Barack Obama: The Story

To the wondrous girls of my life—

Linda, Sarah, Ali, Heidi, Ava, and Eliza—

and to Alice

The mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived.

RALPH ELLISON, Invisible Man

CONTENTS

Introduction: It’s Not Even Past

1. In Search of El Dorado

2. Luoland

3. In This Our Life

4. Nairobi Days

5. Afraid of Smallness

6. Beautiful Isle of Somewhere

7. Hapa

8. Orbits

9. Such a World

10. Marked Man

11. What School You Went?

12. Barry Obama

13. Riding Poniyem

14. Mainland

15. End and Beginning

16. The Moviegoer

17. Genevieve and the Veil

18. Finding and Being Found

Coda

Photographs

Acknowledgments

About David Maraniss

Notes

Bibliography

Photo Credits

Index

INTRODUCTION

It’s Not Even Past

This volume is not a traditional biography. It begins long before Obama was born and ends before he entered politics. He is inevitably the principal subject, and I would not have undertaken the book if not for his history-making rise, but he does not appear until the seventh chapter and even after that at times gives way to other relatives. He came out of an uncommon family, brilliantly scattered and broken, and although the parts could never be fitted neatly together again, my goal was to examine them as a whole and see the story in all its jagged and kaleidoscopic fullness. We are all random creatures, in one sense, our existence resulting from a particular series of random events, but Barack Obama’s life seems more improbable than most, and I saw in the story of his family a chance to write about many of the themes of the modern world. And then, given the circumstances into which he was born, how did he figure it out? How did he create a life that made it possible for his political rise? Those are the twin obsessions that drove me as I researched this book—the world that created him and how he created himself. Four years ago, I set off in search of answers.

On a whitewashed ledge at Punahou School bathed in Honolulu sunshine, Alan Lum and I sat and talked about the past, revisiting the days when Lum and his friend Barry were teammates on Hawaii’s state championship basketball team. Then we got up and took a short walk. We left the athletic center and strolled past the prep school’s outdoor pool, constructed since their days there in the late 1970s, and along the edge of a vast green playing field, before climbing the broad steps leading up to the Dole Center, the student cafeteria. Lum turned left on the lanai and cast his eyes downward, examining the concrete sidewalk. Where was it, again? He walked farther toward a set of outdoor benches, then stopped and brushed the pavement with his shoe, cleaning away the daily soot. There it was, etched in block letters decades ago by a stick or index finger before the concrete had set. OBAMA.

No historical marker designated the site. Generations of students had walked over and around it without taking notice of the name below their feet. For the first twenty-five years or so after it was written, the name would have provoked little interest in any case. Just one name among multitudes, and locals might have assumed Obama was Asian American; the syllables had a familiar Japanese cadence. The testament of a teenage boy, and he didn’t even write it himself. The story goes that one of his buddies scratched his name there to get him in trouble. But it had the same meaning nonetheless. A name etched in concrete, like Kilroy was here carved into rock, is an expression of time and history and fleeting existence. Looking down, I could only think: That could have been the lone mark he left.

One April morning in Topeka, the capital of Kansas, my wife and I went searching for an address in the eleven-hundred block of Sixth Avenue. Long ago there had been an auto garage there—the Palace, it was called—and a drugstore next door. In the intervening decades, as often happens, addresses had changed and seemed two or four off from what they had been in the 1920s. The drugstore had vanished. A wide driveway now opened from the avenue into a few parking spaces in front of a nondescript building. A sign said it was an auto repair shop, an unwitting reiteration of what once had been. In front, a single-room office had gone up in recent decades, sparsely furnished with desk, telephone, and shelves of manuals, but farther into the interior was the old garage, with a high-ceilinged work area where one could envision the scene from more than eighty years earlier: a mechanic in overalls sweating under the hood of a Studebaker Big Six. Windows had been bricked up, and most of the old tin ceiling had been covered, but the place seemed to trap the dust and suffocating air of the past.

The shop manager was obliging, and let us look around. As we stood in the dingy garage, staring up at the ceiling, I asked whether he knew the building’s history. It had undergone many transformations over the years, he said. There had been a pharmacy attached to it once, and next to the pharmacy was an apartment building. According to legend, the landlord had built a secret passageway from the shop to the back door of one of the apartments, where his mistress awaited for illicit trysts. Quite a story, but there was another bit of history about which the present-day tenants knew nothing. It was in that very garage that Obama’s great-grandmother Ruth Armour Dunham took her own life on a chilly Thanksgiving night, setting off a chain of events that changed the course of American history.

Out in the western reaches of Kenya, a harrowing seven-hour drive from the capital city of Nairobi, in the region hugging the uppermost gulf of Lake Victoria, I encountered a tale of two villages. The first village was Nyang’oma Kogelo, up in the brushland northwest of the major city out there, Kisumu. That is where a woman known as Mama Sarah lived. She had become a celebrity in Kenya as the step-grandmother of Obama and a figure in his best-selling memoir. A trip to her compound now was like visiting royalty. The entrance was gated. Vendors sold tourist trinkets at tables just inside the grounds. She was connected to the outside world by giant satellite dishes, and protected by armed guards. There were lists to be checked, names to be vetted, rules to be imposed, factotums to accommodate. "Mr. David . . . [pause] . . . David, said one young relative during his inquisition in the shade of a mango tree, stopping to assess my name and worthiness. Is that Christian or Jew? Both," I responded. All to see a woman who had no blood relationship to the famous American, and was, as one Kenyan put it, nothing more than a historical accident.

