The past and the president

Barack Obama: The Making of the Man By David Maraniss. Atlantic Books, 643pp. £16.99

IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama made his story as a child of mixed African and American heritage his political calling card. Obama’s unique trajectory is proof that, contrary to what Republicans say, Obama not only believes in American exceptionalism but also embodies it.

“Every single day I walk into the Oval Office,” Obama told Latino leaders in late June, “every day that I have this extraordinary privilege of being your president, I will always remember that in no other nation on earth could my story even be possible. That’s something I celebrate.”

David Maraniss, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalist and author, has brought nuance and detail to at least two earlier acclaimed biographies, as well as books about Obama’s mother and father. Building on Obama’s own account, Maraniss interviewed 350 people in Kansas, Kenya, Jakarta, Hawaii, New York and Chicago. He charted the lives of the president’s parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, ferreting out omissions and disentangling the strands of what Obama admitted were composite characters.

William Faulkner famously wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Maraniss uses that quote, repeated often by Obama, as the justification for delving so deeply into Obama’s family history. Maraniss discovered a miracle of self-discipline and self-determination; the deliberate, relentless self-creation of a man whom nothing predestined to become president of the United States. Maraniss chronicles Obama’s quest to define his own identity, ending the book when the future president, aged 27, leaves for Harvard Law School.

Obama’s great-grandfather on his mother’s side drove his wife to suicide with his philandering. Maraniss opens his book with this tragedy, on Thanksgiving Day 1926. He tells the equally sordid stories of Obama’s African father and grandfather beating their wives, of Barack Hussein Obama snr’s death in an alcohol-related car crash.

This book tells how Obama rose above his history, willed himself to be Everyman. “Caught without a class, a structure or a tradition to support me . . . the only way to assuage my feelings of isolation is to absorb all traditions, classes,” Obama wrote to an early girlfriend, Alex McNear. “I don’t distinguish between struggling with the world and struggling with myself . . . I enter a pact with other people, other forces in the world, that their problems are mine and mine theirs.”

Obama initially titled his autobiography Journeys in Black and White. During his childhood years in Jakarta he was often mistaken for a native of Ambon, an island where people had darker skin. In Hawaii he lived among hapa, people of mixed race, like himself. But on the mainland Obama learned cruelly that in the US a drop of African blood makes you black. At Occidental College, in Los Angeles, he was mocked by other blacks as an “Oreo”, a cookie that is black on the outside, white on the inside. Physically, he resembles his white maternal grandfather far more than he resembles his Kenyan father.

With his African-American friend Eric Moore, Obama began to forge his black identity, through the songs of Bob Marley and Stevie Wonder. It was Moore who persuaded him to stop using an anglicised nickname, asking: “‘Barry Obama, what kind of name is that for a brother?’ And he said, ‘Well, my real name is Buh-ROCK. Barack Obama.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s a strong name. Rock, Buh-ROCK.’ ”

Even when he moved on to Colombia University and a brief corporate job in New York, Obama confessed to Genevieve Cook, his white girlfriend, that “he felt like an imposter. Because he was so white. There was hardly a black bone in his body.” Cook recorded that “it became very, very clear to me that he needed to go black”. As a social worker on the south side of Chicago, Obama finally “went black”.

The media buzz around Maraniss’s book has focused on McNear and Cook, who were glossed over as a composite character in Dreams from My Father, and on the future president’s use of marijuana at Punahou School, in Hawaii. Obama wrote frankly about the latter, but Maraniss takes the story further, describing him as an active member of the “choom gang”. (Choom is a verb meaning to smoke marijuana.)

With his usual self-discipline, Obama shed his marijuana habit, further evidence of what Maraniss calls “his determination to avoid life’s traps”. He overcame the instability and psychological pitfalls of his family history, the trap of geography – a childhood far from the US mainland – and, most of all, the trap of being slotted into a cliche by his race.

If Maraniss proves one thing, it is that character is formed early in life, that people do not change. At Punahou, one of Obama’s schoolmates recounted, he was “never panicked, never fazed”, a precursor of the “no-drama Obama” whose coolness and detachment sometimes frustrate supporters.

Jerry Kellman, the white Jewish social organiser who hired Obama in Chicago, described him as “one of the most cautious people I’ve ever met in my life. He was not unwilling to take risks, but was just this strange combination of someone who would have to weigh everything to death, and then take a dramatic risk at the end. He was reluctant to do confrontation.”

This is Barack Obama as we have seen him in office, whether pushing through healthcare reform or killing Osama bin Laden: cool and calm, shrinking from confrontation, but taking calculated risks when necessary. Surely desirable traits in a leader? We’ll learn next November if the American people think so.

Lara Marlowe is Washington Correspondent