On His Own

Stanley Dunham was a vivid American character. He grew up in El Dorado, Kans., an oil town in the 1920s that declined sharply in the Depression. He was himself abandoned by his own father, and his mother committed suicide. (The 8-year-old Stanley discovered her body.) Like Obama, Dunham was raised by his grandparents. But in spite of—or perhaps because of—their devout Baptist faith, Dunham was something of a rebel and a drifter. He was kicked out of high school for punching the principal, and spent the next three years riding rail cars. He was a charmer and a dreamer who courted his Wichita girlfriend Madelyn (Obama calls her "Toot") even though her parents—Methodists and more middle class—disapproved. The young couple eloped just before Pearl Harbor. Stanley enlisted in the Army while Madelyn worked on a bomber-assembly line. After the war, he found work as a salesman in a furniture store first in El Dorado, then moved from small-town Texas to Seattle, finally settling in Hawaii. Stanley styled himself as a freethinker and apparently raised no objections to his daughter's marriage to Obama, and he cherished his grandson.

Soon Ann met and fell for another foreign student—Soetoro, a geologist from Indonesia. The new stepfather liked tennis, played chess with Stanley and playfully wrestled with Obama. He returned to Jakarta first, with Ann and Obama joining him later. (Toot, forever practical, telephoned the State Department to check on Indonesia's stability and insisted on packing trunks of food. "You never know what these people will eat," she said.)

In the years since Sukarno had created a new regime in the aftermath of centuries of colonialism, Indonesia had been tense. Ronny Amir, a neighbor of Obama's who went to school with him, remembers stories about kidnappings, about disappearances, about communists chopping people's heads off. It was tense inside Obama's house, too. Ann and Obama both thought Soetoro different, more distant, than he had been in Hawaii. "It was as if he had pulled into some dark hidden place, out of reach, taking with him the brightest part of himself," Obama wrote. Some nights Soetoro would be "wandering through the house with a bottle of imported whiskey, nursing his secrets." The truth—which he kept from his new family—was that he had been recalled to Indonesia during a bloody purge, and he had been sent to New Guinea. "And he was one of the lucky ones," a cousin told Ann. Other students had been imprisoned or had disappeared. Little wonder, then, that he wanted his stepson to know how to fight.

Barry liked being in charge. Every day before class, kids lined up outside the classroom. In first grade, his first year at the school, Barry commanded the front of the line, calling out baris ("make a line")—the kids would line up; siap grak ("get ready")—the kids would straighten the line; tegap ("stand straight"), and then, once he was convinced the lines were straight, he would let them into the classroom. His third-grade teacher had to encourage him to take turns. "He always wants to be No. 1, to be at the front. Psychologically, he wants to be in charge," she says. "Sometimes I had to tell him to let other kids do it." He ceded his place willingly, she says. (Still, he acknowledges a bossy streak. As a young man, he recalled, he was tough on his sister and mother: "I scolded Maya for spending one evening watching TV instead of reading the novels I'd bought for her," Obama wrote. "I instructed my mother on the various ways that foreign donors and international development organizations like the one she was working for bred dependence in the Third World.") In the Jakarta years, Obama also often tried to be the schoolyard peacemaker. "Barry, if his friends were having arguments, he'd become a mediator," says Harmon Askiar, a neighborhood playmate. "He would grab one friend's hand and grab the other friend's hand and force them to shake each other's hands and be friends again."

Ultimately Ann decided that her son needed to be in America, even if it meant they had to live apart. And so Obama returned to Hawaii and to the care of his grandparents. Their world was his world for crucial years. Stanley had moved out of furniture sales and into life insurance; Madelyn, meanwhile, became a successful executive at the Bank of Hawaii. Obama's life with them was as conventionally American middle class as his life with his mother in Indonesia had been foreign. Obama bought comics from the local newsstand, spent hours watching television (he had to go to bed when Johnny Carson came on), fell asleep to top 40 on the radio.

Obama seems never to have heard a word said against the man who, from year to year and move to move, was not there. There were stories, always stories, about his father: about his brilliance, his charm, his ambitions to be a great man in a new era of Kenyan history. Then, at Christmastime 1971, came word that both Obama Sr. and Ann, still in Indonesia, would be coming to Honolulu for the holiday. "Should be one hell of a Christmas," Stanley said, and he was right.

Who was the man at last making the journey to see his son? Over the years, Obama was to discover the more complicated truth about the father so often spoken of as larger than life. "My father was a deeply troubled person," Obama told me. "My father was an alcoholic. He was a womanizer. He did not treat his children well." Barack Obama Sr. had grown up near Kenya's far western border, not far from the silvery waters of Lake Victoria, in a small house surrounded by a riot of millet, wheat and sorghum, where the land was crisscrossed with rutted dirt lanes that turned to mud in the rainy season and appeared baked red in the dry months. The local school at the time was several miles away, but he happily made the trip every day, on foot. Afterward, he would return home and boast and brag and confide to his mother, Sarah, about his academic accomplishments and whatever he had learned that day. It seemed to her that her son, from a very early age, was intent to do great things, to rise from the rutted roads. He was proud of himself, and she was proud of him. He soaked up knowledge as if he depended on it for survival—which, in a way, he did. He was prideful. "I got the best grades today," he would say to Sarah. "I am the cleverest boy." If he did not get the best marks, which was not often, he sulked. He had a complex relationship with his own father, who once beat Barack Sr.'s back bloody with a stick when he was expelled from a school. The father was bent on his son's behaving "responsibly," Sarah later told the grandson, and he thought it irresponsible when Barack Sr. left his first African wife and married Ann.

When he graduated from Harvard, Barack Sr. made sure to have his picture taken. It is black-and-white, a 10-by-12 portrait in which he wears a suit and tie, and the horn-rimmed glasses that were fashionable at the time. He is gazing off into the middle distance, looking both relaxed and serious. After he graduated, he brought the picture home to his mother and told her to hang it on the wall. "Whenever you look here you'll be reminded of me, of what I have achieved, and you'll think of me," he told her. Scott Johnson, NEWSWEEK's Africa bureau chief, visited Sarah recently, and there the picture still sits, opposite Sarah's favorite chair.