Debunking of Obama’s bestselling 1995 memoir,
Dreams from My Father.
Maraniss’s Barack Obama: The Story punctures two
sets of falsehoods: The family tales Obama passed on, unknowing; and the
stories Obama made up. The 672-page book closes before Obama enters law school,
and Maraniss has promised another volume, but by its conclusion I counted 38
instances in which the biographer convincingly disputes significant elements of
Obama’s own story of his life and his family history.
The two strands of falsehood run together, in that
they often serve the same narrative goal: To tell a familiar, simple, and
ultimately optimistic story about race and identity in the 20th Century.
The
false notes in Obama’s family lore include his mother’s claimed experience of
racism in Kansas, and incidents of colonial brutality toward his Kenyan
grandfather and Indonesian step-grandfather. Obama’s deliberate distortions
more clearly serve a single narrative: Race. Obama presents himself through the
book as “blacker and more disaffected” than he really was, Maraniss writes, and
the narrative “accentuates characters drawn from black acquaintances who played
lesser roles his real life but could be used to advance a line of thought,
while leaving out or distorting the actions of friends who happened to be
white.”
That the core narrative of Dreams could have
survived this long into Obama’s public life is the product in part of an
inadvertent conspiracy between the president and his enemies. His memoir evokes
an angry, misspent youth; a deep and lifelong obsession with race; foreign and
strongly Muslim heritage; and roots in the 20th Century’s self-consciously
leftist anti-colonial struggle. Obama’s conservative critics have, since the
beginnings of his time on the national scene, taken the self-portrait at face
value, and sought to deepen it to portray him as a leftist and a foreigner.
Reporters who have sought to chase some of the
memoir’s tantalizing yarns have, however, long suspected that Obama might not
be as interesting as his fictional doppelganger. “Mr. Obama’s account of his
younger self and drugs…significantly differs from the recollections of others
who do not recall his drug use,” the New York Times’s Serge Kovaleski reported
dryly in February of 2008, speculating that Obama had “added some writerly
touches in his memoir to make the challenges he overcame seem more dramatic.”
(In one of the stranger entries in the annals of political spin, Obama’s
spokesman defended his boss’s claim to have sampled cocaine, calling the book
“candid.”)
Maraniss’s deep and entertaining biography will
serve as a corrective both to Obama’s mythmaking and his enemies’. Maraniss
finds that Obama’s young life was basically conventional, his personal
struggles prosaic and later exaggerated. He finds that race, central to Obama’s
later thought and included in the subtitle of his memoir, wasn’t a central
factor in his Hawaii youth or the existential struggles of his young adulthood.
And he concludes that attempts, which Obama encouraged in his memoir, to view
him through the prism of race “can lead to a misinterpretation” of the sense of
“outsiderness” that Maraniss puts at the core of Obama’s identity and ambition.
Maraniss opens with a warning: Among the falsehoods
in Dreams is the caveat in the preface that “for the sake of compression, some
of the characters that appear are composites of people I’ve known, and some
events appear out of precise chronology.”
“The character creations and rearrangements of the
book are not merely a matter of style, devices of compression, but are also
substantive,” Maraniss responds in his own introduction. The book belongs in
the category of “literature and memoir, not history and autobiography,” he
writes, and “the themes of the book control character and chronology.”
Maraniss, a veteran Washington Post reporter whose
biography of Bill Clinton, First in His Class, helped explain one complicated
president to America, dove deep and missed deadlines for this biography. And
the book’s many fact-checks are rich and, at times, comical.
In Dreams, for instance, Obama writes of a friend
named “Regina,” a symbol of the authentic African-American experience that
Obama hungers for (and which he would later find in Michelle Robinson).
Maraniss discovers, however, that Regina was based on a student leader at
Occidental College, Caroline Boss, who was white. Regina was the name of her
working-class Swiss grandmother, who also seems to make a cameo in Dreams.
Maraniss also notices that Obama also entirely cut
two white roommates, in Los Angeles and New York, from the narrative, and
projected a racial incident onto a New York girlfriend that he later told
Maraniss had happened in Chicago.
Some of Maraniss’s most surprising debunking,
though, comes in the area of family lore, where he disputes a long string of
stories on three continents, though perhaps no more than most of us have picked
up from garrulous grandparents and great uncles. And his corrections are, at
times, a bit harsh.
Obama grandfather “Stanley [Dunham]’s two defining
stories were that he found his mother after her suicide and that he punched his
principal and got expelled from El Dorado High. That second story seems to be
in the same fictitious realm as the first,” Maraniss writes. As for Dunham’s
tale of a 1935 car ride with Herbert Hoover, it’s a “preposterous…fabrication.”
As for a legacy of racism in his mother’s Kansas
childhood, “Stanley was a teller of tales, and it appears that his grandson got
these stories mostly from him,” Maraniss writes.
