Brilliance in the making

Young Obama and His Girlfriends: A Biographer Gets the Story

Posted by John Cassidy


Vanity Fair’s new extract from David Maraniss’s forthcoming biography of Obama is all over the Web, not necessarily for the right reasons. The flap over Maraniss’s “revelation” that Obama, in his 1995 memoir “Dreams from My Father,” confected a composite girlfriend from his years in New York during the early eighties, and described at least one event that didn’t take place there, has diverted attention from some of fascinating material Maraniss obtained from actual women who dated the future President. (In the introduction to his book, Obama said that some of his characters were composite and that he had played with the chronology.)

After leaving Occidental College in 1981 and transferring to Columbia, where he majored in political science, Obama went through a period of soul-searching, during which he struggled to assimilate the various elements of his cosmopolitan heritage. His memoir, which is still well worth reading, begins with a phone call he received, shortly after his twenty-first birthday, informing him of his father’s death in Kenya. In his own telling, he emerges as a conflicted and sensitive, but also intellectually confident and rather self-absorbed, young man, who is seeking his path. What Maraniss has done, thanks to some meticulous reporting, is complement this picture with a more objective view of Obama from two women, young at the time, who knew him intimately.

One of them was Genevieve Cook, a well-bred and somewhat rebellious New Yorker, who smoked non-filter Camels and drank Baileys Irish Cream from the bottle. When she met Obama at party in the East Village, in late 1983, she was a twenty-five-year-old assistant teacher at Brooklyn Friends, a private school in downtown Brooklyn. After Obama, who was three years younger, cooked her dinner and invited her to stay the night, they became an item. In her personal journal, which she shared with Maraniss, Cook recorded many details of the relationship, down to the odors that pervaded Obama’s room in the rent-controlled three bedroom apartment he shared on West 114th Street: “running sweat, Brut spray deodorant, smoking, eating raisins, sleeping, breathing.”

As the entries proceed, the Obama that Cook knew comes across very clearly. She found him intriguing and smart, warm sometimes, but also guarded and self-protective.

Thursday, January 26
How is he so old already, at the age of 22? I have to recognize (despite play of wry and mocking smile on lips) that I find his thereness very threatening…. Distance, distance, distance, and wariness.

Sunday, February 19
Despite Barack’s having talked of drawing a circle around the tender in him—protecting the ability to feel innocence and springborn—I think he also fights against showing it to others, to me. I really like him more and more—he may worry about posturing and void inside but he is a brimming and integrated character.

Saturday, February 25
The sexual warmth is definitely there—but the rest of it has sharp edges and I’m finding it all unsettling and finding myself wanting to withdraw from it all…His warmth can be deceptive. Tho he speaks sweet words and can be open and trusting, there is also that coolness—and I begin to have an inkling of some things about him that could get to me.

As the months went on, Cook’s doubts about Obama grew:

Friday, March 9, 1984
It’s not a question of my wanting to probe ancient pools of emotional trauma … but more a sense of you [Barack] biding your time and drawing others’ cards out of their hands for careful inspection—without giving too much of your own away—played with a good poker face…I feel that you carefully filter everything in your mind and heart—legitimate, admirable, really—a strength, a necessity in terms of some kind of integrity. But there’s something also there of smoothed veneer, of guardedness … but I’m still left with this feeling of … a bit of a wall—the veil.

Thursday, March 22
Barack—still intrigues me, but so much going on beneath the surface, out of reach. Guarded, controlled.

Saturday, May 26
Dreamt last night for what I’m sure was an hour of waiting to meet him at midnight, with a ticket in my hand. Told me the other night of having pushed his mother away over past 2 years in an effort to extract himself from the role of supporting man in her life—she feels rejected and has withdrawn somewhat. Made me see that he may fear his own dependency on me, but also mine on him, whereas I only fear mine on him.

In late 1984, Cook and Obama moved in together, but it didn’t work out. Obama’s elusiveness continued to frustrate Cook, and, in the spring of 1985, they split up:

Thursday, May 23, 1985
Barack leaving my life—at least as far as being lovers goes… I read back over the past year in my journals, and see and feel several themes in it all … how from the beginning what I have been most concerned with has been my sense of Barack’s withholding the kind of emotional involvement I was seeking. I guess I hoped time would change things and he’d let go and “fall in love” with me. Now, at this point, I’m left wondering if Barack’s reserve, etc. is not just the time in his life, but, after all, emotional scarring that will make it difficult for him to get involved even after he’s sorted his life through with age and experience. Hard to say, as obviously I was not the person that brought infatuation. (That lithe, bubbly, strong black lady is waiting somewhere!)

While it is obviously dangerous to project forward thirty years to the Obama of today, it is hard not to speculate about how much or little of his young self remains. In an Oval Office interview with Maraniss, he acknowledged that during his time in New York he was “deep inside my own head … in a way that in retrospect I don’t think was real healthy.” During much of this time, Maraniss informs us, Obama carried around with him a dogeared copy of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel “Invisible Man,” which is written from the perspective of an unnamed African-American who feels isolated from and ignored by the rest of society. The young Obama also had broader literary interests, and he dreamed of becoming a writer. Another of his girlfriends was Alex McNear, whom he knew from Occidental College, where she edited a literary magazine. In the summer of 1982, McNear spent the summer in New York, and she and Obama started dating. After she went back to California, Obama sent her a series of letters, one of which concerned an essay she was writing on “The Waste Land,” by T. S. Eliot:

Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this…. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times.

Perhaps Obama was just trying to impress the lady. Clearly, though, this was no ordinary twenty-two-year-old. In another letter to McNear, he revealed his ambitions as a prose stylist:

I run every other day at the small indoor track [at Columbia] which slants slightly upward like a plate; I stretch long and slow, twist and shake, the fatigue, the inertia finding home in different parts of the body. I check the time and growl—aargh!—and tumble onto the wheel. And bodies crowd and give off heat, some people are in front and you can hear the patter or plod of the steps behind. You look down to watch your feet, neat unified steps, and you throw back your arms and run after people, and run from them and with them, and sometimes someone will shadow your pace, step for step, and you can hear the person puffing, a different puff than yours, and on a good day they’ll come up alongside and thank you for a good run, for keeping a good pace, and you nod and keep going on your way, but you’re pretty pleased, and your stride gets lighter, the slumber slipping off behind you, into the wake of the past.

What are we to make off all this? Setting aside campaign politics and the brouhaha over how exactly Obama put together his memoir, Maraniss has done something larger. He has shed new light on what is a remarkable American story. At one point during Obama’s relationship with Cook, Maraniss reminds us, he visited her family’s country estate in leafy Norfolk, Connecticut. Standing in the library, Obama recalled in his memoir, “I realized that our two worlds, my friend’s and mine, were as distant from each other as KenÂya is from Germany. And I knew that if we stayed together I’d eventually live in hers. After all, I’d been doing it most of my life. Between the two of us, I was the one who knew how to live as an outsider.” Ultimately, of course, Obama didn’t remain an outsider for very long. He moved to Chicago, climbed the political ladder, and became, at the age of forty-seven, the President. “The ironic thing,” Cook told Maraniss, “is he moved through the corridors of power in a far more comfortable way than I ever would have.”



From the New Yorker 3/may/2012