The Other Barack (20 page)

Obama grew close to several of the newcomers whom he felt were his intellectual equal. One was Naranhkiri Tith, a worldly student of economics and the son of the former prime minister of Cambodia, Khim Tith. Another was a young American bound for the Foreign Service named Robert M. Ruenitz. The three took an economics course together and spent many hours discussing geopolitics—the role of communism in the developing world was their primary topic—over beers and pupus. Tith, a voluble debater, volunteered the three of them to speak on the subject at a local church, and soon they found themselves invited to appear at a number of local venues.

Each fell to their debate position by virtue of their life experience. Tith, who had observed the Hungarian Revolution and the Algerian War for independence while living in France in the mid-1950s, was a firm opponent of communism. Obama, who was drawn to the aspects of communism that he believed reflected African communalism, took the opposite side. Ruenitz, the diplomat, stayed the middle course. In time, Ruenitz dropped out, but the Obama-versus-Tith show found its way to several neighboring islands to appear before professional associations, municipal groups, and churches. “Obama and I were on opposite poles,” said Tith,
who went on to be a senior manager with the International Monetary Fund and an adjunct professor in international economics at Johns Hopkins University. “I did not believe communism could save the world. It was too good to be true and I gave examples of what I had seen. Obama senior was the opposite. He was always glorying about how communism had liberated Africa and Cuba. He had no idea what communism was all about. For him, communism was going to save the world. Capitalism was going to collapse.”

The East West crowd also partied together. One of their friends was Arnold Nachmanoff, a naval officer stationed at Pearl Harbor who often opened his home so they could listen to records and drink beer. Or they gathered round the worn rattan furniture at Atherton House and drank coffee. Obama particularly loved to socialize with the East West crowd, as international affairs largely dominated the conversation. But with a whiskey in hand, soon followed by one or two more, Obama would lapse into other topics as well, running the gamut from literature, African music and dance, and the latest news. Although he rarely brought a date, Obama was famously flirtatious and could always be counted on to leap to the dance floor when the music began. Tith found Obama highly entertaining but difficult to know. “He was detached. He never talked about his personal life or anything to do with home or his tribe,” recalled Tith. “So you only got so far. He never opened himself up, so you did not know him well. I liked him though. I was impressed by his intelligence. A very impressive guy.”

Less impressive was Obama's drinking. Some nights he drank so much whiskey he passed out in the middle of the party or slumped onto the dining table while still sitting in his chair. Other students, accustomed to the sight, would carefully step around his sleeping form or talk right over him. And when the party wound to a close, they would slap his cheeks and pull him to his feet. Although mildly embarrassed, Obama was unapologetic. “People talked about it, sure,” said Tith. “But sort of jokingly. I never mentioned it to him. It was none of my business.”

Propelled by the simmering discussion of communism, Obama entered his first class in Russian language in the fall of 1960 with enthusiasm. Introductory Russian was taught by Ella Wiswell in Room 209 of the new Physical Science Building, and she had established the Russian undergraduate
program several years earlier. One of his classmates was a slender young woman with expressive brown eyes who had recently graduated from Mercer Island High School in Seattle. Although Russian might hardly have been the expected choice for a girl freshly minted by the Seattle suburbs, Stanley Ann Dunham was never one for the predictable. The only child of a furniture salesman and a bank officer, Dunham had seen some of the world by the time she landed in Wiswell's classroom. Born in Wichita, Kansas, her ever-wandering father had moved his small family to California then to Oklahoma and with a foray into Texas before they wound up in Seattle in the mid-1950s. Her father, Stanley Dunham, a talkative dreamer, again decided to pick up stakes after his daughter graduated in June of 1960 to move to Honolulu, where he had been promised, as always, a bigger, better job that somehow always turned out to be somewhere else.

