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Understanding 9/11tv David Maraniss Barack Obama CSPAN June 20, 2020 10:20pm-12:01am EDT
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[background noises] >> you are watching tv on c-span2 and we are showing some programs with award-winning author, david. the previous program you just saw was his research trips to vietnam and madison, wisconsin while he worked on his book, they marched into sunlight. david appeared on book tv over 30 times, he is the author of a dozen books and in 2010, he offered book to be another opportunity to travel with him. this time to kenya why health did research for his biography on barack obama. the program we are about to show you aired in 2012. >> over the past three years, he's been researching his book,
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so this product, washington post associate editor and pulitzer prize winner traveled across the world to kansas, indonesia, kenya, hawaii, new york and chicago. president obama and kenya discovered the president african ancestral history. he toured houses for young barack obama in indonesia and found homes and sites with his family mother. >> began. discussing his latest book, barack obama. >> you write and barack obama about the story, no life could have been more the product of randomness than that of barack obama. >> it is the world coming together accidentally and honolulu, hawaii in 1960. her father who happens to come
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from kenya because he read a story in the saturday evening post describes the great place because of the diversity and mother who gets there because she has a father is a wonder and hands up hawaii telling furniture. here comes barack obama, he emerges as a global existence. >> where did their lives begin? >> 's grandmother corrupter, i start the story in topeka which is the state capital because they lived there a short time, his father, the president great-grandfather was an auto repairman and their
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great-grandmother, a very difficult marriage. the book begins with her suicide in topeka. stan lee, the president's grandfather back butler county and that's where he meets the grandmother and the story begins. >> we want to show you a little video montage shop by your wife on your trip to kansas in 2009. >> what are we doing?
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[inaudible] >> topeka, kansas. that's where they committed suicide. obama's grandfather and his brother, the house here on
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buchanan street, the auto shop, sixth avenue right around the corner and thanksgiving, 1826 buchanan, that little white two-story, shotgun house, more than 10 feet wide, one house on the corner of seventh of buchanan.
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1946, this is where he died. >> that looked cold. >> how old was she when she killed herself? >> she was 26. >> why did she killed herself? >> what we know is she left a suicide note that said she was
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distraught over her husband, i was the immediate call. >> that was the president's grandfather, stanley's father. >> yes. because of that traumatic event, they went back to toledo, with his grandparents. and his great-grandfather, christopher columbus clark who fought in the civil war. >> where did stan lee, the grandparent meet? >> agusta which is about 12 or 15 miles from toledo in butler county, that's where metal grew up. madeleine was a senior in high school. he's working in construction,
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renovation there and that's where he met her. >> what was her life like in kansas? >> before or after they were married? >> after. >> her parents didn't the like him. the first thing her father said, the dark skin, an element of race evening that and she married in secret. before she graduate high school, she was a smart, young woman was on the honor roll until she met stan lee who was talking. that's what she wanted. she'd grown up loving betty davis in the sophistication of hollywood. it already been to california, he promised to take her back
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there. it was somewhat unstable. not that the marriage was unstable but jobs were unstable, they never knew where they were going next. it was a rocky road. >> where did the obama clan begin? >> it began several hundred years ago but i start the story in the small by vittoria to the south and east of the city, and what we call newer, it was like underwear tribe, basically centered in the third largest tribe there.
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that's where the obama's found themselves. >> on the president paternal side, who are his grandparents? >> his grandfather with hussein who was born in the late 1800 and the first wave in western kenya, learned english and otherwise became in the british culture of the british colony so he worked for many british military people and mother was a woman who came from another village in the area and she did
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not, it was very different. he had several wives which was part of the culture and when he moved, the area near where she grew up, it was back to another homestead of the obama clan. she'd had enough. a new wife with him so she ran away. she left the family when barack obama, the president's father, who was author also barack hussein obama. >> grandparent and kenya died in 1979 in 2006, president obama ever meet them? >> no. he never met his kenyan grandparents. he got there in the 80s when his grandfather was already dead.
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the very early days of his life but he didn't get back to kenya until both of his grandparents went on. >> for barack obama, sorry, honey interviews did you do over the past four years? >> almost 400. i had a wonderful assistant, gabriel who helped with some of the later interviews in specific parts of the story but i traveled all around the world, everybody i could find in every part of the life of president obama, his parents and his grandparents. >> barack obama senior was born in 1936, was his childhood like? >> from an early age, he was dealing with western culture and the british, his father was
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difficult to get along with he was lucky in the sense, he got into a good school in the area and although he never totally finished, he was a very smart student. you have that sort of clash of old and new almost anyone in his generation had to deal with. is living in a colonial country in a poor part of kenya so he lived in mud huts and dealing with cows and no television or
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anything like that, centric behind in some ways. kenya was starting to emerge and it was beginning. he was part of that so he struggled. >> how long for you in kenya? what did you see over there? >> kenya was one of the great experiences in life, every day was unforgettable. we were there about two weeks and it felt like a year. in a wonderful sense though. we moved from washington to london to nairobi and spent a couple of days there he spent
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much of his career there. then after several days, we drove from nairobi across the highway, all the way up west, experience there was so different. my goal was to find as many as i could. a great young journalist there and he and i had been working in aspects of getting information many months before we got there. we were incredibly lucky to also have a translator who i met in the u.s. who happened to be in kenya and are driver. >> how many interviews did you do in kenya?
