With the recent publication of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s memoirs, the cynics amongst us have once again had an opportunity to register our doubts about the veracity of events recorded by former public servants. 

Who is Barack Obama...?

Radical British socialist, Tony Benn, a well-known critic of police powers and vehement anti-nuclear activist, famously explained in his ministerial diaries that he had been tricked by the British civil service into establishing the nation’s first armed police force, to protect nuclear facilities.  

Since we weren’t there to witness the events ourselves, we are obliged to take the word of our erstwhile leaders in good faith.  The alternative, of course, is to give greater weight to the recollections and repudiations of others from the political elite – but that simply repeats the same dilemma. 

The memoir that is most prescient today is Barack Obama’s “Dreams From My Father”.  With some conspiracy theorists doubting that he was born in the United States, and therefore alleging that he is ineligible to be president, his 1995 autobiography is the source document that silences the doubters.  What can we take from this book? 

Race is its underlying theme, with Barack Obama and his friends encountering a series of black versus white situations that shaped his political outlook.  But more than anything, this book, written as a first person novel, documents a search for identity and love as Obama’s childhood endures a series of upheavals.  His father abandons his family, his mother remarries and uproots with Barack and his sister to Indonesia, and they subsequently return to live with his grandparents in Hawaii.  After high school, he moves to Occidental College in Los Angeles and then to New York and later to Chicago.  Stability and a father figure are notably absent throughout his formative years. 

Young Barack wrestles with his identity and becomes manipulative: “I had given her [his mother] a reassuring smile and patted her hand and told her not to worry, I wouldn’t do anything stupid.  It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned:  People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves.  They were more than satisfied; they were relieved – such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time.”  

Dreams From My Father collates the accounts and memories of the author and the stories he says he was told by his relatives.  But most of the dialogue and thoughts that he documents from his childhood and adolescence could not possibly have been recalled.  Here is one example:  “I rose from the couch, flipped the record, drank what was left in my glass, poured myself another.  Upstairs, I could hear someone flushing a toilet, walking across a room.  Another insomniac, probably, listening to his life tick away.” 

From this perspective, Dreams From My Father is at least partly a work of fiction, based loosely on what may or may not have happened.  These events can neither be corroborated nor easily contradicted.  After all, as with other memoirs, we weren’t there.  Who can say what proportion is fact and what is simply made up?  The author himself writes in his introduction that: “(T)here are the dangers inherent in any autobiographical work: the temptation to color events in ways favorable to the writer, the tendency to overestimate the interest one’s experiences hold for others, selective lapses of memory.  Such hazards are only magnified when the writer lacks the wisdom of age; the distance that can cure one of certain vanities.  I can’t say I’ve avoided all, or any, of these hazards successfully.  Although most of this book is based on contemporaneous journals or the oral histories of my family, the dialogue is necessarily an approximation of what was actually said or relayed to me.” 

Public relations professionals will often advise individuals and organizations to proactively define themselves on the basis that bad news has a habit of surfacing at inopportune moments.  According to this theory, it is better to get bad news out of the way and characterized in the way you would like it to be characterized.  This was part of the problem for Sarah Palin in 2008: she had little opportunity to define herself, so the media, dominated by liberals who desperately wanted to see Obama win the presidency, did it for her.  The results speak for themselves. 

Obama was smart.  He chose to define himself before entering politics by writing an account of his early life at the age when many political wannabees formulate their grand ambitions.  Days before Barack Obama’s election triumph, veteran liberal broadcasters Tom Brokaw and Charlie Rose admitted that little was known about the Democratic presidential nominee other than what had been written in his autobiography. 

This reliance on Obama’s own words prevails today.  Almost two years after he was elected President of the United States, America knows little about his family life, his upbringing, his educational record or his intimate influences.  All this lies in stark contrast to the journalistic invasion of Alaska, dispatched to uncover and expose any scandals that may have touched Sarah Palin and her family. 

Of his birth, he writes about his father: “In 1959, at the age of twenty-three, he arrived at the University of Hawaii as that institution’s first African student.  He studied econometrics, worked with unsurpassed concentration, and graduated in three years at the top of his class.  His friends were legion, and he helped organize the International Students Association, of which he became the first president.  In a Russian language course, he met an awkward, shy American girl, only eighteen, and they fell in love.  The girl’s parents, wary at first, were won over by his charm and intellect; the young couple married, and she bore them a son, to whom he bequeathed his name.  He won another scholarship – this time to pursue his Ph.D. at Harvard – but not the money to take his new family with him.  A separation occurred, and he returned to Africa to fulfill his promise to the continent.  The mother and child stayed behind, but the bond of love survived the distances….”   

With so much still to learn about Barack Obama, perhaps it is no wonder that his birth place is doubted and the validity of his Social Security Number is questioned.  Whatever the truth behind those issues, it is notable that before now we haven’t had cause to doubt the recollections of statesmen before they reached high office.

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