Across the ocean, the family story that Hussein
Onyango, Obama’s paternal grandfather, had been whipped and tortured by the
British is “unlikely”: “five people who had close connections to Hussein
Onyango said they doubted the story or were certain that it did not happen,”
Maraniss writes. The memory that the father of his Indonesian stepfather,
Soewarno Martodihardjo, was killed by Dutch soldiers in the fight for
independence is “a concocted myth in almost all respects.” In fact,
Martodihardjo “fell off a chair at his home while trying to hang drapes,
presumably suffering a heart attack.”
Most families exaggerate ancestors’ deeds. A more
difficult category of correction comes in Maraniss’s treatment of Obama’s
father and namesake. Barack Obama Sr., in this telling, quickly sheds whatever
sympathy his intelligence and squandered promise should carry. He’s the son of
a man, one relative told Maraniss, who is required to pay an extra dowry for
one wife “because he was a bad person.”
He was also a domestic abuser.
“His father Hussein Onyango, was a man who hit
women, and it turned out that Obama was no different,” Maraniss writes. “I
thought he would kill me,” one ex-wife tells him; he also gave her
sexually-transmitted diseases from extramarital relationships.
It’s in that context that Maraniss corrects a
central element of Obama’s own biography, debunking a story that Obama’s mother
may well have invented: That she and her son were abandoned in Hawaii in 1963.
“It was his mother who left Hawaii first, a year
earlier than his father,” Maraniss writes, confirming a story that had first
surfaced in the conservative blogosphere. He suggests that “spousal abuse”
prompted her flight back to Seattle.
Obama’s own fairy-tales, meanwhile, run toward
Amercan racial cliché. “Ray,” who is in the book “a symbol of young blackness,”
is based on a character whose complex racial identity — half Japanese, part
native American, and part black — was more like Obama’s, and who wasn’t a close
friend.
“In the memoir Barry and Ray, could be heard
complaining about how rich white haole girls would never date them,” Maraniss
writes, referring to Hawaii’s upper class, and to a composite character whose
blackness is. “In fact, neither had much trouble in that regard.”
As Obama’s Chicago mentor Jerry Kellman tells
Maraniss in a different context, “Everything didn’t revolve around race.”
Those are just a few examples in biography whose
insistence on accuracy will not be mistaken for pedantry. Maraniss is a master
storyteller, and his interest in revising Obama’s history is in part an
interest in why and how stories are told, a theme that recurs in the memoir.
Obama himself, he notes, saw affectionately through his grandfather Stanley’s
fabulizing,” describing the older man’s tendency to rewrite “history to conform
with the image he wished for himself.” Indeed, Obama comes from a long line of
storytellers, and at times fabulists, on both sides.
Dick Opar, a distant Obama relative who served as a
senior Kenyan police official, and who was among the sources dismissing legends
of anti-colonial heroism, put it more bluntly.
“People make up stories,” he told Maraniss.
The media firestorm that has erupted this past week
over alleged inconsistencies in Dr. Ben Carson’s life story has been
breathtakingly hypocritical. Not only is
there no evidence that Carson embellished any aspect of his personal biography,
this kind of scrutiny was never even remotely applied to President Obama when
he was a candidate.
Here is a list of just some of the many
inaccuracies in Barack Obama’s personal bio that the media never bothered to
investigate.
From IJ Review:
1. “Obama’s Staff Corrects WWII Story” (New York
Times)
In response to a question at a Memorial Day
appearance in New Mexico, Mr. Obama said an uncle helped liberate the Nazi death
camp at Auschwitz during World War II. The problem? That story didn’t track
with history, considering Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet forces.
2. Selma Birth Connection (Independent Journal)
“[W]hen the president spoke before an audience in
Selma back in 2007, Obama credited the civil rights march as the inspiration
for his conception. The only problem with that, as conservative punditMichelle
Malkin points out, is that the president was already three years old when the
march occurred in 1965.”
3. “Obama Overstates Kennedys’ Role in Helping His
Father” (Washington Post)
Addressing civil rights activists in Selma, Ala., a
year ago, Sen. Barack Obama traced his “very existence” to the generosity of
the Kennedy family, which he said paid for his Kenyan father to travel to
America on a student scholarship and thus meet his Kansan mother.
The Camelot connection has become part of the
mythology surrounding Obama’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.
[…]
It is a touching story — but the key details are
either untrue or grossly oversimplified.
4. “Tale of British brutality toward Barack Obama’s
grandfather probably untrue, book claims” (The Telegraph)
It is a harrowing tale of torture in a colonial
prison in Kenya that is said to explain the President’s coolness towards
Britain and even his removal of Winston Churchill’s bust from the Oval Office.