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>> about 40. most of them were there, a few of them over the phone, later interview were not available so i provided the questions and he conducted interviews "afterwards". >> book to be traveled with you to kenya and conducted an interview there as well. we want to show you that now. >> january 16, 2010. you've been in western kenya for about two days now as you work on your new book, out of this world, the making of barack obama. >> how has it been worth it? >> days remind me of when i do, why i do what i do. everything morning until night, it energizes me, even as i get
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tired of doing interviews, this is the reality behind so many things you think you know but you don't really know and it is of vibrant life and things i could never see my lifetime any other way because of what i do but i think wow, i am so lucky. these last few days, we traveled around this part of western kenya, based in consumer, the capital of this part of the country. informally called wildland because the main tribe are the the well. it is the tribe from where his family came. we drove down to a little town where we interviewed barack
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obama's only living paternal aunt. the sister of barack obama, senior. living in a small, mud floored one-room house, back in the back streets of this tiny village was only a couple of couches there in about five pictures and a few calendars on the wall, most of them related to the president of the united states. this woman, he kept going further into the middle to the western world to this small village in africa, the president of the u.s. is just kind of mind-boggling, awesome and obligatory.
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that is how we started today and from there, we interviewed three other members of the obama clan in the can-do bay area around lake victoria. i was told stories you could never get anywhere else about obama's grandfather, his father, barack obama senior, we walked through the compounds of the obama clan and saw the gravesite obama, his great-grandfather, the person from whom the obama name derives. it's kind of amazing stuff all day. >> you spent a lot of time in your interviews talking about the situation here in kenya. what importance does that have to your bookmarks. >> it explains a lot about barack obama senior. this book is more than just a
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biography of barack obama who became president of the u.s. it is about the places that created him, the people who created him, starting two generations back and moving through to obama himself and his father, in some ways, represented the promise and frustration of africa and of kenya and brilliance and flaws and some of it had to do with tribalism, the second largest tribe in kenya and the colonial. of one kenya created this tribalism, putting all of these different tribes in different reserves in different parts of the country, when they got in, there was this unfortunate sort
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of conflict or power. they were basically, ever since 19 to 63 had been dominated by the larger tribe. barack obama senior was a nationalist, he wasn't a tribalist. when he came back to kenya in 1965 and started his career here, suffered and i wanted to get the full context of that. another character in the story from a fascinating guy, he was the intellectual leader, a major spokesman for all of the independence movement in kenya before he left. his only a possible future president of kenya. he was very, in the cold war era
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is western of it and it helped in many ways. there is also the patron of barack obama senior because of him obama got to the u.s. the whole reason barack obama, the president, exist, it wouldn't have happened without him who organized the airlift that brought the canyons to the u.s. tom boyer was assassinated in 1969. the presumption is by people high up in the leadership who were afraid he would become president. it was nearly clearly established the man who was tried and hanged, some of his last words, why didn't you call after the big man? meeting somebody who organized the whole thing.
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assassination also fueled barack obama fuel assassination, the tribalism that was created ever since. >> you talk to folks about barack obama senior, attorney keeps coming up and it might be misleading but politically connected and political entry. >> barack obama senior was trained as an economist at both the university of hawaii where he went to undergraduate and harvard where he left before he got his phd project quite a bit of study there and he was a fairly brilliant macro economist. but his rise in all of his movement within the government in nairobi over the decade was
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filled with political frustrations. after just doing four or five days of interviews in kenya, street in nairobi and to out here, my mind is spending with all that i've heard, one story of an another your manipulations. death threats and people losing their jobs because of tribalism or some other power. barack obama, unavoidably was caught up in that. >> another term that's come up as alcoholic. >> i think barack obama senior definitely had a drinking problem. many of the people call them outright and alcoholic some of his family members were reluctant to go that far.
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just say he drank a lot. but he certainly there were a lot of occasions where many of the people said loved his double double, double double scotch and would drink it in the hour of the day but it did affect his wife. they attributed in part just because an alcoholic is a dramatic thing but also the frustrations he had over the years because of his family life and his job in climate ups and downs, just exaggerated. >> womanizer. >> i've heard two things. he's an excellent dancer and another, he loved women. i don't think the word womanizer is used in kenya in the same way
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it is in the u.s. partly because much of kenya is a polygamist culture. from where he came, definitely part of the culture. his grandfather from what we've been told over the last few days and perhaps as many as 15 lives, barack, himself, senior had four lives but not all at the same time. at most, two at the same time divorced from his two wives at different times. but he also had many other wom women, the word womanizer to me, i don't feel comfortable using that but definitely had a lot of women in his life.
