Obama Barack - Barack Obama: the story

From one of our preeminent
journalists and modern historians comes
the epic story of Barack Obama and
the world that created him.

In Barack Obama: The Story, David Maraniss has written a deeply reported generational biography teeming with fresh insights and revealing information, a masterly narrative drawn from hundreds of interviews, including with President Obama in the Oval Office, and a trove of letters, journals, diaries, and other documents.

The book unfolds in the small towns of Kansas and the remote villages of western Kenya, following the personal struggles of Obamas white and black ancestors through the swirl of the twentieth century. It is a roots story on a global scale, a saga of constant movement, frustration and accomplishment, strong women and weak men, hopes lost and deferred, people leaving and being left. Disparate family threads converge in the climactic chapters as Obama reaches adulthood and travels from Honolulu to Los Angeles to New York to Chicago, trying to make sense of his past, establish his own identity, and prepare for his political future.

Barack Obama: The Story chronicles as never before the forces that shaped the first black president of the United States and explains why he thinks and acts as he does. Much like the authors classic study of Bill Clinton, First in His Class, this promises to become a seminal book that will redefine a president.

DAVID MARANISS, an associate editor at The Washington Post and fellow of the Society of American Historians, is the author of critically acclaimed bestselling books on Bill Clinton, Vince Lombardi, Vietnam and the sixties, Roberto Clemente, and the 1960 Rome Olympics. He won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Clinton, was part of the Post team that won the 2007 Pulitzer for coverage of the Virginia Tech tragedy, and has been a Pulitzer finalist three other times. He lives in Washington, D.C., and Madison, Wisconsin, with his wife, Linda.

MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT

SimonandSchuster.com

THE SOURCE FOR READING GROUPS

COVER DESIGN BY MARLYN DANTES
COVER PHOTOGRAPH MCT VIA GETTY IMAGES
COPYRIGHT 2012 SIMON & SCHUSTER

ALSO BY DAVID MARANISS

Into the Story

Rome 1960: The Summer Olympics That Stirred the World

Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseballs Last Hero

They Marched into Sunlight:
War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967

When Pride Still Mattered:
The Life of Vince Lombardi

The Clinton Enigma

First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton

The Prince of Tennessee:
Al Gore Meets His Fate (with Ellen Nakashima)

Tell Newt to Shut Up! (with Michael Weisskopf)

Thank you for purchasing this Simon & Schuster eBook.

Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Simon & Schuster.

C LICK H ERE T O S IGN U P

or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2012 by David Maraniss

Maps by Gene Thorp

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition June 2012

SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com .

Designed by Ruth Lee-Mui

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Maraniss, David. Barack Obama : the story / by David Maraniss. 1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Obama, BarackChildhood and youth. 2. Obama, BarackFamily. 3. HawaiiBiography. 4. Obama, BarackTravelAfrica. 5. PresidentsUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.

E908.M368 2012

973.932092dc23

[B]

2011052983

ISBN 978-1-4391-6040-4

ISBN 978-1-4391-6753-3 (ebook)

To the wondrous girls of my life
Linda, Sarah, Ali, Heidi, Ava, and Eliza
and to Alice

The mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived.

RALPH ELLISON, Invisible Man

Its Not Even Past

T his volume is not a traditional biography. It begins long before Obama was born and ends before he entered politics. He is inevitably the principal subject, and I would not have undertaken the book if not for his history-making rise, but he does not appear until the seventh chapter and even after that at times gives way to other relatives. He came out of an uncommon family, brilliantly scattered and broken, and although the parts could never be fitted neatly together again, my goal was to examine them as a whole and see the story in all its jagged and kaleidoscopic fullness. We are all random creatures, in one sense, our existence resulting from a particular series of random events, but Barack Obamas life seems more improbable than most, and I saw in the story of his family a chance to write about many of the themes of the modern world. And then, given the circumstances into which he was born, how did he figure it out? How did he create a life that made it possible for his political rise? Those are the twin obsessions that drove me as I researched this bookthe world that created him and how he created himself. Four years ago, I set off in search of answers.

On a whitewashed ledge at Punahou School bathed in Honolulu sunshine, Alan Lum and I sat and talked about the past, revisiting the days when Lum and his friend Barry were teammates on Hawaiis state championship basketball team. Then we got up and took a short walk. We left the athletic center and strolled past the prep schools outdoor pool, constructed since their days there in the late 1970s, and along the edge of a vast green playing field, before climbing the broad steps leading up to the Dole Center, the student cafeteria. Lum turned left on the lanai and cast his eyes downward, examining the concrete sidewalk. Where was it, again? He walked farther toward a set of outdoor benches, then stopped and brushed the pavement with his shoe, cleaning away the daily soot. There it was, etched in block letters decades ago by a stick or index finger before the concrete had set. OBAMA .

No historical marker designated the site. Generations of students had walked over and around it without taking notice of the name below their feet. For the first twenty-five years or so after it was written, the name would have provoked little interest in any case. Just one name among multitudes, and locals might have assumed Obama was Asian American; the syllables had a familiar Japanese cadence. The testament of a teenage boy, and he didnt even write it himself. The story goes that one of his buddies scratched his name there to get him in trouble. But it had the same meaning nonetheless. A name etched in concrete, like Kilroy was here carved into rock, is an expression of time and history and fleeting existence. Looking down, I could only think: That could have been the lone mark he left.