Obama and Family

Review of David Maraniss, Barack Obama: The Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), ISBN 978-1-4391-6040-4, 641 pages, hardbound, $32.50.

The book’s title could have been The Obama Family Saga, as it is as much about his grandparents and parents as it is about the President. Only eight of the 18 chapters are about him. He is not born until almost a third into the book, and he is 27 when the biography ends. Maraniss has managed to find and talk to more people who knew Obama and his relatives than anyone else. His themes are that Obama seeks to avoid life’s traps, is very cautious, and has forged a distinct identity.

The book’s strongest parts address Obama’s time in Manhattan in the 1980s while studying at Columbia. Maraniss quotes extensively from letters Obama wrote to one girl friend and journal excerpts by another. The author’s impressive achievement is persuading them to let him use these materials. Obama writes of himself as a man “without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me” and who sought “to assuage my feelings of isolation” by absorbing “all the traditions” (p. 452). Despite Obama’s soul-searching, one of his romantic partners, Genevieve Cook, found he kept “a veil” separating himself from others (p. 481). Still, his psychology comes through. There is also a third romantic partner, this time in Chicago. This woman and Cook were anthropology students, as was Obama’s mother. He had told Cook that for the past two years he was pushing his mother away, yet he was dating women who resembled her (p. 491). While Obama then was struggling with his racial identity, all three of these lovers were white. Cook tells Maraniss, there “was hardly a black bone in his body.” Another friend recollects that Obama “never had many black friends” (p. 497). Maraniss concludes that Obama “remade himself” (p. 417). Obama is African American in a different sense than most American blacks. He is equally black African and white American, and has no rela-

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tives who were American slaves, sharecroppers, or were raised in our urban ghettos. Obama has made a greater self-transformation than any other American president.

Maraniss has impressive skills as a narrator; this is a richly textured book. His thesis about Obama as a cautious man seeking to avoid life’s traps has merit. Yet Maraniss shies away from some rougher edges, except concerning the President’s biological father. Barack Obama Sr. was a womanizer, an alcoholic, and an abusive husband. Maraniss portrays the full scope of Obama Sr.’s destructiveness and self-destructiveness, but less the flaws of the future President’s maternal grandfather, Stan Dunham. While Maraniss does document the elder Dunham’s frequent geographical moves, that his wife made more than he did, and the distanced relationship between him and his only child (Ann Dunham, the President’s mother), he omits much that others have discussed. For example, Dunham’s volatile temper made for stormy family relationships. When his daughter was a teenager, he would let her friends drive his car if they sat on his lap. Ann sought to escape from her father’s control and unusual behavior, but he insisted she go to the University of Hawaii and live at home (Janny Scott, A Singular Woman, 2011, pp. 46-47). Six weeks after this 17 year-old started college, she was pregnant.

Maraniss’ portrait of Ann Dunham is also milder than others have presented. He does say that she resembled her father in being a restless soul who moved from place to place. To Maraniss, Ann became a hard-working, knowledgeable, professional anthropologist, who was even employed by the Ford Foundation in Indonesia. Maraniss does not mention that once Ann’s contract was up, she was let go, nor does he show that she had trouble completing things, including taking 11 years to finish her master’s degree and another nine to complete her doctorate (Scott, p. 25; Stuart Lau, to reviewer, May 27, 2009). Her son said that she “was not a well-organized person” and was “always at the margins.” Both of Ann’s children said that she remained financially dependent on her parents for much of her life (Scott, pp. 252-254, p. 267). Maraniss does not report these deficiencies, nor that Ann hit Barry, discouraged him from showing emotion when Indonesian children would pelt him with rocks in her presence, nor the rebukes she would direct at him

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when he expressed his feelings. Obama’s caution and often hiding his emotions are connected to his need to accommodate his mother. He never knew when she was going to lavishly praise him, be sharp tongued, uproot him, or send him away.

Maraniss does shed some light on what happened between the President’s parents. After marrying Ann, Obama Sr. kept a separate residence. Maraniss correctly concludes that Obama was a “man who was married in name only” (p. 175). Yet Maraniss does not report Obama’s April 1961 statement to the University that he did not live with Ann. While Ann told her son that his father remained with them for two years, Maraniss effectively debunks this. She and her child moved from Hawaii to Seattle when her infant was a month old. The father left Hawaii before his wife and son returned. When Maraniss considers what led to Ann’s leaving Hawaii with a newborn, he does not ask why she would separate from her parents. Nor does he report that Obama Sr.’s African step-mother said that Stanley was furious with his daughter’s marriage. Her father’s rage could be a reason Ann left Honolulu. In some ways, Ann never recovered from these tumultuous events of her adolescence. Her son was deeply marked by his mother’s unsettledness and seeks stability and reliability. He is no-drama Obama.

Barack Obama, the future prophet of self development through a united American community, is better suited for a time of reconciliation and prosperity than of political slash and burn and deep economic divides. In seeking to remake himself and transcend divisions, he wants the American center to hold and does not fully recognize, as Yeats did, that the “blood-dimmed tide” has been unleashed and that “the worst” are “full of passionate intensity” (Yeats, Collected Poems, 1950, pp. 184-185). The roots of Obama’s underestimating the irrational stem from his response to his childhood travails. Maraniss supplies much of the necessary evidence and omits other information. As admirable as his book is, the definitive psychohistorical biography of this president has yet to be written.

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