The second village was Oyugis. It was around the gulf, down and to the east, a bumpy journey into the hills of south Nyanza. An old toothless woman named Auma Magak lived there with several relatives, including her son, Razik. In her seventies, Auma was a recovering alcoholic who scratched out a living by selling charcoal from a shack by the side of the road. It was Auma, in her isolation and anonymity, who had the strongest link to the Kenya side of the Obama story. She was the younger sister of Barack Hussein Obama Sr.—the president’s father—and in a tribal culture where polygamy was routine, her bloodlines were the most direct in that she and Obama Sr. had both the same mother and father. Her compound was not on the tourist maps. It was surrounded by high euphorbia bushes, but no guards checked visitor lists and there were no vendors selling trinkets. Yet step inside her hut, into the darkened stillness, and there were the testaments on her mud walls: four framed photographs of President Obama with his wife and two daughters, along with two posters and a calendar from his most recent visit as a U.S. senator. And she and Razik had stories. She talked about how her mother ran away from a brutal husband and how the little children, including Obama Sr., ran after her. Razik recalled the time in the late 1980s when his American cousin came to visit and they went fishing for Nile perch in the great lake and drank chang’aa, a potent gin distilled from fermented corn, and smoked weed together.

In Jakarta, in the midmorning humidity of early September, our taksi driver wended through the traffic-clogged roadways of Indonesia’s booming capital city until we came to the corner of Dr. Supomo and Haji Ramli streets, where he turned left and let us out at the entrance to the Menteng Dalam neighborhood, or kampung. To the right, we looked down at a swampy urban culvert strewn with trash. Straight ahead, up a gentle slope, ran the opening stretch of Haji Ramli, a row of storefronts at first, then zigging and zagging left-right-left up to the small whitewashed house on a corner where Obama lived forty-plus years earlier when he was six, seven, and eight years old. He was Barry Soetoro then, taking the family name of his stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, his mother’s second husband. Some things had changed in the ensuing decades. Then the neighborhood was on the edge of a city of about three million residents; now it is surrounded by an urban sprawl that goes on for several more miles, skyscrapers sprouting in every direction as Jakarta’s metropolitan population has swelled to nearly twenty million. Then Haji Ramli was unpaved, nothing but dirt that turned to mud in the rainy season, and a small playing field and forest were within an easy walk of the Soetoro house. The street is paved now and the green space long gone; houses and people are everywhere. But the sensibility of the neighborhood remains much the same: the narrow pathways and alleyways; the street carts with pungent offerings of nasi goreng and rendang; fried rice and spicy beef; the symphony of neighborhood rhythms and sounds and a daily song of the kampung—the low undulating buzz of a call to prayer at the nearby mosque; the beseeching voice of the bread seller; the hollow bock-bock-bock-click of a meatball vendor knocking his bamboo kentongan; and the shrieks and laughs of children down on the playground at the neighborhood school, SD Asisi.

There are no markings outside the gate at No. 16 Haji Ramli to designate that Barack Obama once lived there, nor are there any official designations of his presence at the nearby school. The first section of SD Asisi was built in 1966, one year before Barry arrived. It was long and narrow, one story, with the look of an army barracks. That structure still stands, but is enfolded into a handsome complex of buildings that now hold classes for more than five hundred students in kindergarten through grade 12. Then and now, the fact that the school happened to be Catholic in a predominantly Muslim community seemed to make little difference to the residents, reflecting both the moderate form of Islam that prevails in Jakarta and the common appreciation of a good school no matter its denomination. Barry was just another neighborhood kid here. He learned Bahasa Indonesia, the national language, so well that by the end of his first year his classmates assumed he was Indonesian, a little darker than the rest, probably from one of the easternmost islands. Just another kid playing kasti, a form of softball, under the shade of the commodious mangosteen tree. No one special. But now there is one telltale sign, something inside Kelas III, the third-grade classroom, on the wall above one of the tiny wood-on-metal chairs where he once sat. It is a color poster showing the president and First Lady smiling on the night he accepted the Democratic nomination for president in 2008. Seeing that classroom and strolling up and down Haji Ramli street in the morning and at sundown, I could not help but be overwhelmed by how utterly improbable it was that Barry Soetoro, the boy from Menteng Dalam, had made his way to the scene depicted in that poster.

One glistening afternoon in Chicago, I sat across from the Reverend Alvin Love as he peered out the window of his second-floor office in the rectory of Lilydale First Baptist Church on 113th Street on the city’s sprawling South Side. A young man stood down below on the sidewalk, gesturing up, trying to catch the minister’s attention, a pantomime plea for some kind of handout. It was through that same window, a quarter century earlier, that Love watched a tall and slender stranger wearing khaki pants and a short-sleeve shirt stroll down the sidewalk, stop at the front entrance, and ring the doorbell. He thought it was another unexpected visitor needing some kind of help. It was, in fact, Barack Obama, community organizer, who was asking not for assistance, but for fifteen minutes of the pastor’s time. This happened in 1985, not long after Obama had left New York to start a new life in Chicago. He and Rev, as he would come to call Love, ended up talking much longer than fifteen minutes. From that initial meeting they developed a relationship that carried through the years. Love was Obama’s first guide through the subculture of African American churches in Chicago, and later helped connect him to a larger network of Baptist ministers throughout the state of Illinois. He came to his aid when Obama’s relationship with another Chicago preacher, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, jeopardized his political career just as it reached sight of the promised land of the White House. Love had watched Obama rise from an unseasoned young man trying to organize a troubled neighborhood to president of the United States trying to organize a divided country.

