Chapter 1Honolulu

Foreword

I have spent my working life on the machinery of American politics. My subjects have been presidents and the operatives who make presidents — the men who counted votes in marble hallways, the finance chairmen who understood that a campaign is a corporation with a candidate attached, the procedural specialists whose names appear in no schoolbook and whose fingerprints appear on every law. My conviction, held across three decades of this work, has been that American political history is written less in speeches than in rules: in the filibuster arithmetic, the committee calendar, the disclosure filing, the reconciliation instruction. So when I told colleagues I was writing a book about Barack Obama, more than one of them assumed I had changed churches. Obama was the orator. He was the crowd in Grant Park and the eulogy in Charleston. He was, they meant, the opposite of my subject.

That assumption was exactly why I wanted him. Because the proposition I set out to test was that the most celebrated rhetorical presidency of the modern era was, underneath its rhetoric, one of the most relentlessly procedural presidencies the country has produced — that the man remembered for the speech was, in the operational record, a man of the sixty-vote threshold, the fourteen-month markup, the executive workaround drafted precisely because the legislation had died in a chamber that refused to schedule a vote. The speeches were real. They were also, I came to believe, the least explanatory part of the story.

The title of this book is a claim, and I should state it plainly. The Punahou years — the eight years a scholarship kid spent in a Honolulu prep school where he was one of a handful of Black students among thousands, watching, calibrating, learning to move between worlds that had not been built for him — were where the operational discipline was formed. Everything I found in the later record, from the precinct work on the South Side to the Christmas Eve vote count in the Senate, ran back through that formation. A biographer of process must eventually concede that process has a childhood. This book is organized around that concession.

The research was conducted from the public record, and I want to be precise about what that means, because Obama presents a documentary situation nearly unique among modern presidents. He wrote his own life, at length and with genuine literary skill, before and after the office; the memoirs are indispensable and they are also advocacy, and I have tried to read them the way I read a campaign filing — for what they disclose, for what they time carefully, and for what they leave in the footnotes. Around them stand the congressional record, the litigation record, the contemporaneous press, and the enormous secondary literature of aides, critics, and scholars who have been arguing about this presidency since before it ended. I have not pretended to original interviews. What I have attempted is the older discipline: reading the record slowly, in sequence, and letting the procedure testify.

What I expected to find was a gifted politician constrained by institutions. What I found was harder to summarize: a man whose deepest political instinct — the watchfulness learned in childhood, the preference for calibration over confrontation — was simultaneously the mechanism of his accomplishments and the substance of the case against him. The same discipline that carried a bill through a seven-vote House margin was the discipline his critics experienced as distance. I have tried to render both sides of that ledger without pretending the ledger balances.

Why is Obama worth a book, when the shelf already groans with them? Because the question his career poses is the standing question of the American system itself: whether the machinery can be worked, from inside, by someone the machinery was never designed to admit. He believed it could. He staked his public life on the belief. The evidence, as the reader will find, is mixed — and the mixture, not the myth, is what I have tried to write down.

— Theodore Pemberton, Boston

Chapter 1 · Honolulu

The photograph had been taken in 1963, probably at Honolulu International Airport, at the moment Barack Obama Sr. boarded a flight for Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a scholarship to Harvard awaited him. The photograph showed him in a dark suit, tie, hat held in hand. He was twenty-six years old. He was leaving. He had a wife and a two-year-old son behind him on the island. He would never live with them again.

The son, Barry Obama, was two. He would not remember the airport. He would not remember Honolulu through the lens his father's departure deposited in him; he would not remember, at two, that his father had gone. What Barry would remember, across the subsequent decades, was the photograph. His mother Ann Dunham kept it. She added to it, across his childhood, a small collection of subsequent photographs and letters that his father had sent from Cambridge and then, from 1965, from Nairobi. The collection — curated and carefully narrated by Ann — constituted the paternal presence that Barry would know across his formative years. The actual father had left. The constructed father — heroic, principled, African — stayed.

Ann Dunham was eighteen when Barry was born, nineteen when her husband left for Harvard, twenty when she filed for the divorce her husband's subsequent career made structurally necessary. She had been a student at the University of Hawaii when she had met Barack Obama Sr. in a Russian-language class in 1960. He was twenty-three. He was the first African student at the university. The circumstances of their meeting — a Cold War-era Russian class, an African graduate student, a Kansas-born white teenager — were not unusual for the internationalist student culture the early-1960s University of Hawaii had accommodated. The marriage that followed, six months later, was unusual. Interracial marriage remained illegal in twenty-two American states in 1961. Hawaii was not among them. The license was issued. The ceremony was conducted by a judge on February 2, 1961, in Maui. Barack Hussein Obama II was born on August 4, 1961, at the Kapiolani Medical Center in Honolulu.

