Vanity Fair: "Young Barack Obama in Love: A Girlfriend's Secret Diary (Facinating)

[KoKo]

Last edited Wed May 30, 2012, 07:18 PM - Edit history (1)

"This is a Long Read...so, maybe good for Weekend...but fascinating insight into Obama's long relationship with Genvieve Cook and her journals about her relationship with our now President of the USA. It's very personal and I think so private that it sometimes seems "too intimate" between them. I would have hoped this could have waited unti after Obama's second term to be put into the Presidential Archives...but then...I'm old school about Privacy. It's still a good read into Obama from his early years that's not been so much seen except from the books he wrote himself. It's a very touching account with his early relationship with the Swarthmore Gal...who looked so much like his Own Mother ...Ann Dunham that it's uncanny.)

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Becoming Obama

When Barack Obama met Genevieve Cook in 1983 at a Christmas party in New York’s East Village, it was the start of his most serious romance yet. But as the 22-year-old Columbia grad began to shape his future, he was also struggling with his identity: American or international? Black or white? Drawing on conversations with both Cook and the president, David Maraniss, in an adaptation from his new Obama biography, has the untold story of the couple’s time together.

Related: David Maraniss discusses his biography of President Barack Obama—and his reaction to Genevieve Cook’s diaries being used—in a VF.com Q&A.



By David Maraniss

From A.P. Images/Obama Presidential Campaign.
BREAKING AWAY Obama in New York’s Central Park while a student at Columbia University, to which he transferred as a junior in 1981. Six months after graduation he began a long romantic relationship with Genevieve, who, like him, kept a journal.

Adapted from Barack Obama: The Story, by David Maraniss, to be published this month by Simon & Schuster; © 2012 by the author.

Barack Obama transferred from Occidental College to Columbia University in 1981, his junior year. Although he left Los Angeles with enough ambitious propulsion to carry him into a more active period, he instead receded into the most existentialist stretch of his life. As he put it himself dec­ades later during an interview in the Oval Office, “I was leading a very ascetic existence, way too serious for my own good.” In most outward ways, compared with what had come before, his life in New York was a minimalist one, without the sprawling cast of characters that had surrounded him at Oxy and in Hawaii and Indonesia. He felt no attachment to Columbia or to the first jobs he landed after graduation. But it would be a misreading to say that he was tamping down his ambitions during that period. Just the opposite, in fact. If anything, his sense of destiny deepened. He was conducting an intense debate with himself over his past, pres­ent, and future, an internal struggle that he shared with only a few close friends, including his girlfriends, Alex McNear and Genevieve Cook, who kept a lasting rec­ord, one in letters, the other in her journal.

Much More...Long Read at.......

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/06/young-barack-obama-in-love-david-maraniss

Genevieve Cook (there's another photo...not this but in "VF" article that shows Cook looking much more like Ann Dunham. It's really a profound snip about that part of his life with diary of Genvieve Cook from the Wealthy Family and Obama and the intimacies of relationships of young people in that time in America.

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=&imgrefurl=http://loop21.com/life/obamas-ex-girlfriend-love-letters-genevieve-cook&h=435&w=300&sz=115&tbnid=r5K0AjOgTcpk-M:&tbnh=104&tbnw=72&prev=/search%3Fq%3DPhoto%2Bof%2BGenieve%2BCook%26tbm%3Disch%26tbo%3Du&zoom=1&q=Photo+of+Genieve+Cook&usg=__Gx3C7kkFMjPr9uR5lLtrcnlkZyA=&docid=UDt6OeibcdeyTM&sa=X&ei=NaLGT6vkDoTw0gGSzaSSCw&ved=0CFcQ9QEwBQ&dur=1092

IMAGE OF Genvieve Cook from SWARTHMORE YEAR BOOk:



LINK TO PHOTOS OF YOUNG ANN DUNHAM:

[KoKo]

1. BTW...I think this whole Article show a Positive View of our President...and how he grew..

I don't know quite what he's grown into these days...but, I thought this is the most human side of him in his "learning years" and the realtionship is really quite tender and revealing about him.

I thought it was a good read. I had trouble getting photos and stuff to work...computer problems...but, hope others will find it as interesting as I did. And, apologize for my crappy tech skills trying to get the post together with photos...the first try. Not all of us are cool tech. Just saying.