By then, Stanley Ann, as she was called as a girl, had grown succinct in explaining her unusual name. “My name is Stanley,” she would say. “My father wanted a boy, and that's that.” By the time Dunham arrived in Honolulu, she had dropped the Stanley. It wasn't cute anymore. Her name was Ann Dunham now, and she was a young woman. Although shy, Dunham had nonetheless asserted herself as an iconoclast, an independent thinker with decidedly liberal views. Like many self-respecting teenagers of the time, she abhorred the deadly conformity of the suburbs. She was an atheist who sported a campaign button for Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson and liked foreign movies and jazz. Although she was known for being a good and patient listener, she would not hesitate to roll her huge brown eyes in exaggerated disbelief at something she considered pompous or untrue. A dreamer like her father, she had a tendency to romanticize that enabled her to glide over human failings and foibles.

Dunham was also exceptionally bright. With a vast vocabulary and an intellect to match, she could hold her own on most any subject. And she didn't hesitate to challenge the sacred cows of her era. What was so good about democracy? What's so bad about communism? And why was capitalism so great?

She was a young woman who was quite clear that she wanted a life of the mind. No marriage for her, at least not yet. Even as a teenager, Dunham was already fascinated with other cultures and declared that she
would be an anthropologist. “You have to remember this was the era of June Cleaver,” explained Susan Botkin Blake, a classmate and close friend of Dunham's. “In the advertisements all the women cleaned their houses wearing high heels and girdles. So Stanley says she is going to be an anthropologist. What the hell is that? I didn't even know what an anthropologist was. I had to look it up in the dictionary.”

At the time she graduated high school, Dunham had been accepted at the University of Chicago and was eager to go. But her father put his foot down, saying she was too young. Nor would he permit her to enroll at the University of Washington, known as “U-Dub,” as many of her friends intended to do. Instead, Dunham and her parents headed for Honolulu a few days after commencement. Dunham was angry at her father, with whom she already had a prickly relationship. Annoyed at his protectiveness, Dunham declared to her friend, “Who ever heard of the University of Hawaii?”
¹⁵

But within weeks of starting school Dunham had changed her tune. Her classes were interesting, she wrote Blake. While her old classmates were tucked into nylons and girdles, she was wearing shorts and muumuus to class. And one other thing, she added: She was dating “a very interesting fellow in my Russian class. An African from Kenya.”

Many years later Dunham would describe to her son, Barack Jr., her first date with his father. Obama Sr. had asked her to meet him at one o'clock in front of the university library
.
She arrived before Obama and soon fell asleep in the warm sun. He got there an hour late. She awoke to find him peering down at her with a couple of his friends, saying, “serious as can be, ‘You see, gentlemen, I told you that she was a fine girl, and that she would wait for me.'”
¹⁶

He called her Anna, and their courtship was as swift as it was intense. In his book Obama ruminates about his mother's attraction to his father that warm day. He tells of going with his mother years later to see the movie
Black Orpheus
, a 1950s film remarkable because of its predominantly black and brown Brazilian cast, and it tells the tale of a pair of illfated lovers. When Dunham first saw it as a teenager, it was her first foreign film and she loved it. Obama Jr. suggests that the film's “depiction of childlike blacks ... was what my mother had carried with her to Hawaii all those years before, a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been
forbidden to a white middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of another life: warm, sensual, exotic, different.”
¹⁷

Dunham could not wait to tell her friends about her new boyfriend. In a Christmas card to Blake, Dunham wrote excitedly, “I'm in love with the African! I'm in love with the African.” Blake adds, “She always called him ‘the African,' and I remember writing her, ‘Does he have a name, this African?'”

Obama, however, said nothing of his new girlfriend to most of his friends on campus. This was hardly surprising because, despite all his talking, he was silent on the topic of personal matters. But he did take her to an occasional party with the friends with whom he hung out at the Stardust. She was the only girl Obama ever brought to their gatherings. Sitting quietly beside Obama, she spoke little herself and instead listened closely as the men—and it was mostly men at their gatherings—argued and laughed. Six years his junior and a head shorter, she was obviously smitten with her handsome beau. “Any female in his life, she was in
his
life, he was not particularly in [hers],” Abercrombie observed. “He was much more in love with his intellect than with a woman. And he did not change his ways at all to accommodate her. She was just with him. He was always the center of attention.”

