60 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography... after reading his autobiography, I have to say that Barack engages in some serious
exaggeration when he describes a job that he held in the mid-1980s. I know because I sat down
the hall from him, in the same department, and worked closely with his boss. I can’t say I was
particularly close to Barack – he was reserved and distant towards all of his co-workers – but I
was probably as close to him as anyone. I certainly know what he did there, and it bears only a
loose resemblance to what he wrote in his book. First, it wasn’t a consulting house; it was a
small company that published newsletters on international business. Like most newsletter
publishers, it was a bit of a sweatshop. I’m sure we all wished that we were high-priced
consultants to multinational corporations. But we also enjoyed coming in at ten, wearing jeans
to work, flirting with our co-workers, partying when we stayed late, and bonding over the low
salaries and heavy workload. Barack worked on one of the company’s reference publications.
Each month customers got a new set of pages on business conditions in a particular country,
punched to fit into a three-ring binder. Barack’s job was to get copy from the country
correspondents and edit it so that it fit into a standard outline. There was probably some
research involved as well, since correspondents usually don’t send exactly what you ask for,
and you can’t always decipher their copy. But essentially the job was copyediting. It’s also not
true that Barack was the only black man in the company. He was the only black professional
man. Fred was an African-American who worked in the mailroom with his son. My boss and I
used to join them on Friday afternoons to drink beer behind the stacks of office supplies. That’s
not the kind of thing that Barack would do. Like I said, he was somewhat aloof.
Out of these mundane facts, Obama (or more likely his ghostwriters) construct a modern
morality play to burnish the credentials of an ambitious young proto-pol: “...as the months passed, I
felt the idea of becoming an organizer slipping away from me. The company promoted me to the
position of financial writer. I had my own office, my own secretary; money in the bank. Sometimes,
coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my
reflection in the elevator doors—see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand—and for a split
second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before
I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of
resolve.” (Dreams)
Armstrong notes ironically: “If Barack was promoted, his new job responsibilities were more of
the same – rewriting other people’s copy. As far as I know, he always had a small office, and the
idea that he had a secretary is laughable. Only the company president had a secretary. Barack never
left the office, never wore a tie, and had neither reason nor opportunity to interview Japanese
financiers or German bond traders.” Obama wants the reader to believe that he was saved from a
life of corporate ambition by a telephone call from his African, Kenyan sister, who wanted to tell
him that their brother (or half-brother) David had been killed in a motorcycle accident: “Then one
day, as I sat down at my computer to write an article on interest-rate swaps, something unexpected
happened. Auma called. I had never met this half sister; we had written only intermittently ...a few
months after Auma called, I turned in my resignation at the consulting firm and began looking in
earnest for an organizing job.” (Dreams) Armstrong points out that what Obama “means here is that
he got copy from a correspondent who didn’t understand interest rate swaps, and he was trying to
make sense out of it.”
PORTRAIT OF THE CANDIDATE AS A YOUNG MEGALOMANIAC
In Armstrong’s view, the entire story of this turning point in the life of the selfless young
community organizer was a tissue of lies: “All of Barack’s embellishment serves a larger narrative