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Chapter Three

SEARCHING FOR HOME

EAGLE ROCK, MANHATTAN, BROOKLYN, AND HERMITAGE, PA

SEPTEMBER 1979–JULY 1985

Eighteen-year-old Barry Obama arrived on Occidental College’s campus in Los Angeles’s far northeastern Eagle Rock neighborhood on Sunday, September 16, 1979. Upon arrival, he learned that his dormitory assignment was Haines Hall Annex, room A104, a small, three-man “triple.” Oxy, as everyone called it, had expected 425 entering freshmen but, on the day before Obama arrived, the number hit 434 before growing to 458. Of them, 243 were men and 215 were women. The students noted the unexpectedly tight quarters, but college officials were overjoyed, because for several years Oxy had been having a hard time both attracting and retaining academically qualified undergraduates.

Eighteen months earlier, college president Richard C. Gilman had told the faculty that the freshman class target was being reduced from 450 to 425 because for the last three or four years “admission had been offered to every qualified applicant,” Oxy’s student newspaper reported. Gilman confessed that some who were admitted “may not have been fully qualified.” Out of 1,124 applicants for the class of 1980, only 179 had been refused admission. To raise Oxy’s standards, a new dean of admissions and new staff were hired in mid-1977, but as of 1978 only 54.2 percent of students admitted to the previous four graduating classes had graduated in the normal four years. The class of 1980 was distinguished by the number of dropouts and students transferring to larger institutions. Oxy’s student newspaper interviewed sophomores about their plans, and in a front-page story reported that “it seems that at least half of them are not planning to return next year.” The “primary complaint is that the college is too small and limited” academically; other issues were “the limited social atmosphere, the immaturity of the student body and the lack of privacy on campus.”

Privacy didn’t get any easier with the advent of three-person triples, and Haines Annex and a second dorm each had three of these freshman rooms interspersed on hallways otherwise housing upperclassmen. Barry’s two roommates had arrived before him: Paul Carpenter had grown up in nearby Diamond Bar, California, and graduated from Ganesha High School in Pomona. Imad Husain was originally from Karachi, Pakistan, and he and his family now lived in Dubai; he had graduated from the Bedford School in England. Imad was one of many international students at Oxy; in contrast, this freshman class of 1983 included only twenty-plus African American students, mostly from heavily black neighborhoods in nearby South Central Los Angeles. Oxy’s tuition for the 1979–80 year was $4,752, with room and board adding another $2,100, for a total of just under $7,000.

Barry’s mother Ann Sutoro was earning a respectable salary from DAI in Indonesia—and, as the IRS would charge six years later, was failing to pay her U.S. taxes on it—and Madelyn Dunham still worked as a vice president at Bank of Hawaii. Decades later, an article in an Occidental publication would print Obama’s statement that he had received “a full scholarship” that he recalled totaling $7,700, and journalists would repeat that pronouncement as an unquestioned fact. But Occidental awarded financial aid only on the basis of financial need and, like Punahou, made work-study employment a part of any recipient’s financial aid package. There is no evidence in Oxy’s surviving records that support Obama’s statement about financial aid, and none of his Oxy classmates remember him working any on-campus job.

Classes began on September 20. Occidental operated on a quarter, or more accurately, trimester system—fall, winter, and spring. Most freshmen followed Oxy’s Core Program. A freshman seminar covered the basics of how to use the library and write a paper, easy indeed for anyone from Punahou. Distribution requirements mandated a sampling of American, European, and “World” culture courses across freshman and sophomore years, plus a foreign language—Spanish in Obama’s case, after his unfortunate early encounter with French at Punahou—but within that framework students had a great deal of choice. That fall Obama selected Political Science 90, American Political Ideas and Institutions, a lecture class of about 120 students taught in two five-week segments. The first, covering American political thought from Madison and Jefferson through Lincoln, the Progressives, the New Deal, and the mid-twentieth-century debate over pluralism versus elitism, was handled by Roger Boesche, a young assistant professor who had received his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1976. The second, covering the structure and powers of the federal legislative, executive, and judicial branches, was taught by Richard F. Reath, a soon-to-retire senior professor. Boesche in particular impressed Obama. One of his other enduring memories from freshman year was reading Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, published just two years earlier, in an introductory literature course.

One hope Barry brought with him to Oxy was quickly diminished, namely any future as a collegiate basketball player, even at a small Division III school. Midday pickup games at Rush Gymnasium well in advance of preseason team practice—“noon ball” in the school’s parlance—quickly demonstrated that Oxy had plenty of players with talent well beyond what Obama had seen in Hawaiian high school AA games. Barry was still not a good outside shooter, and he was so left-handed he always drove leftward and could not cross over. His love of basketball would remain, but his final official team game had taken place in Honolulu six months earlier.

Instead Obama’s freshman year revolved around Haines Annex, with its mix of students crammed into tiny rooms on a narrow hallway with one alcove that offered an old couch of uncertain color. In addition to Barry, Paul, and Imad, a second freshman triple included Phil Boerner, a graduate of Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland, whose father was a foreign service officer stationed at the U.S. embassy in London. Another triple just around the corner housed Paul Anderson from Minneapolis, a track-and-field athlete. A sophomore triple right across the hall had two Southern Californians, Ken Sulzer and John Boyer. A second next door included Sim Heninger, a North Carolina native who had grown up in Bremerton, Washington; a third had Adam Sherman, from Rockville, Maryland. Tight quarters made for open doors and quick, close friendships. One night early on Barry, Paul Carpenter, Phil Boerner, John Boyer, and others drove to Hollywood to see the movie Apocalypse Now, which had opened just a few weeks earlier. There was a long line; right in front of the Oxy crew was the well-known musician Tom Waits, who Phil remembered was “quite wasted.”

Getting wasted happened at Oxy too, and perhaps more in Haines Annex than in any other dorm. Loud music helped set the tone, and as Ken Sulzer drily recalled, “if there was an alcohol restriction in the dorms, I wasn’t aware of it.” But drinking wasn’t the half of it. “Choom” and “pakalolo” weren’t part of mainland vocabulary, but partaking was even more common in Haines Annex that 1979–80 school year than Barry’s trips up to Pumping Station had been a year earlier. Adam Sherman, who was an enthusiastic participant in what he later would acknowledge was a “very wild year,” wrote a short story describing the group of regulars who gathered at least four or five nights a week in the hallway alcove that Sim Heninger termed “a male sanctum.” The “threadbare couch” sat on a “cigarette-scarred” “aquamarine carpet which is littered with broken, stale potato chips” and “a few mangled and crushed beer cans.” Drawing from a ceramic “crimson bong,” “the dope” is passed from Paul Carpenter, whose blue eyes are “glazed over in pink, dilated inebriation,” to Imad and then to Sim Heninger. The early-morning scene ends with Paul waking Adam from a sound sleep on the hallway floor. Other nights proceeded more energetically, with Phil Boerner ruefully recalling how the regulars would “repeatedly break the fire extinguisher glass during late-night wrestling matches.”

Barry Obama was a nightly participant in the hallway gatherings. John Boyer, who kept an irregular journal over the course of the year, recorded how Adam was upset after one holiday break when Obama failed to bring something back for the group from the lush environs of Oahu. Carpenter remembered Obama as someone who “listened carefully” during hallway discussions; Michael Schwartz, a good friend of Carpenter’s and Anderson’s, remembered Barry as “reserved” and can picture him drinking beer out of a paper cup. Samuel Yaw “Kofi” Manu, a Ghanaian student who met Obama in the introductory political science class, recalls how “extremely friendly” Obama was; sophomore Mark Parsons, a fellow heavy smoker, remembers Barry telling him, “I smoke like this because I want to keep my weight down.” John Boyer still has an image of Barry and Adam having long, late-night conversations on the decrepit couch. Obama was “personable” and “quick to laugh,” with “a great sense of humor.” But Boyer notes that Barry was “always vague” about his family, and even during those late-night discussions, with beer and marijuana relaxing most everyone’s demeanors, “there was always kind of a wall” on Barry’s part. It was “not really aloofness,” Boyer explained, but something self-protective; Obama was more an observer than a spontaneous participant. “ ‘Remove’ is a good word,” Boyer concluded.

One Friday night in mid-October Barry, Sim, and a sophomore woman were sitting in Haines Hall proper, all under the influence of mood enhancers. In Barry’s case those included psychedelic mushrooms, and as a result, Obama “just came unglued. He was a mess.” Sim believed that Barry had been adopted and raised by an older white couple whose photo he once displayed, but this night, as Obama babbled about identity and nudity and not wanting to experience rejection, it seemed as if he “was pretty troubled” and was experiencing a “big crisis.” At bottom Barry seemed “uncomfortable and frightened,” as well as “hysterical and angry,” Heninger remembered. “There was no barrier between us in this moment,” but for Sim “it was difficult and uncomfortable” in the extreme. Eventually Barry “scraped himself together.” Given everything that had been consumed, Sim later mused that neither Obama nor the young woman probably remembered the experience at all, even though in Heninger’s eyes it was “a big deal. We called it a day and it blew over,” and “I never talked to him about it” again.¹

For Thanksgiving 1979, just like on weekends “if there was wash to be done, or refrigerators to be raided,” Barry joined Paul Carpenter at Paul’s family home about thirty miles away. Mike Ramos, in college in Washington State, remembers some holiday in late 1979 when he picked up Greg Orme in Oregon and then rendezvoused with Barry and some others at Mike’s younger sister’s apartment in Berkeley, just east of San Francisco. Oxy had an almost four-week break after fall exams ended on December 6 and before winter term classes began on January 3, 1980, so Barry probably returned to Honolulu for a good chunk of that time, when Oxy’s dorms were closed.

When winter term commenced, Obama took the second course in the political science introductory sequence, Comparative Politics, which that year was taught by the campus’s most easily recognized and outspoken young faculty member, openly gay assistant professor Lawrence Goldyn. A 1973 graduate of Reed College in Oregon who had earned his Ph.D. from Stanford just months earlier, Goldyn was an unmistakable figure on Oxy’s campus. To say that Goldyn was out “would be an understatement,” political science major Ken Sulzer recalled. Goldyn was “funny, engaging,” and wore “these really tight bright yellow pants and open-toed sandals.” Gay liberation was not part of the Comparative Politics course, but Goldyn drew “a good-sized crowd” one evening during that term when he spoke on gay activism, and a column he wrote for the student newspaper ended by declaring that “the point of liberation, sexual or otherwise, is to rewrite the rules.”

Goldyn made a huge impact on Barry Obama. Almost a quarter century later, asked about his understanding of gay issues, Obama enthusiastically said, “my favorite professor my first year in college was one of the first openly gay people that I knew … He was a terrific guy” with whom Obama developed a “friendship” beyond the classroom. Four years later, in a similar interview, Obama again brought up Goldyn. “He was the first … openly gay person of authority that I had come in contact with. And he was just a terrific guy,” displaying “comfort in his own skin,” and the “strong friendship” that “we developed helped to educate me” about gayness.

Goldyn years later would remember that Obama “was not fearful of being associated with me” in terms of “talking socially” and “learning from me” after as well as in class. Three years later, Obama wrote somewhat elusively to his first intimate girlfriend that he had thought about and considered gayness, but ultimately had decided that a same-sex relationship would be less challenging and demanding than developing one with the opposite sex. But there is no doubting that Goldyn gave eighteen-year-old Barry a vastly more positive and uplifting image of gay identity and self-confidence than he had known in Honolulu.²

Gayness was not one of the subjects discussed every night in Haines Annex’s grungy alcove in early 1980. But the residents did talk about the Soviet Union’s recent invasion of Afghanistan. Then, on January 23, President Jimmy Carter in his State of the Union speech announced that he would ask Congress to register young men in preparation for possibly reinstituting a military draft to augment the U.S.’s all-volunteer forces. That news gave Oxy’s small band of politically conscious students a new issue to use to regenerate significant student activism.

Two years earlier, a trio of Oxy students—Andy Roth, Gary Chapman, and Doyle Van Fossen—had responded to a challenge posed by the well-known political activist Ralph Nader during an early 1978 campus speech. Occidental, Nader noted, had some $3 million of its endowment invested in more than a dozen corporations such as IBM, Ford, General Motors, and Bank of America that did business in South Africa, which was known for its harshly racist system of apartheid. In reaction, the undergraduate Democratic Socialist Fellowship formed a Student Coalition Against Apartheid (SCAA) to demand that Oxy divest its stock holdings in companies that continued to operate there.

SCAA quickly gathered more than eight hundred student signatures on a petition calling for divestment, but in early April 1978, Oxy president Gilman rebuffed the students’ request. A week later a protest rally of more than three hundred, including Oxy’s only African American faculty member, Mary Jane Hewitt, greeted a board of trustees’ meeting that affirmed Gilman’s refusal. Several weeks later Hewitt resigned from Oxy after she was denied promotion to a higher rank, and the trio of student leaders submitted an angry letter to Oxy’s weekly newspaper saying that in light of those two outcomes “we are forced to conclude that a racial bias permeates this institution.”

By the 1978–79 academic year, the trustees’ finance committee chairman, Harry Colmery, debated Gary Chapman, head of the newly renamed Democratic Socialist Alliance (DSA) at a campus forum, but then the board announced it had ceded investment decisions to a mutual fund, thus ostensibly rendering the entire issue moot. Oxy’s faculty responded in May 1979 by adopting a resolution condemning the board’s action, but in June the trustees again reaffirmed their refusal to divest.

In early 1980, the Los Angeles Times ran two stories about Oxy and its students that highlighted how significant increases in tuition and room and board fees would raise an undergraduate’s annual tab to $8,200 the next fall. Oxy’s student body was called “introspective” by one senior, and the reporter stated that “student life today” in Eagle Rock “seems placid, serene, contemplative.” Given that portrait, a turnout of more than five hundred students at an afternoon protest rally just a week after Carter’s nationally televised speech was a dramatic triumph for Oxy’s DSA. But a second meeting drew only 150 students, and a teach-in two weeks later attracted just sixty. As winter term ended in mid-March, a student newspaper headline signaled the short-lived movement’s demise: “Anti-Draft Activism Fades with Finals.”³

Oxy’s small black student population, about seventy in 1979–80, represented a marked decline from more than 120 just three years earlier. Academic attrition was high, the student paper reported, and after Mary Jane Hewitt’s resignation, two brand-new assistant professors, one in French, the other in American Studies, represented Oxy’s entire black faculty. A young black graduate of Vassar College was a newly hired assistant dean, but by spring she had submitted her resignation before a student petition effort led Oxy to successfully request that she withdraw it. Two black male sophomores, Earl Chew and Neil Moody, petitioned to establish a chapter of the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, citing “a serious social and cultural problem on campus” for minority students. Chew, a St. Louis native, had graduated from tony Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and weeks earlier had taken the lead in creating an Oxy lacrosse team. But blacks at Oxy, Chew and Moody said, suffered from “a lack of cohesiveness, a generally present personal sense of being members of an ethnic minority group which cannot engage in collective achievement.” Indeed, when Oxy’s yearbook, La Encina, scheduled its 1979–80 photo of Ujima, the African American undergraduate group, only fourteen students showed up to appear in the picture. Barry Obama was not one of them.

Haines Annex’s short hallway was home to three other black male undergraduates besides Barry, sophomores Neil Moody and Ricky Johnson and freshman Willard Hankins Jr., but Obama did not develop relationships with any of them like he did with the crew of late-night alcove regulars. Most Oxy black students, particularly those from greater Los Angeles, stuck pretty much together. “There is a certain amount of minority segregation in the dining hall and in the quad,” the student paper observed. Black students who did not follow that pattern stood out.

Judith Pinn Carlisle’s African American mother had graduated from Howard University, her white father from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. She and her two siblings all attended junior high schools in Greenwich, Connecticut, but a family financial setback during Judith’s high school years had her living in South Central Los Angeles while she attended Oxy. Shy and quiet, “I kept to myself,” she said, and as a result, “I was challenged by many people on that campus as to my black legitimacy,” notwithstanding how “I’m living at Crenshaw and Adams” in the heart of black L.A. Earl Chew was a particular antagonist, treating Judith as if she was “a sellout,” she recalled. Chew “did not like me” and the hostility “was very disturbing.”

Sophomore Eric Moore’s mother had also graduated from Howard, and Eric grew up in mostly white, upper-middle-class Boulder, Colorado. “There weren’t that many black students on campus and there weren’t that many that went outside of the black clique,” he recounted. Eric had a diverse set of friends, including a junior from Karachi, Pakistan, Hasan Chandoo, who had grown up largely in Singapore and transferred to Oxy after a freshman year at Windham College in Vermont. Also from Karachi was sophomore Wahid Hamid, who roomed with French-born sophomore Laurent Delanney. Both Hamid and Chandoo had long known Imad Husain, Barry Obama’s roommate. By the spring of 1980 Chandoo was living off-campus with Vinai Thummalapally, an Indian graduate student who along with Hasan’s cousin Ahmed Chandoo was attending California State University and whose girlfriend, Barbara Nichols-Roy, who had also grown up in India, was an Oxy junior. As Eric Moore later said, they had “our own little UN there.”

Eric remembers Obama as always having “that big beaming smile,” and says he was “always in a Hawaiian shirt and some OP shorts and flip-flops.” Indeed, he says, Barry seemed “more Hawaiian and Asian and international in his acculturation than certainly he was African American.” Obama “hadn’t had an urban African American experience at all,” and at Oxy “many of the local Los Angeles African Americans were not as receptive to the cultural diversity” on campus as Eric was. Barry was “a little isolated from that group,” and just as Judith experienced, “there was some pushback from certain individuals.”

Earl Chew was the most widely visible African American student on campus, and while some found him hostile, Hasan Chandoo considered him a “really wonderful friend.” African American freshman Kim Kimbrew, later Amiekoleh Usafi, remembers Earl as “a bright and shining person” who was “just completely committed” to black advancement. Like Eric, she viewed Barry as “a really relaxed boy from Hawaii who wore flip-flops and shorts.” Obama once asked her to “come over here and talk to me,” Kim recalled. “I don’t know if he’d ever really been around black women at that point” and in terms of pursuing women, “he seemed to keep himself away from all of that.”⁴

Spring term began the last week of March and lasted until early June. Barry, along with Paul Carpenter, was in a third core political science course, this one on international relations and cotaught by professors Larry Caldwell and Carlos Alan Egan. Junior Susan Keselenko found Egan “a very romantic figure,” but the course itself was “really tedious.” A significant portion of it involved pairs of nine-student teams contending with each other in a multistage group paper exercise that Keselenko would remember as “very kind of mechanical.” Susan and a fellow junior, Caroline Boss, ended up in “Group Y” along with Barry; Paul Carpenter was in the opposing “Group A.” Boss, a political science major and active DSA member who as a freshman had run on the progressive slate for Oxy’s student government offices, served as the group’s informal leader. In mid-May Caroline and Susan orally presented Group Y’s six-page paper, “The MX Missile: Bigger Is Not Better.”

In the January State of the Union speech that had generated Oxy’s draft registration protests, President Carter also had proposed spending as much as $70 billion to build two hundred mobile, ten-warhead-apiece MX missiles that would be deployed all across the U.S. Southwest. Attacking Carter’s proposal as “an unnecessary, economically and environmentally devastating venture,” Group Y said that if implemented, the MX project “will destabilize the international balance, accelerate the arms race, and increase the likelihood of nuclear war”—the same themes that one group member’s father had publicly articulated exactly eighteen years earlier!

Whichever instructor gave it a C was not impressed. The paper had “a certain superficial fluency or glibness,” he wrote, but “it demonstrates a very great disregard for careful thought, little concept of how one analyzes an issue, and fails to make a persuasive argument.” Ouch. Carpenter’s Group A was hardly kinder in their critique, asserting that “Group Y’s paper as a whole lacked original analysis” and that “vital contradictions … undermined their thesis considerably.” Y then penned a rebuttal as well as their critique of Group A’s own paper, which addressed the 1978 Camp David Accords. The critique received an A even though it contained multiple obvious spelling errors, including “Palestenians,” and creation of the verb “abilitated.” Obama appears to have orally presented Group Y’s critique, for in the margin alongside their paper’s statement that “A settlement amenable to the oil producing Arab states does not insure an improved position for the U.S. in regard to oil,” one of his fellow students penned “Barry > abandon Israel will not protect U.S. oil access.”

Outside of class, regular activities from earlier in the academic year continued apace. Humorous event listings in the somewhat tardy April Fools’ issue of the student newspaper included one announcing that “Haines Annex will host a religious revival this Wednesday at 8:00. Participants will be asked to let their hair down for one night in an effort to communicate with extra-terrestrial Gods utilizing the means of herbal stimuli.” Just as at Punahou a year earlier, there was hardly anything secretive about some students’ recreational preferences.

One Saturday Barry, Eric Moore, and seniors Mark Anderson and Romeo Garcia went to a music festival in nearby Pasadena Central Park. Eric remembered that “we were culture and music hounds,” but with Oxy being an “island in the barrio” of surrounding Eagle Rock, Obama would join him on drives to South Central Los Angeles to get their hair cut. Sometimes the police pulled over Eric and Barry. “It was par for the course,” Moore explained years later.

The April 4, 1979, execution of former Pakistani president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had been deposed two years earlier in a military coup led by General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, had greatly intensified Pakistan’s political turmoil and also caught the attention of several Oxy students. Hasan Chandoo had grown up in a politically aware family, and his mother was a distant relation of Pakistan’s revered founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Chandoo’s girlfriend Margot Mifflin, a sophomore who had started an Oxy field hockey team that Hasan volunteered to coach because he found its star player so attractive, knew best how “passionate” Chandoo’s hatred was for the military dictatorship. “I think I recall Hasan spray painting ‘Death to Zia’ somewhere on campus,” she later recounted. Pakistan was a regular topic of discussion in the Haines Annex alcove and even more so in the Freeman student union snack bar that everyone called the Cooler. Open during the day and then again from 8:00 P.M. to 11:30 P.M., the Cooler was the favorite hangout for Oxy’s most politically conscious students, like Caroline Boss, as well as for self-identified literati like Chuck Jensvold, a junior transfer from a community college who was five years older than his classmates.

By spring term 1980, Barry was an evening regular there too. “Obama always seemed to be in there,” smoking and drinking coffee, “just jousting back and forth with whoever would come,” Eric Moore remembered. One day when Barry walked into the Cooler, Caroline Boss from his political science class introduced him to Susan Keselenko’s roommate, junior Lisa Jack, an aspiring portrait photographer. Lisa already had been told that Barry was this “hot” guy, and seeing that he indeed was “really cute,” she asked if she could take a roll of photos of him. Barry readily agreed, and a few days later he walked over to Lisa and Susan’s nearby apartment. Wearing jeans, a dress shirt, and a leather bomber jacket with a fur collar, Barry also wore a ring on his left index finger, a digital watch on his left wrist, and a bushy Afro that was in need of a drive to South Central. Jack’s first fifteen photos captured Obama smiling and smoking while sitting on a simple couch. Then Obama doffed the jacket, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and put on a colorful Panama hat he had brought along. Jack shot eighteen pictures of Obama wearing the hat, then a final three of him bareheaded. Throughout them all, Obama looked without question happy, carefree, and very young for eighteen years of age.

Over a quarter century later, when Jack discovered her old negatives and sold publication rights for some of them to Time magazine, former Oxy classmates who had clear memories of Obama’s daily appearance during those years said the guy in the photos bore little resemblance to how they remembered him. “That’s not how he looked or dressed,” Eric Moore commented. John Boyer was even more succinct: “That’s not him.”⁵

After spring term exams, Barry spent some of the summer living with Vinai Thummalapally in the apartment Vinai and Hasan Chandoo had shared. Barry returned to Hawaii for at least part of the summer, and on July 29 he registered for the reinstituted military draft at a Honolulu post office. His almost ten-year-old sister Maya had landed in Hawaii twelve days earlier; their mother, Ann, apparently had arrived some weeks previously, because on June 15, a local attorney had filed her signed divorce complaint against Lolo in the same court where sixteen years earlier Ann had divorced Barry’s biological father. Ann’s filing said that “the marriage is irretrievably broken”; in a supporting document she stated that “husband has not contributed to support of wife and children since 1974,” was “living with another woman” and “wishes to remarry.” Ann reported that she was living “in 4-bedroom house provided by” DAI, her employer, and that she had “2 full-time live-in domestics.” The decree she and Lolo signed stated that Lolo “shall not be required to provide for the support, maintenance, and education” of Maya.

Ann and Maya were again staying with Alice Dewey, but Barry was back with his grandparents in their apartment near Punahou. As Obama later told it, one morning Stan and Madelyn argued over her wanting him to drive her to the Bank of Hawaii instead of her continuing her years-long pattern of taking a bus. Madelyn said that on the previous morning an aggressive panhandler had continued to confront her even after she gave him a dollar. Barry offered to drive her downtown, but Stanley objected. He said Madelyn had experienced this before and had been able to shrug it off, but now her fear was greater simply because this panhandler was black. That angered Stan, who refused to take her.

In Obama’s later telling, Stan’s use of the word “black” was “like a fist in my stomach, and I wobbled to regain my composure.” Stan apologized for telling Barry, and said he would drive Madelyn downtown. Then they left. Stanley’s obvious comfort with people of color, as well as his liberal political leanings, may not have been fully shared by now fifty-seven-year-old Madelyn, and in Obama’s recounting years later he added that never had either grandparent “given me reason to doubt their love.” Yet he was struck by the realization that men “who might easily have been my brothers” could spur Madelyn’s “rawest fears,” at least when they aggressively approached her at close quarters.

Obama says he went that evening to see Frank Marshall Davis, who was now approaching his seventy-fifth birthday. Frank’s poetry from the years before his 1948 move to Hawaii was now being rediscovered and studied by a younger generation of African American literature scholars, several of whom had interviewed Frank about his long and fascinating life. Barry recounted his grandparents’ argument, and Frank asked if Barry knew that he and Barry’s grandparents had grown up hardly fifty miles apart in south central Kansas at a time when young black men were expected to step off the sidewalk if a white pedestrian approached. Barry hadn’t. Frank remembered Stan telling him that when Ann was young, he and Madelyn had hired a young black woman as a babysitter and that she had become “a regular part of the family.” Frank scoffed at that patronizing, but told Barry that Stanley was a good man even if he could never understand what it felt like to be black and how those feelings could affect black people.