Now, as we sat in the same office where they first talked, Love took me back into the past, recalling that visit and their subsequent struggles to force political change in places where people were poor and powerless. He spoke of preachers who were supportive and preachers who were not, of how young Barack helped him and his church as much as he helped Barack, and he closed with the story of how President Obama, hours after taking the oath of office, paid a private visit to a gathering of old friends who had traveled to Washington for the inauguration, shaking hands with fifty of them one by one in a hotel conference room, until he came to Love and said, Rev, you gotta keep me in prayer. This is something else, and minutes later, as he left the room, turned back one more time, his eyes fixing on Love in the crowd, and said, Rev, I wasn’t playing. Don’t forget me.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past, William Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun. They are words that Barack Obama himself has paraphrased more than once in his writings and speeches, and for a biographer and historian, their meaning seems self-evident. That is why I went looking for that name in the concrete in Hawaii, and stepped inside the auto garage in Kansas, and visited those villages in western Kenya, and walked the alleyways of Menteng Dalam in south Jakarta, and roamed the South Side of Chicago, and made many other ventures from the present into the past during four years of travel researching the world that created Obama. The past is where many of the most revealing clues to the present and future are found, clues to the shaping of individuals and of cultures and societies.

To write a book that leaves its protagonist before his days of notable accomplishment requires an implicit belief that the past is never dead. But when it comes to this book, to the particulars of the Obama story, there are some crosscurrents and countervailing notions to consider.

Obama grew up without his father, with his mother often gone, and in a sense raised himself, working his way alone through many confounding issues life threw his way. If he emerged in adulthood as a self-creation, one argument goes, how relevant are the genealogy and geography of his family, and his own early life, in decoding what he later made of himself? Valid question. My answer: they are certainly not everything, but they are crucial. The supposition of Obama being a self-creation is inadequate. One can see the imprint of his mother and maternal grandmother in almost every aspect of his character. That is nurture. The effects of his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia are also readily evident in the adult Obama, his uncommon combination of cool remove and adaptability. That is environment. As for nature, there are parts of his appearance and personality—his voice and self-confidence, for starters, each of which should not be underestimated as factors in his political ascent—that can be traced clearly to his absent father. He has his white grandfather’s long face and his motions and gestures. And, all in all, the past might be even more essential in figuring out someone who has re-created himself. People are shaped equally by action and reaction, by what they accept and what they reject from their own inheritance. Obama is best understood with that in mind, not only by how his family and environment molded him but how he reshaped himself in reaction to them.

Then there is the aspect of his past that tends to overwhelm everything else, the fact that he was the product of different continents and different races, an American made from the multifarious world of color and culture. He was reared by white relatives and grew up mostly in a place, Hawaii, where being hapa—half and half—was almost the norm, though the multihued combinations involved mostly Asians and very few blacks. He came from all sides and no sides, a fact equally relevant to his past, present, and future. When he first arose to political prominence, there was a familiar lament when white people talked about Obama. He is black and white, some would say, so why is he called only black? Most of the answer comes from the history of this country. That is how society categorized him before he could choose. But he also did make that subjective choice. The arc of his life, emotionally and geographically, traced a route toward blackness and home, which he found in Chicago. From the other side, less frequent but still noticeable, came the question of whether he was black enough. He had no slaves in his heritage and had never fully experienced the African American condition until well into adulthood, some blacks argued, so what did he know?

His memoir, Dreams from My Father, confronts those and other questions about race. It is much more about race than about his father, a man he barely knew. I consider it an unusually insightful work in many respects, especially as an examination of his internal struggle. In that sense it is quite unlike the average book by a politician, or future politician, which is more likely to avoid self-analysis. But it is important to say that it falls into the realm of literature and memoir, not history and autobiography, and should not be read as a rigorously factual account. In his introduction, Obama states that for the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people I’ve known, and some events appear out of precise chronology. There is more to it than that. The character creations and rearrangements of the book are not merely a matter of style; they are devices of compression but also of substance. The themes of the book control character and chronology. Time and again, the narrative accentuates characters drawn from black acquaintances who played lesser roles in his real life but could be used to advance a line of thought, while leaving out or distorting the actions of friends who happened to be white. Sometimes the composites are even more complex; there are a few instances where black figures in the book have characteristics and histories that Obama took from white friends. The racial scene in his family history that is most familiar to the public, the time when he overheard his grandparents in Hawaii argue because his grandmother was afraid of a black man down at the bus stop, also happens to be among those he pulled out of its real chronology and fitted into a place where it might have more literary resonance. Like many other riffs in the book, it explored the parameters and frustrations of his blackness.

Without dismissing the anger and confusion that he surely felt as he tried to sort out his identity, I would argue that to view him primarily through a racial lens can lead to a misinterpretation of the root causes of his feelings of outsiderness and a misunderstanding of his responses to it. In any case, the point of my book is not to keep a scorecard recording the differences between the memoir and the way things were remembered by others; that would distort the meaning and intent of his book, and of mine. But I do not hesitate to explain those discrepancies when they occur.

Throughout the first four years of his presidency, and as he prepared to be sworn in for a second term, some people considered Obama as much of a mystery as when he first took office. This seemed especially true for those who supported him and wanted him to succeed but were frustrated by his performance at various points. It is always dangerous for a biographer to deal in the present. The present is transitory and mutable. What could seem relevant today fades into irrelevance tomorrow. But there are certain tendencies and recurring themes from Obama’s history that help explain his presidency. When I wrote a biography of Bill Clinton, one central theme that emerged from my study of his past was a repetitive cycle of loss and recovery. Whenever Clinton was on top, one could see the seeds of his own undoing, and whenever he was down, one could see that he would find a way to recover. Again and again, here was a pattern in his life that played out in his presidency. With Obama, a comparable recurring theme has to do with his determination to avoid life’s traps. First he escaped the trap of his unusual family biography, with the challenges it presented in terms of stability and psychology. Then the trap of geography, being born and spending most of his childhood in Hawaii, farther from any continental landmass than anywhere in the world except Easter Island, along with four formative years on the other side of the world, in Indonesia. And finally the trap of race in America, with its likelihood of rejection and cynicism.

