University Place  David Maraniss David Maraniss On Obama  November 12, 2012 UP807   cc >> ...Best-selling books on Bill Clinton, Vince Lombardi, Vietnam and the '60s, Roberto Clemente, and the 1960 Rome Olympics. He won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Clinton and was part of a team that won the 2007 Pulitzer for coverage of the Virginia Tech tragedy, and he's been a Pulitzer finalist three other times, including in the nonfiction history category for "They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967," much of which takes place here in Madison. Maraniss is a fellow of the Society of American Historians and a member of Biographers International Organization. He lives in Washington, DC, and Madison, right here on the west side, with his wife, Linda, and they have two grown children and three granddaughters. Now, I have about five or ten minutes of cogent, insightful analysis of his book, but this is an evening about democracy and politicians, so we're going to do this democratically. All of you who would rather... [LAUGHTER] Listen to David Maraniss talk about his own book rather than listen to me talk about David Maraniss' book, please raise your hand. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, I kind of thought that would be the case. Ladies and gentlemen, David Maraniss. [APPLAUSE]  >> Thank you all for coming out on this beautiful Wisconsin evening. 

[LAUGHTER] My wife and I do live here, but we usually leave when the geese leave. [LAUGHTER] I truly enjoyed that presentation, but I have to say that since I covered the 1992 Clinton campaign I have a Pavlovian response every time I hear "Don't Stop." [LAUGHTER] Which is, I don't want to hear it again, let's get on the bus. [LAUGHTER] But I could listen to Bruce Springsteen for hours, and that was truly something. About a year after I started researching this book, I went to Hawaii for the second time with my wife Linda, and one early evening around dusk we were walking along the Waikiki Beach area and just sort of walking along and talking, and all of the sudden out of the shadows, the crepuscular shadows, came this 14-year-old boy, running. And he had beautiful colored skin and a little bit of an afro. And it was the eeriest feeling. It was like I don't believe in ghosts or apparitions or reincarnation, but Obama was on my mind deeply and I was studying him at 14 years old, and there he was running by. And then he disappeared. We turned around and he was gone. And I thought of that the other day when, as many of you, I watched the video of President re-elected Obama talking to his campaign workers in Chicago and tearing up over it. 

And, as he said, he was, in a sense, thinking back to his own journey and his own start in Chicago when he didn't know anybody, and he also complimented his staff by saying, "You're all so much smarter than I am." But it was, to me, a notification of what politics and what campaigns can mean so much beyond the quantitative analysis of them in terms of there is that 14-year-old boy out there running through the shadows because of Barack Obama. And there's a girl out there because of Tammy Baldwin. And all of that is so much, you don't talk about that or think about it when you're discussing the unemployment rate or all of the other issues of a campaign, but they have a meaning that lasts even longer. Hearing "Bridge Over Troubled Water" and thinking about George McGovern, it was almost like a little memorial service for us here in Madison who loved McGovern and what he inspired over the years. Gary Hart, the day or two after he died, said something very profound about how we judge winners and losers in this society. And when you think about what George McGovern contributed to the world and what Richard Nixon contributed to the world, who's the winner and who's the loser? I have written 10 books, and this Obama book is my tenth, and because I work at the Washington Post and I've spent much of my career there every four years writing about political people who want to be president and because I had written a biography of Bill Clinton after he was elected, there was kind of an assumption that I would go about writing another book about Barack Obama. And, as I've said before, that decision was one of the toughest ones I've had to make in my life, and it had nothing to do with Barack Obama. It had to do with what I considered the toxic political environment in this country in some ways and the realization that an effort to write a serious historical biography about someone who was president, throwing it into the maw of this culture would be problematic. And I had a sense that certain parts of society would, the right wing would dismiss the book and at the same time try to rip everything out of it they could to beat up Obama. And that troubled me, and I wasn't sure I wanted to do that, but I am trained as a journalist and an historian. 