Young Ann Dunham:

[kentuck]

2. kick and rec

:kick:

[lamp_shade]

3. What a fascinating man. I read some but will bookmark to read it all later. Thanks.

[KoKo]

5. He has a remarkable life. Similar in some ways to Clinton.

in it's themes.

It's important we read and synthesize info ...as we go to the polls in November.

[KoKo]

7. Agree...and that's why I posted... It's a side of him that many can identify with and

revealingly personal. As I said in OP ...it's almost too revealing with diaries of a former lover ...and I wish it could have been held (like in the old days) until after his Presidency. But..it does reveal another side to him of those days in NYC.

I lived there then...so found these snips of his life and lover...kind of a nostaligic retro.

And, since many of us have had family problems...considering what he had to go through...I thought the photos and the article showed a conflicted young man (as was Clinton) and how he made his best of it and now is President of the USA.

I'm not saying I agree with all of his policies (indeed I differ with him on endless wars and too much pandering to Wall Street) but, this kind of "fills out" some missing pieces in his life that might explain the policies of his Adminstration...and WHO the MAN IS.

It's very tender and lovely in many ways and worth a read over the weekend...because it's a long article and needs time to read and digest.

[lamp_shade]

8. From the guardian write-up "The College Years" > >

"His classmates considered Obama "a floater", moving not only from culture to culture but also from political group to political group, dabbling, showing interest, but never staking a home. This was a natural part of college experimentation, to be sure, but in Obama's case it reflected a deeper and longer-lasting trend, one that would define his life in and out of politics: his need and ability to avoid traps. The less entrenched he was, the easier it was for him to get out of something and move on."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/25/barack-obama-the-college-years

[KoKo]

4. Photo of Young Ann Dunham....

[KoKo]

6. More from the book and Genvieve's Recollections in her Diary of the Conflicted Obama

FROM OBAMA's Recollection:



The parents were there, and they were very nice, very gracious. It was autumn, beautiful, with woods all around us, and we paddled a canoe across this round, icy lake full of small gold leaves that collected along the shore. The family knew every inch of the land. They knew how the hills had formed, how the glacial drifts had created the lake, the names of the earliest white settlers—their ancestors—and before that, the names of the Indians who’d once hunted the land. The house was very old, her grandfather’s house. He had inherited it from his grandfather. The library was filled with old books and pictures of the grandfather with famous people he had known—presidents, diplomats, industrialists. There was this tremendous gravity to the room. Standing in that room, I realized that our two worlds, my friend’s and mine, were as distant from each other as Ken­ya is from Germany. And I knew that if we stayed together I’d eventually live in hers. After all, I’d been doing it most of my life. Between the two of us, I was the one who knew how to live as an outsider.

The differences in this case between Barack’s portrayal and Genevieve’s recollections are understandable matters of perspective. It was her stepfather’s place. They rode the Bonanza bus up from New York and got off at the drugstore in Norfolk. It was indeed a beautiful autumn weekend, though colder than expected, and Obama complained about it. He did not bring warm enough clothes, so he had to borrow a woolen shirt from Genevieve. The Jessup property was 14 acres, with woods, brook, and pond. The library was exactly as he described it, cluttered with photographs and memorabilia of the grandfather’s distinguished career. The family mostly watched the evening news in there, and played charades.

From the distance of decades, in reading the memoir, what struck Genevieve most was Obama’s description of the gravity of that library, and the vast distance between their worlds, and his conviction that he alone was the one who knew how to live as an outsider. She felt as estranged from that milieu as he did, and he knew it, and over the ensuing decades it was Barack, not Genevieve, who would move closer to presidents, diplomats, and industrialists, the world of an insider. “The ironic thing,” she noted, “is he moved through the corridors of power in a far more comfortable way than I ever would have.”
“I Pushed Her Away”


That was something Obama, in his own self-assessment, deeply wanted to avoid. He said he would never keep a job just for security. In early December, after one year at Business International, he quit. He also left the apartment on 114th Street and moved in with Genevieve. It was to be a temporary arrangement until he left for Hawaii over the Christmas holidays. When he returned, he would find another place of his own, he said. Their time living together did not go well.

[KoKo]

9. A Tender side of our President that we might have missed...

:kick: