US Beltway-watchers have been buzzing over a long conversation in Tablet between David Samuels and David Garrow, author of a biography of Barack Obama called Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.
Garrow, a prize-winning civil rights historian who specialises in excavating details overlooked by others, became a pariah on the left with his previous book about Martin Luther King in which he revealed from FBI wiretaps evidence of King’s drinking and womanising.
In Rising Star, Garrow effectively took apart Obama’s autobiography, Dreams From My Father. Garrow interviewed a number of people to whom Obama had referred or whom he had quoted. These interviewees gave Garrow a radically different account from the one that Obama had written, leading Garrow to conclude that Obama’s narrative couldn’t be true.
The most explosive claims in Rising Star were made by Obama’s former live-in girlfriend in the 1980s, Sheila Miyoshi Jager. In Obama’s own book, he described a major row with a girlfriend (who was a composite of various girlfriends) after they had seen a play. He depicted the row as pitting his own black consciousness against the girlfriend’s white liberal universalism — for him, the defining existential struggle.
But Garrow tracked down Jager, who told him that the row that ended their relationship — he twice asked her to marry him, but was turned down — was not about Obama’s black consciousness but his refusal to condemn black antisemitism.
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