Using diary entries and love letters from former girlfriends, biographer David Maraniss uncovers the President's youthful passions...President Obama's romantic adventures as a young man have been the stuff of secrecy, thanks in part to the fact that he obscured many details in his memoir Dreams From My Father. That's the word from Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Maraniss, author of the forthcoming biography Barack Obama: The Story. There's a long excerpt newly published online in Vanity Fair, titled "Young Barack Obama in Love: A Girlfriend's Secret Diary." The future President's most serious juvenile romance, with a white Australian woman named Genevieve Cook, is chronicled with excerpts from the journal she kept during their now-historic affair. (Above: The photo that accompanies the Vanity Fair piece)
The President was newly graduated from Columbia and living in New York when he first met Cook in a mutual pal's East Village kitchen at a Christmas party in 1983. She had brought along a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream, a possibly psychic move, since more than two decades later Mr. Obama's Irish roots would be discovered. She was 25, he was 22. Maraniss covers another romance in the excerpt, too, as well as lots of food-centric details: The future President liked to hang out in restaurants as he did battle with his own existential crises.
The bio will be published this month by Simon & Schuster. The Vanity Fair article is in the June print edition, and also includes details about the President's relationship with a woman named Alex McNear. She was co-editor of the Occidental College student literary magazine Feast, which published two of Mr. Obama's poems before he transferred to Columbia as a Junior. While Cook kept a journal, McNear kept the many letters "Barry" wrote to her.
She spent the summer of 1982 in New York with Mr. Obama, "walking miles through the city, lingering over meals at restaurants...." During one meeting at an Italian restaurant, McNear said, "we sat and talked and ate and drank wine. Or at least I drank wine. I think he drank something stronger."
The future President was also a big fan of a place on Broadway and 112th called Tom’s Restaurant, Maraniss reports, where he hung out with his roommate Phil Boerner, whom he'd met at Occidental College. Tom's was "immortalized later as the fictional Monk’s, a familiar meeting place for the characters on Seinfeld. A full breakfast went for $1.99," Maraniss wrote.
The Vanity Fair piece contains much more about Cook, the President's first very serious romance (the magazine promises that a photo of the two together is in its print edition). The young Obama made Cook dinner on the evening she first slept over at his apartment, according to Maraniss, who also notes that the President purposefully mis-described Cook in his memoir:
"Obama did not name this old girlfriend even with a pseudonym— she was just “a woman” or “my friend.” That she remained publicly unidentified throughout his rise to national prominence became part of the intrigue of his New York period’s “dark years” narrative. His physical description was imprecise but close. Genevieve is five-seven, lithe and graceful, with auburn-tinged brown hair and flecks of brown, not green, in her hazel eyes. Her voice was confident and soothing. Like many characters in the memoir, he introduced her to advance a theme, another thread of thought in his musings about race."
The Vanity Fair section on their romance is subtitled "Enthralled":
"December 1983. A Christmas party down in the East Village, at 240 East 13th Street. It was B.Y.O.B., and Genevieve Cook brought a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream. The host was a young man employed as a typist at Chanticleer Press, a small Manhattan publishing company that specialized in coffee-table books. Genevieve had worked there briefly but had left to attend graduate school at Bank Street College, up near Columbia, and was now an assistant teacher for second and third graders at Brooklyn Friends School. She was living temporarily at her mother and stepfather’s place on the Upper East Side.
The party in the sixth-floor apartment was well under way when Genevieve arrived: lights dim, Ella Fitzgerald playing on the stereo, chattering people, arty types, recent college grads, some in the publishing world, none of whom she knew except the host. She went into the kitchen, to the right of the front entrance corridor, looking for a glass, then decided it would be less fussy to drink straight from the bottle. That was her style. She fancied smoking non-filter Camels and Lucky Strikes. She liked drinking Baileys and Punt e Mes, an Italian vermouth. Standing in the kitchen was a guy named Barack, wearing blue jeans, T-shirt, dark leather jacket. They spoke briefly, then moved on. Hours later, after midnight, she was about to leave when Barack Obama approached and asked her to wait. They plopped down on an orange beanbag chair at the end of the hall, and this time the conversation clicked.
He noticed her accent. Australian, she said. He knew many Aussies, friends of his mother’s, because he had lived in Indonesia when he was a boy. So had she, before her parents divorced, and again briefly in high school. As it turned out, their stays in Jakarta had overlapped for a few years, starting in 1967. They talked nonstop, moving from one subject to another, sharing an intense and immediate affinity, enthralled by the randomness of their meeting and how much they had in common. They had lived many places but never felt at home.
At night’s end, as Genevieve recalled that first encounter when I spoke with her decades later, they exchanged phone numbers on scraps of paper. “I’m pretty sure we had dinner maybe the Wednesday after. I think maybe he cooked me dinner. Then we went and talked in his bedroom. And then I spent the night. It all felt very inevitable.
Obama was six months out of Columbia when Genevieve Cook came along and engaged him in the deepest romantic relationship of his young life. She called him Bahr-ruck, with the accent on the first syllable, and a trill of the r’s. Not Bear-ick, as the Anglophile Kenyans pronounced it, and not Buh-rock, as he would later be called, but Bahr-ruck. She said that is how he pronounced it himself, at least when talking to her. He was living on the Upper West Side and working in Midtown, at a job that paid the rent but did not inspire him. He was still in a cocoon phase, wondering about his place, keeping mostly to himself, occasionally hanging out with his Pakistani friends, who partied too much and too hard, he thought, but were warm and generous and buoyant intellectual company.
Genevieve offered something more. She was 25, three years older than he was, born in 1958. She kept a journal, as he did, and thought of herself as an observer, as he did, and brooded about her identity, as he did, and had an energetic, independent, and at times exasperating mother, as he did, and burned with an idealism to right the wrongs of the world, as he did."
Excerpt's from Cook's diary included in Vanity Fair:
Sunday, January 22, 1984
What a startling person Barack is—so strange to voice intimations of my own perceptions—have them heard, responded to so on the sleeve. A sadness, in a way, that we are both so questioning that original bliss is dissipated—but feels really good not to be faltering behind some façade—to not feel that doubt must be silenced and transmuted into distance.
Thursday, January 26
How is he so old already, at the age of 22? I have to recognize (despite play of wry and mocking smile on lips) that I find his thereness very threatening…. Distance, distance, distance, and wariness.
Sunday, February 19
Despite Barack’s having talked of drawing a circle around the tender in him—protecting the ability to feel innocence and springborn—I think he also fights against showing it to others, to me. I really like him more and more—he may worry about posturing and void inside but he is a brimming and integrated character.
Today, for the first time, Barack sat on the edge of the bed—dressed—blue jeans and luscious ladies on his chest [a comfy T-shirt depicting buxom women], the end of the front section of the Sunday Times in his hand, looking out the window, and the quality of light reflected from his eyes, windows of the soul, heart, and mind, was so clear, so unmasked, his eyes narrower than he usually holds them looking out the window, usually too aware of me.
Saturday, February 25
The sexual warmth is definitely there—but the rest of it has sharp edges and I’m finding it all unsettling and finding myself wanting to withdraw from it all. I have to admit that I am feeling anger at him for some reason, multi-stranded reasons. His warmth can be deceptive. Tho he speaks sweet words and can be open and trusting, there is also that coolness—and I begin to have an inkling of some things about him that could get to me.
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*AP photo
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