Barack and Michelle Read online

  Conversely, Obama continued to do well on Punahou’s basketball team, earning the nickname “Barry O’Bomber” for his driving jump shot. Over the years, he worked his way up the ranks until, in his senior year, he made the varsity team. “It was rare for someone to make the team in the last year,” said varsity coach Chris McLachlin. “It’s a testament to Barry’s perseverance that he practiced and practiced and perfected his game until he was finally given a spot on the varsity team.” Unfortunately, the team was so top-heavy with talent that he often found himself sitting on the bench. At one point, he approached McLachlin as the appointed representative of several benched players. “He wanted to know what they could do to get in the game, how they could improve,” McLachlin said. “He was very respectful, much more mature than other kids his age.”

  Still, that final year his grades slipped noticeably—though not enough to keep him from being accepted to several major universities in Hawaii and on the U.S. mainland. His final choice—Occidental College in Los Angeles—was unexpected, but Barry had his reasons: he had struck up a friendship with an attractive young coed from the affluent L.A. suburb of Brentwood who was vacationing with her family on Oahu, and he was hoping to hook up with her once he got to Los Angeles.

  The yearbook entry for “Barry Obama,” which featured a photo of him in a short-cropped Afro, reflected those things he considered important at the time: basketball, family, and his fellow pot smokers. Included was a snapshot of “Barry O’Bomber” on the basketball court with the Pidgin English caption “We go play hoop,” a photo of his paper-strewn dorm room desk showing a beer bottle, turntable, telephone, and tennis trophy as well as Zig-Zag rolling paper and a book of matches under the title “Still Life”—and, most revealing, a nod to those who mattered most to Barry at the time. He thanked Toot, Gramps, “Ray” (Keith Kakugawa), and “Choom Gang” for “all the good times.” Choom is the act of smoking pakalolo, the Hawaiian word for marijuana. Barry signed off with “LATERS”—slang for “see you later.”

  At his Punahou graduation ceremonies in June 1979, Barry, beaming in his navy blue blazer and blue and gold rep tie, bounded onstage to accept his diploma to loud cheers from his mother and grandparents. No one was more moved than Toot, who sobbed as she rushed up to Barry after the ceremony and draped an orchid lei around his neck.

  Conspicuously absent that day was Barack senior. It had been eight years since they had seen each other, and four years since Barry, weary of trying to forge a bond with his father, had stopped corresponding with him.

  It was around this time that Neil Abercrombie was vacationing in Kenya and decided to look up his old University of Hawaii buddy. By this point Barack senior, who had been sidelined in the Ministry of Tourism, was depressed and drinking even more heavily than usual.

  Barack senior had always been a menace behind the wheel—drunk or sober. “He was a terrible driver,” said his friend Philip Ochieng. “He would get very excited and zoom like Mr. Toad.” Now, driving under the influence on a more or less daily basis, he caused a series of serious accidents. One of these resulted in the death of another motorist. Inexplicably, Barack was never charged in the case.

  On another occasion, Obama himself was struck by a hit-and-run driver and left for dead. “They tried to kill me,” he told his old friend Pake Zane when Zane and his wife, Julie, visited him in Kenya in the 1970s. Obama went on to tell them he had been marked for death by forces within the Kenyan government because, despite the testimony he had given years earlier as a prosecution witness in the trial of nationalist leader Tom Mboya’s accused killer, he still knew who was really behind Mboya’s assassination.

  “It all made him a very angry man,” Zane said. “He was limping badly, and he would go out every night and get really drunk and really abusive. He yelled at everyone in that booming voice. It was overwhelming—just way too heavy to take. Even his friends couldn’t stand to be around him anymore.”

  “He was a very bitter man,” Abercrombie said of Barack when he last saw him in 1979. Obama felt he had “not been given the chance to fulfill his destiny and play a major role in the running of his country…. He was drinking too much. His frustration was apparent.”

