Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama

By May 1949, Frank began writing an unpaid regular column for the Honolulu Record, a weekly paper that matched his political views. In July the FBI placed his name on the Security Index, a register of the nation’s most dangerous supposed subversives, and four months on he was added to DETCOM, the political equivalent of the Bureau’s “most wanted” list of top Communists marked for immediate detention in the event of a national emergency.

Frank had realized almost immediately that he would not be able to make a living as a writer in Hawaii, and in January 1950, he started Oahu Paper Company. That same month he and Helen purchased a home in the village of Hauula, thirty miles from Honolulu in northeastern Oahu, for their quickly growing family that included daughter Lynn, who was approaching her first birthday, and son Mark, who would be born ten months later.

The FBI began constant surveillance of the Davises’ mail in mid-1950, and in March 1951, a fire at Oahu Paper destroyed thousands of dollars’ worth of stock. The Bureau’s agents reported that Frank was fully insured, and in June 1952 an informant who had quit Hawaii’s Communist Party told agents he had personally collected Frank and Helen’s monthly party dues for the last two years. In early 1953 Frank became president of the small Hawaii Civil Rights Congress (HCRC), but within two years the group was “almost inactive.” The FBI also noted that on Christmas Day 1955 the Communist Party’s national newspaper, the Daily Worker, included an article by Frank on jazz.

By that time, Frank and Helen had a third child, but in April 1956, he closed Oahu Paper, filed for personal bankruptcy, and took a job as a salesman. That summer the family moved from Hauula to Kahaluu. Several months later, Eugene Dennis, general secretary of CPUSA, writing in a national newspaper, and then Frank in his weekly Honolulu Record column, said “there is no longer a Communist Party in Hawaii.” Even so, Mississippi senator James O. Eastland, chairman of the U.S. Senate’s Internal Security Subcommittee, scheduled a December hearing in Honolulu to probe Soviet activity in the balmy islands. Fearing how Davis might dress down the notoriously racist Eastland in a public hearing, the subcommittee instead subpoenaed Davis to appear at a private executive session, where he took the Fifth Amendment three times when questioned about his CPUSA ties. Just two weeks later, in another Record column, Frank forcefully attacked the Soviet Union for its military invasion of Hungary, calling the move “a tragic mistake from which Moscow will not soon recover.”

But Honolulu FBI agents, and their informants, kept their focus on Frank. In mid-1957 he told one supposed friend that Helen had taken up with a visiting musician who was performing in Waikiki. The Bureau quickly took note of Frank’s move to the Central YMCA for a month before he and Helen reconciled and the family moved to a house up in Honolulu’s Kalihi Valley neighborhood. In February 1958 Helen gave birth to twin daughters, and a year later Frank started a new company, Paradise Papers.

Two years later, agents learned that Helen was working for Avon Products and “works mostly in the evenings making house calls. As a result, subject is now forced to spend most of his evenings babysitting and has little opportunity to contact his former friends outside working hours.” That led Honolulu agents to request that Frank be demoted from the top-risk Security Index, but FBI headquarters refused until early 1963, when it ordered Honolulu to interview Frank about his past affiliations, and Frank met with two agents in Kapiolani Park on August 26, 1963. Asked to confirm his CPUSA membership, Frank said the party had not existed in Hawaii for at least seven years and that it would do him no good to acknowledge his past membership. But, Frank added, he would “consort with the devil” in order to advance racial equality. With that the FBI finally closed its file on fifty-seven-year-old Frank Marshall Davis.

Frank busied himself with Paradise Papers, but it, and Helen’s work, hardly provided enough money to raise a family. By June 1968, Frank’s two eldest children had graduated high school, and that summer Frank earned a modest sum of money by publishing a self-proclaimed sexual autobiography, Sex Rebel: Black—Memoirs of a Gash Gourmet, under the pseudonym “Bob Greene.” It began with an introduction, supposedly authored by “Dale Gordon, Ph.D.,” which observed that the author may have “strong homosexual tendencies.” “Bob Greene” then acknowledged that “under certain circumstances I am bisexual” and stated that “all incidents I have described have been taken from actual experiences” and were not fictionalized. “Bob’s” dominant preference was threesomes, and he recounted the intense emotional trauma he experienced years earlier when he learned that a white Chicago couple with whom he had repeatedly enjoyed such experiences were killed in a violent highway accident.

