II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 39idolised for his keen sportsmanship. “He was the star basketball player and always had a ball in his
hand wherever he was,” Wysard recalled.’ (London Daily Mail, January 27, 2007)
OBAMA AS EXISTENTIALIST POET
One of Obama’s classmates and friends during this time was Keith “Ray” Kakugawa, who later
observed that “Barry’s biggest struggles then were missing his parents. His biggest struggles were
his feelings of abandonment.” Ray later went deeply into the drug culture and served three years in
prison because of illegal narcotics, emerging as homeless in the spring of 2007. A window into the
mentality of the youthful Obama is available in the form of a short poem he wrote during these
years, and which is quoted by Purdum in Vanity Fair. Purdum reports that Obama ‘immersed
himself in the writings of James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and Malcolm X, only to
find the same anguish, the same self-doubt, a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed
able to deflect,” as he did in this poem for the school literary magazine, Ka Wai Ola:
I saw an old, forgotten man
On an old, forgotten road.
Staggering and numb under the glare of the
Spotlight. His eyes, so dull and grey,
Slide from right to left, to right,
Looking for his life, misplaced in a
Shallow, muddy gutter long ago.
I am found, instead.
Seeking a hiding place, the night seals us together.
A transient spark lights his face, and in my honor,
He pulls out forgotten dignity from under his flaking coat,
And walks a straight line along the crooked world.
When I mentioned the poem to Obama, he at first had no memory of it. After I read it to him, he
said, “That’s not bad. I wrote that in high school? You know, it sounds in spirit that it’s talking a
little bit about my grandfather.”’ (Purdum, Vanity Fair, March 2008) Based on this evidence,
Obama was most likely a typical teenage existentialist, preoccupied above all with his own feeling
states, self-doubt, and pessimism. It is curious that he cannot remember a statement as personal as
this, even when shown it years later. Is Obama’s memory still intact? And if not, why not? A whole
range of possibilities, from drug abuse to early onset Alzheimer’s to simple prevarication need to be
considered.
HAWAII CPUSA CELL: FRANK MARSHALL DAVIS
During Obama’s high school years in Hawaii, he came into close contact with an older black
man whom he described in his memoir as Frank. This turns out to be one Frank Marshall Davis, a
devoted long-term member of the Communist Party of the United States. Marshall had moved to
Honolulu from Kansas in 1948; according to the pro-communist history Professor Gerald Horne of
the University of Houston, Davis made the move “at the suggestion of his good friend Paul
Robeson,” the well-known black singer and actor who was also a CPUSA member. Both Davis and
Robeson were from Chicago, and this may have something to do with Obama’s later decision to
move there. ‘As Horne describes it, Davis “befriended” a “Euro-American family” that had
“migrated to Honolulu from Kansas and a young woman from this family eventually had a child
with a young student from Kenya East Africa who goes by the name of Barack Obama, who