On His Own

He was certainly volatile. Back in Kenya, Senior liked to show off how much he knew and how well connected he was. In the early 1970s, Mwai Kibaki (the current president) was Kenya's Finance minister. On one occasion Senior took Hilba and some other cousins to see Kibaki at the Kenyan Treasury. "Kibaki, come and see my children," he told his boss. Senior joked, "You see Kibaki here, he's the minister, but I'm better than he is." Despite his Harvard pedigree and his skills, he did not get the opportunities he wanted—or, when he got them, he squandered them. "He was alcoholic, yes, and he was brilliant, everyone in that line [of the family] is brilliant," recalls Hilba of those years. "But [Senior] wasn't getting the opportunities to prove himself, even though he was maybe the first Kenyan to go to Harvard. So you release your frustrations through alcohol, not because you want to, but because society pushes you to." Sometimes, Senior would beat her, though not, she says, in the vicious way that some alcoholics do, but rather as punishment if she did not do well in school. "And he would say to us," Hilba recalls, " 'I am trying to discipline you to be like me, to excel even me'."

By 1982 Senior was working on a plan to revitalize Nairobi's infrastructure. One night that year, as on so many nights, Senior was out in Kaloleni after working hours, drinking. Kaloleni was an old gathering place that dated back to colonial days. Senior was in a jovial mood. He had bought a few rounds for everyone else, including some of the barmaids. In a few days he was meant to travel to Uganda. There was even talk of a promotion—to chief economist at the Ministry of Finance. But that night, driving himself home, he ran off the road and crashed into the tall stump of a giant gum tree. He died instantly.

Family memory—understandably, given Obama's trajectory—puts the distant American son at the center of the Kenyan father's life. It is impossible to judge how much of this is embellished and how much reflects what really happened, but Obama is a cold-eyed historian of his own life. Today, when "Granny" gazes at the portrait of her African son on her wall, she thinks of her American grandson. "I look at him and I see all the same things, he has taken everything from his father," she tells Scott Johnson. "The family is still intact, this son is realizing everything the father wanted—fighting for people, the dreams of the father are still alive in the son. The two loved each other so much and when Barry was here, and was asking, we could see the emotion, the emotion of losing someone, his head would go down. After the burial, he came away but his head was down for losing the father, and that for his love he had to come all this way and bury the father."

Obama did not attend his father's burial; he came to Kenya only in 1987, on a journey, perhaps, to metaphorically bury Senior—or "the Old Man," as others in the family called him. In fact, Barack Obama was in New York, making breakfast in his apartment on 94th Street between First and Second Avenues, when an aunt telephoned him with the news of his father's death. As his eggs burned, Obama wondered how to react to the news. To his son, Obama Sr. was "both more and less than a man," and he would ultimately travel to Kenya in search of the reality behind the mythology and the facts behind the dreams. What he found, as he (and we) now know, was the most human of fathers.

As he had grown older, Obama had struggled to see himself as a black man, though his experience was far from that of the typical African-American. Hawaii helped; there, his grandfather had introduced him to one of the most intriguing mentors of his youth, Frank Marshall Davis. Davis had been a leading black activist and writer of the 1930s and 1940s—a contemporary and friend of Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson. Davis grew up in Kansas, where he was nearly lynched by a group of schoolchildren at the age of 5. He took up a career as a journalist and poet with a strong voice for racial justice, working in Chicago before moving to Hawaii with his second wife, who was white. His political activism, especially his writings on civil-rights and labor issues, prompted a McCarthyite denunciation by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Davis was an eccentric but engaging figure by the time Obama met him in the 1970s. "I was intrigued by old Frank, with his books and whiskey breath and the hint of hard-earned knowledge behind the hooded eyes," wrote Obama. It was around this time that Obama started his own course of reading black literature—Wright, Hughes, Du Bois and Baldwin. "It was almost as if Obama had wandered into a museum," says Dr. Kathryn Takara, a Hawaii-based political scientist who first met Davis at the same time and is now writing a biography of the poet-activist. "It was an electrically charged intellectual atmosphere, with culture all around. There was always music and news, and the TV was never off. The house was full of books and records, old albums and old furniture. He had a porch that was almost on the sidewalk and you could sit out there and hear the jazz from the living room. People would walk up and he invited conversation. There was always something going on." It was Davis who delivered one of the most enduring lessons of Obama's teenage years. After his grandparents argued about a black panhandler who scared his grandmother, Obama visited the poet, shared some whiskey, and recounted the story. When Davis told him his grandmother was right to be scared, that "black people have a reason to hate," Obama realized how distant he was from his closest family. "The earth shook under my feet, ready to crack open at any moment," he wrote. "I stopped, trying to steady myself, and knew for the first time that I was utterly alone."

The story of the rest of his life—a story that is, obviously, still unfolding—is how Obama, now necessarily self-sufficient and wary, always surrounded himself with those with whom he felt secure—though he knew, and knows, that any one of those people might eventually disappoint him. In Chicago he found his way to the Trinity United Church of Christ, and to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. When Wright's "God Damn America" clips emerged earlier this year, Obama's friend Jim Wallis sent him a note of condolence. Late one night, Wallis received an e-mail in reply, something like: "God has his purposes." "I was quite astounded," says Wallis, the left-leaning evangelical writer, activist and founder of Sojourners. "Here's a 46-year-old, which for me at 59 seems young, and he says something like that. This is not what politicians think and do. Politicians want always to be predictive and controlling."

Obama's reply to Wallis reflected a kind of Lincoln-esque fatalism. It is a sad but inescapable fact of life that people—in Obama's case, people close to you—often fail you. Wright, obviously, was far from the first man to disappoint Obama.

Dwight Hopkins, a professor of theology at the University of Chicago and a member of Trinity, believes that Obama was drawn to Wright as a father figure. If Trinity was the large, extended family Obama never had—"people are walking around talking, shaking hands, saying, 'How's your child?', 'How's the cancer?' " Hopkins says—then Wright was the paterfamilias.