On November 25, 1975, Obama’s father, Hussein Onyango Obama, died at age eighty. Barack Sr. attended the funeral accompanied by his then-girlfriend, Akinyi Nyaugenya. Sometime soon after, Obama’s old friend Mwai Kibaki, now Kenya’s minister of finance, hired him into a post there. His drinking was as heavy as ever, and colleagues often saw him headed to a bar before noontime. “I can’t stand it anymore. Let’s get a drink.” Once Obama received a large cash travel advance a day before his scheduled departure on a business trip, but before the night was out, he had spent the entire sum treating colleagues, including Okoda, to rounds of drinks at a fancy Nairobi bar.
One Kenyan academic who had first met Barack Sr. in the U.S. found his deterioration sad. “Before, he was everyone’s role model. With that big beautiful voice, we all wanted to be like him. Later, everybody was asking what happened.” A younger female government colleague knew that Obama was “disillusioned and discouraged and depressed” but mentioned to him her desire to get a Ph.D. She was astonished at his response: “It’s useless doing a Ph.D. What do you want a Ph.D. for? It’s just academic.” Obama “was very, very strong about that: ‘Don’t do a Ph.D.’ ”
By mid-1980, the forty-six-year-old Obama was living with Jael Atieno, a friend of his younger sister Marsat who was the same age as his daughter Auma. Obama had visited Auma in Europe two years before his death, but “I didn’t want to see him,” she recounted. He “appeared broken” and “seemed defeated.” Auma felt “betrayed by my father, blaming him for not holding the family together.” When Aunt Jane telephoned her in November 1982, “I scarcely felt anything for him.”
Ruth Baker Obama Ndesandjo had remarried to a stable and reliable man, Simeon Ndesandjo, and in April 1980, she had opened a preschool, the Madari Kindergarten. She learned of Obama’s death from that November 30 newspaper story. “I was not surprised, because he had been heading that way for a long time,” Ruth said. She told her son Mark more than once that his father had been “a brilliant man, but a social failure.”
Zeituni Onyango, the person to whom Barack Obama Sr. was closest and who loved him most profoundly, understood more deeply than anyone the immense tragedy and lost promise of his life. Despite Barack’s remarkable intelligence, he had ended up living a “miserable life” that was “ruined by alcohol.” Yet even in his last days, one thing had never changed since his unwilling 1964 return to Nairobi without the Ph.D. from Harvard that had been his dream. Even though almost none of his friends ever heard him mention a son in the U.S., “Barack’s picture was always next to his bed,” according to Zeituni.31
In later years, the younger Barack’s comments about his father’s death would vary considerably. Sometimes he incorrectly said he began using the name Barack instead of Barry at that time, rather than almost two years earlier. On other occasions, he mused that he had been motivated by his father’s death. “I think it’s at that point where I got disciplined, and I got serious,” but the few people who knew Barack well during his first fifteen months in Manhattan—Phil, Sohale, and Alex—had all witnessed that transformation take hold many months earlier.
Obama also later wrote that “my fierce ambitions might have been fueled by my father … by my resentments and anger toward him,” but in 1982 those who knew him well did not see evidence of any fierce ambitions. Obama’s belief that in some ways he had raised himself would not be questioned by anyone from Punahou or Occidental who had noticed the absence of his birth parents in his life, but his most acute and accurate comments about the father he saw for only a few weeks when he was ten years old acknowledged how “I didn’t know him well enough to be angry at him as a father. Mostly I feel a certain sadness for him, and the way that his life ended up unfulfilled, despite his enormous talents.” In time he realized that “I was probably lucky not to have been living in his house as I was growing up.”32
After Aunt Jane’s telephone call, Barack said little about his father’s death. “I had no clue,” Sohale Siddiqi recalls. “Not a word from” Barack referenced it. “I never heard about his father from him. I would hear about” Stanley Dunham in particular. “He brought up his grandparents plenty,” and Sohale remembers an off-color note Stan had sent his grandson along with a jogger’s wristband, suggesting there were multiple appendages upon which he might wear it.
Sometime in early December, Keith Kakugawa was in New York for several days and managed to meet up with Barack for lunch near Columbia and then one night for dinner. Obama told Keith that “his dad had just died in a car wreck.” When Barack arrived in Los Angeles just before Christmas and began seeing Alex McNear almost daily, Alex too remembers him telling her about his father’s death, but, she says, “it was not an emotional telling.” In a letter to Phil Boerner, Obama described his three weeks of winter vacation in Los Angeles. Other than when he was with Alex, Barack stayed with Wahid. He told Phil that his days there were “standard fare—good relaxation with the Paki crowd, dinners with Alex, lunches with Jensvold, tennis with Imad, and pipe tokes with Carpenter. They all seem to be doing well enough and have themselves set up in big cushy apartments. The whole process was like a spiral back in time; nothing had changed except my perceptions, it seemed.” Barack’s close friend Mike Ramos had moved from Honolulu to Orange County six months earlier, and he remembers driving up to Pasadena and eating curry with Barack and the Pakistani trio of Wahid, Imad, and Asad.
Other than this unrevealing reference in his letter to Phil, the extent of Barack and Alex’s relationship was kept entirely private, with all of their time together involving just the two of them and not any of Barack’s other friends. “No one really knew that we were having a relationship,” Alex later explained. Barack “seemed to be incapable of bringing a relationship into the rest of his world,” and their quiet dinners often featured long conversations about Alex’s immersion in French literary theory and especially its focus on the concept of difference. “I’m really much more interested in how people are similar,” Alex remembers Barack saying in response to one such discussion. Alex recalls writing in her diary at that time, “I realized how much I loved him, and that he was like my closest friend,” but she also expressed doubts that their relationship could blossom. Barack seemed “very controlling” and “so self-conscious.” On January 17, they had a final dinner before Barack flew back to New York City for his final semester as an undergraduate.33
Barack was still taking Spanish, and the spring semester of his yearlong political science senior seminar would have fewer class meetings in lieu of students writing a paper due at the end of the term after multiple one-on-one consultations with Michael Baron. But in addition, Barack was able to choose three upper-level elective classes. One was a seminar taught by a young English professor whom Pern Beckman had recommended as a “really cool guy.” Lennard “Len” Davis’s first book, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel, a revision of his 1976 Columbia Ph.D. dissertation under Edward Said, was just being published by Columbia University Press. The Columbia catalog said Davis’s seminar Ideology and the Novel would examine “the nature of ideology in Marxist and sociological thought.” Theoretical readings included works by Raymond Williams and Louis Althusser as well as Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Novels to be read started with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and moved on to Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855) and Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854). Only about twelve students enrolled in the seminar, and years later Davis readily volunteered that “it was definitely a Marxist course.” His purpose, Davis explained, was to make students realize that while any individual novelist “felt free to improvise and create,” nonetheless the surrounding “culture and its ideology would ultimately determine the novelist’s innovations.”
Davis devoted a chapter of his new book to analyzing Robinson Crusoe, and in teaching Defoe’s novel, he asked students what “overt ideological statements” they could detect in Robinson Crusoe. An erudite and well-spoken teacher, Davis eventually answered his own