Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Loves, and Letters of America's First Postmodern President

by Jack Cashill

  Throughout his career, Said returned again and again to the source of his own moral power—the forced exile from “my beautiful old house.” For Palestinians and postmodernists, the house at 10 Brenner Street in Jerusalem was at least as iconic as a certain stable in nearby Bethlehem. The Palestinian Heritage Foundation honored Said with a portrait of the house. Harper’s Magazine commemorated Said’s celebratory visit to the house. The BBC featured the house in a documentary, which showed, among other indignities, Said fussing to get it back from the Israeli authorities.

  Although the house would stand, the fable Said had constructed was about to be deconstructed. By 1998, the year of the documentary and the year he and Obama schmoozed in Chicago, an Israeli scholar named Justus Reid Weiner had already done two years of hard-nosed research on the excellent adventures of Edward Said. “Virtually everything I learned,” Weiner would write, “contradicts the story of Said’s early life as Said has told it.”

  Weiner released his findings a year later in the September 1999 issue of the influential Jewish magazine Commentary. As Weiner revealed, Said’s early life was even more charmed and elitist than Obama’s own and his origins story just as shaky. Yes, Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935 but only because maternity care—Jewish doctors?—was better there than in Egypt. After his birth, the family hightailed it back to Cairo, where his father, a naturalized American citizen, had been living for the last decade and continued to grow his prosperous office supply business.

  A Christian and an American citizen from birth, Said attended the best British schools in Cairo before leaving for the Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts, Princeton University, and ultimately Harvard. The famed house, Weiner learned, belonged to Said’s Jerusalem relatives. It was sufficiently small that the affluent Cairo cousins may never have even stayed there.

  Said was busted big-time. Weiner had proved beyond doubt that America’s most celebrated Palestinian refugee was not really a Palestinian or a refugee, let alone a Muslim. The whole moral basis for his postcolonial posturing as victim seemed shot. To its credit, the New York Times gave Weiner’s exposé decent coverage and confirmed his findings.

  Not surprisingly, however, when Said died four years later, the media buried the fraud along with his body. In a glowing obituary, the New York Times revived Said’s imaginary past, claiming in the obit’s opening that he had “spent his childhood” in Jerusalem and fled with his family “to Cairo in 1947 after the United Nations divided Jerusalem into Jewish and Arab halves.” The Times mentioned the Weiner research dismissively two thousand words into an otherwise laudatory 2,600-word obituary.

  The lack of diversity at the cultural gates makes cases like Said’s much more common than they ought to be. The gatekeepers tend to think scarily alike on social and political issues. Not unnaturally, they promote individuals who think as they do and they protect those from people who think otherwise. In their eyes, a favored artiste could do almost anything shy of telling a racial joke and not lose standing. And in the fall of 2008, no one was more favored—or less likely to tell a racial joke—than Barack Obama. Taking him on would not be easy.

  FUGITIVE DAYS

  Although I continued to dabble in literary detective work that September, I spent most of my spare moments on the Khalid al-Mansour angle. I strongly suspected that Obama had help with Dreams, but I saw no easy way of proving it or identifying his muse. I was more interested in how he had gotten into Harvard.

  One diary entry that I found caught my attention. Radical-turned-actor Peter Coyote entered it at the time of the 1996 Democratic National Convention. “After that,” Coyote wrote, “I inform Martha that I’m dragging her to the apartment of old friends, ex-Weathermen, Bernadine [sic] Dohrn and Bill Ayers, hosting a party for Senator Leahy. Perhaps Edward Said will be there.” I still don’t know who Martha is, but the entry got me to wondering whether an Ayers-Obama-Said-al-Mansour cabal had formed in the early 1980s back in New York City. If so, such a combine might have generated enough momentum to push Obama’s career along.

  To see if Obama and Ayers had crossed paths before Chicago, I ordered a copy of Bill Ayers’s 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days. The book had a memorable marketing history. In August 2001, Chicago magazine helped launch it with a color photo of Ayers, hands in pockets, face alight with his superior wisdom, feet firmly planted on an American flag. The article is aptly titled “No Regrets,” and the sympathetic author suggests no reason why Ayers should harbor any.

