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Chapter Two

A PLACE IN THE WORLD

HONOLULU, SEATTLE, HONOLULU, JAKARTA, AND HONOLULU

AUGUST 1961–SEPTEMBER 1979

Barack Hussein Obama departed Nairobi’s Embakasi Airport on the evening of August 4, 1959, bound for New York, via Rome, Paris, and London. He was twenty-five years old—not twenty-three, as he would later claim—and he was leaving behind a nineteen-year-old wife, Grace Kezia Aoko, who was three months pregnant with a second child, and a sixteen-month-old son, Roy Abon’go.

Obama’s dream was to have an education beyond what was available in colonial Kenya. A possession of Great Britain since the late nineteenth century, Kenya lacked any post-secondary educational institution aside from a newly opened technical college. Three years earlier, a dynamic young Kenyan politician, Tom Mboya—who, like Obama, was a Luo, Kenya’s third-largest ethnic group—had visited the United States and begun making it possible for young Kenyans to seek higher education opportunities there. Mboya was introduced to Bill Scheinman, a wealthy young businessman likewise interested in African decolonization, and thanks largely to Scheinman’s personal largesse, as many as thirty-nine Kenyan students enrolled at a variety of U.S. colleges and universities during the years 1957 and 1958.

By 1958, Barack Obama and his young wife were living in Kenya’s capital of Nairobi, yet the first twenty-four years of his life had been anything but easy. The second child, and first son, of Hussein Onyango Obama and Habiba Akumu, he was born near Kendu Bay in the Nyanza region of western Kenya, close to Lake Victoria. Hussein Onyango had served as a cook with the British colonial military forces, traveling widely. Hussein’s third child, Hawa Auma, later recounted that “he loved all the whites, and they loved him.” Another younger daughter, Zeituni Onyango, remembered Hussein as “unyielding and unapologetic…. My father never shed the attitude of a soldier,” nor his belief in corporal punishment for wives as well as children.

When Barack Hussein was nine years old and his older sister Sarah Nyaoke about twelve, Hussein Onyango moved the family—now including a second wife, Sarah Ogwel—from Kendu Bay to the village of Kogelo, well north of Lake Victoria in the Alego area of Nyanza, where his ancestors had historic roots. But Alego was wild and rugged, and within a few months, a pregnant Habiba Akumu escaped from her husband and three children and returned to Kendu Bay. In despair, Barack and Sarah soon tried to follow her but were returned to Kogelo to live with their stepmother, Sarah Ogwel, while their father increasingly worked in Nairobi. Decades later Sarah would tell her stepgrandson that his father “could not forgive his abandonment, and acted as if Akumu didn’t exist. He told everyone that I was his mother.”

In Kogelo Barack attended Ng’iya Intermediate School, and in 1949, at age fifteen, he took the Kenya Africa Examination. In early 1950, he was admitted to Maseno Mission School, Kenya’s oldest secondary institution. School records initially described Barack as “very keen, steady … reliable and outgoing,” but during his senior year school administrators took a strong dislike to him and effectively expelled him. Classmates acknowledged that Obama had become “rude and arrogant” toward teachers, and the white English principal fingered him as the primary author of an anonymous letter criticizing the school’s practices. Wherever the blame lay, Obama was out of school without having graduated, and a furious Hussein Onyango instructed him to move to Mombasa, Kenya’s eastern port city, to earn his own living.

By some time in 1955, Barack had relocated to Nairobi, where he was a clerk typist in a law firm and also did some work for a British engineering firm. At a Christmas Day 1956 dance party back in Kendu Bay, he met sixteen-year-old Grace Kezia Aoko, and the next month, they were married and moved into Obama’s Nairobi apartment. Fourteen months later, Kezia gave birth to Roy Abon’go. Soon thereafter, sometime in mid-1958, Barack met Betty Mooney, the forty-four-year-old American woman who would become his ticket to the United States.¹

For more than a decade before arriving in Nairobi in 1957, Betty Mooney had worked closely with world-renowned literacy advocate Frank Laubach, whose “each one teach one” method had helped millions across the globe learn to read. Mooney had spent eight years in India before moving to Baltimore to oversee the training of additional literacy teachers at the Laubach-sponsored Koinonia Foundation. In Nairobi, she quickly won the active support of Tom Mboya, who introduced her to a large crowd at one of his weekly political rallies. Then, in the summer of 1958, she and Helen Roberts, another American literacy teacher, began preparing a series of elementary instructional readers in Swahili, Luo, and Kamba.

In September 1958, Mooney hired the young Barack Obama as her secretary and clerk and paid him the handsome sum of $100 monthly. Before long Obama was taking a lead role in the writing of two Luo readers Mooney’s team was producing. Laubach himself visited Nairobi in November 1958; a photo published in the monthly newsletter Mooney had just launched pictured her, Laubach, and “Mr. B. O’Bama.”

This was a great opportunity for Obama to perfect his own English literacy, and Mooney quickly became impressed by his abilities. “Barack is a whiz and types so fast that I have a hard time keeping ahead of him,” she wrote Laubach. “I think I better bring him along and let him be your secretary in the USA.” Indeed, getting to the U.S. was Obama’s express goal, and by early 1959, even without a diploma from a secondary school and with only some UK correspondence courses on his record, he wrote to several dozen U.S. colleges and universities seeking undergraduate admission for fall 1959. He had read about one of them in the Saturday Evening Post, a weekly U.S. pictorial magazine, in Mooney’s office. The University of Hawaii was described as being a “Colorful Campus of the Islands.” The article praised the “multi-racial make-up” of the university’s student body and emphasized that Hawaii was “one of the few spots on earth where there is little racial prejudice.”

In early March, Barack Obama received notice of his acceptance from the University of Hawaii, plus a certificate to show U.S. consular officials in order to obtain a student entry visa. Classes would begin on September 21. Betty Mooney was overjoyed, and quickly wrote Frank Laubach to request his help. Barack “is extremely intelligent and his English is excellent, so I have no doubt that he will do well.” Mooney wanted to pay both Obama’s tuition and half of his estimated $800 annual room and board, but she wanted Kenyan officials—and apparently Barack too—to view these funds as a scholarship rather than a personal gift, and Laubach agreed to help. “I remember him very well, and agree that he is unusually smart. I have no doubt that he will do a very good job.” Enclosed with his reply to Mooney was a copy of a letter addressed to the University of Hawaii, which stated that the Laubach Literacy and Mission Fund had granted Obama $400 toward his first year of studies.

Barack worked to complete the Luo primers and also advertised in Kenya’s Luo language newspaper, Ramogi, for contributions toward his upcoming expenses in Hawaii. Gordon Hagberg, an American whose family had employed Hussein Onyango Obama while they resided in Nairobi, asked his employer, the African-American Institute (AAI), to assist with Obama’s airfare, explaining that Obama “is what could be called a self-made man.” In late July the U.S. consul general formally issued Barack’s nonimmigrant student visa, and AAI booked and paid for his flights. Obama wrote to Frank Laubach, thanking him “for all that you have done for me to make my ways for further studies possible,” including the essential $400 that actually came from Betty Mooney. Barack hoped to see Laubach during the three weeks that Betty had arranged for him to stay at Koinonia, outside Baltimore, before going to Hawaii. On Sunday morning, August 9, 1959, Barack Hussein Obama arrived on a British Overseas Airways Corporation Comet 4 at New York’s Idlewild Airport and was granted entry to the United States.²

Even before Obama registered for his fall semester courses on September 21, one of Honolulu’s two daily newspapers, the Star-Bulletin, ran a photo of the twenty-five-year-old freshman in an article entitled “Young Men From Kenya, Jordan and Iran Here to Study at U.H.” Obama had secured a room at the Atherton YMCA, just across University Avenue from the campus, but he told the newspaper he was already surprised by the high cost of living. He enrolled in a roster of unsurprising freshman courses—English Composition, World Civilization, Introduction to Government, Business Calculations—and as the first and only African student on campus, and perhaps the only student always wearing dark slacks and dress shirts rather than casual Hawaiian clothing, Obama was immediately a standout presence at UH.

Obama frequented a campus snack bar with lower prices than the main cafeteria, and he soon fell in with a band of friends. Neil Abercrombie was a newly arrived graduate student in sociology from Buffalo, New York; undergraduates Andy “Pake” Zane and Ed Hasegawa had grown up on Oahu—Hawaii’s commercial hub—and the Big Island—Hawaii’s most rural isle—respectively. Abercrombie recalled Obama as “an unforgettable presence” with a “James Earl Jones voice. It was resonant, deep, booming and rich. It carried authority. He spoke in sentences and paragraphs.” Zane agreed. It was “a simply amazing voice,” sometimes “mesmerizing.”

But Abercrombie remembered Obama for more than just his voice. “He was always the center of attention because he had an opinion on everything and was quite willing to state it…. He had this tremendous smile, a pipe in his mouth, dark-rimmed glasses with bright eyes. He was incandescent.” Abercrombie told journalist Sally Jacobs how Obama “talked about ambition, his ambition for independence in Africa in general, and his own personal ambition to participate in the emerging nationalism in Kenya … it was the central focus of his life. He was full of such energy and purpose.” Obama’s brimming self-confidence was usually engaging rather than off-putting. “He thought he was the smartest guy in the room, I think, and with good reason … everybody else thought so too,” Abercrombie recalled. “I could easily call him the smartest person I’ve ever met.”³

Just two weeks into the fall semester, the UH student newspaper, Ka Leo O Hawaii, published a story on Obama, in which he said he chose UH over other acceptances from San Francisco State College and Morgan State College in Baltimore but again referred to Honolulu’s high cost of living. He spoke of his homeland’s desire for independence from Britain, saying, “Kenyans are tired of exploitation.” Several weeks later, Ka Leo O Hawaii ran a photograph on its front page of Obama talking with university president Laurence H. Snyder about UH’s newly proposed trans-Pacific East-West Center. In late November, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin printed its second story on Obama, under the headline “Isle Inter-Racial Attitude Impresses Kenya Student.” This time Obama was quoted as saying he was surprised that “no one seems to be conscious of color” in Hawaii, adding that “people are very nice around here, very friendly.” He hoped to finish his degree in three years and hoped to take up some type of government work when he returned to Kenya.

Sometime in November, Betty Mooney, returning to the U.S. via Asia and the Pacific, stopped in Hawaii for several days and was “much impressed” with how well Obama was doing. So was Frank Laubach when he passed through Honolulu several weeks later. In early December Obama sought permission from U.S. immigration officials to work part-time, citing the “high cost of meals,” and he was approved for up to twenty-five hours weekly. Once the 1960 spring semester began, Obama participated in a model United Nations exercise that debated race, and in early June, he submitted a strongly worded letter to the editor criticizing a Star-Bulletin editorial that had denounced “Terror in the Congo.” “Speaking as one who has been in the Congo,” he wrote, Africa needed to throw off “the yoke of colonialism” as “the time for exploitation, special prerogatives and privileges is over.”

By midsummer, Obama had moved first to an apartment on Tenth Avenue east of the university, then to one on Eleventh Avenue, and finally westward to a neighborhood just north of the Punahou School. In late July 1960, he submitted a routine request to extend his student visa, noting that he was earning $5 a day as a dishwasher at the Inkblot Coffee Shop while also taking a full summer-session course load. After summer session ended, Obama earned $1.33 an hour from Dole Corporation—Oahu’s principal pineapple grower—during August and September as an “ordinary summer worker.”

During his time in Honolulu Obama exhibited an increasing appetite for alcohol. Drinking and talking were two of Obama’s favorite pastimes, but there was also a third. As one female student later told Sally Jacobs, Obama “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.’ ” Another woman agreed. “He was flirtatious,” but “he was too close in my personal space. … I thought he was a little bit almost aggressive in his way of meeting and being around women.” Among Obama’s Luo friends in Kenya, “he-man-ship” was “no big deal,” and one of his closest acquaintances later boasted that Luo men of their generation had a “habit of waylaying foreign women and literally pulling them into bed.”

When fall 1960 classes began on September 26, Obama’s seven courses included Russian 101. A fellow student was a virginal seventeen-year-old freshman with an incongruous first name who still lived at home with her parents. By early November 1960, however, Stanley Ann Dunham was pregnant.⁴

Stanley Ann Dunham was born on November 29, 1942, at St. Francis Hospital in Wichita, Kansas. She received her forename not from her identically named father but from her mother. Seventeen-year-old Madelyn Payne had secretly married twenty-two-year-old Stanley Armour Dunham a month before her own high school graduation in June 1940. Stanley’s mother, Ruth Armour Dunham, had named her second son after the explorer Henry M. Stanley, her eldest son Ralph would later explain, and the Dunhams didn’t see Stanley as “a man’s name or a girl’s name, it was a family name.”

Ruth Dunham had committed suicide by swallowing strychnine in 1925, at age twenty-six, after learning that her husband was busy womanizing. Her sons, ages seven and eight, grew up living with their maternal grandparents in the small town of El Dorado, Kansas, and would only “very rarely” ever see their father again.

Teenaged Madelyn Dunham was also a devoted fan of the actress Bette Davis, who six months earlier, in a popular feature film titled In This Our Life, had played a southern belle character named Stanley Timberlake. Asked decades later why she had named her daughter Stanley, all Madelyn would say is “Oh, I don’t know why I did that.”

Madelyn’s family had been far from pleased about her marriage to Stanley Dunham, who had failed one year of high school and whose older brother Ralph described him as “a Dennis the Menace type” given to naughty high jinks. One of Madelyn’s younger brothers later said, “I think she was looking at Stanley as a way of getting out of Dodge,” and the newlyweds soon set out on a road trip to the San Francisco Bay Area. By 1941 they were back in Kansas, with Stanley apparently working in an auto parts store before enlisting in the army a few months after Pearl Harbor. With her husband away and a new baby to care for, Madelyn moved in with her parents and commuted to a night shift job at a new Boeing B-29 bomber plant in Wichita. Stanley had become a sergeant by the time his unit entered France some weeks after D-Day, but in April 1945 he was reassigned back to Britain before being discharged that August, following Germany’s defeat and Japan’s announced surrender.⁵

Just a few weeks later, Stanley, his wife, and his daughter all arrived in Berkeley, where he began taking classes at the University of California. But academic work was not Dunham’s forte. His older brother Ralph, who was working on a Ph.D. at Berkeley, remembered that Stan could not cope with the foreign language requirement. Madelyn’s younger brother Charles heard from his sister that Stanley was more interested in reading murder mysteries than doing his course work, and he expected Madelyn to write his term papers for him. “What can you do when your wife won’t support you in getting an education?” Stan later told Charles.

Madelyn was unhappy with their situation, and in mid-1947, Stanley, Madelyn, and four-year-old Ann drove eastward with Ralph Dunham. Following a July 4 stopover at Yellowstone National Park, Ralph dropped the young family off in Kansas, inscribing a copy of C. S. Forester’s Poo-Poo and the Dragons for his niece: “To Stanley Ann Dunham / As a going away present from her Uncle Ralph / Summer of 1947.” More than sixty-five years later that volume and Ann’s other childhood books would lie well preserved in a box in Honolulu.

Stanley enrolled in several classes at Wichita State University, but within months, he had taken a sales job at the Jay Paris Furniture Store in Ponca City, Oklahoma, two hours south of Wichita. One colleague later remembered Stan as a successful, first-rate salesman, knowledgeable about both furniture and his customers. He was also remembered as “a smart guy who liked to tell you how smart he was.” In Ponca City, Madelyn initially stayed home before realizing that she had to have a job. “The evening cocktail hour gets earlier every day. If I don’t work, I’ll turn into an alcoholic.”

Ann began first grade at Ponca City’s Jefferson Elementary School in September 1948, and in 1950, she transferred to another for third grade after the family moved to a different home. Then, in the spring of 1951, Stanley moved the family more than 250 miles southwest, to Vernon, Texas, when he took a new furniture store job, and Ann completed third grade there, as well as all of fourth, fifth, and sixth, before the peripatetic family again moved, this time back to El Dorado, Kansas. Stanley worked first at a Farm & Home store, then got a better job at Hellum’s Furniture in Wichita, while Ann attended seventh grade in El Dorado.⁶

During the summer of 1955, the Dunhams moved yet again, this time all the way westward to Seattle, where Stanley had a job at the huge Standard-Grunbaum Furniture store. They moved into an apartment northeast of the University of Washington’s campus, and Ann walked to nearby Eckstein Middle School for eighth grade. The next summer they moved to Mercer Island in Lake Washington, southeast of downtown Seattle, and Ann began ninth grade at the brand-new Mercer Island High School. They rented a nice apartment in Shorewood, and sometime in 1957 Stan changed jobs once more, working at Doces Majestic Furniture.

Throughout high school, Ann went by her given name of Stanley, or Stannie. She made a good number of friends and was taught by some outspokenly progressive teachers. One friend later recalled that Stanley showed little interest in clothes or boys; instead, she and her friends would take a long bus ride to the lively “UDub” campus neighborhood, an unusual expedition for Mercer Island teenagers. At home, tensions about money sometimes brought on loud arguments between Stan and Madelyn, who had found a job as an escrow officer at a bank in nearby Bellevue. Stanley also had a strained relationship with her father, and one high school friend said she “hated her father at the time that I knew her.”

Sometime during her senior year, she and a male classmate set off on a nonromantic road trip that took them as far south as Berkeley, California, before anguished parents and law enforcement officials located them there. Stan Dunham flew down and drove them back to Seattle. Also during her senior year, Stannie saw a much-heralded foreign film, Black Orpheus, which was French director Marcel Camus’s adaptation of the famous Greek legend, set in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She would still recall the movie a quarter century later, and she may have been especially struck by the film’s male lead, black Brazilian actor Breno Mello.

Toward the end of Stannie’s senior year, Stan heard about a job opportunity that was even farther west than Seattle—in Honolulu. Albert “Bob” Pratt, who operated Isle Wide furniture distributors, was adding a retail outlet, and he hired Stan Dunham to run it. The rental home where Pratt’s family lived, at 6085 Kalanianaole Highway, had a backyard cottage, and Stan relocated there sometime before Stannie’s high school graduation. On the day after commencement in June 1960, she and her mother flew to Honolulu.

Stannie had not wanted to move to Hawaii, especially given her great attraction to UDub in Seattle, but she was still five months shy of her eighteenth birthday. So, in September 1960, she enrolled as a freshman at the University of Hawaii, taking a philosophy course and perhaps others in addition to Russian 101.⁷

How Stanley Ann Dunham’s relationship with Barack Obama commenced and developed remains deeply shrouded in long-unasked and now-unanswerable questions. A quarter century after she became pregnant, her son, temporarily back in Honolulu, would write to his girlfriend that “one block from where I sit, the apartment house where I was conceived still stands.” By early 1961, Barack Obama Sr. was living in apartment 15 at 1704 Punahou Street, just across the street from Punahou School, and while literary license shrank three or four blocks to one, that is where Ann Dunham said her pregnancy originated in November 1960.