  The two men talked for hours. Most of that time, Abercrombie sat quietly while a well-lubricated Barack railed against his bosses in government. The only thing that was memorable was what Barack Obama Sr. did not say. Not once, Abercrombie marveled, did Barack Obama ask about his ex-wife or the son who was graduating from high school that year. “Even for a man as self-absorbed as Barack was,” Abercrombie said, “I was shocked. How sad for his son…”

  She was a slight, graying Mexican woman of indeterminate age, and she smiled wanly at Barry and his friends as she trudged down the hallway toward their dorm room at eight o’clock. Monday morning. The students were sitting on the floor, propped up against the wall with beer cans in hand, oblivious to the woman’s presence. They had been partying for two days straight and were far too busy praising their own stamina as they passed around yet another joint.

  Jackets and shoes were heaped against the front door, making it difficult for the cleaning lady to push her way into Barry’s dorm room. Once she did, she wished she hadn’t.

  “My God!” she cried in Spanish as she surveyed the wreckage—a mind-spinning blur of bottles, cans, pizza cartons, half-eaten hamburgers, styrofoam cups, Chinese food take-out containers, discarded wrappers, cigarette butts, and overturned bowls of potato chips and popcorn. The kitchen sink brimmed with dirty dishes, and the towel-heaped bathrooms, where many a porcelain bus had been driven, were simply indescribable.

  Wading through the debris, she held a rag up to her nose and mouth to protect against the overpowering stench—a rank blend of cigarette and marijuana smoke, incense, rotting food, urine, and vomit. Since she had worked for a decade as a maid assigned to clean up the dormitories at Occidental College, the Mexican woman had no illusions about what awaited her each Monday morning. But there were limits. She wept as she stepped back into the hallway to fetch her mop and pail. Standing there was another maid who, after surveying the scene, offered to help.

  As the two women, neither of whom spoke English, gathered up their cleaning supplies for the assault on Barry’s room, they glanced down the hall. They shook their heads in disgust at the sight of Barry and his pals convulsed with laughter.

  Just as he had identified with some of the most unsavory elements in his high school class, Barry wasted no time seeking out the hardest partyers once he arrived at Occidental. For the next two years, he would be unapologetic in his pursuit of getting high.

  Toward that end, Obama cast himself during this period as, in the words of his classmate and friend Eric Moore, “a definite surfer-type.” Barry’s carefully chosen uniform of flip-flops, Hawaiian shirts, and board shorts—finished off with wraparound sunglasses, a puka shell necklace, and an ever-present cigarette—was designed to convey the sort of familiar, laid-back persona that Occidental’s overwhelmingly white student body would find least threatening.

  Rounding out the image of a well-heeled surfer dude cum college man was Barry’s used red Fiat—a gift from his grandparents. It also helped that he played intramural sports, including tennis, flag football, and water polo. (Barry tried out for but did not quite make Occidental’s basketball team.) “He was an athletic guy,” recalled his freshman roommate Paul Carpenter. “He was gifted in that regard.” Barry was also “superbright,” Carpenter said. “He could get through the course work in a fraction of the time it took me.”

  Classmate Margot Mifflin remembered him as “an unpretentious, down-to-earth, solidly middle-class guy who seemed somewhat more sophisticated than the average college student. He was slightly reserved and deliberate in a way that [she] sometimes thought betrayed an uncertainty.”

  There were those, however, who saw Barry’s “reserved and deliberate” demeanor as a sign of something else. “He definitely had a cocky, sometimes arrogant way abo
ut him,” recalled another classmate, Robert McCrary. “He was not open to others.”

  Eric Moore agreed with Margot Mifflin that Barry “was already very polished” by the time he arrived at Occidental. Being biracial, having grown up in Hawaii and lived for a time in Indonesia, Barry was “more worldly than the average kid in California,” Moore said. “But he still wanted to fit in.”

  When they first met, Moore, an African American from the mostly white Colorado college community of Boulder, was taken aback by Obama’s first name. “What kind of name is Barry Obama for a brother?” he kidded.