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>> children? >> i have no idea. that has not really come up, except one, children scattered all over western kenya by from his wives, he had eight children. >> of those eight, or any talking? >> well, not yet. it's interesting within the obama family, is a lot of friction going on. they don't all get along. some of them imply they want renumeration for us. others have been asked to be protective of the family. i've interviewed a lot of people
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who haven't talked before but half brothers tomorrow. >> common mistakes and how do you handle it? >> it is not common in the states. >> i don't know if it's a dilemma but had to think about a lot of different things including cultural values, expectations, they are giving up talk to me and what it means to them and in the culture. the washington post, traditionally, the strongest ethics rules you can ever imagine, give back a christmas
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gift, couldn't accept anything, our editors for couple decades went on, he didn't even vote. pure and pristine, i myself, the boys have very strong personal ethics but i am operating in a different culture here so i've had to make a few interesting decisions, a few months ago, who wanted to interview before i got here, and other in a little village said he would talk got a he goat. in that village, when you visit that other, you are expected to bring a gift. it wasn't like paying to talk to him, it was like a business. i debated it for a while, it's about 60 bucks. yesterday and today, there have been situations where people have left work to talk to me and
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i've made up for that differen difference. we've gotten a few photographs because of the photographs and it's been hit up by publishers $1000, why can't pay canyon 141? it's been that kind of situati situation. >> you've already been to hawaii, kansas, texas, tell us about your research on this book and in kenya, windows and? >> you just know when you get there. you won't know. the research never ends actually. there is a time when i say i'm ready to start writing. i started this book, essentially
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the day after obama was elected resident, that's when i decided got to do this book. i've written a few pieces before that so i had some basis of research, particularly on his mother. i think when i get home from this incredible kenyan journey, i'll have a kenya and kansas story pretty much completed in fact where the story begins. two incredibly different worlds created unique person. i was just bouncing around out of africa and i said out of africa, out of hawaii, out of kansas, out of indonesia, out of this world. the book is two things.
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it's a world that created obama and how he re-created himself so the first, i'm not sure the proportions get, it's important for me to get it right but perhaps even the first half of the book, there's not quite that much. the character wasn't even on the stage yet. the second half of the book is largely in chicago, also his education california and new york and boston thrown in some. but largely chicago and that's when he re-created himself as a political being so you think about it, we're all sort of created from a lot of different strengths but i can't think of anybody more fascinating than obama. >> tell us about your team here.
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>> i can't tell you how happy about the people i am working with. i don't know swahili, i don't know the well which is the mother part, swahili is the language there. drive on the other side of the road here and i think i would have been dead in the first day if i tried to drive myself. plus, no road signs. so i definitely needed a great driver and we got one. he's a friend and interested in politics, getting, a great guy. i needed somebody to help set up the interviews and help me get documents from the national archives and elsewhere. i looked out got powerless, 40
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years old, a great investigative journalist in kenya, very tough, straightforward, smart, savvy, politically instinctive guy who's helped me immeasurably also does some interpreting of the swahili for me. then the interest of ocala, a graduate student in wisconsin and last summer when i needed documents translated into english, my wife and i lived there in the summers, there's one from a futures, should come over to my house in the afternoon and translate for me and i discovered she would be here and right now, we were going to come to kenya and
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family is from about ten minutes from one of the obama homes emotional beatrice has been our interpreter of today and tomorrow. my wife, linda came along -- she is an environmentalist, terrific environmentalists who retired about seven years ago and has gone on almost every major trip since then. i'm not a grump or anything but i seemed like it compared to my wife the best, any person could ever have so she makes friend wherever we go.
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>> this is not a cheap trip. you've got three people on staff the whole time for a number of weeks. there is an advanced cover all of this or every author? >> i can't speak for every author in this is my tenth book. i get enough of an advanced to pay for all this and i have, i have my own corporation. that has funds i can use for all of this stuff and i do spend -- why do it if you're not going to do it thoroughly? i couldn't have done this trip without that kind of team put
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together so it's not like you get an advance and then spend it all on vacation. a lot of it goes into the work of making the book. >> the family connections, the obama family connection, my head is stuck. [laughter] >> and is going to be a challenge for me in the book, for couple of reasons. it is a fairly complicated family web and the second reason, which is unavoidable is kenyan names read by greeters in the u.s. can sound different to remember. i have to be able to deal with that and that is a challenge for any writer. have some ways i've done it in
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the past and essentially, what is important to me is not quoting somebody, when you write a long narrative, you're not putting together a string of quotes, or during a narrative story so i will take elements from each of the people i've interviewed and weave them into the story i tell. it was the family tree that will become understandable. there's a whole obama plan down in one section of the bay area and another one which the u.s. knows better in a larger district and that's where mama lived, thomas ran for the
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they're not even flood relatives but she's the one everybody goes to visit, everybody that's with the obama's are from. a whole other group of obama's going to deal with. probably in a more substantive way in terms of where the story really comes from. it reminded me a little bit of what i was doing the clinton book and what people thought was, because he said it, it is in clinton's convention acceptance, they ran one from hope. it's a little town into the simplicity of all life and in fact, he was from hot springs, a different place, much more cosmetology a darker side. the obama story is what people know.
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the real story of barack obama senior and his father fix someone else in kendo faith infects for the africa of this book will start. >> want to introduce our viewe viewers. [laughter] ... uganda back in the 70s and 80s to everybody in kenya and he traveled, we met him
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yesterday and had three or four hours of fascinating discussion anthony traveled with us today in the morning. he was very close to barack obama senior and two obama's teacher and knows all of the political intrigue of kenya and a lot of the personal promise and flaws of barack obama senior. >> host: did you have to listen carefully to what he said? >> guest: it was not easy to. luckily this is the other key thing. you can't go on a chip like this unprepared. i had spent months studying kenyan politics learning everything i could going to an archive in syracuse that have the kenya national archive and a lot of information i got from there. i really knew a lot of the
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background. if you just had a conversation cold with leo you wouldn't understand a word he said but i knew where he was going and i knew a lot of the beginnings of the stories and so yes i could piece it together and it filled in 100 holes for me in terms of the politics and obama seniors personal life. >> host: last question. you went to the house that president obama stayed at. where was it and we are going to show the video. you were really excited about that. >> guest: that's one of the moments when we started this interview i am right here. this is an incredible place to see and get to and impossible to find just out of the blue. it is in what's called the obama
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compound in a little teeny village or compound and ken dubay probably an hour and a half from the city of consumer and it's just another one of those small cuts really. it now has an upslope but i'm told it's not just rolled mud and we spent two nights there when he was visiting the area and that part of the obama clan on his journey through africa his first-ever trip there. just to think, it's not like -- it has nothing to do with how i feel about obama and the dawn of purchased the book that way anyway. he's just the main character in my book.