It's been my life's work, and I decided that I owed it to myself and to my craft and to my beliefs to go about and do the book anyway and do it to the best that I could to try and define the truth. This book is the first of two volumes, and it's really about two things. It's about the world that created him and how we recreated himself. Those are the two obsessions that drove me into the book. All of us are random creations, but Barack Obama is so much more improbable in the world that created him. And I realized that through his life story, through the story of his family, I could really write about the modern world. And that's the first obsession that drew me in. And then it was, given the contradictions into which he was born, without a father, in Hawaii, half black, half white, a hapa as they call it there, trying to deal with so many and with a dysfunctional family in different ways and mother not always there, although she was loving, how did he figure it out? How did he invent himself, in a sense, so that he could get on the path to where he is now? And I thought that by figuring that out, I might be able to actually explain him in a way that would become more understandable to people as they were trying to deal with him as president and as a candidate for president. Because, although you can't judge somebody by their early life, you shouldn't judge them by it or by their relatives, you can understand them by it, and there's a difference, and that's what I was trying to do with this book. So, whether it was the first debate, I'm sure there are many people in this room who were wondering what the heck was going on there, or different points in his presidency where progressives might have been frustrated by him for various reasons. 

I think that his life offers explanations for all of that. And so, my pursuit of the book was really along those ends. To try to eliminate who he is today through what he was. In all of my books my first mantra is go there, wherever there is. And for the book on Vince Lombardi meant turning to my wife Linda and uttering the immortal loving words, how would you like to move to Green Bay for the winter? [LAUGHTER]  I need some water. Is that all right?  So, I'm sorry. So, we did and it made all the difference for that book, and I've been making it up to her ever since. [LAUGHTER] It was a lot easier to say, how would you like to go to Rome to study the world of 1960 and the Olympics, or to Puerto Rico to study Roberto Clemente. But this book took me into places we never would have gone otherwise. It was an incredible journey of more than 60,000 miles around the world. 

To Kenya and Indonesia, to Hawaii several times, to Kansas where the white side of Obama's family arose, and then the arc of his life off Hawaii to Los Angeles and New York and Chicago, where he eventually found home. And as I was on that journey, all along the way I could see things evolving in his story that I though applied to the present. And one of those elements that I think was very important in trying to figure out how he was operating as president is that his whole life was essentially a successful endeavor to avoid traps. The first trap was being born in Hawaii, thousands of miles from the centers of power and from the mainland. A paradise where one can get stuck. Sort of like Madison in that sense, for me. [LAUGHTER] I had to leave and so did he. The trap of being born biracial and in a society where, of course, from the day he was born society judged him by the color of his skin, so he had to deal with race in that sense. But being the son of a white mother and living a long time with his white grandparents in Hawaii created certain difficulties and obstacles to overcome. In one sense, Hawaii was the best place in the world for Barack Obama because of all of the states in America, it is the most diverse. 

Everybody is of some different shade and part of a hapa background, whether it's Chinese, or Japanese, or Okinawan, or Portuguese, or Haole, as they call Anglos, or native Hawaiians, Polynesians, Barack Obama, one of his childhood friends was named Tom Topolinski. Sounds Polish. He was Chinese. [LAUGHTER] It was that kind of place, but it was also, the difficulty was that there were very few African Americans there. There were some affiliated with the military bases, but not many others. Only two in his high school. And so from that early age he had to figure out how to avoid the traps of who he was, of race in America. Then spent many, many years trying to figure that out, and, of course, gets to Chicago and has the trap again of are you black enough and how do you survive in Chicago politics. But I think it's important, and I've applied this to his presidency, there are times when he seems a little bit not quite clear. A little bit behind. 