“What I’m trying to tell you is, your grandma’s right to be scared. She’s at least as right as Stanley is. She understands that black people have a reason to hate. That’s just how it is. For your sake, I wish it was otherwise. But it’s not. So you might as well get used to it.” In Obama’s telling, Frank then fell asleep in his chair, and Barry left. Walking to the car, “the earth shook under my feet, ready to crack open at any moment. I stopped, trying to steady myself, and knew for the first time that I was utterly alone.”

That night was apparently the last time Obama saw Frank Marshall Davis. But no matter how overdramatized Obama’s later account may have been, his previous nine months at Oxy had exposed him for the very first time to mainland African Americans who had a racial consciousness that a Hawaiian who had hardly ever experienced even minor racial mistreatment could not grasp any more than his sixty-two-year-old white grandfather could understand what four decades of being a black man in mainland America had taught his friend Frank. And black Oxy students from South Central L.A. or St. Louis had more trouble feeling at ease in a 90 percent white institution than someone from Punahou could. Barry Obama’s Oxy classmates were not being racially obtuse when they saw their happy, relaxed, and reserved friend as a multiethnic Hawaiian rather than a black American.⁶

Oxy’s fall term classes began at the end of September 1980. By then, Barry had accepted Hasan Chandoo’s invitation to share a two-bedroom ground-floor apartment in a small two-story, multiunit building at 253 East Glenarm Street in South Pasadena, a fifteen-minute drive from Oxy. Before the dorms opened, Hasan’s younger friend Asad Jumabhoy, an Indian-origin Muslim also from Singapore who was an entering freshman, crashed on their living room couch. Hasan had a yellow Fiat 128S, and Barry soon acquired a beat-up red Fiat coupe. Vinai Thummalapally and an Indian roommate lived upstairs, and Barry sometimes gave Vinai’s girlfriend Barbara a lift to or from Oxy.

Living off campus, Barry spent more time hanging out in the Cooler between and after classes. Cooler regular Caroline Boss cochaired Oxy’s Democratic Socialist Alliance, in which Hasan was active, and Hasan was also still coaching Margot Mifflin’s field hockey team. As Margot and Hasan got more involved, Margot and her roommate, Dina Silva, spent increasing time at Hasan and Barry’s apartment. “They had great social gatherings, parties, dinners,” Dina recalled, and Imad Husain and Paul Carpenter, still living in Haines Annex, plus Paul’s girlfriend Beth Kahn, were among the regulars. “They used to throw a great party there,” Paul agreed. “Food and dancing and a great mix of folks,” including Bill Snider and Sim Heninger from the old Haines Annex crowd plus Wahid Hamid, Eric Moore, and Laurent Delanney. Barry and Hasan went on outings with Wahid or Vinai and Barbara to places like Venice, where Margot took a photo of Barry, Wahid, Hasan, and Hasan’s cousin Ahmed all wearing roller skates.

Whether in the Cooler or at Glenarm, Hasan’s passionate interest in politics dominated many discussions. Hasan was “very outspoken about his political views, very aggressive, opinionated, extroverted,” Margot remembers, and identified himself as a Marxist—at least “to the extent that any of us knew what we were talking about,” as Susan Keselenko sheepishly puts it. Asad Jumabhoy concurs that “Hasan was very radical at the time” and “had very strong views and he could support his argument very well.” To Chris Welton, who returned to Oxy that fall after a year abroad and soon became a close friend after meeting Hasan in one of Roger Boesche’s classes, what everyone in Hasan’s circle shared was “an outlook” that contemplated the wider world beyond “the borders of the United States.” The crux of their orientation was “international, period,” or what Caroline Boss called a “more globalized perspective” than undergraduates who had experienced only the mainland U.S. could envision.

Irrespective of the venue, Hasan was “a force to be reckoned with,” Paul Carpenter recalls; Sim Heninger terms him “just a domineering personality.” Compared to Hasan, who “cursed like a sailor” while smoking incessantly, everyone saw Barry as quiet, measured, and reserved. Chris Welton remembers him as “a keen observer,” Caroline Boss would call him “mainly an observer.” Dina Silva thought of Barry as “quiet,” “thoughtful,” and “contemplative” during conversations. Obama “was listening and absorbing everything much more than being demonstrative,” Paul Anderson recalls. “He would watch people—that is what I remember,” artist friend and junior Shelley Marks recollects. “I specifically remember him being quiet and watching and observing.”

During the 1980–81 academic year, Barry and Hasan became the closest of friends. Hasan’s girlfriend Margot describes it as “an affectionate relationship,” one that “wasn’t hampered by masculinity issues. They were open with each other, affectionate with each other,” for Hasan was “an open, intimate, direct person.” Often the two of them would sit and study in their kitchen; Chandoo can picture Obama reading Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” at that kitchen table. Some nights Barry studied in a glass-enclosed area in the library’s basement that everyone called the Fishbowl. Other nights Margot Mifflin and Dina Silva would join Hasan and Barry to study on East Glenarm. Marijuana was a regular though perhaps not nightly relaxant for Hasan and Barry. “I got stoned with him many times,” Margot acknowledged when asked about that 1980-81 year. And, on a less regular basis, “we did occasionally snort cocaine” at Glenarm as well, although it was “not a routine part” of their lives at that time. Sim Heninger can remember nights of “uproar and hilarity” at Barry and Hasan’s apartment, but also at least one scene that was “a little scary for me.” Bill Snider, reflecting back on both Obama’s freshman and sophomore years, deftly remarks that “his memory may be a little hazy” both from those nights at Haines Annex and from the subsequent regular parties on Glenarm.⁷

In mid-October 1980 Roger Boesche and faculty colleague Eric Newhall failed badly in an effort to persuade Oxy’s faculty to adopt a resolution demanding that the college divest itself of stock holdings in companies still doing business in South Africa. Oxy’s student newspaper immediately noted that two years earlier student activism had forced the issue to the top of Oxy’s agenda. Just days later, Caroline Boss announced that she and friends were reviving the Student Coalition Against Apartheid (SCAA). Oxy president Richard Gilman dismissed divestment as “an altogether too simplistic solution” while nonetheless acknowledging “the racist conditions in South Africa,” but a young sociology professor, Dario Longhi, who had studied in Zambia, took the lead in organizing a series of expert visiting speakers on South Africa for late in the fall term. Earl Chew took an active role while also complaining that Oxy lacked a “multicultural curriculum and social life” and needed far greater diversity.

Sometime late in the fall term, Eric Moore and Hasan Chandoo had conversations with Barry Obama about his name. Eric had spent part of the previous summer in Kenya as part of Crossroads Africa, a student educational program that dated from 1958 and in which Oxy was an active collegiate participant. “What kind of name is Barry Obama—for a brother?” Eric asked him one day. “Actually, my name’s Barack Obama,” came the answer. “I go by Barry so that I don’t have to explain my name all the time.” Moore was struck by Barack. “That’s a very strong name,” he told Obama, who then raised the issue with Hasan one day while they walked across campus. Chandoo agreed, and liked Barry’s middle name too. While most close friends like Paul Carpenter and Wahid Hamid had called him “Obama” instead of Barry and stuck with that usage, from that day forward Eric, joined only by Bill Snider, began addressing him as Barack while Hasan, being Hasan, would sometimes say “Barack Hussein,” as Asad Jumabhoy clearly remembers even thirty years later. Margot Mifflin too “can remember Hasan saying ‘He goes by Barack now,’ and I said, ‘Well, what is Barack?’ and he said ‘That’s his name.’ ” At the time, she recalls, “it was jarring.”

Over a quarter century later, Obama would say that he saw the change from Barry to Barack as “an assertion that I was coming of age, an assertion of being comfortable with the fact that I was different and that I didn’t need to try to fit in in a certain way.” With his Oxy friends “he would never correct you” if he was addressed as Barry, Asad explains, but when Obama returned to Honolulu for Christmas 1980, he told his mother and his sister that from now on he would no longer use his childhood nickname and instead would identify himself as Barack Obama. But to his family, just as with Hasan, Eric, and Bill, the name change signified no break in who they thought he was. As Snider explained, “I did not think of Barack as black. I did think of him as the Hawaiian surfer guy.”⁸

Long breaks between academic terms gave Barack and his best friends plenty of opportunities to travel. One week Barack and Wahid Hamid headed down to Mexico, then northward to Oregon, in Obama’s red Fiat. Two days before the end of fall term exams, Hasan and Barack showed up in the Oxy library with a surprise birthday cake for Caroline Boss, who was hard at work on her senior thesis and whom they spoke with almost every day in the Cooler. Caroline invited the duo to stop by her family home in Portola Valley, near Stanford, over the holidays when Hasan and Barack would be on the road in Hasan’s yellow Fiat. Either before or after a New Year’s Eve party in San Francisco at which Hasan introduced Barack to another Pakistani friend, Sohale Siddiqi, Hasan and Barack arrived at midday at Boss’s home.

Her boyfriend John Drew, a 1979 magna cum laude Oxy political science graduate, was also there; he was in his second year of graduate school at Cornell University. Boss had spent the summer of 1980 in Ithaca taking summer classes, and Drew knew Caroline as “a fun, scintillating, hyper-extroverted,” and “intellectually vibrant” young woman who, despite her adoptive parents’ significant wealth, worked cleaning an Oxy professor’s home. That winter day in San Mateo County, the four young people headed out to lunch with Caroline’s parents; Drew recalled much of their conversation focusing on Latin America and particularly El Salvador. Back at the Bosses’ home, as Drew remembered it, he and Obama got into a “high-intensity” argument about the relevance of Marxist analysis to contemporary politics. Drew’s “most vivid memory” was how strongly Obama “argued a rather simple-minded version of Marxist theory” and that “he was passionate about his point of view.”

Drew recalled Obama citing the work of the late French Caribbean decolonization scholar Frantz Fanon. At Oxy Drew had been active in the democratic socialist student group, but a course that past fall with Cornell’s Peter Katzenstein had significantly altered Drew’s views. “I made a strong argument that his Marxist ideas were not in line with contemporary reality—particularly the practical experience of Western Europe,” Drew would recount years later. In Drew’s memory, “Caroline was a little shocked that her old boyfriend was suddenly this reactionary conservative,” but Obama shifted to downplay their degree of disagreement, conceding that there was validity to some of Drew’s points. Drew briefly saw Barack three more times during the remaining six months of his relationship with Boss before finishing his Ph.D., teaching at Williams College, and evolving into an ardent Tea Party conservative.⁹

Oxy’s 1981 winter classes began on January 6. For the first two weeks of January, Hasan’s friend Sohale, who now lived in New York City, joined them in the Glenarm apartment as they hosted almost nightly parties. For Barack, though, this new term would be by far the most academically and politically engaging ten weeks of his collegiate career. One course he chose, Introduction to Literary Analysis, was taught by English professor Anne Howells, who had been at Oxy almost fifteen years. Utilizing the popular Norton Introduction to Literature, Howells had her fifteen students devote the first five weeks of the term to a “close reading of poetry—old-fashioned textual analysis” and then five weeks to reading short stories. There was “not very much reading, but a lot of writing”—five papers in the course of ten weeks. Barack “spoke well in class,” Howells would recall, and submitted well-written papers, but “he wasn’t a really committed student” and was late with assignments more than once.

Obama also enrolled in English 110, Creative Writing, which met Tuesday and Friday mornings 10:00 A.M. until 12:00 P.M., with David James, an Englishman who had graduated from Cambridge in 1967 and earned his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971. After teaching for nine years at the University of California at Riverside, James had arrived at Oxy just four months earlier. He required interested students to submit a writing sample prior to registration, an indication of the seriousness he brought to his teaching. At least five of the dozen or so students in the small class were earnest aspiring writers: Jeff Wettleson, Mark Dery, Hasan’s girlfriend Margot Mifflin, and Bill Snider and Chuck Jensvold, the older transfer student, both of whom Barack had known since his freshman year.

David James was “a marvelous character,” Dery recalled, “a classic British Marxist film theory jock” who was “a very penetrating analyst of poetry.” James handed out copies of contemporary poems he believed students would find stimulating, including ones by Sylvia Plath, W. S. Merwin, and Charles Bukowski, but viewed the course as “essentially a workshop to facilitate the students’ own compositions.” Jensvold’s presence was especially generative, for writing “seemed to define his whole being,” James remembered. In particular, Jensvold had an acute “eye for concrete detail” and knew that “amassing an inventory of details” was invaluable to a creative writer. Dery also appreciated Jensvold’s presence in what became “a very invigorating class.” Chuck was “an exemplar of the serious writer,” and as an older student he was “almost our mentor.” Dery and another classmate each referred to Jensvold as “hard-boiled,” and that classmate warmly remembered Chuck as “the Bogart of Occidental.”

Dery also recalled James as “a strict disciplinarian” who “didn’t suffer fools gladly” and had “zero tolerance for undergraduate lackadaisicalism.” A growing problem as the term progressed was students “straggling into class late.” One morning an angry James announced, “I am going to lock the door.” Soon a figure appeared outside the frosted glass door, unsuccessfully trying the handle. James did not react, nor to an ensuing tap or two on the classroom window. Finally Dery took the initiative to open the door, and in strolled Barack Obama. To Dery, Barack was “some species of GQ Marxist,” but an “almost painfully diffident” one whose “caginess,” even in the Cooler, made it hard to know “what he truly thought.”

A third course that winter was Political Science 133 III, the final trimester of Roger Boesche’s upper-level survey of political thought, this one covering from Nietzsche through Weber to Foucault. The fifteen or so students included Hasan as well as Barack’s former Haines Annex neighbor Ken Sulzer. Although memories three decades later would be hazy on the exact details, the results of two different assignments were notable in disparate ways. Sulzer and his friend John Boyer recalled seeing Obama heading into the library late one evening before an exam or paper was due. A day or so later, pleased with his own A-, Sulzer asked Barack what he had gotten, but Obama demurred. Sulzer grabbed Barack’s blue book and was astonished that Obama had gotten a higher A than he had.

Some weeks later, though, Boesche returned a paper on which he had given Obama a B. As both Barack and Boesche later recounted, within days, Obama encountered his young professor in the Cooler and asked, “Why did I get a B on this?” Boesche viewed Obama as “a student who gives incredibly good answers in class” but failed to consistently live up to his ability level on written assignments that required sustained preparation. In the Cooler, Boesche told Obama that he was smart, but “You didn’t apply yourself,” that he “wasn’t working hard enough.” Barack responded, in essence, “I’m working as hard as I can.” Boesche knew better than to believe that, but Obama would remain irritated about that B even a quarter century later, especially because Hasan Chandoo, not known for his academic diligence, received a higher grade for the term than did Barack: “I knew that even though I hadn’t studied that I knew this stuff much better than my classmates.” Obama believed Boesche was “grading me on a different curve, and I was pissed.”

Obama would allude to that experience a half-dozen times in later years, often not expressly mentioning Boesche but recounting how “I had some wonderful professors … who started giving me a hard time…. ‘Why don’t you try to apply yourself a little bit?’ And that made a big difference” in later years as Obama gradually came to appreciate that he was much smarter and far more analytically gifted than anyone who knew him at either Punahou or Occidental fully realized in those times and places.¹⁰

Early 1981 was just as significant politically for Obama as it was academically. A listless rally on the first day of classes resulted in an Oxy newspaper headline reporting “Students Lack Interest on Draft Issue.” Six days later, an evening appearance by Dick Gregory, the comedian and political activist, that Hasan played a lead role in engineering, attracted a huge crowd of 550. Greeted by the “thunderous applause,” Gregory then spoke for more than two hours, offering up a pastiche of loony assertions about election tampering and CIA and FBI involvement in the killings of both Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr., all somewhat leavened by countless humorous asides.

Two days later, a far more serious student forum explored all manner of prejudices at Oxy itself, with African American junior Earl Chew confessing, “Coming here was hard for me. A lot of things that I knew as a black student, that I knew as a black, period, weren’t accepted on this campus.” Three days later, in response to a flyer distributed on campus, Hasan and Barack drove to Beverly Hills to join 350 others in a silent candlelight vigil protesting the opening of a new South African consulate on Wilshire Boulevard. Relocation of the office there, from San Francisco, had attracted hundreds of protesters three months earlier when the consulate first opened. The vigil was cosponsored by the Gathering, a two-year-old South Central clergy coalition led by Dr. King’s closest L.A. friend, Rev. Thomas Kilgore, the L.A. chapter of King’s old Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the antinuclear Alliance for Survival.

Four days after that event, Thamsanqa “Tim” Ngubeni, a thirty-one-year-old South African member of the African National Congress living in exile in Los Angeles, addressed a lunchtime crowd of students on Oxy’s outdoor Quad. Born on the outskirts of Johannesburg in 1949, Ngubeni had joined the South African Students’ Organization in his early twenties and moved to Cape Town. A friend of prominent student leader Steve Biko, Ngubeni was arrested by South African authorities and imprisoned for several months before leaving South Africa and eventually making his way to L.A. in 1974, three years before Biko was killed while in South African police custody. A soccer scholarship enabled Ngubeni to attend UCLA, where he helped initiate the Afrikan Education Project and led demonstrations against the Bank of America’s involvement in South Africa.

In his January 21 speech at Oxy, Ngubeni told the students that South African apartheid “causes human beings to be considered as second-class citizens within their own country, the place where they were born and raised.” ANC’s goal was for black South Africans to be “recognized as human beings” in a country that had “more prisons than schools.” Ngubeni defended the ANC’s own use of violence against the South African regime, emphasizing that “we’ve been negotiating with them all these years while they were shooting us down in the streets.” He challenged Oxy’s students to reconsider which banks they patronized given how Bank of America and Security Pacific, like IBM and General Motors, continued to do business in South Africa.

Ngubeni often preached that “if you live for yourself, you live in vain. If you live for others, you live forever,” and his remarks that day certainly made an indelible impression on at least one of his young listeners. Barack Obama would tell two student interviewers a quarter century later that his meeting an ANC representative was the first time he thought about his “responsibilities to help shape the larger world.” Hasan’s intense politicization and their drive to Beverly Hills for the candlelight protest against South African apartheid were, like Roger Boesche’s professorial reprimand, the beginnings of an evolution that would flower more fully in the years ahead.¹¹

As winter term approached its midpoint, political events took place almost nightly. On Sunday evening, February 8, Hasan and Barack both attended a dinner held by Ujima as part of Black Awareness Month at Oxy. The next night Lawrence Goldyn delivered a scintillating talk, deftly titled “Why Homosexuals Are Revolting.” On Tuesday evening, Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative Equal Rights Amendment opponent, spoke at Oxy and was met with heckling from a trio of young men: Hasan Chandoo, Chris Welton, and Barack Obama. But the activist students’ primary focus was on the Student Coalition Against Apartheid’s upcoming divestment rally on February 18, scheduled to coincide with the next meeting of Oxy’s board of trustees. Oxy’s paper urged all students to attend since it “has the potential to be the most effective display of student initiative in recent years.”¹²

Three students took the lead in organizing the rally: Caroline Boss, Hasan Chandoo, and Chris Welton. Caroline and Hasan decided the roster of speakers, with Hasan recruiting Tim Ngubeni to return as their keynote speaker, while Chris and Hasan handled the logistics for the noontime gathering just outside Oxy’s administration building, Coons Hall. No one can remember who first had the idea of opening the rally with a “bit of street theater,” in which two supposed South African policemen dragoon a young black speaker who wants to quiet the crowd, but Hasan and Caroline were two of Barack Obama’s closest friends. Obama later wrote that he prepared for what he expected would be two minutes of remarks prior to being dragged off.

Margot Mifflin and Chuck Jensvold videotaped the rally for a class project. A large banner calling for “Affirmative Action & Divestment NOW” hung in the background. Two folksingers played “The Harder They Come” and the crowd sang along before Barack, wearing a red T-shirt and white jeans, stepped up to the microphone. It was too low, forcing him to hunch over it. Barack asked “How are you doing this fine day?” before declaring that “We call this rally today to bring attention to Occidental’s investment in South Africa and Occidental’s lack of investment in multicultural education.” The crowd cheered and clapped. Barack, with his right hand in his front pants pocket, nodded and resumed speaking. “At the front and center of higher learning, we find it appalling that Occidental has not addressed these pressing problems.” The crowd cheered again, and Barack continued, “There is no—” before Chris Welton and another white student suddenly grabbed him from behind and wrestled him offstage, much sooner than Barack had expected.

“I really wanted to stay up there,” Barack later wrote, “to hear my voice bouncing off the crowd and returning back to me in applause. I had so much left to say.” In his own fictional retelling, he spoke much longer than actually was the case. “There’s a struggle going on,” he imagined having said. “I say, there’s a struggle going on. It’s happening an ocean away. But it’s a struggle that touches each and every one of us. Whether we know it or not. Whether we want it or not. A struggle that demands we choose sides.” In his recounting, Barack had gone on for another seven or more sentences, drawing cheers from the crowd and imagining that a “connection had been made.” But as Margot Mifflin later wrote after watching the videotape she had long retained, Barack’s version was “factually inaccurate” and “Obama’s speech was not long enough to be galvanic, or really even to be called a speech.” A detailed account of the rally in the next issue of Oxy’s student paper did not mention the opening skit at all. “Led by chants of ‘money out, freedom in,’ and ‘people united will never be defeated,’ ” the story said the ninety-minute rally attracted a crowd of more than three hundred, plus several local TV news crews.

As a few Oxy trustees and even President Gilman watched, Caroline Boss introduced Tim Ngubeni, who spoke briefly before giving way to senior Sarah-Etta Harris, a Cleveland native, Philips Exeter graduate, and Ujima leader with a glowing résumé that included a semester’s study in Madrid and a summer fellowship in Washington, D.C. A photograph taken by sophomore Tom Grauman during Ngubeni’s remarks captured a tall, regal Harris standing well apart from Caroline, Hasan, Obama, and other friends, including Wahid Hamid and Laurent Delanney.

Harris warned the crowd that by continuing to invest in companies that did business in South Africa, Oxy’s trustees “are telling us that they support oppression over there and also over here.” She then spoke directly about Oxy. “I can count the number of black faculty on two fingers, and black student enrollment has been going down steadily.” Harris drew cheers from the audience when she said she found it “hard to believe that the trustees cannot redirect their investments to correct some of the problems we have right here on campus.”

Many viewed freshman Becky Rivera as the day’s star speaker. “We’re upset,” she announced, and they were “demanding answers and demanding action.” Margot Mifflin remembers several African American women jumping to their feet during Rivera’s speech and exclaiming, “Say it!” Rivera closed by declaring that “students are responsible for revolutions. Students have power. It starts on the campuses.”

The rally’s final speaker was Ujima president Earl Chew. Caroline Boss remembers him as “so angry and on fire” but also “a kind person.” Chew was a complicated figure because he “had this prep school background, but at the same time he was very street.” After almost three years at Oxy, he was “very disillusioned” with a college that was “so painfully white.” Chew denounced Oxy’s idea of a liberal arts education as “a farce,” and excoriated the college for “taking our tuition and investing it in the oppression of our ancestral people.” Divestment “may not change the apartheid regime, but it’s letting our brothers and sisters in South Africa know that we … know better than to oppress other humans for economic gain.” As the rally broke up, Rivera sought out Obama to congratulate him on his role. “He really had been on the fringes politically up until that point,” Rivera recalled. She told him, “I wish you would get more involved,” but rather than thanking Rivera, Obama was simply “noncommittal.”¹³

That evening Hasan and Barack hosted a party to celebrate everyone’s efforts. Caroline Boss remembers her exchanges with Obama that evening and, like Rebecca Rivera earlier, she was annoyed that he was openly moping rather than savoring his role. “I was really annoyed with him” when he started “yapping about how ‘I didn’t do a good job, and I could have said it better.’ ” As Boss recalled, “we all sort of went ‘Shut up! It was great. It was fine. You did what you were supposed to do. Move on.’ ” She was irritated that Barack viewed their group effort only in terms of himself. “The rally wasn’t about you developing your technique,” she spat out. “It was about South Africa, not you.”

Obama would recall a similar conversation with Sarah-Etta Harris, who had quietly befriended him a year earlier. Boss’s annoyance was grounded in the many discussions she had had with him in the Cooler, including ones about Obama adopting Barack in place of Barry. “A lot of the year’s conversations when they weren’t about politics was about identity, me talking about being adopted and him talking about sort of this weird experience of who’s his father and where’s his mother.” Caroline’s adoptive parents came from Switzerland, and were now wealthy, but Caroline’s maternal grandparents had been peasants who worked as a janitor and maid in an Interlaken bank. “I was very forthright about my own feelings about my adoptive state,” Boss remembers, and Barack was “absolutely” clear that he was wrestling with his own feelings about having been abandoned by both his birth parents. “That was something where he and I had a kind of a common understanding,” she explains, “of what it means to try to figure all that out.” Regarding his mother, Barack “was just very conflicted that she was absent so much,” yet given her resolute independence “he admired her enormously and of course found her irritating.”

Obama and Boss also discussed “class and race,” with Boss citing her grandmother’s story to argue the primacy of the former over the latter. Her grandmother had “a royal name,” Regina, despite her humble life circumstances, and Boss made Regina “a prominent part of some very intense conversations concerning the relationship between class and race.” She said Barack talked “about a lot of things that he’s seeing and feeling” with regard to race in the U.S. Boss said she would reply, “Yeah, but my grandmother in Switzerland—you have to see this internationally—my grandmother’s scrubbing those floors, and my mother and her brothers aren’t allowed to go into most of the town. The police will come and get them because they’re in the tourists’ place because they’re just these little local brats as far as the town council was concerned, so class is huge.”

Fifteen years later, Obama combined these reprimands into an account of how a woman named “Regina” upbraided him after he responds to her kudos about his skit with cynical sarcasm, saying that it was “a nice, cheap thrill” and nothing more. Regina replies that he had sounded sincere, and when Obama calls her naive, Regina counters that “If anybody’s naive, it’s you” and tells him his real problem: “You always think everything’s about you…. The rally is about you. The speech is about you. The hurt is always your hurt. Well, let me tell you something … It’s not just about you. It’s never just about you. It’s about people who need your help.”

