I. ORIGINS 19611985
Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, is a blend of extraordinary diversity: parents from Kenya and Kansas; an education in Indonesia, Hawaii, California, New York, and Massachusetts; employment in Chicagos poorest communities, leading law firms, and premier university; best-selling books that merge personal history and political action; and elected positions in the Illinois and United States Senates before the Presidency.
The result is a politician who asserts that we all are linked, and that while idealism must serve realism, pragmatism requires purpose. His latest book, which carries the inspirational title The Audacity of Hope, contains the following conclusion: We should be guided by what works.
The Obama family traces its modern lineage to Hussein Onyango Obama, a Kenyan member of the Luo tribe born in 1895 near Lake Victoria. Onyango was a restless man of ambition. He was one of the first in his village to wear western clothing, walked for two weeks to Nairobi to find work, braving leopards and other dangers, and served with the British armed forces in World War I. He visited Europe, Myanmar and Sri Lanka as a soldier and briefly converted to Christianity, but abandoned it for Islam and added Hussein to his name after the war. He was arrested by British colonial authorities in 1949 during the struggle for Kenyan independence, tortured and jailed for two years, but eventually found innocent and released, after which he returned to his homeland.
Obamas father, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., was born in 1936 in Nyangoma-Kogelo, Siaya District, also near Lake Victoria, to Onyangos second wife Habiba Akumu. She quarreled with her husband and left when her son was nine. The boy was raised by Onyangos third wife Sarah. He was a precocious student but chafed at traditional village employment, which included tending goats. He took success in high school for granted, became boastful and truculent, and was expelled. He squabbled with his father, left the family lands, married his first wife Kezia in 1954 at age 18, and by his early 20s found himself employed as a shop boy in Nairobi with two children and little money. A pair of American teachers befriended him and helped him apply to U.S. universities. In 1959 he secured admission, after many rejections, to the University of Hawaii to study economics: the institutions first African student. A scholarship program organized by Kenyan politicians and financed by over 8,000 American donors paid for his studies.
Obama, Sr. wore religion lightly. Although my father had been raised a Muslim, by the time he met my mother he was a confirmed atheist, thinking religion to be so much superstition, his son has written. Indeed Sarah, the step-mother who raised Obama Sr., has said her step-son was never a muslim.
Obamas mothers family history begins with her parents Madelyn Payne and Stanley Dunhamgrandparents of Barack Obama who cared for him during high school. Payne was a Kansan raised in Wichita by stern Methodist parents who did not believe in drinking, playing cards or dancing. Nonetheless, their daughter, one of the best students in her high school graduating class, often went downtown to listen to big bands. On one of these outings she met Stanley Dunham, originally from the oil-town of El Dorado, Kansas, a furniture salesman who could charm the legs off a couch. Dunham was a Baptist from the other side of the railroad tracks. (It later emerged that he was also a seventh cousin, once removed, of Vice-President Dick Cheney and also a seventh cousin, twice removed, of President Harry S. Truman.) Paynes family did not approve of the liaison, and the pair married in secret a few weeks before Madelyn graduated from high school. She told her parents after she received her diploma.
During World War II, Dunham joined the Army and served under General George S. Patton. Madelyn worked on a Boeing B-29 assembly line in Wichita. Obamas mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was born in 1942 at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Her father wanted a boy, thus the name, which grieved the girl.
Dunham moved the family frequently: California, Kansas, Texas, and finally Mercer Island in Washington statenow a high end home for wealthy Seattle residents, then a somewhat isolated and bucolic suburb. Madelyn became vice-president of a local bank. The family attended the East Shore Unitarian Church. Stanley Annshe dutifully carried the first name through her mid-teensthrived in the intellectual atmosphere of the local high school, where her philosophy teacher challenged his classes with texts like The Organization Man, The Hidden Persuaders, and 1984. The precocious student was offered admission to the University of Chicago in 1958 at the age of 16, but her father said she was too young to go.
In 1960, Ann graduated from high school and the family moved to Hawaii. Stanley got a job at a large furniture store, Madelyn at the Bank of Hawaii, and they bought a house near the University of Hawaii. Ann, 18, enrolled as a freshman. In a Russian language class, she met Barack Obama, Sr., 23, who told her he was divorced. They gathered with friends on weekends to listen to jazz and discuss politics and world affairs. Ann was the only woman. She was the original feminist, according to Neil Abercrombie, now a Democratic congressman from Hawaii who participated in the meetings.
On 2 February 1961, the pair slipped away to Maui and were married. The weddingObama black as pitch, Ann white as milkwould have been illegal in 22 states. Ann dropped out of college. On 4 August Barack Hussein Obama Jr. was born at the Kapi olani Medical Center in Honolulu.
The couple moved into a small apartment near the university. The following year, just three years after he had arrived, Obama Sr. completed his studies. He obtained two offers of admission to Ph.D. programs in economics. The first, from Harvard, did not include enough funding to support his family. The second, from the New School in New York, included a more generous stipend. Obama chose Harvard, and did not take his family to Cambridge.
In 1963, Ann returned to college. Food stamps helped support the family. After two years, her husband still absent, she filed for divorce.
At the East-West Center at the university she met Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian student. In 1967, he proposed, she graduated, and the three moved to his home on the outskirts of Jakarta. Soetoro, who was drafted into the Indonesian Army as a lieutenant on his return, was not wealthythey had no air conditioning, refrigerator, flush toilet, or carbut the six year old Obama was impressed nonetheless. His step-father had acquired a pet monkey for him. Baby crocodiles inhabited the garden. He learned to speak Indonesian and attended the local Catholic Franciscus Assisi Primary School. The children of farmers, servants and low-level bureaucrats had become my friends, and together we ran the streets morning and night, hustling odd jobs, catching crickets, battling swift kites with razor-sharp linesthe loser watching his kite soar off with the wind, he wrote later in his memoir. His mother was hired to teach english at the U.S. embassy.
