The Other Barack (19 page)

At a time when many linked Africa's rejection of colonialism to American blacks' escalating demand for equal treatment, Obama's passion was infectious. But he was also conversant on a range of other issues as well. Abercrombie, for one, admired Obama's intellectual reach. “He was brilliant,” he said. “He did not have to cultivate the image. His grasp of the subject matter was total, and part of the reason for that was his willingness to get the information. He was an absolute bear for work.”

Africa was Obama's singular burning focus, but he understood that America's own evolving political situation had global implications. Aware that as a foreign student—and a highly visible one at that—his activities did not go unnoticed, he often declined to get involved in some of the more public events in which his friends were engaged. But Obama could not resist taking to the podium on occasion. In May 1962, for example, he addressed a Mother's Day peace rally in Ala Moana Park, declaring that, “Anything which relieves military spending will help us. ... Peace will release great resources.”

On the subject of civil rights, Obama's engagement was complete. He was a voracious reader of newspapers and would pepper other students about the history of repression of blacks in the United States. The idea of
protest, so resonant of his own country's ongoing drama, appealed to him. And despite his general caution about engaging in political events, he at times jumped in. When Alabama governor John M. Patterson, an avowed enemy of integration, arrived in Honolulu for the National Governors' Conference in the summer of 1961, Obama was among a surging crowd demonstrating at the airport. He later participated in a picket at Patterson's hotel. “This was the first real civil rights demonstration in Hawaii,” said Hal Abercrombie. “There were Chinese, Japanese, haoles, and Barack there. He was the only black person. He was surrounding the governor's car with everyone else calling for an end to segregation.”

Obama's participation came at a price. Few could measure up to his level of commitment, and he treated with respect only the small inner circle of those who did. He had no patience for other people's shortcomings and grew visibly exasperated with those he perceived as having lesser abilities than his own. If he was not interested in what someone else was saying, he would talk right over them. And if he felt their point was not well articulated, he bluntly told them so. If others were not so intimidated by his verbal onslaught and jabbing pipe, they might have given it right back to him. “He did not lack for a sense of self-importance. We forgave him for that because he was so genuine. But he was a very daunting personality,” sighed Abercrombie. “He just could not contain his irritation with people who were not as facile as he, and he did not hesitate to say so.”

Few experienced the force of that personality more fully than a musicologist visiting from the university from South Africa. The man, who was white, was scheduled to address the students over the course of days, but Obama and another student had a different agenda. On the first night, when the man approached the podium in Orvis Auditorium, Obama leapt to his feet before the other man could open his mouth. What right did the white South African government have to deprive Africans of citizenship? When the man attempted to answer, the other student, strategically positioned on the opposite side of the auditorium, would jump to his feet and fire off more aggressive questions at the musicologist. On and on it went. Their verbal battering made it virtually impossible for the man to respond, and finally he surrendered and walked off the stage. Some students joined in the questioning and applauded when the speaker left. But a few in the audience, even those who were opposed to apartheid, were left feeling
ambivalent about the ambush. “It just went on and on and the poor guy finally gave up,” recalled Kimo Gerald, now the house manager at Carnegie Hall in New York. “I had mixed feelings at the time because his delivery and body language sent the message to me that he was not an apologist for apartheid. But here he was forced in his position to represent the South African government in Hawaii.”

Another place that regarded Obama with some consternation was the university's international student office. Administrators there repeatedly asked Obama to come into the office and complete some routine paperwork in his file, but he never showed up. His record was incomplete and vague, and the university could not fathom why. They were also becoming concerned about reports of Obama's dating habits; the international student office was the first to raise the questions about his womanizing and uncertain marital status. Every time he was asked about his family, Obama had a different answer depending on what served him the best. Sometimes he had a wife in Kenya, sometimes he did not. When he met his second wife, he claimed to have divorced the first. Later, he decided he had not. Mostly, he tried not to answer the question. Even so, such questions would dog him throughout his stay and would eventually culminate in disastrous results.

Immigration officials struggled to get to the truth of the matter. Sumi McCabe, UH's foreign student adviser, brought the issue to their attention during Obama's second summer in Hawaii, when she reported that Obama “has been running around with several girls since he first arrived here,” according to a 1961 memo written by Lyle H. Dahling, an administrator with the Immigration and Naturalization Service's Honolulu office.

Dahling's memo is one of dozens of communications regarding Obama that the INS maintained in his alien file, known internally as an “A” file. Although Obama was likely unaware of it, such files are kept on any non–U.S. citizen in the country who has ongoing communication with federal immigration agencies. The correspondence includes Obama's applications to extend his period of admission to the country, requests for permission to work, as well as numerous related school documents and memos. McCabe told Dahling in an April 1961 phone conversation that during the previous year she had “cautioned him about his playboy ways. Subject
[Obama] replied that he would ‘try' to stay away from the girls,” according to Dahling's memo.
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He didn't try very hard. Early on, Obama gained a reputation as a party man who liked his whiskey straight up. Although he worked diligently, he was also a regular at gatherings at Atherton House and the Pacific House, another hangout popular with international students. Obama would grab a guitar and entertain the crowd by crooning his favorite Kenyan lullabies. And at private gatherings, he would drink. By his early twenties Obama already had a legendary capacity for his beloved Johnnie Walker, and he would regularly down half a dozen drinks as his jokes grew increasingly raucous and his come-ons to women more overt. At such moments no one had the faintest idea that he was married with two small children back at home. “He was a real ladies' man,” recalled Dorothy Heckman Gregor, a graduate student at the time. “He was always ready to engage you as a woman beyond the normal conversation, you know, to take it one step further. Today you'd call it ‘coming on.' Part of the attraction was his intellect. He was just a really smart guy. But he was also a very good conversationalist. Women were really attracted to him.”

