Littauer Center, a formidable granite structure with an imposing six-columned portico and the last of the Harvard buildings constructed in the imperial tradition. That he had made his way from a barefoot childhood on the parched African earth not far from the equator to the nation’s oldest and most prestigious center of learning was a monumental achievement.
Barack Obama II, his son, would earn distinction nearly three decades later in the university’s far more modest Gannett House, a three-story Greek Revival structure built in 1838. Just a few hundred yards away from the stolid Littauer, Gannett was the home of the illustrious Harvard Law Review. There, second-year law student Barack Obama II was named the first black president of the 103-year-old journal, a position considered to be the highest honor a student can attain at Harvard Law School. That victory earned him his first taste of national media attention and positioned him on the path that led ultimately to the presidency.
In a way Harvard was as close as the Obama father and son would come to each other. Although they of course never met on the Harvard campus, their presence there represented a pinnacle of achievement that linked them far more than the awkward month they spent together in a Honolulu high-rise. What had brought them to Cambridge in the first place were the very characteristics that they shared: well-honed intellects, fierce ambition, and the daring to aspire far beyond the circumstances to which each was born. If they had met on the gently curving walkway that leads from Littauer to Gannett, paralleling bustling Cambridge Street, each might have recognized strokes of himself in the other.
One cannot help but wonder how the two Obama men might have regarded each other. Did Obama the younger dwell much on his elusive father during his years at Harvard? During the long hours that he toiled over legal articles on the third floor of Gannett, did he peer through the window at Littauer and imagine his father loping up the granite stairs, his books held close to his pressed white shirt? How deeply did he resent that his father had chosen Littauer and all that it represented—Harvard, career, his own future in Kenya—over his infant son in Hawaii? The subject clearly weighed heavily on his mind, for during the busy months after his election as president of the law review, Obama signed a contract to write his memoir, Dreams from My Father, a heartfelt rumination on his relationship with his absent father and his painful discovery of all that he was not. That a twenty-nine-year-old Harvard student felt his life even worthy of a memoir suggests a robust measure of self-confidence, one reminiscent of that exhibited by a certain young Kenyan in his twenties as he interviewed for a seat on the airlift to the United States.
And what about Obama Sr.? What would he have said to the slender young man in tattered blue jeans and leather jacket, his very American second son? Would he have indulged in a rare moment of paternal pride or admonished his namesake to work harder at his studies, as he had done decades earlier? Or would he have cringed in remorse at the decision he had made as an equally ambitious young man himself to abandon his small family in Hawaii in order to pursue his own dream? Perhaps he would have tried to explain the many years that they had been apart.
For both young men, their time at Harvard was a richly formative period: for the son, the law; for the father, the critical shift in economic thinking underway that would make him of singular value on his return to Kenya. For both, their Harvard pedigree would ultimately become an aspect central to their identity, although in sharply contrasting ways.
On his arrival in Cambridge in the fall of 1962, Obama must surely have thrilled at the sight of the venerable ivy-shrouded brick buildings that flank Harvard Yard, feeling the weight of more than three centuries of academic ritual. For a man instilled with a deep reverence for the power of the mind and the practical virtues of an education, a man who had walked miles as a child just to get to a tin-roofed schoolhouse where he had had to share the tattered and dusty primers, Harvard must have felt other-worldly. This was no second-rate state university where students stepped around chicken poop in their flips-flops. This was the epicenter of learning in America—some would say the world—a monument to the potential of the human mind. But as Obama pointedly noted, even Harvard wasn’t perfect.