Dunham became pregnant around the time she wrote Blake. Now she faced some hard choices. As much as Dunham loved her boyfriend of a few months, the decision to get married could not have been an easy one. Although mixed marriage was far more common in Hawaii than most anywhere else in the United States, accounting for 36 percent of the 5,298 marriages that occurred there in 1961,
¹⁸
unions between black and white were still rare, in large part because the number of blacks on the islands was so small.

Outside of Hawaii, the impediments facing mixed marriage were even greater. At the time miscegenation, or marriage between different races, was a felony in most of the twenty-two states in which it was banned.
¹⁹
Even in states where it was legal, many still regarded intermarriage as a shocking violation of the natural order of things.

When the young couple told their parents they intended to get married, the fireworks erupted as loudly on the shores of the Pacific as they did on the banks of Lake Victoria. Stanley and Madelyn Dunham had been
cordial to Obama when their daughter introduced him. They had both experienced racism firsthand during a one-year stint in Texas in 1951, during which, on one unforgettable day, Madelyn arrived home to find a group of children taunting her ten-year-old daughter and a friend who were sitting on the front lawn, with the children shouting, “Nigger lover!” and “Dirty Yankee!” Stanley Ann and her friend, who was black, were lying under a tree pretending to read a book, immobilized by fear.

Stanley saw himself as a bohemian. He liked jazz, read poetry, and counted among his closest friends a number of Jews. Madelyn too resisted conformist thinking and liked to come to a point of view on her own, all of which led their grandson to describe them as “vaguely liberal” in his book. They would have been inclined to welcome their daughter's new friend, he reasoned. But the Dunhams were furious when they learned she intended to marry Obama, worried about the vast cultural differences between the two.

There was also the small matter of Kezia, Obama's first wife in Kenya. That he also had two children, one of them only a year old, was a detail that he apparently neglected to mention to either Dunham or her parents. Obama had told school administrators that, according to Luo tradition, a man need only tell his wife that he wished to get a divorce in order to separate. And that he claimed to have done.
²⁰
However, divorce was extremely rare in the Luo culture. According to tribal customary law, a couple who wished to separate was required to appear before a council of village elders who would determine if a divorce was necessary. If it was deemed so, then the committee would assess the number of cows to be returned, a process known in Dholuo as
waro dhok
. Obama and Kezia had not been separated in such a way and were thus still fully married, according to Luo marital custom. All he seems to have told the Dunhams was that he was divorced.

Even after he married Dunham, Obama clearly considered Kezia to still be his wife and wrote letters in which he referred to her as such. To Obama, coming from a polygamous culture in which multiple wives were the norm, taking another wife would have been the predictable, even laudable thing to do. Indeed, he wrote to his family explaining that he was going to take a second wife. Kezia, still waiting for him back home, was disappointed but says she wasn't particularly surprised. But Obama
showed no desire to tell the Dunhams that he had a wife and two children waiting for him. Well aware of marital customs in the United States, Obama surely knew that Dunham's parents would not have permitted her to marry a man who already had a wife. What Dunham would have done if she had known the whole story, however, is another matter.

Madelyn was skeptical. More practical than her dreamer husband, she would say later that she had never particularly trusted Obama Sr.'s stories. “I am a little dubious of the things that people from foreign countries tell me,” she said in a rare 2004 interview. Obama, she added, “was . . . straaaaaange.”
²¹

When Hussein Onyango learned of the impending nuptials, he penned an angry letter to Stanley opposing the marriage, declaring he did not want “the Obama blood sullied by a white woman.”
²²
He also wrote to his son, sternly reminding him that he had a family back home. Hussein, well aware of the white man's ways, got right to the point. Would Obama's intended “accept that you already have a wife and children?” he asked. “I have not heard of white people understanding such things. Their women are jealous and used to being pampered.”
²³