The totality of the effort it took to get around these traps shaped his personality. It helped explain his caution, his tendency to hold back and survey life like a chessboard, looking for where he could get checkmated, analyzing the moves two and three steps ahead. There were times when this approach made him appear distant, slow, reluctant to decide, and out of the zeitgeist. Sometimes that perception was accurate, sometimes not. He could be behind the curve, or ahead of the curve, but with the notable exception of his two presidential campaigns, rarely right at the curve. But wherever he was, it helps to keep in mind the patterns of his caution and the reasons for it. As he worked his way through the traumas and troubles of his young life, he developed what one close friend called a perfectionist’s drive for unity—within self and within community. It burned inside, underneath his cool exterior, and was another reason why he would have so much trouble with confrontation. To confront was to acknowledge division, rupturing, imperfection, the traps of life he so wanted to transcend. One of the ideas he became obsessed with as he reached adulthood was the notion of choice—how much choice he really had in determining his own future and how much was already shaped for him by his history and family. He worried about the narrow choices being made all around him, and concluded that the only path he could follow, the only choice he had, was to embrace it all—meaning a philosophy that was large enough to take in life in all of its colors and contradictions. That is not to say that he disparaged the role and meaning of struggle—his entire early life was a struggle, inside and out—but that he was always trying to look past that, to resolution.

It is instructive here to compare his rise with the ascent of Bill Clinton, another president I have studied. They both came out of remote places far from the centers of power (Hawaii and southwest Arkansas); they both grew up without fathers and with alcoholism and other dysfunction in their family; and they dealt with these factors in diametrically different ways.

Clinton’s method was to plow forward no matter what, to wake up every morning and forgive himself and the world. He did not address and resolve the broken parts of his life, but rushed past them. He reinvented himself when he needed to and developed a preternatural ability to survive. These skills got him to the White House and got him in trouble in the White House—and out of trouble in the White House. Obama, on the other hand, spent nine years of his early adulthood, from the time he left Honolulu for college to the time he left Chicago for the first time to attend Harvard Law School, intensely trying to resolve the contradictions life threw his way—racially, culturally, sociologically, professionally—and came out of that introspective process with what could be called an integrated personality. That quality helped direct him to the White House, then in its own way caused him trouble in the White House. He was not naive so much as overconfident and not fully prepared for the level of polarization he would confront. If he could resolve the contradictions of his own life, why couldn’t the rest of the world? Why couldn’t Congress?

There is a chapter in this book about his college years that I titled The Moviegoer, a notion drawn from the Walker Percy novel of that name in which the main character is one step removed from his life and unable to live in the moment. That was young Obama, through and through. He was the son of an anthropologist, with an anthropologist’s mind-set as a participant observer, sitting on the edge of a culture and learning it well enough to understand it from the inside, yet never feeling fully part of it. He was at the same time a double outsider, both as a biracial kid and a cross-cultural kid, living in a foreign country, often on the move, tending toward contradictory feelings of inclusiveness and rootlessness. If he had not gone into politics, he would have been a writer, and he still holds onto much of that sensibility. He stands not alone but apart, with the self-awareness of a skeptical witness to everything around him, including his own career. These are unlikely characteristics for a successful politician, the seeming antithesis of what it takes to rise in a world of emotion and visceral power, yet Obama holds that contradiction in subtle balance with his uncommon will and overriding sense of purpose.

When examining a subject’s ancestry and early life it is important to draw a distinction between revelation and responsibility. No one wants to be judged or held responsible as an adult for how they behaved in their youth, or for how their relatives behaved. That should be neither the function nor the intention of a biographer. But there is an important difference between laying blame and searching for clues to a life, and many important clues come in the early years. The point in any case is to explore that territory in search of understanding, not retroactive condemnation. It seems obvious, but it demands explanation in the modern American political culture, where facts are so easily twisted for political purposes and where strange armies of ideological pseudo-historians—predominantly, these days, on the irrational flank of the political right—roam the biographical fields in search of stray ammunition.

My perspective in researching and writing this book, and my broader philosophy, is shaped by a contradiction that I cannot resolve and never intend to resolve. I believe that life is chaotic, a jumble of accidents, ambitions, social forces, geography, misconceptions, bold intentions, lazy happenstances, and unintended consequences, yet I also believe that there are connections that illuminate our world, revealing its endless mystery and wonder. I find these connections in story, in history, threading together individual lives as well as disparate societies—and they were everywhere I looked in the story of Barack Obama. In that sense, I reject the idea that every detail in a book must provide a direct and obvious lesson or revelation to be praised or damned. The human condition is more ineffable than that, and it is by following the connections wherever they lead, I believe, that the story of a life takes shape and meaning.

As the paperback edition of this book went to press, Barack Obama was preparing for his second term, a period historically fraught with dangers and possibilities. Second terms often bring a new set of unexpected frustrations, and the job only becomes more difficult as the end of power draws closer and the laws of diminishing returns take hold. But history also reinforces the notion that it requires a second term to create presidential greatness, or to ratify it—and Barack Obama in that sense is not ambivalent about his ambitions. Since he first thought about being president—a notion that came relatively late to him compared with most politicians—he has wanted to be a great one.

His reelection solidified his past and opened his future. A defeat after one term would have forever changed the meaning of his being the first African American president. Regarding the integration of major league baseball, the argument used to go that Frank Robinson’s firing as the first black manager was a step toward equality as important as his hiring as the first black manager. An interesting notion, but not easily applied to the presidency, where the stakes are so much higher and the historical resonance so much deeper. Obama’s defeat would have brought more comparisons, fair or not, to the racial backsliding of Reconstruction than to professional sports. But that is separate from the way Obama himself viewed his situation. The fact that his reelection affirmed his first-term accomplishments, and especially assured the survival of his health care initiative, seemed more important to him than any racial ramifications of victory or defeat.