  The New York Times followed soon thereafter with a lengthy article of its own. Dinitia Smith begins her review of the book and its author with a now-famous quote from Ayers. “I don’t regret setting bombs,” Ayers tells her. “I feel we didn’t do enough.” Smith interviewed Ayers in his unproletarian “big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house” in Chicago’s Hyde Park.

  In the book, Ayers traces his career arc from his upbringing in a prosperous Chicago suburb to his emergence as a campus radical to his ten-year stint in the Weather Underground as a part-time bomber and full-time fugitive. As Smith notes, Ayers plays with the truth. Of the events related in the book he writes, “Is this, then, the truth? Not exactly. Although it feels entirely honest to me.” When questioned by Smith as to why someone should read a less than honest memoir, Ayers answers, “Obviously, the point is it’s a reflection on memory. It’s true as I remember it.”

  Given Ayers’s career as a bomber, the review is sober, lengthy, and exquisitely nonjudgmental. Despite the occasional quibble about Ayers’s career choices, Smith allows him the last word. “I was a child of privilege,” he tells her, “and I woke up to a world on fire. And hope and history rhymed.” If Ayers told Smith he lifted the “hope and history” line from Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy, she neglected to mention it.

  Under normal circumstances, a lengthy Times article titled “No Regrets for a Love of Explosives” would have propelled Fugitive Days onto the bestseller lists. But there was nothing normal about the day of this article’s publication. Within hours of the paper’s release, the world, or at least the Lower Manhattan part of it, was literally on fire. On this memorable September 11, more competent terrorists than Ayers had suddenly thrown his “love” into disrepute. If not literally, certainly emotionally, Ayers was forced underground again.

  The specter of Bill Ayers resurfaced dramatically during an April 2008 presidential debate broadcast live on ABC. Moderator and former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos threw Obama a curve that he likely expected at some point, but not on his home turf, a primary debate on network TV. His checked swing would mark his character as surely as Bill Clinton’s memorable whiff on the subject of “that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.”

  While addressing the “general theme of patriotism,” Stephanopoulos asked Obama about Ayers. “He was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s,” Stephanopoulos reminded the audience. “They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol, and other buildings. He’s never apologized for that.” He then asked Obama, “Can you explain that relationship for the voters and explain to Democrats why it won’t be a problem?”

  If Obama was caught asleep at the plate, there was a good reason why. David Axelrod thought he had retired the Ayers issue two months earlier. In February, Ben Smith of Politico had reported as gospel Axelrod’s claim that Obama scarcely knew Ayers. Their children “attend the same school,” said Axelrod, but the relationship went no deeper. When a reader alerted Smith that Ayers’s youngest child was twenty-three when Obama’s oldest child started kindergarten, Smith added a comically circuitous “update,” but the media shied from chasing the story or even chiding Axelrod. It was clear they wanted no part of Ayers.

  The Stephanopoulos question put Obama on the spot. “I know not the man,” he replied—no, excuse me, that was Peter on the subject of Jesus. On the subject of Ayers, Obama proved only slightly more straightforward. “This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” said Obama for the ages. “He’s not somebody who I exchange ideas from [sic] on a regular basis.
” Obama then went on to scold Stephanopoulos for daring to ask a question about a man who “engaged in detestable acts forty years ago, when I was eight years old.” To suggest that this relationship somehow reflected on him and his values, huffed Obama, “doesn’t make much sense.”

  Following the debate, just about every chatterbox in the chattering class fueled what the Los Angeles Times called a “storm of criticism.” Their rage was directed not at Obama for his evasiveness, but at Stephanopoulos for his effrontery. How dare he confront Obama with “such tired tripe,” said the Washington Post’s Tom Shales. How dare he ask Obama about an “obscure sixties radical,” said Michael Grunwald of Time.

  A Huffington Post blogger likened Stephanopoulos to the inevitable Joe McCarthy. He was one of many to do so. In the unkindest of cuts, several pundits accused him of conspiring with Sean Hannity. “The real story of this debate,” snarled MSNBC’s ever-suspicious Keith Olbermann, may be “where one of the moderators found his questions.”