Ann Dunham was not, in the biographical record, a passive figure in Barry's formation. She was a woman of fierce intellectual ambition whose Kansas origins — she had been born in Wichita in 1942, the daughter of Stanley Dunham and Madelyn Payne — had never defined her. Stanley Dunham had moved the family to Hawaii in 1960, drawn by the possibility of a new American frontier. Ann enrolled at the University of Hawaii the same year and was, by the accounts of her fellow students, one of the more intellectually serious members of her class. She would, across the subsequent decades, complete her doctorate in anthropology at the University of Hawaii in 1992 — the dissertation a meticulous 1,043-page analysis of village-level metalworking industries in Central Java. She died of ovarian and uterine cancer in November 1995, at fifty-two, while Barry was already into his first year as an Illinois state Senate candidate. She did not live to see what she had partly made.

The Dunham family's Kansas origins were working-class Protestant. Stanley Dunham's father, Ralph Dunham, had been a farmer in El Dorado, Kansas, who had briefly walked away from his family during the Depression. Stanley himself, by the family accounts, was a complicated man — garrulous, affectionate, prone to exaggeration, haunted by ambitions that never quite materialized. He had served in World War II in Patton's army after Pearl Harbor and was stationed in France. Madelyn Payne had married him in 1940, against her parents' wishes. She was, from the start, the organizational center of the family — the one whose discipline and financial prudence kept the household from the chaos Stanley's romantic optimism might otherwise have produced.

Obama Sr. had come to Hawaii from a small Luo village in western Kenya near the shores of Lake Victoria. His own father, Hussein Onyango Obama, had been a World War II veteran of the British colonial forces who had served as a cook for British officers in Burma and Europe, had converted to Islam from his ancestral Luo beliefs in the 1940s, and had, across his life, traversed the complicated social and religious geography that late-colonial East Africa imposed on its working-class men. Onyango was, by the accounts Barry would eventually collect from his Kenyan relatives, a precise and authoritarian man who had demanded from his children a discipline that the colonial environment required and that the post-colonial one would not automatically reward. Obama Sr. had grown up in his father's household under those disciplines, had gone to school in Kenya under British colonial instruction, and had demonstrated — by the assessment of the Kenyan educational authorities who tracked outstanding students for overseas study — an intellect of exceptional range. He received a Kenyan government scholarship in 1959 to study economics in the United States, arriving in Honolulu at the University of Hawaii as part of a program of African educational development that the Kennedy-era American interest in African independence had partially funded. He was the first African student at the university. Obama Sr. had grown up Muslim, converted to Christianity as a young man, then moved progressively toward the secular rationalist identification that his subsequent education in economics at the University of Hawaii and Harvard would consolidate. He was brilliant. He was, by the testimony of his American classmates and professors, one of the most impressive students the economics department had encountered. He was also, as his American marriage proceeded, an alcoholic whose capacity to sustain the arrangement proved insufficient.

He left. He went to Harvard in 1963 — a year before his second son, Mark, was born to his second American wife, Ruth Nidesand, a white American woman from Newton, Massachusetts, whom he would meet in Cambridge and whom he would eventually bring back to Kenya, marry, and eventually divorce after extended domestic violence that the subsequent Kenyan biographical record has documented. He worked at Harvard, completed his doctoral coursework without finishing his dissertation, returned to Nairobi in 1965 as an economist for the Kenyan government. He would rise, across the late 1960s and into the 1970s, to senior positions in the Kenya Treasury and the Ministry of Finance, where the Kenyan government's post-independence economic planning was being assembled. He was, in the assessment of his Kenyan government colleagues, a figure of genuine policy brilliance who could project the economic futures of a developing nation with the kind of clarity that the colonial-era economists had not provided. He would then, across the 1970s, progressively destroy his career through alcoholism, through political conflicts with the Kikuyu-dominated Kenyatta government whose preferred economic policies differed substantially from Obama Sr.'s views on African socialism, and through the automobile accidents (one of which cost him both legs) that his drinking made increasingly likely. The government career that had once placed him at senior tables of the post-independence Kenyan state ended in demotion, isolation, and the poverty that his drinking accelerated. He would die on November 24, 1982, at age forty-six, in a car crash in Nairobi — his third serious automobile accident, this one fatal. Barry was twenty-one, a student at Columbia University in New York. He received the news by phone. He had seen his father exactly once since the age of two: for approximately a month at Christmas 1971, when Barry was ten years old. The meeting had been, in its emotional register, a disaster — the cold and authoritarian stranger who arrived was not the heroic father that Ann Dunham's careful biographical narration had constructed across the preceding decade. Barry had not spoken to his father since. He did not weep for long when the phone call came. He later described the experience as grieving for a loss that had occurred, in its real emotional sense, years earlier. He went to class the next day. He graduated from Columbia the following year, 1983.