On November 6, 2012, election night in Chicago, a colleague came up to me in the press workspace at McCormick Place, where Obama’s supporters were gathering for the victory celebration, and asked if he could pose a sensitive question: Was I at some deep level feeling a sense of pride in what the subject of my biography had accomplished? I said that it was not a personal matter. I have no personal relationship with the president. I did not fly around with him on Air Force One and play basketball with him and ask him what the tricks were to being president. I just studied his life and tried to figure him out, for better or worse. And in that sense, I felt a sense of pride for him. I could see the uncommon arc of his life, the distance he had traveled, all the contradictions he had tried to resolve, what had burned inside him, and how far he had come.

CHAPTER 1

IN SEARCH OF EL DORADO

On Thanksgiving morning in 1926, the Dunhams set out from their home in Topeka, traveling south down U.S. Route 75 on a forty-five-mile ride through the autumn countryside. Five people were in the car: the parents, Ralph and Ruth Armour Dunham; their two young sons, Ralph Jr. and Stanley; and Ralph Sr.’s brother, Earl, who worked with him at an auto garage. They were on their way to the town of Melvern to spend the holiday with the Whitneys. Mabel Whitney was Ralph and Earl’s sister. The Dunham brothers and their brother-in-law, Hugh Whitney, had made plans to go hunting while the women prepared a holiday meal and the children played. The morning broke clean and bright, an Indian summer reprieve with temperatures climbing to sixty-eight degrees, the warmest in three weeks. Most Kansans had the day off and were outside enjoying the balmy weather. Ruth’s younger sister, Doris Armour, who lived in El Dorado with their parents, rode up to Emporia with two friends to attend a football game between the College of Emporia and her old school, Kansas State Teachers College, one of dozens of college and high school football rivalries scheduled around the state that afternoon.

Ruth might have preferred going to Emporia with her sister. She and Ralph were quarreling again, a common occurrence. Only twenty-six, she had been married for eleven years already, since she was fifteen, when she had dropped out of high school in the second month of her junior year. The wedding, held at nine at night at her sister-in-law’s house in Wichita, had been a tightly held secret, with friends and parents kept in the dark until a week later, according to a belated announcement in the Wichita Eagle. Married life had been difficult from the start, as Ruth endured the serial philandering of her husband, who was seven years older. Their latest argument ended that afternoon, when Ralph departed with his hunting party. Ruth, distraught, waited until he was gone, then left for home, leaving her boys with Mabel and the other children.

Sometime that evening, back in Topeka, she emerged from their house at 703 Buchanan and walked in the darkness two blocks toward Sixth Avenue. Seasons had changed at sundown, from summery day to wintry night. There was a lashing wind and the temperature was in free fall, plummeting to an overnight low of twenty-four. Most of the shops along the avenue—Fritton Grocery, Golden Gate Coffee Shop, Home Bakery and Lunch—were closed, but lights were on at the Lawrence Drug Store next to the Palace Garage, Ralph’s place. The pharmacist, George W. Lawrence, was working inside. Ruth entered and told Lawrence that a dog had been hit by a car and she needed something to put the poor critter out of its misery. Lawrence, amenable to the idea, suggested chloroform. Ruth said that would not do; the smell of chloroform made her sick. She asked for strychnine, and Lawrence relented, selling her ten grams. For whatever pain the dog was in, Ruth seemed in no hurry. Lawrence later recalled that she lingered in the pharmacy and talked to him for several minutes seemingly in the best of spirits, joking and visiting.

After leaving, Ruth went next door to her husband’s office and sat at his desk. One call from the Palace Garage, telephone exchange 2-7312, was placed that night, a twenty-five-cent evening call to El Dorado. Ruth had phoned her parents, Harry and Gabriella Armour, who had not seen her since late October, when she came home for the weekend of the Kafir Corn Carnival. Harry Armour had been laid up at St. Luke’s Hospital; he had fallen off a tank ladder in the oil field and broken a shoulder bone. But the accident did not stop the family from luxuriating in the news that Doris, a former Pi Kappa Sigma sweetheart described as a genuinely beautiful girl with dark brown bobbed hair, brown eyes, and a delicate coloring that is entirely natural, had been elected Miss El Dorado for the carnival. Six years younger than her sister, Doris was the jewel of the family: a popular beauty queen, smart and fun-loving, with a year of college education and a secure job in town. Ruth, by contrast, though equally attractive and intelligent, was a high school dropout in a difficult marriage. In the call to her parents that night from the Palace Garage she apparently did not discuss her troubles, but presented herself as being in the best of health.

Two people saw her after that phone call. The first was W. E. Briggs, who owned an auto paint shop in the same building as the garage and lived nearby. Briggs later remembered that at ten-thirty, as he put away his car, he caught sight of Mrs. Dunham sitting at Ralph’s desk, writing something. He presumed that she was waiting for her husband. About half an hour later, George Lawrence, the pharmacist, who also kept his car in the tin-ceilinged garage, noticed the same sight: Ruth sitting at her husband’s desk.

In Melvern the men returned from their hunt after dark. When Mabel told Ralph that his wife was long gone, he and Earl left for Topeka to find her. No one was home when they reached 703 Buchanan. Ralph started a search with Earl. Eventually, shortly before two in the morning, Ralph stopped at his garage, where he intended to make another call back to Melvern. As he entered his office, he saw Ruth lying on the floor behind the desk.

Here she is! he called out to his brother. She’s asleep.

As they moved closer, they could see that she was not breathing. She was taken by ambulance to nearby St. Francis Hospital, but was already dead. The county coroner, Dr. Herbert L. Clark, began an investigation, interviewing the Dunham brothers along with the pharmacist and the auto paint shop owner, and determined that she had killed herself, dying of strychnine poisoning. By the time her husband found her she had been dead no more than two hours. The letter that Briggs saw her writing at the desk hours earlier was a suicide note. In it, according to the coroner, Mrs. Dunham declared that the reason for her act was that her husband no longer loved her.

