Ending just before Barack Obama joins Harvard, this biography paints a Byzantine life and the discovery of that magical surge of energy which comes when a speaker has an audience rapt and buying in
In ?Barack Obama?, David Maraniss (who won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Bill Clinton) has written a sweeping narrative which reveals the real story of Obama?s beginnings: child of a black man from Luoland and a white woman born in Texas. He charts the fortunes of the two disparate families, polar opposites in every way, which produced these two extraordinary individuals, who met briefly in Hawaii, never cohabited, and married only to legitimise the child born of that union. At the heart of Obama?s psyche and his political beliefs?and therefore his presidency?is his life-long struggle to understand the extreme duality of his identity. Maraniss explores his extraordinary journey from a mixed race boy raised by white grandparents in laid-back Hawaii to an African America with a burning political vision and vocation.
?Barack Obama? contains a wealth of new material. Maraniss reveals here previously unpublished love letters written by Obama as a young man in a search of an identity: black or white, writer or a man who could lead. He also includes the journal entries of Obama?s first significant (white) girlfriend, which chart their intense relationship and the moment when young Barack realised that he must leave everything behind him and set out for Chicago in order to ?become? an African American. The story wrought here is one of fierce ambition, survival, and love. Excerpt:
His classmates considered Obama ?a floater,? moving not only from culture to culture but also from political group to political group, dabbling, showing interest, but never staking a home, never grabbing hold of something and making it his. This was a natural part of college experimentation, to be sure, but in Obama?s case it reflected a deeper and longer-lasting trend, one that would define his life in and out of politics: his need and ability to avoid traps. The less entrenched he was, the easier it was for him to get out of something and move on. He had enough traps already: the trap of not knowing his father; the trap of growing up in Hawaii, farther from any continental landmass than anywhere in the world except Easter Island; the trap of growing up hapa, caught between worlds. Those were the early traps, and he was just now finding his way safely around them. By the middle of his sophomore year, after being steeped in political theory by Roger Boesche, after endless political discussions with Hasan Chandoo, Caroline Boss, with Earl Chew and Sarah Etta-Harris, with Margot Mifflin and Eric Moore, he had become part of Oxy?s activist network. Chandoo was constantly writing letters to The Occidental, articulating his skepticism about America?s intentions in the cold war struggle against the Soviets. He pleaded for American leaders to ?spare the Third World in their effort to save them from the communist threat,? noting, ?There has been enough blood shed in the Third World to know that we do not want this type of benevolent attitude from either the USA or the USSR.?
There was no Vietnam War to protest against, no single dominant issue providing the combination of idealism and self-interest that could ignite a movement. But they did have one issue to rally around: South Africa and the quest to abolish the racism of apartheid. Since 1977 the Student Coalition against Apartheid had been pushing Occidental?s board of trustees to divest all school holdings in corporations that did business in South Africa. The intensity of the divestiture effort ebbed and flowed, depending on its leadership and the normal college distractions and diversions, but it had picked up again just as Obama was getting involved. He and Chandoo participated in a vigil protesting the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela. Chandoo and Boss were behind-the-scenes leaders of the divestiture issue on campus and certainly helped draw Obama into that effort, though in his memoir he offered another perspective on the subtleties of his motivation: ?It had started as something of a lark, I suppose, part of the radical pose my friends and I sought to maintain, a subconscious end run around issues closer to home.?
However it started, he got into it more every week, and eventually it led him to one of the key moments of his time at Oxy, the first public political speech of his life. It came on a Wednesday afternoon, February 18, 1981, the same day the new president, Ronald Reagan, one month into his presidency, delivered an address to a joint session of Congress outlining his plan for national economic recovery. It was a sun-splashed day in Southern California as Obama stood in the Arthur G. Coons Administrative Center Plaza, looking out on a gathering of a few hundred students. Up on the second floor of Coons, the board of trustees was about to meet, and whenever the door opened to their conference room the clamour outside washed in. Policemen planted themselves outside the locked door. One officer escorted Rary Simmons, a 1953 Oxy grad and trustee from upscale San Marino, down the hallway to the restroom. Black armbands, music, chanting. Money out, freedom in! The timeless protest chestnut The people united will never be defeated! When Occidental?s president, Richard C Gilman, came into sight on his way to the board meeting, he received a personal greeting: President Gilman, what?s the word? Oxy?s not Johannesburg. Behind Obama stood Caroline Boss, who had fumbled nervously in her introduction of the main speaker, Tim Ngubeni, a South African activist, who had issued the call for Oxy to ?invest your money elsewhere? and invited the students to a concert across town that night at UCLA?s Royce Hall to raise money for the Steve Biko Fund. Biko was a South African martyr of the freedom movement, a former student leader and promoter of black consciousness who had died three years earlier in police custody in a Pretoria prison. To the side stood Earl Chew and Sarah Etta-Harris, also on the speaking roster, along with Eric Newhall, a comparative literature professor who represented the faculty committee on multicultural education.
Obama had been given a scripted role in the protest drama. What he said was not supposed to be the point of his being up there. It was designed as a bit of guerrilla theater, with students dressed as policemen yanking him from the stage, symbolising attempts by the establishment, there and in South Africa, to stifle the movement. The microphone was too low for him. He had to hunch over to project his voice, but once he started speaking, he built a cadence: ?There?s a struggle going on… I say there?s a struggle going on… It?s happening an ocean away. But it?s a struggle that touches each and every one of us, whether we know it or not. A struggle that demands we choose sides… It?s a choice between dignity and servitude, between fairness and injustice.? And he started to feel that magical surge of energy and power that comes when a speaker has an audience rapt and buying in. In the wings, Eric Moore turned to Tim Yeaney and asked, ?Should we go ahead with the plan?? Yeaney said, ?Yes!? and they marched up to Obama and dragged him away from the microphone.
Looking back on it later, Yeaney remarked on how even he was struck by Obama?s performance, which he thought was an unpolished version of what millions of people would see 25 and 30 years later. ?It was like eating a really good chocolate cake and someone takes it away from you,? Yeaney said. ?You want it more. What we intended was someone would say a few phrases, but he really launched into it and the crowd was into it. It was startlingly good. It was much more than we expected. It was genuine… It was very passionate, very heartfelt. It was not dramatic, it was just calm but passionate… Even days afterwards people were just saying how impressed they were with his speech.?
There were, in retrospect, two notable and related aspects to this event. The first was that it gave Obama the first intimations of what it was like to move crowds, large or small, with words. Words, he had said in Barbara Czurles-Nelson?s English class at Punahou years earlier. Words are the power to be feared most. But the second revelation was how little the protest meant to him. His favourite professor, Roger Boesche, had spent years involved in the divestiture effort. The first student organiser, who graduated just before Obama reached campus, was a Boesche prot?g?, Gary Chapman. Another of his disciples, Caroline Boss, had worked vigorously behind the scenes on that and other student protests, and Hasan Chandoo, Obama?s roommate, was also involved. His African American cohorts, Chew and Etta-Harris and Moore, all thought that what they were doing was important. But after his own speech was cut off, Obama stopped paying attention to the rest of the rally, by his own account, and that night spoke dismissively of the entire event: ?I don?t believe we made any difference by what we did today.? It was a cutting appraisal, though with some measure of truth. Oxy did not divest for another nine years. (Pages 376-379)
Barack Obama:
The Making of The Man
David Maraniss
Atlantic Books
Hardcover, Pp 641
R899
Exclusively represented by
Penguin Books India