The visit, when it came, was a disaster. Barry had, by ten, constructed from the photographs and letters the idealized father that Ann's narration had enabled. The actual man who arrived at Honolulu International Airport in December 1971 was a stranger. He was cold. He was authoritarian in ways that the American boy had no framework for. He disliked the family relationships Barry had built with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham. He argued with Stanley across dinners. He made pronouncements about African responsibility and discipline that the ten-year-old Barry found distant and alarming. He left after a month. Barry would not see him again.

The psychological deposit that the 1971 visit produced in Barry has been the subject of his own subsequent extended reflection — most notably in his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father, which is organized substantially around the question of what his absent father meant and how the constructed paternal ideal had shaped Barry's own self-understanding. The deposit, as Barry would subsequently articulate it, was double. The father had been, in his absence, the masculine reference point against which Barry measured his own emerging identity. The father had also been, in his one-month appearance, the demonstration that the constructed ideal did not correspond to the actual man. Barry would, across his adolescence and young adulthood, spend substantial internal effort trying to reconcile the gap between the two.

The effort had structural consequences. Barry became a reader. He read, across his adolescent years, substantial literary and political material that his mother and grandparents encouraged. He became an observer of the adults around him — watching, assessing, categorizing — in ways that his subsequent political career would convert into a political gift. He became, also, an accommodator. He had been raised primarily by white grandparents in a predominantly white social environment, but he was a Black boy whose racial identity was, across American society in the 1970s, registered first. He developed, across his adolescence, the capacity to navigate between different social and racial worlds with the sustained sensitivity that a child of his circumstances was required to develop. He was learning, without quite knowing he was learning it, the foundational operational skill of his subsequent political life.

Stanley and Madelyn Dunham — Gramps and Toot, as Barry called them — were the practical parental figures of his childhood. Stanley was a furniture salesman who had drifted across the American West before settling in Hawaii in 1960. He was, by all accounts, expansive, opinionated, sentimental, and limited. Madelyn had risen, across her career, from an escrow officer at a Honolulu bank into the vice-presidential position that made her, across the later years of Barry's upbringing, the family's primary income earner. She was, by contrast with Stanley, disciplined, conservative, and formidable. She retained across her life Kansas-white-working-class racial attitudes that Barry, as a Black teenager living in her household, would periodically encounter. He would describe her, in a 2008 campaign speech about race, as "a typical white person" who had, at moments, expressed fear of Black men crossing her path. The phrase would become, in the 2008 campaign context, one of the more widely debated moments of his public career.

What Stanley and Madelyn provided Barry was the stable domestic framework that Ann's more peripatetic adult life could not reliably supply. Ann — who had, following the dissolution of her marriage to Obama Sr., remarried in 1965 to an Indonesian geology graduate student named Lolo Soetoro — had taken Barry with her to Jakarta in 1967, when he was six. The Indonesia period would last approximately four years. In 1971, Ann sent Barry back to Honolulu to live with the Dunhams while she remained in Indonesia working on her doctoral research in anthropology. The decision — that Barry's American education required the stability his Dunham grandparents could provide — was the practical arrangement that produced the Punahou School years, the college preparation that his subsequent trajectory required, and the sustained encounter with his grandparents that his emerging character progressively absorbed.

He would live with the Dunhams from 1971 through 1979, when he left Honolulu for Occidental College in Los Angeles. The eight years were, in their register, the stable plateau of his childhood. Ann would visit across the period. The Soetoro family — Barry now had a half-sister, Maya, born in 1970 — would visit. But the daily domestic life was with Stanley and Madelyn in their apartment on Beretania Street, a short walk from Punahou, where Barry attended on the scholarship that his grandparents' professional networks had helped secure.

