Every man is trying to live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his mistakes. In my case, both things might be true.
—BARACK OBAMA
As a child, as an adolescent and especially as a teenager, Barack Obama showed relatively few signs that he would evolve into a nationally recognized politician in adulthood. He mostly spent his upbringing in Hawaii soaking up the serene environment of the tropical island in the Pacific—playing basketball, bodysurfing and socializing with friends. “Hawaii was heaven for a kid and consequently I was sort of a goof-off,” Obama conceded, although that self-assessment might be a bit harsh. Two things, however, did set him apart from most of his peers: his skin color and his nearly five years living in Jakarta, Indonesia. “I was raised as an Indonesian child and a Hawaiian child and as a black child and as a white child,” Obama said. “And so what I benefited from is a multiplicity of cultures that all fed me.”
Ann Dunham remarried after divorcing Obama’s father. True to her nature, she again did not take the conforming path. This time, she wed an Indonesian native named Lolo Soetoro, another foreign student at the University of Hawaii. After spending two years in Hawaii, he was forced by political upheaval in his native Indonesia to suddenly return to Jakarta. About a year later, Ann and Barry moved to be with him.
Indonesia was an exotic experience for the boy, then six years old. He encountered new food, wild animals and an entirely foreign culture. He played in rice paddies and rode water buffalo. Wrote Obama in Dreams: “I learned how to eat small green chili peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice), and away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy).” For the first time, he also bore witness to the unpleasantness of dire poverty. Beggars would come to their door, and even his mother, who had a woman’s “soft heart,” according to Lolo, eventually learned to “calibrate the level of misery” before handing out money. Obama wrote that, over time, he also developed his own calculations, a result of lectures from Lolo advising him not to give all his money away. Said Obama in a 2004 radio interview: “I think [Indonesia] made me more mindful of not only my blessings as a U.S. citizen, but also the ways that fate can determine the lives of young children, so that one ends up being fabulously wealthy and another ends up being extremely poor.”
Beyond his advice not to be loose with his money, Lolo imparted a store of tough-minded, masculine wisdom to young Barry. Amid the widespread privation of Third World Indonesia, Lolo had lived a hard existence, extremely different from the relatively comfortable, middle-class American experience to which Obama and his mother were accustomed. As a soldier in New Guinea, Lolo told the boy, he would dig leeches from his military boots with a hot knife. Lolo explained that he had seen a man killed “because he was weak.” “Men take advantage of weakness in other men,” Lolo had told him. “The strong man takes the weak man’s land. He makes the weak man work in the fields. If the weak man’s woman is pretty, the strong man will take her. . . . Which would you rather be?”
Obama heard such words and realized that he was slowly slipping out of the orderly and secure cocoon that his mother and grandparents had carefully woven around him. He wrote: “The world was violent, I was learning, unpredictable and often cruel.”
Yet, as Lolo preached the importance of strength and courage to Barry, Ann stressed moral values to her son. She emphasized four things: honesty, fairness, straight talk and independent judgment. On the last, she gave Barry this example: Just because other children are teasing a boy for something awkward about him, such as a bad haircut, that does not mean you should do it as well.
Ann also gave him an education in African-American history, albeit it was skewed heavily toward the positive. With his father absent, she wanted him to take pride in this side of his racial heritage. So she pushed on him books about Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, and played recordings of the soaring gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. She filled him with stories of accomplishments by African-American heroes such as U.S. Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall and Hollywood movie star Sidney Poitier. “To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear,” Obama wrote. Despite the unfulfilled promises of her ex-husband, Ann also talked up the positive traits of Obama’s biological father, building up Barry’s ego by telling him that he acquired his intellect and character from his father.
But mostly, Barry was given a lesson that he would consume over and over: His unique racial ancestry made him someone who certainly was not to be ostracized or shunned. Far from it—he was a special person worthy of others’ deep admiration.