When the final exam for that Russian 101 course took place on January 28, 1961, Ann Dunham as well as her parents knew she was almost three months pregnant. According to later documents—no contemporary one has ever been located—on Thursday, February 2, 1961, Ann and Barack took a brief interisland flight from Honolulu to Maui and were married in the small county seat of Wailuku, with no relatives or friends present. Obama’s closest confidante, his younger sister Zeituni Onyango, recounted her older brother’s version of what had occurred: “the father of Ann said that they have to marry.” Stanley Dunham insisted that his pregnant daughter get married rather than give birth to a bastard. But why did they go to the time and expense of flying from Honolulu to Maui? Stanley and Madelyn likely did not want any potentially embarrassing questions arising at either Isle-Wide furniture or at the Bank of Hawaii, where Madelyn had been hired as an escrow officer. They knew that marriages on Oahu were regularly listed in both of Honolulu’s daily newspapers, but ones occurring in the outer islands were not.⁸

Ann Dunham Obama did not register for spring classes at the University of Hawaii. In contrast, Obama was honored with a Phi Kappa Phi certificate for his freshman-year grade point average and then a few weeks later was named to the Dean’s List because of his fall 1960 GPA. A young English professor, writing to AAI in support of Obama’s request for scholarship assistance for his sophomore year, reported that “Obama has done an exemplary job of getting along with people” and called him “a genuinely enlightened twentieth-century man.” Obama’s friends Neil Abercrombie and Andy Zane were leading local racial equality efforts, and when a national governors’ conference brought outspoken segregationist governor John Patterson of Alabama to Honolulu in June 1961, he was greeted at the airport by about two dozen picketers holding signs proclaiming “Welcome to the Land of Miscegenation.” The lone black participant certainly represented the truth of that slogan, and he told a reporter that “Hawaii gives them an example where races live together,” but he asked “not to be identified” other than as a UH student.⁹

But in that student’s own personal context, the races actually did not live together. During her pregnancy, Ann continued to reside with her parents at 6085 Kalanianaole Highway, and Obama remained in his apartment on Punahou Street. When UH’s foreign-student adviser, Mrs. Sumie McCabe, learned of Obama’s new marriage some two months after it occurred, she immediately called the Honolulu office of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to tell the INS about his changed circumstances. INS agent Lyle Dahlin memorialized McCabe’s call in a memo that went into Obama’s file, noting that “the problem is that when he arrived in the U.S. the subject had a wife in Kenya.” McCabe said Obama “is very intelligent,” but he “has been running around with several girls since he first arrived here and last summer she cautioned him about his playboy ways. Subject replied that he would ‘try’ to stay away from the girls. Subject got his USC [U.S. citizen] wife ‘Hapei’ and although they were married, they do not live together, and Miss Dunham is making arrangements with the Salvation Army to give the baby away. Subject told Mrs. McCabe that in Kenya all that is necessary to be divorced is to tell the wife that she is divorced and that constitutes a legal divorce. Subject claims to have been divorced from his wife in Kenya in this method.”

The INS was powerless to take any action absent a criminal conviction for bigamy, but Dahlin recommended that Obama be “closely questioned” before he was approved for another extension of his student residency visa and that “denial be considered.” If Ann were to petition on his behalf, “make sure an investigation is conducted as to the bona-fide[s] of the marriage.” Subsequent documents in Obama’s own hand would soon demonstrate that he in no way really considered himself divorced from Kezia. He had grown up in a family and ethnic culture where multiple wives were the norm, and he was not telling the truth about that to McCabe. There are no documents or anyone’s recollections to support Obama’s claim that Ann Dunham intended to give birth to their child and then put it up for adoption. Obama’s closest relative, his sister Zeituni, dismissed the possibility out of hand when the memo first came to light decades later: “no African especially in Kenya would think of giving his child away.”

So when Dr. David A. Sinclair delivered Barack Hussein Obama II at 7:24 P.M. on Friday, August 4, 1961, at Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital on Punahou Street, just three blocks south from where the child had been conceived, the Salvation Army was not called. Instead, Madelyn and Stan each called their siblings with the news. Madelyn’s younger brother Charles recounted her description of the new baby: “He’s not black like his father, he’s not white. More like coffee with cream.” Ralph Dunham remembered Stan calling him from the hospital and Madelyn getting on the phone too. Stan’s younger sister Virginia Dunham Goeldner recalled him phoning her too and, fifty years later, expressed astonishment that some of her longtime neighbors in Maumelle, Arkansas, doubted the fact of her grandnephew’s birth. “Why did Stanley call and say he was born and why were they over at the hospital? Why did he bother to call” on that Friday night?

The birth occurred exactly two years to the day, and indeed almost exactly to the hour, since Barack Hussein Obama had boarded his flight at Nairobi Embakasi. On Monday, Ann Dunham Obama signed her son’s Hawaii State Department of Health birth certificate, and it was signed on Tuesday by Dr. Sinclair and the local registrar of births. Five days later, on August 13, the Honolulu Advertiser’s listing of “Births, Marriages, Deaths” on page B6 included in the first category “Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama, 6085 Kalanianaole Hwy., son, Aug. 4.” The next day’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin carried the same listing on page 24, with copy editors at that paper spelling out “Highway” and “August” in full. The birth certificate only contained the address for “Usual Residence of Mother”; there was no request for an address following “Full Name of Father,” so the newspapers presumed that the newborn’s parents lived together.¹⁰

Less than four weeks after his son’s birth, Barack Hussein Obama applied for and quickly received a routine one-year extension of his student residency visa. Lee Zeigler, newly arrived from Stanford University, had replaced Sumie McCabe as UH’s foreign student adviser, and a different INS agent, William T. Wood II, not Lyle Dahlin, reviewed and approved Obama’s application. Obama said he had received $1,000 in scholarship support via the African-American Institute, but again requested to work for up to twenty-five hours a week to meet the balance of his expenses. He also indicated that sometime subsequent to March 1961 he had moved from Punahou Street to 1482 Alencastre Street, well east of UH’s campus. Barack listed Ann S. Dunham as his spouse, and Agent Wood’s summary memo noted, “They have one child born Honolulu on 8/4/61—Barack Obama II, child living with mother (she lives with her parents & subject lives at 1482 Alencastre St.).” But Wood noted something else too: “U.S.C. spouse to go to Wash. State University next semester.”

Sometime soon after Wood wrote that memo, Ann and her weeks-old son flew from Honolulu to Seattle: not so she could attend WSU, in far southeastern Washington State, but to enroll at her beloved UDub, which she had wanted to attend a year earlier. Ann and baby Barack stayed briefly with a family friend on Mercer Island before settling into an apartment at 516 Thirteenth Avenue East in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, well south of the university. According to her UDub transcript, she registered for two evening courses, Anthropology 100: Introduction to the Study of Man and Political Science 201: Modern Government. Classes began in late September.

But why did Ann Dunham Obama take her newborn and leave her husband, parents, and Honolulu for the familiar confines of Seattle? She clearly preferred UDub and its environs over UH, but she told half a dozen old high school friends, as well as a woman who also lived at 516 Thirteenth Avenue East and babysat young Barack while Ann attended classes, that she loved her husband. But the young couple never chose to live together at any time following the onset of Ann’s pregnancy, and Ann relocated herself a long airplane flight away as soon as her son was old enough to travel. None of the direct participants—Ann, Obama, Madelyn, and Stan—ever offered a clear explanation that has survived in anyone’s recollections a half century later.

Obama had taken to calling his son’s mother Anna, not Ann, and she seems to have adopted this as well, according to both the 1961–62 Polk City Directory for Seattle, which lists “Obama Anna Mrs. studt” and her neighboring babysitter, Alaskan native Mary Toutonghi, who also remembered her as Anna. Ann did well in her fall courses, earning an A in anthropology and a B in political science; she did even better in the winter term that ran from late December 1961 through mid-March 1962, getting As in both Philosophy 120: Introduction to Logic and, interestingly, History 478: History of Southern Africa. Mary Toutonghi babysat regularly during those months on the evenings Ann attended classes, and years later she would recall infant Barack as “very curious and very alert,” “very happy and a good size.” In March Ann enrolled in three regular daytime courses, obtaining Bs in Chinese Civilization and History of Modern Philosophy but changing English Political and Social History to just an audit.¹¹

With Ann in Seattle, Obama launched into his senior year at UH. Only Neil Abercrombie was aware of Obama’s relationship with Dunham or that he had fathered a child in Honolulu. One new graduate student, Robert Ruenitz, would later admit that “for any of us to say that we knew Obama well would be difficult. He was a private man with academic achievement his foremost goal.” Another 1961 grad student, Cambodia native Naranhkiri Tith, debated nuclear arms with Obama at a widely publicized campus symposium. Obama labeled the issue not a “balance of power” but a “balance of terror” and asserted that most U.S. foreign aid took the form of weapons and other military assistance. Tith and other graduate students also partied regularly with Obama, who “loved to drink” to the point of becoming “totally drunk” at repeated parties. “He also was a womanizer,” Tith recounted years later.

Even so, Obama’s academic success continued apace. In mid-January he addressed the NAACP’s Honolulu branch on “Changes in Africa Today,” and in early February, he was featured prominently in a “Dear Friend” fund-raising appeal distributed by Bill Scheinman and Tom Mboya’s African-American Students Foundation. Sent in the name of Ruth Bunche, whose diplomat husband Ralph in 1950 had been the first African American ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize, the letter briefly profiled two young men “of whom we are especially proud” out of more than five hundred African students who were then studying in the U.S. One was completing a graduate degree in engineering at Columbia University; the other was Obama, “an honor student of the University of Hawaii where he will complete a four year course in three years.” The letter predicted Obama would soon qualify for the national academic honor society, Phi Beta Kappa, and in late April he was elected to membership.

With graduation only a month away, Obama was also a featured speaker at a large Mother’s Day event organized by the Hawaii Peace Rally Committee to oppose nuclear weapons. The afternoon event drew hundreds to Ala Moana Beach Park. Liberal Democratic state legislators Tom Gill and Patsy Mink were joined on the speakers’ platform by four clergymen and several UH professors. The crowd included powerful International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) director Jack Hall, and conservative counterprotesters from the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) who waved signs advocating continued U.S. nuclear weapons testing.

Speaking to the crowd, Obama denounced “foreign aid which is directed toward military conquest or the acquisition of bases.” Speaking as an African, “anything which relieves military spending will help us,” and if peace were to replace nuclear confrontation, “we will be able to receive your aid with an open mind and without suspicion.”¹²

In early May 1962, Betty Mooney Kirk, who had married and relocated to her husband’s hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, wrote to Tom Mboya in Nairobi to seek his help in finding someone to sponsor Obama for graduate school, “preferably at Harvard.” She enclosed a copy of Barack’s résumé, which she had prepared, and it stated that Obama already had applied to and been accepted for graduate study at Harvard, Yale, the University of Michigan, and the University of California at Berkeley. Harvard alone had offered financial aid, in the limited amount of $1,500, but Betty hoped Tom could find further assistance because Barack “has the opportunity and the brains.” Mboya replied with congratulations, but according to Betty was “not very hopeful” about locating available funding.

Betty’s colleague Helen Roberts was back in Nairobi, and, perhaps at Betty’s urging, was actively assisting Kezia Obama, now the single mother of two young children—Rita Auma had been born in early 1960, six months after her father’s departure for the U.S. Kezia was sometimes in Kogelo with her two children and Barack’s father and stepmother Sarah, sometimes with her parents in Kendu Bay, and other times staying with her brother Wilson Odiawo in Nairobi. Roberts helped Kezia take some educational courses, and told one friend that Kezia “is very anxious to be a suitable wife for Barack when he returns.” Roberts remarked, “I think Barack will notice quite a difference in her when he at last returns.”

In late May 1962, Obama wrote to Mboya and apologized for not having written in a long time. He bragged about his academic achievements at UH, falsely claiming to have already earned an M.A. degree in addition to his impressive three-year B.A. and a 3.6 GPA. Reciting his Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Phi honors as well as an Omicron Delta Kappa award, he told Mboya—twice, in almost identical sentences—that these were “the highest academic honours that anyone can get in the U.S.A. for high academic attainments.” What’s more, he was about to leave for Harvard, “where I have been offered a fellowship for my Ph.D. I intend to take at least two years working on my Ph.D. and at most three years. Then I will be coming home.” Obama closed by telling Mboya, “I have enjoyed my stay here, but I will be accelerating my coming home as much as I can. You know my wife is in Nairobi there, and I would really appreciate any help you may give her.”¹³

His letter to Mboya did not mention his second wife or third child, nor did he ever say anything about them to Helen Roberts or to the hugely supportive Betty Mooney Kirk. As his eldest son would ruefully put it years later, by the end of his time in Hawaii “Barack’s life was now a series of compartments.” On June 17, 1962, Obama received his B.A. degree—and not any M.A.—at UH’s commencement. Three days later the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, in an article headlined “Kenya Student Wins Fellowship,” reported how the “straight A” economics major was headed to Harvard to obtain his Ph.D. “He plans to return to Africa and work in development of underdeveloped areas and international trade at the planning and policy-making level,” the story explained. “He leaves next week for a tour of mainland universities,” beginning in California, prior to entering Harvard.

In Seattle, Ann’s spring quarter classes had concluded, and her high school friend Barbara Cannon Rusk, who had moved to Utah after graduating, “came back to Seattle in the summer of 1962.” One day, Rusk stopped by Ann’s apartment on Capitol Hill. Her initial visit “was after June, and could have been as late as September. I visited her a couple of times,” she recalled more than forty years later. “She wasn’t in classes, and didn’t have a job. I recall her being melancholy…. I had a sense that something wasn’t right in her marriage. It was all very mysterious,” as her husband was already headed to Harvard. “I didn’t ask her about the relationship.”

Also years later, another young woman whose Mercer Island family had known the Dunhams very well, Judy Farner Ware, would recount to Janny Scott, Ann’s biographer, a distinct memory of meeting Ann and Obama in what she recalled was Port Angeles, Washington—the ferry port at the top of western Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula, just across the Strait of Juan de Fuca from Victoria, British Columbia. She remembered the meeting because an openly flirtatious Obama all but hit on her. Had Obama traveled north from San Francisco to see his second wife and second son in Seattle, and then perhaps they toured the region? Ann didn’t own a car or know how to drive, and neither Ann nor Obama ever mentioned such a visit to anyone in later years.

Ann and her son were still in Seattle when Obama left Honolulu for the mainland. Perhaps it should be presumed that Obama did set eyes on his newborn son back in August 1961 before Ann and the baby left for Seattle—though no one’s surviving accounts say that did occur—but unless Obama made some equally unrecorded, unremembered visit to Seattle before heading eastward, he would not have seen his son for years to come. In truth, as one scholar would acutely put it, Barack Hussein Obama was only “a sperm donor in his son’s life.”

Almost three decades later, his eldest daughter would meet Ann Dunham and ask her what had happened between her and her father. Ann’s story then was that Obama had asked her to join him at Harvard, but “she had not wanted to go. She had loved him, but she had feared having to give up too much of herself.”¹⁴

By mid-July 1962, Obama had gotten as far east as Oklahoma, where he stopped in Tulsa to visit Betty Mooney Kirk and her husband. By no later than August 17, he was in Baltimore, at the Koinonia Foundation’s campus, where he had stayed exactly three years earlier. While there, he updated his immigration papers, telling the INS his study at Harvard would be supported by $1,000 each from Frank Laubach’s Literacy Fund and the Phelps Stokes Fund, in addition to his university fellowship. On his “Application to Extend Time of Temporary Stay,” Obama listed himself as married, but under children entered only one name: “Roy Obama.”

By September, Obama had arrived at Harvard, and Ann and her now one-year-old son had returned to Honolulu. Stan and Madelyn had moved from Kalanianaole Highway to an apartment on Alexander Street, but Ann and young Barack initially stayed at 2277 Kamehameha Avenue, close to UH. Ann sat out the fall semester, but in January 1963, she resumed taking classes as a sophomore. Sometime prior to the end of 1963, Stan and Madelyn relocated to a house at 2234 University Avenue, and Ann and her son soon moved in with her parents.

As Ann adapted to a heavier academic load, and Madelyn worked long days at her bank job, young Barack spent most of his time with his fit and youthful forty-five-year-old grandfather. Obama Sr.’s old friend Neil Abercrombie, still a graduate student at UH, saw Stan and young Barry—as his grandparents called him—around town during Barry’s childhood. “His grandfather was the most wonderful guy” and it was readily apparent that “Stanley loved that little boy,” Abercrombie remembered. “He took him everywhere,” including to an arrival ceremony for two Gemini astronauts who had splashed down safely in the Pacific after an aborted space flight. Barack would “remember sitting on my grandfather’s shoulders” at Hickam Air Force Base and “dreaming of where they had been.” Abercombie recalled: “In the absence of his father, there was not a kinder, more understanding man than Stanley Dunham. He was loving and generous.”

Indeed, among the dozens of photos of young Barry from his childhood, it is impossible to find one where he is not smiling broadly. Stan’s boss’s daughter, Cindy Pratt Holtz, remembers Stanley bringing Barry with him to the Pratt furniture warehouse. Young Obama was “so full of life, a twinkle in the eye, giggling all the time.” In the fall of 1966, five-year-old Barry began kindergarten at nearby Noelani Elementary School, and Aimee Yatsushiro, one of his two teachers, remembers him similarly: “always smiling—had a perpetual smile.” Obama later said, “My earliest memory is running around in a backyard gathering up mangoes that had fallen in our backyard when I was five” or perhaps four. “A lot of my early memories,” he added, are “of an almost idyllic sort of early childhood in Hawaii.”¹⁵

In the meantime, his barely twenty-one-year-old mother had found new happiness in tandem with her studies. “Lolo” Soetoro—officially Soetoro Martodihardjo, after his Javanese father’s name—first arrived in Honolulu from Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in September 1962 as a twenty-seven-year-old graduate student in geography. After his first year of classes, Soetoro spent the summer of 1963 at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, but that fall he returned to UH for the final year of his two-year master’s program. He and Ann met each other sometime during those months. One mutual friend recalled that “he had a good sense of humor, and he loved to party.” Ann would later remark how attractive Lolo was in tennis shorts. “She liked brown bums,” her most outspoken friend would tell biographer Janny Scott, and by early 1964, Ann and Lolo were a public couple. Seemingly because of this new romance, on January 20, 1964, Stanley Ann Dunham Obama signed a “Libel for Divorce,” as Hawaii legal process termed the form, and five days later the complaint was officially filed in Honolulu circuit court. A copy was addressed to Barack H. Obama in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Obama had been at Harvard for almost eighteen months. He was one of thirty-five newly admitted doctoral students in the Department of Economics, and in a December 1962 letter to a friend in Hawaii, Obama confessed that “the competition here is just maddening.” The heavy reading load made every week “pretty rough,” and while “I find Harvard a very stimulating place at least intellectually,” his focus was “my own research on the theory I am trying to build.” He added, “I will stay here at least for two years to three years depending on when I am able to finish my dissertation,” but after he received a C+ and two Bs in his first semester, Harvard refused to renew his fellowship to cover his second year of classes. Two senior economists nonetheless praised Obama’s “intelligence, initiative, and diligence,” and thanks once again to Betty Mooney Kirk and the African-American Institute, external funding allowed him to continue.

Barack first lived at 49 Irving Street before moving into a top-floor apartment at 170 Magazine Street with a Nigerian fellow, one of about eighty African students at Harvard—a vast change from his unique status in Honolulu. Obama actively mentored younger Kenyan students from around greater Boston; George Saitoti, who was eighteen years old when he knew Obama, told biographer Sally Jacobs “we looked upon him as a model. He really gave us inspiration.” In the fall of 1963, Obama’s brother Omar Onyango, a decade younger, arrived in Boston to attend the posh Browne & Nichols School, just west of Harvard, thanks to his older brother’s social acquaintance with a young woman whose father was the school’s treasurer.

That same young woman, like a number of Obama’s African friends in Cambridge, also witnessed a continuation—and perhaps an intensification—of the heavy drinking and heavy-handed pursuit of women that had marked Barack’s three years at UH. “He’d dance in a very suggestive way, no subtlety,” that female friend recounted to Sally Jacobs. “He used suggestive, provocative language, I would say overly sexual…. It was kind of a God’s gift to women thing.” One Nigerian friend recalled telling a drunken Obama to leave a young woman alone, and an African undergraduate woman told Jacobs about consoling a fellow female undergraduate who had been an Obama girlfriend until she learned he was already married, presumably to Kezia.