His progressive supporters are wondering what is he doing? Why isn't he acting? Why isn't he being tougher on the republicans or clarifying the issue the way he did? Now, of course, some of that is just simply that he's learning how to do it, but another part of it is that he's probably two steps ahead trying to think of where the traps are and how to get around them. And so, for the first two years of his presidency, for example, you saw frustration about, well, he promised that he would end Don't Ask, Don't Tell as soon as he got into office and deal with what would seem to be the most fundamentally issue for someone of his background which is human rights, civil rights of that sort. And there was a lot of anger directed toward him by the gay and lesbian community during that period, and it was understandable, but it was also, I could see what was going on and how he was trying to figure out the right moment, and he did. And two years later, after he got the military completely on board, he had it. And now you don't even think back to those years of frustration because he actually accomplished something. And there's also this frustration about he hasn't done everything that he promised. Well, the major promise he made was affordable healthcare, and he actually did it. There's all this critique of Barack Obama compared with LBJ and Bill Clinton in terms of he doesn't like to schmooze with politicians, and if only he'd have them over to the White House he would have gotten more accomplished. They didn't get healthcare accomplished, he did. In his own way. 

[APPLAUSE] And equally important, he realized that for it to be enacted he'd have to get reelected. And with Barack Obama, again, because of figuring out the traps of life and the work he did studying the uses of powers in Chicago when he was a community organizer thinking about the world as you want it to be but dealing with the world as it is, he came to understand that he had to get reelected for healthcare to last. And so, some of the times when, again, people could be frustrated over some of his action or inaction, he was thinking a couple of steps ahead in that way. When you go to that first debate, it was a perfect storm of Barack Obama's personality that worked against him in that instance. First of all, his campaign felt, and they were right, that they were winning, and so they had, and they were wrong about this, they had a sort of defensive strategy at that point: don't just blow it. So that was the mind set, overarching mind set, of the campaign when he went to Denver: just don't blow it. But then there are all these other aspects to it which fed into it which are explainable by his life. Barack Obama is inherently not confrontational. The way he figured out how to maneuver around the traps of his life was to do it his own way and not be directly confrontational. And so, in that instance, it would have served him better had he been more confrontational with Mitt Romney, but it wasn't inherently part of his style. 

He also has, more than any politician I've ever encountered, a certain ambivalence towards the game of politics, which comes out in interesting ways. He has the sensibility of a writer as much as a politician. He's observing the process while he is also participating in it. And there are certain aspects of it that he sort of disdains. The sound bite culture, the 24-hour news cycle, and that doesn't serve him well, necessarily, as a politician. I compare him with Bill Clinton in the regard, who I also wrote a book about, and Bill Clinton essentially wanted to be president from the day he was born. [LAUGHTER] And he ran for president every year when he was in high school until, when he was a senior, his principal, Johnnie Mae Mackey, came to him and said, Billy, we're sick of you, you can't run for president anymore. [LAUGHTER] So, he said, okay, I'll run for class secretary. [LAUGHTER] And that job in that era, as the woman in this crowd know the sexism of that era, the secretary is supposed to be a girl because the president would be a boy, right? So, he ran for class secretary against his girlfriend. [LAUGHTER] And she beat him. 

[LAUGHTER] And he wouldn't talk to her for weeks. [LAUGHTER] But that's Bill Clinton. And then he got to Georgetown and Washington and was freshman class president and sophomore class president. [LAUGHTER] And late in his junior year, he ran for senior class president and he got beat, because his peers were sick of him. [LAUGHTER] But he kept going and he eventually became president and president again, and I've always said that he'll run for president the rest of his life. He was never happier than this campaign when he was running for president again. [LAUGHTER] Thirty-seven times for Barack Obama. That relationship has had its ups and downs, to say the least, but I've said of Bill Clinton that he loves to be needed as much as he needs to be loved. And Barack Obama needed him and wisely used him, and it helped in so many different ways this campaign. But Barack Obama himself really didn't have that political bug in the same way. 

What he had, as Mayor Dave captured in a review that he would have told you about had you not raised your hands that way... [LAUGHTER] What he had was an incredible infusion of idealism from his mother, who had him when she was 18 years old. And, by the way, I can't imagine there's a birther in this crowd. [LAUGHTER] But if there is, maybe we will never have to deal with it again. I wish we'd never have to talk about Donald Trump again. [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] Or look at his ugly mug. [LAUGHTER] But, for the last time, this is the conspiracy that would have had to exist for Barack Obama not to have been born on August 4, 1961, at Kapiolani Medical Center in Honolulu. First of all, the local newspapers would have had to have been part of the conspiracy because they ran his birth notice. Then the immigration and naturalization service would have to have been part of the conspiracy because Barack Obama, Sr., was in Honolulu then as a student from Kenya on a student visa, and the INS didn't like him. He was, by American standards, a bigamist. 

