Obama’s Books: Composite Characters, False Memories

People here have inquired about the accuracy of the books written by Barack Obama. Hundreds of thousands of people have read these books, and probably believe every word. However, several newspapers have verified that Obama admitted that he used composite characters in the books. Then there’s the investigative biography — over six full pages long — at the Chicago Tribune (and this link takes you to just ONE of the long articles exploring Obama’s past at the Tribune). Below, I quote from it. The quotes are long, but fascinating, particularly since the Chicago Tribune reporters wrote Obama’s history, and investigated his accounts, so thoroughly. While I’d ordinarily not quote so much from an article, it is so very long that you’ll want to go to the original article to read it in full. I am only excerpting the portions I recall from first reading it in December that relate to Obama’s false recall about his history.

First, there’s this quote from “The Delusional Style in American Punditry,” by the New Republic‘s Sean Wilentz, Dec. 19, 2007 (“Forget experience: Opinion-slingers are mooning over Barack Obama’s instincts. Don’t they remember how badly that worked out last time?“):

The Boston Globe, in an ideal specimen of the delusional style, ran an editorial that endorsed Obama because he is biracial and grew up in “multi-ethnic cultures”–adequate substitutes, by the editorial’s lights, for serious background and expertise in foreign affairs. Obama, according to the Globe, has engaged in “a search for identity” and taken “a roots pilgrimage to Kenya,” all of which supposedly displays a “level of introspection, honesty, and maturity” that the newspaper longs for in a president. “Obama’s story is America’s story,” the Globe intoned–a sentence that comes as close as any distinguished newspaper ever has to perfect emptiness.

Let us hold aside that the book the Globe relied on in discovering these singular Obamaesque virtues, Dreams From My Father, contains composite characters and other fictionalized elements–not exactly a portrait of sterling honesty or authenticity. What is especially delusional is the Globe’s confidence that its own projections about Obama’s character and personality, as well as the mystical conclusions it draws from his ethnicity, are serious grounds for endorsing any candidate for any office, much less the presidency.

Now for the Tribune biography:

Here are instances of fabrication or colored memories or false memories, whatever you wish to call them from the Chicago Tribune story. For ease of reading, and brevity, I won’t indent these quotes:

[...]

At the same time, several of his oft-recited stories may not have happened in the way he has recounted them. Some seem to make Obama look better in the retelling, others appear to exaggerate his outward struggles over issues of race, or simply skim over some of the most painful, private moments of his life.

The handful of black students who attended Punahou School in Hawaii, for instance, say they struggled mightily with issues of race and racism there. But absent from those discussions, they say, was another student then known as Barry Obama.



In his best-selling autobiography, “Dreams from My Father,” Obama describes having heated conversations about racism with another black student, “Ray.” The real Ray, Keith Kakugawa, is half black and half Japanese. In an interview with the Tribune on Saturday, Kakugawa said he always considered himself mixed race, like so many of his friends in Hawaii, and was not an angry young black man.



He said he does recall long, soulful talks with the young Obama and that his friend confided his longing and loneliness. But those talks, Kakugawa said, were not about race. “Not even close,” he said, adding that Obama was dealing with “some inner turmoil” in those days.

”But it wasn’t a race thing,” he said. “Barry’s biggest struggles then were missing his parents. His biggest struggles were his feelings of abandonment. The idea that his biggest struggle was race is [bull].”



Then there’s the copy of Life magazine that Obama presents as his racial awakening at age 9. In it, he wrote, was an article and two accompanying photographs of an African-American man physically and mentally scarred by his efforts to lighten his skin. In fact, the Life article and the photographs don’t exist, say the magazine’s own historians.



Some of these discrepancies are typical of childhood memories — fuzzy in specifics, warped by age, shaped by writerly license. Others almost certainly illustrate how carefully the young man guarded the secret of his loneliness from even those who knew him best. And the accounts bear out much of Obama’s self-portrait as someone deeply affected by his father’s abandonment yet able to thrive in greatly disparate worlds.

[...]

Yet even Obama has acknowledged the limits of memoir. In a new introduction to the reissued edition of “Dreams,” he noted that the dangers of writing an autobiography included “the temptation to color events in ways favorable to the writer … [and] selective lapses of memory.”



He added: “I can’t say that I’ve avoided all, or any, of these hazards successfully.”

[...]

Memories of a racial awakening?