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it has nothing to do with whether i like him or dislike him. has to do with the history of seeing this little place before anybody knew who the barack obama was. he was 26 years old making that first journey back to a land that he had never seen before and i was looking at this little huts on the floor were he slept to back in 1987 and it didn't overwhelm me but it made me realize history is so much more powerful if you see it that then if you just think about it or read about it and i will be able to portrayed that to see it rings of life for me and also brings my work alive. >> host: david maraniss that interview was shot over two years ago. anything you'd like to change?
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>> guest: first of all my voice but there are a couple of things that change since then. one is the title of this book. the fact that he is a global character leading to a double entendre that implied something else and might publisher simon & schuster was really the idea, call it the story so i was really happy with that. i and this book in a way i didn't expect to cut site got so much misinformation from the time he left honolulu to go to college and kelly initiates community organizing to go to harvard. so important in terms of the evolution of his search for
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identity and it became the last part of the book. i decided to end it earlier than i expected and altered another volume someday. the ark arc of the book and the title is somewhat different. it's how we create a barack obama and how he created himself. >> host: the book ends in 1989 is he's going off to boston going to harvard law school. barack obama is finally going to make an appearance in your book halfway through the book. >> guest: no, it's not halfway. it's 166 pages into a 586 page book. >> host: how did his parents meet? >> guest: well his mother was 17 years old but she was a
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freshman at the university of florida. >> host: i apologize take it one step back rate how did she get to why? >> guest: her father who had been a finishing salesman in seattle washington next is seattle suburb, he got a job selling furniture and honolulu and he was always looking for the next thing. he moved from kansas to california several times from kansas to seattle and then seattle to hawaii. she came along with the family. she was only 17 when she graduated from high school and went to an excellent public school in seattle. she was an only child. i can tell you the story some other time but in any case she's there is a freshman. barack obama has been there since 1959. also an undergraduate even though he is much older and they
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both happen to sign up for a beginning russian class. this is right after sputnik and schools all over the country started to teach russian. it was the one thing the public schools could do to prepare for the cold war so they both ended up in a russian class and that's where they met. >> host: how long did do they know each other before they got married? >> guest: they knew each other for five months. they met in september and they got married and therefore he. she she got regnum before that. everything about it you know it was not a normal courtship let me put it that way. >> host: what were metal and his family's reaction to stanley ann bringing home and african? >> guest: madeleine, i could
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not interview her. david mandel who did the first obama book said he described obama senior tim is very strange. and then there's everybody else around it. they were not happy. i wouldn't say horrified but it was very difficult for them. it wasn't necessarily because it had a lot of elements to it. his personality because he was so much older and their daughter was barely 17 when they met and she got pregnant. she had been an incredibly intelligent young woman so this creates a difficulty in their lives. they didn't know but another element of this whole thing was obama senior i noticed i was reluctant to use the word
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minimize. he was in honolulu and she was by no means the only american woman. >> host: barack obama senior married four times first in kenya in 1957 and did they ever get divorced? >> guest: interesting. they got married in kenya and according to obama senior you could say i'm divorcing my wife in the book. she was starting to call herself a married lack senior. she she did know that he was already married. she was under the impression that he was divorced which was not legally. in essence he was 40 when he married her.
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>> host: they were legally married the 1964 barack obama senior was married to ms. baker who we will talk about later in his final marriage -- how many children did barack obama senior and the pavi pavi and how many haps samplings as the present have? >> guest: i think i said i didn't know the number per data want to get too far knew that i'm not sure the paternity of those children. >> host: back to why. february 1961 barack obama senior ends up getting married to ann and the president is born august 4, 1961 and by the end of that first month of his life ann had taken them to seattle. >> guest: there's a lot of mythology that surrounds that has nothing to do with the
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burger idea of which the book thoroughly documents as being completely fabricated and untrue. as he would tell the story in his own memoir it wasn't until his father left for harvard that the family split up. there were no reasons for that are what he says in the book. surely if he was born his mother went back to seattle in the enrolled in the university of washington. they never really lived together when i interviewed all of the people who knew barack senior at the university of hawaii before he graduated and left only once did he remember ann at all. there is a mystery. she wasn't their preachers in seattle. >> host: how long was she in seattle? >> guest: about a year and a half. as a single mother.
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she had babysitters and she went to school part time and got herself back together. the first semester at the university of hawaii was very difficult because she got pregnant. she had to renew herself academically and she did that at the university of hawaii. after barack senior at left hawaii to go to harvard she came back. >> host: 1962 to 1967 they were back in honolulu. who is her second husband? >> guest: her second husband was another in relational got -- international guy preaching met him at the university of hawaii at the east-west center which barack comes to from oia and brought americans to honolulu preparing to go to asia for different studies and that's where she met him.
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he was a tennis player. she fell in love with him. >> host: at what point did they move to jakarta? >> guest: he had been there. both barack senior and he were being watched by the ins and different regulations with these and so on. he kept trying to extend his visa after he married her and find ways to stay. he got certain jobs that were related to the geography that it learned and topography in honolulu to keep them there but he was changing in dramatic webb ways. in 1967 not sober. obama and his mother and code
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tutorial moved back to indonesia. >> host: ages six through 10? >> guest: about for years. >> host: while you were in jakarta david maraniss you were in school and he found where barack obama went to school. >> the elementary school where barry went to school in jakarta. [inaudible] c is that his exact chair?