During this time, Ann gave birth to Maya, her second and final child. Ann pushed Barry and Maya to assimilate to Indonesian culture as much as possible so they would not appear to be arrogant children on foreign soil, conducting themselves as spoiled Americans. But over time, her naïveté as an American raising children in Indonesia came to the fore. After several years in Jakarta, she considered the lives of Indonesians and the lives of Americans—and she began thinking about how many more opportunities would be available to her son in the United States. First, Obama could receive a superior education, an education of a quality that even private Indonesian schools could not give him. Barry had attended Muslim and Catholic schools in Indonesia, but his advancement was not up to the standards that Ann desired. So five days a week, she would roust Barry out of bed before dawn and teach him three hours of English before she went to her job instructing Indonesian businessmen in English at the American embassy.
Meanwhile, over the phone from Hawaii, Ann fielded lectures from her mother about her children’s well-being amid the Third World environment of Jakarta. One day in particular, Obama recounted in Dreams, was instrumental in Ann’s coming around to her mother’s way of thinking. Obama had been out playing and didn’t arrive home until well after dark. As he approached the house, his greatly worried mother noticed that he had a sock tied around his arm. Underneath the sock was a long gash. When he explained that he had cut his forearm on a barbed wire fence, his mother rushed to Lolo for parental assistance. But Lolo seemed nonplussed at her concern and suggested the boy be taken to the hospital in the morning. This evoked Ann’s ire. So disregarding Lolo’s nonchalance, she borrowed a neighbor’s car and rushed Barry to the hospital. There, in a darkened back room, she found two men playing dominoes. When she asked where the physicians were, they informed her that they were the doctors. She explained her son’s injury, and they told her to wait until after they finished their game. After what surely was an agonizing wait for Ann, the doctors placed twenty stitches in Obama’s arm. Soon afterward, Ann reached a conclusion that she had been edging toward for some time—her only son belonged back in America.
ARRANGEMENTS WERE MADE, AND BARRY WAS SENT TO LIVE WITH his grandparents back in Hawaii, where he was enrolled in the private Punahou School (pronounced Poon-a-ho). Founded in 1841 by missionaries, Punahou had evolved into a prestigious college preparatory academy that served Hawaii’s upper crust. Obama’s senior class was more than 90 percent white, with just a smattering of Asians, and so it was known informally among Hawaiians as “the white school,” or the school for the haole, the derogatory moniker for Caucasians used by island natives. Obama’s grandparents maneuvered him into Punahou; his grandfather’s boss, an alumnus, intervened to have Obama accepted. And Madelyn’s job at the bank helped pay the steep tuition. By living in a modest apartment and sending Obama (and eventually Maya) to private school, his grandparents had sacrificed their own prosperity for the sake of Obama and his sister. “We never suffered,” Madelyn answered when I asked what specific things were given up to send her grandchildren to Punahou. “As you can see, we live in an apartment instead of a house. . . . But I think we could have done the other if we had wanted. But I traveled, you know, and spent money on the kids—the kids and traveling were priorities. We’re not poverty-stricken.” This was a trend that would follow Obama throughout his charmed personal life and into his political career—people going out of their way to clear a path for him to succeed. At Punahou, Obama took his first step into an educational institution for elites, a rarefied world where he would remain through all of his formal education.
Punahou was situated just beyond walking distance of his grandparents’ apartment in a rather densely populated section of Honolulu. The campus itself was an island on an island, a fenced-in tract of several scenic acres largely hidden from public view. Under the silvery morning sunshine, Maya gave me a tour of her alma mater. A misty rain sprinkled on us from the lone cloud in an otherwise clear blue sky, giving the day a perfect tropical feel. On his first visit to Punahou, Obama’s grandfather described the school campus as “heaven,” and it would be hard to disagree with that assessment. The school featured elegant theaters and stately buildings set amid shady palm trees, verdant fields and neatly sculpted walking paths. High, tree-covered hills served as backdrop to the campus. The scene was so idyllic that it resembled a Hollywood set. That landscape, in conjunction with the surrounding fence, provided visitors and others with a feeling of safe insularity. And after a long day of hectic travel, it provided me with a sense of calm.