Obama has told the story–one of the watershed moments of his racial awareness–time and again, in remarkable detail.



He is 9 years old, living in Indonesia, where he and his mother moved with her new husband, Lolo Soetoro, a few years earlier. One day while visiting his mother, who was working at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Obama passed time by looking through several issues of Life magazine. He came across an article that he later would describe as feeling like an “ambush attack.”



The article included photos of a black man who had destroyed his skin with powerful chemical lighteners that promised to make him white. Instead, the chemicals had peeled off much of his skin, leaving him sad and scarred, Obama recalled.

“I imagine other black children, then and now, undergoing similar moments of revelation,” Obama wrote of the magazine photos in “Dreams.”



Yet no such Life issue exists, according to historians at the magazine. No such photos, no such article. When asked about the discrepancy, Obama said in a recent interview, “It might have been an Ebony or it might have been … who knows what it was?” (At the request of the Tribune, archivists at Ebony searched their catalogue of past articles, none of which matched what Obama recalled.)



In fact, it is surprising, based on interviews with more than two dozen people who knew Obama during his nearly four years in Indonesia, that it would take a photograph in a magazine to make him conscious of the fact that some people might treat him differently in part because of the color of his skin.



Obama, who has talked and written so much about struggling to find a sense of belonging due to his mixed race, brushes over this time of his life in “Dreams.” He describes making friends easily, becoming fluent in Indonesian in just six months and melding quite easily into the very foreign fabric of Jakarta.



The reality was less tidy.



Obama and his mother joined her new husband, a kind man who later would become a detached heavy drinker and womanizer, family members in Indonesia say. Their Jakarta neighborhood resembled a village more than the bustling metropolis the city is today. Electricity had arrived only a couple of years earlier. Half the homes were old bamboo huts; half, including the Soetoro house, were nicer, with brick or concrete and red-tiled roofs.



Former playmates remember Obama as “Barry Soetoro,” or simply “Barry,” a chubby little boy very different from the gangly Obama people know today. All say he was teased more than any other kid in the neighborhood–primarily because he was bigger and had black features.



He was the only foreign child in the neighborhood. He also was one of the only neighborhood children whose parents enrolled him in a new Catholic school in an area populated almost entirely by Betawis, the old tribal landowning Jakarta natives who were very traditional Muslims. Some of the Betawi children threw rocks at the open Catholic classrooms, remembered Cecilia Sugini Hananto, who taught Obama in 2nd grade.



Teachers, former playmates and friends recall a boy who never fully grasped their language and who was very quiet as a result. But one word Obama learned quickly in his new home was curang, which means “cheater.”



When kids teased him, Obama yelled back, “Curang, curang!” When a friend gave him shrimp paste instead of chocolate, he yelled, “Curang, curang!”



Zulfan Adi was one of the neighborhood kids who teased Obama most mercilessly. He remembers one day when young Obama, a hopelessly upbeat boy who seemed oblivious to the fact that the older kids didn’t want him tagging along, followed a group of Adi’s friends to a nearby swamp.



“They held his hands and feet and said, `One, two, three,’ and threw him in the swamp,” recalled Adi, who still lives in the same house where he grew up. “Luckily he could swim. They only did it to Barry.”



The other kids would scrap with him sometimes, but because Obama was bigger and better-fed than many of them, he was hard to defeat.



“He was built like a bull. So we’d get three kids together to fight him,” recalled Yunaldi Askiar, 45, a former neighborhood friend. “But it was only playing.”



Obama has claimed on numerous occasions to have become fluent in Indonesian in six months. Yet those who knew him disputed that during recent interviews.



Israella Pareira Darmawan, Obama’s 1st-grade teacher, said she attempted to help him learn the Indonesian language by going over pronunciation and vowel sounds. He struggled greatly with the foreign language, she said, and with his studies as a result.



The teacher, who still lives in Obama’s old neighborhood, remembers that he always sat in the back corner of her classroom. “His friends called him `Negro,’” Darmawan said. The term wasn’t considered a slur at the time in Indonesia.



Still, all of his teachers at the Catholic school recognized leadership qualities in him. “He would be very helpful with friends. He’d pick them up if they fell down,” Darmawan recalled. “He would protect the smaller ones.”



Third-grade teacher Fermina Katarina Sinaga, now 67, has perhaps the most telling story. In an essay about what he wanted to be when he grew up, Obama “wrote he wanted to be president,” Sinaga recalled. “He didn’t say what country he wanted to be president of. But he wanted to make everybody happy.”