In late January 1964, Rev. Dana Klotzle, who oversaw the Unitarian Universalist Association’s (UUA) sponsorship of about a dozen East African students who, like Omar, were attending secondary schools around Boston, notified the local INS office of a troubling development. A young Kenyan woman who was attending school in Auburndale, Massachusetts, had suddenly flown to London on January 10 on a round-trip ticket. UUA had terminated her sponsorship and would not accept her back; an INS agent phoned the school for additional information. The dean of women said the girl had claimed she was visiting a sick sister, but there was no evidence of a sister in Britain. What’s more, she had been “receiving advice from another student from Kenya, one Obama who is likely her boy friend and who is at Harvard.” The Unitarians suspected she had flown to London to obtain an abortion. Obama had been phoning the school seeking her reinstatement and also had called a second school, which refused to accept her. Rev. Klotzle, the memo reported, thought Obama was “a slippery character.” The Boston INS office then notified the U.S. consul in London of the girl’s flight and Obama’s involvement.

In Hawaii, on March 5, Judge Samuel P. King held a brief hearing on Ann’s divorce petition; fifteen days later, he signed a “Decree of Divorce.” Ann was “granted the care, custody and control of Barack Hussein Obama, II,” with Obama Sr. having “the right of reasonable visitation.” Pursuant to Ann’s request, “the question of child support is specifically reserved until raised hereafter.” As with Ann’s initial complaint, a copy was mailed to Obama in Cambridge.

Four weeks later, Obama visited the Boston INS office to extend his student residency visa for another year. For the new application, Harvard certified that “Mr. Obama expects to be registered as a full-time student during the academic year 1964–65,” but the INS agent reviewing the file noted the January contretemps and a supervisor instructed him to “hold up extension for present.” The agent made several calls to Harvard, in part because Obama had left blank both the marital line and the one about employment, stating there that he could not remember where he had worked in the U.S. The agent noted: “Harvard thinks he’s married to someone in Kenya and someone in Honolulu, but that possibly he belongs to a tribe where multiple marriages are O.K.” Obama’s doctoral qualifying exams were soon approaching, and the director of Harvard’s international students office wanted to hold off on questioning Obama until those were finished.

Obama was aware of the inquiries, and he called the INS to say he now remembered working at the Institute of International Marketing in Cambridge during the summer of 1963. Harvard officials told the INS that Obama might also be married to someone in Cambridge, and in mid-May David Henry, director of Harvard’s international students office, called INS agent M. F. McKeon to say he had conferred with both a graduate school dean and the chairman of Harvard’s Economics Department.

“Obama has passed his general exams, which indicates that on academic grounds, he is entitled to stay around here and write his thesis,” McKeon wrote in a memo memorializing the phone conversation. “However, they are going to try to cook something up to ease him out. All three will have to agree on this, however. They are planning on telling him that they will not give him any money, and that he had better return to Kenya and prepare his thesis at home.” That would take several weeks, but “at this time Harvard does not plan on having Obama registered as a full-time student during the academic year 1964–1965 as stated on” Obama’s application a month earlier.

On May 27, 1964, Harvard’s David Henry sent Obama a life-changing letter. It began by acknowledging that Obama had completed his course work and that only his thesis remained to be completed before he could get his Ph.D. But the letter also said that neither the Department of Economics nor the graduate school had the funds to support him in Cambridge. It then said, “We have, therefore, come to the conclusion that you should terminate your stay in the United States and return to Kenya to carry on your research and the writing of your thesis.” He was given until June 19—which was hardly three weeks away!—to arrange for his departure. Henry indicated that copies of the letter were going to graduate school associate dean Reginald H. Phelps, a historian of modern Germany, and Economics Department chairman John T. Dunlop, a distinguished professor who would go on to become dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and then U.S. secretary of labor.

Unspoken in Henry’s letter—though crystal clear in Obama’s INS file—was Harvard’s unwillingness to continue hosting a man whose sexual energies, whether inter-African or serially miscegenous, would not be tolerated in tony Cambridge as they had been in multihued Honolulu. Two weeks later an INS form letter instructed Obama that he had until July 8, instead of June 19, to depart the United States. On June 18, an understandably agitated Obama phoned the Boston INS office and insisted that he be given specific grounds for why his residency extension was being denied. An INS agent emphasized that the decision was final, but Obama called again the next day and asked to speak to the district director, who refused to take the call. Obama declared he lacked funds to leave the U.S., and the next day he asked a Harvard secretary to call the INS on his behalf. She too was told INS’s ruling was final. At that point, Obama apparently gave up; on Monday, July 6, 1964, he departed from New York’s newly renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport bound for Paris and then Nairobi, which, as of seven months earlier, was now the capital of newly independent Kenya.¹⁶

On the other side of the United States, Ann Dunham and Lolo Soetoro were married on Monday, March 15, 1965, on Molokai, a smaller Hawaiian isle southeast of Oahu. Neither Ann’s son nor her parents attended the ceremony, which took place only three months before Lolo’s current residency visa would expire. He had received his M.A. in geography in June 1964, but a month later both UH and the INS approved another one-year residency during which he could get practical experience working for local engineering and surveying firms.

INS documents indicate that Ann and Barry never moved to 3326 Oahu Avenue, where Lolo was living, but instead remained at 2234 University Avenue with Stan and Madelyn. The looming question of whether Lolo would be able to remain in the U.S. beyond June soon brought both him and Ann into extensive contacts with the INS that mirrored what her ex-spouse had experienced a year earlier.

Sometime during May or June 1965, UH’s East-West Center (EWC), which had sponsored Lolo’s graduate study, received a cable from the Indonesian embassy in Washington requesting Soetoro’s immediate return to Jakarta. But Lolo and Ann had already taken the initiative to win an extension of his visa, and following two joint interviews at the Honolulu INS office, on June 7 Lolo’s residency permit was extended until mid-June 1966. On July 2, when Lolo informed the EWC of that, he was summoned to a July 6 meeting to be reminded “that the East-West Center still retained visa sponsorship and authority” regarding his residency. Lolo said he had sought the extension because his wife was suffering from a stomach ailment that might require surgery, but later that day EWC phoned INS, which immediately summoned both Lolo and Ann to another interview on July 19. In the interim, Ann, using Dunham as her surname, applied for and received her first U.S. passport.

Officials from the EWC visited the Honolulu INS office to explain that their agreement with the Indonesian government required that “every effort will be made to return students at the completion of their grants.” Thus EWC “shall appreciate any effort which you can make to insure that Mr. Soetoro will be returned to Indonesia as soon as possible.”

Before the July 19 session, Lolo submitted a statement to the Honolulu INS office noting that in his homeland “anti-American feeling has reached a feverish pitch under the direction of the Indonesian communist party.” This was supported by widespread U.S. press reports. Lolo asserted, “I have been advised by both family and friends in Indonesia that it would be dangerous to endeavor to return with my wife at the present time.” In addition, “I would meet with much prejudice myself in seeking employment” because of his U.S. educational background, and “land belonging to my family has already been confiscated by the government as part of a communistic land reform plan,” a policy that press reports again corroborated. Citing his “former compulsory association with the Indonesian army while still a student,” Lolo also feared being dragooned into battlefield service in Indonesia’s armed conflict with Malaysia if he returned home.

Soon after the July 19 interview, INS Honolulu recommended denial of any ongoing residency for Lolo. But almost two months later, the EWC notified Indonesia’s San Francisco consulate that Lolo would return to Indonesia in June 1966—and his wife would accompany him. This was just days before Indonesia was plunged into months of bloody, widespread violence in which hundreds of thousands of the previously ascendant Communists and perceived sympathizers were slaughtered by the Indonesian army and allied militias. That turmoil commenced with an unsuccessful, Communist-backed revolt against the army leadership by a small band of junior officers on September 30, 1965.

For the next six months, the violently anti-Communist army leadership took firm control of the country and a half million or more civilians were killed. Even with knowledge of the tumult, Ann, on November 30, gave the INS an affidavit acknowledging, “I don’t feel that I would undergo any exceptional hardship if my husband were to depart from the United [States] to reside abroad as the regulations require.” Those rules would allow Lolo’s readmission, as her husband, after two years’ absence from the U.S., a preferable course to being hamstrung by EWC’s deference to Indonesian authorities.

If the elimination of the anti-American Communist presence in Indonesia is what caused Lolo and Ann to change their strategy, that has gone unrecorded. Ann’s affidavit did, however, say she was “living with my parents in the home which they rent” and that “my son by a former marriage lives there with us.” INS’s efforts to revoke Lolo’s existing extension petered out, and on June 20, 1966—the last possible day—Lolo Soetoro flew out of Honolulu bound for Jakarta.¹⁷

After Lolo’s departure, Ann took a secretarial job in UH’s student government office and also began doing some temporary nighttime tutoring and paper grading. That gave her an income of about $400 per month, and she told INS officials she hoped to save enough money to join Lolo in Indonesia in summer 1967. “We figure on going and staying until my husband’s time is up and then come back together.” With young Barry in kindergarten at Noelani Elementary School, and Stan and Madelyn both working full-time, Ann spent $50 to $75 a month for a babysitter on weekdays from 2:30 P.M. to 5:00 P.M. In December 1966, she told INS that she expected to complete her B.A. degree in anthropology in August 1967 and would join Lolo in Indonesia that October. She was already attempting to secure employment at the U.S. embassy in Jakarta.

INS did not appear open to waiving the two-years-abroad requirement for Lolo, and in May 1967 INS agent Robert Schultz phoned Ann for an update. “She and her child will definitely go to Indonesia to join her husband if he is not permitted to return to the United States sometime in the near future, as she is no longer able to endure the separation,” Schultz noted. “Her son is now in kindergarten and will commence the first grade next September and if it is necessary for her and the child to go to Indonesia, she will educate the child at home with the help of school texts from the U.S. as approved by the Board of Education in Honolulu.” Unbeknownst to Ann, this description of young Barry’s educational plight would set in motion a change in the INS’s attitude about a waiver. Still, in late June, she applied to amend her 1965 passport, taking Soetoro rather than Dunham as her surname.

In August 1967, just as Ann was receiving her B.A. from UH, INS, layer by bureaucratic layer, gradually agreed to grant Lolo a waiver, and two months later notified the State Department of that intent. Nine months would then pass before the Honolulu INS office realized that State had never responded. In the interim, sometime in October 1967, twenty-four-year-old Ann Soetoro and six-year-old Barry Obama boarded a Japan Airlines flight from Honolulu to Tokyo. During a three-day stopover, Ann took Barry to see the giant bronze Amida Buddha in Kamakura, thirty miles southwest of Tokyo. Then they boarded another plane, headed for Jakarta via Sydney.¹⁸

In Honolulu, Barry had begun first grade at Noelani Elementary School, and upon arrival in Jakarta, Ann initially followed through on her promise to homeschool her son. Home was 16 Haji Ramli Street, a small, concrete house with a flat, red-tiled roof and unreliable electricity on an unpaved lane in the newly settled, far from well-to-do Menteng Dalam neighborhood. Jakarta was a sprawling metropolis, but one where bicycle cabs—becak, in Indonesian—and small motorbikes far outnumbered automobiles.

Outside of the privileged expatriate community, where young children attended the costly international school, “Jakarta was a very hard city to live in,” said another American woman—later a close friend of Ann’s—who lived there in 1967–68. One had to deal with nonflushing toilets, open sewers, a lack of potable water, unreliable medical care, unpaved streets, and spotty electricity. When Ann and Barry arrived, Lolo was indeed working for the Indonesian army’s mapping agency, though now, unlike four months earlier, he was based on the other side of Jakarta, not hundreds of miles away in far-eastern Java.

Barry would later say that “for me, as a young boy,” Jakarta was “a magical place.” Revisiting the city more than forty years later, he recounted how “we had a mango tree out front” and “my Indonesian friends and I used to run in the fields with water buffalo and goats” while “flying kites” and “catching dragonflies.” But during the long rainy season, Jakarta was no wonderland: Barry, like others, would have to wear plastic bags over his footwear, and on one mud-sliding jaunt, he badly cut his forearm on barbed wire, a wound that required twenty stitches and left him with what he later called “an ugly scar.”

In January 1968, Ann enrolled Barry, using the surname Soetoro, in a newly built Roman Catholic school three blocks from their home—“she didn’t have the money to send me to the fancy international school where all the American kids went,” Barry later recounted. That allowed Ann to take a paid job as assistant to the director of a U.S. embassy–sponsored program offering English language classes to interested Indonesians. Barry’s school, St. Francis Assisi, as its name would be rendered in English, was avowedly Catholic: “you would start every day with a prayer,” Barry later explained, but classes met for only two and a half hours on weekday mornings. His first-grade teacher there, Israella Darmawan, decades later told credulous reporters, “He wrote an essay titled, ‘I Want to Become President’ ” during that spring of 1968, prior to his seventh birthday. She also told journalists that Barry struggled greatly to learn Indonesian; in contrast, Obama later boasted that “it had taken me less than six months to learn Indonesia’s language, its customs, and its legends.”

Barry’s second-grade teacher, Cecilia Sugini, spoke no English, but Barry received more exposure to the Indonesian language during family visits to Lolo’s relatives in Yogyakarta, in central Java. Yet even his third-grade teacher, Fermina Katarina Sinaga, later stated that eight-year-old Barry was not fluent in Indonesian. And she would also tell wide-eyed reporters that Barry, during the fall of 1969, declared in a paper, written in Indonesian, that “Someday I want to be President.” One journalist, embracing Sinaga’s direct quotation forty years later, would insist that Sinaga’s “memory is precise and there is no reason not to trust it.”

By the end of 1969, Lolo, thanks to his nephew “Sonny” Trisulo, switched to a much better job with Union Oil Company of California. Soon thereafter, he, Barry, and newly pregnant Ann moved to a far nicer home at 22 Taman Amir Hamzah Street in the better neighborhood of Matraman. Around the same time, Ann left the English teaching post, which she had come to loathe, for more rewarding work, primarily in the evenings, at a nonprofit management training school headed by a Dutch Jesuit priest.

Moving houses also meant that Barry would attend the Besuki elementary school, which traced its roots back thirty years to Indonesia’s Dutch colonial government. Classes met for five hours each weekday, double what St. Francis Assisi offered. Ann’s new work schedule gave her time to intensify her efforts to homeschool Barry in English using workbooks from the U.S. At Besuki, his all-Indonesian classmates found Barry—or “Berry,” as they pronounced it—unique not only because of his darker complexion and chubby build but also because he was the only left-hander.

Before the spring of 1970 was out, and with a second child on the way, Ann hired an openly gay twenty-four-year-old, sometimes-cross-dressing man—Turdi by day, Evie by night—to be both cook and nanny. Neighbors thought little of it. “She was a nice person and always patient and caring in keeping young Barry,” one later recalled. Turdi often accompanied Barry to and from school. Later, Turdi, at age sixty-six, told the Associated Press: “I never let him see me wearing women’s clothes. But he did see me trying on his mother’s lipstick sometimes. That used to really crack him up.”¹⁹

Sometime apparently also during that spring, Barry saw something that, in his later tellings, had a vastly more powerful impact upon his young mind. A quarter century passed between the moment and Obama’s first telling of it, but in his 1995 version, the memory was of paging through a pile of Life magazines in an American library in Jakarta and finding an article with photographs of a man of color who had paid for chemical treatments in a horribly unsuccessful attempt to make himself appear white. In Obama’s 1995 account, “thousands of people like him, black men and women back in America,” had “undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person.” To him, “seeing that article was violent for me, an ambush attack,” leaving his image of his own skin color “permanently altered.”

In a conversation soon after writing that, Obama recounted how “after reading that story, I knew there had to be something wrong with being black.” Earlier, while “growing up in Hawaii, all of the kids were kind of brown,” so “I didn’t stand out” and “I was too busy running around being a kid” to appreciate racial differences. At his two Jakarta schools, he experienced some normal teasing by other children, but to no obvious or remembered ill effect. “He was a plump kid with big ears and very outgoing and friendly,” one of Ann’s closest Jakarta friends later recalled.

Nine years later, Obama described the memory again. “I became aware of the cesspool of stereotypes when I was eight or nine. I saw a story in Life magazine about people who were using skin bleach to make themselves white. I was really disturbed by that. Why would somebody want to do that?” A few weeks later, Obama again recounted seeing a Life magazine picture of “a black guy who had bleached his skin with these skin-lightening products.” That was “the first time I remember thinking about race” and worrying that having darker skin was “not a good thing.”

In 2007, a reporter told Obama that no issue of Life magazine ever contained such an article or such photographs; this was confirmed by Life. “It might have been an Ebony or it might have been … who knows what it was?” a flustered Obama responded. But then Ebony too examined its archive of past issues and found no such story. Indeed, the other two major picture magazines of that era, Look and the Saturday Evening Post, published no such story either. Yet Obama understandably stood by his recollection: “I remember the story was very specific about a person who had gone through it and regretted it.”

But Ebony had published a somewhat similar story, in its December 1968 issue, titled “I Wish I Were Black—Again.” It was a profile of Juana Burke, a young African American art teacher who at age sixteen had begun to suffer from vitiligo, a disease which turned portions of her dark brown skin white as it killed off pigmentation cells. The article included photographs of her forearm and legs. Dermatologists’ efforts to counteract the spread of the affliction through skin chemicals and even prolonged sunbathing failed completely, and Ms. Burke reluctantly accepted her pale new appearance.

The four-page Ebony spread stressed that she “retains her old sense of black pride and identifies with her people,” and she continued to teach at a predominantly black school. However, becoming white had left her “very pessimistic about the future of race relations in this country.” A black boyfriend had ditched her, and she was dismayed to repeatedly experience a “more courteous attitude” from white strangers than she had when she had been visibly black.

Had eight-year-old Barry actually seen that issue of Ebony? Who knows. But many teenagers growing up in the 1960s heard about a journalist named John Howard Griffin, a white Texan who, in the late 1950s, had undergone chemical treatments so he could pass as black and write about the experience—the obverse of Ms. Burke’s deflating color change. Griffin’s resulting book, Black Like Me, first published in 1961, was a nationwide best seller and was made into a major motion picture.

Irrespective of what magazine pictures young Barry did or did not see, the overarching question of how and why anyone would seek to alter their visible racial identity had become a staple of U.S. popular culture in the late 1960s, even if the notion of any African American becoming white was starkly out-of-date in the new era of “I’m Black and I’m Beautiful.” Obama’s encounter with the pictures had seemingly been a “turning point,” “a transformation in the life story that marks a considerable shift in self-understanding” and in “his racial identity development.” The Obama of 1995, 2004, and 2007–08 certainly agreed—“Growing up, I wasn’t always sure who I was”—regardless of whether at age ten, at age eighteen, or even at age twenty-seven he actually pondered the memory of those images.²⁰

Sometime in the late spring of 1970 Ann Dunham, in concert with her father and no doubt her mother, decided that within a year’s time, when Barry would begin fifth grade, he should continue his future schooling in Honolulu rather than Jakarta. Stan Dunham’s twenty-year career as a furniture salesman had ended sometime in 1968, following changes in Bob Pratt’s enterprises, and by 1969, he was one of about twenty-five agents at John S. Williamson’s John Hancock Mutual Insurance agency in downtown Honolulu. Perhaps because of a decrease in income from that shift, Stan and Madelyn had left the rental home at 2234 University Avenue and relocated to unit 1206 in the Punahou Circle Apartments at 1617 South Beretania Street, just a few blocks south of Punahou School.