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>> this is marty who is there so he is the witness of the chair. and what is this? the corner and the back? and there were tables in front of the chair. >> host: that school is a statue david maraniss. >> guest: the statues outside of the second school he went to
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in shorts and a short-sleeve shirt. the second school had much more money than the first one. a little catholic school he went two for two and a half years and the family moved and his father got another job and that's where you see the statue. >> host: is that put up then? >> guest: is very controversial. there were people in indonesia they didn't want that statue to go up. obama if he ran for president of indonesia would win in a landslide but everywhere in the world there is some controversy about any politician so there were questions about it but now everybody in indonesia is very proud. >> host: what was his life like in jakarta? >> guest: imagine being a six show kid thrown into a place where you didn't know the language of the culture and you are living in sort of the middle class lower middle-class section of town and the exotic sounds
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and smells of the big city of jakarta with your mother going to work and your father riding a motorbike to his job and just being thrown in with these kids analysis life. he had to adapt and obama's life is an adaptation in that sense. >> host: why did he leave jakarta in 1971 and? >> guest: he left because you know there's an international school in jakarta. for three and a half years he was in the has indonesia the native language. she was waking up at 4:00 in the morning to teach him with english schoolbooks to supplement his learning. this was very difficult and the
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whole process was something that she realized she was still married and she wanted to stay but he was coming to a point where she had to make key decisions. he got into the most is elite private test -- school in honolulu. plus he lived with his grandparents in the apartment? >> guest: open a host circle apartments which were five blocks from the school and he lived there from fifth grade through senior year. >> host: ages 11 to 18 he lived with his grandparents in honolulu. >> guest: i have to correct that. there were periods where his mother did come back. they lived a couple of blocks away on pokey street for two years and then she went back to
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indonesia again. the bulk of that period he looked at his grandparents. >> host: that was 71 to 79 back in honolulu. what was his life like and what did he study and what kinds of great city get it? >> guest: his mother and sapporo were separated and soon to be divorced. he was always very obama. his life there you know he wasn't a serious student by any means. he was smart enough to get i with his grades without ever really applying himself to hard. his real love was basketball.
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the one time he saw his father when barry was of a conscious age was in honolulu when he was 10 years old and his father came back for three weeks at christmastime. from that time through basketball wasn't incredibly important to young barry. i considered it an important theme of his adolescence and his rise because he connected the disparate parts of them. think about basketball. he came to kansas to be the coach of some of the great figures in basketball history came out of kansas. obama's great uncle on his mother's side was a very good desk a ballplayer. but basketball was also way that this young kid could start to identify with african-americans in the way that living with his white grandparents was a black
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game. basketball has other meanings to it as something fun to play. i think that is one of the central themes of his adolescence. >> host: you write david maraniss and "barack obama" the stories. did not know or have the luckiest thing that happened to him and his young wife was that his father had left. sparing his mother and him years of unpredictability and potential -- >> guest: hired ralph -- rapanos on speculative but when you study the history of barack obama senior it's a reality and it's a very difficult reality and it grows out of what happened after. after he and ann have that short time together at harvard he met another american woman and jeff: with ann he knocked her
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off her feet and she became entranced by him. she he called him mesmeric. she married him and i interviewed her. i was the first reporter to interview her. saul jacobsen wrote an excellent look and interviewed him -- her after me. and more power to sally and all these biographers that came after me. the story moves on and grows deeper and deeper but in any case when i talked to rick baker she told me the story of how abusive barack senior was in he beat her and he was an alcoholic incredibly difficult to live with. that would have been the fate of barry had he and ann stayed together. >> host: while in kenya we talk to you about ruth baker and that want to show just a little
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piece of video. seeming she is a mumbai said. she came to norfolk and the interview with lucas a little late are. >> host: david who is that? >> guest: that's the fifth member lisa molly nesmith an american he lifts it mumba the who is also a writer. >> he is helping me connect to ruth barack obama senior's third
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wife. >> host: has she talked to -- >> guest: she is talking to me on tuesday. for several hours. this is one of the key interviews. >> host: that was the only interview you got over here. would that be worth coming over here for? [laughter] >> guest: that is a tough question. very interesting, yeah. it's too hypothetical.
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thank you for giving lisa credit because she helped me find ruth baker and that was very important. that interview i'll never forget in the back of the kindergarten on the lawn for several hours pouring your heart out. >> host: after she married barack obama she divorced him but she stayed in kenya. >> guest: she did. she married another african and took that name and had two children by barack senior and another by her second husband. she stayed the whole time. she still very much part of the nairobi community and has run a kindergarten for many years. >> host: 1964 to 1973 they were married. how long had she known him before she put school and flew
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to kenya? >> guest: she finished school but she was teaching by that point. it was one of those very quick things a couple of months but what she did knows the reason he left harvard was because it was kicked out. the imf had had enough of him. drinking and women. they had been following very closely good i want to go back to one little thing just because the whole birther idea is so troublesome to me as a serious historian. baird documents that show him a the grecian officials in honolulu traces barack obama senior all of the days before and after the boy was born in honolulu. there's no way he could have gone anywhere else and have that baby. it was in honolulu. anyway so he was kicked out at
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harvard before he got his ph.d. and had to go back to nairobi. he went back and he called himself a doctor even though he never finished his dissertation. she followed him a few months later and showed up the nairobi ready to go not knowing what she was getting into. >> host: back to your book's "barack obama" the story you write what brock learned was devastating to mythology carefully constructed by his mother was shattered. his missing father was far from what he had been portrayed not the moral man not the freedom fighter not the polished professional, brilliant yes a brilliant splintered by drinking despair disillusionment and disappointment. >> guest: is quite amazing to think about how ann dunham and obama and her sudden barack.