In Obama’s telling, that night at the party another friend approaches and recalls the awful messes they had left in the Haines Annex hallway a year earlier for the poor Mexican cleaning ladies, to which Barack manages a weak smile. “Regina” angrily asks Obama why he thinks that’s funny. “That could have been my grandmother,” she said. “She had to clean up behind people for most of her life. I bet the people she worked for thought it was funny too.” In truth, it was not Harris but another African American woman, young American studies professor Arthé Anthony, who had objected when someone mentioned the dorm messes during a conversation in Barack and Hasan’s kitchen.

In future years, Obama would embrace the mantra of “It’s not about you” as a core life lesson and as a powerful antidote to what he described as “the constant, crippling fear that I didn’t belong somehow.” He would invoke the story of a cleaning lady “having to clean up after our mess” on subsequent occasions both obscure and prominent, and would cite a friend’s rebuke about her grandmother having cleaned up other people’s messes. With one interviewer, Obama would fuzz the details, saying, “I remember having a conversation with somebody and them saying to me that, you know, ‘It’s not about you, it’s about what you can do for other people.’ And something clicked in my head, and I got real serious after that.”

Obama would recite the moral of the story—“It’s not about you. Not everything’s about you”—without naming Harris, Boss, or Anthony. In one rendition, Obama said the rebuke had come from a female professor, but in his written account of that night, he gave Regina the biography of the tall, regal Sarah-Etta Harris. His physical description of Harris was distorted—only her “tinted, oversized glasses” match up to the Harris of 1981—and he says she was brought up in Chicago, not Cleveland, but the other history he attributes to “Regina” is drawn from Harris’s own undergraduate achievements. Most of Obama’s Oxy friends have difficulty remembering Harris, but “Regina” leaves Oxy “on her way to Andalusia to study Spanish Gypsies.” A 1981 Occidental promotional prospectus highlighted Harris’s receipt of a Watson Fellowship and said she “will travel to Hungary, France, Italy and Spain to study the socio-economic problems of sedentary gypsies of those countries.” Obama’s account accurately details the lifelong impact that Harris’s, Boss’s, and Anthony’s rebukes of his self-centeredness had on him, but the “Regina” story merges no fewer than three conversations into one.¹⁴

The same issue of the Oxy newspaper that covered the rally on its front page also featured “Rising Above Oxy Through Columbia.” Junior Karla Olson wrote that a year earlier she had been “stuck in a rut” at Oxy. Deciding that she needed to try another institution, “I tried to pick a college the polar opposite of Oxy” and “within a month I had applied and been accepted as a visiting student to Columbia University in New York City.” Upon arriving there, she had been presented with “Columbia’s catalogue of 2,000 or more available classes,” a stark contrast to tiny Occidental. Olson knew Columbia was “an Ivy League school,” but “I soon realized that I wouldn’t have to work nearly as hard as I do at Oxy.” Olson lived in Greenwich Village, where she had easy access to “museums, art galleries, Broadway, Fifth Avenue, Central Park, clubs, bars, restaurants, and a myriad of other diversions.” It seemed as if “95 percent of Columbia students live off-campus, and most go straight home from class … making it really hard to meet people,” but “my overall experience at Columbia was fantastic…. I learned a lot from my classes and benefited even more from the opportunities New York offered in my spare time.”

At Occidental, many if not most students thought about transferring to larger institutions. Eric Moore, who tried unsuccessfully to transfer to Stanford, believed “most people were trying to transfer from Oxy,” and Phil Boerner, Obama’s across-the-hall friend from Haines Annex, “wanted to attend a larger university” and one that was less “like Peyton Place” than Oxy, where “everybody knew who was dating who.”

Nineteen-year-old Barack Obama had never even passed through New York City, and he knew no one there aside from Hasan’s friend Sohale Siddiqi, but one day he asked Anne Howells, his literature professor, if she would write a letter of recommendation for him to Columbia University. “He wanted a bigger school and the experience of Manhattan,” Howells recalled years later. “I thought it was a good move for him.” Oxy assistant dean Romelle Rowe remembers Barack discussing a transfer to Columbia and saying he wanted “a bigger environment.” Years later Obama would say he transferred “more for what the city had to offer than for” Columbia, that “the idea of being in New York was very appealing.” Crucial too was how his closest friends were soon leaving Occidental. Hasan and Caroline were graduating in June and both were headed for London, Hasan to join his family’s shipping business and Caroline to study at the London School of Economics. Wahid Hamid, in a dual degree program, was about to shift to Cal Tech.

Caroline Boss, with whom Barack spoke most days, agrees that “he did have a lot of us who were graduating,” but “he definitely felt the need to transfer,” and not just because his closest friends were leaving. The biggest factor was Obama’s emerging belief that he ought to make more of himself than he felt able to do at Oxy. When Caroline and Barack discussed their families, he always said “that his father was a chief” of some sort among Kenya’s Luo people and that that lineage represented something he should be proud of, “something to live up to.” A quarter century later, Obama would reflect that if “you don’t have a sense of connection to ancestors … you start feeling adrift and … you start maybe devaluing yourself and internalizing” self-doubts. Pride in one’s roots can offer “a more powerful sense of direction going forward.” Obama’s conversations with Boss gave him his first-ever opportunity, far more so than with any friend from Punahou or even the voluble Hasan, to verbalize his developing thoughts about the kind of person he thought he should try to become.

Boss remembers “he basically said, ‘I’ve got to bail. I’ve got to get myself to where it’s cold. I have to be in the library’ ” and someplace where he would have “ ‘access to a black cultural experience that I don’t actually know’ ” and that would “ ‘make me an American and not just this cosmopolitan guy.’ ” As Boss remembers, they “talked about why it was important to be Barack. We talked about why it was important to be a man, and why that meant leaving Oxy because he was just going to hang around being a stupid little boy, smoking cigarettes and … never getting the A that he knows he’s perfectly capable of because you kind of slide.”

Obama also realized that the beer drinking, pot smoking, and cocaine snorting that Oxy, like Punahou, offered him, and that had cemented his reputation as “a hard-core party animal” to some friends, was incompatible with any self-transformation into a more serious student and person. Sim Heninger and Bill Snider believed that Obama’s decision to apply to Columbia sprang from a desire for greater self-discipline, and over a quarter century later Obama would remark, “I think part of the attraction of transferring was it’s hard to remake yourself around people who have known you for a long time.” He knew he was at a “dead end” at Oxy and needed a fresh start, that “I need to connect with something bigger than myself.” So when Barack mailed his transfer application sometime just before Oxy’s spring break began on March 20, at bottom he was making “a conscious decision: I want to grow up.”¹⁵

For Oxy’s spring term, Barack, along with scores of other students, enrolled in Lawrence Goldyn’s PS 115, Sexual Politics, which met Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. His old Haines Annex friend Paul Anderson took it too and recalls “many times having to stand in the back because there weren’t any chairs left.”

A new regular for the daily conversations in the Cooler was sophomore Alex McNear, who had arrived at Oxy the previous fall as a transfer from Hunter College in New York City, where she lived. By the end of winter term, she and fellow sophomore Tom Grauman had decided to start a literary magazine at Oxy. They announced the launch of Feast in the Oxy newspaper and invited submissions of short stories and poems for spring term.

Obama had composed two poems in David James’s winter term creative writing seminar, and he had presented each in class sometime late in the term. One, a twelve-line composition entitled “Underground,” may be no more comprehensible now than it was in 1981:

Under water grottos, caverns

Filled with apes

That eat figs.

Stepping on the figs

That the apes

Eat, they crunch.

The apes howl, bare

Their fangs, dance,

Tumble in the

Rushing water,

Musty, wet pelts

Glistening in the blue.

The second, titled “Pop,” made enough of an impression on his listeners in March 1981 that at least two of them still recalled that morning three decades later.

Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken

In, sprinkled with ashes,

Pop switches channels, takes another

Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks

What to do with me, a green young man

Who fails to consider the

Flim and flam of the world, since

Things have been easy for me;

I stare hard at his face, a stare

That deflects off his brow;

I’m sure he’s unaware of his

Dark, watery eyes, that

Glance in different directions,

And his slow, unwelcome twitches,

Fail to pass.

I listen, nod,

Listen, open, till I cling to his pale,

Beige T-shirt, yelling,

Yelling in his ears, that hang

With heavy lobes, but he’s still telling

His joke, so I ask why

He’s so unhappy, to which he replies …

But I don’t care anymore, ’cause

He took too damn long, and from

Under my seat, I pull out the

Mirror I’ve been saving; I’m laughing,

Laughing loud, the blood rushing from his face

To mine, as he grows small,

A spot in my brain, something

That may be squeezed out, like a

Watermelon seed between

Two fingers.

Pop takes another shot, neat,

Points out the same amber

Stain on his shorts that I’ve got on mine, and

Makes me smell his smell, coming

From me; he switches channels, recites an old poem

He wrote before his mother died,

Stands, shouts, and asks

For a hug, as I shrink, my

Arms barely reaching around

His thick, oily neck, and his broad back; ’cause

I see my face, framed within

Pop’s black-framed glasses

And know he’s laughing too.

David James can remember Obama “reading that or an early version of that,” and particularly the “amber stain” reference to urine, because of “how powerful an image it was.” But James thought the poem seemed “dispassionate” because it was “neither sentimental nor cruel.” Margot Mifflin, no doubt with “Underground” in mind, noted that Obama’s “previous poems had been more abstract and fanciful,” but “Pop” made a stronger impression because of its “honest ambivalence and because it was so unabashedly personal, especially coming from someone who tended to be reserved.” Mifflin was also impressed that “it wasn’t sentimental. It had an edge of darkness to it, and that made it genuine.”

Alex McNear and her colleagues accepted both of Barack’s poems for Feast’s inaugural issue. When the fifty-page magazine arrived on campus in May, a review in the student newspaper described it as a “most outstanding collegiate example of writing talent” and said copies “should be sent to other colleges.” McNear and her contributors appreciated that praise, and over a quarter century later, Feast would be discovered by a new generation of readers who sought to understand Obama’s poems. Given both the title and the reference to “black-framed glasses,” most commentators presumed that Obama had written about his grandfather, Stan Dunham, not Frank Marshall Davis. But hostile critics focused on how the subject “recites an old poem he wrote before his mother died” and noted that Stan’s mother had killed herself when he was eight years old, yet Barack would forcefully reject the Davis hypothesis. “This is about my grandfather.”¹⁶

Alex McNear was one of two Occidental women whom male students immediately remembered three decades later. The list of men who actively sought her attention included 1980 graduate Andy Roth, who was in Eagle Rock through February 1981; Phil Boerner, who invited Alex to brunch multiple times; and Feast cofounder Tom Grauman, who found her “a magnetic force” before shifting his gaze to Caroline Boss. But interest in Alex ranged far wider. One upperclassman imagined she was “the most beautiful lesbian I ever knew,” and Susan Keselenko recalled that “everybody had a crush on Alex.”

McNear was unaware of the full degree of interest in her, but she was curious about one fellow sophomore she got to know in the Cooler during spring 1981. To Alex, Barack was “intriguing and interesting and smart and attractive,” and they spoke regularly as the school year wound down. Some friends believed the interest was mutual. “I thought he was pursuing her,” recalled Margot Mifflin, Occidental’s other unforgettable woman. She and the dashing Hasan Chandoo had been a steady couple the entire year, but that did not lessen Margot’s own “magnetism,” Tom Grauman noted. “It’s hard to forget Margot,” said Paul Anderson. “She had a way about her that was captivating.” Chandoo too was a compelling presence. When one classmate compared Hasan to the singer Freddie Mercury, Margot coolly suggested the handsome actor Omar Sharif instead. But perhaps Tom Grauman’s most striking photograph from that spring captures an enchanting Margot addressing a slightly blurred Barack. In contrast, a survey publicized in the student newspaper reported that 32 percent of Oxy women and 17 percent of men admitted that they had never had sex.¹⁷

Oxy’s black students remained politically marginalized despite the almost nonstop efforts of Earl Chew, who by April was trying to get support for a Black Theme House dormitory. Only nine African American students turned out for Ujima’s annual photo, and when a five-page Black Student Directory was distributed during winter term, one perplexed undergraduate sent a letter to the student paper that asked, “Why does the Oxy black community need their own directory; don’t they know who they are?” Whoever compiled it did not know Obama well, because it spelled his given name as “Barrack.”

Oxy president Gilman announced there would be no further discussion of divestment, yet the controversy continued to percolate even years later. In May Earl Chew, along with Becky Rivera, ran successfully for top student government positions, but Chew’s close girlfriend from that year later said she had no memory of Barack working with them at all.¹⁸

Instead Barack and Hasan channeled their energies into a newly created Oxy chapter of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. CISPES had been founded six months earlier to oppose U.S. aid to El Salvador’s military government, whose violent death squads had assassinated Roman Catholic archbishop Oscar Romero while he was offering mass in March 1980. CISPES supported El Salvador’s left-wing opposition, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), whose ties to the Salvadoran Communist Party had led the FBI to investigate CISPES even before Barack and Hasan helped start Oxy’s chapter in early March 1981.

One of Barack’s favorite professors, Carlos Alan Egan, had prompted the student interest in El Salvador, and on Saturday, April 18, Barack, Hasan, and Paul Anderson drove to MacArthur Park in L.A.’s Westlake neighborhood for a CISPES event led by actors Ed Asner and Mike Farrell. The short march and ensuing rally attracted a crowd of three thousand as well as counterprotesters from Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. “We were walking around and absorbing it all,” Anderson remembers, and particular enjoyed “exchanging barbs” and “verbally going back and forth” with the hostile Moonies. Scores of banners and signs made for a colorful event. “Long Live the Revolutionary Democratic Front,” an FMLN ally, read one; “U.S. Out of El Salvador” demanded another.

With Egan’s assistance, Barack, Paul, and Hasan helped organize a mid-May symposium on El Salvador that drew seven prominent speakers to Oxy, including Sister Patricia Krommer, one of the most prominent U.S. supporters of the Salvadoran left. Several academics, a U.S. State Department officer, and a refugee doctor whom Paul would remember as “actually an El Salvadoran revolutionary” were also on the panel. The event drew a crowd of more than three hundred—a larger number than attended the February divestment rally—and the Oxy paper devoted a front-page photo and a lengthy story to the symposium. Paul recalls several right-wing hecklers showing up, and the student organizers “had to have them extracted.” Multiple off-campus CISPES events took place during late May and early June, with flyers for all of them distributed on the Oxy campus by student CISPES supporters.¹⁹

Hasan also organized a Sunday forum featuring former Pakistani Supreme Court justice Ghulam Safdar Shah, who had opposed the military dictatorship’s execution of former president Bhutto and been forced from office in late 1980, plus prominent politician Afzal Bangash, who had founded Pakistan’s most militant Marxist party in 1968 but was living in exile following Zia-ul-Haq’s 1979 military coup. This event too was a success, attracting an audience of more than two hundred, and Barack and Hasan’s friend Chris Welton wrote a front-page account of it for Oxy’s newspaper.

That same week, Oxy students were angered when they learned that the Political Science faculty had refused to reappoint Lawrence Goldyn, the department’s most popular professor. Goldyn denounced the senior faculty’s conduct as “completely unethical and certainly unprofessional,” but he was also aware of the effect he had had on countless Oxy students. Speaking with Susan Keselenko for a long, two-page profile in the year’s final issue of the newspaper, Goldyn said that “frankly I think I’ve probably had as much or more impact on straight people at this school than I have on gay people.”

Goldyn believed he had had “a rather profound effect on a lot of people, but there’s no way of measuring that or knowing that,” at least not for years to come. Many students have “studied with me, gotten close to me, and really been supportive of and loyal to me. I can’t tell you how much respect I have for people like this.” Notwithstanding that realization, Goldyn would abandon political science after this and enter medical school, earning his M.D. from Tufts University in 1988 and becoming an internal medicine/HIV specialist in Northern California. Thirty-three years after his dismissal from Oxy, one former student would thank and laud him in one of Washington’s most august settings.²⁰

Obama’s belief in his potential as a serious writer suffered a painful blow when Tom Grauman told him a short story about driving a car had been voted down for publication in Feast’s second issue on the grounds that it needed more work. Obama was livid. Caroline Boss appreciated how Barack took pride in “his writing and he was trying to hone that as an actual craft,” especially after taking David James’s seminar. But to be told by Grauman that his story had been rejected was more than he could bear. “We had a fairly frank argument about it,” indeed “a shouting match,” Grauman recounted years later. “I just said it wasn’t done,” and “I didn’t want to finish it for him.” Obama “was peeved” and “you could see that his feelings were hurt,” in part because Feast “was a social thing as well as a literary thing,” and “he felt he deserved to be a part of this group.”

But Obama had more important things to consider. Sometime before Oxy’s spring term exams ended on June 9, he and Phil Boerner learned they had each been admitted to Columbia University. Boerner’s Oxy GPA was a less than robust 3.25, or a high B, but Columbia College—the men’s undergraduate portion of the larger university that also included all-female Barnard College—had received only 450 transfer applications that spring, and accepted sixty-seven. Columbia admissions officials were unhappy about the quality of those applicants as well as the quantity. Dean Arnold Collery believed they had not attracted stronger applicants because “we’re not housing them,” instead leaving them to fend for themselves in Manhattan’s rental apartment market. Assistant Dean of Admissions Robert Boatti also cited the limited financial aid as well as Columbia’s policy of requiring all transfers to take core courses that other students had completed as freshmen and sophomores. As a result, a majority of transfer students came from the New York area, many from community colleges. Those who had been accepted had GPAs of about 3.0 and combined SAT scores of 1,100, Boatti said, while entering freshmen averaged well over 1,200.

Boerner and Obama were excited by their acceptances. Eric Moore heard the news and tried unsuccessfully to persuade Barack to stay at Oxy. Sim Heninger, who had seen so much of “Barry” in Haines Annex almost two years earlier, spoke with him in the Cooler one day at the end of spring term and was struck by how “polished and funny” Barack now was. He had changed “very swiftly,” Sim thought, from the emotionally fragile youngster who had almost come apart in front of Heninger in October 1979. “He was a different person by the time he left,” Heninger said. Kent Goss, who had played basketball with Barry during fall 1979, saw the same thing. “He was different. He was more serious … there was a shift somewhere in those two years.”

Alex McNear sensed something similar. “I think he had like a broader vision of something…. He thought there was going to be a different kind of opportunity” at Columbia. Caroline Boss would remember Obama saying “very directly … ‘I don’t know what it is, but I feel I have a destiny, and I feel I have a purpose. I feel I have something that is being asked of me to do; I just don’t know what it is, and I need to … go someplace that challenges me, that forces me to focus and that gives me a sense of direction and personal identity, some kind of avenue to ask myself good questions,’ ” so that “ ‘I will be prepared … I need to be prepared so that if the moment comes, I’m ready for it.’ ”²¹

When spring term exams ended on June 9, Hasan and Barack hosted a graduation party for all their friends and friends of friends before everyone left for the summer. Margot and her roommate Dina Silva, plus Dina’s boyfriend Chuck Jensvold, were there. Caroline Boss brought her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend John Drew, who was spending the summer in D.C. working at Gar Alperovitz’s National Center for Economic Alternatives, just two years after its failure to win a reopening of Youngstown’s Campbell Works. The next Saturday, Barack and Imad Husain went to Paul Carpenter’s family home for his younger brother’s birthday party, and Barack told friends he and Hasan were leaving L.A. the next Thursday, June 18.

After stopping in Honolulu to see Stan and Madelyn, they continued westward, with Barack heading to Jakarta to spend a good part of the summer with his mother and sister Maya before meeting up with both Hasan and Wahid Hamid in Karachi, Pakistan. From Pakistan, Obama would fly to France, and then to London, before arriving in New York City for Columbia’s fall semester. Carpenter told Phil Boerner that “knowing O’Bama, he will reach the shores of the ‘empire state’ at the last possible moment if not later.”

In Honolulu, Hasan was struck by how “very small” Barack’s grandparents’ apartment was. Madelyn Dunham was pleased to see her grandson and later told an interviewer “he seemed to have gotten some purpose in life during those two years at Occidental.” Barack ran into Keith Kakugawa and his two young sons. Keith remembered that Barack “told me he was leaving Oxy and going to Columbia.” From there, Barack headed to Indonesia.

Six months earlier, Ann had left USAID contractor Development Alternatives for a two-year stint as a program officer in the Ford Foundation’s regional office in Jakarta. That job came with a comfortable Ford-owned home at Jalan Daksa I/14 in the lush South Jakarta neighborhood of Kebayoran Baru, a considerable step upward from the two houses Barry had lived in with her when she was married to Lolo. The Ford salary gave Ann enough to send ten-year-old Maya to the Jakarta International School, and Ford appears to have paid for Barack’s summer 1981 plane fares after Ann requested that her educational travel for dependent children benefits be used for that purpose.

Ann knew her son needed a place to stay when he arrived in Manhattan in late August, and she heard from a fellow expatriate about an apartment for sublet at 142 West 109th Street, just a few blocks south of Columbia’s campus. Barack spent most of July living with his mother and sister, and he later wrote that he “spent the summer brooding over a misspent youth.” Then he flew to Karachi, where Hasan and Wahid met him at the airport. He stayed for a few days at the Chandoo family’s Karachi home, then for a week or more at Hamid’s before the trio and several relatives set out on a road trip that took them northeastward to Sindh province’s second-largest city, Hyderabad, and then well north to Larkana in interior Sindh. They visited a high school friend of Wahid’s whose famous family, the Talpurs, had played a major role in Sindh’s earlier history and whose feudal lands were still worked by peasants. Barack met one such older man of African ancestry, and traditional hospitality also led to a partridge hunting outing for the visitors.

Obama then flew westward from Karachi. How much time he spent in either France or London is unrecorded, and in subsequent years, he did not write about his three weeks in Pakistan nor did he often mention the visit when recounting his life experiences. But no later than August 24, Barack Obama arrived in New York City for the first time, having just turned twenty years old—five years younger than his father had been when he first arrived there twenty-two Augusts earlier.²²

Obama later wrote that he “spent my first night in Manhattan curled up in an alleyway” off Amsterdam Avenue after no one was present at 142 West 109th Street’s apartment 3E when he arrived a little after 10:00 P.M. He did not have enough money for a hotel room, and while he did have Hasan’s friend Sohale Siddiqi’s phone number, Sohale worked nights at a restaurant. After waiting futilely on the building’s front stoop for two hours, he “crawled through a fence” to an alleyway. “I found a dry spot, propped my luggage beneath me, and fell asleep…. In the morning, I woke up to find a white hen pecking at the garbage near my feet.”

In the morning, Barack called Sohale, who told him to take a cab to his building on the Upper East Side. Sohale remembered Obama arriving “totally disheveled,” and after breakfast at a nearby coffee shop, Obama crashed on Siddiqi’s couch. Within a day or two, Barack gained access to the two-bedroom apartment on 109th, and he immediately invited Phil Boerner, who was still searching for housing, to share it with him: $180 a month per person. Phil arrived on Saturday, August 29, two days before Columbia’s orientation, and his top priority was retrieving a bed from family friends. Phil and Emmett Bassett, a sixty-year-old African American medical school professor, got the bed to 109th Street on top of Bassett’s station wagon. Phil remembers “Barack and I huffing and puffing up the stairs to get half the bed” up to their third-floor apartment; in contrast, “Emmett just grabbed the mattress with one arm and hauled it up no problem.” The next weekend, Phil and Barack spent Labor Day weekend at the Bassetts’ country home in the Catskills. Phil said later that Emmett “was the most impressive person I’ve ever met,” but years later Bassett could not recall Obama at all.

That weekend was a welcome respite from both the sorry state of apartment 3E and the strictures Columbia imposed upon junior transfers. On 109th Street, the downstairs buzzer did not work, forcing visitors to shout their arrival from the sidewalk, as Phil had discovered when he first arrived. The apartment door featured at least five locks, perhaps not a bad idea, as the unit next door was vacant and burned out. The four-room apartment was a railway flat: the front door opened into the kitchen, which led first to Barack’s bedroom, then Phil’s, and lastly their living room. With no interior hallway, there was no privacy whatsoever. The bathroom had a tub, but no shower, and hot water was a rare treat. Hot showers could be taken at Columbia’s gym—phys ed was another requirement—and once the weather turned cold, keeping coats on indoors and taking refuge in sleeping bags could partially compensate for the usually stone cold radiators.

Barack had learned to cook one or two chicken dishes from Oxy’s Pakistanis, but in stark contrast to daily life back on Glenarm, Phil and Barack hosted parties only when someone from Oxy like Paul Carpenter and his girlfriend Beth Kahn visited them. Sometime in September, Earl Chew and a friend came to stay for several nights, but “spent most of their time at a porn theater,” Phil remembered. Chew would not complete his senior year at Oxy and next surfaced eleven years later when he was arrested on a charge of attempted murder outside a Santa Monica reggae club. Jailed for six months before being convicted, Chew pled guilty to misdemeanor assault after his initial conviction was overturned. He was last known to have disappeared from an L.A. halfway house in 2007, three decades after his graduation from Philips Exeter and his arrival at Oxy.²³

Registration and the start of classes was not any more welcoming for Barack and Phil than their living conditions on 109th Street. Columbia required them to take a full year of both Humanities and Contemporary Civilization plus a semester apiece of art and music. Two semesters of physical education were reduced to one if you passed a swimming test. A foreign language was mandatory; Barack enrolled in an intermediate Spanish class. In all of those courses his classmates were almost entirely freshmen and sophomores. Additional requirements included two natural science courses plus whatever was necessary for a departmental major.

Columbia would accept up to sixty transfer credits from Oxy toward the 124 needed to graduate, and Phil and Barack each met with assistant dean Frank Ayala to determine which of their Oxy courses satisfied Columbia’s many requirements. Tuition was $3,350 per semester, and with other fees, the cost of a full year was $8,620, independent of food, lodging, and books. Obama may have received some financial aid in the form of federal Pell Grant assistance, and he may have taken out a modest amount of student loans.