As we strolled across the campus, I could envision a relaxed, smiling teenage Barry Obama walking from one class to the next, stopping to chat up a girl or joke with a buddy. Absorbing the atmosphere of this campus gave me a sense of the cool, unflappable Hawaiian nature at Obama’s core. The night of his Senate primary election victory, for example, reporters marveled curiously at Obama’s exceptionally cool exterior as others around him exhibited jubilation. One of Obama’s greatest talents is that, even in the midst of chaos, he has the ability to slow things down internally, to project serenity, a sense of emotional control. It is a quality that superb professional athletes often possess—the ability to slow the game down and see everything around them clearly. Hawaii, if not fully responsible, most certainly contributed heavily to this trait. As I recollected that election night and mulled over my observation, Maya chimed in: “Hawaii is such a generally sweet place. You can come back here from almost anywhere and refresh yourself mentally.”
Besides the island charm and physical beauty, another aspect of Punahou immediately jumped out: how incredibly slowly students moved about the campus. They sauntered around in flip-flops and blue jeans, seemingly in no hurry to be anywhere but under a palm tree to gossip or study. Even students who gathered at picnic tables were not engaged in typical teenage jawing or horseplay but in peaceful chitchat. It’s almost as if there were a perpetual state of serenity in the air. Racially, most of the students were still white, although a few more kids of Asian descent were mixed in compared with Obama’s years here. As the tour concluded and we headed to our domestic rental cars, which were parked amid Saabs and Volvos and Lexuses, Obama’s introduction to his memoir flashed to my mind. I realized that the Manhattan publisher who turned down Obama’s book idea was correct on one account—Obama certainly had not come from an underprivileged background.
IN HIS FIRST YEAR AT PUNAHOU, WHEN HE WAS TEN, OBAMA received a quite unexpected Christmas gift: a visit from his father. To this day, those several weeks are the only memories of Barack Sr. that Obama holds. At the time, they left young Barry even more confused about the man who had been served up to him as a legend. He learned that his father had remarried and Barry had five half brothers and one half sister living in Kenya. To prepare him for his father’s arrival, his mother had plied him with information about Kenya and its history. She told him the Luo tribe had migrated to Kenya from its first home along the banks of the world’s greatest river, presumably the Nile. This was another attempt by Obama’s mother to create an almost godlike figure out of Barack Sr. But Barry began discovering that his mother and grandfather tended to relay only half the story when it came to his father. When Obama went to the library himself to read about his father’s tribe, he discovered that the Luo raised cattle, lived in mud huts, and their main sustenance was cornmeal. He did not know it at the time, but his father had herded goats as a child, and only through sheer intellectual ability and educational promise did he escape living an African tribal farm life. Barry left the book on the table and stomped out of the library in a huff.
This research, unfortunately, dovetailed with something he had run across a bit earlier in a story about a black man who tried to lighten his skin with a certain chemical. Barry had wondered why on earth a black man, who was a member of such an esteemed people, would want to make himself appear less than black? After such discoveries, his young inquisitive mind became suspicious of his mother’s portrayal of blacks as superior beings.
Obama recalls most vividly only a few aspects of his father’s visit. First was his father’s commanding physical presence—he could make himself the focus of a room simply by walking in, speaking in his confident manner, moving in his debonair fashion. An act as simple as wrapping one leg over the other would conjure a feeling of elegance from a person in Barack Sr.’s presence.
One incident from the visit also stuck out: Obama recalled starkly how his father drew the wrath of his grandmother and his mother when he stepped in and forbade Obama to watch a classic holiday television cartoon, How the Grinch Stole Christmas. His father believed the boy had been studying too little and watching too much TV. The orders barked from Barack Sr. led to a bitter argument, in which family members accused each other of one thing or another. In his book, Obama uses the fiction of the Grinch story as a metaphor for the fiction of happiness and comfort that was now evaporating around him, revealing instead the harsh reality of life—his parents’ failed marriage and his father’s abandonment of his familial responsibilities. Like the premise of blacks belonging to a superior race, the stories he had been told of his father’s greatness were becoming ever more dubious to Barry. His youthful innocence was being lost, and he was confronted with a wholly different image of his heritage.