He was already married in Kenya and had not been divorced. And he was also, by the morass of racist 1960 America, someone that was disliked because he was a black man from Kenya dating white women. And so, the INS was keeping track of him with documents that I got through the Freedom of Information Act. And every week they were writing about Barack Obama, Sr, and how he was behaving and whether he was married or not and the white woman he was dating. And they were trying to get him out of the country. Even though he was a brilliant man, he had some flaws that left him vulnerable. So, if Barack Obama, Sr, and the mother had left and gone to Mombasa, Kenya, to have this little baby, they never would have gotten back into this country. So, the INS had to be part of the conspiracy too. And thirdly, Barack Obama's mother's name is Stanley Ann Dunham. She was named Stanley. 

Her father was Stanley. The assumption always was that she was named after her father. Again, another act of sexism. A man wanting a boy and imposing a boy's name on a daughter. In fact, the real story is that Madelyn Dunham, the mother, was this small-town Kansas woman who didn't want to be trapped in a small-town life, and she would go to the Augusta Theater in Augusta, Kansas, and watched movies, and her favorite movie star was Bette Davis. And Bette Davis, in 1942, a few months before the daughter was born, starred in a movie where she played a woman named Stanley. And that is where the daughter got the name Stanley. So, fast forward to 1961. You're at Kapiolani Medical Center, a journalist takes a notable doctor out for lunch at the Outrigger Canoe Club that week and says, so, did anything interesting, what interesting happened in your world this week? And he said, well, Stanley had a baby. [LAUGHTER] It's not every day that Stanley has a baby. 

And every nurse and doctor at that hospital knew and was talking about it. So, for all those reasons, I hope that that goes away forever. But in any case, Barack Obama, born into that world and infused by his mother his her idealism. She was only 18. She, too, didn't want to be trapped in a small life, so she was attracted to this brilliant and incredibly deep voiced and sexually charismatic Barack Obama, Sr. and they had this boy, and they never really had a family. He left and she left as well, immediately. Barack grew up with the mother, at first, in Seattle and then back in Honolulu, and then at age six they went to Indonesia. And he lived there for almost three years as a boy. And I have to say that of all my travels, there was a moment in Indonesia when something that's incredibly simple and obvious washed over me in a way that had a deeper meaning. And that was to think about this little boy, Barry as he was called, or Bare by his mother, and his mother had remarried to an Indonesian named Soetoro, so, to make it easier, for those three years he went by Barry Soetoro, living in a little neighborhood called Menteng Dalam in South Jakarta. 

And he wasn't in the protective cocoon of the international school. He was completely thrown in. Had to learn the local language, Bahasa Indonesia, deal with the neighborhood boys, go to the neighborhood school, Barry Soetoro. And it was when I was in that neighborhood walking in the narrow alleyways and hearing the street vendors and all of the other sights and sounds and smells of that neighborhood that it sort of washed over me. Whatever you think of the political part of the story, what an incredible journey from seven-year-old Barry Soetoro in Menteng Dalam to President Obama in the White House. His mother had also wanted to be an anthropologist, and she had this humanist sensibility that she pounded into her son about trying to put yourself in someone else's shoes, trying to do something better for the world. She, herself, devoted most of her life to trying to empower women, handicraft women in Indonesia in a very male-dominated society to survive and thrive there. And she had that sensibility that she pounded into her son, but he was dealing with a lot of other things as a kid. He wasn't thinking, I want to be president of the United States. He was thinking, I want to play basketball and I want to smoke dope. 

