OC: The Summer of 1981

Paul Hollrah

On Page 118 of Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father, he tells of his arrival in New York to attend Columbia University and of the events that took place during that summer… the summer of 1981.

While still in Los Angeles, before leaving Occidental College, he’d heard of a vacant apartment on 109th Street in the Spanish Harlem section of Upper Manhattan. He arranged to sublet the apartment and he tells of dragging his luggage through the airport, through Times Square and the subways, and along 109th Street, all the way from Broadway to Amsterdam Avenue.

When he arrived at the apartment just after 10:00 pm, there was no one at home. He tells of waiting on the front stoop until well past midnight and, not having enough money to rent a room in a cheap hotel, he crawled through a hole in a fence across the street, found a garbage-strewn alley, made a pallet with his luggage, and went to sleep. He awakened the next morning with a white hen pecking at some garbage near his feet.

The only person he knew in New York was an illegal alien named Sadik, a Pakistani he’d met in Los Angeles who had overstayed his tourist visa and who supported himself by waiting tables in restaurants and bars. They met for breakfast, and when Obama explained that he was unable to get into the apartment he’d sublet, Sadik invited him to stay with him until he could work out his housing difficulties.

Obama was able to sublet another apartment, but when his utilities were turned off he learned that the people who held the lease had failed to pay the rent and had absconded with his deposit money. And since his friend, Sadik, had lost his lease as well, the two of them found an apartment and moved in together.

Obama tells us that, in the weeks following his arrival, he was like a large “lab rat” exploring the byways of Manhattan, with Sadik as his guide. Experiencing the true flavor of New York, he tells of offering his seat to a middle-aged woman on a subway, and how a burly young man beat the woman to the seat. And he tells of a stroll through Bloomingdale’s where he was impressed by the price tags on the winter coats. He wrote, “Like a tourist, I watched the range of human possibility on display, trying to trace out my future in the lives of the people I saw, looking for some opening through which I could reenter.”

Then his life took an unexpected turn. He writes, “It was in this humorless mood that my mother and sister (Maya Soetoro) found me when they came to visit during my first summer in New York,” and that, “They stayed with Sadik and me for a few nights, then moved to a condominium on Park Avenue that a friend of my mother’s had offered them while she was away.”

Obama explains, “That summer I had found a job clearing a construction site on the Upper West Side, so my mother and sister spent most of their days exploring the city on their own. When we met for dinner, they would give me a detailed report of their adventures… I would eat in silence until they were finished and then begin a long discourse on the problems of the city and the politics of the dispossessed.” He says, “I instructed my mother on the various ways that foreign donors and international development organizations like the one she was working for bred dependence in the Third World.”

It sounds as if Obama was an absolute joy to be around. The “dog-eat-dog” environment of the streets of New York must have been a welcome departure from their evenings with Obama.

But wait a minute. How can this be?

Although Obama fails to mention it in either of his memoirs… not in Dreams from My Father and not in The Audacity of Hope… he traveled to Indonesia and Pakistan during the summer of 1981. In an April 6, 2008 speech in San Francisco… the same speech in which he referred to rural Pennsylvanians as “bitter” people who “cling to guns or religion…” he explained, offhand, the value of his trip to Pakistan, vis-à-vis his knowledge of foreign affairs. He said, “I knew what Sunni and Shia was (sic) before I joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.”

When questioned about that trip, Obama’s campaign press secretary, Bill Burton, confirmed to the New York Times, and others, that Obama had visited his mother and his sister in Indonesia during the summer of 1981 and that, after leaving Indonesia, he’d spent three weeks in Pakistan, traveling with a Pakistani friend from Occidental College, Wahid Hamid. According to Burton, Obama stayed in Karachi with the family of another Pakistani friend, Mohammed Hasan Chandoo. Obama has never mentioned the Pakistan trip again.

So the question arises, which version are we to believe: the version contained in his memoir, Dreams from My Father, or the version his press secretary provided following his April 2008 speech in San Francisco? In other words, if Obama arrived in New York, say, during the first week of June, had housing problems, explored Manhattan like a “lab rat,” lived for a time with a friend, spent time with his mother and sister during their stay in New York, and worked as a laborer on a construction site on the Upper West Side, how did he find the time or the money to embark on an around-the-world trip to Indonesia and Pakistan by the middle of July?

The Los Angeles Times once referred to Obama as “the magic Negro.” Is it possible they were right, or is Obama simply challenging Bill Clinton for the title of “unusually good liar?”

By his own admission, it is now well established that Obama did travel to Indonesia and Pakistan during the summer of 1981, but that trip raises some serious questions. Aside from the question of how he went from being flat broke to financing an around-the-world trip in just four weeks, it would be interesting to know how he managed to squeeze so much into such a short period of time. But now it appears we may be one step closer to having definitive answers to part of the mystery.

Jack Cashill, a recognized authority on intellectual fraud, is the author of numerous books, including Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture, in which he details the 20th century history of American intellectual fraud.
In addition to his own exhaustive examination of Barack Obama’s memoirs, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope, which led him to believe that Obama’s terrorist friend, Bill Ayers, is in fact the principal author of Dreams from My Father, Cashill reviews a new best-seller by Christopher Andersen, the author of 28 books, including best-sellers on the Clintons; Diana, Princess of Wales; and Caroline Kennedy. The latest Andersen book to catch Cashill’s eye is titled Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage.

Writing in the October 1, 2009 edition of WorldNetDaily, Cashill tells us, “The headline of the USA Today review captures the message Andersen hoped to bring to the market, ‘A glowing Portrait’ of the Obamas' rock-solid marriage.” However, according to Cashill, Andersen then threw the reviewers an “unexpected curve.”

Cashill tells us, “In a lengthy and detailed section on the Obama’s financial struggles in the early 1990s, Andersen relates how at the urging of Michelle, a ‘hopelessly blocked’ Obama turned to ‘friend and neighbor’ Bill Ayers to help him with his much acclaimed 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.” He continues, “Andersen’s details are specific. The Obamas were convinced of ‘Ayers’s proven abilities as a writer.’ Barack particularly liked the novelistic style of To Teach, a 1993 book by Ayers. Obama hoped to use a comparable style for his own family history. The problem was that although he had taped interviews with many of his relatives, he could not find it in himself to write the book.”

According to Cashill, “The key sentence in Andersen’s account is the one that follows: ‘These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunk load of notes were given to Ayers,’ ” and, ‘Thanks to help from veteran writer Ayers, Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Books.’”

What does literary investigator Cashill conclude from all this? He says, “To a book reviewer or to a political editor, this revelation should matter hugely. Throughout the 2008 campaign, Obama insisted that he barely knew Ayers. He was just some guy in the neighborhood. Obama was lying.”

If Andersen’s account is correct, that Obama experienced a bad case of writer’s block and was unable to complete his memoir… after having spent his advance money… and that he and Michelle dumped his notes, his taped interviews, and his own partially-completed manuscript on Bill Ayers, then it is all but certain that the Dreams from My Father account of Obama’s summer of 1981 in New York is pure fiction, a product of Bill Ayers’ imagination, and that his own inadvertent admission of spending much of the summer of 1981 in Indonesia and Pakistan is the version that is “straight from the horse’s mouth.”

Whatever the truth of the matter, Obama has an obligation to set the record straight. If his first memoir is not his own work, in spite of his many claims that it is, then the American people deserve to know. They deserve to know who it is who now occupies the Oval Office. And given the destructive nature of his plans for America, the sooner we learn the truth of all this, the better.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Paul Hollrah is a Senior Fellow at the Lincoln Heritage Institute.