“My father’s absence in my life, it was just so complicated,” Obama explained in my first extended interview with him in December 2003. “I mean, here is a guy who spanned, who sort of leapfrogged from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century in just a few years. He went from being a goat herder in a small village in Africa to getting a scholarship to the University of Hawaii to going to Harvard. He was active in high government positions, but then sort of tragically was destroyed, although destroyed is too strong a word. But he was somebody who never really achieved his potential because of problems of tribalism and nepotism in politics in Kenya and partly his own failures, his inability to truly reconcile his past with modern life. . . . He was a brilliant guy, but in so many ways, his life was a mess—children by different women, a political career that turned in on itself.”
Obama then used a quote that he would repeat often about his father’s influence on his own life. In essence, he said he derived his personal ambition, arguably the most powerful force in his life, from his father’s shortcomings. He also gained his own high expectations of himself from his father’s sterling image and talents. Said Obama: “Every man is trying to live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his mistakes. In my case, both things might be true.”
BY THE TIME BARRY REACHED HIGH SCHOOL, ANN HAD SEPARATED from Lolo and returned full-time to Hawaii with Maya, where she began studying postgraduate anthropology at the university. The family lived in a small apartment just a few blocks from Punahou. Barry’s days were filled with the normal adolescent activities of a teenager in Hawaii in the mid-1970s—seeking to understand what attracts the opposite sex; attending parties in which alcohol (and marijuana) were the main courses; hanging out at the beach; body-surfing on the rolling Pacific waves; and playing sports, especially basketball—lots and lots of basketball. At the time, basketball was fast becoming the sport of choice for African-American youth in the United States, as a particular blend of acrobatic street game made its way into the college and professional ranks. For Obama and many other youth, Julius Erving, better known by his moniker, Doctor J, was the hero of the era. It is not hard to see a teenage Obama being drawn to Erving, a gentlemanly, smart and thoughtful African-American sports figure. Erving was also one of the key players who changed the game from a dribble-pass-jumpshot affair to the driving-and-soaring-above-the-rim highlight reel of today. Doctor J’s dunks were wondrous to the eye. He seemingly could fly through the air, with a long, slender arm extending to its fullest, effortlessly pinwheeling the basketball and slamming it into the cylinder. His game was awe-inspiring, graceful and ferocious, all at once.
Most of Obama’s friends were white, although in his book he describes long conversations with an older black friend who had moved from Los Angeles to Hawaii. He named the friend “Ray” and portrayed these talks as his first serious struggle to manage the complicated racial questions brewing in his mind. Ray generally saw racism around every corner, while Barry was much less cynical about these matters, often providing a calming influence on Ray’s angry nature. When Ray would complain that girls refused to date him because they were racist, Barry would smile and suggest that it wasn’t necessarily that these girls didn’t like blacks, but maybe they were just attracted to men they’d been socialized to connect with, people who reminded them of their father or brother. Ray, whose real name is Keith Kakugawa, surfaced in April 2007 and confirmed the intense discussions between the two teenagers. Of mixed race himself, Kakugawa was homeless on the streets of Los Angeles after being recently released from prison where he had served time for a parole violation. He called Obama’s presidential campaign in search of money from his old high school chum, now a famous politician. Kakugawa said that, as a teen, Obama had a troubled side that stemmed from issues of parental abandonment and his mixed racial heritage. “He wasn’t this all-smiling kid,” Kakugawa told ABC News. “He was a kid that would be going through adolescence, minus parents, feeling abandoned and, you know, inner turmoil with himself. He did have a lot of race issues, inner race issues, being both black and white.”
While these teenagers dealt with their blackness, Obama’s various white friends were largely unaware that Obama was grappling with this weighty matter. Bobby Titcomb, one of Obama’s closest high school friends, who remains a friend today, said he never sensed his friend wrestling with identity issues. In fact, Titcomb said he thought Obama was one of the most emotionally secure teenagers on the island. “He was just a normal Hawaiian kid, a normal guy,” Titcomb said.
