“She felt a little bit wistful or sad that Barack had essentially moved to Chicago and chosen to take on a really strongly identified black identity,” recalled Don Johnston, Dunham’s colleague at Bank Rakyat Indonesia. That identity, she felt, “had not really been part of who he was when he was growing up.” Dunham thought he was making what Johnston called “a professional choice” to strongly identify as black. “It would be too strong to say that she felt rejection,” he said. But she felt “that he was distancing himself from her.”
Given the breadth of her reporting, Scott at times seems too tentative in her conclusions. She too often introduces her certainly valid observations with “it seems reasonable to imagine” or “it is tempting to conclude.”
At times, the book’s accounts conflict with recollections Obama has related in his memoirs and public anecdotes. For instance, a servant who lived with Dunham and her second husband, Lolo Soetoro, and the two children in Jakarta has no memory of her waking her son at 5 a.m. to attack his English-language workbooks, as he often has recounted.
“I’ll never forget watching my own mother, as she fought cancer in her final days, spending time worrying about whether her insurer would claim her illness was a preexisting condition so it could get out of providing coverage,” Obama told the American Medical Association in June 2009, a story he repeated often during the push to change the health-care system.Scott, however, uncovers correspondence that indicates Dunham’s fight with her insurance carrier, Cigna, was over disability payments, not coverage. And if her son “watched,” it appears to have been in his mind’s eye, since there is no record presented that he interrupted his state Senate campaign to go to her side.
Then again, as Madelyn Dunham’s brother Charles Payne takes pains to tell Scott, family history is recalled in fragments, reassembled and turned this way and that, distorted and reimagined depending on the narrator. He offers examples, then looks at her evenly:
“All of this is just to tell you: Don’t trust memory.”
Better to follow the guidance of Stanley Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro, who instructed her young research assistants, and her children, to emphasize “accuracy, rigor, patience, fairness, and not judging by appearances. ‘Don’t conclude before you understand,’ ” a friend from the Ford Foundation recalled her saying. “ ‘After you understand, don’t judge.’ ”
Ann Gerhart, deputy editor of Outlook, is the author of “The Perfect Wife: The Life and Choices of Laura Bush.”
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