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she told the story. out of love. she never said an ill word about barack obama senior because she didn't want to destroy this little boy who had enough other things to deal with than his life. i find it completely understandable why she created this mythology about him. year by year he started to understand to some degree that the reality had to be different from what he had been told but it wasn't until we got to kenya himself that he fully understood. >> host: in the introduction to your book david maraniss wrote without missing the anchor confusion that is surely felt as these try to sort out his identity eye, you would argue to view him primarily through a racial lens could lead to the root causes us his feelings
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about the misunderstanding of his responses to it. >> guest: well this is not in any way to diminish the role of the role that a place in his formation. central but the other thing involved their which is to search for identity and the search for home and also the fact that his life involve leaving and being left with his father left before berry was conscious. his mother even as much as she loved him and inculcated her philosophy of life into them she was gone for most of his formative adolescent years. all of that is universal in the sense that it transcends race and the struggles were not just about race. it certainly key to it but you
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can't look at his life and he with her racial lens. >> host: and about 15 minutes we will be taking your calls for david maraniss who on june 19 will publish his 10th book's "barack obama" the story. we are getting a of the books i than booktv. if you'd like to die when they start talking and have questions for other go ahead do so. (202)737-0001 at 11 eastern central time zone 20273700 so2 02 and those of you in the mountain pacific timezones you can send an e-mail to a tv at c-span.org or ask a question via twitter. twitter.com/booktv. that will begin in 15 or 20 minutes we will begin taking your calls. jeff cox a classmate of the president at prud'hommeaux high school. this is a quote have jeff cox talking. barry has the ability to project
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cool almost a nonchalant. it was all part of the image thing and not just of him but generally in hawaii were in my mind there was some kind of line between sophisticated attachment and just slacker lazy and dairy exhibit this sophisticated attachment. he had his act together in a way. he understood how things worked maybe a little better than the rest of us. >> guest: you know that's when he is 15 or 16 years old. we can see some of those cared or six today in his presidency and he hasn't changed all that much. that cooled attachment part of it has to do with hawaii. no matter what happens just keep cool man and that's the thing that berry and his buddies who
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had which was the trim game which was basketball and smoking dope. just be cool. that's part of hawaii in part of buries formative years and he saw his head that nature. another aspect to it is more developed and related i would say to politics which is in this country in all of its racial dynamics in explosiveness a black person to rise in politics has to stay cool cool. unfortunately that's part of the mandate of this country. >> host: homage pot smoking did the president do in honolulu? >> guest: he doesn't write a particular about it. the whole notion of bill clinton saying and never inhaled. when jay leno asked him about it without going overboard document
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is a pretty thoroughly. that's what he did. they had a thing called total absorption which not only did you inhale but you inhaled everything in a car when you were smoking it. that was part of his existence during the period. >> host: david maraniss when did. become barack? >> guest: it started at occidental which was the college in los angeles that he attended for his freshman and sophomore years. there were few people there an african student in one of the african-americans and some others who started calling and barack when they knew that was his name. they started to go back to their identity in college and that's what he was searching for. many of the occidental classmates called him buried and
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when he got to new york and colombia in those four years and next years and eric city years and eric city people call him barry and some call them barack. >> host: why did you choose occidental of cuva bajo and why did he transfer? >> guest: he chose occidental because he got a partial scholarship and envelope lot of people who were going there in and the way he tells the story there were some girl from brentwood that he met in honolulu before that. he was in that area so he was attracted to gove for that reason. that's a demo was like put a to. barry beautiful bucolic small contained and the california sunshine. it was very comfortable. it was a very important to years really started to expand
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intellectual event but i think he got his first sense of destiny during those two years but he left the coast it was too much like pudahoe. he was still on this perk up finding himself so he went from honolulu to us lessen just to new york and eventually to chicago it was important important to get to new york first. >> host: he transfers to columbia. his first night in new york city where did he spend it? >> guest: i was a little dubious but it turns out to be true. not that spending the night in the apartment would have been a bargain is pretty much of a hellhole but he couldn't get in. he couldn't get the key in and couldn't find a landlord in u.s. sub letting it from a friend of his mother. he's locked outside with the cks and the person who later became
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his roommate sadberry had called him and brought the key over the next morning. >> host: genevieve make the scene in the city. who is genevieve? >> guest: genevieve crooke, an australian who's mother married, second marriage was to a notable american phil just up. the family had american ties to genevieve and went to high school in new york state and then came to new york city and matt barack obama as she called them after he graduated from columbia. they have a lot in common from the moment they met. they both had integration connections. her father and mother had lived in indonesia. he was a diplomat says she had
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lived there and in the time when the 1960s when young berry was there felt like an outsider because she like many children of diplomats they don't have connections. her family was in the upper crooke but she never felt connected to that. she said they both have this connection as outsiders with indignation connections as well. so they became lovers and she was his girlfriend for quite a while in new york. >> host: how did you get ahold of her? were you the first journalist to talk to her at length? >> guest: to two years and it was hard work on the part of me and julie who was a fabulous researcher and gabriel banks who was my researcher.
