Sometime in late 1968 Neil Abercrombie and Andy “Pake” Zane, two of Obama’s best buddies from the University of Hawaii, came through Nairobi as part of a months-long tour through Europe, the Middle East, and East Africa. “He showed us around, we stayed at his house, partied, had a good time,” and met Ruth, Roy, Rita, and young Mark, Zane recalled more than forty years later, with dozens of photographs from that visit spread out before him. Abercrombie thought “he seemed very frustrated … that he was being underutilized” at KTDC. As Zane recalled to Sally Jacobs, “The one thing Barack wanted was to do something for his country, but he felt he could not” accomplish anything significant at KTDC. “He was angry, but it was contained.” Yet Abercrombie recalled that “he was drinking constantly. It was as though the drinking was now part of his existence.” But in retrospect, one other thing stood out in both friends’ memories: Obama never asked about his American son or his ex-wife Ann.
At about 1:00 P.M. on Saturday, July 5, 1969, Tom Mboya was shot and killed at close range outside Chhani’s Pharmacy on Nairobi’s Government Road. Just moments earlier, Barack Obama had seen Mboya’s car parked on a yellow line in the street and had stopped to talk and joke with his friend for four or five minutes. “You will get a ticket,” he had warned.
A gunman was arrested, though it was commonly believed that Mboya’s assassination was ordered by someone at or near the peak of Kenya’s government. On September 8, Obama was the prosecution’s final witness at the gunman’s trial, testifying about Mboya’s final sidewalk chat. The defendant was convicted and soon hanged, but that resolved nothing. Far more than one man had died on Government Road, for Kenya’s future as a nonviolent, multiethnic, multiparty democracy died with Tom Mboya.
In June 1970, Obama was fired by the KTDC because of serial dishonesty in matters large and small. Some months later, he had another drunken car crash, and this time he suffered at least one badly injured leg that required prolonged hospitalization. Still, by the early fall of 1971, he was planning a trip to the U.S., perhaps in part because he expected that Ruth would flee from him again, this time permanently.
Rita Auma Obama, who was eleven years old by the time of her father’s 1971 departure, recalled him speaking of her American brother and how Ann “would send his school reports to my father.” Her older brother Roy, later Abon’go Malik, would later remember seeing “an old briefcase” that contained “the divorce letters, and Ann Dunham’s letters.” Even Ruth told Sally Jacobs how “very proud” Obama was of his American son. “He had a little picture of him on his tricycle with a hat on his head. And he kept that picture in every house that we lived in. He loved his son.”26
Barack Obama Sr. arrived back in Honolulu almost ten years after he had left there with glowing credentials to earn a Harvard Ph.D. and then help guide Kenya’s economic future. Now he had no doctoral degree, no job, and a visible limp. How he financed the trip remains a mystery. He planned to stay for a month, and the Dunhams had sublet an apartment downstairs from theirs where Obama could sleep.
Madelyn’s younger sister Arlene Payne, who also was in Hawaii at that time along with her lifelong companion, Margery Duffey, later told Janny Scott, “I had the sense then, as I had earlier, that both Madelyn and Stanley were impressed with him in some way. They were very respectful to him” and “they liked to listen to what he had to say.”
How Ann viewed Obama’s visit, and whether he did suggest to his married ex-spouse that he would welcome her and their son joining him in Kenya, is unknown. Obama still referred to her as Anna, and he brought along for his ten-year-old son a trio of Kenyan trinkets: “three wooden figurines—a lion, an elephant, and an ebony man in tribal dress beating a drum.” Ann, Stan, and Madelyn had prepared Barry for the visit with intensified renditions of the upbeat themes Ann had insistently sounded during Barry’s earlier years. “My father was this very imposing, almost mythic figure,” he recounted years later. “In my mind he was the smartest, most sophisticated person that my maternal grandparents had ever met.” Then, when they first met, his father entirely lived up to his advance billing, at least in the son’s subsequent retelling of it. “He was imposing and he was impressive, and he did change the space around him when he walked into a room,” Barry recalled. “His capacity to establish an image for himself of being in command was in full force, and it had an impressive effect on a ten-year-old boy.”
“He was an intimidating character,” the son told a subsequent interviewer. “He had this big, deep, booming voice and always felt like he was right about everything.” All told, it “was a very powerful moment for me,” but he also confessed later that his father’s visit was deeply unsettling. “If you’ve got this person who suddenly shows up and says, ‘I’m your father, and I’m going to tell you what to do,’ and you don’t have any sense of who this person is, and you don’t necessarily have a deep bond of trust with him, I don’t think your reaction is, ‘How do I get him to stay?’ I think the reaction may be ‘What’s this guy doing here and who does he think he is?’ ”
One day during the first two weeks, Ann told her son that Mabel Hefty had invited his father to speak to her and Pal Eldredge’s fifth-grade classes about Kenya. That news made Barry nervous, but Obama Sr. carried off the appearance in fine form, and Barry was enormously relieved. Years later, Eldredge could still picture the scene: “He seemed to be real proud, right at his side, kind of holding on to his dad’s arm.” Barry’s classmate Dean Ando recalled it similarly: “All I remember is Barry was just so happy that day it was incredible … the dad and Barry had the same smile.” Young Obama remembered Eldredge telling him, “You’ve got a pretty impressive father,” and a classmate saying, “Your dad is pretty cool.”
A few days after Obama’s appearance at Punahou, he took his son to a Honolulu Symphony concert featuring the famous jazz pianist Dave Brubeck, who was joined by his sixteen- and nineteen-year-old sons, Daniel and Christopher, on bass and drums. It was a grand event. The Honolulu Chorale joined the symphony and the family trio to perform Brubeck’s new oratorio, The Light in the Wilderness. Hawaii’s junior U.S. senator, Daniel K. Inouye, served as narrator for the piece.
For Christmas, Obama gave Barry his first basketball. But the end of the month was fast approaching. Obama failed to look up his old Honolulu friends Neil Abercrombie and Andy “Pake” Zane, and when he was with his son, “he never pushed me to speak,” Barry later recounted. “It was only during the course of that month—by the end of that month—that I think I started to open myself up to understanding who he was. But then he was gone, and I never saw him again.”27
Right after New Year’s, Ann applied for a new U.S. passport in order to “return home” to Jakarta on January 14, 1972. She listed her stay there as “indefinite,” but within a month she made the first of three requests that spring 1972 for UDub to send copies of her old 1961–62 transcript to University of Hawaii’s graduate school. In Honolulu, Barry immediately started putting his favorite Christmas present to good use, playing basketball with his good friend Mark Hebing, among others, sometimes at several courts on King Street only a block or so south of his grandparents’ apartment building.
His math and science teacher, Pal Eldredge, would remember fifth-grade Barry as “a happy kid. He had a good sense of humor and was smiling all the time,” as virtually every photo of young Obama from that time confirms. “He was a rascal too—he had a little spunk to him,” Eldredge adds, but “he was always smiling” and was “a good student—he related well with everybody.” Obama Sr.’s old buddy Neil Abercrombie, now at work on a Ph.D. dissertation and holding down a variety of odd jobs, would run into Stan Dunham and Stan’s grandson several times that spring. “When I would see them, Stanley would offer how bright Barry