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Why So Many Critics Hate the New Obama Biography David Garrow Had the Temerity to Depict Obama As a Real, Complicated Human Being

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Why So Many Critics Hate the New Obama Biography David Garrow Had the Temerity to Depict Obama As a Real, Complicated Human Being Getty Images HISTORY DEPT. Why So Many Critics Hate the New Obama Biography David Garrow had the temerity to depict Obama as a real, complicated human being. Too bad the former president’s mythmakers can’t accept that. By DAVID GREENBERG | June 19, 2017 part from journalists assigned to review it and a book editor who considered publishing it, I have yet to meet anyone who has read, or is reading, Rising Star: The Making of Barack A Obama, the phenomenal new biography of the former president by the Pulitzer Prize- winning historian David J. Garrow. Although the book made No. 14 on the New York Times best- seller list—no mean feat—it stayed there just one week. This is a little surprising, because Rising Star has got to be one of the most impressive and important books of the year. It’s a masterwork of historical and journalistic research, Robert Caro-like in its exhaustiveness, and easily the most authoritative account of Obama’s pre-presidential life we’ve seen or are likely ever to see. It’s also a terrific read. Garrow’s research alone makes his book essential for anyone who wants to understand our recently departed president. Early headlines pounced on his discovery of, and interviews with, a previously unknown Obama girlfriend: Sheila Miyoshi Jager. Now a professor at Oberlin University, Jager was a graduate student in anthropology (just like Obama’s mother) when she lived with Obama in his community organizing days. He proposed marriage to her and even continued to see her a bit after he began dating Michelle. But the revelations about Jager are just the most sensational of innumerable new and often fascinating details Garrow reveals. He interviewed more than a thousand of Obama’s friends and colleagues, and Obama himself for eight hours, and unearthed documents from every stage of the president’s life: his undergraduate poetry and his law school exams, an unpublished policy manuscript he co-wrote, his evaluations as a professor at the University of Chicago, his annual tax payments to the IRS, an opposition-research dossier from his 2004 U.S. Senate primary campaign, letters he wrote to his most serious girlfriends and even the diaries they kept of their years with him, including frank (though not lurid) accounts of sex. What’s more, Garrow’s meticulous reconstructions of Obama’s formative years in Chicago organizing and of his political education as a state senator are unparalleled. It’s a stunning and indispensable work of history. So why isn’t the book on everyone’s nightstand? No doubt some readers have been deterred by its formidable length; at 1,460 pages, 1,078 of them narrative text, it’s not so much a doorstop as a nightstand itself. But some would-be readers have mentioned to me a prominent pre-publication dismissal by the dean of book reviewers, the New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani, who trashed Rising Star (in her lead paragraph no less), as “a dreary slog of a read … bloated, tedious and— given its highly intemperate epilogue—ill-considered.” Four days later, a caustic viral tweet by the Washington Post’s David Maraniss (a Pulitzer-winner in his own right whose admirable—though briefer—Barack Obama: The Story Garrow’s volume effectively supersedes), probably scared off more readers: “Will say this once only. David Garrow, author of new Obama bio, was vile, undercutting, ignoble competitor unlike any I’ve encountered.” Maraniss, whom I know a bit, is a decent and generous man; he doesn’t lash out lightly. No question, Garrow’s jabs at his rivals, especially the two other Davids who’ve authored major Obama biographies (Maraniss and Remnick), are unnecessarily sharp, and probably altogether unnecessary. Rising Star quotes from the negative or mixed reviews those writers’ books received and folds in some cutting asides for good measure: Jager tells Garrow she’s glad to hear from “a first-rate historian” (that would be Garrow) instead of a journalist; elsewhere, Garrow bemoans that “scores of journalists” looked into Obama’s high school years and yet “no more than two would take the trouble to even telephone, never mind visit, the only other black male student” at Punahou, the academy he attended. Garrow also subtly drops in mentions of his own previous books, touting their appearance, for example, in the footnotes of the never-published manuscript that Obama wrote with his law school friend Rob Fisher. This coy self-referencing is more wry than grandiose, but it surely didn’t charm adversely inclined reviewers. (Garrow, I hasten to add, is often magnanimous, too; throughout Rising Star he praises many writers whose books and articles he finds illuminating.) More notable than the digs at his competitors