  “Actually, my name is Barack Obama,” he replied.

  “That’s a very strong name,” Moore said. “Why don’t you use it?”

  Barry sighed and shook his head. “It’s just too much of a hassle,” he said. “I don’t want to have to explain it every five seconds.”

  “Well, screw that Barry shit,” Moore said. “From now on I’m calling you Barack.”

  Obama was grateful that Moore called him Barack, although Paul Carpenter was among many students who never heard him called Barack at all. “It was always Barry,” Carpenter said. “And if someone asked him what he preferred, he didn’t hesitate to say Barry.” Anne Howells, who taught literary theory at Occidental in the winter of 1980, concurred: “I asked him if Barack was a Hawaiian name, and he told me it was African. But when I went around the room asking each student what he or she wanted to be called, the only African American in the class did not hesitate to answer. ‘Barry,’ he said.”

  In truth, this part of sunny Southern California, with its tile-roofed, Spanish-style houses, palm-lined streets, and sweeping views of the Pacific, seemed comfortably familiar to Barry. Back at Punahou, he was never exposed to anything resembling a slum or a ghetto. At “Oxy,” he was just as shielded from the grim realities of life for blacks in communities like Watts, Compton, and South Central L.A.

  Still, he did set out to build relationships with other African Americans on campus. Soon he was spending most of his time with a handful of other black undergraduates. Unlike the white students and faculty members who called him Barry, his African American friends addressed him as “Obama.” Wahid Hamid, a wealthy Pakistani who became one of Barack’s closest friends at Occidental, was “not surprised that he decided to embrace that identity because ‘Barry’ could be perceived as trying to run away from something and trying to fit in, rather than embracing his own identity, in many ways, kind of opening himself to who he is.”

  Hamid was just one of the many foreign students that Barry went out of his way to befriend during his freshman year. His inner circle at that time included another well-to-do Pakistani named Mohammed Hasan Chandoo as well as Vinai Thummalapally, a native of Hyderabad, India. Thummalapally, who roomed with Barry and Paul Carpenter that first year at Oxy and was six years older than Barry, did a three-mile run with him every morning before classes. As they ran, Thummalapally invariably shared his dreams of opening a successful business back home in India. Barry made it clear that he had no interest in the private sector. “I want to get into public service,” he told Thummalapally, pausing after each run to reward himself with another cigarette. “I want to write and I want to help people who are disadvantaged.”

  Obama quickly impressed his professors with his newfound social conscience. “He hung out with the other young men and women who were most serious about issues of social justice,” said Roger Boesche, one of Barry’s political science professors.

  Boesche was also impressed with Barry’s fearlessness when it came to questioning his teachers—a self-confidence that bordered on cockiness. The professor was having lunch at a local restaurant called The Cooler when he looked up to see Barry standing by his table. “I really think I deserved a better grade than the one you gave me,” he told Boesche point-blank.

  “You are really smart, Barry,” Boesche replied. “But I’m afraid you just aren’t working hard enough.”

  “I disagree,” Barry pressed on. “You’re holding me up to a higher standard than everybody else in class and that’s unfair. I’m being graded on a different curve than everybody else and I’d like to know why.”

  Clearly taken aback, Boesche squirmed in his seat for a moment. “You are capable of so much better, but no, Barry, I gave you the grade you deserved.”

  Barry shook his head and walked off, never saying anything to his professor that might be construed as rude or inappropriate. He told Moore, Hamid, and his other friends, however, that he was “really pissed off” about his grade. “If he thought he was being treated unfairly,” said an Occidental classmate, “he just wouldn’t let go of it. He was a man obsessed. But he never really became outwardly agitated, either.”