A series of headlines in the Columbia Spectator, the excellent student newspaper, told the story of life for the Columbia undergraduate: “Alienation Is Common for Minority Students,” “Students Label CU Life Depressing,” “Striking Tenants Demand Front-Door Locks.” The second of those stories described “the crime and poverty surrounding the school and the immensity of the university bureaucracy.” One classmate later said, “Columbia was a very isolating place,” and another rued “a culture at the college and in the city that wasn’t exactly nurturing.” Several years later Obama wrote to Boerner, “I am still amazed when I think of what we put up with there” on 109th Street. Living in Manhattan and going to Columbia was nothing at all like that glowing account the Oxy student newspaper had offered up eight months earlier.²⁴

Luckily there were interesting events to attend. One flyer advertised “A Forum on South Africa—Including the Film The Rising Tide,” with speakers such as David Ndaba, the nom de guerre for Dr. Sam Gulabe, the African National Congress’s representative to the United Nations. Boerner said he and Barack attended that forum, but not a mid-November speech by black Georgia state legislator Julian Bond. The two apartment mates often ate breakfast at Tom’s Restaurant on Broadway at 112th Street, and they sometimes had dinner at nearby Empire Szechuan. Drugs were no part of the depressing scene at 142 W. 109th, but they would go drink beer at the venerable West End bar on Broadway or with Phil’s cousin Peregrine “Pern” Beckman, a Columbia sophomore, at his nearby apartment. To Pern, Phil’s friend seemed “diffident,” a “shy kid who spoke when spoken to” while “nursing a beer.”

Looming over their daily lives was how unlivable their dire apartment was, especially as winter closed in. They could let their sublease expire on December 7 and simply remain until fall exams concluded on December 23; given New York’s arcane housing code, they could receive no punishment for that brief time. They began searching without success for a place to live in January. Phil had family friends in Brooklyn Heights where he could stay, but they still had no solution for both of them when Phil left to spend Christmas with his parents at their home in London.

Columbia’s winter break extended from Christmas Eve until spring registration on January 20. Obama spent most of that time in Los Angeles, seeing Wahid Hamid and Paul Carpenter and encountering old friends like Alex McNear when he visited Occidental, whose winter term started two weeks before Columbia’s spring semester. Obama returned to New York on January 15 and slept on the floor of a friend named Ron on the Upper East Side while he again searched for an apartment. At registration, Barack ran into Pern, who gave him Phil’s number in Brooklyn, and when Barack called two nights later, he told Phil he had found only a $250-per-month one-person studio just south of 106th Street that he could soon move into as a sublet.

On Sunday afternoon, January 24, the day before Columbia’s spring classes began, Barack and Ron went to visit Phil where he was staying, at 11 Cranberry Street in Brooklyn Heights. They drank beer and ate bagels while watching the San Francisco 49ers defeat the Cincinnati Bengals 26–21 in Super Bowl XVI. On Monday Barack was again saddled with Columbia’s core courses and another semester of Spanish. That Friday night, Phil met up with Barack at Columbia; the two then headed downtown on the subway to rendezvous with Ron and his girlfriend at a Lower East Side bar before having dinner at the well-known Odessa restaurant on Avenue A, just across from Tompkins Square Park. Then Barack and Phil headed back to Morningside Heights, and Boerner spent the night on Obama’s floor rather than take the subway back to Brooklyn after midnight. The next Friday Barack and Phil ate an early Chinese dinner before taking the subway to Phil’s place and polishing off a bottle of wine while watching the New Jersey Nets play the Philadelphia 76ers. Barack still occasionally played pickup basketball in Columbia’s Dodge gym; a female graduate student years later remembered him playing pickup soccer on the lawn in front of Columbia’s imposing Butler Library.²⁵

But Barack’s life during those early months of 1982 was radically different from his daily routine one year earlier. At Oxy, living with Hasan was an almost nonstop party with a band of close friends. Rallies, protests, and political events occurred almost weekly, and the days were filled with energetic debates and conversations in the Cooler. Now, in dreary Morningside Heights, Obama faced a daily schedule of core classes and perhaps a once-a-week meet-up with Phil to have dinner, drink beer, or watch a game. A quarter century later, Obama remembered that time as just “an intense period of study…. I spent a lot of time in the library. I didn’t socialize that much. I was like a monk.” He started keeping a journal, less a diary than a descriptive collection of city scenes and characters that caught his eye. In retrospect, he believed it was an “extremely important” period “when I grew as much as I have ever grown intellectually. But it was a very internal growth,” one that left him “painfully alone and really not focused on anything, except maybe thinking a lot.” He had been “comfortable in my solitude, the safest place I knew.”

“It was a pretty grim and humorless time that I went through,” Obama remembered, an “ascetic” and “hermetic existence … I literally went to class, came home, read books, took long walks,” and wrote in his journal. “It’s hard to say what exactly prompted” such a stark change from his attitude toward life both at Oxy and back in Hawaii, Obama told the journalist David Remnick. Yet he gained “a seriousness of purpose that I had lacked before.”

Spring exams ended by the middle of May, and sometime soon after that, Obama lost both his studio apartment and his security deposit when the actual leaseholder informed him that his sublet was invalid. Thus sometime in early or mid-summer 1982, Barack moved in with Sohale Siddiqi in a two-bedroom apartment at 339 East 94th Street, just west of First Avenue. Siddiqi managed to score the lease on the $450-a-month sixth-floor walk-up by exaggerating his own income, and though Barack was now living on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, their immediate neighborhood was anything but fashionable. Sohale recalled that it was “a scary street,” with a corner gas station “patrolled by this Doberman Pinscher with a beer bottle in his mouth.” Their own building was “a hovel … the hallways were dingy. Everything was beat up and gray and dimly lit. The front door didn’t lock completely.” Up in 6A, “you would enter through a kitchen, which would lead into a living room on one side and a bathroom on the other.” The wooden floors “were all warped … with big gaps between the planks.” One bedroom “was really a closet with a window.” A friendly footrace was used to determine who got the decent bedroom, and Obama, now a regular runner, won. As on 109th Street, “there was never hot water when you wanted it,” but in contrast the heat was always on, “so we used to have our windows wide open, just to cool down.” Outside Barack’s bedroom window was a fire escape, which Sohale said served as “our balcony.” All in all, it was just “a horrid place.”

Siddiqi also witnessed a “transformation” from the “fun-loving … easygoing” Obama he had met eighteen months earlier in South Pasadena to someone who was now “very serious and less lighthearted.” Yet Barack had a stereo and “a huge record collection. Bob Marley was big, Stevie Wonder … also plenty of Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Talking Heads, and this group who I had never heard of before … he had at least twelve of their albums,” the Ohio Players. But once Barack arrived on East 94th Street, “I don’t think he bought any more albums … or even played the stereo much.” He did have “to remind me a few times to call him Barack” rather than Barry.

Sometime soon after Barack moved in with Sohale, his mother Ann and almost twelve-year-old sister Maya arrived in New York from Jakarta, where Ann still worked for the Ford Foundation. They too were struck by the change in the young man they called “Bar.” Maya later recalled that “he seemed more serious. He seemed more pensive. He was reading a great deal.” She believed “he had started taking himself very seriously” and often appeared to have “wrapped himself in his own solitude.” Obama later wrote that he took a summer job “clearing a construction site on the Upper West Side,” and he also described, in a patronizing manner, his mother’s insistence that they see Black Orpheus, a film she had loved as a high school senior twenty years earlier that was playing at a revival theater. Obama told a subsequent interviewer that during that visit “my mother used to tease me and call me Gandhi” because of his newly ascetic life, but Barack did not deny that he had become “deadly serious during those late college years … People would invite me to parties, and I’d say, ‘What are you talking about? We’ve got a revolution that has to take place.’ ”

Andy Roth, who had lived in Oakland after leaving Eagle Rock, moved to Manhattan in the late spring of 1982 and got an apartment on East 95th Street, hardly two blocks from Barack and Sohale. Siddiqi was nowhere near as political as Chandoo, nor as intellectually curious as the new Obama, but when Andy went for dinner at their apartment with several other Pakistanis, he remembered seeing “a portrait of Bhutto on the wall.”

The most significant new acquaintance that year was Mir Mahboob Mahmood, known to friends like Sohale, Wahid, and Hasan as “Beenu.” A 1981 graduate of Princeton University, Beenu was working as a paralegal in Manhattan while preparing to attend law school. At Princeton, Beenu had written a one-hundred-plus-page senior thesis on Mohandas Gandhi, and he was hugely influenced by the teaching of political theorist Sheldon Wolin. As Beenu remembered it, he and Barack began an on-and-off program of reading and discussing a half a dozen or so significant books, interrupted partly by Beenu’s one year of graduate study in political science at Johns Hopkins University. Beenu reconstructed their reading list as beginning with John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1690), then Albert O. Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (1977), followed by Barrington Moore Jr.’s famous The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966) and E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (1939).²⁶

At Oxy in 1980–81, Andy Roth had been one of the many men interested in Alex McNear. When Alex returned to her mother’s apartment at 21 East 90th Street in June 1982 to spend the summer taking a theater course at NYU and interning at a publishing company, they got in touch, and whether from Andy or another Oxy friend, Alex got Barack’s phone number and called him. Sometime in midsummer, they had dinner at an Italian restaurant on Lexington Avenue, and although that evening remained chaste, according to Alex, they “started to see a lot of each other” that summer, becoming “really very close.”

Alex’s parents had divorced when she was four years old. Her father had remained in Chicago, and her mother, originally from Wisconsin, got a graduate degree from UW–Madison before moving to New York. Her comfortable apartment, with its library of “thousands of books” in a tall building just off Madison Avenue, was a world away from Barack and Sohale’s dismal quarters only eight blocks to the northeast. Alex remembers that apartment as “sparsely decorated” with “very little furniture” and recalls “opening the refrigerator and seeing like virtually nothing in there.”

Understandably Alex and Barack “didn’t spend a lot of time there,” and apart from one visit with Phil and a party that also included Andy, they socialized only with each other. After going out to dinner, a museum, or a Broadway play like Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold” … and the Boys, about South African apartheid, “he’d come over, and we’d stay at my apartment.” Barack “did not seem like someone who was at all experienced” or indeed “terribly driven,” but his “shyness” and “lack of experience” matched the novelty of their intimacy for her too.²⁷

Barack’s senior-year classes at Columbia began on September 8. One entering freshman remembered Obama as a fellow student in his yearlong Contemporary Civilization core course, and a junior political science major recalled chatting with Barack a number of times in a hallway in the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) building before one or another political science class. Barack, Phil, and Phil’s cousin Pern all enrolled in C3207, Modern Fiction, taught by Edward Said, a Palestinian American literary scholar whom Columbia’s student newspaper months earlier had called a “bitter” critic of Israel at “a largely Jewish university.” Said would “come in and ramble on for an hour about who knows what,” Pern remembered. The reading list for the twice-a-week, one-hundred-student class included Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, and William Faulkner. Pern thought Said could be “brilliant,” and “when he was focused, he was incredible.” But preparing for class was clearly not one of Said’s priorities, and Phil and Barack did not share Pern’s opinion. “We did not think highly of Said,” Phil recounted. “We thought his class was pretty worthless.”

Having settled on political science as his major, Barack had to take a two-semester senior colloquium and seminar in one of the department’s four subfields. Barack’s course credits fit best with international relations, and he and seven fellow seniors ended up in W3811x and y, taught by Michael L. Baron. A young instructor who had completed his Columbia Ph.D. dissertation on U.S. policy toward China after World War II two years earlier, Baron was returning to Columbia after a year of teaching in Beijing. Baron’s dissertation had argued that President Harry S. Truman “was an activist in foreign policy, basing decisions primarily on personal proclivities,” and this course focused on U.S. foreign policy decision-making rather than a particular topical area.

The assigned readings during the fall semester analyzed how past important decisions had been made: the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the fall 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and the escalation of the Vietnam War. Readings included works by Joseph Nye and Ernest May, as well as Irving Janis’s famous 1972 Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes. Baron recalled that “we definitely focused on groupthink.” Throughout the fall, their focus was historical and practical, not theoretical: “What do you need to do to make a good decision? Which presidents were making good decisions,” first and foremost by “taking advice from people outside the inner circle?”

Baron as well as two other students in the small class recall Obama as a standout performer. “He was a very bright student,” Baron said years later, “clearly one of the top one or two students in the class.” One classmate remembered Barack as “a very, very active participant” in class discussions, and another who “didn’t think the seminar was that great” nonetheless was “impressed with Barack…. There was a maturity about what he said and how he said it” that surpassed the comments offered by most if not all of his fellow seniors.

One way of satisfying half of Columbia’s science requirement was Elementary Physics, C1001x, taught by Gerald Feinberg, a professor in his late forties who had taught at Columbia for more than twenty years. The catalog described the course as “an introduction to physics for students with no previous background in physics” and stated that “very little mathematics is used.” Indeed, Feinberg’s popular 1977 book, What Is the World Made Of? Atoms, Leptons, Quarks, and Other Tantalizing Particles, which Feinberg assigned that fall, declared, “I am convinced that a substantial comprehension of modern physics can be obtained without advanced mathematical training.” That book, like Feinberg’s syllabus, focused on “the study of atoms and of their subatomic constituents.” It explained quantum theory, the special theory of relativity, and especially particle physics, “the main feature of the physics of the last twenty-five years.” The course was essentially “a history of physics,” Feinberg’s son Jeremy recalled from personal experience, and his dad “called it physics for poets.”²⁸

In mid-September, Alex McNear left Manhattan to return to Oxy for the fall quarter, and on September 26, Barack sent her a long letter reporting on his first two weeks of classes after receiving a note from her. “I sit in the campus cafe drinking V-8 juice and listening to a badly scratched opera being broadcast. I am taking a break from studying a theoretical analysis of strategic deterrence in the international arena, muddling through concepts like first strike, mutual assured destruction, nuclear payload, and other such elaborated madness. So forgive the dryness and confusion that have undoubtedly rubbed off.”

Describing himself as trying to stretch “across as many disciplines as possible,” Obama sounded as if he had sat in on a number of courses while considering which ones to take. “My favorite so far is a physics course for non-mathematicians that I’m taking to fulfill the science requirement. We study electrons, neutrons, quarks, electromagnetic fields and other tantalizing phenomenon under the auspice of a Professor Fienberg [sic]. He embodies every stereotype of a science professor from the bow-tie to the sparse, balding hair combed back and monotonous Midwestern twang. Behind the thick glasses that pinch his nose, one can sense the passion he brings to the topic and the quiet, unobtrusive cockiness you find in scientists, certain that no one knows any more than they do.”

Obama’s descriptive sketch of Feinberg confirms the impression that Alex and Phil each had of Barack in 1982: that he wanted very much to become a writer. Presented with that depiction of his father years later, Jeremy Feinberg was impressed: “the physical description … is spot-on” and even Obama’s characterization of his voice was accurate. In Barack’s letter, he then cited what he called “the frustrations of studying men and their frequently dingy institutions” while adding that “the fact that of course the knowledge I absorb in the class facilitates nuclear war prevents a real clean break.”

Then he shifted gears. “A steady flow of visitors camped in our living room for two weeks or so, and I had a chance to catch up with friends and play host.” Hasan and his cousin Ahmed were among them, and Barack told Alex that “Hasan will be marrying” soon and taking over the family business. With “old friends receding into the structures pre-conscribed for them,” relationships became “more reserved” and “the idealistic chatter of college is diplomatically ignored.”

Barack had also heard from Greg Orme in Oregon, who had a new car, a television, and a hot tub. “I must admit large dollops of envy for both groups, my American friends consuming their life in the comfortable mainstream, foreign friends in the international business world. Caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me, in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me. The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions, classes, make them mine, me theirs. Taken separately, they’re unacceptable and untenable.”

Obama’s statement that he felt isolated was unsurprising given his life over the previous twelve months, nor were his remarks about Hasan and Greg. He did not respond to what Alex had written to him about herself, “since I spent so much of my mental energy with you and now need to refuel” and return to Butler Library. “I trust you know that I miss you, that my concern for you is as wide as the air, my confidence in you as deep as the sea, my love rich and plentiful. Please comfort me with another letter when you get a chance. My regards to everyone. Love, Barack.”

A postscript said he was enclosing a New York Times book review from two weeks earlier of Becoming a Heroine by Rachel Brownstein, which he thought would interest her, as well as an excerpt from W. B. Yeats’s 1928 poem The Tower about “a woman won or lost.” He asked Alex, “Who is the ‘woman’ for you?”²⁹

Back in Butler Library, Barack studied for Gerald Feinberg’s first physics exam on October 12. Students had to answer two out of three questions: “(1) Discuss the present atomic theory of the structure of ordinary matter … (2) Describe the photon theory of light … (3) Discuss how some of the estimates of the number of various subatomic particles … are obtained. Your discussion need not be precise on numbers….”

In early November, Columbia’s Coalition for a Free South Africa hosted the prominent white anti-apartheid activist Donald Woods, and Obama may have been among the large crowd. Two weeks later Columbia’s student newspaper published another front-page article reporting how “this is not an easy place to go through as a minority student.” One black senior complained that white students presume the admissions standards for black undergraduates were lower and that “we can’t do the work”; another commented that Columbia’s core curriculum ignored African Americans and “doesn’t prepare you for the real world.”

Alex McNear wrote to Barack in mid-November, and he quickly replied. “You speak with force, Alex, calm and confident, and I’m frankly amazed, not by the brimming talent, not by the thoughts in themselves but by the sureness of the words.” Admitting that “mixed in with those feelings are bits and pieces of envy, uncertainty, some intimidation,” he confessed that “the prejudiced, frightened male makes its atavistic appearance.” Writing cryptically about what he termed “the habits and grooves of separate existence,” he declared that “we will talk long and deep, Alex, and see what we can make of all this.”

Rereading his letter a quarter century later, McNear noted Obama’s “formalism,” and wondered “were mine very formal” as well? “I just wonder where the tone came from.” Barack also wrote, “I think you may have caught me being a fool in my last letter,” and he referred to a conversation they had had outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “When we spoke in front of the Met, I insisted that I made choices, that I wasn’t kind out of necessity, because it can certainly be argued that I’m compelled by my past to be that way, that no choice is involved … and my insistence arises from my fear of emasculation, that if I can’t be cruel any longer, then I must not be a man.” Citing “the past of my ancestors,” Obama wrote, “I see that in a real sense my gravestone is already planted, the feeble eulogic etchings overgrown with moss, blurred and forgotten.”

Barack went on that “this cordoning off of individuals into compartments is something I fight every day,” and said that Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway expressed his point better than he could. After some musings about birth and death, Barack asserted that “the betrayal lies in separation,” that “we feel betrayed by this act of separation,” and that “because the initial act of separation has traditionally been from the mother, men’s retaliation is indeed towards women.”

Alex understood that “he’s clearly enjoying writing: writing it out, toying it out, figuring it out.” Barack continued that “some choose to escape the pain by limiting their interaction with the world. They abstract themselves … which is perhaps the most tolerable option.” He quoted Friedrich Nietzsche’s statement that “in all desire to know there is a drop of cruelty” before acknowledging that “I’m running out of steam and the thoughts are becoming blurred.” Yet he had two points for subsequent discussion: one, “I see that I have been made a man, and physically, in life, I choose to accept that contingency.” Second, “there is a reason why western man has been able to subjugate women and the dark races, Alex; the ideology they present is backed by a very real power. We will speak of this too.”

Rereading that passage, McNear observed how “very professorial” Obama sounded. Barack then added, “I’ve never tried to put down so comprehensively my views. They come out muddled and incomplete, and I wish I could explain more fully.” To that, Alex would wonder “maybe … that was as close as he could get to intimacy.”

Finally Obama concluded by returning to the real world a month hence, after Columbia’s exams ended. “I arrive in L.A. on December 23rd, and expect to be at Wahid’s apartment that evening. I’ll call you upon arrival … see you then. Love, Barack.”³⁰

Three or four days after Barack mailed that letter to Alex, Sohale answered their phone on East 94th Street and an unfamiliar, foreign-sounding woman asked for Barack. It was Kezia Obama’s sister Silpa Obonyo, known throughout the family as Aunt Jane, a Nairobi telephone operator able to make international calls. She had just phoned Auma Obama, now a twenty-two-year-old student in Germany and no longer using “Rita,” and her reason for calling Barack was the same as for dialing Heidelberg: Barack Obama Sr. was dead at age forty-eight.

He had died in the early-morning hours of Wednesday, November 24, when the vehicle he was driving had gone off Elgon Road and struck a large tree stump. Drunken driving had indeed finally killed him. “The body had to be wedged out of the car,” the Nairobi Times reported. The crash site was in Upper Hill, the Nairobi neighborhood where Obama had been living with twenty-two-year-old Jael Atieno, who six months earlier had given birth to George Hussein Obama.

Barack later wrote, “I felt no pain, only the vague sense of an opportunity lost,” and he called his mother in Jakarta, then his uncle Omar Onyango in Massachusetts. A year earlier Barack and his father had corresponded about his visiting Kenya to meet his relatives there once he graduated from Columbia, but now that idea was on hold.

The Nairobi paper said Obama Sr. “leaves four wives and several children,” and the eleven years that had passed since he last saw his second-eldest son in Honolulu in 1971 had been no happier than the seven that had preceded it. Soon after Obama returned to Nairobi in early 1972, Ruth divorced him, but she did not take her two sons and actually leave him until later that year after Obama put a knife to her neck and struck the youngest boy, David Opiyo. Unemployed and still drinking heavily, Obama was able to secure a job offer from the World Bank for a post in the Ivory Coast, but when his sister Zeituni took him to the Nairobi airport, government officials turned him away and canceled his passport. “He left the airport crying, angry, and frustrated,” Zeituni recalled. Some months later, in mid-1973, yet another drunken car crash left him with two badly broken legs and a shattered kneecap. Obama remained hospitalized for six months, sometimes “in real pain,” Zeituni remembered. His teenage daughter Auma was repeatedly “sent home from school” due to unpaid fees and bounced checks. She and her older brother Roy, alone without a mother or stepmother after Ruth left with Mark and David, relied upon Zeituni for their survival. She “regularly brought us something to eat,” Auma remembered.

Not long after Obama left the hospital, his old Honolulu friend Andy “Pake” Zane and his partner Jane visited Nairobi and were astonished at Obama’s condition. “He was a broken spirit,” just “a shell” of the man Zane and Neil Abercrombie had visited in 1968. “Why do you have a limp?” Zane asked. Obama replied, “They tried to kill me,” asserting that the conspirators behind Tom Mboya’s 1969 assassination tried to rub out a possible witness. “He was very depressed,” Zane remembered, and “he got very drunk and very angry” each night they saw him. By then he had been evicted from the council house at 16A Woodley Estate for nonpayment of rent and had a roof over his head only thanks to his friend Sebastian Peter Okoda, who allowed Obama to join him in his flat at Dolphin Court for more than a year.

On November 25, 1975, Obama’s father, Hussein Onyango Obama, died at age eighty. Barack Sr. attended the funeral accompanied by his then-girlfriend, Akinyi Nyaugenya. Sometime soon after, Obama’s old friend Mwai Kibaki, now Kenya’s minister of finance, hired him into a post there. His drinking was as heavy as ever, and colleagues often saw him headed to a bar before noontime. “I can’t stand it anymore. Let’s get a drink.” Once Obama received a large cash travel advance a day before his scheduled departure on a business trip, but before the night was out, he had spent the entire sum treating colleagues, including Okoda, to rounds of drinks at a fancy Nairobi bar.

One Kenyan academic who had first met Barack Sr. in the U.S. found his deterioration sad. “Before, he was everyone’s role model. With that big beautiful voice, we all wanted to be like him. Later, everybody was asking what happened.” A younger female government colleague knew that Obama was “disillusioned and discouraged and depressed” but mentioned to him her desire to get a Ph.D. She was astonished at his response: “It’s useless doing a Ph.D. What do you want a Ph.D. for? It’s just academic.” Obama “was very, very strong about that: ‘Don’t do a Ph.D.’ ”

By mid-1980, the forty-six-year-old Obama was living with Jael Atieno, a friend of his younger sister Marsat who was the same age as his daughter Auma. Obama had visited Auma in Europe two years before his death, but “I didn’t want to see him,” she recounted. He “appeared broken” and “seemed defeated.” Auma felt “betrayed by my father, blaming him for not holding the family together.” When Aunt Jane telephoned her in November 1982, “I scarcely felt anything for him.”

Ruth Baker Obama Ndesandjo had remarried to a stable and reliable man, Simeon Ndesandjo, and in April 1980, she had opened a preschool, the Madari Kindergarten. She learned of Obama’s death from that November 30 newspaper story. “I was not surprised, because he had been heading that way for a long time,” Ruth said. She told her son Mark more than once that his father had been “a brilliant man, but a social failure.”

Zeituni Onyango, the person to whom Barack Obama Sr. was closest and who loved him most profoundly, understood more deeply than anyone the immense tragedy and lost promise of his life. Despite Barack’s remarkable intelligence, he had ended up living a “miserable life” that was “ruined by alcohol.” Yet even in his last days, one thing had never changed since his unwilling 1964 return to Nairobi without the Ph.D. from Harvard that had been his dream. Even though almost none of his friends ever heard him mention a son in the U.S., “Barack’s picture was always next to his bed,” according to Zeituni.³¹

In later years, the younger Barack’s comments about his father’s death would vary considerably. Sometimes he incorrectly said he began using the name Barack instead of Barry at that time, rather than almost two years earlier. On other occasions, he mused that he had been motivated by his father’s death. “I think it’s at that point where I got disciplined, and I got serious,” but the few people who knew Barack well during his first fifteen months in Manhattan—Phil, Sohale, and Alex—had all witnessed that transformation take hold many months earlier.