David Maraniss, the author of Mr Obama’s most
comprehensive biography so far, said five associates of Hussein Onyango Obama
doubt he was even jailed. One told him: “People make up stories”. […]
… Maraniss claims that while “incidents of that
sort certainly happened”, it “seems unlikely” that Mr Obama’s grandfather was
one such victim. “Five people who had close connections to Hussein Onyango said
they doubted the story or were certain it did not happen,” he wrote in Barack
Obama – The Making of the Man.
5. The heroic story of Obama’s step-grandfather
dying while fighting the Dutch is untrue (New York Times)
Mr. Maraniss attributes some of the differences to
the kind of family lore that is often exaggerated. He notes that the story
about the death of Mr. Obama’s step-grandfather — allegedly killed while
fighting Dutch troops in Indonesia — was “a concocted myth in almost all
respects.” Mr. Maraniss writes that he died trying to hang drapes.
6. “Obama Lied About Mother’s Health Insurance
Problem” (Commentary)
During the 2008 campaign and throughout the
subsequent debate over his health care legislation, President Obama used his
mother’s experience as a cancer patient fighting to get coverage to pay for
treatment for what her insurer said was a pre-existing condition as an
emotional argument to sway skeptics. However, a new book by New York Times
reporter Janny Scott has revealed this story appears to be a fabrication.
The Times reports today (in a story buried on page
14 rather than on the front page) that during the course of researching her
book, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother, Scott uncovered
correspondence showing “the 1995 dispute concerned a Cigna disability insurance
policy and that her actual health insurer had apparently reimbursed most of her
medical expenses without argument.” In response to inquiries, “a White House
spokesman chose not to dispute either Ms. Scott’s account or Mr. Obama’s
memory, while arguing that Mr. Obama’s broader point remained salient.”
7. Obama makes white Occidental College classmate
“Regina” into African-American aka “composite girlfriend” (Washington Times)
“During an interview in the Oval Office, Obama
acknowledged that, while Genevieve was his New York girlfriend, the description
in his memoir was a ‘compression’ of girlfriends, including one who followed
Genevieve [Cook] when he lived in Chicago,” Mr. Maraniss wrote in the new
biography.
“In ‘Dreams from My Father,’ Obama chose to
emphasize a racial chasm that unavoidably separated him from the woman he
described as his New York girlfriend,” wrote the author, who interviewed the
woman. “None of this happened with Genevieve. She remembered going to the
theater only once with Barack, and it was not to see a work by a black
playwright.”
Mr. Maraniss said the president acknowledged this
scene did not happen with Ms. Cook.
8. President Obama’s “improbable love” narrative
(Jack Cashill)
In all the talk about David Maraniss’ new book,
“Barack Obama: The Story,” the chattering classes seem to have overlooked the
most significant of Maraniss’ revelations, namely that the story on which Obama
based his 2008 candidacy is “received myth, not the truth.”
“My parents shared not only an improbable love,”
said Obama famously in his 2004 Democratic Convention keynote, “they shared an
abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation.” This concept of
multicultural romance shaped his persona and his campaigns. […]
As Maraniss concedes, these two young people shared
very close to nothing. “In the college life of Barack Obama in 1961 and 1962,”
writes Maraniss, “as recounted by his friends and acquaintances in Honolulu,
there was no Ann; there was no baby.”
Although Maraniss talked to many of Obama Sr.’s
friends, none of the credible ones ever so much as saw him with Obama’s mother,
Ann Dunham.
9. Obama and his mother not “abandoned” by father
in 1963 (Buzzfeed)
It’s in that context that Maraniss corrects a
central element of Obama’s own biography, debunking a story that Obama’s mother
may well have invented: That she and her son were abandoned in Hawaii in 1963.
“It was his mother who left Hawaii first, a year earlier
than his father,” Maraniss writes, confirming a story that had first surfaced
in the conservative blogosphere. He suggests that “spousal abuse” prompted her
flight back to Seattle.
Obama’s own fairy-tales, meanwhile, run toward
Amercan [sic] racial cliché.
At least 38 false accounts of President Obama’s
life story were documented in just the Maraniss biography, as counted by
Buzzfeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith.
Additional falsehoods have been detected in Obama’s
biographies, many of them apparently designed to further a narrative of
overcoming racial adversity and an underprivileged life.
That’s weird.
I don’t remember reading a story in Politico with the title “OBAMA LIED
ABOUT FAMILY’S MILITARY SERVICE” or “OBAMA FABRICATES SELMA STORY”.
The double standard that the media engaged in here
is stunning.
If Ben Carson enhanced his life story, that is
wrong, and he should be held accountable for it so the argument here is not two
wrongs make a right.
However, the media has a responsibility to search for
the truth in all situations regardless of political affiliation and they failed
miserably during the two times that Barack Obama ran for president.
On top of that, all indications point to the fact
that Ben Carson was telling the truth and he remains largely unscathed after
weeks of media scrutiny.
