Barack Obama

The Story

David Maraniss

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781439160411
• eBook ISBN: 9781439167533
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The groundbreaking multigenerational biography, a richly textured account of President Obama and the forces that shaped him and sustain him, from Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, political commentator, and acclaimed biographer David Maraniss. In Barack Obama: The Story, David Maraniss has written a deeply reported generational biography teeming with fresh insights and revealing information, a masterly narrative drawn from hundreds of interviews, including with President Obama in the Oval Office, and a trove of letters, journals, diaries, and other documents.The book unfolds in the small towns of Kansas and the remote villages of western Kenya, following the personal struggles of Obama's white and black ancestors through the swirl of the twentieth century. It is a roots story on a global scale, a saga of constant movement, frustration and accomplishment, strong women and weak men, hopes lost and deferred, people leaving and being left. Disparate family threads converge in the climactic chapters as Obama reaches adulthood and travels from Honolulu to Los Angeles to New York to Chicago, trying to make sense of his past, establish his own identity, and prepare for his political future. Barack Obama: The Story chronicles as never before the forces that shaped the first black president of the United States and explains why he thinks and acts as he does. Much like the author's classic study of Bill Clinton, First in His Class, this promises to become a seminal book that will redefine a president.

CHAPTER 1

IN SEARCH OF EL DORADO

On Thanksgiving morning in 1926, the Dunhams set out from their home in Topeka, traveling south down U.S. Route 75 on a forty-five-mile ride through the autumn countryside. Five people were in the car: the parents, Ralph and Ruth Armour Dunham; their two young sons, Ralph Jr. and Stanley; and Ralph Sr.’s brother, Earl, who worked with him at an auto garage. They were on their way to the town of Melvern to spend the holiday with the Whitneys. Mabel Whitney was Ralph and Earl’s sister. The Dunham brothers and their brother-in-law, Hugh Whitney, had made plans to go hunting while the women prepared a holiday meal and the children played. The morning broke clean and bright, an Indian summer reprieve with temperatures climbing to sixty-eight degrees, the warmest in three weeks. Most Kansans had the day off and were outside enjoying the balmy weather. Ruth’s younger sister, Doris Armour, who lived in El Dorado with their parents, rode up to Emporia with two friends to attend a football game between the College of Emporia and her old school, Kansas State Teachers College, one of dozens of college and high school football rivalries scheduled around the state that afternoon.

Ruth might have preferred going to Emporia with her sister. She and Ralph were quarreling again, a common occurrence. Only twenty-six, she had been married for eleven years already, since she was fifteen, when she had dropped out of high school in the second month of her junior year. The wedding, held at nine at night at her sister-in-law’s house in Wichita, had been a tightly held secret, with friends and parents “kept in the dark” until a week later, according to a belated announcement in the Wichita Eagle. Married life had been difficult from the start, as Ruth endured the serial philandering of her husband, who was seven years older. Their latest argument ended that afternoon, when Ralph departed with his hunting party. Ruth, distraught, waited until he was gone, then left for home, leaving her boys with Mabel and the other children.

Sometime that evening, back in Topeka, she emerged from their house at 703 Buchanan and walked in the darkness two blocks toward Sixth Avenue. Seasons had changed at sundown, from summery day to wintry night. There was a lashing wind and the temperature was in free fall, plummeting to an overnight low of twenty-four. Most of the shops along the avenue—Fritton Grocery, Golden Gate Coffee Shop, Home Bakery and Lunch—were closed, but lights were on at the Lawrence Drug Store next to the Palace Garage, Ralph’s place. The pharmacist, George W. Lawrence, was working inside. Ruth entered and told Lawrence that a dog had been hit by a car and she needed something to put the poor critter out of its misery. Lawrence, amenable to the idea, suggested chloroform. Ruth said that would not do; the smell of chloroform made her sick. She asked for strychnine, and Lawrence relented, selling her ten grams. For whatever pain the dog was in, Ruth seemed in no hurry. Lawrence later recalled that she lingered in the pharmacy and talked to him for several minutes “seemingly in the best of spirits, joking and visiting.”