Ann had been aware of Punahou, and its unequaled-in-Hawaii educational reputation, since her earliest months in Honolulu. Her son was even conceived just across Punahou Street from its spacious campus. Founded in 1841 by Christian missionaries, Punahou had a student body that was still predominantly white—haole, in local parlance—and its alumni included many of Oahu’s civic elite. Fifth grade was one of the two best opportunities—ninth was the other—for youngsters who had not started elementary school there to gain admission, as class sizes increased at the middle and then high school levels.

It is unknown when Ann first thought of sending Barry there, but Stanley had become good friends with Alec Williamson, who also worked at his father’s insurance agency. Alec’s dad had graduated from Punahou in 1937, and both of his sisters had gone there as well, although he had not. Punahou administered admissions tests and required personal interviews. It was “the quintessential local school,” Alec’s sister Susan later explained, and the Dunhams were mainlanders, but John Williamson was more than willing to recommend Stanley’s bright grandson to his alma mater: “My dad wrote the letter,” Alec recounted forty years later.

Sometime in the summer of 1970, eight-year-old Barry, apparently unaccompanied, flew back to Honolulu to live for some weeks with his grandparents—and, more important, to interview with Punahou’s admissions office and take the necessary tests. In his own later telling, those were glorious weeks—lots of ice cream and days at the beach, a radical upgrade from daily life and school in Jakarta. Then, one late July or early August afternoon, after an appointment at Punahou, and with Barry still dressed to impress, Stan took his hapa-haole—half-white—grandson to meet one of his best friends, a sixty-four-year-old black man who had fathered five hapa-haole Hawaiian children of his own.²¹

During their first ten years in Honolulu, Stan and Madelyn’s favorite shared pastime had become contract bridge. Madelyn’s brother Charles Payne later said they played “with almost a fanaticism” and “they were really, really into it” and “worked well together.” Through that hobby, they had met another bridge-playing couple: Helen Canfield Davis, a once-wealthy white woman in her early forties, and her almost-two-decades-older African American husband, Frank Marshall Davis.

By 1970, Frank Davis’s publications, involvements, and activities—some self-cataloged, others invasively and meticulously collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1944 until 1963—were extensive enough to suggest that Davis had led three lives. And indeed he had: almost twenty years as a widely published, often-discussed African American poet and journalist, close to a decade as a dues-paying member of the Communist Party USA, and an entire adult life as an unbounded sexual adventurer.

Born the last day of 1905 in Arkansas City, Kansas—just sixty miles south of Wichita and the neighboring small towns where Stan and Madelyn Dunham would grow up some fifteen years later—Frank’s parents divorced while he was a child. He was raised by his mother, stepfather, and grandparents; he graduated from high school, spent a year working in Wichita, and then attended Kansas State Agricultural College. Already interested in poetry and journalism, he left school in 1927 to move to Chicago and found work with a succession of black newspapers there and in nearby Gary, Indiana. In 1931 Frank moved to Atlanta for a better newspaper job, and while there, he met and married Thelma Boyd. He returned to Chicago in 1934, drawn back primarily because of an intense affair with a married white woman who encouraged him to pursue poetry more seriously. His first volume of poems, Black Man’s Verse, appeared in mid-1935, followed by two more volumes in 1937 and 1938. By the early 1940s Davis had a reputation as an African American writer of significant power and great promise, a leading voice in what would be called the Chicago Black Renaissance.

Decades later, one scholar of mid-twentieth-century black literature would say that Davis was “among the best critical voices of his generation,” but his most thorough biographer would acknowledge that “Davis’s poetry did not survive the era in which it was written,” in significant part because much of it was so polemically political. Another commentator observed that “even at the moments of narratorial identification with the folk, a certain distance is formally maintained.” Similarly, asked years later about an oft-cited poem titled “Mojo Mike’s Beer Garden,” Frank readily acknowledged that his portrayal “was sort of a composite.”

Starting in 1943–44, Frank also began teaching classes on the history of jazz at Chicago’s Abraham Lincoln School, a Communist-allied institution aimed especially at African Americans. Frank would later complain that “only two black students” took the course in four years, but among the whites who enrolled was a twenty-one-year-old, newly married woman with a wealthy stepfather named Helen Canfield Peck. Within little more than a year, she and Frank had secured divorces and were married in May 1946.

In or around April 1943, Frank had become a dues-paying member of the Communist Party USA, according to FBI informants within the party. From mid-1946 until fall 1947, Frank wrote a weekly column for a newly founded, almost openly Communist newspaper, the Chicago Star; in 1948 he published 47th Street: Poems, which scholars later said was his best book of verse.

During the summer of that year, Helen Canfield Davis, who had also joined the party, read a magazine article about life in Hawaii. Not long after that, Frank spoke about the islands with Paul Robeson, the well-known singer who shared his pro-Communist views. Robeson had visited Hawaii in March 1948 on a concert tour sponsored by the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) to boost the left-wing Progressive Party. Frank also heard about life in the islands from ILWU president Harry Bridges. Then that fall, Helen received an inheritance of securities worth tens of thousands of dollars from her wealthy stepfather, investment banker Gerald W. Peck. With that windfall, Frank and Helen decided to see for themselves what Hawaii was like for an interracial couple; they packed with an eye toward making this a permanent move and arrived in Honolulu on December 8, 1948.

From their hotel in Waikiki, Frank called ILWU director Jack Hall at Bridges’s suggestion. The FBI had a tap on Hall’s phone, and this prompted them to watch Frank as well; according to Bureau files, Frank and Helen met Hall in person on December 11. Far more important, though, Frank and Helen thought Hawaii was simply “an amazing place,” and that ironically racial prejudice “was directed primarily toward male whites, known as ‘haoles.’ ” As Frank later recounted, “Virtually from the start I had a sense of human dignity. I felt that somehow I had been suddenly freed from the chains of white oppression,” and “within a week” he and Helen agreed they wanted to remain in Hawaii permanently, “although I knew it would mean giving up what prestige I had acquired back in Chicago.”

By May 1949, Frank began writing an unpaid regular column for the Honolulu Record, a weekly paper that matched his political views. In July the FBI placed his name on the Security Index, a register of the nation’s most dangerous supposed subversives, and four months on he was added to DETCOM, the political equivalent of the Bureau’s “most wanted” list of top Communists marked for immediate detention in the event of a national emergency.

Frank had realized almost immediately that he would not be able to make a living as a writer in Hawaii, and in January 1950, he started Oahu Paper Company. That same month he and Helen purchased a home in the village of Hauula, thirty miles from Honolulu in northeastern Oahu, for their quickly growing family that included daughter Lynn, who was approaching her first birthday, and son Mark, who would be born ten months later.

The FBI began constant surveillance of the Davises’ mail in mid-1950, and in March 1951, a fire at Oahu Paper destroyed thousands of dollars’ worth of stock. The Bureau’s agents reported that Frank was fully insured, and in June 1952 an informant who had quit Hawaii’s Communist Party told agents he had personally collected Frank and Helen’s monthly party dues for the last two years. In early 1953 Frank became president of the small Hawaii Civil Rights Congress (HCRC), but within two years the group was “almost inactive.” The FBI also noted that on Christmas Day 1955 the Communist Party’s national newspaper, the Daily Worker, included an article by Frank on jazz.

By that time, Frank and Helen had a third child, but in April 1956, he closed Oahu Paper, filed for personal bankruptcy, and took a job as a salesman. That summer the family moved from Hauula to Kahaluu. Several months later, Eugene Dennis, general secretary of CPUSA, writing in a national newspaper, and then Frank in his weekly Honolulu Record column, said “there is no longer a Communist Party in Hawaii.” Even so, Mississippi senator James O. Eastland, chairman of the U.S. Senate’s Internal Security Subcommittee, scheduled a December hearing in Honolulu to probe Soviet activity in the balmy islands. Fearing how Davis might dress down the notoriously racist Eastland in a public hearing, the subcommittee instead subpoenaed Davis to appear at a private executive session, where he took the Fifth Amendment three times when questioned about his CPUSA ties. Just two weeks later, in another Record column, Frank forcefully attacked the Soviet Union for its military invasion of Hungary, calling the move “a tragic mistake from which Moscow will not soon recover.”

But Honolulu FBI agents, and their informants, kept their focus on Frank. In mid-1957 he told one supposed friend that Helen had taken up with a visiting musician who was performing in Waikiki. The Bureau quickly took note of Frank’s move to the Central YMCA for a month before he and Helen reconciled and the family moved to a house up in Honolulu’s Kalihi Valley neighborhood. In February 1958 Helen gave birth to twin daughters, and a year later Frank started a new company, Paradise Papers.

Two years later, agents learned that Helen was working for Avon Products and “works mostly in the evenings making house calls. As a result, subject is now forced to spend most of his evenings babysitting and has little opportunity to contact his former friends outside working hours.” That led Honolulu agents to request that Frank be demoted from the top-risk Security Index, but FBI headquarters refused until early 1963, when it ordered Honolulu to interview Frank about his past affiliations, and Frank met with two agents in Kapiolani Park on August 26, 1963. Asked to confirm his CPUSA membership, Frank said the party had not existed in Hawaii for at least seven years and that it would do him no good to acknowledge his past membership. But, Frank added, he would “consort with the devil” in order to advance racial equality. With that the FBI finally closed its file on fifty-seven-year-old Frank Marshall Davis.

Frank busied himself with Paradise Papers, but it, and Helen’s work, hardly provided enough money to raise a family. By June 1968, Frank’s two eldest children had graduated high school, and that summer Frank earned a modest sum of money by publishing a self-proclaimed sexual autobiography, Sex Rebel: Black—Memoirs of a Gash Gourmet, under the pseudonym “Bob Greene.” It began with an introduction, supposedly authored by “Dale Gordon, Ph.D.,” which observed that the author may have “strong homosexual tendencies.” “Bob Greene” then acknowledged that “under certain circumstances I am bisexual” and stated that “all incidents I have described have been taken from actual experiences” and were not fictionalized. “Bob’s” dominant preference was threesomes, and he recounted the intense emotional trauma he experienced years earlier when he learned that a white Chicago couple with whom he had repeatedly enjoyed such experiences were killed in a violent highway accident.

“Bob,” or Frank, championed recreational sex, arguing that “this whole concept of sex-for-reproduction-only carries with it contempt for women. It implies that women were created solely to bear children.” And Frank did little to hide behind the “Bob Greene” pseudonym with close friends. Four months after the 323-page, $1.75 paperback first appeared, Frank wrote to his old Chicago friend Margaret Burroughs to let her know about the availability of “my thoroughly erotic autobiography.” Since it was “what some people call pornography (I call it erotic realism),” it would not be in Chicago bookstores. “You are ‘Flo,’ ” and “you will find out things about me sexually that you probably never suspected—but in this period of wider acceptance of sexual attitudes, I can be more frank than was possible 20 years ago.” He closed by telling Burroughs, “I’m still swinging.”

In June 1969, Frank moved from his family’s home to a small cottage just off Kuhio Avenue in the cramped, three-square-block section of Waikiki known as the Koa Cottages or simply the Jungle. He and Helen divorced the next year, and, as his son Mark would later write, Frank “entered his golden years with glee,” given what life in the Jungle offered. As Frank described it, his little studio had a tiny front porch “only two feet from the sidewalk” and “my pad is sort of a meeting area, kind of a town hall to an extent.” The Jungle was “a place known for both sex and dope,” and was really “a ghetto surrounded by high-rise buildings,” but it was without a doubt “the most interesting place I have ever lived.” Soon after moving there, Frank became known as the “Keeper of the Dolls,” and he later recounted how he had written “a series of short portraits called ‘Horizontal Cameos’ about women who make their living on their backs.”

Two of Frank’s closest acquaintances from the early and mid-1970s readily and independently confirm that Stan Dunham was one of Frank’s best friends during the years he lived in the Jungle. Dawna Weatherly-Williams, a twenty-two-year-old white woman with a black husband and an interracial son, was by 1970 effectively Frank’s adopted daughter and called him “Daddy.” She later described Stan as “a wonderful guy.” She said he and Frank “had good fun together. They knew each other quite a while before I knew them—several years. They were really good buddies. They did a lot of adventures together that they were very proud of.” As of 1970 Stan “came a couple of times a week to visit Daddy,” and the two men particularly enjoyed crafting “a lot of limericks that were slightly off-color, and they took great fun in those” and in other discussions of sex, which Dawna would avoid.

Despite what was readily available in the neighborhood, “Frank never really did drugs, though he and Stan would smoke pot together,” Dawna remembered. Stan had told Frank about his exceptionally bright interracial grandson well before August 1970. According to Dawna, “Stan had been promising to bring Barry by because we all had that in common—Frank’s kids were half-white, Stan’s grandson was half-black, and my son was half-black.” Decades later she could still picture the afternoon when Stan brought young Barry along to first meet Frank: “Hey, Stan! Oh, is this him?” She remembers that over the next nine or ten years, Stan brought his grandson with him again and again when he went to visit Frank, and as Barry got older, Stan encouraged him to talk with Davis on his own. Obama would remember, “I was intrigued by old Frank,” and years later his younger half sister, Maya Kassandra Soetoro, who was born on August 15, 1970, during her brother’s visit with their grandparents in Hawaii, described Stanley telling her that Davis “was a point of connection, a bridge if you will, to the larger African American experience for my brother.” Once Obama entered politics, Davis’s Communist background plus his kinky exploits made him politically radioactive, and Obama would grudgingly admit only to having visited Davis maybe “ten to fifteen times.”²²

Soon after Ann Dunham Soetoro’s second child was born, Madelyn Dunham, along with her grandson, flew to Jakarta to see her new granddaughter and to meet Lolo’s mother and family. Within weeks nine-year-old Barry was back at Besuki school to start fourth grade. The boy who sat next to him, Widiyanto Hendro, later “said Obama sometimes struggled to make himself understood in Indonesian and at times used hand signals to communicate.” The summer in Honolulu had not improved his limited grasp of the Indonesian language, and Lolo’s relatives who saw Barry during his fourth-grade school year noted how much chubbier he had become during his now three-plus years in Indonesia.

For more than a year in Honolulu, Lolo Soetoro had served as Barry’s off-site stepfather, often roughhousing with him and also playing chess with Stanley at the Dunhams’ home. Then, in Jakarta, Barry lived with Lolo on a daily basis for just more than three years, and throughout that time the young boy was impressed with Lolo’s knowledge and self-control, especially the latter. “His knowledge of the world seemed inexhaustible,” particularly with “elusive things,” such as “managing the emotions I felt,” Obama would later write. Lolo’s own temperament was “imperturbable,” and Barry “never heard him talk about what he was feeling. I had never seen him really angry or sad. He seemed to inhabit a world of hard surfaces and well-defined thoughts.”

Three decades later, after Obama’s memoir Dreams From My Father was published, he would select the brief portrait of Lolo he had written when asked to give a short reading from his book. In that scene, young Barry asks his stepfather if he has ever seen someone killed, and when Lolo reluctantly says yes, Barry asks why. “Because he was weak,” Lolo answers. Barry was puzzled. Strong men “take advantage of weakness in other men,” Lolo responds, and asks Barry, “Which would you rather be?” Lolo declares, “Better to be strong. If you can’t be strong, be clever and make peace with someone who’s strong. But always better to be strong yourself. Always.”

In subsequent years, Obama would believe that by 1970–71, Lolo’s acclimation to his new job with Union Oil led Ann to become increasingly disillusioned with her second husband’s evolution into an American-style business executive. Obama admired Lolo’s “natural reserve” if not his “remoteness,” and believed his mother’s growing disappointment with Lolo led her to use an image of his absent father to persuade her son to pursue a life of idealism over comfort. “She paints him as this Nelson Mandela/Harry Belafonte figure, which turns out to be a wonderful thing for me in the sense that I end up having a very positive image” of my father, Obama would later recount. “I had a whole mythology about who he was,” a “mythology that my mother fed me.” But his memories of Lolo from 1970–71 would become dismissive. “His big thing was Johnnie Walker Black, Andy Williams records,” Obama recalled. “I still remember ‘Moon River.’ He’d be playing it, sipping, and playing tennis at the country club. That was his whole thing. I think their expectations diverged fairly rapidly” after 1970.

Some scholars would later credit “the Javanese art of restraint, of not displaying emotions, of never raising your voice,” all of which young Barry witnessed in Lolo, with deeply influencing Obama. Lolo “was as close to a father figure as Obama ever had,” albeit briefly, and “the lessons Obama learned from Jakarta and Lolo,” particularly not “disclosing too much about how one feels,” supplied the human template for Obama’s own practice and appreciation of the “benefit of managing emotions,” a second commentator would conclude.

In subsequent years, when asked about the impact on him of his three-plus years in Indonesia, Obama more often cited an external perception—“I lived in a country where I saw extreme poverty at a very early age”—than any internal conclusions or emotional lessons. “It left a very strong mark on me living there because you got a real sense of just how poor folks can get,” he told one questioner twenty years later. “I was educated in the potential oppressiveness of power and the inequality of wealth,” he told another. “I witnessed firsthand the huge gulf between rich and poor” and “I think it had a tremendous impact on me,” he explained more than once. Such an insistent theme would lead one smart journalist to assert years later that for Obama, “Indonesia was the formative experience.”²³

Sometime soon after his tenth birthday, in early August 1971, Barry again flew from Jakarta to Honolulu. As he had the previous summer, he would live with his grandparents, and in September he began fifth-grade classes at Punahou School, just a four-block walk up Punahou Street. Families of fifth (and sixth) graders received a “narrative conference report form three times during the school year. No letter grades are given. At the initial conference during the fall, achievement test scores, the class standing and a detailed written evaluation of progress in each subject area will be discussed.” Four major subject areas—Language Arts, Social Studies, Mathematics, and Science—were supplemented by a weekly arts class, a music class, and four sessions of physical education. A year’s tuition was $1,165. With two well-employed parents, plus his grandparents—Madelyn nine months earlier had been named one of Bank of Hawaii’s first two women vice presidents—Obama did not receive any form of financial aid.

For Mathematics and Science, Barry was taught by twenty-five-year-old Hastings Judd Kauwela “Pal” Eldredge, who had graduated from Punahou seven years earlier and earned his undergraduate degree at Brigham Young University. For Language Arts and Social Studies, in 307 Castle Hall, Barry had his homeroom teacher, fifty-six-year-old Mrs. Mabel Hefty, a 1935 graduate of San Francisco State College who had taught at Punahou since 1947 and had spent a recent sabbatical year teaching in Kenya. At Punahou, fifth graders had homework, and after a brief period of Barry tackling it at the Dunhams’ dining room table, Stan asked Alec Williamson, his insurance agency friend, to build a desk to go in Barry’s small bedroom. In return, Barry offered Williamson a guitar he had lost interest in. (Williamson still had it more than forty years later.)

As an adult, Obama would praise Hefty for making him feel entirely welcome and fully at home among classmates, most of whom had been together since kindergarten or first grade. Hefty split her class into groups of four at shared desks; Barry was with Ronald Loui, Malcolm Waugh, and Mark “Hebs” Hebing, his best friend that year. “Mrs. Hefty was a great teacher,” Hebing recalled. “One of the first things we had to do” was “memorize the Gettysburg Address”—“the whole thing.” In Hebing’s memory forty years later, Barry was the first student to succeed.