Obama also later wrote that “my fierce ambitions might have been fueled by my father … by my resentments and anger toward him,” but in 1982 those who knew him well did not see evidence of any fierce ambitions. Obama’s belief that in some ways he had raised himself would not be questioned by anyone from Punahou or Occidental who had noticed the absence of his birth parents in his life, but his most acute and accurate comments about the father he saw for only a few weeks when he was ten years old acknowledged how “I didn’t know him well enough to be angry at him as a father. Mostly I feel a certain sadness for him, and the way that his life ended up unfulfilled, despite his enormous talents.” In time he realized that “I was probably lucky not to have been living in his house as I was growing up.”³²

After Aunt Jane’s telephone call, Barack said little about his father’s death. “I had no clue,” Sohale Siddiqi recalls. “Not a word from” Barack referenced it. “I never heard about his father from him. I would hear about” Stanley Dunham in particular. “He brought up his grandparents plenty,” and Sohale remembers an off-color note Stan had sent his grandson along with a jogger’s wristband, suggesting there were multiple appendages upon which he might wear it.

Sometime in early December, Keith Kakugawa was in New York for several days and managed to meet up with Barack for lunch near Columbia and then one night for dinner. Obama told Keith that “his dad had just died in a car wreck.” When Barack arrived in Los Angeles just before Christmas and began seeing Alex McNear almost daily, Alex too remembers him telling her about his father’s death, but, she says, “it was not an emotional telling.” In a letter to Phil Boerner, Obama described his three weeks of winter vacation in Los Angeles. Other than when he was with Alex, Barack stayed with Wahid. He told Phil that his days there were “standard fare—good relaxation with the Paki crowd, dinners with Alex, lunches with Jensvold, tennis with Imad, and pipe tokes with Carpenter. They all seem to be doing well enough and have themselves set up in big cushy apartments. The whole process was like a spiral back in time; nothing had changed except my perceptions, it seemed.” Barack’s close friend Mike Ramos had moved from Honolulu to Orange County six months earlier, and he remembers driving up to Pasadena and eating curry with Barack and the Pakistani trio of Wahid, Imad, and Asad.

Other than this unrevealing reference in his letter to Phil, the extent of Barack and Alex’s relationship was kept entirely private, with all of their time together involving just the two of them and not any of Barack’s other friends. “No one really knew that we were having a relationship,” Alex later explained. Barack “seemed to be incapable of bringing a relationship into the rest of his world,” and their quiet dinners often featured long conversations about Alex’s immersion in French literary theory and especially its focus on the concept of difference. “I’m really much more interested in how people are similar,” Alex remembers Barack saying in response to one such discussion. Alex recalls writing in her diary at that time, “I realized how much I loved him, and that he was like my closest friend,” but she also expressed doubts that their relationship could blossom. Barack seemed “very controlling” and “so self-conscious.” On January 17, they had a final dinner before Barack flew back to New York City for his final semester as an undergraduate.³³

Barack was still taking Spanish, and the spring semester of his yearlong political science senior seminar would have fewer class meetings in lieu of students writing a paper due at the end of the term after multiple one-on-one consultations with Michael Baron. But in addition, Barack was able to choose three upper-level elective classes. One was a seminar taught by a young English professor whom Pern Beckman had recommended as a “really cool guy.” Lennard “Len” Davis’s first book, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel, a revision of his 1976 Columbia Ph.D. dissertation under Edward Said, was just being published by Columbia University Press. The Columbia catalog said Davis’s seminar Ideology and the Novel would examine “the nature of ideology in Marxist and sociological thought.” Theoretical readings included works by Raymond Williams and Louis Althusser as well as Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Novels to be read started with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and moved on to Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855) and Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854). Only about twelve students enrolled in the seminar, and years later Davis readily volunteered that “it was definitely a Marxist course.” His purpose, Davis explained, was to make students realize that while any individual novelist “felt free to improvise and create,” nonetheless the surrounding “culture and its ideology would ultimately determine the novelist’s innovations.”

Davis devoted a chapter of his new book to analyzing Robinson Crusoe, and in teaching Defoe’s novel, he asked students what “overt ideological statements” they could detect in Robinson Crusoe. An erudite and well-spoken teacher, Davis eventually answered his own question by saying “it’s a philosophy of stasis … you reconcile yourself to the world as it is … in a giant way it is against change … it’s essentially an ideology that reconciles you to middle-class life.” That was one illustration of the overarching argument Davis offered in his book: in those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English novels, “the novel’s fictionality is a ploy to mask the genuine ideological, reportorial, commentative function of the novel.” At bottom “the inherent confusion in any factual fiction” would give rise to “the later nineteenth-century assumption that literature is a more penetrating depiction of life than life.” Four years later, in his second book, Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction, Davis singled out the “particularly wonderful” 1983 seminar on Ideology and the Novel in helping him advance and distill his analysis.³⁴

A second course Obama took that spring was International Monetary Theory and Policy, taught by Maurice Obstfeld, a young associate professor of economics who had received his Ph.D. at MIT four years earlier. Barack had already taken Intermediate Macroeconomics, and Obstfeld’s class focused on “the evolution of the world monetary system since 1945” and “monetary problems in international trade.” The third upper-level elective he chose was Sociology W3229y, State Socialist Societies, taught by Andrew G. Walder, a brand-new assistant professor in his first year of teaching who had earned his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 1981. Walder’s syllabus explained that the course would be “an analysis of state socialism as a system. The primary focus will be on the central features of these societies that distinguish them from others,” i.e., “the core features of state socialism,” and “we will spend most of the term comparing China and the Soviet Union.”

Walder recommended that students purchase seven books from which most of the required reading would be drawn, and recommended half a dozen others. The semester began with “The Origins of Russian and Chinese Communism,” and students read Alex Nove’s Stalinism and After, a survey of Soviet political history that focused on how deadly Soviet rule had proven for the regime’s many victims, including the early Bolsheviks. The second major topic was “The Communist Party as an Organization,” and over several weeks students read Elizabeth Pond’s From the Yaroslavsky Station: Russia Perceived, a journalistic work structured around the author’s rich and lengthy Trans-Siberian Railway journey.

Prior to Walder’s seven-to-ten-page typed, take-home midterm exam, the class covered “The Communist Party as a Status Group” and “Organized Surveillance and Repression.” Students read Hedrick Smith’s well-known The Russians as well as Jonathan Unger’s new Education Under Mao. Fox Butterfield’s China: Alive in the Bitter Sea, Miklos Haraszti’s A Worker in a Workers’ State, and Roy Medvedev’s Let History Judge were three other titles on the syllabus. The second half of the semester covered topics such as “Bureaucracy, Office-Holding, and Corruption” as well as “Social Stratification and Inequality.” Everyone read David Lane’s The End of Social Inequality? Class, Status and Power Under State Socialism, which argues that “inequality is a characteristic of state-socialist society as it is of the capitalist.”

The final assigned reading prior to Walder’s ten-to-twelve-page typed, take-home final exam was Milovan Djilas’s 1957 classic The New Class. Smuggled out of Yugoslavia and published in the U.S. while the author languished in a political prison, the book’s publication was “an immediate sensation,” according to the New York Times. Djilas in the late 1940s had served as Yugoslavian ruler Josip Broz Tito’s personal intermediary to Joseph Stalin, but he was expelled from Yugoslavia’s Communist Party after expressing heretical thoughts. His best-selling book gave voice to those insights. Once a Communist Party “has consolidated its power, party membership means that one belongs to a privileged class. And at the core of the party are the all-powerful exploiters and masters.” Experiencing that in Yugoslavia had transformed Djilas into a democratic socialist. “To the extent that one class, party, or leader stifles criticism completely, or holds absolute power, it or he inevitably falls into an unrealistic, egotistical, and pretentious judgment of reality.”

The New Class was a powerful way to end a semester, or indeed to complete one’s undergraduate education. As one student said with some understatement years later, “Walder was anything but a Marxist,” and Walder himself drily observed that what his syllabus presented “was not a flattering portrayal of political and social life in these now-thankfully defunct systems.” Only an extreme control freak would withhold his academic transcripts from public view simply so as to avoid any public discussion of what possible ideological influence either Walder’s impressive reading list or Len Davis’s teaching about the political uses of fiction might have had upon an intellectually hungry twenty-one-year-old mind.³⁵

Several weeks into that spring semester, Obama wrote another lengthy letter to Alex McNear in Eagle Rock. “I run every other day up at the small indoor track” at Columbia, a bit of news that Barack then spun into a lengthy descriptive portrait of the act of running. “After getting clean, I go to the Greek coffee shop … and have the best bran muffin in New York City—dark and fibrous … and coffee and a glass of water. I light a cigarette, make some talk with the Ethiopian cashier with big murky eyes and the sly smile and a small tattoo on her right hand in foreign code.”

Rereading this decades later, McNear wondered whether her letters to Barack “were just as pretentious … equally as convolutedly long and laborious.” Barack wrote, “I enjoyed your letter. I like the way you use words,” and then proceeded to a long disquisition on the concept of resistance against a “bankrupt” and “distorted system…. But people are busy keeping mouths fed and surroundings intact, and it is left to the obsessed ones like us to make the alternatives more tangible … so that resistance and destruction arrive in the form of creation.” He then paused to say “excuse the sermons,” but “I also have thought about us and conclude that I like what we have…. Perhaps what I’ve been after is a correspondence, a union, yes—but never exclusive, cocoon-like, ingrown. Rather something outwards, a point of extension.”

With graduation approaching, he had more mundane issues to discuss. “I’ve been sending out letters to development and social services agencies, as well as a few publications, so I should find out in the next few months what I have to work with next year. Classes are the average fare. A class called Novel and Ideology has an interesting reading list covering several of the things we spoke of” when Barack was in Los Angeles. “Of what I’ve read so far I recommend Marxism and Literature by Raymond Williams. A lot of it is simplification, but it generally has a pretty good aim at some Marxist applications of cultural study. Anyway, it might be a good point of departure for further haranguing between us.”

Obama then ends the letter, but the next day he added a long postscript that began by mentioning homeless panhandlers he often saw. “I play with words and work pretty patterns in my head, but the hole is dark and deep below, immeasurably deep. Know that it’s always there, rats nibbling at the foundations, and it can set me to tremble.” Then he thought to respond to something Alex had said about T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land and told her to read Eliot’s 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” as well as his Four Quartets. “Remember how I said there’s a certain brand of conservatism I respect more than bourgeois liberalism.” Barack finally concluded by saying, “I can’t mobilize my thoughts right now, so … I leave you to piece together this jumble.”³⁶

The label “jumble” could also apply to an article Barack submitted to Sundial, a weekly Columbia student newsmagazine. Just prior to its publication, he wrote to Phil Boerner in Arkansas and mentioned he had “been sending out some letters of inquiry to some social service organizations and will also be making up a resume (no comment) soon. I’ve also written an article for the Sundial purely for calculated reasons of beefing up the thing. No keeping your hands clean, eh.”

The article, titled “Breaking the War Mentality,” began by asserting that “The more sensitive among us struggle to extrapolate experiences of war from our everyday experience, discussing the latest mortality statistics from Guatemala, sensitizing ourselves to our parents’ wartime memories, or incorporating into our frameworks of reality as depicted by a Mailer or a Coppola. But the taste of war—the sounds and chill, the dead bodies, are remote and far removed. We know that wars have occurred, will occur, are occurring, but bringing such experiences down into our hearts, and taking continual, tangible steps to prevent war, becomes a difficult task.”

Following that introduction, Obama cited what he called “the growing threat of war” while profiling the first of two campus antinuclear groups, Arms Race Alternatives. “Generally, the narrow focus of the Freeze movement as well as academic discussions of first versus second strike capabilities, suit the military-industrial interests, as they continue adding to their billion dollar erector sets,” he opined. “One is forced to wonder whether disarmament or arms control issues, severed from economic and political issues, might be another instance of focusing on the symptoms of a problem instead of the disease itself.”

Obama also referenced a recently adopted federal law, set to take effect on July 1, that required every male recipient of federal student aid to demonstrate that he had registered for the draft. Some voices were calling for noncompliance, and Obama observed that “an estimated half-million non-registrants can definitely be a powerful signal” that could herald a “future mobilization against the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country.” He then described the second campus group, Students Against Militarism. Declaring that “perhaps the essential goodness of humanity is an arguable proposition,” Barack contended that “the most pervasive malady of the collegiate system specifically, and the American experience generally, is that elaborate patterns of knowledge and theory have been disembodied from individual choices and government policy.” He ended by commending both groups, saying that by trying to “enhance the possibility of a decent world, they may help deprive us of a spectacular experience—that of war.”

New Yorker editor David Remnick would later characterize Obama’s article as “muddled,” but when it returned to public view twenty-six years after it was first published, it generated astonishingly little discussion of what it said about the political views Obama had held on the cusp of his graduation from college. In his letter to Phil, Barack belittled how “school is just making the same motions, long stretches of numbness punctuated with the occasional insight.” Referencing their disappointing fall semester course, he complained that “Said still didn’t have the grades out for his class until a month into the term, and he cancelled his second term class, so we should feel justified in labelling him a flake.”

As he had in his earlier letter to Alex, Barack singled out Davis’s Ideology and the Novel as an “interesting” course, one “where I make cutting remarks to bourgeois English majors and can get away with it.” But overall, “nothing significant, Philip. Life rolls on, and I feel a growing competence and maturity.” After insulting what he called Phil’s “sojourn to Buttfuck, Arkansas,” Barack closed by saying, “Will get back to you when I know my location for next year.”³⁷

In Boerner’s absence, Barack had been spending time with old Oxy friend Andy Roth, who was working at the John Wiley publishing house. On Friday, April 1, he and Andy attended the first day of the inaugural Socialist Scholars Conference, held at the famous Cooper Union. Roth remembered them both attending an “interesting” talk by sociologist Bogdan Denitch, one of the most committed leaders of Democratic Socialists of America. But rather than attend the conference’s second day, Barack wrote another long letter to Alex McNear. “There are moments of uncertainty in everything that I believe; it’s that very uncertainty that keeps my head alive,” Barack explained. “In pursuit of such hopes, I attended a socialist scholars conference yesterday with Andy. A generally collegiate affair with a lot of vague discourse and bombast. Still, I was pleasantly surprised at the large turnout, and the flashes of insight and seriousness amongst the participants. As I told Andy, one gets the feeling that the stage is being set, that conduits of word and spirit are being layed across diverse minds—feminists, black nationalists, romantics. What remains to be had is a script, a crystallization of events. Until that time a pervasive mood of unreality hangs over such events, a mood that you can see the people fighting against in their eyes, their tone.”

A decade later Obama wrote passingly but imprecisely about “the socialist conferences I sometimes attended at Cooper Union.” His erroneous use of the plural gave future critics fodder to imagine that the “impact of these conferences on Obama was immense” and that listening to Denitch and similar speakers had “turned out to be Obama’s life-defining experience,” a notion that his letter the very next day to Alex utterly rebuts.³⁸

At the outset of that letter, Barack wrote of “churning out assignments” on “state communism” and “the international monetary system” before pausing to reflect on “the wilderness we call life” while smoking and drinking scotch. He reported that he had given his papers to “an elderly woman with a hair-lip and hoarse voice” for typing. This lady was Miss Diane Dee, who was a famous figure around Columbia for decades. A later New York Times profile said “her advertising flyers” are “indigenous to campus walls,” but that her “unkempt hair” and “tired face” made her seem “half-crazed.” One 1983 Columbia graduate believed “she was crazy,” and Gerald Feinberg’s son Jeremy recalled her as “a colorful character—someone I’d expect to appear in a conspiracy theory movie or a Michael Moore film, or both.”

Barack told Alex that Miss Dee was someone “upon whom my graduation depends,” and he was starting to panic because she “has missed two deadlines so far and now seems to have disappeared … no one has answered the phone at her apartment for four days.” He worried that “she’s a mad woman who lures unsuspecting undergraduate papers into her home and then burns them, or uses them to line the bottom of the goldfinch cage.” Following his description of the Socialist Scholars Conference, Barack told Alex that a “sense of unreality describes my position of late. I feel sunk in that long corridor between old values, actions, modes of thought, and those that I seek, that I work towards … this ambivalence is acted out in my non-decision as yet about next year” following graduation.³⁹

Three days after Obama wrote that letter, Columbia’s Coalition for a Free South Africa, in tandem with Students for a Democratic Campus, held a divestment rally outside Low Library, Columbia’s administration building. Student leaders Danny Armstrong and Barbara Ransby had been pressing the issue for months, and the scheduling of a university board of trustees meeting on the fifteenth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination offered an occasion for an afternoon protest. Barack convinced his largely apolitical apartment mate Sohale Siddiqi to attend the rally with him. But Siddiqi thought that compared to the black New Yorkers Siddiqi knew from the restaurant where he worked, “Barack didn’t seem like one of them.” Obama “was soft-spoken and gentle” and used “clean language.” Indeed, “I didn’t consider him American,” never mind African American. Siddiqi believed Barack “seemed like an international individual.”

Siddiqi recalls having witnessed an intensifying change in Barack over the preceding eight months. “He had kind of gone into a bit of a shell and wasn’t as talkative or outgoing as in his earlier days,” Sohale said. When Barack did speak, “he’d give me lectures” about “the plight of the poor” and downtrodden. “He seemed very troubled by it,” and “I would ask him why he was so serious.” Sohale’s interest in drinking, picking up women, and enjoying cocaine held little appeal for the newly abstemious Barack. “He took himself too seriously,” Sohale felt, and “I would find him ponderous and dull and lecturing.”

The April 4 rally drew a disappointing crowd of about a hundred, but afterward a core group of about fifteen student coalition members kept up a 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. weekday vigil to highlight Columbia’s refusal to divest. Barack was not among them, and few of Columbia and Barnard’s black undergraduates from 1981 to 1983 have any recollection of Barack Obama. Coalition leader Danny Armstrong said, “I recall seeing Obama on campus” but never interacted with him. Barbara Ransby, a graduate student who managed the coalition’s contact list and chaired most of its meetings, had “utterly no recollection of Obama.” Verna Bigger Myers, president of the Black Students’ Organization (BSO) in 1981–82, remembered that on a campus with so few minority undergraduates, “all the black people see the other black people” even if they did not really know them. Myers’s close friend Janis Hardiman, who a decade later would be Obama’s sister-in-law, remembered Barack as “sort of a phantom who just kind of walked into” BSO meetings but “did not have an active role” or participate in any the group’s activities.

Wayne Weddington, a junior in 1982–83, remembers seeing Obama at BSO meetings, and Darwin Malloy, a year ahead of Obama, recalled meeting him in the cafeteria in John Jay Hall but agrees that “most people would only remember him as a familiar face.” Malloy believed his friend Gerrard Bushell “probably had more interaction with him than anyone,” but Bushell said he “would see him periodically” and “remember him by face” but no more.

Obama would dramatically exaggerate his involvement in Columbia’s divestment activism on several occasions, telling one interviewer that “I was a leader on these issues both at Occidental and at Columbia.” Talking about his two years there to a second questioner, Obama asserted that “while I was on campus, I was very active in a number of student movements” and particularly “I was very active in the divestment movement on campus.” Several years later, on his first visit to South Africa, Obama declared that “I became deeply involved with the divestment movement” and “I remember meeting with a group of ANC leaders” or at least “ANC members one day in New York City.” There are no contemporary records or other participants’ memories that attest to any such encounter.

Columbia’s African American students were also acutely aware that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences included only four black professors. By far the most visible was the handsome, bow-tie-wearing Charles V. Hamilton, best known as the coauthor of Stokely Carmichael’s 1967 book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. Hamilton had arrived at Columbia in 1969, was named to a chaired professorship two years later, and in 1982 was the recipient of the university’s award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. “Everyone knew who Hamilton was,” one 1983 political science major recalled. In addition, as one younger colleague said, “Hamilton was always approachable. The hallway outside his office at the southwest end of the SIPA building was often filled with students.”

But, thirty years later, when asked for the first time whether one particular 1983 African American poli sci major had ever taken one of his courses or sought his counsel, Hamilton said, “I didn’t know him at all.” Black history professor Hollis R. Lynch also has no recollection of Obama, nor does the entire roster of senior political science faculty. Even within Obama’s particular area of concentration, international relations, neither Warner Schilling, Roger Hilsman, Zbigniew Brzezinski, nor John G. Ruggie remembers him. “Never laid eyes on him,” Ruggie said. Indeed, apart from young Michael Baron, “nobody really knew him,” one thirty-year veteran of the department reported. Obama would earn an A on the senior paper he wrote for Baron. It analyzed the decision-making during the arms-reductions negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union. But Baron would discard the paper years before the world beyond Morningside Heights would yearn to read it.⁴⁰

One week before the end of classes, Obama wrote another long letter to Alex McNear, who had taken leave from Oxy for spring term and was working in Pasadena. Citing “the method of negation” and “comparing what is to what might be,” Barack for a second time referred to something he had said in an earlier letter. Then he referenced their time in L.A. four months earlier: “a young black man” and “a young white woman” “that night in Wahid’s apartment in a timeless reddened room.” He also said his job prospect letters had not produced any firm leads, and that “I feel like forgetting the whole enterprise and taking you with me to Bali or Hawaii to live.” McNear years later recalled no actual invitation, and then Barack’s letter descended into vague declarations. “I am often cruel, and my mind will flash on the screen scenes of violence or petty malevolence or betrayal on my part.” McNear had no idea what he was referencing, and then Barack asked, “am I a blathering chump to you right now, or do you glean some sense from this mess?”

Barack continued on similarly, invoking “the necessary illusion that my struggles are the struggles of the first man, the river is the original river … What else? I enjoy my body, even when it frightens or disgusts me … I recall you saying that you still believe the mind is stronger than the body. A dangerous distinction, Alex, a vestige of western thought.” Rereading that passage years later, McNear felt it was “condescending.” Finally leaving his “river” for firmer ground, Barack wrote that it “looks like I will take a two month vacation to Indonesia and Hawaii next month. Will be stopping in L.A. either on the way over or back, if I come back. Will get in touch before I leave … Love, Barack.”

Photos from sometime around Columbia’s May 17 commencement show that Stan and Madelyn Dunham made the long trip from Honolulu to New York City to see their grandson, although Barack years later explained that “I actually didn’t go to my own graduation ceremony” since “my parents couldn’t come.” Soon after, Barack flew from New York to Los Angeles, where he stayed for several days with Alex McNear in her apartment. “We had this kind of picnic lunch on the floor of my living room,” Alex recalled. Even with Barack’s invocation of “black man” and “white woman” in his letter, blackness and racial identity “really was not something that he talked about a lot,” she remembered. “It barely ever came up.” Reflecting on that visit years later, “I felt he was less engaged” than he had been four months earlier. She thought there was “an enigmatic quality” to Obama, and “most of this relationship really revolved around these letters,” irrespective of their clarity.

Obama then flew to Singapore, where he spent five days with Hasan Chandoo and his family, a visit that coincided with Asad Jumabhoy’s appearance in the championship polo match of the Southeast Asian Games. In a letter to Alex, Barack wrote that Hasan “seemed fine, if more subdued than you remember him.” Barack found Singapore “an incongruous place … slick and modern and ordered, one vast supermarket surrounded by ocean and forest and the poverty of ages. Mostly peopled with businessmen from the states, Japan, Hong Kong as well as various family elites of Southeast Asia.” Hasan, Asad, and Barack went to a discotheque or two, but Barack wrote Alex that he remained largely silent when Hasan talked about the choices he was facing, “primarily to leave a space for our friendship should he move into the business world permanently.”

From Singapore, Barack flew to Indonesia and stayed at his mother’s comfortable Ford Foundation home in South Jakarta. Anthropologist friends of Ann’s often stayed there too, and among the guests that summer was a Rutgers University graduate student, Tim Jessup. Ann’s work at Ford had kept her busy throughout 1982 and into 1983. She had written a brief paper entitled “Civil Rights of Working Indonesian Women” and delivered a lecture entitled “The Effects of Industrialization on Women Workers in Indonesia” to the Indonesian Society of Development. In mid-May, she had spent four days in Kenya, of all places, less than six months after her first husband’s death, but Ann never spoke about this trip to friends.

When she wrote a long priorities analysis for Ford’s continued work in Indonesia, Ann recommended that they “focus on a relatively new program area, women and employment,” and particularly “the role of poor women as workers and income-earners.” The ideal grantee would be “a non-governmental social action group founded by women for women,” but she rued “the general weakness and lack of leadership within the women’s movement in Indonesia.” As Alice Dewey and a colleague wrote years later about Ann, “Java”—Indonesia’s principal island—“was as much her home”—if not far more—“as Honolulu.”

In his letter to Alex, Barack wrote that “my mother and sister are doing well,” but with Ann “the struggling seems out of her, and the colonial residue of her life style—the servants, the shopping at the American supermarket, the office politics of the international agencies—throw up continual contradictions to the professed aims of her work.” Barack was writing not from Jakarta but “from a screened porch somewhere on the northwest tip of Java.” He confessed that “I can’t speak the language” and that Indonesians treated him “with a mixture of puzzlement, deference and scorn because I’m American, my money and my plane ticket back to the U.S. overriding my blackness,” as Obama was now old enough to perceive how many Indonesians loathed his skin color. But he closed by saying, “I feel good, engaged, the mystery of reality, the reality of mystery filling me up.”

From that same porch, sitting “in my sarong, sipping strong coffee and drawing on a clove cigarette, watching the heavy dusk close over the paddy terraces of Java,” Obama also wrote a postcard to Phil Boerner. “Very kick back, so far away from the madness. I’m halfway through my vacation, but still feel the tug of that tense existence…. Right now, my plans are uncertain; most probably I will go back” to New York City “after a month or two in Hawaii.” In early July, he and apparently also his almost thirteen-year-old sister Maya flew from Jakarta to Honolulu. Only then did he actually mail his letter to Alex, writing on the back of the envelope that “with the postal system in Indonesia we’d be dead and gone before it arrived.”⁴¹

Barack did not write to Alex again until September 1, and by then, his tone was dramatically cooler, almost palpably angry. Reacting apparently to something Alex had written to him, Barack wrote that “you are correct when you say that initially you were to me nothing more than a lovely wraith I had shaped to fit my needs, and I fought against this and you taught me yourself and I feel I showed progress eagerly, like a repentant student coming home with high marks. All this I have admitted to you in my letters—go back and reread some.” Indeed rereading them three decades later, McNear reacted immediately to Obama’s self-characterization: “student? … They all seem more like the professor,” and that he was writing lectures. She said they are “not romance letters at all.”