That was basically it in Hawaii for that period as a teenager which was utterly understandable and normal in that period. Then he got to college and his mother's voice started resounding a little deeper. You can't be just a good-time Charlie, Barry. You're special and you've got to do something with your life. And you can see at that point when he reach Occidental College in Los Angeles that he was starting to think about a sense of destiny, but he really didn't know what it would be yet, and he had along period of trying to figure himself out. Again, I'll go back to the comparison with Bill Clinton. They both, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, both came out of nowhere, in a sense. I don't mean to disparage Hawaii or southwest Arkansas, but far from the seats of power. They both came out of dysfunctional families that had to deal with alcoholism. Neither one of them had a father. 

They both had a lot to work out in their lives. And they did it in completely opposite ways. Bill Clinton's philosophy was just keep going. Plow forward. Wake up every day, forgive yourself, forgive the world, reinvent yourself, keep going. And, out of that, he became an incredible survivor with a capacity to keep going no matter what. And that's how he survived his presidency and was able to accomplish certain things, but also, in the cycle of Bill Clinton's life, because he never resolved those problems, he would get in trouble, and then his survivability would get him out of trouble again. So that very capacity that he developed as a kid was what both got him into the White House and got him in trouble in the White House and got him out of trouble in the White House and into trouble when he was leaving the White House. [LAUGHTER] And now he's the most popular guy in the country. [LAUGHTER] I hate to say this, but watch out. 

[LAUGHTER] But then he'll figure his way back again. Barack Obama dealt with his contradictions, the contradictions that life presented him in the opposite way. From the time he left Honolulu at age 18 to go to Occidental, to the time nine years later when he left Chicago, drove up to Harvard Law School, basically those nine years he intensely, internally tried to figure himself out, racially, sociologically, professionally, personally. And he did it in a way that I would say allowed him to become more of a "integrated character" or personality than any politician I've covered. And that capacity gave him a certain self-confidence that got him to the White House and then got him in trouble in the White House in the same way that Clinton's personality did with completely different reasons for it. But in Barack Obama's case, it was sort of this sensibility that he represented something transcendent, not himself but what he represented was, which was the commonality of the human experience. He had been thinking about that and writing about since he was in college. I have a letter that he wrote when he was at Columbia sort of describing all of his friends from up through that point of his life and how they were finding their certain niches in life, both professionally and in terms of race and other things, and he was wondering, why can't I be like that? He was almost envious of his friends, but he said, for me to justify my own existence, I have to try to embrace it all. And, really, that's really the motivating factor of so much of the impulse that he has. And so, he sort of incorporated that. 

That letter, really, was the first iteration of the speech by which everyone in this room got to know him in 2004 at Democratic National Convention in Boston and really something that he brought into the White House with him. But he was somewhat naive in that sensibility of how he'd worked himself, the contradictions of himself out got him in trouble in the White House because, essentially, he was thinking, if I can figure it out with everything that was thrown at me, why can't the Congress, why can't the rest of the world? And so, that naive or idealism, in a sense, did not serve him well in the beginning of his presidency. I have to also say that some politicians never change. They just sort of become more so of what they were. And Barack Obama is a person of various flaws and he came into the White House probably not as experienced as one would hope in terms of being administratively experienced, and yet, he's shown a capacity to learn and grow throughout his life, which is also one of those echoes that I see in his early life and to change in a way that makes him more than he was. And so that also is how he found his way out of his problems in the White House and got reelected to where he is today. The years in Chicago, he got there in 1985, and I was thinking about that again when I was watching that video of him thanking his campaign workers. When he arrived in Chicago, nobody knew him. Three people arrived in Chicago about the same time within six months of one another. Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan... 

[LAUGHTER] And Barack Obama. [LAUGHTER] Two became world famous immediately; the third was unknown except to the person who'd hired him and to his grand-uncle who was a librarian at the University of Chicago. But he got there, he had sort of wanted to come to Chicago in part because it's in some ways the pole star of black America, and it had such a rich history to it. And also, it had just elected its first African American mayor, Harold Washington. And before he came, a year before Obama arrived in Chicago, he'd applied for a job with the Harold Washington Administration. Again, somewhat naively, not realizing that you don't just get hired in Chicago. [LAUGHTER] It's who brung ya. But he did get hired a year later to work as a community organizer on the south side in Roseland. And, really, at that point, you see his life starting to all fit together, personally and professionally. The arc of his life searching for home, mostly in terms of his comfort level personally, where that home would be. 