“Bob,” or Frank, championed recreational sex, arguing that “this whole concept of sex-for-reproduction-only carries with it contempt for women. It implies that women were created solely to bear children.” And Frank did little to hide behind the “Bob Greene” pseudonym with close friends. Four months after the 323-page, $1.75 paperback first appeared, Frank wrote to his old Chicago friend Margaret Burroughs to let her know about the availability of “my thoroughly erotic autobiography.” Since it was “what some people call pornography (I call it erotic realism),” it would not be in Chicago bookstores. “You are ‘Flo,’ ” and “you will find out things about me sexually that you probably never suspected—but in this period of wider acceptance of sexual attitudes, I can be more frank than was possible 20 years ago.” He closed by telling Burroughs, “I’m still swinging.”

In June 1969, Frank moved from his family’s home to a small cottage just off Kuhio Avenue in the cramped, three-square-block section of Waikiki known as the Koa Cottages or simply the Jungle. He and Helen divorced the next year, and, as his son Mark would later write, Frank “entered his golden years with glee,” given what life in the Jungle offered. As Frank described it, his little studio had a tiny front porch “only two feet from the sidewalk” and “my pad is sort of a meeting area, kind of a town hall to an extent.” The Jungle was “a place known for both sex and dope,” and was really “a ghetto surrounded by high-rise buildings,” but it was without a doubt “the most interesting place I have ever lived.” Soon after moving there, Frank became known as the “Keeper of the Dolls,” and he later recounted how he had written “a series of short portraits called ‘Horizontal Cameos’ about women who make their living on their backs.”

Two of Frank’s closest acquaintances from the early and mid-1970s readily and independently confirm that Stan Dunham was one of Frank’s best friends during the years he lived in the Jungle. Dawna Weatherly-Williams, a twenty-two-year-old white woman with a black husband and an interracial son, was by 1970 effectively Frank’s adopted daughter and called him “Daddy.” She later described Stan as “a wonderful guy.” She said he and Frank “had good fun together. They knew each other quite a while before I knew them—several years. They were really good buddies. They did a lot of adventures together that they were very proud of.” As of 1970 Stan “came a couple of times a week to visit Daddy,” and the two men particularly enjoyed crafting “a lot of limericks that were slightly off-color, and they took great fun in those” and in other discussions of sex, which Dawna would avoid.

Despite what was readily available in the neighborhood, “Frank never really did drugs, though he and Stan would smoke pot together,” Dawna remembered. Stan had told Frank about his exceptionally bright interracial grandson well before August 1970. According to Dawna, “Stan had been promising to bring Barry by because we all had that in common—Frank’s kids were half-white, Stan’s grandson was half-black, and my son was half-black.” Decades later she could still picture the afternoon when Stan brought young Barry along to first meet Frank: “Hey, Stan! Oh, is this him?” She remembers that over the next nine or ten years, Stan brought his grandson with him again and again when he went to visit Frank, and as Barry got older, Stan encouraged him to talk with Davis on his own. Obama would remember, “I was intrigued by old Frank,” and years later his younger half sister, Maya Kassandra Soetoro, who was born on August 15, 1970, during her brother’s visit with their grandparents in Hawaii, described Stanley telling her that Davis “was a point of connection, a bridge if you will, to the larger African American experience for my brother.” Once Obama entered politics, Davis’s Communist background plus his kinky exploits made him politically radioactive, and Obama would grudgingly admit only to having visited Davis maybe “ten to fifteen times.”22

Soon after Ann Dunham Soetoro’s second child was born, Madelyn Dunham, along with her grandson, flew to Jakarta to see her new granddaughter and to meet Lolo’s mother and family. Within weeks nine-year-old Barry was back at Besuki school to start fourth grade. The boy who sat next to him, Widiyanto Hendro, later “said Obama sometimes struggled to make himself understood in Indonesian and at times used hand signals to communicate.” The summer in Honolulu had not improved his limited grasp of the Indonesian language, and Lolo’s relatives who saw Barry during his fourth-grade school year noted how much chubbier he had become during his now three-plus years in Indonesia.