After leaving, Ruth went next door to her husband’s office and sat at his desk. One call from the Palace Garage, telephone exchange 2-7312, was placed that night, a twenty-five-cent evening call to El Dorado. Ruth had phoned her parents, Harry and Gabriella Armour, who had not seen her since late October, when she came home for the weekend of the Kafir Corn Carnival. Harry Armour had been laid up at St. Luke’s Hospital; he had fallen off a tank ladder in the oil field and broken a shoulder bone. But the accident did not stop the family from luxuriating in the news that Doris, a former Pi Kappa Sigma sweetheart described as “a genuinely beautiful girl with dark brown bobbed hair, brown eyes, and a delicate coloring that is entirely natural,” had been elected Miss El Dorado for the carnival. Six years younger than her sister, Doris was the jewel of the family: a popular beauty queen, smart and fun-loving, with a year of college education and a secure job in town. Ruth, by contrast, though equally attractive and intelligent, was a high school dropout in a difficult marriage. In the call to her parents that night from the Palace Garage she apparently did not discuss her troubles, but presented herself as being “in the best of health.”

Two people saw her after that phone call. The first was W. E. Briggs, who owned an auto paint shop in the same building as the garage and lived nearby. Briggs later remembered that at ten-thirty, as he put away his car, he caught sight of Mrs. Dunham sitting at Ralph’s desk, writing something. He presumed that she was waiting for her husband. About half an hour later, George Lawrence, the pharmacist, who also kept his car in the tin-ceilinged garage, noticed the same sight: Ruth sitting at her husband’s desk.

In Melvern the men returned from their hunt after dark. When Mabel told Ralph that his wife was long gone, he and Earl left for Topeka to find her. No one was home when they reached 703 Buchanan. Ralph started a search with Earl. Eventually, shortly before two in the morning, Ralph stopped at his garage, where he intended to make another call back to Melvern. As he entered his office, he saw Ruth lying on the floor behind the desk.

“Here she is!” he called out to his brother. “She’s asleep.”

As they moved closer, they could see that she was not breathing. She was taken by ambulance to nearby St. Francis Hospital, but was already dead. The county coroner, Dr. Herbert L. Clark, began an investigation, interviewing the Dunham brothers along with the pharmacist and the auto paint shop owner, and determined that she had killed herself, dying of strychnine poisoning. By the time her husband found her she had been dead no more than two hours. The letter that Briggs saw her writing at the desk hours earlier was a suicide note. In it, according to the coroner, “Mrs. Dunham declared that the reason for her act was that her husband no longer loved her.”

The staggering news of Ruth’s death reached El Dorado a few hours later. Doris was home from the football outing to Emporia, and she and her parents drove up to Topeka in the early morning of Friday, November 26. Whether they were told the circumstances of the death when they reached the capital is unclear. Most likely they knew. An enterprising reporter at the Topeka State Journal, with nothing juicier to pursue during a placid holiday stretch—only one arrest in the police logs since Tuesday night—had already found the coroner and pieced together parts of the story, which would appear in the newspaper that afternoon. It was not as though suicides were unmentionable in the Kansas culture of that era. That same week, C. J. (Pat) Kroh of Oil Hill, a druggist who had talked about opening a cigar and confectionery store at the Philips Petroleum camp in Borger, Texas, chose instead to die “by his own hand,” according to an obituary in the El Dorado Times, poisoning himself with carbolic acid: “Each heart knoweth its own sorrow, so poor Pat took a shortcut out of it all.”