Then Barack’s tone turned almost hostile, or ugly. “When I see you, the palpitations of the heart don’t boil to the surface,” he told Alex. “I care for you as yourself, nothing less but also nothing more. Does this anger you?” Again, “Does this anger you? When I sit down to write I no longer feel the need to bleed for brilliance on the page.” Years later, McNear does not know why Obama’s attitude had changed so starkly during these two summer months in Honolulu. “Here was someone who I felt that I cared a lot about. I loved him, I enjoyed seeing him,” but his interest in her had somehow waned. “I trust the strength of our relationship enough that I can show myself with rollers in my hair,” Barack wrote before again asking, “Does this anger you, Alex? It shouldn’t. Friends feel weary sometimes. When I said that we will ever want what we can’t have, I missed nothing.” He referenced “the bitterness that plagues my grandparents,” a comment McNear later said contradicted everything else she recalled him saying about them.

“I seek something in myself using the clues of this wind, that boy, my mother, your pain, perhaps the world,” Barack wrote, returning to his prior form. “Yes, this requires a monumental arrogance, and of late I feel it whittling away. If my arrogance (which has always been confessed—run back the tapes) angers you, then my last letter, our last meeting, should douse it. It is precisely the arrogance, the sense of destiny, that has been absent. I no longer feel compelled to try to shackle you in my abstruse dreams.” Addressing something Alex apparently had written, “When you doubt my honesty, you give me more credit in the past than I deserve. As though I calculated to deceive you in some way, represented myself as something I didn’t believe I was. You judge me badly; I think I have been as upfront about my doubts and demons as I knew how to be.”

Barack’s defensiveness was more than evident. “And when you question my sincerity (a word much abused, like democracy and justice) … you haven’t been listening very well when I spoke of myself.” He closed the letter by saying, “my plans are still uncertain right now” and that he had been “typing up letters to perspective [sic] employers for the last two hours with maniacal tidiness.” But “unless a job of some interest pops up soon, I’ll be flying back to New York at the end of this month” and will stop in Los Angeles. Almost three months would pass before Barack wrote her again.

Sometime in the first half of October, Obama left Honolulu for New York. If he stopped in Los Angeles, he did not contact Alex. Arriving in New York, he stayed for one week with Wahid Hamid, who now had a job with Siemens, in a second-floor apartment in suburban Long Island. He then returned to the familiar confines of 339 East 94th Street #6A, where he crashed on the living room couch of Sohale and his new roommate. “I felt a slight longing to move back into the known quantity,” Barack wrote Alex a month later, but “the howling and drinking and haze of my short stay smothered any productive impulses I may have had, so that moving to a new situation came easily.”

Obama next found a room in a three-bedroom apartment at 622 West 114th Street #43. He told Alex that out on Long Island he had spent his days “in seclusion sorting through various letters and timetables, spying on the damp, A-frame life of suburbia, wandering along the shoulders of roads” that lacked sidewalks. Wahid was “absorbed with his work” but retains “his integrity and curiosity for the strangeness of life, and I left his apartment certain that our friendship can straddle the divide of our different choices.” His time at Sohale’s had presented “cash flow problems” that had hindered getting his “job hunt in motion” as one week he was unable to pay for postage to mail out résumés, and “the next I have to bounce a check to rent a typewriter.” To remedy that shortcoming,

I took a one week stint supervising a project to transfer the files of the Manhattan Fire Department into a new facility, a fascinating experience affording me a taste of the grinding toil of low-rung white collar jobs, as well as the ambivalent relationships established between employers, employees, and personnel agencies with their shifting mix of loyalty, manipulation, abuses of power, rebellion and concession. The workers, an odd assortment of lower income kids, elderly women and unemployed liberal arts majors, struck me as some of the best people I’ve met; as the 12 hour shifts (uh-huh) wore on I watched much subtle straightforward contact being made and greater political perception than I had expected (although rarely framed in political terms). I felt a greater affinity to the blacks and Latinos there (who predictably comprised about three-fourths of the workforce there) than I had felt in a long time, and it strengthened me in some important way. My role as supervisor clouded the relationship between myself and them, however, since I felt that the company was using it as leverage to extract cooperation from the people for sometimes unreasonable demands. I tapped a feeling of community that comes in people acting in concert on a certain process; yet I felt frustrated that the project was imposed from above, structured according to bids and contracts and the bookkeeper, without lasting benefit beyond the pint-sized paychecks for the workers involved.

At 622 West 114th, “I occupy a room in the apartment of a woman in her late twenties,” Dawn Reilly, who was “a dance instructor and taxi cab driver. The arrangement is fine for now. The place is large and warm, we see little of each other and when we do we maintain a pretty good patter. I suspect I may move if and when the opportunity for a lease arises, though, simply because the rent is a bit steep, and I feel obliged to keep the kitchen clean and air out the living room when I smoke.” Since salaries in “community organizations are too low to survive on right now … I hope to work in some more conventional capacity for a year, allowing me to store up enough nuts to pursue those interests the next.”

He closed by remarking that “I feel lonely yet surefooted, and hope all goes well for you … Get in touch when you get a chance, or impulse. Love, Barack.” A month earlier, Alex had begun seeing a new young man, and she believes she did not reply. Six months would pass before she next contacted Obama.⁴²

Within days of mailing that letter, Barack saw a posting at the career office of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs for a job at Business International Corporation, an international finance information and research firm founded in 1956 that published numerous analytical and data service periodicals from its offices on the seventh floor of One Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, on the west side of Second Avenue between 47th and 48th Streets in midtown Manhattan. The job had been posted by BI’s Cathy Lazere, a 1974 graduate of Yale who had earned an M.B.A. at New York University before joining BI’s Global Finance Division eight months earlier, in February 1983. Lazere was responsible for a bimonthly newsletter entitled Financing Foreign Operations—Interest Rate & Foreign Exchange Rate Updater, a four- or five-page publication that cost $900 to subscribe to annually but helped BI pull in a tidy profit as one of a bundle of services that major corporations purchased through individual client programs. In November Lazere was being promoted by division vice president Lou Celi to oversee both FFO and its sister reference publication, Investing, Licensing & Trading (ILT), which was edited by Beth Noymer, a 1983 graduate of Franklin & Marshall College who had joined BI just four months earlier.

Lazere had a roommate at Yale who was from Hawaii and had graduated from Punahou, so when a résumé arrived listing that as well as Columbia, Lazere invited him for an interview. Obama impressed her as “articulate and bright,” and knowing he had attended Punahou, “I assumed he came from a privileged background.” Cathy introduced Barack to Beth Noymer and telephoned Lou Celi to get his approval before offering Barack the position. Obama’s salary would be about $18,500—a respectable sum for a newly minted B.A. in 1983—and he would be expected to write for the finance unit’s flagship newsletter, Business International Money Report (BIMR), as well as to do the research and copyediting necessary to churn out each issue of FFO. A few years later Barack would tell a questioner that he took the job at BI because “I wanted to know how money worked.”

More than three dozen correspondents all around the world submitted the data and material that Lou Celi’s unit sliced and diced to produce their multiple publications. FFO’s content, as its title made clear, was both arcane and impenetrable. Celi’s top deputy and sidekick, Barry Rutizer, had started out at BI doing FFO, and he said, “I couldn’t even read it when I was editing it.” Cathy Lazere agreed. “I was certainly bored when I was editing that stuff.” At the time of Obama’s arrival, issues of FFO consisted of lengthy country-by-country lists of exchange rates accompanied by brief comments and a summary table of “Foreign Exchange Rates of Major Currencies.” Barack had his own office, but the composition and production of BI’s publications took place on a central word processing system that relied upon Wang terminals scattered around the office rather than individually assigned. As a result “we sort of duked it out over Wang time,” Beth Noymer said, with almost everyone regularly moving around the roughly sixty-person office. “The Wangs were a big part of our lives,” Celi’s assistant Lisa Shachtman Hennessey recalled, and “every ten minutes” someone seemed to call out from the bullpen area that “the Wangs are down.” Smoking was more than allowed—“there were ashtrays everywhere,” Lisa remembered—and Obama regularly smoked Marlboros while editing manuscript copy by hand. “There was almost no way to get all your work done between nine and five,” Beth explained, especially on days when the final content had to be sent down to the print shop that BI veteran Peggy Mendelow oversaw in the building’s basement.

Much of BI’s information gathering required telephoning various midlevel officials at corporations and banks. When calls were returned, BI’s switchboard operator announced the call over an office-wide paging system if someone was not at their desk. Brenda Vinson, an African American woman in her late thirties, worked in the library and often covered the switchboard. Obama was the first black college graduate to work at BI, and his unfamiliar first name was a challenge to pronounce. Vinson remembers Barack as “very personable” toward her and her cousin, who were BI’s only other black employees; a Puerto Rican father and son staffed BI’s mailroom. There was a good bit of socializing among the young professionals who worked at BI. A nearby Irish pub was one regular destination, and Beth Noymer later described BI’s office culture as “a hotbed of young singles.”⁴³

Obama did not socialize with his BI workmates, but sometime prior to New Year’s Eve, his friend Andy Roth invited him to a party that Andy’s brother Jon was hosting in their sixth-floor apartment at 240 East 13th Street. Jon worked at Chanticleer Press, a publisher that helped produce National Audubon Society guides, and other invitees included Genevieve Cook, a twenty-five-year-old Swarthmore College graduate who had worked at Chanticleer before beginning coursework toward a master’s degree in early childhood education at Bank Street College of Education. She was born in 1958 to parents who were Australian: Helen Ibbitson, the daughter of a Melbourne banker, and Michael J. Cook, a conservative diplomat who would go on to head up Australia’s top intelligence agency before serving for four years as ambassador to the United States. Her parents had divorced when Genevieve was ten years old, and Helen then married Philip C. Jessup Jr., an American lawyer and executive whose International Nickel Company post had him and Helen living in Jakarta during the 1970s. Genevieve attended multiple boarding schools in the U.S. before graduating from the Emma Willard School near Albany, New York. While she was at Swarthmore, her mother and stepfather Phil had moved from Jakarta to New York, and by late 1983 Genevieve was temporarily living in their spacious apartment on Park Avenue just below 90th Street after breaking up with a Swarthmore boyfriend with whom she had lived in Manhattan’s East Village while student teaching that year at the Brooklyn Friends School.

Her four years at Swarthmore were the first time Genevieve attended the same school for more than two years, and it was her first time in one country for more than three straight. “At Swarthmore, I was very drawn to … the drug oriented counterculture” and “its ritualized pot smoking,” she wrote in her impressive 1981 senior anthropology thesis, “Dancing in Doorways.” For the thesis, she interviewed fifteen fellow students who were also the children of expatriates, “people who spent their lives from the time they were born moving around from country to country, who are not members of any one culture, who come from nowhere in particular, and who do not really belong anywhere. You will always know them when you meet them.”

At the Roth brothers’ party, Genevieve did know one when she met one. She and Obama struck up a conversation that lasted several hours after they discovered their mutual ties to Indonesia and expatriate similarities. “I remember being very engaged, and just talking nonstop,” she later wrote. “We both had this feeling of how bizarre and exciting it was that we’d both grown up in Indonesia, and we felt we very much had a worldview in common.” Barack was in no way aggressive. “If anything, he struck me as diffident … although also at ease with himself” and “clearly interested in pursuing this conversation with me.” She found him “just really interesting, intellectually,” and she later reflected that “the thing that connected us is that we both came from nowhere—we really didn’t belong.” Before the night was out, he handed her a small scrap of paper—“Barack Obama 866-8172 622 W. 114th #43”—that she still retains thirty years later. After a phone call the next week, she agreed to meet him at his apartment for dinner, where Barack cooked for the two of them. “Then we went and talked in his bedroom. And then I spent the night. It all felt very inevitable,” she wrote in a private memoir.

That evening stood in sharp contrast to Genevieve’s rejection of a dinner host seven months earlier. That spring she had taken a course at Bank Street that involved having the students share recipes with their classmates. Three decades later Genevieve still had the “Floating Island Pudding” she shared as well as “Zayd’s Catsup,” a contribution from a thirty-seven-year-old classmate. At the end of the semester, that classmate invited her to dinner at his apartment at 520 West 123rd Street #5W. Five-year-old Zayd and his two-year-old brother Malik were asleep, as was Chesa, another almost two-year-old member of the household, whose mother and father were both in prison.

Genevieve was initially surprised that the only food her host had for dinner was grapes, but it quickly became clear what he wanted for dessert. He explained that he was in an open relationship; he and his partner had been leading figures a decade earlier in a group whose slogans included “Smash Monogamy!” His partner was not coming home that night; indeed she was residing involuntarily at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan, where she would remain for another six months. “He gave getting me into bed quite a good go,” Genevieve recalled, but with a thirteen-year age difference between them, he “seemed awfully old to me!” Her host “was quite miffed that I was not impressed by his ‘status’ ” as a notorious former radical, albeit one whose FBI “Wanted” poster made him appear to have just fallen out of bed rather than striving to get into one. He “backed off when I wasn’t interested,” and Genevieve’s rebuff may have had a greater impact than she realized.

Four months later a federal judge gave her host’s partner a weekend furlough so the two former anti-monogamy advocates could marry, and two months after that, the judge allowed her to return to 520 West 123rd Street on a Christmas furlough. Four days after New Year’s, the judge granted a motion to vacate the contempt citation that had kept Bernardine Dohrn jailed since May 19, and she was free to remain with her two sons and now husband, Bill Ayers. As Genevieve would pluperfectly capture the essence of the story, sometimes indeed the “truth is so much stranger than fiction!”⁴⁴

On Monday, January 9, Genevieve spent a second night with Barack on 114th Street, and the next day wrote in her journal, “I have not experienced the kind of intellectual stimulation Barack offers me since I left college.” She expressed similar feelings in a letter she wrote to him but did not mail, a letter she still had three decades later. “You are the first person I’ve met since being in college who has in some way engaged me in a process of self-intellectual questioning. It is a shock to recognize that my engagement with Bank St., education, friends I’ve made through Bank St. & teaching & the kind of process I’ve touted, of teaching forcing you to be self-evaluative, has all been ‘professional.’ ”

Over the next four weeks, Genevieve continued to record in her journal her reactions to Barack. Intercourse was pleasant, and in bed “he neither came off as experienced or inexperienced,” she later recalled. “Sexually he really wasn’t very imaginative, but he was comfortable. He was no kind of shrinking ‘Can’t handle it. This is invasive’ or ‘I’m timid’ in any way; he was quite earthy.” In one late January entry, she wondered “how is he so old already, at the age of 22?” and she wrote two poems for Barack, one teasing him by way of implicit comparison to the mythical Orion. The second, alphabetical in form, progressed from “B. That’s for you” to “F’s for all the fucking that we do” to “L I love you … O is too.”

Obama spoke excitedly about Genevieve during one phone conversation with Hasan Chandoo in London, yet in a “rather mumbled” one with his mother Ann in Jakarta he made no mention of Genevieve but talked about BI. “Barry,” as Ann called him in a letter to Alice Dewey, “is working in New York this year, saving his pennies so he can travel next year … he works for a consulting organization that writes reports on request about social, political and economic conditions in third world countries. He calls it ‘working for the enemy’ because some of the reports are written for commercial firms that want to invest in those countries. He seems to be learning a lot about the realities of international finance and politics, however, and I think that information will stand him in good stead in the future.”

With Genevieve, Barack spoke of BI “only to be disparaging” and only “very rarely” did he speak about his actual five-days-a-week work tasks. “His entire attitude was bearing a necessary burden” and one he was deeply uncomfortable with. “Even just putting on the clothes to go to work in that environment was a political divide—it divided him from how he really saw himself,” she later explained. “He definitely wore it like a penance.” On weekday evenings, Barack’s posture was “They’re the enemy, and I’ve just spent all day at work” but also that “I’m above being emotionally affected by my job.”

His coworkers at BI quickly picked up on Barack’s emotional distance. Cathy Lazere, his immediate supervisor, noted his “aloofness.” “He came across as someone not interested in other people,” she said. Beth Noymer, his closest colleague, said he was “quiet and kind of kept to himself.” To vice president Lou Celi, Barack came across as “shy and withdrawn” and “always seemed aloof.” Lou’s deputy Barry Rutizer thought Obama “was kind of self-involved” and “somewhat withdrawn.” Lou’s assistant Lisa Shachtman remembered Barack as someone who was “sitting back and observing” others rather than interacting with them. BIMR editor Dan Armstrong recalled that Obama “really just kind of kept to himself” and “never joined us” when everyone went out after work. Dan thought “diffident” was the perfect adjective, and in Peggy Mendelow’s memories Obama “had an obvious ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on him.” Years later one colleague would describe Barack as “the whitest black guy I’ve ever met.”⁴⁵

Barack’s life with Genevieve on 114th Street, where she came on Thursdays after a class at Bank Street as well as on weekends, was a separate world from his workday week. In mid-February, Genevieve recorded that Barack the night before had “talked of drawing a circle around the tender in him—protecting the ability to feel innocence and spring born—I think he also fights against showing it to others, to me.” The next day, Presidents’ Day, she recorded her worries about her “unwillingness to believe that he really does like the time spent with me, that he likes me.” Alluding to BI, it “makes me cross that he’s sitting there in that office while all the others take the day off—too soon to scorn the blatant taking advantage of the least powerful on the totem pole—but I hope he will soon find a way to make it clear he sees limits to what can be thrust on him—the loose ends, the overtime.” Her thoughts returned to their weekend together. “It means so much more than lust, after all, all this fucking we do.” Four days later, after Thursday night together, she wrote of “making love with Barack, so warm and flowing and soft but deep—relaxed and loving—opening up more.”

But Genevieve had her own self-doubts. “It’s all too interior, always in his bedroom without clothes on [or] reading papers in the living room. I’m willing to sit and wait too much.” Barack did go out to Long Island one weekend to see Wahid, who had now married his longtime girlfriend Ferial “Filly” Adamjee, yet with Genevieve their time together was interior indeed. She worried “that what men reach for and stay with is the availability to them of a warm time in bed, while they put up with or dismiss the ‘noise’ women ‘indulge’ themselves in.” While “the sexual warmth is definitely there … the rest of it has sharp edges, and I’m finding it all unsettling and finding myself wanting to withdraw from it all. I have to admit that I am feeling anger at him for some reason, multi-stranded reasons. His warmth can be deceptive, tho he speaks sweet words and can be open and trusting, there is also that coolness … Both of us wary … and that is tiring.”

The next weekend found a return to warmth, with Genevieve pleased by Barack’s compliments, “his saying ‘You’re sweet to me,’ that I’m kind, as if he’s not accustomed to that, has not had much of that.” One evening at dinner, Genevieve recorded, she had an image “of being with Barack, 20 years hence, as he falters through politics and the external/internal struggle lived out.” One week later, with Genevieve experiencing a bout of tearful self-pity, “Barack said he used to cry a lot when he was 15—feeling sorry for himself.” Fifteen would have been his tenth-grade year at Punahou, when Barack was closest to Keith Kakugawa, but Genevieve was happy that he “won’t let important things go unspoken. ‘Speak to me.’ ”

Yet more often Genevieve felt a self-distancing on Barack’s part, “a sense of you biding your time and drawing others’ cards out of their hands for careful inspection—without giving too much of your own away—played with a good poker face. And as you say, it’s not a question of intent on your part—or deliberate withholding—you feel accessible, and you are, in disarming ways. But I feel that you carefully filter everything in your mind and heart … there’s something also there of smoothed veneer, of guardedness … I’m still left with this feeling of … a bit of a wall—the veil.”

In early March, Genevieve moved from her parents’ Park Avenue apartment to a top-floor, two-bedroom apartment in a Park Slope brownstone at 640 2nd Street that was owned by relatives of a Brooklyn Friends School secretary. One mid-March morning, she telephoned West 114th Street and for a moment mistook the voice of the third roommate, Michael Isbell, for Barack. Michael’s firm “I’m good” in response to Genevieve’s “How are you?” made her realize “that Barack often doesn’t feel firmly good.”

Barack and Genevieve saw even less of Michael than they did of Dawn Reilly, whom they mostly interacted with on Sunday mornings. Michael worked in advertising, had a full-time girlfriend, and remembered Barack as a quiet, studious smoker. Michael did not get along with Dawn as well as Barack did, and Genevieve believed Dawn “had this kind of motherly attitude towards” Barack, even though she was just five years older. Genevieve remembers Dawn as “a vivacious character … very fond of Barack” and “she thought we were a very cute couple. She saw enough of us that she was very aware when things were good” and also when “things got a little bit strained.” Genevieve recalled that in mid-March, Dawn told her, “ ‘I feel more tension between you two’ ” and said she believed Genevieve was good for Barack, whom she thought was confused about what he wanted. To herself that day Genevieve wrote, “I’m a little worried about Barack. He seems young and defenseless these days.”⁴⁶

Barack intrigued Genevieve greatly, but there is “so much going on beneath the surface, out of reach. Guarded, controlled,” she wrote to herself. Genevieve took the initiative to buy them tickets to a one-woman performance of three short plays by Samuel Beckett at his namesake theater on West 42nd Street. In the last of them, Rockaby, actress Billie Whitelaw onstage uttered just one word, “more.” In between her four increasingly fearful incantations of that one syllable, the audience heard “the tortured final thrashings of a consciousness, as recorded by the actress on tape.” At its close, the audience experienced “relief” as “death becomes … a happy ending,” New York Times critic Frank Rich wrote, saying it was “riveting theater … that no theatergoer will soon forget.” In her journal, Genevieve wrote that “Billie Whitelaw was superb.”

At the end of March, Hasan Chandoo arrived in New York to prepare for his move from London to Brooklyn in early summer. The 1984 Democratic presidential race was in full swing, and on Wednesday evening, March 28, top contenders Walter Mondale and Gary Hart were joined by third-place contestant Jesse Jackson for an intense televised debate from Columbia’s Low Library, moderated by CBS’s Dan Rather. By that time Obama was actively interested in Jackson’s campaign, and the next Saturday, March 31, he persuaded Hasan, Beenu Mahmood, now in his first year at Columbia Law School, and even Sohale, to join him in attending a Jackson campaign rally on 125th Street in central Harlem. Three days later, Jackson finished a strong third in the New York primary with over 25 percent of the vote, including presumably Barack’s. Both Hasan and Beenu also remember that spring and summer that Barack often carried with him a well-worn copy of Ralph Ellison’s famous 1952 novel Invisible Man, which he was reading and rereading. Beenu believed that “Invisible Man became a prism for his self-reflection,” and in retrospect Beenu thought that over time “Ellison assisted Barack in reaching a fork in his life.”

But that fork was more than a year away. Later that night, Barack and Genevieve joined Hasan and Sohale at the latter’s East 94th Street apartment, where Barack had lived a year earlier. “Long time friends, easy with each other but also challenging,” Genevieve wrote in her journal the next day. Everyone “did several lines of cocaine, which added an edge to it all.” For Barack, the almost three years that had passed since he lived with Hasan in South Pasadena in 1980–81 had been almost entirely drug-free, certainly when compared to that year at Oxy and indeed the three previous as well. His twelve months living with Sohale in 1982–83 had seen plenty of “partying” by Siddiqi, but only with Hasan’s incipient move to New York would Barack feel compelled, on account of their friendship, to reengage in something that without Hasan he felt no need to seek out. He was seriously involved with a woman who smoked pot daily, but except when they were at parties with Hasan, Sohale, and Imad, Barack and Genevieve did not partake of such pursuits.⁴⁷

Before the end of that weekend, Barack told Genevieve that “I really care very much about you” and that “No matter how things turn out between us, I always will.” She wrote in her journal that he talked to her as well about his “tendency to be always the observer, how to effect change, wanting to get past his antipathy to working at BI.” A week later “Barack talked of his adolescent image of the perfect, ideal woman—searching for her at the expense of hooking up with available girls.” Presently she imagined him “opting for dirtying his hands in the contradictions and overwhelming complexities this city offers” and resolved that “I must enjoy Barack while I can.” Recounting a scene Barack had described to her, “The image of Barack shaking his grandpa by the shoulders and asking ‘Why are you so damn unhappy?’ really struck me.”

In early April, Barack received a call from Alex McNear, who was still living in Eagle Rock, and soon after, he sent her a long letter, one that portrayed his role at BI somewhat differently from how his coworkers and Genevieve did. “I’ve emerged as one of the ‘promising young men’ of Business International, with everyone slapping my back and praising my work. There is the possibility that they offer the job of Managing Editor for one of the publications, which would involve a hefty raise, but an extended stay,” Barack asserted. “The style and substance of what I write” was such that “I can churn out the crap without much effort” yet “the finished product confronts me as an alien being, not threatening, but a part of another system, another sensibility.”

Barack’s description of some of his interactions with colleagues beggared belief. “Without effort, I find I can perform with flawless grace, patching up their insecurities, smoothing over ruffles among the co-workers.” Yet he described his own attitude with considerable accuracy. “All of them, including my superiors, sense some sort of tethered fury, or something set aside, below the calm surface … so that I remain somewhat alien to them.” Indeed “the implacable manner is not an act, nor is the anger underneath,” but Barack acknowledged that his colleagues “are good people, warm and intelligent.” He told Alex, “I’ve cultivated strong bonds with the black women and their children in the company, who work as librarians, receptionists,” and reported that the only other black men “one sees are teenage messengers.”

