A childhood of privilege, not hardship
September 20, 2012 | 12:13 am | Modified: September 20, 2012 at 12:05 am 632Comments
Obama and his bride
Michelle Robinson, a fellow Harvard Law School graduate, on their
wedding day, Oct. 3, 1992, in Chicago. (Associated Press)
First lady Michelle Obama told the Democratic National Convention that "Barack and I were both raised
by families who didn't have much in the way of money or material
possessions."
It is a claim the president has repeated in his books, on
the speech-making circuit and in countless media interviews. By his
account, he grew up in a broken home with a single mom, struggled for
years as a child in an impoverished Third World country and then was
raised by his grandparents in difficult circumstances.
The facts aren't nearly so clear-cut.
Ann Dunham was just 18 years old when she gave birth to Obama. She was a
freshman at the University of Hawaii. His Kenyan father, Barack Hussein
Obama Sr., was a few years older than Ann. They were married against
family wishes.
Obama Sr. does not appear to have been welcoming or compassionate toward
his new wife or son. It later turned out that he was secretly married
to a Kenyan woman back home at the same time he fathered the young
Obama.
He abandoned Obama Jr.'s mother when the boy was 1. In 1964, Dunham
filed for a divorce that was not contested. Her parents helped to raise
the young Obama.
Obama's mother met her second husband, an Indonesian named Lolo Soetoro,
while working at the East-West Center in Hawaii. They married, and in
1967, the young Obama, then known as Barry Soetoro, traveled to
Indonesia with his mother when the Indonesian government recalled his
stepfather.
In Indonesia, the family's circumstances improved dramatically.
According to Obama in his autobiography "Dreams from My Father," Lolo's
brother-in-law was "making millions as a high official in the national
oil company." It was through this brother-in-law that Obama's stepfather
got a coveted job as a government relations officer with the Union Oil
Co.
The family then moved to Menteng, then and now the most exclusive
neighborhood of Jakarta, where bureaucrats, diplomats and economic
elites reside.
A popular Indonesia travel site describes Menteng: "Designed by the
Dutch Colonial Government in 1920s, Menteng still retains its graceful
existence with its beautiful parks, cozy street cafes and luxurious
housing complexes."
In 1971, his mother sent young Obama back to Hawaii, where his
grandmother, Madelyn, known as Toots, would become one of the first
female vice presidents of a Honolulu bank. His grandfather was in sales.
Obama's grandparents moved the same year into Punahou Circle Apartments,
a sleek new 10-story apartment building just five blocks from the
private Punahou School, which Obama would attend from 1971 to 1979.
Obama explains in "Dreams from My Father" that his admission to Punahou
began "the start of something grand, an elevation in the family status
that they took great pains to let everyone know."
To his credit, Obama did not downplay Punahou's upscale status, noting
in his autobiography that it "had grown into a prestigious prep school,
an incubator for island elites. Its reputation had helped sway my mother
in her decision to send me back to the States."
Obama also admitted in the book that his grandfather pulled strings to
get him into the school. "There was a long waiting list, and I was
considered only because of the intervention of Gramps's boss, who was an
alumnus."
The school still features a lush hillside campus overlooking the Waikiki
skyline and the Pacific Ocean. It was one of the most expensive schools
on the island, and both Obama and his half sister Maya Soetoro-Ng
received scholarships.
While the Dunhams were not among the wealthiest families on the island,
he nevertheless studied and socialized with the children of the social
and financial elite. Obama has said he didn't fit in at the school. But
that's not how other Hawaiians remember it.
Associated Press writer Sudhin Thanawala reported from Honolulu in 2008
that "classmates and teachers say Obama blended in well. He served on
the editorial board of the school's literary magazine, played varsity
basketball and sang in the choir. He went on the occasional date."
In his recent book "Barack Obama: The Story," Washington Post reporter
David Maraniss said the future chief executive often smoked marijuana
with prep school friends, rolling up the car windows to seek "total
absorption," or "TA." They called themselves the "Choom Gang."
Edward Shanahan, a retired newspaper journalist who now edits
downstreet.net and makes no effort to conceal his admiration for Obama,
retraced his Hawaii years shortly after the president was elected.
Shanahan wrote that Obama lived in a "well-off neighborhood near the
University of Hawaii where Barry, as he was known, resided in a
comfortable home with his mother and her parents before she took him to
Indonesia."
Sanahan said "our tour ended up on the lush, exquisitely maintained and
altogether inviting campus of Punahou School, which we can imagine was a
place of great comfort for Obama."
Tellingly, Obama has never lived in a black neighborhood. Maraniss
reported in his book that when leftist activist Jerry Kellman
interviewed Obama for a community organizing job in Chicago, he asked
Obama how he felt about living and working in the black community for
the first time in his life.
Obama accepted the job but chose not to live among those he would be
organizing. Instead, he commuted 90 minutes each way daily from his
apartment in Chicago's famous Hyde Park to the Altgeld Gardens housing
project where he worked.
It was an early instance of Obama presenting himself one way while acting in quite a different way.
Reporting for this special report by Richard Pollock, Examiner staff writer.