Titcomb, however, did remember that Obama had his own style and personality. He said Obama was much larger than most of his peers. Indeed, photos of him in his high school yearbook show a much heavier boy, almost chubby. As a high school freshman, he played defensive line on the football team and Titcomb described him as a strong lineman, “a real people mover.” Yet even though he had a much larger physical presence, he never lorded it over others, Titcomb said. Obama had his own mind and, like his mother, never conformed to whims of the day. “When somebody was getting teased, he kind of gave that look, almost a look of disapproval,” Titcomb recalled. “So that’s kind of just the way he was. He was different in a way in that he didn’t buy into the normal. He didn’t tease kids just because it was the cool thing to do.” Indeed, his mother’s Lesson Number Four was “independent judgment”—never run down another child just because others are doing so. It was a lesson that Ann obviously had ingrained in her son successfully.
Bobby Titcomb was not the type of individual I expected to find as one of Obama’s lasting friends. It’s not that Titcomb wasn’t a likable and bright guy. But as Obama traveled through Harvard and into national politics, Titcomb would seem like the kind of childhood friend who might get left behind. When I interviewed Titcomb, he was building a house on Oahu and working as both a flight attendant and a commercial fishermen. Physically, he was short with a wind-swept and perpetually tanned appearance, and he was laid-back enough that he looked as if he would be most at home relaxing with a margarita at a Jimmy Buffet concert. He was like a good many of Obama’s Punahou classmates, perfectly happy living a settled Hawaiian existence. When I asked Titcomb again about Obama’s racial confusion during high school, Titcomb reiterated that he was oblivious. “You know, in Hawaii, you go to school where you don’t have to wear shoes until, I think, ninth grade. So you go barefoot,” Titcomb explained. “And in Hawaii, you know, you have five best friends and one’s Chinese, one’s Japanese, one’s Hawaiian, and so on. It is kind of just a melting pot. It was cool to have a black friend, you know. So I, you know, I never saw it.”
While Obama was in high school, his mother’s studies called for her to do fieldwork back in Indonesia. When she suggested that Barry return with her and Maya, Barry resisted. He was happy at Punahou and with his life in Hawaii. He had a circle of friends with whom he felt comfortable and he was in no mood to leave that for a deprived existence in Indonesia, even if he would go to an international private school. So he struck an agreement with his grandparents that when his mother left, he would move in with them, and they would not get in his way so long as he gave them no reason to. Madelyn Dunham, who had nagged her daughter to bring her grandchildren back to Hawaii, encouraged this idea. “I suppose I provided stability in his life,” Madelyn said, noting that her daughter’s global curiosity could take her away from her son for months at a time. Even with his mother gone, Madelyn said, Barry was essentially a well-behaved teen who spent most of his time involved in sports. “He was a jock,” she said.
But out of sight of his white grandparents and his white friends, Barry’s struggles to understand the African-American experience became a stronger force, a lonely force, and he mostly suppressed it from others. “I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America,” he wrote, “and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.” Various racially driven incidents in his life had piled up in his psyche, causing him anguish. A small-minded tennis coach joked about his color rubbing off, prompting Barry to quit the tennis team. While waiting for a bus, Madelyn was harassed by a black panhandler, and Barry’s grandfather offered her little sympathy, thinking she overreacted to the incident because of the man’s race. Barry took two white friends to a party thrown by blacks and noted angrily to himself their obvious discomfort in the all-black surroundings.
Hoping to clear up his own racial confusion, he would forgo doing homework and bury himself in the works of prodigious black authors who sought to explain or amplify the feelings of powerlessness and anger embedded in the hearts of black men: Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, W. E. B. DuBois. Of these readings, he said he most closely identified with the Autobiography of Malcolm X. Since becoming a politician, Obama has steered clear of quoting such a militant and revolutionary figure as Malcolm X. But in his book, he wrote that the activist’s “force of will” and “repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me.”