Barack admitted “the resistance I wage does wear me down—because of the position, the best I can hope for is a draw, since I have no vehicle or forum to try to change things. For this reason, I can’t stay very much longer than a year. Thankfully, I don’t yet feel like the job has dulled my senses or done irreparable damage to my values, although it has stalled their growth.” But, “like other malcontents, I have my other life as opposed to my working life … weeknights I spend a few hours writing, a few hours eating, and take occasional walks along the river. I recently finished the first fiction piece I’ve attempted in over a year, and I got some good feelings doing it, even though it’s not top quality. I still have a certain ambivalence towards writing/art as a vocation.” As for “my political reading/spectating—my ideas aren’t as crystalized as they were while in school, but they have an immediacy and weight that may be more useful if and when I’m less observer and more participant. On weekends I see Sohale, Wahid et al. fairly frequently and let myself slip back into old comfortable activities like bullshitting and watching basketball,” though to Alex, Barack made no mention of his reintroduction to cocaine. He confessed that “I’ve also become quite close to an Australian woman who teaches in a Brooklyn grade school. She doesn’t put up with a lot of my guff, and has a good sense of humor without any cynicism, which is a good tonic for my occasional attitude problems.” Obama ended the letter by saying “look forward to seeing you in the summer if you choose to come back East. Love, Barack.”⁴⁸

The divergence between how Obama described his interactions with his BI colleagues and how they viewed him was great indeed. Eugene Chang, one of the two editors of the finance unit’s lead newsletter, Business International Money Report, made an effort to get to know Obama, inviting him to lunch at a Korean restaurant and mentioning how he jogged. Barack’s responses were chilly and abrupt: “I don’t jog, I run.” Susan Arterian, a decade older than Obama, thought “there was a certain hauteur about him and a somewhat cultivated aura of mystery.” To her, “BI was a friendly place” with lots of “wonderfully quirky characters,” and Eugene’s BIMR coeditor, Dan Armstrong, saw Barack as “reserved and distant towards all of his coworkers,” notwithstanding how BI was “not a corporate place in any way.”

Bill Millar, a 1983 graduate of CUNY’s Baruch College, found Obama “arrogant and condescending,” someone who “treated me like something less than an equal” even though Millar was a higher-ranking assistant editor. Millar once argued with Barack about corporations that did business in South Africa, and another colleague, Tom Ehrbar, recalled Barack quarreling about the CIA with another coworker who did not remember the exchange. As Peggy Mendelow described Barack, he “kept very much to himself” and “didn’t seem to want to be there.”⁴⁹

Barack was far more interested in old friends than in making new ones. Genevieve described “Barack’s face opening up in a broad grin after talking with Bobby [Titcomb] on the phone in Honolulu.” She also described their sexual interactions positively: “really communicating instead of merely getting off.” At the end of April, Genevieve wrote, “I’m falling in love with Barack…. Spent Sunday with Barack in the park.” They saw a boy in a sandbox “with his Superman cape on, and I launched into some kind of spiel about kids and imagination and fantasy, and he launched into this thing about superheroes and was revealing about some relationship he had to superheroes, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s fascinating, I’ve never heard him come out with that before,’ and I pounced on it and wanted to really like push an exploration of it” but Barack gently rebuffed her.

At the end of April, old Oxy friend Sim Heninger came through New York and stayed with Phil Boerner, who was just about to finish his degree at Columbia. One evening, Sim, Phil, and Phil’s girlfriend Karen had dinner with Barack and Genevieve. Sim in particular was struck by the seriousness of their romantic attachment. Early in May, however, Genevieve detected a “deliberate distancing” on Barack’s part and wrote, “I think I am probably being rejected more for what I represent in Barack’s mind than for who I am.” She imagined that Barack would be more comfortable with a black woman, and she wrote in her journal, “I think I’ve known all along that he plots this into his life as something temporary—not open-ended as he had said.” She wondered if they were just “using each other,” yet understanding what was going on was difficult, because “he is so wary, wary. Has visions of his life, but in a hiatus as to their implementation—wants to fly, and hasn’t yet started to take off.”

Within a week their relationship had righted itself, although Genevieve was feeling “depressed about teaching” as the school year was ending. “It so delights me that from time to time, Barack will talk about the more private, inner aspects of what he sees and feels of our relationship.” In late May, Barack told her one night “of having pushed his mother away over the past 2 years in an effort to extract himself from the role of supporting man in her life—she feels rejected and has withdrawn somewhat.” By then he knew his mother and sister were moving back to Honolulu in mid-August. Ann had learned in February that her Ford Foundation post would expire in six months. She had resolved to make the best of that by returning to her long unfinished Ph.D. at the University of Hawaii, a move that would allow soon-to-be fourteen-year-old Maya to begin ninth grade at Punahou. Ann wrote the chairman of UH’s Anthropology Department to say that “the major reason” for her long absence from the program had been “the need to work to put my son through college,” and with his graduation, “I’m now free to complete my own studies.”⁵⁰

Once classes ended at Brooklyn Friends School, Genevieve left New York to spend a week at her stepfather’s family’s estate in Norfolk, Connecticut. She dreaded the next school year, when she would be teaching first grade at PS 133 in Park Slope. “I’m feeling really bad about myself in general,” she wrote in her journal, and by phone Barack sought to reassure her. By early June, Hasan Chandoo had an apartment at the Eagle Warehouse building on Old Fulton Street underneath the Brooklyn Bridge, and both there and at Sohale’s apartment on East 94th Street, Barack and Genevieve joined some assortment of the Pakistani friends almost every weekend. If Wahid came into the city, or if Beenu and his girlfriend Chinan were present, drinks and dinner would be the centerpiece of an evening. But with Hasan, Sohale, and Imad, pot and cocaine were usually involved, though Barack’s ambivalence about those activities was crystal clear to Genevieve and obvious to Hasan too.

Sometimes Barack would beg off, but most times he asked Genevieve to come along—“We’ll go together,” he would say—knowing that one or both of them would try to leave before the evening got too late or the activities got too “out of control and manic,” as Genevieve described it. For all her pot smoking, Genevieve did not care for cocaine, yet Barack “didn’t like it when I said ‘Well I’m going to leave now’ or ‘I don’t feel like coming’ ” because “that made it harder for him to ignore the fact that he didn’t really want to go either, that he would have rather stayed home and read.”

But Barack’s bond with Hasan was stronger than his self-discipline, and Genevieve thought “it seemed important to Barack that I bolster him in his desire to maintain allegiance to the guys.” To her, Barack’s indulgence “was definitely out of loyalty and an inability to kind of give the flick to people who had been so incredibly loyal and embracing” of “this lost boy, who had no group, who had no community, and they knew him from before,” from Oxy, “and embraced him warmly.” Hasan was “absolutely” the driving force, not Sohale or Imad, and while that trio was “doing lots of cocaine,” Barack “did not do as much as they did.” Indeed, Barack did “a lot less of everything, like for every five lines that somebody did, he would have done half, and for every scotch that Hasan poured, he would have had one out of every ten compared to what Hasan was drinking.”

In a more understated voice, Hasan agreed with Genevieve. “We dabbled in drugs,” but with Barack “there wasn’t anything excessive by him, by my standards.” As of that 1984 summer, Obama was “much more serious” than the college sophomore Hasan had lived with three years earlier, and at times Barack “would tell me to go easy on my drinking or my smoking pot, and I’m saying ‘What a change!’ ” Genevieve recognized a tension between Barack’s loyalty to his Pakistani friends and his emerging realization that “somehow splitting himself off from people is necessary to his feeling of following some chosen route which basically remains undefined.” She continued to worry about “veils and lids and control,” but Genevieve enjoyed being “cosseted in Barack’s apartment” on weekend nights before returning to her Brooklyn apartment and a new roommate whose presence she found irritating. Genevieve found her intimate time with Barack special and uplifting, but she was sometimes troubled by his behavior toward the Pakistanis, writing one night that “the abruptness and apparent lack of warmth with which Barack left them was jarring.”⁵¹

A few days later Hasan and Barack had dinner at Genevieve’s apartment, and she remained fascinated with Barack’s deeper, preoccupying thoughts. He talked about Ernest Hemingway “and the integrity of grasping for those times, those visions that are ones of true magnificence and profundity,” but “when Barack speaks of missing the signs of some central, centered connection with the powerful maelstroms of deep feeling, grand scopes, I have responded with comments such as ‘Maybe you need not to look for them at such dizzying heights, but on other levels.’ ”

In mid-July, Genevieve took offense at “all the artifice in his manner,” but a large Saturday-night dinner at Hasan’s that included his cousin Ahmed, Beenu and his sister Tahir, and Wahid and his wife Filly left Genevieve impressed with Filly’s intelligence and independence. Yet Genevieve’s persistent self-doubts continued to trouble her feelings about Barack. “How long will it take him to see that I am silly and insecure and inarticulate in a way he will find repulsive rather than acceptable?” she wrote in her journal.

A trio of cheap photo booth pictures the couple took of themselves that summer shows Genevieve looking exceptionally energized, striking, and happy, and a somewhat full-faced Barack looking pleased and happy as well. On the first Sunday in August, Genevieve challenged him to a footrace in Prospect Park near her apartment. Barack greeted the challenge with gently mocking bemusement, but then, to his utter amazement and chagrin, Genevieve won, demonstrating that he had seriously underestimated her. “Barack couldn’t really believe it and continued to feel a bit unsettled by it all weekend” as they showered and then went to see a new film, James Ivory’s The Bostonians, starring Vanessa Redgrave and Christopher Reeve. “Being beaten by a woman,” especially when Barack prided himself on his almost daily running, “really unsettled him,” Genevieve recalled.

Genevieve believed that Barack’s running was motivated by unpleasant memories of having been a chubby boy in his pre-basketball years. “There was still quite a bit of ‘I was a fat boy’ feeling lurking underneath his resolve to be so disciplined with the running. He was very trim, except for a bit of pudgy tummy,” which “he couldn’t get rid of” and “was quite self-conscious about,” she remembered. “That’s why he ran,” to “get rid of that last little bit of being a pudgy boy.”

That did not hinder what she described as “passionate sex,” and after a week apart when Genevieve went to London, she returned to find Barack troubled after having been told by his African sister Auma, who hoped to visit New York in November, about a rumor that their father may have been murdered rather than killed by his own drunken driving. Barack and Auma had become irregular correspondents following Obama Sr.’s November 1982 death, and either just before or just after this latest word from Auma, Barack had a memorable dream about his father that he shared with Genevieve, who had also “grown up without my dad.” But now he also told her that a month earlier he had cried when he saw television news coverage of a mass murder that claimed the lives of twenty-one people at a fast-food restaurant near San Diego. “Interesting that he was connecting the two,” Genevieve wrote in her journal, “when in fact the tears he cries are, I’m sure, buried tears over his dad, and the loss over all the years without him. He was very subdued” for the balance of that weekend.

To Genevieve, who was “constantly looking for an explanation for this wary guardedness” she so often felt from Barack, the answer lay in how “he was not in touch with how deeply wounded he was by his mother’s and his father’s relationships with him.” In her mind, Barack’s “woundedness” and “abandoned child persona” meant “the amount of suppression of negative emotion is just heroic” and explained why “there was a ‘no go’ zone very, very quickly” whenever talk about deep personal feelings threatened to undermine all of that successful suppression.⁵²

In late August, Alex McNear called Barack to say she would be arriving in New York on August 23. The two of them had dinner that night, although years later Alex would have no memory at all of that evening. Genevieve was not looking forward to the start of her school year at PS 133, but in her journal she again wrote, “I love him very much.” Obama met up with Mike Ramos for a beer one night when Mike came to New York for the first of two training events for his job at a large accounting firm. Barack talked about quitting his job at BI so he could do something more rewarding, and Mike, impressed with his friend’s courage, ended up crashing at 114th Street rather than making it back to his hotel. Either during that visit or when Mike returned to New York just before Halloween, they had dinner one night with Genevieve, whose unusual name Mike would remember years later.

Early in the fall, Phil Boerner, Barack, and another old Oxy friend, Paul Herrmannsfeldt, who was working at a publishing house, started a book discussion group at Paul’s seventh-floor apartment in Soho. Their first selection was Samuel Beckett’s 1938 novel Murphy, and Phil’s girlfriend Karen plus several friends of friends attended two or three subsequent meetings, but the group petered out within two months. Barack also attended a reading by several writers at the West End bar on Broadway just south of 114th Street that his apartment mate Michael organized just prior to moving out, but his attempt to interest Michael in his own work failed. As Phil later said, they all found Barack “an interesting yet unremarkable person,” a young man whom some saw as “a bit smug” but whom no one imagined would ever be seen as an exceptional individual.⁵³

At BI Barack’s colleagues felt similarly. In early fall, Lou Celi and Cathy Lazere launched a new series of “Financial Action Reports” that required updating BI’s data on companies’ cash management strategies in particular foreign countries, with new information gleaned from interviews with corporate treasurers. The first two countries were Mexico and Brazil, and Obama and the slightly more senior Michael Williams were given a task that Williams remembered as “my least favorite project” at BI. About twenty treasurers had to be contacted either by phone or in person in New York, and the thirty-minute interviews had to be transcribed. Williams and Obama each took half, and though Williams recalled transcribing his own tapes, Lou’s assistant Lisa got newly arrived editorial assistant Jeanne Reynolds to transcribe at least one of Obama’s more difficult ones. Williams remembered Barack as someone who “kept to himself,” spoke only when necessary, and never seemed “fully engaged.” That was atypical indeed at “a very friendly place” with “a pretty hip crowd” that offered great opportunities for advancement “if you wanted them.”

Jeanne Reynolds recalled Barack as “quiet, reserved, polite,” and Barack’s copy editor on the Mexico and Brazil reports, newly arrived Maria Stathis, would likewise remember him as “very quiet.” Another new arrival, Gary Seidman, remembered Barack teaching him to use the Telex machine that was cheaper than the telephone for international communication. Barack seemed “aloof,” a stark contrast to his “vibrant” coworker Beth Noymer. When Obama gave Cathy Lazere formal notice one day in November that he was quitting effective early December, Cathy mused that “it must have been a little lonely for him to work at a place for a year and not be fully engaged in the world around him.”

A few days earlier, his sister Auma called from Nairobi to say she was canceling her New York trip because their younger brother David Opiyo had just been killed in a motorcycle crash at age sixteen. That news may have strengthened Barack’s resolve to leave a job he found so foreign to his political views, and although he told Cathy “he wanted to be a community organizer because he didn’t find business that meaningful,” he also was leaving BI without a new job in hand. Cathy, Gary Seidman, and the young man Cathy interviewed and then hired as Barack’s replacement, Brent Feigenbaum, all had the impression that Barack was considering law school in addition to community organizing. In Barack’s exit interview, Lou Celi told him, as he told everyone leaving BI, that he was making a big career mistake, and when Barack told editor Dan Armstrong he did not yet have a new job, Dan asked, “Are you crazy?” He also told Barack he at least should “get another job before you quit.” In Armstrong’s memory, Barack simply shrugged. Feigenbaum spent one day working alongside Barack and recalled him as “remote … not a terribly warm person.” Beth Noymer’s monthly calendar for December 1984 would show “Barack lunch” on Friday the fourteenth, but neither she nor Cathy nor anyone else had any memories of a farewell meal.

Asked two decades later what he recalled from his time at BI, Barack answered “the coldness of capitalism.” He told an earlier questioner, “I did that for one year to the day,” a clear indicator of his desire to leave that world for something he found more fulfilling. But giving up his BI paycheck meant leaving the apartment on West 114th Street, and on the weekend of December 1 and 2, Barack temporarily moved in with Genevieve on the top floor of 640 2nd Street in Park Slope.

Earlier in the fall, they had taken the bus to her family’s estate in Norfolk, Connecticut, where they slept in an open-air cottage and joined Genevieve’s mother and stepfather for one meal. Barack later recounted paddling a canoe on a nearby pond, and a photo shows a happy and relaxed young couple outdoors in the morning sun. Their first week together in Genevieve’s cramped quarters produced minor irritations, but a nice weekend then included seeing the Eddie Murphy film Beverly Hills Cop in downtown Brooklyn. Genevieve was the only white person in the audience, but she says she and Barack never experienced any hostility or rudeness toward them as an interracial couple.

In the days just before Barack left to spend the holidays in Honolulu, their feelings of being in each other’s way multiplied, with Barack saying, “I know it’s irritating to have me here,” and telling Genevieve that she was being “impatient and domineering.” But they exchanged Christmas gifts, with Barack embarrassed when Genevieve bought an expensive white Aran cable-knit wool sweater for him at Saks Fifth Avenue. When he asked her what she wanted, Genevieve suggested lingerie, which she says “threw him into an absolute tailspin” before he returned with something that Genevieve privately thought was “incredibly tame.”⁵⁴

A week before Christmas, Obama flew to Honolulu, and he spent much of his time in transit reading a book by Studs Terkel, most likely his newly published The Good War: An Oral History of World War II. On New Year’s Day, he wrote to Genevieve that “my trip has progressed without any notable events” but that “I was foolish to think that I’d have the time or energy to work on my writing” in Hawaii because “reacquainting myself with the family has proven to be a fulltime job … they all have used me as a sounding board for all sorts of conflicts and emotions that have previously stayed below the surface…. I’ve been the catalyst for tears, confessions, ruminations, and accusations.”

Genevieve had never met any of Barack’s family, but he offered her sketches of them all. “My mother is as I last saw her, gregarious and sensitive, although she’s undergoing some difficult changes after uprooting herself from Indonesia” to live in a visibly humble cinder-block apartment building at 1512 Spreckels Street, where she and fourteen-year-old Maya shared the two-bedroom unit 402, less than a block from Maya’s ninth-grade classrooms at Punahou.

“My grandfather,” Barack went on, now age sixty-six and retired, “appears immutable. He looks more robust than ever, even while eating donuts, smoking a cigarette, and drinking whiskey simultaneously. My grandmother is doing less well—she continues to drink herself into oblivion,” indeed “incoherence,” when not working. “Her unhappiness saddens me deeply…. It may be my helplessness in the face of her problem that angers me more than the problem itself. But she retires next year, and if the fortitude she’s channeled exclusively into her work can’t be transferred into the remainder of her life, not much life will remain.” With Maya, “I watch with joy her development into a fine person,” but being back in the all too familiar tenth-floor apartment at 1617 South Beretania meant that “ghosts of myself and others in my past lurk around every corner.”

Obama wrote that his relatives all “think I’m too somber…. My mother explains that I was normal until 14, from there went directly to 35.” Stan joked that Barack is “as mean to himself as he is to everyone else. The only difference is he likes it.” But Obama was clearly discomforted by this return to his childhood surroundings. “I have trouble fitting into these Island Ways,” he told Genevieve. Within blocks were “the apartment house where I was conceived … the hospital where I was born … and the school where I spent a third of my life.” But nonetheless “I’m displaced here, it’s not where I belong—sometimes I think my only home is on the road towards expectations, leaving what’s known, complete, behind. I no longer find that condition romantic—at times I resent it deeply—but I accept it.”

That sentence was as self-revealing as any Obama had ever written, but the contrast between “the incredible isolation of people here” in far-off Hawaii and “the nervous energy or self-consciousness you find in New York” was discombobulating. “My contradictory feeling for Hawaii reflects itself in my relationship with Bobby, who embodies the beauty and limitations of the place. He’s making a comfortable living running a concession at a local high-school, and supplements his income with cash from a few big cocaine deals he was involved with last year”—an aspect of a best friend’s life that was unobjectionable only if you viewed cocaine use itself as unremarkable.

Obama observed that Titcomb “jokes about his appetite for food and women, exhibiting a charm and flair in everything he does, but a sustained commitment or depth in nothing.” But Barack added, “He loves me and I love him, but he senses different priorities in me now,” though “I admire and envy his easy manner and fluid grace.” One day the two old friends went scuba diving two miles off Oahu, fifty feet down. On another, Ann’s mentor Alice Dewey “argued in husky tones with me and a few other of my mother’s friends over politics, sexual relations, art and the economy.” Only “after five hours and four cups of coffee” did Barack drive her home.

Alluding most likely to how they had met exactly one year earlier, Barack asked Genevieve, “How did you spend New Year’s Eve? Mine was not as eventful as the last one.” He told her he was flying back to New York on January 22 and would likely stay with Hasan and his cousin Ahmed at the Eagle Warehouse apartment “until I find a place. I confess to a fear of failing to find a useful gig for myself upon my return, but have no thoughts of doing anything else. I expect the transition may be tough on me,” as his prior attempts to obtain a politically satisfying job had failed, “but I expect you to have some patience with my foolishness and kick me when I get out of line. I miss you very much, and hope your enthusiasm for school stays high.” He signed off “Love, Barack.”

The same day Barack wrote that letter to Genevieve, his mother Ann privately recorded her own plans for the New Year. Many of her jottings concerned the multiple debts she owed her parents, including $1,764 per semester for Maya’s Punahou tuition, and $175 for an airplane ticket for “Barry.” The “$4,846 withdrawn from account by Toot” was later updated with “$3,940 repaid 2/6/85.” A long numerical “People List” began with Maya as #1, Ann’s Indonesian lover Adi Sasono #2, “Bar” #3, her parents #s 4 and 5, and included former brother-in-law Omar Obama as #175. The “Long Range Goals” she listed on New Year’s Day began “1. Finish Ph.D. 2. 60K 3. In shape 4. Remarry 5. Another culture 6. House + land 7. Pay off debts (taxes) 8. Memoirs of Indon. 9. Spir. develop (ilmu batin) 10. Raise Maya well 11. Continuing constructive dialogue w/ Barry.”⁵⁵

Once Obama returned on January 22, Genevieve was disappointed that having him back in her daily life was “so disruptive, instead of a sweet re-meeting.” Given how challenging teaching first grade at PS 133 was, “I actually find his interruption of my focus on school as damaging, disconcerting,” but “he’s really into travelling his path with concentrated determination as well. It is still true that I want to live alone.” Obama later wrote of refusing the offer of a well-paid job from an impressive black man who headed a New York City civil rights group and had recently dined at the White House with “Jack,” the secretary of housing and urban development. Arthur H. Barnes headed up the New York Urban Coalition, but African American New Yorker Samuel R. Pierce was HUD secretary; only four years later did Jack Kemp succeed him.

Instead Obama focused on a job ad from the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG), for its Project Coordinator post at the City College of New York (CCNY) in West Harlem. NYPIRG, founded in 1973, was based on a campus chapter model first outlined in Action for a Change. A Student’s Manual for Public Interest Organizing, a 1971 book written by famous consumer advocate Ralph Nader and three coauthors, one of whom, Donald K. Ross, became NYPIRG’s initial executive director. By 1985 NYPIRG had chapters at most campuses of New York State’s two public college systems, the predominantly white State University of New York (SUNY) and the largely minority City University of New York (CUNY). Campus referenda that authorized a $2-per-student-per-semester fee provided NYPIRG’s financial base.

The project coordinator post paid only about $9,200, half of what Barack had been making at BI, and the CCNY job was open at midyear because of the departure of a young woman whose fall tenure had been unsuccessful. Yet the CCNY chapter boasted one of NYPIRG’s most experienced student leaders, Buffalo native Diana Mitsu Klos, who had moved to New York City eighteen months earlier upon being elected NYPIRG’s student board chair for the 1983–84 academic year. NYPIRG’s campus projects statewide were overseen by Chris Meyer, and 1983 Yale graduate Eileen Hershenov supervised CCNY and other Manhattan chapters from NYPIRG’s tumbledown office at 9 Murray Street in lower Manhattan. On some day in late January or early February, Obama appeared there for a job interview with Hershenov and Meyer, who were “enormously impressed” with him, particularly since NYPIRG was “desperate to diversify” its predominantly white staff, especially at such a heavily minority campus as CCNY.

Obama’s hiring was all but immediate, as CCNY’s spring semester classes began on Monday, February 4. Eileen accompanied him up to City and introduced him to Diana Klos and seven or eight other core chapter members, including Alison Kelley, who thought Obama was “very poised, very together” right from day one. The NYPIRG chapter had a small office with desks and a telephone in a homely metal trailer known as the Math Hut that sat between CCNY’s iconic Shepard Hall and the college’s low-rise administration building south of 140th Street on the east side of Convent Avenue, just across from the North Academic Center (NAC), a hulking modern gray-brick behemoth that housed City’s humanities and social science departments.

The key to NYPIRG’s student recruitment efforts was “class raps,” where the project coordinator would ask faculty members to give up five minutes of class time so that students could hear a brief pitch about NYPIRG. As of February 1985, NYPIRG’s top statewide issue was its Toxic Victims Access to Justice Campaign, which sought passage of state legislation that would allow women and their offspring who had been harmed by the synthetic estrogen DES to file civil damage suits. New York was one of only seven states where such a right to sue did not exist, and generating citizen pressure on state legislators was a major focus of Hershenov and her colleagues’ work.

Barack and Diana were present in NYPIRG’s trailer office every day, and throughout February they concentrated on doing as many “class raps” as possible in advance of a late February “general interest meeting” intended to attract several hundred students. In some departments, like African American Studies, where senior professors like Leonard Jeffries Jr. and Eugenia “Sister” Bain were notorious for showing up late, if at all, for many scheduled classes, getting “class rap” time was easy. In others, like Political Science, Barack’s efforts met with mixed success. Frances Fox Piven, who taught Politics and the Welfare State, and Ned Schneier, whose Congress and the Legislative Process also met on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, both said yes. A young associate professor teaching civil rights and civil liberties would have been less amenable, replying that it was inappropriate to sacrifice classroom time for nonacademic matters.

Like all CUNY colleges, CCNY was entirely a commuter campus, and one with “nowhere to hang out anywhere near there,” as Alison Kelley recalled, so generating student participation in such a setting was a considerable challenge. Eileen Hershenov pitched in at least one day a week, and every Friday Obama joined project coordinators from NYPIRG’s ten other southern New York schools for an afternoon staff meeting at 9 Murray Street. NYPIRG had an active relationship with Saul Alinsky’s inheritors at the Industrial Areas Foundation, and one Friday Michael Gecan, one of IAF’s four top organizers, spoke to the group and also spoke individually with Obama.

Eileen Hershenov was Barack’s closest staff colleague, and they had several conversations about different models of organizing. She had read Clayborne Carson’s 1981 history of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), In Struggle, and could remember even two decades later at least one conversation with Obama about SNCC’s Mississippi grassroots organizing, which Bob Moses came to personify. “It was a very abstract intellectual conversation that I had with him,” she recalled, one that contrasted SNCC’s approach versus charismatic leaders, but all toward the end of “how do you empower people?”⁵⁶

Even with his full-time weekday job up at CCNY, Obama spent all of February and early March splitting his time between Hasan’s apartment below the Brooklyn Bridge and Genevieve’s top-floor apartment in Park Slope, quite a commute on New York’s far from reliable subways. “Who is this boy/man/person, Barack Obama?” Genevieve wrote in her journal in early February. “We communicate, we make love, we talk, we laugh. I insulted him the other night—a retaliatory ‘fuck you’ ” for his complaining about Genevieve “always wimping out on dinners with the gang” or saying “You stay, I’m leaving” as a night drew on. “Both of us feeling dissatisfied, wanting something more—but he from himself, and me from the pair of us…. I don’t really know or understand how he feels, privately, about me, us,” given his “veiled withholding.”