He was, at Punahou, one of a small handful of Black students across the entire school. The school enrolled, across Barry's years there, one or two other Black students per grade in a student body that ran to approximately 3,700 students total. He was not, by the assessment of his teachers, an exceptional student — his grades were in the B range, his academic engagement was measured rather than urgent. He played basketball on the school team under coach Chris McLachlin, spending hours in the gym developing the game that had become, across his adolescence, his primary competitive arena. The court was, in his own subsequent description, one of the few environments of his adolescence where the racial categories his wider world imposed were temporarily suspended — where being a tall, quick half-Kenyan kid from Honolulu was simply an advantage rather than a complication. He played point guard and shooting guard. He was, by the accounts of teammates, good but not exceptional — a player who understood the game better than his physical gifts alone would have produced, whose basketball intelligence was visible in how he positioned himself and when he passed. He wrote occasional poetry that survived into his adult archive. He smoked marijuana with a group of friends he called the Choom Gang — the word "choom" being Hawaiian slang — and the drug use was, across his later Punahou years, regular enough to constitute a pattern rather than an experiment. He acknowledged the drug use in Dreams from My Father, published in 1995, with unusual candor: "Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though." He developed, across his adolescent years, the watchful quietness that his subsequent public persona would retain. He did not, in the reports of his high school classmates, stand out. He was a Black kid on scholarship whose future path was not, at Punahou in 1978, visible.

He graduated from Punahou in 1979. His college applications led him to Occidental College, a small liberal-arts school in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, whose environment he found intellectually stimulating in ways that Punahou had not provided. He spent two years at Occidental, from 1979 to 1981, during which he delivered his first public political speech — at a campus rally against South African apartheid, organized by Occidental's student divestment campaign. The speech was brief and nervous. He was supposed to be dragged off the stage mid-address as a political theater piece. What he noticed, in the seconds before his pretend-removal, was the audience leaning toward him. He would, in his subsequent account of the moment, identify the Occidental speech as the first time he understood what political persuasion felt like from the speaker's side. It was the beginning of something.

He transferred to Columbia University in New York in 1981, after applying for transfer admission from Occidental and being accepted into the political science program. He was twenty. He lived for a period in Harlem — on 109th Street between Amsterdam and Broadway — in the low-income neighborhood that the Colombian drug trade and the Reagan-era crack cocaine surge would, across the succeeding years, transform into the specific urban crisis zone that his subsequent South Side organizing would rhyme with. He kept largely to himself. He ran three miles a day in Riverside Park, running the river paths in the early mornings before the city fully woke. He read obsessively across a curriculum of his own construction: Foucault and Marx and Derrida and the Frankfurt School; the Black American canon he had been working through since his Punahou years; Ellison and Wright and Baldwin in new readings, now with a different set of questions. He attended classes. He wrote papers. He completed his political science degree in 1983, concentrating in international relations, writing a senior thesis on Soviet nuclear policy and arms control. The Columbia years were, in the accounts he has offered across multiple subsequent memoirs and interviews, among the lonelier of his adult life. He was, in New York, another anonymous young Black man in a city whose racial dynamics he was still calibrating. He did not party. He did not pursue the social integration that university life conventionally offered. He read. He wrote in journals. He was, by his own description, working out questions about his identity that no classroom could answer. One Columbia classmate who remembered him was Sohale Siddiqi, a Pakistani student who had met Obama at Occidental and who shared a Harlem apartment with him for a stretch during 1981. Siddiqi later described Obama as serious, solitary, and already operating with the kind of moral intentionality that did not, at twenty, produce many close friendships.

Chapter 2 walks into the Indonesian interval and its subsequent impact on Barry's Hawaiian adolescence. The four years in Jakarta — from 1967 through 1971 — were the compressed period during which Barry was exposed to a different national and religious context that would, across the subsequent decades of his career, provide ammunition both for his supporters (who would cite the cross-cultural formation as foundational to his political capacity) and for his opponents (who would cite the Muslim-majority Indonesian context as evidence of a non-American religious identity he was concealing). Both framings were, at the level of the documentary record, substantially distorted. The actual Indonesian period was formative without being definitive. It contributed to Barry's emerging character without displacing the American identity the Dunham household was producing.