  However “pissed off” he may have been, Barry still seemed congenitally incapable of losing his temper. Even when everyone else in the room seemed to be shouting to make a point, Vinai Thummalapally said, Obama “wouldn’t get worked up. Other people would be standing, waving their arms around, and Barack wouldn’t even change his position on the sofa—and still he could make his point. Everybody would just suddenly shut up and listen when he talked.” According to Thummalapally, his roommate never swore: “Not once can I ever remember him using a cussword. Imagine it: an eighteen-year-old who never used profanity.” By the same token, Thummalapally insisted, Barry “was not a nerd. He was not a bore. People were drawn to him.”

  Even though as a biracial man he could still easily move from one social circle to another (“He had the benefit of knowing both cultures firsthand,” Eric Moore observed), Barry felt at his most comfortable in the company of other African American students. They understood completely, for example, when Barry said he suspected his professors were holding him to a different standard because of his color. In turn, he nodded sympathetically whenever the others griped about the slights and insults they endured on any given day.

  It was no small irony that these conversations were the exception rather than the rule. Obama quickly discovered that he and his black friends banded together precisely so they wouldn’t have to think about race all the time. The question of race always hung in the air whenever they were in the company of whites. “To constantly think about race,” he said, “it’s so damned exhausting.” Most of the time, Barry later said, he and his friends talked about the same things their white counterparts talked about: “Surviving classes. Finding a well-paying gig after graduation. Trying to get laid.”

  As “progressive” as he and his friends claimed to be, they showed no remorse when the Mexican maids came to clean up their mess after yet another nonstop weekend of partying. That unfortunate disregard for others continued into Barry’s sophomore year, even as he and other members of Occidental’s Black Student Alliance planned a demonstration demanding that Occidental divest itself of its interests in apartheid South Africa.

  The rally, staged opposite the president’s office, marked Barry’s public speaking debut. Haltingly at first, he managed to seize the attention of the lunchtime crowd with a speech that scarcely lasted one minute. For the first time he realized that the timbre of his voice was not unlike his father’s. “He had this booming voice,” Eric Moore said. “It helped that people knew who he was because he was so popular on campus, but he also had this commanding presence.”

  When that lunchtime crowd cheered and applauded his speech (albeit fleetingly), no one was more surprised than Barry. It was heady stuff for a nineteen-year-old still in the throes of an identity crisis. “I knew I had them,” he later wrote. “The connection had been made.”

  No romantic connection, however, had been made with anyone. His infamous parties notwithstanding, Barry did not come close to forging a serious relationship with any female during his first two years at college. According to one Oxy colleague, “Barry dated girls, but there was no one who came close to being his girlfriend or anything like that. Barry wasn’t at all shy, and women liked him, but he seemed too focused on himself to really get involved
with someone romantically.”

  After two years at Occidental, Barry was floundering. He had no idea of what he wanted to do with his life, or where he wanted to settle down. Neither Hawaii nor California—at least the affluent parts of California he had been exposed to—offered him the sort of life experience he longed for. Barry wanted to live in a city—the sort of multinational, multicultural, polyglot urban environment that would stimulate him intellectually and ground him at the same time.

  As soon as he learned that Occidental had begun a transfer program with New York’s Columbia University, he signed up. Barry’s friend Eric Moore pleaded with him to remain at Oxy, but Barry argued that he needed to make a clean break from his past—and that meant leaving his friends behind. “I think there was a lot of stuff going on in me,” Obama later said. “I was starting to work it through. It’s hard to remake yourself around people who have known you for a long time.”

  Before he made the trip to New York, Barry made another voyage that would, he later said, shape his view of the world. Traveling to Pakistan with his friend Wahid Hamid, Barry spent three weeks touring the countryside around Karachi. He had already witnessed grinding Southeast Asian poverty during his childhood years in Indonesia, but he was still shocked by what he saw in Pakistan—particularly the power that wealthy landowners had over the lives of the peasants who worked their fields. As the landowners drove by in their Land Rovers and Mercedeses, the workers—men, women, and children alike—would literally bow down until they passed. “It was straight out of the Middle Ages,” Barry would later recall. “The serfs bowing to their lord and master.”