The staggering news of Ruth’s death reached El Dorado a few hours later. Doris was home from the football outing to Emporia, and she and her parents drove up to Topeka in the early morning of Friday, November 26. Whether they were told the circumstances of the death when they reached the capital is unclear. Most likely they knew. An enterprising reporter at the Topeka State Journal, with nothing juicier to pursue during a placid holiday stretch—only one arrest in the police logs since Tuesday night—had already found the coroner and pieced together parts of the story, which would appear in the newspaper that afternoon. It was not as though suicides were unmentionable in the Kansas culture of that era. That same week, C. J. (Pat) Kroh of Oil Hill, a druggist who had talked about opening a cigar and confectionery store at the Philips Petroleum camp in Borger, Texas, chose instead to die by his own hand, according to an obituary in the El Dorado Times, poisoning himself with carbolic acid: Each heart knoweth its own sorrow, so poor Pat took a shortcut out of it all.

But in dealing with newspapers in their home turf, 140 miles from Ruth’s death scene in Topeka, the Armours and family friends felt compelled to conceal the suicide and concoct a more benign version of the tragedy. Doris sent a telegram to the El Dorado Times claiming the cause of death was food poisoning. A similar account was presented to the Wichita Eagle by Ruth’s close friend there, Mrs. Roy Reeves. Under the headline Former Wichita Woman Ptomaine Poison Victim, the account noted that Mrs. Dunham had been feeling well up to a late hour Thursday night, and it is believed that food eaten at Thanksgiving dinner was responsible for her death.

The mythology surrounding Ruth’s passing began then and there. It would take on another variation later, when retold by her younger son, Stanley, the grandfather of a future president. He would get the essence of the story correct, calling it a suicide, but then place himself at the dramatic center, claiming he had discovered her body. He told this story later to his wife and daughter and then to his grandchildren and anyone else who would listen, and though most knew he was a teller of tales, this particular tale was accepted, often as a psychological explanation for his later rebellions and peculiarities. But the boy was not at the Palace Garage at two in the morning when Ruth’s body was discovered. Stanley, said Ralph Dunham Jr., his older brother, "did not find my mother dead."

From the distance of eight decades, Ralph Jr., who was ten at the time of the suicide, remembered an unseasonably warm day, a picnic (in Melvern), the boys playing with other kids. He recalled the sudden, surprise arrival of his grandparents from El Dorado. And there was one other shard of memory, the sort that can be trusted because of its odd specificity. Ralph Jr. and his eight-year-old brother, Stanley, had read books about Uncle Wiggily, the lame old rabbit with the striped barber-pole cane, and his cast of creature friends and enemies, the Skeezicks, Bushy Bear, Woozy Wolf, Jimmie Wibblewobble, and Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy. Milton Bradley had issued a board game based on the Uncle Wiggily stories, and the Dunham sons coveted it. Soon after the grandparents arrived from El Dorado, they gave the boys some money and sent them to the drugstore to buy the game. It was while playing Uncle Wiggily, as Ralph Jr. remembered it, that he and Stanley were told their mother was dead.

The house where the boys learned of their mother’s death was in the oldest section of Topeka, where numbered streets were intersected by side streets named for presidents of the United States. The next block over was Lincoln. One block up Buchanan stood the governor’s mansion, a twenty-room brick bulwark with striped awnings, gingerbread trim, and fanciful turrets that accommodated Governor Benjamin Paulen and his wife, along with a cook, chauffeur, and private secretary. Despite their proximity to power, the Dunhams dwelled at the other end of the social order. Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham was the full name of the father, a literary appellation passed down from his father, a Wichita pharmacist and graduate of the University of Kansas who considered himself a Middle American disciple of the New England transcendentalist poet. This latest Ralph Waldo never thought much of his name, never went to college, never read Emerson, and pursued less elegiac lines of work. He had managed the Little Traveler Café next to the central fire station in Wichita, then was a mechanic for several years at the Oakland auto dealership in El Dorado before relocating again to Topeka, where he repaired cars at the garage on Sixth Avenue. Their house on Buchanan was plain and wooden, dirty white slats on a narrow slab, ten yards wide as it faced the street. The most recent census noted that the coal furnace needed repair. The neighbors to one side were the Wilkersons, a truck driver and his wife, and to the other side the widowed sisters Mrs. Waters and Mrs. Embry. The landlord was a local plumber. This was eighty-two years before a great-grandson of Ruth and Ralph joined Buchanan and Lincoln in the line of presidents. This was how it began, with an ending.

The funeral was held that Sunday at the First Baptist Church on Central Avenue in downtown El Dorado. Services were conducted by the minister from West Side Baptist in Wichita who had married Ruth and Ralph eleven years earlier.

Twenty-six years—a life cut short in every respect. When she was a child Ruth thought she would grow up to be a schoolteacher, as her parents had been when they were young adults. She played the role of teacher even before she went off to first grade. Classroom discipline in that era began with the barked order Position! At the command the students were to sit upright at their desks, mouths shut, hands folded in front of them. As a toddler, Ruth would call for order with the shout Pa-dish-shun! She was smart enough to skip a grade, but an early marriage and teenage motherhood ended her education before high school. Her boys remembered running into the house, where their mother held out a clenched fist to the first one to reach her. When he tapped it she would open it to reveal the gift of a Life Saver candy. She would then hide her other fist behind her back until the second boy circled around her waist and tapped the fist, which opened to another candy prize.

Four churchwomen, members of the Sunday school class Ruth had attended when she lived in El Dorado with her young family, sang Abide with Me and Beautiful Isle of Somewhere. Somewhere the heart is stronger; somewhere the prize is won.