Growing up without a father with a mother who loved him but wasn't always there, trying to deal with race in America, and in Chicago on the south side, he worked in an area that was 98% African American. And he was completely embraced, something that didn't happen in his years in New York, but in Chicago it did. And he was sort of overwhelmed by the chaos and love of many of the middle aged black women who he was trying to help empower on the south side, and he'd never really felt that sort of feeling before of family, and he realized that Chicago was the place. This was before he met Michelle. Michelle is sort of the magnet drawing him all the way through his life, but Chicago is where he would inevitably find her. And he also, in those years in Chicago, was studying power. As an organizer, you lose 95% of the time. And he understood that. It was very frustrating but it was also very rewarding because he was understanding what power means, how you get it, what you have to do to really affect change, not just talk about it, but actually make it happen. And, in many ways, watching Harold Washington operate and watching the corporate powers move jobs out of the south side of Chicago, all of that was really his graduate school, as was going every Sunday to a different black church in Chicago. 

He wasn't an orator until that job. And watching the great preachers on the south side is when he learned how to speak, really. And so, when you see him today, it's their legacy that you're watching, in many ways. But in Chicago, so he found himself personally and professionally. And he realized what he wanted to do and he had to go into elected office. And that's really where my book, this first volume ends is with him figuring all that out, going to Kenya where his father was from, sort of learning about his grandfather, Hussein Onyango, who was the first of the Obamas in western Kenya to be westernized and being taught by conservative evangelical Christians. The great myth of Obama being a secret Muslim... [LAUGHTER] The truth is that Muslims had nothing to do with it, and it was evangelical Christians who were responsible for the rise of the Obamas every step along the way in Kenya. First, the Seventh-day Adventist missionaries who came out to the shores of Lake Victoria and taught his grandfather, Hussein Onyango, English and westernized him, and then Hussein Onyango's son, Barack Obama, Sr, was educated at another mission school, Maseno School, and was, essentially, mentored by this fascinating woman named Betty Mooney, an American whose grandfather was the founder of Texas Christian University, who came to Kenya to spread the gospel and literacy. And she encountered Barack Obama, Sr, in Kenya and hired him to translate some of her literacy books into the Luo language, the local Luo language. 

And she's the one who sponsored him to come to Honolulu, to come to the United States. None of this would have happened without evangelical Christians. [LAUGHTER] Which makes me smile. [LAUGHTER] Because it talks about the unintended consequences of life. There's so many things where you don't know where they're going to go, and that's where this one went, to President Obama. He would not exist without Betty Mooney. [LAUGHTER] But in any case, Barack Obama went back and started to learn the history of his family and visited the grave of his father, who was a brilliant, frustrated man who was an alcoholic and an abusive person. The title of his memoir, "Dreams from My Father," evokes sort of a hole in his life that he never knew his father, and the truth is, he's lucky he never lived with his father because his father was physically abusive, and it would have made his life more difficult had he done that. But in any case, he did go visit where his father died in Nairobi and where he was buried out in Nyang'oma Kogelo out in the Nyanza Province. And then he came home, prepared to go start his political life. 

And so, as I watched Barack Obama this campaign year, I could see the echoes of all of that playing out. And I wrote a column that appeared in today's Washington Post about what I see as the potential for greatness in Barack Obama. And it ends like this: Late on election night, after Obama's victory was clinched, Mark Leibovich of the New York Times, a friend and former Post colleague, came up to me in the press workspace at McCormick Place and asked, was I at some level proud of what the subject of my latest biography had accomplished? "It was not a personal matter," I said. I have absolutely no personal relationship with the president. I did not fly around with him on Air Force One or play basketball with him or ask him to explain the tricks of being president. I just studied his life and tried to figure him out. And in that sense, yes, I felt a sense of pride for him. I could see the uncommon arc of his life, what he had overcome, all of the contradictions he tried to resolve, what had burned inside him and what he was aiming at, and that he just might get there. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]