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Obama's NYC Girlfriend Wrote About His "Sexual Warmth" And "Guarded, Controlled" Nature In 1984
By
Jen Chung
Published May 2, 2012
Modified May 2, 2012
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By
Jen Chung
Published May 2, 2012
Modified May 2, 2012
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David Maraniss, who wrote the great Bill Clinton biography, First In His Class, has a biography about President Barak Obama, Barack Obama: The Story, coming out in July, but Vanity Fair has an excerpt now. And perhaps timed for Obama's address to Barnard College on May 14, it focuses on his years in New York... and in love.
Maraniss mentions a student from Occidental College (where Obama studied before transferring to Columbia), Alex McNear, "with whom he reconnected when she spent the summer of 1982 in New York. Alex had always been fond of Barry, as she called him, and 'thought he was interesting in a very particular way. He really worked his way through an idea or question, turned it over, looked at it from all sides, and then he came to a precise and elegant conclusion.'" McNear mentioned they met at an Italian restaurant on Lexington Avenue: "It was one of those dark, old Italian restaurants that don’t exist in New York anymore. It was the kind of place where they leave you alone. I remember thinking how happy I felt just talking to him, that I could talk to him for hours."
Months after graduating from Columbia, in December 1983, at a party on East 13th Street, Obama met an Australian transplant, Genevieve Cook, who was an assistant teacher (see a picture), who had also lived in Indonesia as a child. Maraniss printed passages from Cook's journal:
Saturday, February 25, 1984
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.Friday, March 9, 1984
It’s not a question of my wanting to probe ancient pools of emotional trauma … but more a sense of you [Barack] biding your time and drawing others’ cards out of their hands for careful inspection—without giving too much of your own away—played with a good poker face. And as you say, it’s not a question of intent on your part—or deliberate withholding—you feel accessible, and you are, in disarming ways. But I feel that you carefully filter everything in your mind and heart—legitimate, admirable, really—a strength, a necessity in terms of some kind of integrity. But there’s something also there of smoothed veneer, of guardedness … but I’m still left with this feeling of … a bit of a wall—the veil.Thursday, March 22
Barack—still intrigues me, but so much going on beneath the surface, out of reach. Guarded, controlled.
Maraniss told Vanity Fair, "Barack Obama’s family certainly shaped him, but so did his long search for family. He grew up without a father, with a loving and intelligent mother who was often gone, with white grandparents who did the best they could. He had his missing father’s voice and self-confidence, his mother’s will and adventurousness, the face of his grandfather, and the coolness and matter-of-factness of his grandmother. Because of the circumstances of his young life, and of his racial composition—part white, part black, what was known in native Hawaiian as hapa—he had to find his own way and his own home. That is the arc of my book." The book ends with [SPOILER ALERT!] Obama attending Harvard Law School.
Tagged
barack obama
David Maraniss
genevieve cook
obama new york years
president obama
Jen Chung
Jen Chung is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.
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