  Not surprisingly, the ABC debate proved to be one of the topics about which the participants in the notorious JournoList had conspired. Before the conspiracy unraveled, Michael Calderone of Politico would classify Stephanopoulos’s grilling of Obama on Ayers and Jeremiah Wright as sixth among the “top ten media blunders of 2008.”

  If Ayers was marginally in play before the debate, he was clearly out of bounds afterward, at least in the mainstream arena. Obama had established his distance from this guy in the neighborhood, and God help the reporter or vice presidential candidate who imagined them more closely together.

  That kind of imagining was left to folks like myself in the blogosphere. Reading Fugitive Days recalled for me that eerily unstable age. I had just started graduate school at Purdue when Mark Rudd stopped by on the way to Chicago to recruit young Boilermakers for the now-infamous “Days of Rage.” Although I went to hear him, I was not tempted to join his children’s crusade. I knew only one Weather guy personally, but I knew the type well: soft, suburban, spoiled, self-righteous, petulant, pissed off at the old man. Circa 1969, universities abounded in revolutionary fodder.

  At the time, Ayers had a lower public profile than Rudd, who had held center stage at the Columbia University protests, and a much lower one than his future wife, Bernardine Dohrn, the miniskirted guerrilla hottie with her killer bod and folk-singer hair. In 1969, Dohrn attained a new level of notoriety at a Michigan “War Council.” Here she challenged her comrades to take aim on “Amerikkka” and wreak havoc within the “belly of the beast.” Dohrn then raised three fingers in a “fork salute” to Charlie Manson, recently arrested for the murder of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and seven others. “Dig it,” shrieked Dohrn. “First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach! Wild!” Years later, Dohrn would say she was just kidding.

  At the time, however, the young woman who held Ayers’s heart was the more demure—who wasn’t?—Diana Oughton. In Fugitive Days, he speaks of her as reverentially as Al once did of Tipper. “Diana was fair with glowing cheekbones, prominent forehead, powerful arms and legs,” Ayers writes. “She was somehow both elegant and simple, her golden hair and classic good looks balanced by a gaze that beamed out with unexpected intensity.”

  The prelude of Fugitive Days opens with Dohrn informing Ayers that Oughton had been killed in the explosion of a Greenwich Village bomb factory. Oughton and her comrades had been simply and elegantly plotting to plant an antipersonnel bomb at a dance for noncoms and their dates in nearby Fort Dix, New Jersey. This is a fact that Ayers readily concedes. Had they succeeded, we would remember Ayers today the way we remember Timothy McVeigh, and any kind of relationship with the man would have cost Obama a gig as alderman, let alone president.

  “The woman on the other end of the phone would save me soon,” writes Ayers of Dohrn, “and soon after that we would plunge together into a subterranean river, the strong, swift brown god of life pulling us forward for decades to come.” The guy that readers of Fugitive Days meet in this subterranean swamp is not someone they would probably want their president palling around with.

  Ayers may have outgrown his affection for violence, but his attraction to radical politics smoldered on. Like so many on the hard left, he supported those politics with whatever historical invention he could get away with. “If there is no God,” said Jean-Paul Sartre in his famous paraphrase of Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, “everything is permitted.”

  Ayers admits as much. “The old gods failed and the old truths left the world.” He continues: “Clear conclusions were mainly delusional, a luxury of religious fanatics and fools.” Having declared truth obsolete, Ayers goes on to say pretty much whatever serves his political purpose. “He was not interested in finding the truth but in proclaiming it,” British historian Paul Johnson said of Karl Marx, but he might as well have been talking about Ayers. To justify his bombing of the Pentagon, for instance, Ayers tells the reader that a century earlier abolitionist John Brown had “shot all the members of the grand jury.” Brown, of course, did no such thing.

  Nowhere is an ill word said about the demonstrably murderous thugs Ayers holds up as heroes: Castro, Che, Ho Chi Minh, or even Mao, arguably the greatest monster of the 20th century. As to Oughton and her two comrades who blew themselves up, Ayers wonders out loud how long it will take before America “imagines their actions as heroic.”