There was one other African American student, Joella Edwards, in Barry’s fifth-grade class, and she was “shocked” by the arrival of her new classmate. She would remember Barry as “soft-spoken, quiet, and reserved,” but he hung back from befriending her in any way. Ronald Loui, like Joella, would recall other classmates teasing both her and Barry with common grade-school rhymes. “There were many times that I looked to Barry for a word, a sign, or signal that we were in this together,” Joella later wrote, but none ever came. For the next three years too—grades six, seven, and eight—they would be the only two black students in Punahou’s middle school, but no bond ever formed before Joella left Punahou come tenth grade.²⁴

In late October 1971, Ann Dunham returned to Honolulu from Jakarta. It is unclear who suggested what to whom, but the timing of her trip was not happenstance because five weeks or so after her arrival in Honolulu, Barack H. Obama Sr. arrived there as well, from Nairobi.

The seven years since Obama Sr. had been forced to leave the United States in July 1964 had been eventful and often painful. Not even a week after his departure, an agitated woman from Newton, Massachusetts, Ida Baker, twice telephoned the Boston INS office to report that her twenty-seven-year-old daughter, Ruth, was so romantically infatuated with Obama she was planning to follow him to Kenya and get married. In late August, Mrs. Baker called again to say that Ruth had flown to Nairobi on August 16. An INS agent checked in with Unitarian reverend Dana Klotzle, as well as an official at Harvard, both of whom reported that Obama already had two wives, plus a child in Honolulu. Mrs. Baker acknowledged that Ruth knew of at least the wife in Kenya, but pursued Obama anyway. The agent concluded the report with: “Suggest we discourage her from further inquiries,” because it was “time consuming and to no point where her daughter, an adult and apparently fully competent, is in possession of the information re Obama’s marriages.”

Ruth Beatrice Baker, a 1958 graduate of Simmons College, had become involved with Obama in April 1964 after meeting him at a party. “He had a flat in Cambridge with some other African students, and I was there almost every day from then on. I felt I loved him very much—he was very charming and there never was a dull moment—but he was not faithful to me, although he told me he loved me too.” In June, Obama told her he had to return to Kenya, but said she “should come there, and if I liked the country we could marry. I took him at his word” and bought a one-way plane ticket despite how “devastated” her parents were. But Obama was not at the Nairobi airport to meet her, and a helpful airport employee who knew Obama took her home, made some phone calls, and Obama soon appeared. “We went off and started living together” in a home at 16 Rosslyn Close, but “right from the very start he was drinking heavily, staying out to all hours of the night” and “sometimes hitting me and often verbally insulting me,” Ruth later recounted. “But I was in love and very, very insecure so somehow I hung on.”

On December 24, 1964, she and Obama were formally married; by then his two oldest children, Roy and Rita, were living with him and Ruth in Nairobi. As Barack’s younger sister Zeituni described the highly uncomfortable situation: “the children did not know their father, and this white mother did not speak Luo.” Zeituni moved in with them to try to ease the tensions, but Obama’s deepening alcoholism—Johnnie Walker Black Label was his drink of choice—and abusive behavior made for an unceasingly volatile situation.

Following his return from the U.S., Obama had a job with Shell Oil Company, but five months after Tom Mboya became Kenya’s minister of economic planning and development in December 1964, Obama became a senior economist in that ministry. That involved a move to a house at 101 Hurlingham Road, and within three weeks of Obama’s joining Mboya’s team, the ministry issued a landmark fifty-two-page sessional paper titled “African Socialism and Its Application to Planning in Kenya.” In it, President Jomo Kenyatta declared that under his KANU (Kenya African National Union) Party, Kenya “would develop on the basis of the concepts and philosophy of Democratic African Socialism” and had “rejected both Western Capitalism and Eastern Communism” as models for economic development. Kenyatta said that publication of the paper “should bring to an end all the conflicting, theoretical and academic arguments that have been going on,” for political stability and confidence could not be established “if we continue with debates on theories and doubts about the aims of our society.”

The paper was understood to be primarily Mboya’s own handiwork, and knowledgeable commentators praised it as “a middle-of-the-road approach” aimed at tamping down strong ideological differences within KANU. When students at a left-wing institute voiced critical objections, parliament authorized an immediate takeover of the school, with Mboya seconding the motion to do so. But less than eight weeks later, the East Africa Journal published an eight-page critique of the paper written by Barack H. Obama.

There was no mistaking Obama’s political views. “The question is how are we going to remove the disparities in our country,” and “we may find it necessary to force people to do things which they would not do otherwise.” In addition, “we also need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now.” Obama argued that the sessional paper was too tolerant of such “economic power concentrations” and what was “more important is to find means by which we can redistribute our economic gains to the benefit of all.” Not only should government “tax the rich more” and pursue nationalization; it should do so in an explicitly racial way. “We have to give the African his place in his own country,” he asserted, “and we have to give him this economic power if he is going to develop.” Obama ended with a political call to arms. “Is it the African who owns this country? If he does, then why should he not control the economic means of growth in this country? … The government must do something about this and soon.”

Obama’s essay also featured some thinly veiled special pleading, observing that “we do not have many people qualified to take up managerial positions” or “who could participate intelligently in policy-making functions.” What’s more, “the few who are available are not utilized fully.” Obama almost certainly believed he deserved a more senior job in the government. Not surprisingly, his employment at the ministry came to an end within months after his searing article was published. With that came another household move, this time to city council housing at 16A Woodley Estate.

Sometime soon after that, a drunken Obama insisted on taking the wheel of his friend Adede Abiero’s new car and promptly wrecked it. Abiero died in the crash. Obama suffered only minor injuries, but his longtime friend Leo Odera Omolo later said, “Barack never really recovered from that. It had a strong impact.” Even so, it did not lead to any increased self-discipline or sobriety. In November 1965 Obama contacted Harvard, seeking the university’s support for a return to the U.S. so he could present his Ph.D. dissertation. But the registrar’s office rebuffed his request, saying he had failed to register its title with Harvard’s Economics Department. Ruth later recalled Obama telling her that his dissertation materials had disappeared following a burglary in which their television was stolen, but in any event Obama failed to pursue the matter further with Harvard, although in Kenya he would often declare himself to be Dr. Obama.

On November 28, 1965, Ruth and Obama’s first child, Mark Okoth Obama, was born, but their home life remained fraught with drunken abuse. In 1966 there was increased tension in Kenya’s domestic politics, beginning when left-wing Luo vice president Oginga Odinga broke from KANU and formed a new opposition party, the Kenya People’s Union (KPU). That was seen as a “direct challenge to Kenyatta,” and days later KANU pushed through two constitutional amendments, one mandating new parliamentary elections and another enlarging the president’s national security powers to allow for detention without trial.

Kenyatta’s security services turned an increasingly hostile eye toward foreigners, and particularly Americans, who were in Odinga’s political orbit. The American-born wife of the first Kenyan to attain a Ph.D., Julius Gikonyo Kiano, was charged with disloyalty and expelled; some months later the focus was on a young white American woman from southern Illinois, Sandra Hansen, who had come to Nairobi as a Northwestern University undergraduate interested in African literature. While taking classes at what by then was University College Nairobi, she met a Luo student who invited her to a party at which “the center of attention,” as she recounted years later, was a somewhat older Luo man, Barack Obama. Sandy found him “funny, charming,” and “extremely charismatic,” and they “became fast friends and spent a lot of time together” during 1966 and 1967, by which time Hansen was teaching at a boys’ school. “His drinking started to be more of a problem,” she recollected, but he “loved music, dancing and dressing well.”

Obama was the first person Hansen turned to when Kenyan security officers told her she had seventy-two hours to leave the country or be arrested. Obama accompanied her to see some official in the security ministry, who displayed an extensive file they had collected on her. “I think, Sandy, you’ve got to go,” Obama told her. When her day of departure arrived, Obama drove her to the airport and walked her to the boarding area. Almost fifty years later, Hansen’s memories of what Mark Obama would later call “my father’s warm and gracious side” are a partial counterpoint to the alcoholic rages that Ruth and his African children endured. But that side was memorialized in an indelible way too, even if for half a century only the tiniest number of people knew the story. Upon leaving Nairobi, Hansen stopped in London, where she saw her Luo boyfriend, Godfrey Kassim Owango, like Obama an economist and later chairman of Kenya’s Chambers of Commerce. Back in Illinois, nine months later, Hansen gave birth to a son. She named him not for his father, but for the Kenyan man she most admired and remembered, Barack Obama.²⁵

Few other people’s experiences with Obama mirrored Sandy Hansen’s. In September 1966, Obama had found new employment, with the Central Bank of Kenya, but he was terminated nine months later. Then Ruth, fed up with his violence, fled with one-year-old Mark to the United States. Obama flew across the Atlantic and persuaded her to return to Kenya. “He was a man I had a very strong passion for,” Ruth told Sally Jacobs years later. “I loved him despite everything,” but Obama’s behavior hardly changed for the better. In September 1967, he secured a new job as a senior officer at the Kenya Tourist Development Corporation (KTDC), but within six weeks there were reports that he had drunkenly driven his vehicle into a milk cart one day at 4:00 A.M. By the new year, Ruth was pregnant with their second child; David Opiyo Obama was born on September 11, 1968, at Nairobi Hospital.

Sometime in late 1968 Neil Abercrombie and Andy “Pake” Zane, two of Obama’s best buddies from the University of Hawaii, came through Nairobi as part of a months-long tour through Europe, the Middle East, and East Africa. “He showed us around, we stayed at his house, partied, had a good time,” and met Ruth, Roy, Rita, and young Mark, Zane recalled more than forty years later, with dozens of photographs from that visit spread out before him. Abercrombie thought “he seemed very frustrated … that he was being underutilized” at KTDC. As Zane recalled to Sally Jacobs, “The one thing Barack wanted was to do something for his country, but he felt he could not” accomplish anything significant at KTDC. “He was angry, but it was contained.” Yet Abercrombie recalled that “he was drinking constantly. It was as though the drinking was now part of his existence.” But in retrospect, one other thing stood out in both friends’ memories: Obama never asked about his American son or his ex-wife Ann.

At about 1:00 P.M. on Saturday, July 5, 1969, Tom Mboya was shot and killed at close range outside Chhani’s Pharmacy on Nairobi’s Government Road. Just moments earlier, Barack Obama had seen Mboya’s car parked on a yellow line in the street and had stopped to talk and joke with his friend for four or five minutes. “You will get a ticket,” he had warned.

A gunman was arrested, though it was commonly believed that Mboya’s assassination was ordered by someone at or near the peak of Kenya’s government. On September 8, Obama was the prosecution’s final witness at the gunman’s trial, testifying about Mboya’s final sidewalk chat. The defendant was convicted and soon hanged, but that resolved nothing. Far more than one man had died on Government Road, for Kenya’s future as a nonviolent, multiethnic, multiparty democracy died with Tom Mboya.

In June 1970, Obama was fired by the KTDC because of serial dishonesty in matters large and small. Some months later, he had another drunken car crash, and this time he suffered at least one badly injured leg that required prolonged hospitalization. Still, by the early fall of 1971, he was planning a trip to the U.S., perhaps in part because he expected that Ruth would flee from him again, this time permanently.

Rita Auma Obama, who was eleven years old by the time of her father’s 1971 departure, recalled him speaking of her American brother and how Ann “would send his school reports to my father.” Her older brother Roy, later Abon’go Malik, would later remember seeing “an old briefcase” that contained “the divorce letters, and Ann Dunham’s letters.” Even Ruth told Sally Jacobs how “very proud” Obama was of his American son. “He had a little picture of him on his tricycle with a hat on his head. And he kept that picture in every house that we lived in. He loved his son.”²⁶

Barack Obama Sr. arrived back in Honolulu almost ten years after he had left there with glowing credentials to earn a Harvard Ph.D. and then help guide Kenya’s economic future. Now he had no doctoral degree, no job, and a visible limp. How he financed the trip remains a mystery. He planned to stay for a month, and the Dunhams had sublet an apartment downstairs from theirs where Obama could sleep.

Madelyn’s younger sister Arlene Payne, who also was in Hawaii at that time along with her lifelong companion, Margery Duffey, later told Janny Scott, “I had the sense then, as I had earlier, that both Madelyn and Stanley were impressed with him in some way. They were very respectful to him” and “they liked to listen to what he had to say.”

How Ann viewed Obama’s visit, and whether he did suggest to his married ex-spouse that he would welcome her and their son joining him in Kenya, is unknown. Obama still referred to her as Anna, and he brought along for his ten-year-old son a trio of Kenyan trinkets: “three wooden figurines—a lion, an elephant, and an ebony man in tribal dress beating a drum.” Ann, Stan, and Madelyn had prepared Barry for the visit with intensified renditions of the upbeat themes Ann had insistently sounded during Barry’s earlier years. “My father was this very imposing, almost mythic figure,” he recounted years later. “In my mind he was the smartest, most sophisticated person that my maternal grandparents had ever met.” Then, when they first met, his father entirely lived up to his advance billing, at least in the son’s subsequent retelling of it. “He was imposing and he was impressive, and he did change the space around him when he walked into a room,” Barry recalled. “His capacity to establish an image for himself of being in command was in full force, and it had an impressive effect on a ten-year-old boy.”

“He was an intimidating character,” the son told a subsequent interviewer. “He had this big, deep, booming voice and always felt like he was right about everything.” All told, it “was a very powerful moment for me,” but he also confessed later that his father’s visit was deeply unsettling. “If you’ve got this person who suddenly shows up and says, ‘I’m your father, and I’m going to tell you what to do,’ and you don’t have any sense of who this person is, and you don’t necessarily have a deep bond of trust with him, I don’t think your reaction is, ‘How do I get him to stay?’ I think the reaction may be ‘What’s this guy doing here and who does he think he is?’ ”

One day during the first two weeks, Ann told her son that Mabel Hefty had invited his father to speak to her and Pal Eldredge’s fifth-grade classes about Kenya. That news made Barry nervous, but Obama Sr. carried off the appearance in fine form, and Barry was enormously relieved. Years later, Eldredge could still picture the scene: “He seemed to be real proud, right at his side, kind of holding on to his dad’s arm.” Barry’s classmate Dean Ando recalled it similarly: “All I remember is Barry was just so happy that day it was incredible … the dad and Barry had the same smile.” Young Obama remembered Eldredge telling him, “You’ve got a pretty impressive father,” and a classmate saying, “Your dad is pretty cool.”

A few days after Obama’s appearance at Punahou, he took his son to a Honolulu Symphony concert featuring the famous jazz pianist Dave Brubeck, who was joined by his sixteen- and nineteen-year-old sons, Daniel and Christopher, on bass and drums. It was a grand event. The Honolulu Chorale joined the symphony and the family trio to perform Brubeck’s new oratorio, The Light in the Wilderness. Hawaii’s junior U.S. senator, Daniel K. Inouye, served as narrator for the piece.

For Christmas, Obama gave Barry his first basketball. But the end of the month was fast approaching. Obama failed to look up his old Honolulu friends Neil Abercrombie and Andy “Pake” Zane, and when he was with his son, “he never pushed me to speak,” Barry later recounted. “It was only during the course of that month—by the end of that month—that I think I started to open myself up to understanding who he was. But then he was gone, and I never saw him again.”²⁷

Right after New Year’s, Ann applied for a new U.S. passport in order to “return home” to Jakarta on January 14, 1972. She listed her stay there as “indefinite,” but within a month she made the first of three requests that spring 1972 for UDub to send copies of her old 1961–62 transcript to University of Hawaii’s graduate school. In Honolulu, Barry immediately started putting his favorite Christmas present to good use, playing basketball with his good friend Mark Hebing, among others, sometimes at several courts on King Street only a block or so south of his grandparents’ apartment building.

His math and science teacher, Pal Eldredge, would remember fifth-grade Barry as “a happy kid. He had a good sense of humor and was smiling all the time,” as virtually every photo of young Obama from that time confirms. “He was a rascal too—he had a little spunk to him,” Eldredge adds, but “he was always smiling” and was “a good student—he related well with everybody.” Obama Sr.’s old buddy Neil Abercrombie, now at work on a Ph.D. dissertation and holding down a variety of odd jobs, would run into Stan Dunham and Stan’s grandson several times that spring. “When I would see them, Stanley would offer how bright Barry was and how well he was doing in school. He had ambitions for little Barry,” Abercrombie remembered. “It was obvious to everybody and certainly must have been obvious to little Barry that his grandfather not only loved him but, more importantly, liked him and liked having him around and liked him as a pal.”

By September 1972, when Barry began sixth grade, Ann and now-two-year-old Maya had returned to Honolulu from Jakarta so that Ann could begin graduate study in anthropology that fall at UH, thanks to a grant from the Asia Foundation. Ann and both of her children lived in apartment #3 at 1839 Poki Street, only one short block west of Punahou. A classmate who sat beside Barry remembered a “chubby-cheeked boy” who was “articulate, bright, funny, and kind.” Sixth-grade coursework added “oceanography, electricity and atomic structure” to the science class and also introduced students to “the use and abuse of drugs.” In addition, one week at Camp Timberline gave the class an opportunity to try archery and horseback riding; four decades later homeroom teacher Betty Morioka still had a photograph showing a pensive Barry in an oversized gray T-shirt, a rare instance of a picture in which he was not smiling broadly. Young Obama’s clearest memory was of a Jewish camp counselor who described the time he had spent in Israel.

Not long after the end of that sixth-grade year, Ann, Madelyn, Barry, and Maya set off on a long tour of the American West. They first flew to Seattle—Ann’s first time back there, or anywhere else on the mainland, since her return to Hawaii eleven years earlier—and then headed south down the West Coast. From Disneyland, in Southern California, they headed east to the Grand Canyon, then to Kansas City, where Madelyn’s sister Arlene was teaching at the University of Missouri. From there it was north to Chicago, then back westward to Yellowstone National Park and San Francisco before returning to Honolulu. Ann told a friend the trek was “pretty exhausting” since “we traveled by bus most of the way.” Her son remembered chasing bison at Yellowstone, but also the “shrunken heads—real shrunken heads” at Chicago’s Field Museum. “That was actually the highlight. That was almost as good as Disneyland.”

As summer ended, Ann wrote to an old friend in Seattle to say that “I do hope to spend most of my time for the next few years in the islands, since my son Barry is doing very well in school here, and I hate to take him abroad again till he graduates, which won’t be for another 6 years.” In seventh grade Barry began foreign language (French) instruction, and his other classes would also now be taught by departmental specialists. Barry’s homeroom was in 102 Bishop Hall with Joyce Kang; a yearbook photo of the group labeled “Mixed Races of America” declared, “Whether you’re a [Sarah] Tmora, a [Pam] Ching, or an Obama, we share the same world.” A girl who had pre-algebra and other seventh- and eighth-grade classes with Barry remembered him as “boisterously funny and a big, good-hearted tease” who had “a variety of friends and activities,” one of which was now tennis. Throughout these years, Barry spent a good deal of time at Punahou’s tennis courts, and one classmate, Kristen B. Caldwell, later wrote and spoke about one incident that remained painfully clear in her memory.

A chart of who would play whom in some tournament had just been posted by Tom Mauch, Punahou’s tennis pro. Mauch, then in his early forties, had come to Punahou in 1967 from Northern California’s East Bay. Barry and other students were running their fingers along the chart when Mauch told him, “Don’t touch that, you’ll get it dirty!” In Caldwell’s memory, “he singled him out, and the implication was absolutely clear: Barry’s hands weren’t grubby; the message was that his darker skin would somehow soil” the diagram. “I could tell it upset Barry,” she recalled, but “he said, ‘What do you mean by that?’ with just a perfect amount of iciness to get his point across.” Mauch fumbled for a response. “Nothing—I was making a joke.”

Only once, in 1995, would Obama himself expressly refer to the incident with the tennis pro. In subsequent years, aside from one unspecific allusion, Obama never mentioned the exchange to any interviewers. Contacted forty years later and asked for the very first time if he remembered Obama, Tom Mauch refused to talk about his years at Punahou.