The next day she wrote that “since I’ve known him, he has not yet developed a concrete sense of direction,” and in retrospect Genevieve remembered that Barack “came back from Hawaii definitely exuding impatience and frustration and dissatisfaction with the life he was leading.” She was increasingly stressed by her teaching and by the shared space at 640 2nd Street. In mid-March her unhappiness led Barack to remark, “You like to make trouble.” When that led to tears, Genevieve wrote that her own emotional insecurity “all relates back to my father, and his ‘abandonment’ of me and wanting desperately to have someone love me like a father.” But she also believed that “all of this insecurity” is “a product of the conversation” she and Barack had had “about living together,” coupled with all of the “distance on his part.” Before the end of March, Genevieve found a better apartment at 481 Warren Street #4A in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill neighborhood.

Obama was still in touch with Oxy friends Phil Boerner and Andy Roth, and by early 1985 Andy was living with musician friend Keith Patchel in an informal sublet at 350 West 48th Street in Manhattan’s rough Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. Patchel had left for Sweden at the first of the year to work on a record with his friend Richard Lloyd, a member of the underground band Television, and in March Andy was headed to Managua, Nicaragua, for more than two months. Apartment 4E had been home to the grandparents of neighbor Nick Martakis, a friend of Television’s manager, and Keith and Andy simply paid Nick $200 or $250 a month in cash—“there was no lease” and “everything was on the down-low,” Keith explained. “Keith and I were expected to keep a low profile,” Andy remembered, and even incoming mail had to be addressed “c/o Martakis.” The building was “decrepit,” a step down even from Sohale’s apartment on East 94th Street, but it was relatively spacious. It was also a shorter subway trip to CCNY in West Harlem, and on Sunday, March 31, Barack moved in there, while continuing to spend each weekend at Genevieve’s Warren Street apartment in Brooklyn.

Two visitors whom Barack had met two years earlier in Jakarta—his mother Ann’s anthropologist friends Pete Vayda and Tim Jessup—came for dinner one weekend. Tim was Genevieve’s older stepbrother—the son of her stepfather, Phil Jessup. Barack did not say much to Genevieve about his NYPIRG work, and he never introduced her to any staff or students: “that compartmentalizing thing,” she later remarked. Genevieve continued to wrestle with her own issues, and in mid-April wrote in her journal, “I am making a commitment here and now to stop smoking pot. I must. Because I am debilitating myself.”

Genevieve’s ongoing anxieties about teaching were always close to the surface. One mid-April weekend Genevieve told Barack that the older teachers at PS 133 had said, “Just stick in there. Nobody has a good first year, and the pension’s really good.” That pension reference so offended Barack he almost yelled in response. “It just really set him off. I had never seen him so upset,” Genevieve recounted. “He was almost thumping the table he was so upset—the idea that you would sell out for security” made him “so angry.” The next weekend Genevieve and Barack walked from Boerum Hill into Brooklyn Heights, and by Sunday afternoon, he was “acting a tad hostile. When he talks of enjoying being alone, I wonder that he so regularly attends this weekend pattern of ours,” she recorded.⁵⁷

On Wednesday, May 1, the CCNY chapter of NYPIRG held a demonstration at Broadway and 137th Street to protest the abysmal condition of that IRT #1 line station. This was part of NYPIRG’s Straphangers Campaign for better subway service across the city. The next day a noontime rally outside NAC drew attention to how the NYPIRG chapter, in tandem with CCNY’s student government, had gathered more than a thousand handwritten letters to members of Congress opposing the Reagan administration’s proposed budget cuts for Pell Grants and guaranteed student loans in the pending Higher Education Reauthorization Act.

That weekend Barack and Genevieve went to Hasan’s apartment on Saturday night and got “high on coke,” she recorded in her journal. On Sunday Barack sat around her Warren Street apartment reading the New York Times and watching basketball. As he left that evening, Barack “said he felt strained,” and then told Genevieve, “This apartment is alien to me,” a comment she found hurtful. “Barack is discovering the ennui of life being uneventful and unfulfilling and not knowing where to look for the source of it,” she wrote. In retrospect she thought he was “depressed” and “not really talking that much.” She sensed “a great deal of disappointment and more emotional involvement” with his NYPIRG job than at BI. Barack’s inability to distance himself from his job as he had at BI made him “significantly more troubled by what was going on at work.” Genevieve thought that “as long as he was still at BI and paying his dues,” Barack had believed that a community organizing job would “be the fulfillment of his dream” and gave him hope for the future after his self-imposed 365-day sentence was up. But “the disappointment with how his actual experience” at NYPIRG had played out was leaving him “very broody.”

Yet the CCNY students and NYPIRG staffers who worked most closely with Barack could not have been happier with him. On Tuesday, May 7, NYPIRG’s annual Lobby Day in Albany drew almost two hundred students from around the state, and the senate leader who previously had blocked passage of NYPIRG’s Toxic Victims Access to Justice bill told reporters, “I am convinced we will have an agreed-upon bill before the session ends.” The next afternoon CCNY’s NYPIRG chapter hosted a well-publicized community forum on federal budget cuts featuring Frances Fox Piven. CCNY’s classes ended one week later, on May 15, and the NYPIRG chapter held an end-of-semester pizza party in their Math Hut office.

Alison Kelley had interacted with Barack as much as anyone over the preceding three months, and Obama had encouraged her to overcome her shyness and learn new skills, accept an invitation to join a singing group, and run for a seat on NYPIRG’s state board. “He was relentless,” and he had “a huge impact,” even if he did not realize it. “He changed the vector of my life in so many ways,” Alison later recalled. Barack was also “constantly bringing stuff in for us to read,” including publications on South Africa. In return, “Every day I’d hound him because he smoked,” and Barack’s usual reply was “We all have flaws.” Nonetheless, “every single female had a crush on him” and “everyone thought he was cute,” but “he was just always warm and friendly … in a very professional way.”

At the end of the semester, “we begged him to stay. We loved him,” because “we all felt that he was the perfect person for our chapter, to meet our needs,” Alison recounted. But Barack was explicit that he would not return to CCNY for the fall semester nor stay with NYPIRG over the summer. “He talked about being frustrated, that he wasn’t moving fast enough,” Alison remembered. “It was so clear that he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, and he didn’t feel that he fit in anywhere.” Barack “was just deeply searching for his niche in the world … searching in terms of his own psyche.” He “seemed unsure of where he belonged” and “didn’t know where he was going.”

Eileen Hershenov “desperately wanted him to stay,” and her boss Chris Meyer remembered “having a conversation with Barack” after “Eileen put me up to trying to convince him to stay.” To Eileen it was clear that Barack “was interested in organizing but not this kind of organizing.” NYPIRG executive director Tom Wathen concluded that Barack viewed NYPIRG’s issues as “too vanilla,” and “we were disappointed, but not surprised” when he resigned at the end of CCNY’s spring semester.

NYPIRG’s top priority, the Toxic Victims Access to Justice bill, would be signed into law a year later by New York governor Mario Cuomo, but in Obama’s own subsequent references to his time at NYPIRG, he never once mentioned that signal achievement. The first time he described his experience, nine years later, he stated that “when I first got involved in organizing, in Harlem, I was out there because of liberal guilt, and I got disabused of that real quickly.” NYPIRG “sent me out into the middle of Harlem to try to get people involved in environmental and recycling issues,” but “the folks in Harlem weren’t all that interested … and I would guilt them all the time.” That description bore no relationship whatsoever to Obama’s actual work on CCNY’s campus, nor would the single phrase he devoted to his NYPIRG work in his subsequent book—“trying to convince the minority students at City College about the importance of recycling”—be much better.

In a trio of cable news show interviews in subsequent years, Obama would say that he was “an organizer in Harlem” for “about a year,” that for “six months” he “recruited students out of the City College of New York … to work in the community,” and that he left NYPIRG because “the organization ran out of money.” None of these statements were accurate.⁵⁸

At much the same time that his work at CCNY ended, in mid-May 1985, Barack’s relationship with Genevieve deteriorated seriously. Genevieve wrote a brief poem entitled “Where’s the Beef?” invoking a famous 1984 political aphorism. That same day she told her closest friend at PS 133, “I just wanted to chop his dick off,” and the next day, she recorded in her journal, “I called him a prick.” Years later she had no idea what had made her so “aggressively angry at him” or why her feelings had been “so vicious.” That weekend, however, they once again partied with the Pakistanis, but less than two weeks later, Genevieve wrote in her journal about “Barack leaving my life—at least as far as lovers go. In the same way that the relationship was founded on calculated boundaries and carefully, rationally considered developments, it seems to be ending along coolly considered lines.”

Once again, Genevieve’s own issues were front and center, as she acknowledged, after rereading her journal entries, “how consistently I mention having been drunk and how many times I’ve said I was giving up pot.” Yet “from the beginning what I have been most concerned with has been my sense of Barack’s withholding the kind of emotional involvement I was seeking. I guess I hoped time would change things, and he’d let go and ‘fall in love’ with me. Now, at this point, I’m left wondering if Barack’s reserve, etc., is not just the time in his life, but, after all, emotional scarring that will make it difficult for him to get involved even after he’s sorted his life through with age and experience. Hard to say.”

But within just a few days, on Genevieve’s birthday, June 7, Barack gave her a huge philodendron. Even so, a few days later, Genevieve composed another deeply critical poem about him:

You masquerade, you pompous jive, you act,

but clothes don’t make a man,

and I know you just coverin’ a whole lot of pain and confusion.

You think you got it taken care of,

but I’m tellin’ you bro, you don’t.

You masquerade, you pompous jive, you act.

A week later, Genevieve wrote a letter to a friend that she never sent. Only one week of school remained, and “I don’t know how I’ve managed to survive this year: it has been horrendous.” She was continuing to debate whether to teach again in 1985–86, but she was happy at 481 Warren Street, where “I’m making a home for myself. I had wanted to live with Barack—we were lovers for a year—but the relationship as far as steadiness goes has dropped away. The fact that he’s 23 put us in very different places, and I was demanding more than he could give. So I just quietly stopped asking, and it all fell away. We are friends and feel close, and suddenly I find that it’s not me who’s the confused, needy person in a relationship.”⁵⁹

By the second week of June 1985, Barack Obama was unemployed again, and he had broken up with the woman with whom he had had the closest and most intimate relationship of his entire life. He was also living alone in an unfurnished apartment that Genevieve described as “creepy and very dark” under “very sketchy” circumstances that left Barack visibly nervous the few times Genevieve ever visited him there.

But his NYPIRG experience at CCNY had not extinguished Barack’s desire to pursue some different kind of organizing, and with time on his hands, he spent a good amount of it at the Mid-Manhattan Public Library, on the east side of Fifth Avenue just south of 40th Street. “I started casting a wide net to see if there were jobs available doing grass roots organizing all across the country,” he later recounted. As Obama remembered it, he felt “a hunger for some sort of meaning in my life. I wanted to be part of something larger,” something “larger than myself,” indeed something less “ ‘vanilla’ ” than NYPIRG. One resource he carefully perused was the June issue of Community Jobs. “I wrote to every organization” that advertised, and one résumé and cover letter he put in the mail some time in mid-June was addressed to Gerald Kellman, Director, Calumet Community Religious Conference, 351 E. 113th St., Chicago, IL 60628.

Jerry Kellman remembered receiving Obama’s résumé, seeing his surname and Hawaiian background, and asking his Japanese American wife April whether “Obama” might be Japanese. “Sure, it could be,” she replied. Within a day or so Jerry telephoned Barack in New York, and early in that conversation, it was clear that Obama was African American—just what Jerry’s ad, and his DCP leadership, hoped to find. Jerry’s father lived on the Upper West Side, and Jerry was already scheduled to visit him two weeks later. He told Barack they should talk in person in Manhattan.

Barack was ecstatic and nervous about his upcoming meeting with Kellman. “He was very much keyed up about it,” Genevieve remembered, “with a very strong sense of wanting to impress and be found suitable … but also a great deal of angst about how the future of his entire life hinged on this meeting.” There was the deep attraction of a real community organizing job, but also, visible yet unspoken, was a strong desire to break free from the weekly pattern of “partying” with Hasan, Sohale, and Imad. “He felt trapped by the Pakistanis and their expectations that he would continue to party with them,” Genevieve realized. Barack “had zero drive to substance use from within himself. It was just an ‘If I don’t, they’ll think I’m stuck up’ ” fear on his part. “He was only doing it so as not to rub it in their face that they were still doing the same-old same-old and he wasn’t interested.” That problem did not present itself when the group gathered at Beenu Mahmood’s apartment on Riverside Drive, or when Wahid attended, but otherwise the weekend cocaine parties extended right up through the spring and summer of 1985—“nonstop—without a doubt—continuous,” Genevieve replied when asked about that time. “It’s uppity to decline because you’re being superior, and he just didn’t want to.” She believed Barack “was very uncomfortable with what he felt was incredibly deep division between where they were going and how they chose to conduct themselves…. If he had been capable of hurting their feelings and being disloyal, he would have stopped engaging” in the weekend gatherings, but he was not, so the prospect of having to leave New York for an organizing job elsewhere held out a promise of freeing him from the bonds of a friendship he could not bring himself to break but very much wanted to sunder. “He mostly wanted to get away from the Pakistanis,” Genevieve believed, for “the restrictions the Pakistanis put on his sense of expanded identity and hopes for the future” had become too much.

Hasan Chandoo sensed much the same thing, especially come that spring and early summer of 1985. Barack “had a tough life in New York. No money, hard work,” and in private he had begun to lecture Hasan about how his profligate use of pot and cocaine was part and parcel of a criminal drug economy that was doing untold damage to black young men and black neighborhoods. “He’s telling me as a friend, ‘Stay away from this shit’ ” and become “more disciplined,” Hasan recalled. “I listened to him” and “I was taken by his maturity,” but “I didn’t stop completely.”

Just before the July 4 holiday, Keith Patchel returned to 350 West 48th Street from Stockholm. Keith was eight months into the sort of lifestyle change Barack was advocating to Hasan, and as a result “I wasn’t there very much” since “I was going to a lot of meetings.” Apartment 4E was “such a casual, come and go kind of place” that “there were endless occasions when I wouldn’t see my roommates for days at a time, especially” given the apartment’s layout. “I do remember somebody being there” when Keith returned, “somebody in a Hawaiian shirt,” but “we could both be living there and not see each other for days at a time.” Only after being told who that had been did Keith come to the realization that “I do have a recollection of meeting Barack.”

Sometime soon after the July 4 holiday, Jerry Kellman arrived in Manhattan and met Obama at a coffee shop for a good two hours. “The whole purpose of this interview for me was to ascertain his motivation,” Kellman recalled, “because it seemed like he must have had so many opportunities” given Barack’s résumé. “He was good-looking and articulate and obviously very, very bright.” When Jerry asked him what he knew about Chicago, Barack’s immediate reply—“Hog butcher for the world,” the opening line of Carl Sandburg’s famous 1914 poem “Chicago”—demonstrated just how much literature Barack had absorbed during his college years.

Kellman knew from his years in organizing that “people who were as young as” Barack—not yet twenty-four—sometimes “burn out very quickly” when they “for the first time in their life, encounter significant failure” as novice organizers. For that reason, Kellman wanted to understand why a Columbia graduate who had earned almost $20,000 at BI was applying for this trainee position and its advertised salary of $10,000. Kellman explained CCRC’s hope of staunching the Calumet region’s loss of steel industry jobs, and how church congregations were CCRC’s organizational base. He also made clear that for DCP’s Chicago parishes, he inescapably needed a black organizer. But Jerry had to know why this animated Barack.

“What he told me was that he wanted to make positive changes around economic equality,” Kellman recalled. Barack “was clearly an idealist” and “was very hungry to learn.” Indeed Obama “challenged me on whether we could teach him” more than he had experienced at NYPIRG. “ ‘How are you going to train me?’ and ‘What am I going to learn?’ ” were questions Jerry could answer convincingly given his organizing experience stretching back to IAF. Barack wondered too “how would he survive financially” on $10,000, and Kellman suggested Hyde Park as a place to live while making it clear that if Barack rose from his initial trainee status, his salary would go up as well. Jerry then offered Obama a job on the spot, which he accepted, and upon discovering that Barack did not own a car, which would be essential on the Far South Side, Kellman offered him an additional $1,000 to buy a car. A check would be in the mail as soon as Jerry returned to Chicago, and Barack agreed to make the drive to Chicago as soon as he acquired a car that would get him there. Beenu Mahmood was in Chicago, living in Hyde Park while working as a summer associate at the law firm of Sidley & Austin prior to his final year of law school, so Obama knew he had an initial place to stay.

Either that day or the next, Barack went to Brooklyn to see Genevieve at her Warren Street apartment. “He was very, very sure that Chicago would offer him the organizing experience that New York” had not, she recalled, but what she remembered most clearly was the question he posed to her: “Do you want to move to Chicago with me?” Given how their relationship had “devolved” over the previous two months, Genevieve was surprised, but “I was so sick of the withheldness that I never even hesitated with ‘No.’ ” Years later she would debate with herself whether Barack asked only because he was certain she would decline, or whether he still felt a deep attachment to her.

Only in retrospect would she come to believe that “all the tension he was feeling that May and June had very little to do with me” as opposed to Barack’s need to find a purpose in his life. Now he was headed to a predominantly African American working environment, even though, in her view, “he had zero experience of black culture.” Genevieve had long recognized and teased him about “the grandness of his vision,” even though “it wasn’t at all an articulated vision.” But now Barack was undertaking the most consequential decision of his still young life, leaving a city to which he repeatedly had returned following his college graduation two years earlier for a new metropolis he had glimpsed only as a young child for whom the Field Museum’s shrunken heads were Chicago’s most memorable attraction.

By July 16 Barack was looking to buy an affordable used car, and within a week, he acquired an “old, beat up” blue Honda Civic for the grand sum of $800, $200 less than what Kellman had sent him. Genevieve recorded in her journal “the thought of being alone again and somehow defenseless once Barack’s gone.” He had a good-bye lunch with Andy Roth on the Upper East Side, and early on Friday afternoon, July 26, 1985, Barack pulled away from 350 West 48th Street with all of his worldly possessions in his “raggedy” Honda.

“My radio/cassette sprang to life with a slight touch of the antenna, just as I was about to enter the West Side Highway,” he wrote some days later. “I tuned into the jazz station and drove over the George Washington Bridge, straining my neck to catch a last glimpse of the Manhattan skyline. It was overcast.” Once across the soaring span, he bore right when the expressway forked, with the New Jersey Turnpike bending south and Interstate 80 heading west as the urban clutter of Hackensack and Paterson gave way to the rural countryside of northwest New Jersey before the road descended to the Delaware Water Gap and the historic river that marked the Pennsylvania state line. It was a road he had never traveled, and as Pennsylvania passed by with nary a single city to be seen, all Barack would remember of the transit was “hazy green.”

In Boerum Hill, Genevieve mourned the departure of a man she would never see again, “sitting in a chair weeping about the fact that he had left.” She wrote in her journal, “So. Alone again … Barack’s leaving—now being goneness.” A chapter in both of their lives had closed, and for Barack a brand-new one was about to open.⁶⁰

“Around 9:00PM, too tired to drive further,” Barack turned off of I-80 at the last exit before the Ohio state line. Leaving the interstate, a local highway afforded an easy right turn onto South Hermitage Road. A Holiday Inn was brightly visible, but so was a sign advertising a budget motel a few hundred yards farther north, on the west side of the road across from the Tam O’Shanter Golf Course. Less than eight weeks earlier a tornado, rare in the Shenango Valley, had leveled many surrounding trees, but the funnel cloud had inflicted only incidental damage on the Fairway Inn.

“I rang the bell at a small, ill-lit lobby, and out came a tall, gangly man with a checkered shirt, plaid jacket and golf hat. He looked like an overgrown leprechaun…. He pulled out a slip of paper and ran off the nightly rates in rapid fire. I told him I would take the cheapest room and gave him my driver’s license,” which featured Barack’s full name. The owner “was struck by my name”—“Hussein …isn’t that some bad guy there in the Middle East?”—“and asked me what I did for a living. I explained my new job, and he went into a ten-minute monologue.”

Ten-minute monologues were not unusual for Bob Elia, but the one he delivered that evening to Barack Hussein Obama would replay itself again and again in Obama’s mind in the years to come. Barack recounted Bob’s monologue in a letter to Genevieve two weeks later, and he would allude to it three years later in a magazine essay. He would also transmogrify Elia into a fictional black security guard in his first book, and he would recount Elia’s monologue virtually word for word almost half a dozen times to diverse audiences more than twenty years later.

Many individuals who come to believe that their lives stand for more—sometimes much more—than the sum of their own personal experiences retrospectively identify one signal event, one single conversation, as representing the moment when they first knew that they could contribute to the world something more eternal than their own individual fate. Such experiences occur in places sacred, historic, and profane: the kitchen of a parsonage at 309 South Jackson Street in a southern capital city on a January night, the front yard of Coffin Point Plantation on St. Helena Island on a balmy New Year’s Eve, or the lobby of a budget motel at 2810 South Hermitage Road in Hermitage, Pennsylvania, on a warm July evening.

A minister of the gospel might understandably believe he was communicating with a higher being—“He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. No never alone. No never alone.” Someone less religious might hear a voice from history’s recent past, offering fortitude against the national security state. But when Barack Obama’s foundational experience occurred, the voice he was hearing was indisputably that of fifty-two-year-old, six-foot-two-inch Bob Elia.

Bob grew up in nearby Farrell, Pennsylvania, where most of the racially diverse population drew its paychecks at Sharon Steel’s Roemer Works. Bob had a number of black friends across the early decades of his life. By 1985 the local Sharon Herald had for several years been publishing the syndicated columns of conservative black economists Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams, and Bob had taken a hankering to both men’s writings, regularly clipping and saving Williams’s essays. Bob often cited their analyses when telling acquaintances how they might better themselves, and operating a motel gave Bob a never-ending population of new guests to whom he could offer his thoughts on how they could improve their lives.

Barack’s brief response that he was headed to Chicago to become a community organizer was fuel for Bob Elia’s fire. “Look here, Mr. Hussein, I’m going to give you the best advice anyone’s ever given you…. Drop this public service crap and pursue something that’s going to get you some money and status … and then maybe you’ll have the power to do something for your people. I’m telling you now because I see potential in you … you got a nice voice, you can be one of them T.V. announcers, or one of those high-priced salesmen. Peddling bullshit, but look here, bullshit’s the American way.” Bob cited Williams or Sowell in telling Barack that political and social influence follow from economic strength, period. “Black people need more like this fellah, not Jesse with rhymes and jive…. Most folks at the bottom can’t be helped by you” and “most of ’em don’t want your help.”

Finally Barack was able to interject a more pressing question: Where could he get dinner? Bob recommended the West Middlesex Diner, back down South Hermitage Road just south of I-80. Wanting some fresh air and time to reflect, “I took the man’s words on a long walk along the highway to a small all-night diner and had supper,” Barack wrote Genevieve. After eating, “the walk back was cool and silent, the stars cluttering the sky as they hadn’t in five years. Back in my room, The Year of Living Dangerously”—a 1982 film set in a city that Barack himself knew, Jakarta on the eve of the mid-1960s mass killings—“was playing” on the black-and-white television. If Bob Elia’s fervent plea to reconsider his new job had given him something to think about, being reminded of his years in a truly foreign land while in the middle of this drive offered even more.

Elia’s comments would echo in Barack’s memory for decades to come. Three years later, some of Bob’s advice would be attributed to a black female school aide. “Listen, Obama. You’re a bright young man…. I just cannot understand why a bright young man like you would … become a community organizer … ’cause the pay is low, the hours is long, and don’t nobody appreciate you.” In its next rendition, Bob’s remarks would be made by “Ike,” a fictional black security guard: “Forget about this organizing business and do something that’s gonna make you some money…. I’m telling you this ’cause I can see potential in you. Young man like you, got a nice voice—hell, you could be one a them announcers on TV. Or sales … making some real money there. That’s what we need, see. Not more folks running around here, all rhymes and jive. You can’t help folks that ain’t gonna make it nohow, and they won’t appreciate you trying.”

More than twenty years later, Barack would accurately recount how “I stopped for the night at a small town in Pennsylvania whose name I can’t remember any more, and I found a motel that looked cheap and clean, and I pulled into the driveway, and I went to the counter where there was this old guy doing crossword puzzles” who “asked me where I was headed, and I explained to him I was going to Chicago because I was going to be a community organizer, and he asked me what was that.” Then came Bob’s monologue: “You look like a nice clean-cut young man, you’ve got a nice voice. So let me give you a piece of advice: forget this community organizing business. You can’t change the world, and people will not appreciate you trying. What you should do is go into television broadcasting. I’m telling you, you can make a name for yourself there.”

“Objectively speaking, he made some sense,” Barack would reflect in that retelling. Two weeks later, he repeated the centerpiece of Bob’s monologue word for word. Thirteen months later Obama recited Bob’s message once more, as he did again five months after that. In May 2008, Obama recounted his memory of that night yet again: “You’ve got a nice voice, so you should think about going into television broadcasting. I’m telling you, you have a future there.”

In contrast to Barack’s indelible memory of their conversation, twenty-nine years later Bob Elia had no recollection of young Obama. When asked, though, he almost immediately told a caller, “You’ve got a nice voice” before launching into a ten-minute monologue on the life-extending powers of a trio of multisyllabic nutritional supplements.

But in 1985, on the next summer morning, Barack checked out of the motel without reencountering Bob, and after heading down South Hermitage Road and bearing right onto I-80, the Ohio state line was just a few miles ahead. I-80 became the Ohio Turnpike and then the Indiana Toll Road once it crossed another state line. Chicago lay six hours ahead, but as Barack Obama drove west, he was headed toward a place he really had never been, indeed toward a place he really had never known: he was heading west toward home.⁶¹