But in dealing with newspapers in their home turf, 140 miles from Ruth’s death scene in Topeka, the Armours and family friends felt compelled to conceal the suicide and concoct a more benign version of the tragedy. Doris sent a telegram to the El Dorado Times claiming the cause of death was food poisoning. A similar account was presented to the Wichita Eagle by Ruth’s close friend there, Mrs. Roy Reeves. Under the headline “Former Wichita Woman Ptomaine Poison Victim,” the account noted that “Mrs. Dunham had been feeling well up to a late hour Thursday night, and it is believed that food eaten at Thanksgiving dinner was responsible for her death.”

The mythology surrounding Ruth’s passing began then and there. It would take on another variation later, when retold by her younger son, Stanley, the grandfather of a future president. He would get the essence of the story correct, calling it a suicide, but then place himself at the dramatic center, claiming he had discovered her body. He told this story later to his wife and daughter and then to his grandchildren and anyone else who would listen, and though most knew he was a teller of tales, this particular tale was accepted, often as a psychological explanation for his later rebellions and peculiarities. But the boy was not at the Palace Garage at two in the morning when Ruth’s body was discovered. “Stanley,” said Ralph Dunham Jr., his older brother, “did not find my mother dead.”

From the distance of eight decades, Ralph Jr., who was ten at the time of the suicide, remembered an unseasonably warm day, a picnic (in Melvern), the boys playing with other kids. He recalled the sudden, surprise arrival of his grandparents from El Dorado. And there was one other shard of memory, the sort that can be trusted because of its odd specificity. Ralph Jr. and his eight-year-old brother, Stanley, had read books about Uncle Wiggily, the lame old rabbit with the striped barber-pole cane, and his cast of creature friends and enemies, the Skeezicks, Bushy Bear, Woozy Wolf, Jimmie Wibblewobble, and Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy. Milton Bradley had issued a board game based on the Uncle Wiggily stories, and the Dunham sons coveted it. Soon after the grandparents arrived from El Dorado, they gave the boys some money and sent them to the drugstore to buy the game. It was while playing Uncle Wiggily, as Ralph Jr. remembered it, that he and Stanley were told their mother was dead.

The house where the boys learned of their mother’s death was in the oldest section of Topeka, where numbered streets were intersected by side streets named for presidents of the United States. The next block over was Lincoln. One block up Buchanan stood the governor’s mansion, a twenty-room brick bulwark with striped awnings, gingerbread trim, and fanciful turrets that accommodated Governor Benjamin Paulen and his wife, along with a cook, chauffeur, and private secretary. Despite their proximity to power, the Dunhams dwelled at the other end of the social order. Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham was the full name of the father, a literary appellation passed down from his father, a Wichita pharmacist and graduate of the University of Kansas who considered himself a Middle American disciple of the New England transcendentalist poet. This latest Ralph Waldo never thought much of his name, never went to college, never read Emerson, and pursued less elegiac lines of work. He had managed the Little Traveler Café next to the central fire station in Wichita, then was a mechanic for several years at the Oakland auto dealership in El Dorado before relocating again to Topeka, where he repaired cars at the garage on Sixth Avenue. Their house on Buchanan was plain and wooden, dirty white slats on a narrow slab, ten yards wide as it faced the street. The most recent census noted that the coal furnace needed repair. The neighbors to one side were the Wilkersons, a truck driver and his wife, and to the other side the widowed sisters Mrs. Waters and Mrs. Embry. The landlord was a local plumber. This was eighty-two years before a great-grandson of Ruth and Ralph joined Buchanan and Lincoln in the line of presidents. This was how it began, with an ending.

The funeral was held that Sunday at the First Baptist Church on Central Avenue in downtown El Dorado. Services were conducted by the minister from West Side Baptist in Wichita who had married Ruth and Ralph eleven years earlier.