For more than a year in Honolulu, Lolo Soetoro had served as Barry’s off-site stepfather, often roughhousing with him and also playing chess with Stanley at the Dunhams’ home. Then, in Jakarta, Barry lived with Lolo on a daily basis for just more than three years, and throughout that time the young boy was impressed with Lolo’s knowledge and self-control, especially the latter. “His knowledge of the world seemed inexhaustible,” particularly with “elusive things,” such as “managing the emotions I felt,” Obama would later write. Lolo’s own temperament was “imperturbable,” and Barry “never heard him talk about what he was feeling. I had never seen him really angry or sad. He seemed to inhabit a world of hard surfaces and well-defined thoughts.”

Three decades later, after Obama’s memoir Dreams From My Father was published, he would select the brief portrait of Lolo he had written when asked to give a short reading from his book. In that scene, young Barry asks his stepfather if he has ever seen someone killed, and when Lolo reluctantly says yes, Barry asks why. “Because he was weak,” Lolo answers. Barry was puzzled. Strong men “take advantage of weakness in other men,” Lolo responds, and asks Barry, “Which would you rather be?” Lolo declares, “Better to be strong. If you can’t be strong, be clever and make peace with someone who’s strong. But always better to be strong yourself. Always.”

In subsequent years, Obama would believe that by 1970–71, Lolo’s acclimation to his new job with Union Oil led Ann to become increasingly disillusioned with her second husband’s evolution into an American-style business executive. Obama admired Lolo’s “natural reserve” if not his “remoteness,” and believed his mother’s growing disappointment with Lolo led her to use an image of his absent father to persuade her son to pursue a life of idealism over comfort. “She paints him as this Nelson Mandela/Harry Belafonte figure, which turns out to be a wonderful thing for me in the sense that I end up having a very positive image” of my father, Obama would later recount. “I had a whole mythology about who he was,” a “mythology that my mother fed me.” But his memories of Lolo from 1970–71 would become dismissive. “His big thing was Johnnie Walker Black, Andy Williams records,” Obama recalled. “I still remember ‘Moon River.’ He’d be playing it, sipping, and playing tennis at the country club. That was his whole thing. I think their expectations diverged fairly rapidly” after 1970.

Some scholars would later credit “the Javanese art of restraint, of not displaying emotions, of never raising your voice,” all of which young Barry witnessed in Lolo, with deeply influencing Obama. Lolo “was as close to a father figure as Obama ever had,” albeit briefly, and “the lessons Obama learned from Jakarta and Lolo,” particularly not “disclosing too much about how one feels,” supplied the human template for Obama’s own practice and appreciation of the “benefit of managing emotions,” a second commentator would conclude.

In subsequent years, when asked about the impact on him of his three-plus years in Indonesia, Obama more often cited an external perception—“I lived in a country where I saw extreme poverty at a very early age”—than any internal conclusions or emotional lessons. “It left a very strong mark on me living there because you got a real sense of just how poor folks can get,” he told one questioner twenty years later. “I was educated in the potential oppressiveness of power and the inequality of wealth,” he told another. “I witnessed firsthand the huge gulf between rich and poor” and “I think it had a tremendous impact on me,” he explained more than once. Such an insistent theme would lead one smart journalist to assert years later that for Obama, “Indonesia was the formative experience.”23

Sometime soon after his tenth birthday, in early August 1971, Barry again flew from Jakarta to Honolulu. As he had the previous summer, he would live with his grandparents, and in September he began fifth-grade classes at Punahou School, just a four-block walk up Punahou Street. Families of fifth (and sixth) graders received a “narrative conference report form three times during the school year. No letter grades are given. At the initial conference during the fall, achievement test scores, the class standing and a detailed written evaluation of progress in each subject area will be discussed.” Four major subject areas—Language Arts, Social Studies, Mathematics, and Science—were supplemented by a weekly arts class, a music class, and four sessions of physical education. A year’s tuition was $1,165. With two well-employed parents, plus his grandparents—Madelyn nine months earlier had been named one of Bank of Hawaii’s first two women vice presidents—Obama did not receive any form of financial aid.