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she was living in los angeles and a triangulated everything and eventually found her. i can't tell all of that story because to protect her not because of the book but because of, she had an abusive ex-husband that we don't want to find her. in any case once we started with genevieve eventually i found, we found a wedding announcement in "the news york times" that rang a lot of pills because it had indonesia and in northwest connecticut and at and obama in his memoir writes about in new york or a friend i'm taking her up to her family's estate in this wealthy area of connecticut
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to everything hit with me and in the court records i found another name for her and tracked her down and made the call. we have had a lot of conversations during that time. >> host: you write in your book you were quoting mahmoud and you can tell us who he is in a minute but a columbia university classmate of the president. to beyonce's never had many black wrens and i saw that switch happened most markedly during the period that i was very close to him. barack was the most elaborate person i have ever met in terms of constructing his own identity and his achievements come his achievement was an achievement of identity in the modern world. first the shift from not international to american did not white with black. >> host: >> guest: he was one of a group of pakistanis that barack
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had. he made friends with several pakistanis and shared with him an internationalist perspective which he had visited indonesia and his mother was there and he was searching for himself. when he got to new york some of his pakistani friends and some of their friends were there and he was part of that group at columbia law school. a very interesting guy. it's true obama moved to new york ostensibly to be closer to harlem to find his but it didn't happen m. president obama when i interviewed him in the oval office made no lasting african-american friends in his time in new york. he started to make that transition during the arc of the
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search for home and that change is starting to happen. he was perceptive when he saw that going on and that's when he took them to chicago. >> host: why did the presidents' day and air guard after graduating? >> guest: he did committed to organizing and he applied for a job in chicago and got elected there. he didn't get anything. the best he could do was stay in new york and he didn't want to go back to honolulu. he stayed there and as he put it he tried to make -- he got a job at sort of a magazine/consulting out that called as the center national. he really didn't like it there was the business world which held no just for him.
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they talked a lot and met genevieve. >> host: david maraniss per gigabyte to the "that was the program with. no life could have been more of randomness than barack obama. chicago became random the fact that he got to chicago. >> guest: i wouldn't quite call a random because the election of washington the first african-american in chicago is very attractive tamper a chicago was the place to be at that point but if you read the book it within the six month period three people arrive in chicago oprah winfrey, michael jordan who came to the bulls during the period and oprah was about to start her show and brought obama came anonymously. >> host: jerry kelman the chicago community organizer you quote him. obama was one of the most cautious people i had ever met
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my life. he was not unwilling to take risks but was just a strange combination of someone who would have to weigh everything to death in the take a dramatic risk in the end. >> guest: that sounds a lot like president obama two. in some ways that characteristic can be seen drivers life and career. as a community are nicer in the southside of chicago the whole training method for community organizer was to take action. power does not exist in a vacuum have to seize it and he was dealing with poor people on southside of chicago. cameron who was through for -- one of three or four of his mentors said barack was a different sort. he was looking for ways to not
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conform to achieve another way so that can be frustrating at times but it helped him get to where he won to go. >> host: while he was there as a community organizer david maraniss what was the presence lifelike and where do they live and work? >> guest: ... aybar which is a community part of chicago that is the most integrated part of the city. a city that is notorious as the most segregated big city in the united states. that's what the current commission called the 19th at denying and different degrees in the late 80s when obama got there. hyde park was the pocket of integration so he was comfortable there. he would spend every day going to the southside which was 89% african-american of vast sprawling bubbling rich area, rich in terms of personalities which is where he felt at home for the first time in his life.
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he was embraced by a group of eager black women who took him under their wing and loved him and created a sense for him that he had never felt before. but it was incredibly frustrating. inc. community organizing you lose 40% of the time. he became a community organizer large that it is other sensibility. she would start in organizing of a different sort in trying to help poorer women artisans survive in a male-dominated culture and her beliefs were transferred to him. that's why he did it. he also thought his mother was a little bit naïve in terms of the realities of the world and during those three years on the southside he started to see what
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power meant and how you get it and when he needed to exert power and that's what took him into in to politics. that's why my book ends there. he has found his home which is in chicago. in some senses she is the magnet of the book because you see him find that woman and that's michelle. his self-identity and what he wants out of life which is powered, political power and he needs to go to harvard to get into that life. >> host: in the interview conducted with the president on november 10 of 2011 you quote the present is saying there is no doubt that but i retained at my politics is a sense that the only way i could have a sturdy sense of identity of who why was the pentagon digging beneath the surface differences of people. the only way my life made sense
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was regardless of culture, race religion triay, there are some commonality. essential human truths and passions and hope us and moral precepts that are universal. >> guest: in some ways that's another variation of what he said in the speech that made him famous in the keynote address during the democratic national convention in boston where he said there were no red states and blue states but the united states. he took that as the personification of that notion. this president had a rude awakening in terms of how far we can take that. he has been dealing with the frustrations of that idea of% as i'm sure we will both be experiencing when the telephone calls come for the show. >> host: your book ends in 1989, "barack obama" the story and he said there's another volume coming?