  The question that those of us not on the JournoList were asking in the fall of 2008 was how Obama responded to after-dinner stories chez Ayers that ended with the punch line “Kaboom.” Did he too imagine the Weather pals’ actions as “heroic”?

  One cultural artifact that sheds light on Obama’s milieu is Weather Underground, a watchable 2002 documentary on the soi-disant Weathermen and their times. Although superficially objective, the film allows the final comment of Rudd to stand as something of a thesis statement. “It was this knowledge that we couldn’t handle,” says Rudd, explaining the group’s turn to violence. “It was too big. We didn’t know what to do. In a way I still don’t know what to do with the knowledge.”

  The Russian equivalent for Rudd’s “big” knowledge is pravda, as in “larger truth” or “truth and justice.” In the Soviet era, Communists hammered the facts Procrustes-style until they fit the “truth.” Small c communists like Rudd and Ayers still do. By contorting every fact that did not naturally fit their template, the Weathermen and their allies concluded, in Ayers’s words, that America’s “intentions were evil and her justifications dissembling, her explanations dishonest, her every move false.” This was the “knowledge” uniquely intuited by the hard left that Rudd and his colleagues found “too big” to handle.

  In Weather Underground not one of the seven or eight Weathermen interviewed in 2002 questions this assumption about America and the Vietnam War. Neither do their liberal critics in the film, nor do the filmmakers for that matter. All that anyone questions are the futile ends to which the Weathermen applied their superior insights.

  The film offers no hint that Cambodia sunk into horrific genocide and Vietnam into a repressive Stalinist state after the Weathermen’s Communist heroes took over. No hint that the antiwar left ignored, or cheered, the horrific consequences of America’s withdrawal. In sum, no hint that the Weathermen’s larger truth was largely false.

  More troubling, in neither of their memoirs does either author give any sense that his “big” knowledge is any less true or relevant today than it was forty years ago. America was and remains, in Rudd’s words, “racist” and “imperialist.” It must be thus, as Ayers declaimed in a 2006 speech in Venezuela, because “capitalism promotes racism and militarism—turning people into consumers, not citizens.” In a 2006 essay, he describes America as “still the biggest threat to a world at peace and in balance.”

  If there is any one chapter in Dreams that shows how seamlessly Obama could have embraced this worldview, it is the one that documents his life in I
ndonesia, ages six to ten. Much has been made of his education as a Muslim during those years but not enough of his grooming as a secular humanist with a deeply ingrained contempt for his fellow Americans.

  The chapter reads like an extended parable on the subject of American imperialism. No doubt, terrible things happened in Indonesia shortly before Obama’s arrival in 1967. As intimated in Dreams, the United States, “obsessed with the march of communism through Indochina,” instigated a coup that resulted in the installation of a corrupt military dictatorship and the subsequent slaughter of perhaps a half million otherwise innocent communists.

  In reality, however, the Indonesian military led a counterrevolution to suppress a bloody coup by the huge and restless PKI, the communist party of Indonesia. Islamic political organizations took advantage of the upheaval and began slaughtering communists wherever they could find them. In those places like Bali, where Hindu groups ruled, the Hindus led the anti-PKI pogroms. One gets the sense that in Indonesia no one much liked the communists.

  Obama’s mom, the wide-eyed Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro, stumbled into the country just as the dust was settling on this mayhem. As attracted as she was to the multicultural ideal, she didn’t much like Indonesian health care or, come to think of it, Indonesian education. These Western weaknesses, however, did not prevent her from feeling purer than her fellow Americans. When her then husband Lolo Soetoro asked her to meet some of “her own people” at the American oil company where he worked, she shouted at him, “They are not my people.” In the midst of all these “ugly Americans,” Ann remained, in Obama’s words, “a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.”

  As a boy, Obama learned that perhaps the only thing exceptional about America was Barack Hussein Obama. Back in Hawaii, his communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, reinforced his mom’s ugly-American riff, and Obama soaked it in. In Dreams, he describes the Americanization of Hawaii as an “ugly conquest.” Missionaries brought “crippling diseases.” American companies carved up “the rich volcanic soil” and worked their indentured laborers of color “from sunup to sunset.” And during the war, of course, the government interned Hawaii’s “Japanese-Americans.”