“Obama has passed his general exams, which indicates that on academic grounds, he is entitled to stay around here and write his thesis,” McKeon wrote in a memo memorializing the phone conversation. “However, they are going to try to cook something up to ease him out. All three will have to agree on this, however. They are planning on telling him that they will not give him any money, and that he had better return to Kenya and prepare his thesis at home.” That would take several weeks, but “at this time Harvard does not plan on having Obama registered as a full-time student during the academic year 1964–1965 as stated on” Obama’s application a month earlier.
On May 27, 1964, Harvard’s David Henry sent Obama a life-changing letter. It began by acknowledging that Obama had completed his course work and that only his thesis remained to be completed before he could get his Ph.D. But the letter also said that neither the Department of Economics nor the graduate school had the funds to support him in Cambridge. It then said, “We have, therefore, come to the conclusion that you should terminate your stay in the United States and return to Kenya to carry on your research and the writing of your thesis.” He was given until June 19—which was hardly three weeks away!—to arrange for his departure. Henry indicated that copies of the letter were going to graduate school associate dean Reginald H. Phelps, a historian of modern Germany, and Economics Department chairman John T. Dunlop, a distinguished professor who would go on to become dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and then U.S. secretary of labor.
Unspoken in Henry’s letter—though crystal clear in Obama’s INS file—was Harvard’s unwillingness to continue hosting a man whose sexual energies, whether inter-African or serially miscegenous, would not be tolerated in tony Cambridge as they had been in multihued Honolulu. Two weeks later an INS form letter instructed Obama that he had until July 8, instead of June 19, to depart the United States. On June 18, an understandably agitated Obama phoned the Boston INS office and insisted that he be given specific grounds for why his residency extension was being denied. An INS agent emphasized that the decision was final, but Obama called again the next day and asked to speak to the district director, who refused to take the call. Obama declared he lacked funds to leave the U.S., and the next day he asked a Harvard secretary to call the INS on his behalf. She too was told INS’s ruling was final. At that point, Obama apparently gave up; on Monday, July 6, 1964, he departed from New York’s newly renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport bound for Paris and then Nairobi, which, as of seven months earlier, was now the capital of newly independent Kenya.16
On the other side of the United States, Ann Dunham and Lolo Soetoro were married on Monday, March 15, 1965, on Molokai, a smaller Hawaiian isle southeast of Oahu. Neither Ann’s son nor her parents attended the ceremony, which took place only three months before Lolo’s current residency visa would expire. He had received his M.A. in geography in June 1964, but a month later both UH and the INS approved another one-year residency during which he could get practical experience working for local engineering and surveying firms.
INS documents indicate that Ann and Barry never moved to 3326 Oahu Avenue, where Lolo was living, but instead remained at 2234 University Avenue with Stan and Madelyn. The looming question of whether Lolo would be able to remain in the U.S. beyond June soon brought both him and Ann into extensive contacts with the INS that mirrored what her ex-spouse had experienced a year earlier.
Sometime during May or June 1965, UH’s East-West Center (EWC), which had sponsored Lolo’s graduate study, received a cable from the Indonesian embassy in Washington requesting Soetoro’s immediate return to Jakarta. But Lolo and Ann had already taken the initiative to win an extension of his visa, and following two joint interviews at the Honolulu INS office, on June 7 Lolo’s residency permit was extended until mid-June 1966. On July 2, when Lolo informed the EWC of that, he was summoned to a July 6 meeting to be reminded “that the East-West Center still retained visa sponsorship and authority” regarding his residency. Lolo said he had sought the extension because his wife was suffering from a stomach ailment that might require surgery, but later that day EWC phoned INS, which immediately summoned both Lolo and Ann to another interview on July 19. In the interim, Ann, using Dunham as her surname, applied for and received her first U.S. passport.
Officials from the EWC visited the Honolulu INS office to explain that their agreement with the Indonesian government required that “every effort will be made to return students at the completion of their grants.” Thus EWC “shall appreciate any effort which you can make to insure that Mr. Soetoro will be returned to Indonesia as soon as possible.”
Before the July 19 session, Lolo submitted a statement to the Honolulu INS office noting that in his homeland “anti-American feeling has reached a feverish pitch under the direction of the Indonesian communist party.” This was supported by widespread U.S. press reports. Lolo asserted, “I have been advised by both family and friends in Indonesia that it would be dangerous to endeavor to return with my wife at the present time.” In addition, “I would meet with much prejudice myself in seeking employment” because of his U.S. educational background, and “land belonging to my family has already been confiscated by the government as part of a communistic land reform plan,” a policy that press reports again corroborated. Citing his “former compulsory association with the Indonesian army while still a student,” Lolo also feared being dragooned into battlefield service in Indonesia’s armed conflict with Malaysia if he returned home.
Soon after the July 19 interview, INS Honolulu recommended denial of any ongoing residency for Lolo. But almost two months later, the EWC notified Indonesia’s San Francisco consulate that Lolo would return to Indonesia in June 1966—and his wife would accompany him. This was just days before Indonesia was plunged into months of bloody, widespread violence in which hundreds of thousands of the previously ascendant Communists and perceived sympathizers were slaughtered by the Indonesian army and allied militias. That turmoil commenced with an unsuccessful, Communist-backed revolt against the army leadership by a small band of junior officers on September 30, 1965.
For the next six months, the violently anti-Communist army leadership took firm control of the country and a half million or more civilians were killed. Even with knowledge of the tumult, Ann, on November 30, gave the INS an affidavit acknowledging, “I don’t feel that I would undergo any exceptional hardship if my husband were to depart from the United [States] to reside abroad as the regulations require.” Those rules would allow Lolo’s readmission, as her husband, after two years’ absence from the U.S., a preferable course to being hamstrung by EWC’s deference to Indonesian authorities.
If the elimination of the anti-American Communist presence in Indonesia is what caused Lolo and Ann to change their strategy, that has gone unrecorded. Ann’s affidavit did, however, say she was “living with my parents in the home which they rent” and that “my son by a former marriage lives there with us.” INS’s efforts to revoke Lolo’s existing extension petered out, and on June 20, 1966—the last possible day—Lolo Soetoro flew out of Honolulu bound for Jakarta.17
After Lolo’s departure, Ann took a secretarial job in UH’s student government office and also began doing some temporary nighttime tutoring and paper grading. That gave her an income of about $400 per month, and she told INS officials she hoped to save enough money to join Lolo in Indonesia in summer 1967. “We figure on going and staying until my husband’s time is up and then come back together.” With young Barry in kindergarten at Noelani Elementary School, and Stan and Madelyn both working full-time, Ann spent $50 to $75 a month for a babysitter on weekdays from 2:30 P.M. to 5:00 P.M. In December 1966, she told INS that she expected to complete her B.A. degree in anthropology in August 1967 and would join Lolo in Indonesia that October. She was already attempting to secure employment at the U.S. embassy in Jakarta.
INS did not appear open to waiving the two-years-abroad requirement for Lolo, and in May 1967 INS agent Robert Schultz phoned Ann for an update. “She and her child will definitely go to Indonesia to join her husband if he is not permitted to return to the United States sometime in the near future, as she is no longer able to endure