Much of BI’s information gathering required telephoning various midlevel officials at corporations and banks. When calls were returned, BI’s switchboard operator announced the call over an office-wide paging system if someone was not at their desk. Brenda Vinson, an African American woman in her late thirties, worked in the library and often covered the switchboard. Obama was the first black college graduate to work at BI, and his unfamiliar first name was a challenge to pronounce. Vinson remembers Barack as “very personable” toward her and her cousin, who were BI’s only other black employees; a Puerto Rican father and son staffed BI’s mailroom. There was a good bit of socializing among the young professionals who worked at BI. A nearby Irish pub was one regular destination, and Beth Noymer later described BI’s office culture as “a hotbed of young singles.”43
Obama did not socialize with his BI workmates, but sometime prior to New Year’s Eve, his friend Andy Roth invited him to a party that Andy’s brother Jon was hosting in their sixth-floor apartment at 240 East 13th Street. Jon worked at Chanticleer Press, a publisher that helped produce National Audubon Society guides, and other invitees included Genevieve Cook, a twenty-five-year-old Swarthmore College graduate who had worked at Chanticleer before beginning coursework toward a master’s degree in early childhood education at Bank Street College of Education. She was born in 1958 to parents who were Australian: Helen Ibbitson, the daughter of a Melbourne banker, and Michael J. Cook, a conservative diplomat who would go on to head up Australia’s top intelligence agency before serving for four years as ambassador to the United States. Her parents had divorced when Genevieve was ten years old, and Helen then married Philip C. Jessup Jr., an American lawyer and executive whose International Nickel Company post had him and Helen living in Jakarta during the 1970s. Genevieve attended multiple boarding schools in the U.S. before graduating from the Emma Willard School near Albany, New York. While she was at Swarthmore, her mother and stepfather Phil had moved from Jakarta to New York, and by late 1983 Genevieve was temporarily living in their spacious apartment on Park Avenue just below 90th Street after breaking up with a Swarthmore boyfriend with whom she had lived in Manhattan’s East Village while student teaching that year at the Brooklyn Friends School.
Her four years at Swarthmore were the first time Genevieve attended the same school for more than two years, and it was her first time in one country for more than three straight. “At Swarthmore, I was very drawn to … the drug oriented counterculture” and “its ritualized pot smoking,” she wrote in her impressive 1981 senior anthropology thesis, “Dancing in Doorways.” For the thesis, she interviewed fifteen fellow students who were also the children of expatriates, “people who spent their lives from the time they were born moving around from country to country, who are not members of any one culture, who come from nowhere in particular, and who do not really belong anywhere. You will always know them when you meet them.”
At the Roth brothers’ party, Genevieve did know one when she met one. She and Obama struck up a conversation that lasted several hours after they discovered their mutual ties to Indonesia and expatriate similarities. “I remember being very engaged, and just talking nonstop,” she later wrote. “We both had this feeling of how bizarre and exciting it was that we’d both grown up in Indonesia, and we felt we very much had a worldview in common.” Barack was in no way aggressive. “If anything, he struck me as diffident … although also at ease with himself” and “clearly interested in pursuing this conversation with me.” She found him “just really interesting, intellectually,” and she later reflected that “the thing that connected us is that we both came from nowhere—we really didn’t belong.” Before the night was out, he handed her a small scrap of paper—“Barack Obama 866-8172 622 W. 114th #43”—that she still retains thirty years later. After a phone call the next week, she agreed to meet him at his apartment for dinner, where Barack cooked for the two of them. “Then we went and talked in his bedroom. And then I spent the night. It all felt very inevitable,” she wrote in a private memoir.
That evening stood in sharp contrast to Genevieve’s rejection of a dinner host seven months earlier. That spring she had taken a course at Bank Street that involved having the students share recipes with their classmates. Three decades later Genevieve still had the “Floating Island Pudding” she shared as well as “Zayd’s Catsup,” a contribution from a thirty-seven-year-old classmate. At the end of the semester, that classmate invited her to dinner at his apartment at 520 West 123rd Street #5W. Five-year-old Zayd and his two-year-old brother Malik were asleep, as was Chesa, another almost two-year-old member of the household, whose mother and father were both in prison.
Genevieve was initially surprised that the only food her host had for dinner was grapes, but it quickly became clear what he wanted for dessert. He explained that he was in an open relationship; he and his partner had been leading figures a decade earlier in a group whose slogans included “Smash Monogamy!” His partner was not coming home that night; indeed she was residing involuntarily at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan, where she would remain for another six months. “He gave getting me into bed quite a good go,” Genevieve recalled, but with a thirteen-year age difference between them, he “seemed awfully old to me!” Her host “was quite miffed that I was not impressed by his ‘status’ ” as a notorious former radical, albeit one whose FBI “Wanted” poster made him appear to have just fallen out of bed rather than striving to get into one. He “backed off when I wasn’t interested,” and Genevieve’s rebuff may have had a greater impact than she realized.
Four months later a federal judge gave her host’s partner a weekend furlough so the two former anti-monogamy advocates could marry, and two months after that, the judge allowed her to return to 520 West 123rd Street on a Christmas furlough. Four days after New Year’s, the judge granted a motion to vacate the contempt citation that had kept Bernardine Dohrn jailed since May 19, and she was free to remain with her two sons and now husband, Bill Ayers. As Genevieve would pluperfectly capture the essence of the story, sometimes indeed the “truth is so much stranger than fiction!”44
On Monday, January 9, Genevieve spent a second night with Barack on 114th Street, and the next day wrote in her journal, “I have not experienced the kind of intellectual stimulation Barack offers me since I left college.” She expressed similar feelings in a letter she wrote to him but did not mail, a letter she still had three decades later. “You are the first person I’ve met since being in college who has in some way engaged me in a process of self-intellectual questioning. It is a shock to recognize that my engagement with Bank St., education, friends I’ve made through Bank St. & teaching & the kind of process I’ve touted, of teaching forcing you to be self-evaluative, has all been ‘professional.’ ”
Over the next four weeks, Genevieve continued to record in her journal her reactions to Barack. Intercourse was pleasant, and in bed “he neither came off as experienced or inexperienced,” she later recalled. “Sexually