For Mathematics and Science, Barry was taught by twenty-five-year-old Hastings Judd Kauwela “Pal” Eldredge, who had graduated from Punahou seven years earlier and earned his undergraduate degree at Brigham Young University. For Language Arts and Social Studies, in 307 Castle Hall, Barry had his homeroom teacher, fifty-six-year-old Mrs. Mabel Hefty, a 1935 graduate of San Francisco State College who had taught at Punahou since 1947 and had spent a recent sabbatical year teaching in Kenya. At Punahou, fifth graders had homework, and after a brief period of Barry tackling it at the Dunhams’ dining room table, Stan asked Alec Williamson, his insurance agency friend, to build a desk to go in Barry’s small bedroom. In return, Barry offered Williamson a guitar he had lost interest in. (Williamson still had it more than forty years later.)

As an adult, Obama would praise Hefty for making him feel entirely welcome and fully at home among classmates, most of whom had been together since kindergarten or first grade. Hefty split her class into groups of four at shared desks; Barry was with Ronald Loui, Malcolm Waugh, and Mark “Hebs” Hebing, his best friend that year. “Mrs. Hefty was a great teacher,” Hebing recalled. “One of the first things we had to do” was “memorize the Gettysburg Address”—“the whole thing.” In Hebing’s memory forty years later, Barry was the first student to succeed.

There was one other African American student, Joella Edwards, in Barry’s fifth-grade class, and she was “shocked” by the arrival of her new classmate. She would remember Barry as “soft-spoken, quiet, and reserved,” but he hung back from befriending her in any way. Ronald Loui, like Joella, would recall other classmates teasing both her and Barry with common grade-school rhymes. “There were many times that I looked to Barry for a word, a sign, or signal that we were in this together,” Joella later wrote, but none ever came. For the next three years too—grades six, seven, and eight—they would be the only two black students in Punahou’s middle school, but no bond ever formed before Joella left Punahou come tenth grade.24

In late October 1971, Ann Dunham returned to Honolulu from Jakarta. It is unclear who suggested what to whom, but the timing of her trip was not happenstance because five weeks or so after her arrival in Honolulu, Barack H. Obama Sr. arrived there as well, from Nairobi.

The seven years since Obama Sr. had been forced to leave the United States in July 1964 had been eventful and often painful. Not even a week after his departure, an agitated woman from Newton, Massachusetts, Ida Baker, twice telephoned the Boston INS office to report that her twenty-seven-year-old daughter, Ruth, was so romantically infatuated with Obama she was planning to follow him to Kenya and get married. In late August, Mrs. Baker called again to say that Ruth had flown to Nairobi on August 16. An INS agent checked in with Unitarian reverend Dana Klotzle, as well as an official at Harvard, both of whom reported that Obama already had two wives, plus a child in Honolulu. Mrs. Baker acknowledged that Ruth knew of at least the wife in Kenya, but pursued Obama anyway. The agent concluded the report with: “Suggest we discourage her from further inquiries,” because it was “time consuming and to no point where her daughter, an adult and apparently fully competent, is in possession of the information re Obama’s marriages.”

Ruth Beatrice Baker, a 1958 graduate of Simmons College, had become involved with Obama in April 1964 after meeting him at a party. “He had a flat in Cambridge with some other African students, and I was there almost every day from then on. I felt I loved him very much—he was very charming and there never was a dull moment—but he was not faithful to me, although he told me he loved me too.” In June, Obama told her he had to return to Kenya, but said she “should come there, and if I liked the country we could marry. I took him at his word” and bought a one-way plane ticket despite how “devastated” her parents were. But Obama was not at the Nairobi airport to meet her, and a helpful airport employee who knew Obama took her home, made some phone calls, and Obama soon appeared. “We went off and started living together” in a home at 16 Rosslyn Close, but “right from the very start he was drinking heavily, staying out to all hours of the night” and “sometimes hitting me and often verbally insulting me,” Ruth later recounted. “But I was in love and very, very insecure so somehow I hung on.”

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.”