Twenty-six years—a life cut short in every respect. When she was a child Ruth thought she would grow up to be a schoolteacher, as her parents had been when they were young adults. She played the role of teacher even before she went off to first grade. Classroom discipline in that era began with the barked order “Position!” At the command the students were to sit upright at their desks, mouths shut, hands folded in front of them. As a toddler, Ruth would call for order with the shout “Pa-dish-shun!” She was smart enough to skip a grade, but an early marriage and teenage motherhood ended her education before high school. Her boys remembered running into the house, where their mother held out a clenched fist to the first one to reach her. When he tapped it she would open it to reveal the gift of a Life Saver candy. She would then hide her other fist behind her back until the second boy circled around her waist and tapped the fist, which opened to another candy prize.

Four churchwomen, members of the Sunday school class Ruth had attended when she lived in El Dorado with her young family, sang “Abide with Me” and “Beautiful Isle of Somewhere.” “Somewhere the heart is stronger; somewhere the prize is won.”

The boys never went back to the small white house on Buchanan Street in Topeka. Their father lost his garage, moved to Wichita, tried the drugstore business, and lived with one woman, then married another (Martha Mae Stonehouse in 1932, when she was twenty-two and he was thirty-five). The end of the first of those later relationships also came during a hunting trip, though the disintegration this time seemed more farce than tragedy, as his son Ralph Jr. later recalled: “He went away on a hunting trip one weekend, and when he came back, the woman had taken up with some other fella and they had backed up to the drugstore while everyone was away and packed up everything into the truck and moved off, and that was the end of the drugstore.” By then Stanley and Ralph Jr. were out of their father’s life, mostly. From the time of their mother’s death through the rest of their school days, they lived with their maternal grandparents in El Dorado, setting a generational pattern that would be repeated a half century later.

In Section 5 of the Sunset Lawns South Cemetery, on the edge of El Dorado, across the street from an old oil refinery, stands a simple red granite gravestone that reads:

RUTH ARMOUR
DUNHAM
1900–1926

It is a lonesome plot surrounded by parched grass, with no other markers within fifteen yards. Her relatives are buried elsewhere, and her descendants live far away.

El dorado is Spanish for “the golden one,” or “the gilded one.” By most accounts, the long version was El Hombre Dorado, and the original myth was of a tribe so opulent that the chief hombre was painted in gold. The phrase grew shorter, the myth longer. The legend of el dorado began in South America, but the yearning for it is universal: to find that magical place of gold. El dorado is out there, somewhere. John Milton depicted El Dorado in book 9 of Paradise Lost as the mythical land of fabulous wealth. In Voltaire’s Candide, El Dorado is the paradise of happiness. Edgar Allan Poe wrote “Gaily bedight a Gallant knight, / In sunshine and in shadow / Had journeyed long, singing a song / In search of El Dorado.” Poe’s gallant knight never could find that elusive place that lay “o’er the mountains of the moon.” Nor could the conquistadors who went searching throughout the Americas. Francisco Vásquez de Coronado ventured out from Mexico in search of the Seven Cities of Gold in 1540, following one false lead after another as native peoples toyed with his grandiose imaginings. He pushed his expedition of Spaniards, Mexicans, and African slaves through what would become Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma before ending up in the middle of Kansas, where, instead of a golden city high on a hill, he found some naked Indians.

More than three centuries later, in 1857, a party of Scots-Irish settlers traveled from Lawrence south and west across the Flint Hills of Kansas, moving through a sea of big bluestem and Indian grass. When they reached the crest of a hill above the Walnut River, the soft valley below seemed gilded in a sunset glow. The captain of the party gazed down at the sweetly winding river, with stone bluffs shimmering in gold and scarlet, and was moved to shout “El Dorado!” So goes the founding story of the town where Ruth Armour Dunham was buried, the town to which her young sons, Stanley and Ralph Jr., moved at the end of 1926.