The teen years are difficult enough for any male. It is the time when boys begin to establish their adult persona—how they fit into social groups and settings, how they interact with women, how they register their masculinity with other males. At this age, even if boys tend to act as if they disregard their father, in fact they are looking at him as the blueprint for how to conduct themselves in these vital areas. In this regard, Obama had something in common with many African-African males—he lacked a father in his life to counsel him through these confusing times. Obama looked to popular culture for male role models to fill that paternal void, and he tried to mimic African Americans on television and in the movies. “Some of the problems of adolescent rebellion and hormones were compounded by the fact that I didn’t have a father,” Obama said. “So what I fell into were these exaggerated stereotypes of black male behavior—not focusing on my books, finding respectability, playing a lot of sports.” He grew a thick Afro and donned a stylish white open-collared leisure suit with fat lapels, making himself stand out from the crowd in an urban black way. Displaying the touch of personal vanity that he still carries, Obama cherished his full Afro and could spend an inordinate amount of time picking at it in order to make it appear just right. The plastic pick would protrude from Barry’s back pocket and he carried it wherever he went. Playing the role of pesky little sister, Maya enjoyed brushing a hand through Barry’s hair to rile her brother, prompting an angry Obama to cop a cool street attitude and admonish her: “Hey, don’t touch the ’fro!”
Barry found some solace from his deep racial questions on the basketball court, the place he said he felt most at ease. He spent hour after hour on a court located outside a grade school behind his grandparents’ apartment building. He developed a swift crossover dribble and an idiosyncratic, street-influenced style of shooting, cocking the ball far behind his left ear and then shot-putting it toward the rim. His specialty was his left-hand shot from the corner, placing a bit more backspin on the ball and launching it with a low arc. “On the basketball court I could find a community of sorts, with an inner life all its own,” he wrote. “It was there I would make my closest white friends, on turf where blackness couldn’t be a disadvantage.” For Madelyn, there was comfort in knowing the whereabouts of her grandson. She could track him by ear. “I used to know when he was coming home because I could hear the basketball bouncing all the way from over there to over here,” Madelyn said in our interview in her apartment.
The teenage years mark a period of rebellion and disaffection for males, and Obama’s racial turmoil only exacerbated those natural feelings. He was always a solid B student, but by his senior year, he was slacking off in his schoolwork in favor of basketball, beach time and parties. He also, as he described it later, “dabbled in drugs and alcohol.” He would buy a six-pack of Heineken after school and polish off the bottles while shooting baskets. He also smoked marijuana and experimented with snorting cocaine but demurred from heroin when he said a drug supplier seemed far too eager to have him experience it. His stream-of-consciousness passages in Dreams about drinking and drug use, and turning down the heroin offer, are written in the tough, boastful, self-absorbed words of a teenager—prose that marries his racial angst to his drug use. “Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young, would-be black man.” In the next section of the book, however, Obama reveals a broader mind and displays less self-pity. He noted that white kids, Hawaiian kids and wealthy kids also turn to drugs to soothe whatever causes them pain—an astute observation that others perhaps were suffering as much as or worse than he.
His grandmother recalled that she and her husband discussed Barry’s declining grades and grew concerned about his possible drug use and overall lack of direction. She said she urged her husband to give Barry a stern lecture about the pitfalls of this lifestyle. She said she worried that, because Barry was so clearly African-American in appearance, he would be used as a courier by his white friends to buy drugs and distribute them, and that being a drug supplier could land him in long-term trouble with the law. Obama, however, told me that he recalled having no such conversation with his grandfather and questioned his elderly grandmother’s memory. “This was really a very transitory or very short-term period in his life,” Madelyn said. “I mean it wasn’t something that lasted long. . . . Barack didn’t really talk about things too much, you know. He must have suffered some racial prejudice, but he didn’t talk about it with us.”
At Punahou, Barry was popular among his classmates and teachers, but in an understated way. Eric Kusunoki, his homeroom teacher through all four high school years, recalled that on the first day, he reviewed Obama’s first name several times on the class roster and finally admitted that he could not pronounce it. Obama showed no sign of annoyance and spoke up with a smile, “Just call me Barry.”
Kusunoki categorized Obama as a good student but one who failed to reach his vast potential. Despite eventually going on to Harvard Law School, Obama did not stand out academically in high school, mostly from lack of effort. “All of the teachers acknowledged that he was a sharp kid,” Kusunoki said. “Sometimes he didn’t challenge himself enough or he could have done better.” Obama impressed some instructors as being a deep thinker, but his grades did not reflect that. Kusunoki also recalled that he and Obama chatted quite often and Barry would mention problems with individuals he believed were racist. But Kusunoki, like so many others, said Obama gave no outward impression that he felt burdened or confused by his race. “We had discussions along these lines, but he didn’t really express a lot of the thoughts or feelings that I read in his book,” Kusunoki said.