When Obama was in 4th grade, the Soetoro family moved. Their new neighborhood was only 3 miles to the west, but a world away. Elite Dutch colonists once lived there; the Japanese moved in during their occupation of Indonesia in World War II. In the early 1970s, diplomats and Indonesian businessmen lived there in fancy gated houses with wide paved roads and sculpted bushes.

[...]


Obama, however, was not a part of that group, according to Anthony and Smith. Both of them seemed surprised to hear that in “Dreams”–which neither of them had read–Obama writes about routinely going to parties at Schofield Barracks and other military bases in order to hang out with “Ray,” who like Anthony and Smith was two years ahead of him in school.



”We’d all do things together, but Obama was never there,” Smith said, adding that they often brought along the few other black underclassmen. “I went to those parties up at Schofield but never saw him at any of them.”



Obama devotes many words in his book to exploring his outsider status at Punahou. But any struggles he was experiencing were obscured by the fact that he had a racially diverse group of friends–many of whom often would crowd into his grandparents’ apartment, near Punahou, after school let out.



One of those kids was Orme, a smart, respectful teenager from a white, middle-class family. Though Orme spent most afternoons with Obama and considered him one of his closest friends, he said Obama never brought up issues of race, never talked about feeling out of place at Punahou.



“He never verbalized any of that,” Orme said during a telephone interview from his home in Oregon. “He was a very provocative thinker. He would bring up worldly topics far beyond his years. But we never talked race.”



Whatever misgivings Obama had about Punahou, attending the school was largely his decision.


[...]

“Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man,” Obama wrote in “Dreams.”



In the book, Obama discusses race and racism at his high school with one other Punahou student, “Ray,” the young black man described in detail in “Dreams” as perpetually angry at the white world around him. “It’s their world, all right,” Ray supposedly shouts at Obama. “They own it and we in it. So just get the f— outta my face.”



But Kakugawa, in the interview Saturday, said Obama’s recollection of that conversation was mistaken. “I did say we were playing in their world,” he explained, “but that had nothing to do with race. He knew that.”



Kakugawa explained that he had meant they were playing in the world of the elite people who populated and ran Punahou–famous Hawaiian families like the Doles, owners of the pineapple fortune, or the original developers of Waikiki, the tourist mecca. “It just wasn’t a race thing,” he reiterated again and again.



Obama confirmed in an interview earlier this month that the Ray character in “Dreams” actually is Kakugawa.



In another passage from the book, Ray complains that white Punahou girls don’t want to date black guys and that he and Obama don’t get enough playing time as athletes, speculating that they’d be “treated different if we was white. Or Japanese. Or Hawaiian. Or f—— Eskimo.”



But Kakugawa, a convicted drug felon, said Saturday that he had never been the “prototypical angry black guy” that Obama portrays. Because of his biracial heritage, he said, he was “like everyone in Hawaii, a mix of a lot of things.”



A close friend and track teammate of Kakugawa, John Hagar, also said he was surprised by Obama’s description of the character representing Kakugawa as an angry young black man. “I never picked up on that,” Hagar said. “He was just one of those perfect [ethnic] mixes of everything you see in Hawaii.”



Asked Saturday about Kakugawa’s recollections, the Obama campaign declined to make the senator available. But spokesman Bill Burton said Obama “stands by his recollections of these events as related in his book.”



“There’s no doubt that Keith’s story is tragic and sad,” Burton added.



While Obama rocketed to political prominence, his friend headed down the troubled road Obama had feared he was following. Since 1995, Kakugawa has spent more than 7 years in California prisons and months in Los Angeles County Jail on cocaine and auto theft charges.



Another story put forth in “Dreams” as one of Obama’s pivotal moments of racial awakening checks out essentially as he wrote it. Obama recounts taking two white friends, including Orme, to a party attended almost entirely by African-Americans.



According to the book, the characters representing Orme and the other friend asked to leave the party after just an hour, saying they felt out of place. The night, Obama later wrote, made him furious as he realized that whites held a “fundamental power” over blacks.



“One of us said that being the different guys in the room had awakened a little bit of empathy to what he must feel all the time at school. And he clearly didn’t appreciate that,” Orme said. “I never knew, until reading the book later, how much that night had upset him.”