Romantic Images For Girlfriend Biography
Source (google.com.pk)But Obama had met many Aussies while living in Indonesia as a young boy with his mother and stepfather, and it turned out he and Cook — the daughter of a prominent diplomat — had lived in the country at the same time.
As the night wore on, they sat close together on an orange beanbag in the hall while Cook swigged Baileys Irish Cream straight from the bottle.
They were amazed at how much they had in common: both were children of divorced parents, both had lived all over the world and had never felt truly at home anywhere.
They exchanged phone numbers and the self-assured Obama didn’t waste time. Within days, he was cooking her dinner at his apartment.
‘Then we went and talked in his bedroom,’ Cook recalled. ‘And then I spent the night with him.
‘It all felt very inevitable.’
The U.S. president and his First Lady sometimes seem so well-suited to each other that it’s hard to imagine there ever having been any woman in his life other than the formidable Michelle, whom he met while working for a Chicago law firm in 1989.
Obama has reinforced this notion by making only fleeting mention of ex-girlfriends in his carefully calibrated memoirs, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.
'Lithe and mysterious': Obama developed a serious crush on fellow student Alexandra McNear while at Occidental College in Los Angeles
'Lithe and mysterious': Obama developed a serious crush on fellow student Alexandra McNear while at Occidental College in Los Angeles
He gives the impression of a man in such a hurry to save the world that he had no time for such distractions as romance.
But now, in a blistering new biography, Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist David Maraniss has pulled his exes out of the shadows.
In so doing, he has revealed an unflattering picture of a president so desperate to sell an image of himself as a pioneering race warrior that he has air-brushed many of the ‘white’ elements from his life — including that string of well-heeled, well-educated white girlfriends.
Obama’s version of events, in his autobiography, is a moving story of a mixed-race child struggling to find his black identity after being deserted as a young child by his Kenyan father.
It tells how his grandfather was imprisoned by the British for helping the Mau Mau rebels in Kenya — an assertion that Obama’s step-grandmother later embellished with claims he was also tortured — for which Maraniss found no evidence.
Delighted Republican opponents are picking over the inconsistencies (38 at the last count) between Obama’s own memoirs — published in 1995 as he prepared to launch his political career — and the facts uncovered by Maraniss.
Time and again, Obama, who has had to fight hard to convince other African Americans of his ‘black credibility’, appears to have burnished his radical credentials, not least by playing up the roles of black people in his life and playing down the roles of the white.
And nowhere is this more apparent than in his romantic life.
For Genevieve Cook — to whom admittedly the President alludes in his memoirs — wasn’t the first white girlfriend in his life, nor the last.
As a young student in the early Eighties at Occidental College, a small arts university in Los Angeles, Obama developed a serious crush on another student Alexandra McNear, who was co-editor of a college literary magazine which published two of Obama’s poems.
McNear, described by Maraniss as ‘lithe and mysterious, with the face of a young Meryl Streep and a literary bohemian air’, had just the sort of rarefied upbringing that might impress an amibitious young man.
Both her parents were established writers and her father, Erskine McNear, was the scion of a property empire. In the summer of 1981, Obama and McNear moved to New York, she to do a theatre course, he to finish his degree at Columbia University, so he could explore his black identity in a more African American city.
Far away from family and friends, Obama’s first summer in the Big Apple in 1981 might have been lonely but, suggests Maraniss, for the presence of McNear.
She recalls admiring his intellect, his sense of humour and his good looks.
After a first date at a dimly lit Italian restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, they embarked on a two-month affair.
She remembers it as a ‘summer of walking miles in the city, lingering over meals at restaurants, hanging out at the apartments, visiting art museums and talking about life’.
When she went back to Los Angeles, their relationship continued, largely through an exchange of passionate if pompously intellectual letters.
They discussed everything from T.S. Eliot to German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche — but mainly they discussed Barack Obama.
Supremely self-absorbed, Obama forever harped on about his search for meaning and identity.
He seemed oblivious to her feelings, once remarking that, tempting as it would be to run off with her when he finished his degree in New York, it would mean living ‘in some sense of compromise and retreat’.
Obama’s self-obsession would have left many women cold, if not bored to death, but McNear persevered.
Perhaps she appreciated his toe-curlingly pretentious notes on literature, like his observation that T.S. Elliot’s poem The Waste Land ‘contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Munzer [a somewhat obscure Reformation theologian] to Yeats’.
She told her diary that he was ‘the closest friend I had, and that I really loved him but didn’t know if we could sustain a relationship.’
Her instincts were correct.
A few months later, while Obama was visiting his mother in Honolulu, he wrote to inform McNear with cold detachment that he felt their relationship was changing from romantic love to ‘the more quotidian, but finer bonds of friendship’.
McNear went on to scandalise her family by marrying a former Serbian boxer and convicted bank robber called Bob Bozic.
Next for Obama was Genevieve Cook, whom he met at that mutual friend’s flat at a Christmas Party in 1983.
Obama had graduated and was in a dull office job as he worked out what he wanted to do with his life.
No comments:
Post a Comment