As much as Obama loved basketball, it did not always come easy. Like most sports, it taught him a valuable life lesson—humility. Punahou’s team was excelling his senior year, thrashing its competition, and ultimately the squad won the state championship. Unfortunately for Barry, he played only a small role in the team’s success, since the coach relegated him to the bench most of the year. That meant he saw little public glory, and most of his contributions came during practice by pushing the starters to be better players. In Dreams, Obama wrote that his friend and black confidant, Ray, blamed race for keeping Obama out of the starting five during his first couple of years in high school. Obama, however, took up for the coach, countering that the team played a “white” style of game, more of a half-court game and less of a running street game. Perhaps he didn’t fit well into that makeup, Barry said. Obama also noted that the team was winning regularly without him, so he couldn’t complain too loudly.
His coach, Chris McLachlin, told me that Barry accepted his lack of playing time with aplomb and was a wonderful role player for the team. The coach said he had an immensely talented squad and Barry was just shy of being a starter. “I recall his sincere eagerness to want to get better, his positive attitude despite not getting as many minutes as he probably wanted,” the coach said. “He was very respectful and understood his role.”
Despite all the magnanimity that Obama displayed in his book toward the coach, I discovered a different attitude when I mentioned to Obama in October 2004 that I had interviewed his high school coach. His viscerally emotional reaction, even though twenty years had passed, was one of the moments when Obama’s short fuse and healthy ego slipped out from behind his cool exterior. Obama is able to emanate Hawaiian calm in times of strife, but he also has a fiery, highly competitive streak. He has little tolerance for losing or being shoved into the background. “I got into a fight with the guy and he benched me for three or four games. Just wouldn’t play me. And I was furious, you know,” Obama said, a twinge of unresolved bitterness in his voice, along with an implied presumption of “How dare he bench me!” Obama’s former Illinois press secretary, Julian Green, said his boss has mentioned McLachlin in less than glowing terms in private conversations. “There’s still something there between those two guys,” Green said. (Obama kept playing basketball into adulthood, and one of the regulars in his weekly games said Obama was not blessed with inordinate talent, but he was a reliably steady player. “He would have been a very good high school player, very good at that level,” said Arne Duncan, chief executive of the Chicago Public Schools, who has played professional basketball in Europe and Australia.)
Even if Barry was not an exemplary student or a standout athlete, I ran across an occasional acquaintance from his Hawaiian years who spotted something deeper than a likable but underachieving jock. Suzanne Maurer, the mother of one of Obama’s close friends, Darren Maurer, said she sensed an energetic, ambitious spirit in Barry, as well as a precocious wisdom. She said her son and Barry rode the bench together on the high school basketball team, and she believes that basketball “centered” both of them. Obama’s limitations as a player didn’t pull his spirits too low, she said. She added that, even if he was undergoing some internal racial turmoil and disappointment on the basketball court, Barry displayed an optimistic attitude about life in general in her presence. “I recall that he was the type that if he had a dream, he would pursue it,” Maurer said. “The sky seemed to be the limit, and Barry was very much a can-do type person, even with sports, even as a benchwarmer.”
The fact that Obama harbored dreams extending beyond Hawaii was something that perhaps even Barry didn’t realize at the time. But he would soon enough. Maurer said that when she heard in the summer of 2004 that Obama was running for the U.S. Senate and that his political career had rocketed into national stardom, she looked up his campaign website and wrote him an e-mail. A political conservative, Maurer mentioned that she didn’t agree with his political stances, but she admired his integrity and devotion. To her delight, he wrote back. And while she recognized the same wise-beyond-his-years mentality from twenty years earlier, she noted that a personal evolution evidently had occurred after his departure from Hawaii. The boyish, basketball-happy Barry Obama of the Punahou School was someone in the past, someone who no longer existed. “We agreed to disagree on the issues,” she said. “And even though I called him ‘Barry,’ in the e-mail he sent back, he signed his name ‘Barack.’”