The boys never went back to the small white house on Buchanan Street in Topeka. Their father lost his garage, moved to Wichita, tried the drugstore business, and lived with one woman, then married another (Martha Mae Stonehouse in 1932, when she was twenty-two and he was thirty-five). The end of the first of those later relationships also came during a hunting trip, though the disintegration this time seemed more farce than tragedy, as his son Ralph Jr. later recalled: He went away on a hunting trip one weekend, and when he came back, the woman had taken up with some other fella and they had backed up to the drugstore while everyone was away and packed up everything into the truck and moved off, and that was the end of the drugstore. By then Stanley and Ralph Jr. were out of their father’s life, mostly. From the time of their mother’s death through the rest of their school days, they lived with their maternal grandparents in El Dorado, setting a generational pattern that would be repeated a half century later.

In Section 5 of the Sunset Lawns South Cemetery, on the edge of El Dorado, across the street from an old oil refinery, stands a simple red granite gravestone that reads:

RUTH ARMOUR

DUNHAM

1900–1926

It is a lonesome plot surrounded by parched grass, with no other markers within fifteen yards. Her relatives are buried elsewhere, and her descendants live far away.

El dorado is Spanish for the golden one, or the gilded one. By most accounts, the long version was El Hombre Dorado, and the original myth was of a tribe so opulent that the chief hombre was painted in gold. The phrase grew shorter, the myth longer. The legend of el dorado began in South America, but the yearning for it is universal: to find that magical place of gold. El dorado is out there, somewhere. John Milton depicted El Dorado in book 9 of Paradise Lost as the mythical land of fabulous wealth. In Voltaire’s Candide, El Dorado is the paradise of happiness. Edgar Allan Poe wrote Gaily bedight a Gallant knight, / In sunshine and in shadow / Had journeyed long, singing a song / In search of El Dorado. Poe’s gallant knight never could find that elusive place that lay o’er the mountains of the moon. Nor could the conquistadors who went searching throughout the Americas. Francisco Vásquez de Coronado ventured out from Mexico in search of the Seven Cities of Gold in 1540, following one false lead after another as native peoples toyed with his grandiose imaginings. He pushed his expedition of Spaniards, Mexicans, and African slaves through what would become Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma before ending up in the middle of Kansas, where, instead of a golden city high on a hill, he found some naked Indians.

More than three centuries later, in 1857, a party of Scots-Irish settlers traveled from Lawrence south and west across the Flint Hills of Kansas, moving through a sea of big bluestem and Indian grass. When they reached the crest of a hill above the Walnut River, the soft valley below seemed gilded in a sunset glow. The captain of the party gazed down at the sweetly winding river, with stone bluffs shimmering in gold and scarlet, and was moved to shout El Dorado! So goes the founding story of the town where Ruth Armour Dunham was buried, the town to which her young sons, Stanley and Ralph Jr., moved at the end of 1926.

El Dorado, Kansas. The locals pronounce it to rhyme with Laredo, el da-RAY-dough. Thirty miles east-northeast of Wichita, El Dorado is the county seat of Butler County, a rectangular jurisdiction that at 1,440 square miles is the largest county in Kansas. When the Dunham boys arrived, the county was booming again, which meant that oil was booming, with the longest unbroken stretch of rising petroleum prices in the 1920s. The Flint Hills had been the domain of cattle ranches and kafir corn farms until oil was discovered in 1915. On October 16 of that year, the season when young Ruth Armour Dunham married and dropped out of school, drillers for Wichita Natural Gas Co. hit pay dirt in an anticline 549 feet belowground on the property of John Stapleton. It was one of the first times the company had employed precise geology rather than scents, hunches, and luck to divine their spot. And here it was, a few miles outside the El Dorado town limits—black gold, the real el dorado.

Along with the gusher at Stapleton No. 1 came the sudden spasms of an oil frenzy. Roustabouts, wildcatters, pipe fitters, lumbermen, teamsters, preachers, prostitutes, surveyors, carpenters, organizers, political rabble-rousers, gamblers, restaurateurs, scofflaws, hired guns—the full traveling cast of American searchers came clamoring down to Butler County looking for action. The population of El Dorado grew by half to more than five thousand in that first year, on its way to more than ten thousand, and smaller company oil towns littered the surrounding countryside: Midian, Oil Hill, Browntown, Millerville, Haskin’s Camp, Haverhill. Refineries were constructed in El Dorado and Augusta, the county’s second-largest town, twelve miles south, to process the petroleum into gasoline. Pipelines were laid to carry the gas away, and more wells went into operation every week in every direction, more than six hundred in all, producing twenty-three million barrels of oil a year.

The backstreets of El Dorado and Augusta erupted with boardinghouses where men slept in shifts, one bed serving two or three men consecutively during a twenty-four-hour cycle. A single boardinghouse prepared dinners for two hundred men a day: white bread, boiled beef, potatoes, canned corn, sliced tomatoes, celery, boiled cabbage, ice tea, rice pudding—all for forty cents. The few boarders who found space in the rooming house of Mrs. Vincent Brown were perhaps the luckiest; she baked nine pies a day, her crust considered the flakiest in Butler County. Some stores stayed open around the clock seven days a week. It was said, with a touch of hyperbole, that crowds were so dense at midnight it was difficult to make one’s way down the sidewalks of Central Avenue in El Dorado or State Street in Augusta. Oil Hill and Midian, the two largest made-from-scratch boomtowns, morphed into full-blown communities replete with schools, golf courses, churches, general stores, swimming pools, and row after row of shotgun houses (three rooms and an outhouse). The towns and oil companies sponsored semipro baseball teams, attracting players from all over, including an outfielder named Charles D. (Casey) Stengel, a Kansas City native who hired himself out after one major-league season to play in a series between rivals Oil Hill and Midian. (In the seventh game, mighty Casey struck out, according to one report, getting nothing more than a loud foul ball.) During the heat of the First World War, the El Dorado oil field was the most productive in the nation, considered essential to the war effort by military planners in Washington.

