Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life

Oh, where have they gone

Those days of our youth

With those wonderful dreams

Of worlds to be won

When life was a search

For the ultimate truth

Full of adventure

And, Oh, so much fun