El Dorado, Kansas. The locals pronounce it to rhyme with Laredo, el da-RAY-dough. Thirty miles east-northeast of Wichita, El Dorado is the county seat of Butler County, a rectangular jurisdiction that at 1,440 square miles is the largest county in Kansas. When the Dunham boys arrived, the county was booming again, which meant that oil was booming, with the longest unbroken stretch of rising petroleum prices in the 1920s. The Flint Hills had been the domain of cattle ranches and kafir corn farms until oil was discovered in 1915. On October 16 of that year, the season when young Ruth Armour Dunham married and dropped out of school, drillers for Wichita Natural Gas Co. hit pay dirt in an anticline 549 feet belowground on the property of John Stapleton. It was one of the first times the company had employed precise geology rather than scents, hunches, and luck to divine their spot. And here it was, a few miles outside the El Dorado town limits—black gold, the real el dorado.

Along with the gusher at Stapleton No. 1 came the sudden spasms of an oil frenzy. Roustabouts, wildcatters, pipe fitters, lumbermen, teamsters, preachers, prostitutes, surveyors, carpenters, organizers, political rabble-rousers, gamblers, restaurateurs, scofflaws, hired guns—the full traveling cast of American searchers came clamoring down to Butler County looking for action. The population of El Dorado grew by half to more than five thousand in that first year, on its way to more than ten thousand, and smaller company oil towns littered the surrounding countryside: Midian, Oil Hill, Browntown, Millerville, Haskin’s Camp, Haverhill. Refineries were constructed in El Dorado and Augusta, the county’s second-largest town, twelve miles south, to process the petroleum into gasoline. Pipelines were laid to carry the gas away, and more wells went into operation every week in every direction, more than six hundred in all, producing twenty-three million barrels of oil a year.

The backstreets of El Dorado and Augusta erupted with boardinghouses where men slept in shifts, one bed serving two or three men consecutively during a twenty-four-hour cycle. A single boardinghouse prepared dinners for two hundred men a day: white bread, boiled beef, potatoes, canned corn, sliced tomatoes, celery, boiled cabbage, ice tea, rice pudding—all for forty cents. The few boarders who found space in the rooming house of Mrs. Vincent Brown were perhaps the luckiest; she baked nine pies a day, her crust considered the flakiest in Butler County. Some stores stayed open around the clock seven days a week. It was said, with a touch of hyperbole, that crowds were so dense at midnight it was difficult to make one’s way down the sidewalks of Central Avenue in El Dorado or State Street in Augusta. Oil Hill and Midian, the two largest made-from-scratch boomtowns, morphed into full-blown communities replete with schools, golf courses, churches, general stores, swimming pools, and row after row of shotgun houses (three rooms and an outhouse). The towns and oil companies sponsored semipro baseball teams, attracting players from all over, including an outfielder named Charles D. (Casey) Stengel, a Kansas City native who hired himself out after one major-league season to play in a series between rivals Oil Hill and Midian. (In the seventh game, mighty Casey struck out, according to one report, getting “nothing more than a loud foul ball.”) During the heat of the First World War, the El Dorado oil field was the most productive in the nation, considered essential to the war effort by military planners in Washington.

Harry Ellington Armour and Gabriella Clark Armour had been among the searchers who found their way to El Dorado during the oil boom. Harry was born in Illinois, but he and Gabriella had both grown up in the towns of La Grange and Canton in northeastern Missouri and had acquired enough educ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Introduction: It’s Not Even Past
• Chapter 1: In Search of El Dorado
• Chapter 2: Luoland
• Chapter 3: In This Our Life
• Chapter 4: Nairobi Days
• Chapter 5: Afraid of Smallness
• Chapter 6: Beautiful Isle of Somewhere
• Chapter 7: Hapa
• Chapter 8: Orbits
• Chapter 9: “Such a World”
• Chapter 10: Marked Man
• Chapter 11: What School You Went?
• Chapter 12: Barry Obama
• Chapter 13: Riding Poniyem
• Chapter 14: Mainland
• Chapter 15: End and Beginning
• Chapter 16: The Moviegoer
• Chapter 17: Genevieve and the Veil
• Chapter 18: Finding and Being Found
• Coda
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About David Maraniss
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Photo Credits
• Index
• Copyright