White lover ‘a liability’ for young Obama
UNITED STATES: Barack Obama proposed twice to a long-term girlfriend but ultimately decided that her race made her a political liability and married Michelle, a new biography has claimed.
Obama fell in love with Sheila Miyoshi Jager, whose ancestry is Dutch and Japanese, before attending Harvard Law School. He continued to see her after he began dating the future first lady, according to Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama by David Garrow.
The author, who received a Pulitzer prize for a biography of Martin Luther King Jr, also claims that ‘‘Obama wrote somewhat elusively’’ to a girlfriend ‘‘that he had thought about and considered gayness but ultimately decided that a same-sex relationship would be less challenging and demanding than developing one with the opposite sex’’.
The book details how Obama’s friendship with a gay assistant professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles in 1980 shaped his attitudes.
Lawrence Goldyn ‘‘made a huge impact on Barry Obama’’, Garrow writes.
Decades later when asked about his understanding of gay issues, Obama said of Goldyn: ‘‘My favourite professor in my first year in college was one of the first openly gay people that I knew . . . He was a terrific guy.’’
Obama described a ‘‘strong friendship’’ that ‘‘helped educate’’ him. Goldyn retrained as a doctor and is an HIV specialist in California. Jager, a college professor in Ohio, says in the book that Obama first asked her to marry him in 1986, when she was 23 and he was 25.
Told by her parents that they were too young, she rebuffed the future president. They remained a couple but Jager says she began to realise Obama’s ‘‘deep-seated need to be loved and admired’’.
The book claims the future president had decided that to fulfil his political ambitions he had to ‘‘fully identify as AfricanAmerican’’ and marry a black woman.
She is quoted as saying that Obama became ‘‘so very ambitious very suddenly . . . I remember very clearly when this transformation happened, and I remember very specifically that by 1987, about a year into our relationship, he already had his sights set on becoming president.’’
That ambition, Garrow writes, was ‘‘coupled with a heightened awareness that to pursue it he had to fully identify as AfricanAmerican’’.
Garrow quotes a friend of the couple who recalled Obama saying: ‘‘If I am going out with a white woman, I have no standing here.’’
Things are said to have come to a head on a summer holiday, when Obama and Jager spent an afternoon loudly arguing about the issue within earshot of their friends.
’’That’s wrong. That’s wrong. That’s not a reason,’’ they heard her shout from the guest room. Days before leaving for Harvard, Obama proposed again, out of ‘‘a sense of desperation’’ that their relationship was ending, according to Jager.
It was in Chicago that Obama met Michelle Robinson, who became his wife. After they started dating, however, Obama and Jager continued to meet. ’’I always felt bad about it,’’ Jager said.
She was not mentioned in Obama’s autobiography, Dreams from My Father, where she was combined with two other former girlfriends into one composite character.
The new biography also claims that Obama used cocaine aged 22 and 23 – later than he admitted in his own memoir, where he described using the drug as a teenage student.
Garrow describes Obama as relentlessly driven. ’’While the crucible of self-creation had produced an iron-clad will, the vessel was hollow at its core,’’ the book concludes.
If Obama modelled his love life to maximise his political chances, the woman he married still bridled at his ambitions. A frustrated Obama is said to have complained once to a friend about how often Mrs Obama raised the issue of money early in their marriage. ‘‘Why don’t you go out and get a good job? You’re a lawyer – you can make all the money we need,’’ she told him.
The biography cites a passage Obama wrote at Harvard in praise of the opportunities in America. If he did not make the big time, he was sure his children would. ‘‘I may not be Donald Trump now, but just you wait; if I don’t make it, my children will.’’ – The Times