are the gratuitous and even petty swipes at Obama himself. Garrow notes, for example, that while Obama was on his “modest” book tour for Dreams from My Father, his celebrated 1995 memoir, the future president “mispronounced W. E. B. DuBois’s surname, wrongly using a French enunciation” in one interview. He tells us, too, that the letters Obama sent as a state senator to Illinois housing officials on behalf of the shady real estate developer Tony Rezko were “grammatically incorrect.” But who among us hasn’t split the occasional infinitive? Even Rising Star—as fluidly, briskly and engagingly written as it is—contains in its pages a dangling modifier, a misplaced apostrophe and “impact” used as a verb. The gotcha tone is most pronounced when Garrow compares his research to Obama’s recollections of his own life, which are continually exposed as incomplete, exaggerated or inaccurate. In Dreams and in other retrospective accounts of his past, Garrow finds, Obama overstated his facility in learning Indonesian, misrecalled a disturbing magazine article he read as a kid about a black man bleaching his skin, inflated his own importance to the Punahou basketball team, wrongly described himself as a bad boy during his teens, mischaracterized his post-collegiate work for the New York Public Interest Research Group and fudged or misstated the record in countless other ways. ADVERTISING Garrow seems to take pleasure in catching Obama in these mistakes, and I suspect that Rising Star’s critics were put off by his manifest skepticism about the Obama legend. Obama, after all, still has his cheering gallery. In the last year of his presidency, media coverage displayed much of the same solicitous protectiveness toward him that was rampant during the 2008 campaign and never quite disappeared, a sense that this phenom was somehow … different from all other politicians. Many of Obama’s long-standing admirers seemed during his valedictory months to want to restore the shining vision of him that reigned in 2008—the quasi-messianic figure, the rare authentic voice amid a fallen political world. This image was, of course, a carefully crafted illusion; Garrow quotes Bob Schieffer, the longtime CBS newsman, conceding, with understatement, that “maybe we were not skeptical enough” about Obama’s candidacy. But that sentiment, however common among workaday Washington journalists, was never widely shared among the literati and the intelligentsia. If Rising Star comes off at times as captious, it’s because, I think, Garrow is so doggedly determined to get to the real Barack Obama, to peel away the layers of mythology—including self- mythologizing—that surround his now-familiar story. As Garrow shrewdly notes, there have been, at least since the uplifting 2004 Democratic convention address that catapulted him to stardom, two Obamas. “The public image of who he is is not who he actually is,” Fisher, the law school classmate, explained. Or, as Obama himself put it, “There’s me, and then there’s this character named ‘Barack Obama.’” Garrow’s remorselessness in deconstructing the character, the public persona—and in seeking instead to recover and present the real, lesser-known Obama—is what makes Rising Star such an unforgettable and valuable book. But it’s also what imbues the biography with its exacting, sometimes censorious tone. A recurring theme of Rising Star is the discrepancy between Obama as he was and Obama as he portrayed himself to others—in love letters, in interviews, in Dreams from My Father. It’s no scandal that Obama should prettify his life story for public consumption, especially if, as Garrow persuasively argues, he was eyeing a political career when he wrote Dreams. We all chisel a little in our self-presentations, especially politicians. What gives Garrow’s exposure of Obama’s self- fashioning its special frisson is the prevailing image of the president as a squeaky clean, non- political truth-teller. You expect Bill Clinton’s My Life or George W. Bush’s Decision Points to be a self-serving political document. But a lot of people really thought Dreams was something different. When we read, toward the end of Rising Star, that Obama told Oprah Winfrey, “The biggest mistake politicians make is being inauthentic,” it’s hard not to appreciate Garrow’s irony. Thus, in contrast to Obama’s image as a religious man, Garrow tells us that even in Hyde Park he visited Jeremiah Wright’s controversial Trinity Church irregularly and, as far as his Chicago friends could see, he “did not have a religious bone in his body.” Most of us think of Obama’s progressive bona fides on social issues like gay rights as beyond reproach, but Garrow documents ever-shifting stands on same-sex marriage, depending on the political moment. During the 2008 campaign, Obama famously defused questions about the domestic terrorist Bill Ayers by calling him “a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago, who I know,” but Garrow shows the relationship to have been closer than the candidate let on.
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