In the fall of 1959 Juditha Clark Murashige was fresh back from several months at a work-study program in Tanganyika and Kenya, and she immediately noticed a striking African man walking across the UH campus. When the attractive freshman with the cascade of blonde hair approached him, Obama leapt to his favorite topic and the two had a series of coffee dates over the next few months. One night they ventured down to Waikiki beach and dropped into Don the Beachcomber's, a trendy nightclub soon to become a tourist hot spot. They did not sit long. As the throbbing music grew louder, Obama spun around on his toes and twirled Murashige across the dance floor, her hair streaming behind her. Watching as their bodies glided toward one another, almost pressing together before they swung apart again, patrons at the bar grew silent. An ambitious African student was one thing, but a sweaty black man handling a pale co-ed in public was something else entirely. “This was a fairly upper-crust kind of crowd, and we were laughing and having fun,” recalled Murashige. “People were watching us, of course, and that made it even more fun. I think some people didn't know what to think.”

Although Obama cultivated an active social life, he devoted much of his energy to his work. Early on, he decided he would try to complete his coursework as swiftly as he could, partly to hasten his return to Kenya but also to reduce his tuition. By his second semester Obama was already running out of money and took a job that paid $5 a day as a dishwasher at the Ink Blot Coffee Shop downtown. During his first summer he worked for the Dole Corporation doing odd jobs for $1.33 an hour.
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Money would be a perennial problem throughout his years in the United States, and Obama was constantly under pressure to come up with the following year's tuition.

Ultimately, he would complete his undergraduate work in three years rather than the standard four, but to do so he assumed an increasingly large course load. In his first semester Obama was registered in the College of Business Administration and signed up for a standard lineup of classes. These included Business Calculations, English Composition, Introduction to Government, World Civilization, Personal Hygiene, and Public Speaking. His first year grades were good, but not stellar. In all he earned mostly A's, with a smattering of B's. He got a single C in his Introduction to American History course during the summer session.
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One of the B's was for a class in Public Speaking, taught by James C. McCroskey, a young teacher from South Dakota who would remain in Hawaii for a single year. At the time, each speaking class selected its strongest student who would then compete against one another in hopes of winning a spot on the school's debate team. McCroskey remembers Obama trying out for a spot on the team, but he was not impressed with the young African: “He had a good voice, but he did not have very much to say. I remember him being loud more than anything, and not very distinct. But he was very open and friendly.”

Ed Hasegawa, who had been raised by second generation Japanese parents on a sugar plantation on the Big Island, was a student in public speaking as well. Because he had been in the armed services for three years, he was, like Obama, somewhat older than the rest of the class, and the two often had lunch together. They chose the Snack Bar, where prices were significantly lower than the cafeteria in Hemenway Hall. As with Varez, they too had the same thing to eat for every lunch. “We'd get the sandwich made out of the heels of the bread because it was the cheapest, ten cents a
sandwich,” said Hasagawa. “And on the inside were tiny bits of minced ham, you know, the leftover pieces that they crushed together. It was okay. It was really the only thing we could afford, that sandwich and a drink.”

By the end of his first year Obama had had it with public speaking. He decided he would focus more on his calling, the economics and statistics classes that would be of practical use. He also had a language requirement to satisfy. Obama had an abiding interest in the Soviet Union, largely due to his admiration for Oginga Odinga, the Luo politician who had secured a number of scholarships from there for young Kenyans. Despite the simmering hostilities of the Cold War, one of the more popular language courses on the UH campus was Russian. Ever since the Soviet Union had successfully launched the Sputnik satellite a few years earlier, the course had been in such great demand that the school had retained a second Russian teacher. Obama decided to add Introductory Russian to his lengthening course load in the fall of his second year.

That class was where he would meet a seventeen-year-old from Seattle with an appetite for the unconventional. Her name was Stanley Ann Dunham.

 

IN AUGUST 1960 PRESIDENT EISENHOWER signed an appropriations bill that would have a strong ripple effect thousands of miles away on the UH campus. The bill included an allocation of $10 million to establish an international exchange center at the university, officially called the Center for Cultural and Technical Interchange Between East and West. The aim of the project was to improve relations between Asia and the United States by creating a place where intellectuals from around the world could gather and share ideas.

Months after the bill was signed, construction began on the center's new buildings on the east end of campus near the Manoa River where the College of Tropical Agriculture's chickens used to roost. It was another triumph for Hawaii. The East West Center, as it came to called, was not only an added jewel in the crown of statehood, but it also meant that Honolulu might soon become recognized as the “Geneva of the Pacific,” as it had long envisioned itself.

As the Center's new students began to trickle in from Burma, Japan, the Philippines, and farther afield, the flavor of the campus began to grow
decidedly more varied. In Atherton House in particular, where some of the new grantees were housed while their dormitories were being built, discussions about global affairs and the realpolitik of the Cold War were commonplace. Downstairs, the meals students prepared in the small kitchen emitted an array of exotic scents. Bored with the docile under graduate students and their humdrum concerns, Obama welcomed his new housemates with enthusiasm. Early on, he warned them that the intellectual caliber of the school was disappointing. Not only did the students not study very hard, but the professors themselves were not particularly stimulating. Obama gravitated to the older, more sophisticated crowd from the start, and when the Center was completed the following year, he dined there a couple of times a week. “When I came in for dinner, he would be surrounded by people at the table, sort of holding court. He was in charge of the table and I had a feeling that was what he wanted,” said Gregor, an East West student for two years. “He had a very authoritative air about him and he told us about Africa. But mostly he would ask questions. He really wanted to know about America.”