Barry’s eighth-grade year featured one semester of Government and Living in a World of Change and one of Christian Ethics instead of social studies. “Biblical faith is placed in the context of the world in which we live” while examining “the relationship between faith and the everyday experiences of life,” Punahou’s catalog explained. For French, Barry had his former homeroom teacher, now Joyce Kang Torrey.

In the fall, a still-chubby Barry played defensive end on the intermediate football team coached by Pal Eldredge, his fifth-grade teacher. According to Punahou’s catalog, the yearlong science class stressed “human physiology and health … drug and sex education are part of the curriculum as the need and interest are manifested.” Toward the end of the school year, on April 30, an evening open house called “Science ’75” featured eighth graders’ second-semester science projects. Barry’s was titled “Effects of Music on Plants,” though his friend Mark Bendix’s “The Effect of Aerosol Spray on Plants” was probably easier to execute.²⁸

During Barry’s eighth-grade year, Ann finished her graduate coursework, passed her Ph.D. qualifying exams, and gave up the Poki Street apartment to return to Indonesia with four-year-old Maya. She and Lolo had informally separated in mid-1974, and Ann would later record that Lolo did not contribute to her or Maya’s support after that time, though her relationship with both him and his parents remained caring and cordial. With her departure from Honolulu, Barry moved back in with his grandparents, who in 1973 had moved from their twelfth-floor apartment to unit 1008 in the same building. Barry spent the summer of 1975 in Indonesia with Ann and Maya before returning to Honolulu in August before his ninth-grade year.

Punahou spoke of its four high school years as “the Academy,” and many new students entered for ninth grade, bringing each annual class to 400 to 425 students, or twenty homerooms of twenty students apiece. Barry’s new homeroom teacher was Eric Kusunoki, a 1967 Punahou graduate who remembered calling the official roll the very first day and having Obama respond, “Just call me Barry.” The biggest change from prior grades was the Academy’s unusual six-day variable modular schedule that principal Win Healy had instituted four years earlier: days were A-B-C-D-E-F, not Monday through Friday. That arrangement left students with considerable free time between classes on some days, and Barry usually devoted as much of that time as possible to pickup basketball.

“He always had a basketball in his hands and was always looking for a pickup game,” classmate Larry Tavares remembered. Barry later recalled having his worst grade ever—a D in French—that year, and his other classes ranged from speech to boys’ chorus to one on Europe. Classmate Whitey Kahoohanohano recounts that “Barry was happy-go-lucky. A prankster. A tease. He liked to have fun. I remember him giggling a lot. He was real pleasant” and “smart.” Another, Sharon Yanagi, indicates that Barry’s basic persona had not changed at all from previous years: “he was always smiling.”

During his ninth-grade year, Barry began a serious friendship with two older African American students, senior Tony Peterson and junior Rik Smith. Tony was only in his second year at Punahou, but as one younger student stressed, “people looked up to Tony. He was a real smart guy.” One day a week, Tony, Rik, and Barry would meet up on the steps of Cooke Hall, right outside the attendance office. Tony later said that much of their interaction involved “standing around trying to impress each other with how smart we are.”

Although biracial, Rik already firmly identified as black and felt that racism most definitely existed in Hawaii. “Punahou was an amazing school,” he said years later, “but it could be a lonely place.” In his mind, “those of us who were black did feel isolated.” Tony did not entirely share Rik’s attitude. “For black people, there was not a lot of discrimination against us.” The three of them “talked about race but not, I thought, out of a deep sense of pain,” he explained.

One spring morning, to help with an English assignment, Tony recorded some of the trio’s conversation. Rik asked “What is time?” and fourteen-year-old Barry responded that “time is just a collection of human experiences combined so that they make a long, flowing stream of thought.” At the end of that school year, Barry wrote in Tony’s 1976 Oahuan yearbook: “Tony, man, I am sure glad I got to know you before you left. All those Ethnic Corner trips to the snack bar and playing ball made the year a lot more enjoyable, even though the snack bar trips cost me a fortune.” Playing off of some prior conversation, Barry also told Tony to “get that law degree. Some day when I am a pro basketballer, and I want to sue my team for more money, I’ll call on you.”²⁹

Ann had intended for Barry to once again come to Indonesia for the summer. She and Maya had been living with Lolo’s mother in Jogyakarta rather than the capital so she could pursue her doctoral research. “What an enjoyable city it is, especially as compared with Jakarta!” she wrote her University of Hawaii dissertation adviser, Alice Dewey. But in May, she had changed their plans, and in mid-June she and Maya flew to Honolulu, staying at Dewey’s home while Barry continued to live with his grandparents. Stanley was still working at the insurance agency, but his two best friends there, Alec Williamson and Rolf Nordahl, could tell how unfulfilling and oftentimes unpleasant he found the work. “During the day, there wasn’t a whole lot of business” with potential customers not at home, Nordahl recalled, and he and Stan would chat and often at lunchtime go make sandwiches at the Dunhams’ apartment. More than once, Rolf heard Stan mention the Spencer Tracy–Katharine Hepburn film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Released in December 1967, it starred the black Bahamian American actor Sidney Poitier as Dr. John Wade Prentice of Hawaii, whose white fiancée brings him home to meet her parents. “Well, I lived it,” Stan would explain.

On evenings when the two men were finished with customer calls, they often went to Bob’s Soul Food Place or the Family Inn bar on Honolulu’s Smith Street, in the city’s well-known red-light district. “Stanley did not have a great deal of success” selling life insurance, mainly because of his “call reluctance,” Nordahl explained. “There’s nothing worse than calling somebody and wanting to talk to them about life insurance … it’s the last thing anybody wants to talk about.” But Stanley was committed to sticking with the job and wanted to “come up to snuff with Madelyn … I know that bothered him.” To Nordahl, “he spoke very fondly of her” and gave no sign that his job difficulties altered his personality. “He always had a joke” and seemed like “a very, very happy man—always a big smile. I wouldn’t say that I saw any unhappiness at all.”

Stanley also “wanted to learn more about black people,” Rolf knew, and that influenced his and his grandson’s ongoing visits with Frank Marshall Davis. Barry later described Frank’s “big dewlapped face and an ill-kempt gray Afro that made him look like an old, shaggy-maned lion. He would read us his poetry whenever we stopped by his house, sharing whiskey with Gramps out of an emptied jelly jar.” Stan’s close relationship with Frank also generated his own interest in writing poetry, something he regularly talked about with Alec Williamson.

“He loved science fiction,” Williamson recalled, and “we talked a lot of politics.” Stan “did not like Nixon,” would “argue the liberal side,” and often brought his grandson by the office during his late middle school years. Barry “was a good kid … well-educated … I liked him.” Stan was indeed “something of a poet,” and more than thirty-five years later Williamson still had copies of, and indeed could recite, two deeply poignant ones:

Life

Oh, where have they gone

Those days of our youth

With those wonderful dreams

Of worlds to be won

When life was a search

For the ultimate truth

Full of adventure

And, Oh, so much fun

Win all our battles

We just couldn’t fail

For then right was right

It just had to prevail

Then came life’s middle years

Impending old age with all of its fears

The many missed chances

The oft shed tears

Till hope at last dwindles

And disappears

Then comes rebirth

For ’tis Nature’s way

The circle’s full round

Life’s dawned a new day

Erase life’s slate clean

But sell not your shares

For hope still survives

In our children, and in theirs

And if not, SO WHAT!

—STANLEY A. DUNHAM

The second, brief, untitled one spoke to home:

Man can span the oceans of space

Split the atom. Win the race

But all is for naught when against his wishes

He has to help with the dinner dishes.

—STANLEY A. DUNHAM

Williamson and Nordahl agreed that “Stan was a great guy,” and “we had a lot of good times together.” Pal Eldredge at Punahou had exactly the same impression. Both Stan and Madelyn came to “most of the activities” and “any kind of performances we had.” Stan “was a fun guy” and “they were always here with” Barry, Eldredge remembered. “It was always good to be around him because he was always joking with people.” Ann’s mentor Alice Dewey felt similarly: Stanley was a “very charming and fun person, and very affectionate.”

Madelyn, particularly at work, was far less outgoing and seemingly far less happy, though her professional success far eclipsed her husband’s. One young management trainee from the 1970s, who later became Bank of Hawaii’s vice chairman, bluntly acknowledged, “I was afraid of her. She definitely intimidated me. If you were new and still learning, she was like a drill sergeant.” Another young man remembered similarly: “We were afraid of her because she was so gruff.” Two women had comparable experiences. To Naomi Komenaka, Madelyn was “demanding, sharp and feisty”; to Myrtle Choan, one of Madelyn’s direct deputies, “she was a tough lady. Tough, tough lady … I was so afraid of her. I called her Mrs. Dunham, never by her first name.”

At home, though, Madelyn was as devoted to Barry as Stan was; Barry called her “Tut,” with a long “oo” sound, after a common Hawaiian term for grandmother, tutu. Her brother Charles recalled her telling him well before Barry’s high school years that he was a genius; on one of the few occasions she ever spoke publicly about her grandson, she remembered him as “just a basketball-happy little boy…. I think his ambition when he was young was to be a pro basketball player, but he didn’t grow tall enough.”

In their modest apartment, Barry’s tiny bedroom was hardly six feet by eight feet, according to Stan’s brother Ralph, who visited them in Hawaii at that time. “It was about the size of a jail cell.” Stan took Ralph along to his regular chess and checkers club, and also took him to meet Frank Marshall Davis. Along with Stan and young Barry, “we had a terrific time,” Ralph recounted years later. Even close family members did not understand why Stan and Madelyn remained in the small apartment at 1617 South Beretania. Madelyn’s brother Charles believed Stan thought it was perfectly fine, but that his sister did not like it. It was a “pretty depressing” building and “not where a bank vice president would live.”³⁰

For Barry’s tenth-grade year, Literature & Writing used the traditional Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition. A full year of science was required, as was at least one semester of a course on Asia. Tony Peterson had graduated, and seemingly taking his place for Barry was Keith Kakugawa, now a senior, with whom Obama had been acquainted since Keith first arrived at Punahou three years earlier. With a half-Japanese, half–native Hawaiian father who worked as an exterminator, and a half-black and half–Native American mother, Kakugawa personified the islands’ rich mix of ethnicities. Bright, an excellent athlete, particularly in track, and blessed with an excellent memory, Kakugawa lived well west of Honolulu in working-class Pearl City, just north of the famous Pearl Harbor navy base.

Obama later wrote that Keith possessed “a warmth and brash humor” that led to “an easy friendship,” but around Punahou, opinions on Kakugawa varied widely. Tony Peterson thought “his social skills weren’t the best,” and Pal Eldredge felt “he had a chip on his shoulder.” Keith’s longtime friend David Craven later commented that “Barry was the nice guy he hung around with,” but Keith’s best friend at Punahou, Marc Haine, remembered him as “a popular athlete, a popular figure.”

To Kakugawa, fifteen-year-old Barry was “very, very quiet” and “very, very shy … I wouldn’t say introverted, but he was just a very shy, cautious kid.” Keith took a great liking to Stan Dunham. “Gramps was so great to all of us,” he recounted years later. “He was everyone’s grandfather.”

Tenth grade was also the first time Barry played on an actual basketball team. Punahou’s junior varsity one was coached by 1961 Punahou graduate Norbie Mendez and played five preseason and fourteen regular season games between December 1976 and February 1977. Barry’s friends Mark Bendix, Greg Orme, Tom Topolinski, Joe Hansen, and Mark Heflin were also on the team. Obama never cracked the starting lineup, but he ended up as the third leading scorer as the team won nine of its fourteen official games.

Yearbook photos that year show Barry with a bushy Afro and sometimes more than a little extra weight. A classroom picture captures a decidedly chubby Obama, whereas the ones for JV basketball and concert choir, perhaps taken later, show a visibly more mature fifteen-year-old. Sometime midyear Barry also spent significant time reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Keith Kakugawa remembers Obama pointing out the book in Punahou’s library, and Mark Hebing recalls Barry recommending it to him. Barry would later acknowledge absorbing the book that year, saying that Malcolm’s “repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me … forged through sheer force of will.”

One Saturday evening sometime in the late spring of 1977, Kakugawa, Mike Ramos, a junior athlete on Punahou’s varsity basketball team, Obama, and fellow sophomore Greg Orme headed to a party at Schofield Barracks, a large U.S. Army base almost twenty-five miles northwest of Punahou. Most of Oahu’s African Americans were from military families, and the people at this party were predominantly black men and women several years older than the teenage Punahou quartet. Barry didn’t yet drink, but the group stopped to buy a case of Heineken on the way. Once there, the Punahou youngsters were not welcomed with open arms by everyone present.

“The place was packed” and “it was dark,” Ramos remembered. He was more than a year older than Obama, and he was from a Filipino family of modest means; he had first met Barry a year earlier at a party where they discovered they were both fans of jazz saxophonist Grover Washington Jr. Orme was white, and he had known Obama since their seventh-grade year. Barry had passed along his interest in jazz to several friends that year. But at the Schofield party “everyone else, except the four of us, was dressed for a night at Studio 54, and we were dressed for a luau at the beach,” Kakugawa later said.

Especially if they were haoles, Punahou students were looked upon “as the snobs, the rich kids” in many circles on Oahu. “Everyone on the island treated you differently once they knew you were from Punahou,” Keith said. Ramos remembers that Kakugawa, who was known to some of the people at the party, took offense whenever a verbal putdown of Punahou was uttered, and Ramos also remembered Keith “doing a bunch of trash talking” that night in response. Kakugawa admitted “we got in an argument because we were from Punahou,” and the four of them were headed for the door in less than an hour.

Ramos was confused. “I was having a pretty good time”—“Why are we leaving?” For Orme, it was the first time he had been one of the few white people in a mostly black setting, and during the car ride back, he mentioned that to Barry. “One of us said that being the different guys in the room had awakened a little bit of empathy to what he must feel all the time at school,” Orme later recalled. Ramos agreed. “For the haole guys in our group, it was a kind of eye-opening experience for them.” But for whatever reason, Obama was upset by Orme’s comment—“he clearly didn’t appreciate that,” Greg remembered. Kakugawa thought Barry was bothered that one or more girls at the party had refused to dance with him, but Barry had been the youngest person there. Years later, he would describe the evening as a racial coming-of-age moment for him, but Ramos and especially Orme, who would become Obama’s closest friend during their two remaining years at Punahou, never heard or saw anything of the sort. Barry “would bring up worldly topics far beyond his years. But we never talked race.”

In late April or early May 1977, not long after the party, Ann and Maya returned to Indonesia so that Ann could resume her dissertation fieldwork. Keith Kakugawa starkly remembers the day they departed. Ann told her son she was headed “home,” and “Barry was disgusted” after Ann and Maya were dropped off at the airport. “You know what, man? I’m really tired of this,’ ” Obama complained. Kakugawa told his friend that Ann was just doing her job, but Barry almost spat out his response: “Well, then, let her stay there and do it.” Keith’s buddy Jack McAdoo said he remembers that day too and recalls that “there was a lot of pain there” for Obama. Kakugawa knew that Barry “was going through a tough time” that spring and was experiencing a lot of “inner turmoil,” but “it wasn’t a race thing … Barry’s biggest struggles then were missing his parents. His biggest struggles were his feelings of abandonment. The idea that his biggest struggle was race is bullshit.” The crux of what his friend was wrestling with was “the hurt he felt about being abandoned by his mother” on top of his long-absent father.

In later years, Obama would almost always suppress his past feelings about his by-then-deceased mother, but occasionally a highly revealing comment could slip out. “When I was a kid, I don’t remember having, I think, one birthday party the whole time I was growing up,” and he admitted, “I spent a childhood adrift.” But most of Barry’s classmates that spring were not aware of what Orme, Ramos, and especially Kakugawa could sense. “I was probably the only one who didn’t always see him smiling,” Keith recounted. To Kelli Furushima, an attractive Asian classmate whom Obama sought out at the once-per-class-cycle chapel sessions, Barry seemed “a happy guy, comfortable in his skin.” She enjoyed his “casually flirting” with her; “he was very friendly, very warm and had a great sense of humor.” When the school year was ending and everyone was signing each other’s 1977 yearbooks, Obama’s note on Kelli’s copy likewise reflected no angst: “Our relationship is still young so I am looking forward to picking it up where it left off next year. Your [sic] a small but dynamic person. Have a beautiful summer and see you next year. Love, Barry.”³¹

Obama would not turn sixteen years old until August 4, 1977, so getting a summer job was a challenge, though years later he would say he had worked bagging groceries. But that birthday brought with it a driver’s license, and he began driving Stan’s reddish-brown Ford Granada, a car he would look back on with no fondness. One day that summer Keith Kakugawa and Marc Haine took Barry out paddling—Hawaiian for canoeing—and after they were back on dry land, beer was at hand. “I distinctly remember cajoling Barry into getting drunk with us.” He said, “I don’t drink,” but Keith corrected him: “You’re gonna drink.” Kakugawa boasted, “I was the one responsible for making Barry take his first drink, but Marc Haine was the one that handed it to him.”

When Barry’s junior year began, a full-year course in American history was mandatory. Barry had the regular class, not the advanced placement version, taught by his classmate Kent Torrey’s father Bob, who knew Barry pretty well but remembers him as “a totally average” student. Another full year of English was required, but in addition to American Literature, the students chose from Punahou’s almost collegelike breadth of electives. With the standardized college-entry SAT exam scheduled for November, the fall kicked off with eight weeks or so of Saturday-morning preparation classes; instructor Bill Messer recalled Obama as “affable and pleasant” but “oddly quiet in class.” Barry later claimed that “art history was one of my favorite subjects in high school,” but he also took drama. He and four classmates produced a short film they titled The Narc Squad, a parody of The Mod Squad. Linne Nickelsen, who had “long, straight blond hair and a closet full of miniskirts,” played the Peggy Lipton character, and Barry imitated the African American actor Clarence Williams III. Plenty of surfing footage was included, and Barry added a dashiki to his bushy Afro. Nickelsen later took credit for luring “Barry out of his dashiki for the pool party scene…. I must admit to being disappointed at not having received even passing credit for instigating that disrobing.” No screenings of the film have been reported for decades.

Basketball season began in December. Barry and his closest buddies had been playing ball whenever and wherever possible, including evenings and weekends, sometimes going up against adult men and occasionally heading up to UH’s Manoa campus to play there. Outside of basketball season, Punahou’s mandatory after-school phys ed class was another venue for practicing “hack league” skills. Classmates and teachers all unanimously agreed that basketball was Barry’s real passion during all of his high school years, but that December Obama was relegated to the number-two, A-level varsity squad rather than making the cut for the top AA team. Greg Orme and Mark Bendix were also on the A team, but second-class status meant their practices were held every morning from 6:30 A.M. to 8:00 a.m. Once games got under way, the A ballers stumbled to an unmemorable record of seven wins and ten losses. A story in the student newspaper Ka Punahou asserted that the players were “having a good time” nonetheless. Coach Jim Iams insisted the season was “successful,” but decades later, Iams had no recollection of Obama being on his team.

By the fall of his junior year, Barry was a more memorable member of another Punahou assemblage, known as the Choom Gang. It’s not clear when Obama first started to smoke cigarettes, but his friend Mark Hebing can picture Barry coming out of his grandparents’ apartment building on their way to go bodysurfing at Sandy Beach, east of Honolulu, carrying only a towel and a carton of cigarettes. Stan Dunham smoked three packs a day—“always Philip Morris,” his brother Ralph recalled—and Madelyn smoked even more. But the Choom Gang didn’t choom tobacco, they choomed pakalolo, the Hawaiian word for marijuana.

