On His Own

Obama cherishes his life story as a unique saga, but the drama of a fatherless child's rise to temporal power, driven by ambition, a hunger for control and an appetite for the approval of others, is a familiar one in American politics. Presidents, and presidential candidates, tend to come from one of two kinds of distinct families. There is either a powerful, prominent father at the center of the clan (the Adamses, the Kennedys, the Bushes, the McCains) or, more often than you might think, there is either a weak father or no father at all. An unusual number of presidents have been the sons of absent or weak fathers. Andrew Jackson and Bill Clinton lost their fathers before they were born; Gerald Ford did not meet his biological father until he was 17 years old.

I asked Obama why he thought powerful politicians had either a strong father, or no father at all. "I think to put yourself through what is a pretty rigorous process of running for president you've got to have learned to set up some pretty high expectations for yourself," he said. "Something's got to be driving you, and in my case if you have somebody that is absent, maybe you feel like you've got something to prove when you're young, and that pattern sets itself up over time. But also because, again in my case, the stories I heard about my father painted him as larger than life, which also meant that I felt I had something to live up to. You could argue that if you're too well adjusted, you don't end up running for president." I laughed at this; journalists often joke that nobody normal ever makes it to the presidency, and it was funny to hear it from a man who wants the office. Obama went on: "So if the pattern sets in pretty early on where you're pushing your comfort level it probably has to do with those very early influences, and that can come from either the absence or the presence of a father who ends up motivating you in some way." He has a romantic streak about the possibilities of politics—hence the theme of hope—but Obama is also a realist, and his pragmatism has ancient roots.

To those who follow politics closely, and to the legions of book buyers who have purchased Obama's two memoirs, his biography seems familiar now, but it still bears repeating; many Americans are still rather fuzzy about the details. Born in 1961, Obama is the son of a white mother from Kansas; his father was a black man from Kenya. The parents met at the University of Hawaii, and married; Obama was born; the father, who, it turned out, already had one family in Africa, left for Harvard and never came back. "I consider myself a serial polygamist," Obama Sr. once told a friend. "That is, one wife at a time." By most accounts Senior had eight children with four women. The candidate's mother, Ann Dunham Obama, married Lolo Soetoro, the Indonesian, and took her son, Barack, to Jakarta; Barack later returned to live with his grandparents in Hawaii. His mother, who had a daughter, Maya, with Soetoro, separated from Soetoro and also moved back to Hawaii. Obama went to college at Occidental, in Los Angeles, for two years before moving east to Columbia University. He worked in Chicago as a community organizer before applying to Harvard Law School—echoes of his father's earlier journey—and rising to become president of the Harvard Law Review. (If you are really into armchair psychology, consider that the son returns to the scene of his betrayal by his father and outperforms the old man. It is sort of "One L" meets "Oedipus.") At Harvard, Obama, long confused about his identity, learned to negotiate across color lines, and whites began to see him as a redemptive figure. Already interested in politics—an arena in which success brings attention, authority and accomplishment, all things the fatherless tend to crave—he returned to Chicago, married a woman with a strong father, and was soon seeking office.

Where did his drive come from? "At some level I had to raise myself," Obama says. "My mother obviously was the dominant influence in my life, and I had a stepfather and a grandfather who both participated in raising me and were good men … But if I think about how I have been able to navigate some pretty tricky situations in my life, it has to do with the fact that I had to learn to trust my own judgment; I had to learn to fight for what I wanted."

Obama's father was a striking presence on the campus of the University of Hawaii in the early 1960s. Tall, loud, charismatic, opinionated, he had arrived as part of a scholarship program to educate the new generation of African leaders as countries such as Kenya were emerging from colonial rule. Neil Abercrombie quickly befriended Obama, who was studying economics. Obama seemed the embodiment of a new world, a smart set of modern thinkers who would remake the planet. "When he came into a room, you knew it right away," says Abercrombie, now a congressman representing Hawaii. "He had a big heart and a brilliant, brilliant mind."

Their conversations would run long and late, fueled by beer and pizza. Obama and his friends were obsessed with world politics, with freedom movements internationally: the anticolonial independence movement in Africa, and civil rights in the United States. "He was very concerned that the nationalist impulse in Kenya and elsewhere would fall prey to tribalism and individual rivalries," says Abercrombie. For Obama, those tribal concerns were not abstract. The Obama family is of the minority Luo tribe, but the emerging leader Kenyatta was of the majority Kikuyu tribe. The rivalries worsened soon after independence, in the late 1960s, and remain in force today. But Obama was determined to return to Kenya. His decisions to go to Harvard and then to Africa led to the failure of his short marriage to Ann.

A smart, young student with a passion for the emerging civil- rights movement, she had been a teenager when she met Obama in a Russian class. They fell in love, but Obama's ambition quickly broke up the family. "When he brought her to our gatherings, we were pontificating all the time," recalls Abercrombie. "It was clear she had a very adventurous spirit, but she was very calm while he was very voluble. She was an observer and a quiet participant. I think she concluded after little Barry was born that when Barack had an opportunity to go to the mainland, that his ambitions and her ambitions weren't going to work out. He came out of the 1950s in Africa and was affected by the patriarchal culture, as well as his own sense of destiny to participate in this movement. In the end, he went to Harvard because it was the top of the heap." Ann eventually divorced Senior. There were letters from father to son, and replies, but the younger Obama recalls nothing particularly heartfelt.

His grandfather, Stanley, was the most constant male presence in his life. Abercrombie often saw young Barry with Stanley in Hawaii, walking the neighborhood together or going to the beach. "He was very avuncular and very well liked," says Abercrombie. "And he loved that little boy, just loved him. He took him everywhere."