Though Obama Had to Leave to Find Himself, It Is Hawaii That Made His Rise Possible.

Wichterman and Foubert, noted Chip Wall, were "instrumental in getting us to think, and anybody who tries to do that, particularly in high school, has trouble. 'Make my kid a thinker, but make sure he thinks like I do.' " In tracking the Obama story this year, some conservative Web sites have seized on the high school curriculum of his mother as evidence of an early leftist indoctrination. Wall, who has spent his life challenging dogma from any ideology, and whose take on the world often veers from the politically correct, answered this interpretation with a two-word dismissal: "Oh, crap."

Stanley was decidedly liberal. She challenged the existence of God and championed Adlai Stevenson. But while some of her friends turned toward cynicism, she did not. "She was intrigued by what was happening in the world and embraced change," Susan Botkin recalled. "During our senior year, the Doomsday Clock seemed as close as it had ever been to boom. And the thought affected people in our class. There was a sense of malaise that permeated the group: Why bother? The boom is going to happen. But Stanley was better able to laugh it off, to look beyond it. Come out of that bomb shelter and do something."

Their senior class graduated in June 1960, at the dawn of the new decade. A few days after commencement, Stanley left for Honolulu with her parents. Decades later she told her son that she had wanted to go to the University of Chicago, where she had been accepted, but that her father would not let her be that far from them, since she was barely 17. Her friends from Mercer Island recalled that, like many of them, she intended to stay in Seattle and go to "U-Dub," the University of Washington, but that again her father insisted that she was too young even for that and had to accompany them to Hawaii.

That was nearly half a century ago. Time compresses, and the high school classmates of Stanley Ann Dunham now have an unusual vantage point from which to witness the presidential campaign of her son. "You see so much of her in his face," Maxine Box said. "And he has his grandfather's long chin." In watching Obama speak and answer questions, Chip Wall could "instantly go back and recognize the person" he knew decades ago. Stanley is there, he said, in the workings of the son's mind, "especially in his wry sense of speech pattern." The fact that her son is black was surprising but not out of character; she was attracted to the different and untouched by racial prejudice.

The hardest thing for them to grasp was that Barack Obama Jr. came into being only a little more than a year after Stanley left Mercer Island. She seemed like such an unlikely candidate for teenage motherhood, not just because of her scholarly ways and lack of boyfriends, but because she appeared to have zero interest in babies. Botkin had two little brothers and was always babysitting, she recalled, but "Stanley never even babysat. She would come over to the house and just stand back, and her eyes would blink and her head would spin like, 'Oh, my God, what's going on here?' "

In the fall of 1960, as Botkin worried about whether she had the proper clothes to go through sorority rush at U-Dub, where they pinched the young women to make sure they were wearing girdles and where nylons were part of the uniform, she received her first letter from her friend in Hawaii. Stanley was enjoying newfound freedoms. She had ditched her first name and was now going by Ann. And no more nylons and perfect outfits, either. "I'm wearing shorts and muu muus to class," she wrote.

In the next letter, she said she was dating an African student she had met in Russian class. Botkin was more interested in the fact that her friend was studying Russian than in whom she was dating. But soon enough came a card revealing that Ann was in love, and then another that said she was married and expecting a baby in the summer.

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The first African student at the University of Hawaii, Barack Hussein Obama, reached Honolulu 11 months before Stanley Ann Dunham and her parents got there from Seattle. He was on the first airlift of Kenyan students brought to study at U.S. universities as part of a program organized by Kenyan nationalist Tom Mboya and funded primarily by hundreds of American supporters. At the time, there were no colleges in Kenya, which was in the last throes of British colonialism. His arrival in Honolulu was announced in an article in a local newspaper, the Star-Bulletin, under the headline "Young Men from Kenya, Jordan and Iran Here to Study at U.H."

Obama told the journalist, Shurei Hirozawa, that he grew up on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya, in east Africa, and was a member of the Luo tribe. He said he had worked as an office clerk in Nairobi for several years to save money for college and settled on the University of Hawaii "when he read in an American magazine about its racial tolerance."

Other accounts have said he went to Hawaii because it was the only U.S. university to offer him a scholarship, but that appears unlikely, based on this contemporaneous report. Obama told Hirozawa that he had enough money to stay in Hawaii only for two semesters unless he applied for a scholarship. He said he would study business administration and wanted to return to Kenya to help with its transition from tribal customs to a modern economy. He was concerned, he said, about his generation's disorientation as Kenyans rejected old ways yet struggled with westernization.

Taking a room at the Charles H. Atherton branch of the YMCA, not far from campus, Obama quickly adapted to the rhythms of student life. One of his frequent hangouts was the snack bar in an old Army-barracks-style building near his business classes. It was there that he met the Abercrombie brothers, first Neil and then Hal, who had escaped the darkness of Buffalo to attend graduate school in Honolulu, and their friends Peter Gilpin, Chet Gorman and Pake Zane. They were antiestablishment intellectuals, experimenters, outsiders, somewhere between beatniks and hippies, and they loved to talk and drink coffee and beer. They were immediately taken by the one and only African student in their midst.