Barry’s friend Mark Bendix was seen as “the ringleader” of the group. Tom “Topo” Topolinski, who was half-Polish, half-Chinese, explained that “everything centered around him. He always had the idea first, or he had a stronger opinion, or he wanted to do something rowdier. That was Bendix.” The other core members—Russ Cunningham, Joe Hansen, Kenji Salz, Mark “Hebs” Hebing, Greg Orme, Mike Ramos, and eventually Wayne Weightman and Rob Rask—enjoyed drinking beer, playing basketball, bodysurfing when the waves were up, and getting high whenever they had enough money. When they did, Bendix, Topo, and/or Barry would head over to Puck’s Alley on the east side of University Avenue where Ray Boyer, their go-to drug dealer, worked at Mama Mia’s pizzeria.

Boyer was haole, but just as visibly, he was gay. “Let’s just say if he was closeted, he wasn’t fooling anybody,” Hebs said later. The Choom Gang called him “Gay Ray.” He was twenty-nine years old, and he lived in an abandoned bus inside a deserted warehouse in Kakaako, a then-desolate neighborhood west of Waikiki. Topo remembered that the scene there “was very scary…. No one in their right mind would live there.” Ray also had another main interest: porn. “I think he was looking to convert some people,” Topo said years later. “He would bring them back to his bus and stone ’em, with porn movies on—they were heterosexual porn movies, but it was still really creepy.” But Ray always had good-quality pakalolo on hand, so the connection was important. “Ray freaked me out. I was afraid of the guy,” Topolinski said. “But he did befriend us, and he was our connection … there were times where he would take us to a drive-in movie…. He partied with us, but there was something about him that never made me feel comfortable.”

“We were potheads. We loved our beer,” Topo said, but the Choom Gang was not entirely about getting drunk or high. “We loved basketball so much that we couldn’t get enough of it,” and that was especially true of Barry. “For us, it was just all fun and games and basketball and hanging out, listening to music and going to the beach,” Topo emphasized. Bendix’s mother taught at Punahou, and they would quietly borrow her car on days when they had a break in their Academy schedules or when they simply decided to cut class. “We could have been easily terminated for what we did,” Topo said. “We did it all the time” since the lure of the beach oftentimes was too great. For most Choom Gangers, parental supervision was lax at best; when Topo’s parents discovered sand in his shorts one weekday and angrily confronted him about how their tuition payments were being wasted, his lesson was obvious: “I just learned to rinse my shorts out better.”

Even for Topo, who had two parents at home, “the Choom Gang became more of a family to me than my own family.” For Barry, whose grandmother left for the bank each weekday morning at 6:30 and whose grandfather often was trying to sell life insurance in the evenings, his buddies and especially their devotion to basketball became the centerpiece of his daily life. His friend Bobby Titcomb, a year younger and not a Choom Ganger but whom one upperclassman called “a bit of a badass,” has vivid memories of “Obama dribbling his ball, running down the sidewalk on Punahou Street to his apartment, passing the ball between his legs…. He was into it.” Topo saw the exact same thing, with Barry “dribbling his basketball to class every day. He was married to that thing.”

Mike Ramos’s younger brother Greg, who was a year behind Barry, and Greg’s best friend Keith Peterson shared the gang’s love of basketball and thought Obama was a visibly much happier teenager than most of his friends, including Mike, Greg Orme, Mark Bendix, and Joe Hansen. Keith was Tony Peterson’s younger brother, and by 1977–78 Keith and Barry were the only two black males in the Academy’s sixteen-hundred-plus student body. To Keith, Mike Ramos was “brooding, unpleasant … just mean.” From both Mike and Orme, Greg Ramos and Keith “got the full big brother to little brother treatment.” Orme was usually just “a jerk. Greg would challenge us to basketball games just for the pleasure of beating us to death.”

Barry and Mike “were very close,” but Obama took part in none of the taunting the younger boys suffered from the older ones. Instead Barry manifested “a level of kindness and genuine caring” which “was pretty unusual, in particular with that group.” Hebs’s entire family felt the same way about how Obama treated Hebs’s younger brother Brad. Both Keith and Greg Ramos also felt that Topo and Bobby Titcomb were each “a great guy,” but they thought Obama “was always a happy guy.” Indeed, as Keith Peterson puts it, Barry “stands out in my mind as being the happiest of that group.”

The Choom Gang had several regular off-campus hangouts—no one dared to choom at school. Each year’s catalog emphasized that Punahou “will not condone” drugs or alcohol and expressly prohibited even tobacco smoking “on or in the vicinity of” campus. Everyone understood that they would get expelled from school if they were caught. “We always gravitated to areas that were secluded,” Topo explained, and one of their favorite spots was a glade named the Makiki Pumping Station, near the Round Top Drive loop road that circles Mount Tantalus, just a bit northwest of Punahou. “It was a very tucked away, beautiful place,” Topo recalled. “It was kind of like our safe haven.”

One evening the group headed up there in Mark Bendix’s Volkswagen van and Russ Cunningham’s Toyota. “We pulled over at the beginning of the hill and we puffed away,” Topo remembered. Then Mark and Russ decided their two vehicles should race. Barry and Kenji Salz were with Cunningham, Topo and Joe Hansen with Bendix. “ ‘On your mark, get set, go,’ so we took off, and we pulled ahead, and we made a turn, and then nothing happened. We’re up there, and we parked, rolled another fatty, and another one,” Topolinski said. “We’re not that much faster than them. Where the hell did they go?” So “we stayed up there for about twenty minutes and then we decided to go back down just to see what’s going on, and we’re about halfway down, and we see Barry running up the road, halfway in hysterics. ‘What the hell’s going on? Barry, where is everybody?’ ” Obama’s answer was startling: “ ‘Kooks rolled the car.’ ‘What do you mean he rolled the car?’ ‘It’s upside down in the middle of the road.’ ‘What?’ And he’s laughing. ‘Okay, well we need to go down there.’ So Barry got in the van, and we drove to the accident site and sure enough his little Toyota was on its roof in the middle of the road.”

Cunningham had a bloody nose, but Kenji, like Barry, was fine. “We didn’t want to get in any more trouble so the rest of us left Russell there by himself,” Topo recalled, “and we piled in the van to go buy more beer.” After downing some, they decided, “Let’s go back up and see what’s up.” At the accident scene, “there’s fire trucks, flares,” even an ambulance. “We wanted no part of that,” so Bendix made a quick U-turn, and the Choom Gang headed for home.³²

Given the Choom Gang’s intake of both beer and pakololo, it was fortunate that nothing worse than a bloody nose and a totaled Toyota resulted from their many outings. In the middle of the 1977–78 school year, Ann Dunham and Maya returned to Honolulu, once again living at Alice Dewey’s home, so that Ann could take her doctoral candidacy exams in May. Lolo had been stricken with a serious liver disease, and Ann had taken the lead in forcing Union Oil to send him to Los Angeles for treatment before he then joined Ann and Maya at Dewey’s home to recuperate. It is unclear how much Ann saw of her son those months while he continued to live in his grandparents’ tiny apartment. Alice Dewey remembers Barry coming by one Sunday to take his mother, sister, and stepfather out for lunch. In late May, the three of them left to return to Indonesia, but no one recalls any intense bitterness like what Keith Kakugawa had witnessed when Ann left a year earlier.

As school ended, Barry wrote another flirtatious message in Kelli Furushima’s 1978 yearbook. Tom Topolinski wistfully recalled that Kelli was so popular “there was a line for her” and that Barry “wasn’t very forward” with girls. But to Kelli there had been no change in Barry’s demeanor. “He was very funny. He was really warm, friendly,” she recalled. “He just seemed happy all the time, smiling all the time.”

Over the summer, Barry worked at a newly opened Baskin-Robbins at 1618 South King Street, less than two blocks from his grandparents’ apartment. Owners Clyde and Teri Higa remember him clearly as “a very good-natured young man, quick with a smile.” He worked alongside Punahou classmate Kent Torrey, whose dad had just taught Obama’s junior-year U.S. history course; rising junior Annette Yee worked there as well. Clyde Higa said Barry was “the tallest employee we ever had” and thus “seemed to have great difficulty bending over and reaching into the ice cream cabinets to scoop the ice cream.” Obama also remembered it was “tough work” behind the counter, and he did not like the mandatory uniform and the accompanying paper cap. He did have an easier time than tiny Annette Yee, who never forgot falling “head first into the near tub” and how Barry “hauled me out.” Teri Higa remembered seeing Barry “gazing out the front store window at times” as if “wishing he was at the beach instead of working.” One customer who recognized Barry behind the counter was Frank Marshall Davis’s dear friend Dawna Weatherly-Williams. “He was a wonderful kid” and even behind the counter, he always “had this beautiful grin on his face.”

By the beginning of Barry’s senior year, Punahou’s tuition and fees stood at $2,050. For a senior, one semester of economics was required; Barry and Mark “Hebs” Hebing both had it with instructor Stuart Gross. But Barry also enrolled in Punahou’s most demanding senior year elective, Law and Society, which was taught by Honolulu attorney Ian Mattoch at 7:15 A.M., three mornings a week. Punahou’s catalog said the course would “enable students to conceptualize the legal framework of his society, to analyze the terms of the social contract between the individual and the society. Emphasis on the study of the various rights afforded the individual in the Bill of Rights and Constitution and consideration of the bases and characteristics of the executive, judicial, and legislative processes.” Mattoch, a member of Punahou’s class of 1961, had graduated from Occidental College in Los Angeles in 1965 and Northwestern University’s law school in 1968. He had begun offering the course in 1970, and as its syllabus readily revealed, the content was “about a sophomore in college level because Punahou students are eminently capable of doing work at that level,” Mattoch explained years later. A 1976 article in Punahou’s student newspaper had noted that there were also “optional ‘law labs’ held on Saturday mornings at Mr. Mattoch’s law office” in addition to field trips to courtroom trials. Mattoch said his goal was for students “to understand that law is a product of men and institutions.”

Punahou alumni who went on to successful careers in the law testified that Mattoch’s class had been directly helpful to them during law school. Mattoch began by asking “What is law?” with readings ranging from Roscoe Pound to Sigmund Freud. Then he moved to “the organizational basis of the legal system,” with students expected to master the first hundred-plus pages of a text by a well-known University of Wisconsin law professor. A midterm exam might have as many as seven questions; optional “extra reading reports” on books such as Benjamin Cardozo’s The Nature of the Judicial Process could earn students additional credit. “How a bill becomes a law” and “basic techniques of legal research” were followed by a study of notable Supreme Court constitutional decisions ranging from Griswold v. Connecticut’s 1965 recognition of a right to privacy to criminal procedure rulings. Students then submitted reports comparing the Warren Court of the 1960s to the Burger Court of the 1970s. The final exam lasted ninety minutes and featured more than two dozen questions.

Mattoch remembered Obama as “relatively shy and nonassertive” in class, but he showed up early each morning and did first-rate work. His Punahou transcript indicates an A- in Law and Society, perhaps the single best grade he earned during his high school years. Barry also took a creative writing class that included poetry that fall of his senior year, and in mid-December, the student newspaper published a poem he had written entitled “The Old Man”:

I saw an old, forgotten man

On an old, forgotten road

Staggering and numb under the glare of the

Spotlight. His eyes, so dull and grey,

Slide from right, to left, to right

Looking for his life, misplaced in a

Shallow, muddy gutter long ago

I am found instead.

Seeking a hiding place, the night seals us together.

A transient spark lights his face, and in my honor,

He pulls out forgotten dignity from under his flaking coat,

And walks a straight line along the crooked world.

While it is hard to imagine seventeen-year-old Barry being inspired to take up poetry by the example of grandfather Stan, his regular visits to see Frank Marshall Davis, a well-published poet of considerable repute, and by 1978 a man of seventy-two, are a more plausible inspiration, even if Davis’s personal history would prevent his role from ever being fully acknowledged.³³

In December 1978, Barry finally played his way onto the twelve-man roster of Punahou’s top AA varsity basketball team. The coach was thirty-two-year-old Chris McLachlin, a 1964 Punahou graduate with a master’s degree from Stanford who was a devout student of the highly structured style of play that had been successfully pioneered by UNC Chapel Hill’s Dean Smith and especially UCLA’s John Wooden, with whom McLachlin had personally conferred several years earlier. McLachlin’s 1975 team had won the Hawaii state championship in his first year as head coach, and Punahou’s student newspaper commended the “high quality, hustle-oriented basketball which has become a McLachlin and Punahou trademark.” The 1979 team featured seven returning seniors, including starting guards Larry Tavares and Darryl Gabriel and forward Boy Eldredge (Pal’s nephew), plus star junior forward John Kamana and six-foot-five-inch sophomore Dan Hale at center. Tom Topolinski was often the first man off the bench. The four new members also included Barry’s best friend Greg Orme and junior guard Alan Lum.

Mike Ramos had left for college on the mainland, but his younger brother Greg was an AA team manager. Mike’s departure led to both Greg and his best friend Keith Peterson spending more time with Barry, and Greg immediately saw that just because Barry was taking a class like Ian Mattoch’s, it did not mean the Choom Gang had gone on hiatus or lost its connection to Gay Ray. “When Mike went to college, the first thing Barack did was take me up to the mountains to try to get me stoned, because Mike protected me,” Greg confessed years later. But from December through mid-March, basketball dominated their lives on a daily basis.

A Punahou student newspaper profile of “Coach Mac” said that McLachlin possessed a “great ability to get along with students” and quoted him as explaining that “my obligation is not only to teach the skills and strategy, but also to build character and to develop a sense of team and individual pride.” Practices were six days a week, two hours each time, but, unlike the A team’s, they took place in the late afternoon rather than at dawn. Games ran just thirty-two minutes: four eight-minute quarters. The veteran players understood and respected McLachlin. He was “a very tough coach who knew a lot about the game and made sure that we knew about it as well,” Topo explained. McLachlin told the student newspaper: “I’d like to think of myself as a teacher first and a coach second. A ball team is like class after school. I try to teach things like punctuality, industriousness and honesty,” as well as relaxation techniques, “since relaxation is very important in situations when the pressure’s on, like at the free throw line.”

As Topo put it, Punahou’s 1979 team was “just loaded with talent,” and while McLachlin acknowledged that Punahou’s reserves “could have started for any other team in the state,” he also “did not have an everybody plays approach,” Dan Hale remembered. Like so many others, McLachlin had seen Barry dribbling his basketball and shooting baskets whenever possible, and he respected Obama’s “real love and passion for the game.” Ironically, though, Obama’s many hours of pickup game experience on local courts worked against him with McLachlin. As Alan Lum described it, Barry was “a very creative player,” but “his game didn’t really fit our system…. We ran a structured offense. We were very disciplined.” Obama would later assert, “I had an overtly black game,” but that misstated the core of basketball’s deep appeal to him, which he expressed far better when he compared his favorite sport to his favorite music, jazz. “There’s an aspect of improvisation within a discipline that I find very, very powerful.”

Team play got under way with an invitational tournament victory on Maui followed by five straight regular-season wins on Oahu before a one-point loss to University High School. Two victories preceded a defeat by rival Iolani School, then two more wins were followed by a second one-point loss to University High.

Throughout that schedule of games, Barry Obama got little playing time; some days only seven of McLachlin’s twelve players saw game action. At one point during those weeks, Obama, along with Alan Lum and Darin Maurer, made an appointment with McLachlin to request that they receive more playing time. McLachlin remembers the meeting as “nonconfrontational and respectful.” Barry “basically represented the group” and “spoke for them…. It was ‘Coach, what can we do to garner more playing time?’ ” Years later, though, Obama recounted a far angrier scene. “I got into a fight with the guy, and he benched me for three or four games. Just wouldn’t play me. And I was furious.” Lum had been surprised at how direct Barry was with Coach Mac, and McLachlin acknowledged that Barry was clearly “disgruntled.” But Obama was convinced the coach was treating him unfairly. “The truth was, on the playground, I could beat a lot of the guys who were starters,” he later claimed. To team manager Greg Ramos, that was just a “total rationalization…. My perception at the time was that people were where they should have been, and Barack always thought he should have played more than he did.” Even with that tension, Barry’s teammates all remember his usual sunny self. “Very happy, very outgoing,” “a very, very pleasant person to be around,” and “always” with “that smile on his face.”

Punahou was in second place in the AA standings prior to an early March league playoff in which the team defeated University High by one point in overtime before a crowd of more than twenty-two hundred. The student newspaper reported that Obama “gave the team a lift as a second half sub, scoring six points on offense and hustling on defense,” but the box score in the Honolulu Advertiser had Barry missing three free throws. That win gave Punahou top seed in the upcoming three-round Hawaii state tournament. A blowout 77–29 win in their first game included three points by Obama; he played briefly in the second and did not score, but the game still ended in victory for Punahou. The ultimate championship game, against Moanalua on Saturday evening, March 10, 1979, was preceded by a midday team meal at Dan Hale’s home. McLachlin’s wife Beth made “super burgers” that supposedly aided players’ ability to jump.

At Blaisdell Arena in downtown Honolulu, an astonishing crowd of more than sixty-four hundred awaited the contest. “The players majestically strode into the arena as their little admirers flocked around them as if they were blue-clad gods,” Punahou’s student newspaper claimed in its next issue. “They willingly signed autographs and received handshakes from parents and well-wishers,” including of course Stan Dunham. Punahou jumped out to an early lead of 18–4, then ran the score to 32–7. As Alan Lum remembered, “the game was over in the first half” and Coach Mac began substituting liberally. Barry Obama sank one field goal, missed his sole free throw, and finished with two points, but was ecstatic at the 60–28 victory.

“These are the best bunch of guys. We made so many sacrifices to get here,” he told Punahou’s student reporter. McLachlin was equally happy, telling the Advertiser that “we played as near-perfect a game as ever,” including how “the subs came in and played as great a team defense as the regulars.” Within the world of Punahou, winning the state AA championship was just “huge,” as Topo remembered. On the bus ride back to the school, Coach Mac told his team that they had just played “as good a game as I’ve ever seen a high school basketball team play. You played a perfect game, and that included everyone who stepped on that court. This is the finest effort by twelve young men that I have ever seen.”

To Barry Obama, the team’s championship was such an enormous achievement he wrote a tribute to their season for Punahou’s 1979 yearbook, a brief essay that somehow remained utterly undiscovered even a decade after dozens of journalists had traipsed their ways through all manner of various real and imagined details of Obama’s early life. Titled “Winner,” the piece is in no way remarkable, but it most certainly captures how central that team experience was for seventeen-year-old Barry:

A lot of words are thrown around in basketball: unity, character, determination, and sportsmanship. Well, this is a team that lived up to these clichés, both on and off the court. When the season started, we all felt the electricity of something special; through sacrifice, trust, hard work, and a lot of help from coaches and managers, a group of diverse individuals joined together to truly become a team. At times we’ve had problems playing together, but we’ve never had any difficulty getting along; I have never seen a closer bunch of guys. Each player carried his weight and supported the others when they were down; if Gabe wasn’t hot, then John would do it; if Danny’s dunks didn’t beat you, E’s defense would. Some people think that it’s the win/loss record that is important; others think that it’s how you play the game that is important; no matter how you think of it, though, this team was a winner in every sense of the word.