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>> guest: i committed to 30 years of robert caro who is one of my heroes. i have every intention and i've done a lot of reporting. and i don't want to do a quickie. i try to read books for history and i write documents in building me out later and i want to be patient. >> host: the book ends 1989 but at this point a rock obama 1961 born in honolulu 61 to 60 to live in seattle, 62 to 67 back to honolulu and then to jakarta indonesia 67 to 71 back to honolulu 71 to 79, los angeles 79 to 81 while he attended occidental and then he moved to new york for columbia and lived there for four years 1981 to 1985 in chicago for the first time 1985 to 1989 and then
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off to harvard law school. two more pieces of the book i want to ask you about so we can tie these stories together. now we are in 1989. where's his father? >> guest: his father is dead. he was in a car accident driving home drunk from sort of a makeshift bar near the nairobi hospital to his fort white's house and the nairobi we saw the streets in the area where the traffic accident occurred. it was inevitable. he had been in many very serious accidents, drunk driving several times and that one took his life. but to his grandparents, they still alive at this point in his father? >> guest: yes. all three are alive. stand down them died -- and
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company done him died first and then his mother dies right before his book comes out "dreams from my father" and the first iteration of that book in 1995 and of cancer at age 52. she never got to see his political career at all and then the grandmother in many ways the strongest figure in his life, the study one died a few days before he was elected president of the united states. >> host: to barack obama the story by the time brock reached chicago when my was in the fifth grade his grandfather retired after 20 years in the furniture business another 20 selling insurance.
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it ended his life's work which he never liked in their bid will produce a smart man who would not come close to fulfilling his potential. during the years. lived with him the grandson alternated between taking pleasure outsmarting elkind feeling some combination of sadness and anger witnessing the despair of someone who was unfulfilled and you also write mr. merron is there was nothing publicly excessive about their grandmother who then and always would be a significant and underappreciated influence on barack in particular in terms of his personality and the possibilities of his life. he could not tolerate gossiping behavior and she kept her own struggles with alcohol is him private. guess who i should say and i don't mean to correct you i write it because it comes --
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those are his grandparents. the grandmother, i had done a lot of reporting about the grandmother and what a rock she was in the family and president obama acknowledged to me during my interview in the oval office that she too was a knock i like. both of them are fascinating characters. the grandfather without the tragic ending, he has all of the big hopes starting when the two met when stan told madeline that he he was going to be a writer and had all these writings he had done in his trunk and madeline's brother later went into the trunk and there is nothing there. that is the fantastic life of
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stanley dunham. >> host: willie lohmann. >> guest: and madeline the role model. she wanted to be sophisticated in the moment she marries stand down them she realizes she's the one i will have to carry the load in this relationship. she's incredibly dependable and rose to the office of vice president of the bank in hawaii. when i interviewed him he described her as a character of madman which i found really and just think and said he was in devotee of that popular shown his grandmother goes from being a secretary to one of the great ad people in that show. so it wasn't always easy for.
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as a teenager to live in that family but never felt unloved. stan who is the more problematic of the two really adored and showered as much attention on him as he could even though he was troubled in other ways and madeline was ours there for an even though she was not a very emotional person preacher is not a hug or kiss her she'd never say a lucky barry or any grandkids about sword. she was the dependable pragmatic one. >> host: weaver last error happened in talking to david maraniss out the rev "barack obama" the story. this is a stamp book and now it's your turn if you'd like to call in or e-mail or tweet the numbers are up on the screen to the e-mail address and the twitter handle twitter.com/booktv. david maraniss in your book you reference "dreams from my
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father" quite a bit. here is a little bit from president obama in 2004 talking about his autobiography. >> it's a said the parents on charlie rose and he was asking me how does the book connect with your politics and it's very clear to me that there is a direct line between the subject matter that's conveyed in "dreams from my father" and the type of politics that i aspire to. because essentially what the story is about is a boy born to a father from kenya and a mother from kansas in hawaii with an unusual name who traveled to indonesia, came back found himself in chicago working in some of the lowest income
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neighborhoods in the country and then travels back to africa. somehow was able to weave together a workable meaning for his life and an african-american as an american and as somebody who is part of the broader human family. that was not an easy task. it wasn't an easy task not because i didn't have enormous love for my family, i did. it wasn't because i didn't have people helping me every step of the way. i had that help but it was because i found myself born astride a nation and a world that is so often divided, divided along the lines of race and divided along the lines of class, divided along the lines
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of religion. so we have this enormous tragic history that all of us confront from whatever our backgrounds or whether we are white, black, spanish asian muslim or christian. the notion that in fact in the words of a great writer who happened to win the nobel prize william falconer he says the past is never dead and buried, it's the past. i think all of us are confronting constantly her history and confronting the history of the stain of slavery in this country and confronting the history and problems that arose from colonialism and confronting those scars of violence and oppression and struggle and difficulty and hope not only on the larger canvas of
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history but also within our own families. for me it was not entirely obvious how in fact i was going to be able to integrate them pull together all those different strands in my life. so part of my challenge growing up was to figure out how do i function as someone who is black but also has white load in me? how do i function as somebody who is american and takes pride and understands the enormous blood thing that comes with being an american but is also able to recognize that i'm part of something larger than just a nation-state. as though that was author and journalist david maraniss and kenya in 2010 while researching his biography on president
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barack obama. every saturday evening this summer we are taking the opportunity for several hours of programs with well-known authors. in our archives and available to watch on line. david maraniss is our topic tonight. he has spied a freeze on president bill clinton, resident barack obama vince lombardi roberto clemente. the program we are about to show you though is about the city of detroit. it's called once in a great city and it's from 2015. david maraniss offers a snapshot of detroit in the mid-60s. ..
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