“I find Harvard a very stimulating place at least intellectually,” he wrote in December to Sylvia Baldwin, a friend in Hawaii who had hosted a number of international students for meals with her family in her home. “It sort of reminds me of Cambridge University, but rather artificially. Nonetheless, I do think this is a very good institution and I will stay here at least for two years to three years depending on when I am able to finish my dissertation.”1
Obama’s years on the Charles River would coincide with a momentous period not only in American political life but also in that of the University as well. In 1962 the aroma of the placid 1950s still lingered heavily. Students still wore ties at meals and women were forbidden in upperclassmen’s dorm rooms after midnight.2 But the issues that would so luridly dominate the later part of the decade—civil rights, drugs, the women’s movement—were already beginning to percolate. Harvard psychology lecturer Timothy Leary and assistant professor Richard Alpert, who would soon be known as Ram Dass, openly promoted the use of hallucinatory drugs like LSD and psilocybin to students, saying they were no more harmful than “psychoanalysis or a four year enrollment at Harvard College,” until the college sent them packing in 1963.3
Harvard and Radcliffe students were becoming closely attuned to burgeoning issues of race. They picketed Howard Johnson’s restaurants throughout Boston in protest of the chain’s segregation policies in the South and contested the complete absence of any tenured black professors at their own schools. Black nationalist Malcolm X would draw increasingly large crowds during three visits to the campus between 1961 and 1964 and had already prompted soul searching among the handful of black students there. Weeks after Obama arrived, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the future of integration at the Harvard Law School and urged Negroes to take a greater role of leadership in the fight for equality. If necessary, he said, the Negro should be prepared to die in their quest for fair treatment, but to “die quietly.”4
But the biggest news on campus early in the decade was a Harvard man named Jack. Just one year earlier John F. Kennedy, Harvard class of 1940 and one of a host of Kennedy family members to boast a Harvard degree, had reached heights barely imaginable even at University Hall when he claimed the U.S. presidency. A resident of Winthrop House and a member of the varsity swim team during his student days, Kennedy had richly marbled ties to the school. As Kennedy assembled the team that would march into the New Frontier behind him, he cherry-picked from Harvard’s ranks.
On the stately quadrangle that runs from Grays to Holworthy Halls in Harvard Yard, the mood was ecstatic. In the weeks after the election, speculation on who would be summoned to Washington, DC, and for what post was widespread and in some cases the subject of a wager or two. In the end more than fifty Harvardians would get the call, including the brilliant and charismatic McGeorge Bundy, who left his post as the dean of arts and sciences to become National Security Adviser; the eloquent John Kenneth Galbraith, who set off from the Economics Department to become envoy to India; and the erudite Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who became a special assistant in the White House as well as resident historian. No less than four Harvard men assumed positions in the president’s Cabinet. 5 The raid on Harvard prompted much commentary in the media, such as the New York Times columnist James Reston’s notorious quip that soon there “will be nothing left at Harvard but Radcliffe.”6
The campus newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, kept breathless watch of the comings and goings of key players during the two and a half years that Kennedy was president and took close note of the doings of other Kennedy family members as well. When newly elected Senator Edward Kennedy (class of ’54) gave his first speech in Washington, DC, it was front-page news. So too when the undergraduate hu
mor magazine, the Harvard Lampoon, voted Caroline Kennedy “Little Girl of the Year” in 1963, the news appeared on page one. And during the spring of that same year the paper exulted in the announcement that the university’s Board of Overseers, of which Kennedy was a member, would hold its spring meeting in Washington, DC, and would dine at the White House—for the president’s convenience, of course.7
Much has been written about the intimate—some would say incestuous—relationship between Harvard University and the Kennedy administration. But Richard Norton Smith summed up the relationship perhaps most succinctly when he wrote in his book The Harvard Century that “Under John Kennedy, the University sometimes imagined itself to be the fourth branch of government, an impression JFK did little to dispel.”8 It was an intoxicating example of how academic brilliance could position a person next to the ultimate seat of power, and as such it held a magnetic allure for Barack Obama. Indeed, he applied himself to his studies at Harvard with greater determination than ever before, confident that the same kind of elevation that Kennedy had offered his contemporaries would be proffered to him once he returned to Kenya and Tom Mboya’s potent inner circle. Destiny, it seemed, had determined that Obama should join the elect.
Obama arrived at Harvard at a time when the campus was swathed as never before in a self-confidence bordering on hubris. Part of that was due also to significant changes in the cast of the student body that had occurred in recent years. Harvard had worked hard since World War II to broaden its mandate so that by the early 1960s it was no longer the parochial arena of the Brahmin gentry alone but instead home to a much broader swath of backgrounds and intellectual potential. As the pool of applicants knocking at Harvard’s door steadily grew, the number of Harvard alumnae offspring admitted had declined, to the consternation of the school’s admissions officers. Increasingly, the school had its pick. The result was a more sophisticated and academically talented pool of candidates. To say that the students who ultimately selected were supremely self-assured, many of whom were prize winners, Merit Scholars, or just plain-old first in their class, doesn’t begin to do them justice. As Smith describes the students of the time: “Their view of Harvard’s significance roughly matched their own self-estimate, and neither was notably modest.... At their best, they were remorseless in their precocity, stimulating in their company, and challenging in their conversation. At worst, they were neurotic, opinionated grade hounds. Onlookers noted a syndrome called ‘Valedictorian’s Ego,’ wherein over-achievers were thrown together, forced into mortal combat to justify their well-worn halos.”9 In short, they were a lot like Obama.