II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 51the public domain, these are quite simply Obama’s lost years. Dreams from My Father, as we have
seen, is a book prodigal with details about Obama’s drug use — a question that may have a serious
potential to damage his political career. By contrast Obama’s attendance at Columbia University, a
member of the prestigious Ivy League, ought to be a selling point and indeed a point of honor for
our candidate. Instead, any attempts to establish the relevant facts about Obama’s years at Columbia
runs up against a brick wall of silence, evasion, and prevarication. The result is a gaping hole in
Obama’s autobiographical narrative, a serious lacuna precisely where this inveterate showboater
would normally be showcasing his academic achievements. It is in part one, chapter 6 of Dreams
that Obama covers up these years at Columbia. There is almost nothing about his activity as a
student, or about his mental life. The Associated Press ran up against the same wall: “The Obama
campaign declined to discuss Obama’s time at Columbia and his friendships in general. It won’t, for
example, release his transcript or name his friends. It did, however, list five locations where Obama
lived during his four years here: three on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and two in Brooklyn — one
in Park Slope, the other in Brooklyn Heights. His memoir mentions two others on Manhattan’s
Upper East Side.” (Adam Goldman and Robert Tanner, “Old friends recall Obama’s years in LA,
NY,” AP via Newsday, May 15, 2008)
The biographical surveys of Obama published by the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune
are equally incapable of providing any details about Obama’s time on the Columbia campus. As
Janny Scott of the New York Times reported, ‘Senator Obama, an Illinois Democrat now seeking
the presidency, suggests in his book that his years in New York were a pivotal period: He ran three
miles a day, buckled down to work and “stopped getting high,” which he says he had started doing
in high school. Yet he declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his
Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from
those years. “He doesn’t remember the names of a lot of people in his life,” said Ben LaBolt, a
campaign spokesman. Mr. Obama has, of course, done plenty of remembering. His 1995 memoir,
Dreams from My Father, weighs in at more than 450 pages. But he also exercised his writer’s
prerogative to decide what to include or leave out. Now, as he presents himself to voters, a look at
his years in New York — other people’s accounts and his own — suggests not only what he was
like back then but how he chooses to be seen now.’ Why so secretive when he could be
showboating, according to his preferred custom? Or, are we dealing with some form of mental
impairment?
In an article by the insufferable British snob and Obama partisan Richard Wolffe (know to the
few viewers of the Olberman propaganda show, Newsweek magazine attempted to convinced its
readers that Obama is some kind of Christian. This required grotesque contortions, which need not
concern us here. Wolffe reflects the same cone of silence encountered by other researchers into
Obama’s lost years at Columbia, about which he reports virtually no facts and few lies: Obama,
alleges Wolffe, ‘enrolled at Columbia in part to get far away from his past; he'd gone to high school
in Hawaii and had just spent two years "enjoying myself," as he puts it, at Occidental College in
Los Angeles. In New York City, "I lived an ascetic existence," Obama told Newsweek in an
interview on his campaign plane last week. "I did a lot of spiritual exploration. I withdrew from the
world in a fairly deliberate way." He fasted. Often, he'd go days without speaking to another person.
For company, he had books. There was Saint Augustine, the fourth-century North African bishop
who wrote the West's first spiritual memoir and built the theological foundations of the Christian
Church. There was Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th-century German philosopher and father of
existentialism. There was Graham Greene, the Roman Catholic Englishman whose short novels are
full of compromise, ambivalence and pain. Obama meditated on these men and argued with them in