Obama’s memory of his role in the team’s season would grow rosy with age. “My senior year, when we won the state championship, there were a couple games where I think I was a difference maker.” He said his grandfather would recount how impressive a broadcaster had made Barry’s one successful jump shot in that final game sound, but he also acknowledged how those four months had taught him “a lot about discipline, about handling disappointment, being team oriented, and realizing not everything is about you.”³⁴

The overall picture Obama would usually paint of his final year at Punahou bore no resemblance to that long-undiscovered essay in his senior yearbook or to the A- he earned in Ian Mattoch’s exceptionally demanding early-morning Law and Society class. “I’m playing basketball, I’m getting high, and I’m not taking my work seriously at all,” he recalled on one occasion. “We’d have basketball practice get over about six, maybe six-thirty, and we’d go get a six-pack … and go out to the park and just screw around…. Then you’d be waking up in the morning and you hadn’t done the reading.” In some tellings, Obama admitted to taking his schoolwork more seriously his senior year—“Man, I should try to go to college, so let me focus a bit more”—but then his senior year was the only one with afternoon basketball practice every day. In another version, he has his mother, ostensibly back in Honolulu early in his senior year, upbraiding him about his grades and his disinterest in applying to colleges, calling him a loafer and voicing her disappointment in him. Presented with that account, one interviewer responded that it made Barry sound like a hood, a hoodlum, to which Obama responded, “That’s basically it. In fact I think my mother referred to me as such at one point.” On another occasion, Obama went even further, claiming, “I think I was a thug for a big part of my growing up.”

The notion that anyone at Punahou or among his friends and other acquaintances ever thought of Barry Obama as a “thug” or hoodlum could not be further from the way he is remembered. Scores of them did see him as “a pretty good jock,” as Obama also called himself; tiny Annette Yee from their summer at Baskin-Robbins thought of him as “a basketball jock”; their mutual friend and ice cream coworker Kent Torrey likewise recalled Barry as “one of the biggest jocks on campus.” But his intense love of basketball, as his yearbook tribute vividly captured, carried no negativity, and anyone who experienced teenage bullying from one or more of Barry’s closest friends without exception recalls Obama as never manifesting any bad attitudes.

By the onset of Barry’s senior year, Greg Orme was unquestionably his closest friend. Many days after basketball practice, they did not “get a six-pack … and go out to the park and just screw around,” but instead walked down to 1617 South Beretania. “It was Tut and Gramps in this small apartment and us two six-footers,” Orme recalled. “We’d raid the refrigerator and then go to his room. He’d put on his earphones. He liked to listen to Stevie Wonder and jazz, like Grover Washington. So he’d have the earphones on and read his books.” Tom Topo came over “once or twice a month.” He remembered that visitors could barely “set foot in his room—he lived off the floor—everything was on the floor…. He always had a Stevie Wonder record on the phonograph,” like Songs in the Key of Life, and sometimes “like a week-old pizza under his bed … he was a messy person.”

But the Choom Gang was no less active than the year before. Indeed, come January 1979, Punahou’s student newspaper, in a humorous survey of different student “species,” profiled one it called “Cravius Cannabis.” Recognizable from “their bloodshot eyes … Cannabi migrate in vans to ‘country,’ where they indulge in enlightening tribal rituals. They have developed specialized language to deal with their common interests: agriculture and commerce.” Years later, on the one occasion when anyone was able to ask Madelyn Dunham about Barry’s high school drug use, she admitted, “I had a few hints, and I think I talked to him a little about it. But it didn’t seem overwhelming or prolonged.” Obama would later make light of chooming, readily admitting, “I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes I smoked” all through those years.

Once Obama seemingly copped to something more than just pakalolo during his Punahou years, referencing “maybe a little blow when you could afford it” while relating how a food service worker supposedly had offered Barry “smack” (heroin) as well. The Choomers’ relationship with Gay Ray went well beyond just “commerce,” and some of them spent significant social time with him, as Topo readily acknowledged. “The guy was a maniac on the road. He tailgated everybody. I was afraid for my life every time I rode with him.” Yet cocaine had zero presence among the Choom Gang, and multiple friends firmly say they never set eyes on it up through 1979. But at least one Choomer knew for sure that “Barry started to experiment with cocaine.” While Topo recalled that “the police were really, really, really relaxed” regarding pakololo, that was not the case with harder drugs, and in Obama’s own later telling, his mother asks him about his friend “Pablo,” who “was just arrested for drug possession” involving cocaine.

By Barry’s senior year his second-closest friend, after Orme, was Bobby Titcomb, who was one year behind before leaving Punahou without graduating. Titcomb came from a distinguished local family. An ancestor had “married into Hawaiian royalty,” according to the Honolulu Advertiser, and his father was a longtime local judge who had won two Bronze Stars during World War II and lost a congressional race against future U.S. senator Daniel Inouye. Perhaps most notably, the elder Titcomb also frequently appeared on the locally filmed CBS television show Hawaii Five-0, which had begun airing nationally in 1968. Bobby Titcomb had first met Barry back in the fifth grade, and the two young men would hike Rocky Hill, just above Punahou’s campus, before extending their reach to Peacock Flats, on the west side of Oahu. Obama’s private, extremely close friendship with Bobby would remain a constant in his life for many years after 1978–79.³⁵

In his most starkly dramatized account of his supposedly angry and antisocial high school years, Obama wrote about “the intimation of danger that would come upon me whenever I split another boy’s lip or raced down a highway with gin clouding my head.” Not one of Barry’s friends and acquaintances can recall any angry exchanges, never mind any busted lips, and no one remembers him having a taste for gin. In that same passage, Obama also recounted “the swagger that carried me into a classroom drunk or high, knowing that my teachers will smell beer or reefer on my breath, just daring them to say something.”

Paula Miyashiro, Punahou’s 1979 class dean since their freshman year, never knew Barry to have any disciplinary issues and remembers “his infectious, genuine smile” and his “happy,” indeed “jovial,” demeanor. She met with him at least annually to discuss his upcoming year’s classes, and then more frequently as college applications approached. “I remember talking to him about the particular schools he was interested in.” But above all, Miyashiro—now Paula Kurashige—stresses that the one person who saw the most of Barry during high school at Punahou was his homeroom teacher, Eric Kusunoki: “for four years, he saw Barry every single day.”

Even during his junior year’s early-morning basketball practices, or his fall senior year’s three-times-a-cycle early-bird Law and Society classes, Barry was in Kusunoki’s homeroom every morning. Kusunoki was no innocent. “To say there was a lot of drugs going on back then is a fair statement, maybe an understatement,” he frankly acknowledges. But “it wasn’t like guys were smoking dope on campus and coming to school high,” he added. “If they did, it would have been pretty obvious.” Barry without fail would greet “Mr. Kus” with “Good morning,” always “very positive, very pleasant,” and sporting a “big smile.” Barry was “very personable, very respectful,” a “bright presence in the classroom,” and “never got in trouble.” Classmates all continued to have an identical view. To senior-year homeroom colleague Bart Burford, “Barry was one of the more buoyant personalities on campus”; to longtime friend Kelli Furushima, Barry still “just seemed happy all the time. Smiling all the time.”

Decades later, as scores of journalists plumbed the question of Obama’s racial consciousness during his high school years, no more than two would take the trouble to even telephone, never mind visit, the only other black male student in the Academy during both of Obama’s last two years, his friend Keith Peterson. And not a single one would even call the lone black female student, Kim Jones—like Keith, one year behind Barry—who was in the Academy those two years.

Keith Peterson puts it simply. “There was no blackness at Punahou,” only three black students among more than sixteen hundred total there. Across the full range of Barry’s friends and acquaintances, Keith’s perception wins unanimous concurrence. To Bobby Titcomb, Obama “was just another color in the rainbow.” Mark Hebing explains, “We didn’t think about his blackness.” Mike Ramos’s younger sister Connie, who was in the class of ’79, recalls, “I never once thought of Barry as ‘black.’ ” Barry’s friend John Kolivas, who was half Korean and half Greek, says “we didn’t think of each other in terms of race.”

To Keith Peterson, Barry’s “parental piece was a total and complete mystery,” and one Barry never spoke of. “I knew nothing about his father” and “I can’t say that I knew he had a mother at all.” Barry “lived with this older white couple” and “both of his parents so to speak were white.” Indeed “I thought that he was actually adopted by a white family,” that this “older couple had adopted him.” And, in reality, Keith’s impression was not at all wrong. As Madelyn’s younger brother Charles put it, Barack Obama “was raised in a white family.” Bobby Titcomb knew that Stan and Madelyn were Barry’s grandparents, but he understood that actually they were more than that. “You call them grandparents, but they were his parents growing up.”

Yet no one speaks more powerfully, more movingly, about what it was like to be black at Punahou in the late 1970s than Kim Jones Nelson. “It is different being black growing up in Hawaii” than anywhere on the U.S. mainland, she explains. Even more significantly, “It’s an enormous privilege to be a black person in America and grow up in Hawaii. There is no other place in the entire U.S. that provides you with that experience where the color of your skin, the darker your skin is, is not a bad thing.” Just as Frank Marshall Davis had realized thirty years earlier, “the whole race dynamic is turned on its head in Hawaii,” for “in 1970s Honolulu,” as one veteran Asian American journalist would recount, “white people were routinely the target of discrimination,” not African Americans.

Kim Jones had arrived at Punahou in 1976 for ninth grade, and it was “such a multicultural world” that “I never thought about” being the only black female among sixteen hundred students. Hawaii has “just a different worldview,” and “Punahou’s a reflection of the island culture, which is an extremely inclusive culture” of so many countless mixed ethnicities that “I would have had no idea what somebody was.” Across four years at Punahou, Kim had no experience of discrimination. “Not ever. Never, ever, ever. Certainly nothing associated with race.” What instead stood out was “the quality of the teaching” and the richness of the curriculum: the Novel and Film, art history, creative writing. “I loved Punahou.” She barely knew Barry. “He was part of that jock group,” and “I can’t recall any personal interactions with him.”³⁶

On at least one occasion twenty years later, Obama acknowledged “the carefree childhood I experienced in Hawaii” and “how truly lucky I was to have been raised” there. He would give thanks as well for “the wonderful education I received at Punahou” and how “Punahou gave me a great foundation,” especially in terms of “values and ethics,” whose “long-term impact on the trajectory of my life” he would appreciate only a decade later. As a prominent African American, Chicago-based theologian who worshiped in the same church later emphasized, above all else, including color, complexion, and race, first and foremost Barack “Obama is Hawaiian.”³⁷

Eight or ten weeks in advance of Punahou’s June 2, 1979, graduation ceremony, seniors had to submit whatever they wanted published on the one-quarter page they would each have in the 1979 Oahuan. Mark Bendix’s would contain sketches of his VW bus, the “choom van,” and the Koolaus mountain range above Pearl City, plus a “thanks for everything” to classmates whose initials readily translate into their full names: Barry Obama, Kenji Salz, Joe Hansen, Greg Orme, Russ Cunningham, Tom Topolinski, Wayne Weightman, Mark Hebing, and others. Russ Cunningham’s page featured a trio of small photos of Barry, Kenji, and Greg, and “Special Thanks to Friends, Family, Choom Gang.” Both Hebs’s and Topo’s were free of any such allusions, but Orme’s read, “Many thanks to all my friends. Especially the Choom Gang,” with initials for Bendix, Barry, Hansen—who had left school—Kenji, and Cunningham. Kenji’s featured a photo that included Barry and captioned “Ooooochoom Gangooooooo”; his acknowledgments included Bendix, Orme, Barry, Hansen, Cunningham, Hebs, and Weightman. Wayne’s featured the slogan “Fellow students: it’s time to choom!” and a reference to “Pumping station blues.”

Barry Obama’s quarter-page was by far the most striking of all.

Its upper-right corner featured a handsome photo of Barry in a jacket and wide-collared shirt that could have been borrowed from the 1977 dance film Saturday Night Fever. At upper left was a picture of a happy, smiling Obama on a basketball court, captioned “we go play hoop.” At the bottom was a photograph labeled “still life” that included a beer bottle, a record turntable, a telephone, and rolling papers. In the middle was Barry’s chosen message: “Thanks Tut, Gramps, Choom Gang, and Ray for all the good times.”

Decades later, that sentence would receive far less public attention and discussion than it should have. Barry, alone of all the Choom Gang, had singled out their weird, gay, porn-showing drug dealer by name and thanked him “for all the good times.” As Tom Topo most frankly acknowledged, the Choom Gangers had spent plenty of time with Gay Ray over the previous two years, but a public—and permanent—thank-you to their drug connection was something that all the others, even Mark Bendix, did not go so far as to put into print.

Although decades would pass before Obama would learn of his fate, on New Year’s Day 1986, a sleeping thirty-seven-year-old Ray Boyer was bludgeoned to death with a hammer by an angry twenty-year-old male prostitute in an apartment less than two blocks south of 1617 South Beretania Street.³⁸

Several days in advance of the graduation ceremony, Ann Dunham returned to Honolulu from Indonesia for the first time in a year. In late 1978, she had completed her fieldwork for her dissertation but, low on funds, had taken a well-paying job with a USAID contractor, Development Alternatives Inc. Based in the Central Java city of Semarang, the job came with a house, servants, and a driver. She and Lolo were on the verge of formally divorcing, and, staying once again at Alice Dewey’s home, she soon would adopt Dewey’s suggestion that she keep Soetoro as her surname rather than revert to Dunham. But she also made a change from Lolo’s colonial Dutch spelling to the Indonesian “Sutoro.”

Preparations for the Saturday-night commencement required extensive choral rehearsals on the part of the entire graduating class. Punahou’s senior prom took place the night before, Friday, June 1. Greg Orme and his steady girlfriend, red-headed Kelli McCormack, hosted Barry and his date, Megan Hughes, a student at La Pietra School for Girls near Diamond Head, for champagne at her family’s home before the two couples headed to the dance and then an after-party. Decades later Kelli would describe Barry and Greg as “like brothers” and described Barry as “very intelligent and witty.” Megan’s presence that evening was the first time Kelli had seen Barry with a date, but in Kelli’s memory, Megan was “gorgeous…. She had the face of an angel and the body of a goddess.” But Barry’s relationship with her was short-lived. In 1983 Megan would have a brief appearance in one episode of the television series Magnum, P.I., which was filmed on Oahu. A decade later Hughes would appear as Terence Stamp’s girlfriend in a movie called The Real McCoy, starring Kim Basinger. Two years later Megan had her own starring role in an R-rated “erotic adventure” film titled Smooth Operator, but her topless appearance failed to make the movie a popular or commercial success.

Yet in 1979, with Orme already scheduled to be away from Hawaii that summer, Barry betrayed more than a hint of desire for his best friend’s girl in the message he wrote in Kelli’s yearbook. “It has been so nice getting to know you this year. You are extremely sweet and foxy. I don’t know why Greg would want to spend any time with me at all! You really deserve better than clowns like us; you even laugh at my jokes! I hope we can keep in touch this summer, even though Greg will be away.” Inscribing his grandparents’ phone number, Barry encouraged Kelli to “Call me up and I’ll buy you lunch … good luck in everything you do, and stay happy. Your friend, Love, Barry Obama.” McCormack soon broke up with Orme, and she did like Barry. “He and I really clicked. We had great vibes between us,” she recounted years later. But she never called him that summer.³⁹

On Saturday evening, June 2, Punahou’s 412 graduating seniors, all dressed in matching blazers for the men and long dresses for the women, filed into Honolulu’s Blaisdell Arena, where three months earlier Barry’s AA basketball team had won their championship. A prayer opened the ceremony, followed by the entire class singing a school song. Three seniors—Byron Leong, Annabelle Okada, and class president Dennis Bader—had major speaking roles, interspersed among four more choral selections. Bader’s impressive remarks, in which he told his classmates to follow “your pilot light,” drew prolonged applause from the families and friends seated on the arena’s main floor. Class dean Paula Miyashiro welcomed the graduates, and Academy principal Win Healy invoked his personal tradition of choosing one adjective to describe each year’s class. Commending the 1979 graduates for making 1978–79 “the smoothest and best year of the 1970s” at Punahou, he said the best word to describe them was “harmonic.” President Rod McPhee commended Paula Miyashiro on her “great job” with the class, and then presented each of the graduates with their diploma. As the ceremony was ending, Barry ran into his former Baskin-Robbins coworker Kent Torrey. “Kent, I’ve got to tell you, your dad was one major S.O.B. of a teacher, but at least I learned something from him” in junior-year U.S. history. “What a cool, backhanded compliment from one of the bigger jocks on campus,” Kent thought.

Several of Barry’s friends remember a cohosted graduation party at Kenji Salz’s family’s home with Stan Dunham serving as greeter. “Gramps” was “a great guy” who would always “make sure everybody’s being included,” Greg Ramos remembered. None of Barry’s friends have any clear recollections of Ann Dunham from that weekend. Some, like Mike Ramos and Dan Hale, believe they met her then or at some other time, but as Mike put it, “she lived in Indonesia” and “was just in and out” when visiting Honolulu. Mike’s brother Greg knows he never met her. “She was not a part of his life” during those final years at Punahou. “His grandparents raised him.”

Ann remained in Honolulu for five weeks before returning to Indonesia. Early that summer, Barry hoped to get a job at a pizza parlor—not Mama Mia’s with Gay Ray—and Mark Hebing gave him a ride to the interview. But Barry quickly came back out. The place served beer, and Barry was still two months shy of being eighteen—too young to serve beer if not to drink it. Barry sent eighteen-year-old Hebs in, and he was hired. Barry later recalled making $4 an hour painting instead and also working as a waiter at an assisted-living facility.

By the time of his Punahou graduation, Barry knew that in the fall he would be attending Occidental College in Los Angeles—more precisely, in a far northeastern neighborhood called Eagle Rock, close to the small city of Pasadena. Obama later once half-claimed he chose “Oxy” because he had met some girl on vacation in Honolulu who was from Brentwood—far on the opposite side of sprawling Los Angeles—but the choice may also have been influenced by the hope that he was good enough to play college basketball. Punahou teammate Dan Hale remembers that Barry “really wanted to play college basketball” and as of spring 1979, he believed he “had an opportunity to play there” on an NCAA Division III team.

Occidental recruiter Kraig King, a 1977 Oxy graduate who had combined a stellar academic record with four years of standout play as a starter on Oxy’s varsity basketball team, had visited Punahou back in mid-November 1978, at the same time that Barry was doing so well in Occidental graduate Ian Mattoch’s Law and Society class. Obama later publicly thanked Paula Miyashiro Kurashige as “my dean who got me into college,” and Greg Ramos has a clear memory of Barry being disappointed at how his college applications had turned out. Oxy “was clearly a second choice for him,” especially with another basketball teammate, Darin Maurer, headed to Stanford. Years later Obama said that Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania also rejected him. Oxy required two letters of recommendation; might one from an alumnus who could testify that Barry’s A- in Law and Society was a better predictor of his academic potential than the rest of his Punahou transcript have been decisive? If so, no copy survives.

One afternoon in early September 1979, just a few days before Obama was leaving for Occidental, he paid another visit to grandfatherly Frank Marshall Davis. Frank asked him what he expected to get out of college, and Barry, at least as he later recounted their conversation, replied that he didn’t know.

“That’s the problem, isn’t it? You don’t know. … All you know is that college is the next thing you’re supposed to do.” But Frank had a warning. “Understand something, boy. You’re not going to college to get educated. You’re going there to get trained. They’ll train you to want what you don’t need. They’ll train you to manipulate words so they don’t mean anything anymore. They’ll train you to forget what you already know. They’ll train you so good, you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit. They’ll give you a corner office and invite you to fancy dinners, and tell you you’re a credit to your race. Until you want to actually start running things, and then they’ll yank on your chain and let you know that you may well be a well-trained, well-paid nigger, but you’re a nigger just the same.”

Barry was confused. Was Frank saying he shouldn’t be going to college? Frank sighed. “No. I didn’t say that. You’ve got to go. I’m just telling you to keep your eyes open. Stay awake.” With those words of paternal advice, the only African American adult eighteen-year-old Barry Obama had ever known bid him farewell for the West Coast mainland.⁴⁰