The Ghost of a Father

Barack Hussein Obama Sr. grew up herding goats in the remote village of Alego, Kenya. He belonged to the Luo tribe, one of the nation's largest. Bright and enterprising, he became in 1959 part of the first large wave of African students to study abroad. With a scholarship to the University of Hawaii, the 23-year-old quickly fell into a small group of graduate students who met on Friday evenings to eat pizza, drink beer, and talk world politics and economics.

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"He was an intellectual in every sense of the word," recalls Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), who was part of the inner circle. "He was the sun, and the other planets revolved around him."

It wasn't long before Obama brought another planet into their orbit, an 18-year-old white freshman from Wichita, Stanley Ann Dunham (so named because her father had wanted a boy). In late 1960, despite concerns from both families, Obama and Dunham were married. On Aug. 4, 1961, Barack Hussein Obama Jr. was born.

The fact that there was a marriage at all -- such interracial unions were banned in 22 states -- reflected, as Abercrombie saw it, his friend's incredible confidence and daring, traits the younger Obama would later display as a politician. But the marriage did not last long. When Obama won a scholarship to study at Harvard in 1963, and didn't have the money to take his young family with him, some were not surprised that he didn't return. Abercrombie sums up the reason in a single word: ambition.

"His ambition was to be a force in Kenya, to fulfill the drive that he had to make a difference in Kenyan life and perhaps even in African life. And don't forget, this is young love -- or maybe passion is closer to it. And passions can burn out."

It was Ann Dunham who filed for divorce in January 1964, citing "grievous mental suffering," according to court documents. Whatever anger she felt, she did not share it with her son. She made a point of telling Barry that his smarts, character and charm came from his father. Years later when he became upset about his father's behavior, she counseled against judging him too harshly.

The effect, as Obama's sister Maya Soetoro-Ng saw it, was to make him more independent. "It made him perhaps more introspective, perhaps more thoughtful than many people his age," says Soetoro-Ng, the daughter from Dunham's second marriage, to Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian student she met at the University of Hawaii. Soetoro moved the family to Indonesia, where Barry lived for four years before returning to Hawaii to live with his grandparents and to attend the prestigious Punahou prep school. The Dunham-Soetoro marriage would not last either.

Every adult in Barry Obama's life, it seemed, was something of a rolling stone -- his grandparents had moved around, and his mother had hopscotched back and forth from Indonesia to Hawaii, getting her master's degree in anthropology and becoming an expert in microfinance. His father? He wrote occasional letters, on a single blue sheet, with messages that seemed disingenuous, sometimes baffling.

"Like water finding its level," the father once wrote, "you will arrive at a career that suits you."

It would take Barry years -- and a 1987 sojourn to Kenya -- to unravel the mystery of his father, who died in a car accident in 1982. The painful truth was that his father had a series of tangled relationships -- by some accounts, four wives and nine children. When he came to the United States, he left behind a pregnant Kenyan wife and a child. And when he returned to Kenya, he took with him an American woman he had met at Harvard, with whom he had a brief marriage and two children.

Professionally, he was prosperous enough to drive a Mercedes and generous enough that family members and friends knew where to go for handouts. But he often drank too much, stayed out too late, mouthed off too frequently. Though a respected economist in his country, he never reached the heights he set for himself.

"His ideas about how Kenya should progress often put him at odds with the politics of tribe and patronage," his son said in a 2006 speech in Nairobi, "and because he spoke his mind, sometimes to a fault, he ended up being fired from his job and prevented from finding work in the country for many, many years."