Harry Ellington Armour and Gabriella Clark Armour had been among the searchers who found their way to El Dorado during the oil boom. Harry was born in Illinois, but he and Gabriella had both grown up in the towns of La Grange and Canton in northeastern Missouri and had acquired enough education—short of college degrees, but sufficient—to teach elementary grades in rural schoolhouses where classrooms were lit by oil lamps and teachers were also janitors. Gabriella, who disliked her nickname (GAY-be), was a tall woman, about five-eight, and came from a line of taller men. Harry, who was about the same height as his wife, with black hair and blue eyes, was known to his grandsons as Streetcar Papa. He loved to talk about streetcars and show the boys photographs of the few years he had lived up north and worked on the streetcars in Rock Island and Moline, Illinois. He was also proud to have been a member of a literary society, and was especially proficient in math, an attribute that served him well when he found employment in the oil fields for the Magnolia Petroleum Company, a Texas-based outfit eventually swallowed up by Standard Oil. Though census documents listed Armour as a roustabout and pumper, he was more valuable for his brains than his brawn. If the bosses needed to know how many gallons of oil were in a storage tank, they turned to Harry. He developed a chart for each cylindrical tank (they were of various depths and widths) that listed how many gallons the tank held and how to calculate the volume on hand and the amount that could be added to top it off. In his off-duty hours, he found relaxation by working out mathematical puzzles published in the back pages of magazines and newspapers.

When the Dunham sons were taken in, Streetcar Papa and Mama Armour lived at 402 North Washington Street near the corner with Third, only a few blocks from the center of El Dorado. Money was tight, and to help the grandparents take care of the boys, their father, Ralph Dunham Sr., who was still their official guardian, took out a $2,500 loan from the Railroad Building Loan and Savings Association in nearby Newton. As collateral he used the mortgage on a parcel of land in El Dorado’s Cooper Park that had been owned by his late wife and had been passed along to Stanley and Ralph Jr. when her will was probated. The town was not alien to the boys. They had been born in Wichita but lived with their parents in El Dorado for about four years at the start of the 1920s, first at the Opperman apartments next to the railroad station and later at an old house at 321 North Emporia that was owned by their grandfather. They had friends in El Dorado and knew the characters on Main Street and Central Avenue and the shortcuts through neighborhoods.

The boys were motherless, but lived in a home with two women: their grandmother, then forty-nine, and Aunt Doris, twenty. The twelve-year and ten-year age difference between Doris and the boys was close enough for them to be treated as siblings in many large midwestern families, but though Doris was close to them her whirlwind life allowed her little time to assume the watchful duties of an older sister. Like her father, Doris brought home a paycheck from the oil industry, working full-time as personal secretary to Dow Williams, an executive at the local offices of Skelly Oil. And she was among the most promising young women in town. As much as Ruth’s death cast a sorrowful shadow over the family, a gleam of light still shone from Doris’s stature as Miss El Dorado, one of the reigning elite of the 1926 Kafir Corn Carnival.

Oil ruled the economy, but kafir corn, and the carnival celebrating it, delineated the local culture. Far more than a county fair, more than a rite of autumn harvest, the Kafir Corn Carnival was the paramount event on the social calendar in El Dorado and all of Butler County. Observed for three days in October, the carnival engaged the entire populace, from farmers and ranchers to bankers and shopkeepers to teachers and schoolchildren, all of whom willingly suspended disbelief to partake in an elaborate fantasia with its own peculiar customs and lexicon, entering a faraway land in which kafir was king and a brotherhood of businessmen wearing orange fezzes with black tassels walked around saying they were symbolic travelers to the exotic city of Bulawayo.

The inspiration for all this, kafir corn, technically was not corn at all, though close enough. It was a member of the sorghum family that served the same function as feed corn for cattle but was even hardier, able to survive the driest summer. Unlike maize, it was not an indigenous plant but an immigrant to America, first arriving at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876 and brought down a decade later to Butler County, where it became a staple for cattle ranchers. The crop came from what was then known as Southern Rhodesia, a product of Africa joining a bit of Kansas for the first time in this chronicle, though not the last. The very name kafir, also spelled kaffir, reflected the racial insensitivity of that era. A kafir is what some white colonialists called a black African. It had a derisive connotation, equivalent to nigger in America. Kafir corn, cheap and tough, was at the bottom of the agricultural chain, a crop that black African subsistence farmers were allowed to grow on their little plots.

To the citizens of Butler County, kafir corn was a cash crop, a boon to the economy. The lone human connection they had to the African prologue was a black orphan who had been brought from Southern Rhodesia by a kafir corn farmer after a visit there. They called him Kafir Boy, and for several years he was the carnival’s mascot, an exotic creature put out in front of the parade dressed in a loincloth and carrying a spear. The stereotype of Kafir Boy meshed with the carnival’s pseudo-African mythology. Civic organizers had formed a fraternity known as the Knights of Mapira in which initiates, referred to as Wakupolata, were to carry stalks of Mapira (another name for kafir corn) that would light the way and warn the Great Lomagundi of their approach. Like members of most fraternal organizations, they had secrets to keep, odd hats to wear, and oaths of loyalty to swear for the cause. Approaching under a lighted Triumphal Arch at the main intersection downtown, carnival-goers entered the mythical world of Kafirville, where booths, floats, storefronts, and entire houses along Central Avenue were intricately decorated in the reds, browns, yellows, and whites of kafir corn.

In the royalty of Kafirville, there were two leading ladies. One, the queen of the Kafir Corn Carnival, was chosen from among young women in Butler County’s twenty-eight communities outside El Dorado. For residents of the host city itself, there was Miss El Dorado. To be elected Kafir Corn Carnival queen offered the promise of something more alluring than local fame; it was a possible ticket out of rural Kansas. Thelma Marsh, the queen