30 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographyincluded the massacre of several hundred thousand Indonesian communists, leftists, and supporters
of Sukarno. In 1967, when Soetero’s Indonesian passport was revoked because of political unrest in
Indonesia, Ann Dunham and Barack, who was then in first grade, accompanied him back to Jakarta.
It appears that Lolo Soetero was called back to Indonesia because as a student he was automatically
considered a politically unreliable supporter of the now ousted Sukarno regime. As soon as he
returned to Indonesia, Soetero was interrogated by the authorities and then was drafted into the
Indonesian army, spending at least a year in military service in New Guinea. Obama lived with his
mother and stepfather in Jakarta between 1968 and 1973. Obama attended local schools in Jakarta
from ages 6 to 10, where classes were taught in Indonesian. When he was in third grade he wrote an
essay saying that he wanted to become president, although he was not sure of what country.
ANN DUNHAM: RAGE AGAINST THE UGLY AMERICAN
During the time that Lolo was employed in the government relations office of an American oil
company, Ann was massively exposed to The Ugly American. Obama tells us: “sometimes I would
overhear him and my mother arguing in their bedroom, usually about her refusal to attend his
company dinner parties, where American businessmen from Texas and Louisiana would slap Lolo’s
back and boast about the palms they had greased to obtain the new offshore drilling rights, while
their wives would complain to my mother about the quality of the Indonesian help. He would ask
her how it would look for him to go alone, and remind her that these were her own people, and my
mother’s voice would rise to almost a shout. They are not my people.” Obama describes his mother
during this phase: “in a land where fatalism remained a necessary tool for enduring hardship, where
ultimate truths were kept separate from day-to-day realities, she was a lonely witness for secular
humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.” (Dreams 47, 50)
SENIOR AND LOLO: FAITHFUL TO JOHNNY WALKER, NOT THE KORAN
The two third-world men Ann Dunham had chosen to marry had a few things in common: both
were nominal Moslems whose devotion to Johnny Walter Black Label scotch whiskey was greater
than their devotion to the Koran. Her marriage to Lolo Soetero also ended in divorce, but she
remained in Indonesia until her life was almost over; she died in 1995. One witness to Ann
Dunham’s life during these years was one of her later professors; this was “Alice Dewey, a
granddaughter of the philosopher John Dewey and an emeritus professor of anthropology at the
University of Hawaii, who was the chairman of Ann Dunham’s Ph.D. thesis committee and became
a close friend over many years.” Alice Dewey told a reporter that ‘Dunham “divorced happily”
from Soetero—who died in 1987 of complications from a liver ailment—in part because “he
gradually became more and more like a Westerner and she became more and more like a Javanese.”
Obama told me he could only laugh at the false press accounts that portray Soetero as some kind of
radical Muslim who had sent him to an Islamic school. “I mean, you know, his big thing was
Johnny Walker Black, Andy Williams records,” Obama said. “I still remember ‘Moon River.’ He’d
be playing it, sipping, and playing tennis at the country club. That was his whole thing. I think their
expectations diverged fairly rapidly.” (Purdum, Vanity Fair, March 2008) Ann Dunham, we see,
had gone native in Indonesia. The commonality between the two men she married was Islam
according to some, but the deeper commonality would appear to have been Johnny Walker, in
which they both indulged heavily.
After Ann Dunham’s divorce from Lolo Soetero, she went back to live in Hawaii, where she
began the graduate study of anthropology. But she then returned to Indonesia to carry out her