About Obama’s father

HONOLULU – A friend of mine in Hawaii who read my recent commentary on US President Barack Obama’s mother called to say it would be in keeping with the recently observed Father’s Day to write something about his father as well. My friend thinks Barack Obama Sr. has been getting a bum rap in the media as a womanizer, alcoholic, dead-beat father, an arrogant intellectual, and so on. He must have had a story, too.

I agree, and it’s only fair to hear the other side of the narrative.

Fortunately, through the Freedom of Information Act, many heretofore unknown details about the elder Obama have surfaced. After he went to Harvard to do his Ph.D. in economics, he never returned to Hawaii to fetch his wife Ann Dunham and their baby Barry, now the president of the United States. After he passed his comprehensive exams in Harvard for his Ph.D. in 1964, he requested the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to extend his visa to enable him to finish. And this was where his troubles began.

AP correspondent Bob Salsberg reports that Obama’s request was denied by the INS. He returned to his native Kenya without finishing his doctorate. This must have been painful to him. Of course, his visa was terminated.

Evidently, Harvard had written a memo to the INS expressing concern about the elder Obama’s “personal life and finances.” But this was not the first time the INS was concerned. Back in Hawaii in 1961, when Obama Sr. was still an undergraduate, the INS in Honolulu was informed that he had married Stanley Ann Dunham, despite the fact that he already had a wife in Kenya. Apparently, he had told his adviser at the university that he had divorced his wife in Kenya, the same thing he told his future wife Ann, except that he was not telling the truth.

Lying to immigration was punishable then as now. In 1964, the director of Harvard’s international office wrote Obama Sr. that while he had indeed finished the academic requirements for his Ph.D., his department in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences “did not have the money to support him.” The letter added, “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.”

If you are a foreign student in America, something like this sounds like a death sentence. It is not known whether he appealed the INS decision or not. In any case, he already had a previous record that could be counted against him. He could have consulted a lawyer but either he couldn’t afford one or it didn’t occur to him.

Frustrated and unable to stay in the US, Obama Sr. returned to Kenya. Even if he was allowed a grace period to stay, he probably was not in a financial position to send for his wife and son back in Hawaii. In the first place, Ann had already divorced him, compounding his woes.

Back in Kenya, he was reported to have married again a third time. Some media reports even talked about a fourth marriage. He worked as a government economist and also for an oil company. His problems with money to support his families must have added to his personal woes.

His personal as well as professional life deteriorated to an alarming degree, affecting his work. One night in 1982 as he was driving home, his car crashed head-on into a tree and he was killed. He was only 46.

His only visit back in Hawaii happened when Barack Jr. was already 10 years old. The latter would eventually write the book “Dreams from My Father,” which became a bestseller shortly before he ran for US president in 2008.

It was a tragic end because the father was one of Kenya’s most promising young intellectuals in the 1960s sent to the US to prepare themselves for future leadership positions in Kenya. He was, according to reports, a very frustrated man, which was perfectly understandable.

Now, about the rumor mills. It appears from facts now known that Obama Sr. did not exactly abandon his wife and son. In those days, as now, once the INS terminated your visit under suspicion of wrongdoing, you had to clear out as soon as you could. To defy the order was to invite deportation. The INS was not very sympathetic to his prolonged stay despite his academic promise. Harvard issued a disclaimer saying it could not find in its files the memo it was supposed to have sent to the INS objecting to Obama Jr.’s request.

As to reports that he was so drunk he drove his car into a tree, we will never know whether these are true or not. In any case, both he and his former wife Ann, had they lived to their 60s and 70s, would have been so thrilled that their little Barry would become president of the US, the first from African-American ranks to achieve this position and status in the world. It is so sad that they had to die so young, which is a reflection of the hard times they lived in.

(A retired professor of political science and Asian studies, Belinda A. Aquino was also the founding director of the Center for Philippine Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.)