What a family...

Harvard and State Department colluded to get rid of Obama's father

Thomas Lifson

Barack Hussein Obama Senior was forced to leave Harvard in 1964, prior to the completion of his doctoral thesis, according to documents released under the Freedom of Information Act. Jack Cashill comments today on what they tell us about the fairy tale narrative propounded by candidate Obama (II), a story that is demonstrably false, yet was uncritically accepted by the media and political establishments.

The entire cache of documents can be seen here, and they tell quite a story about Obama Senior's truncated academic career. Sally Jacobs of the Boston Globe, writes about the elder Obama's career at Harvard and his subsequent decline and fall. She has biography of the BHO Senior coming out in July, and that should cast further light on Obama's birth certificate father.

The documents released center in the expulsion of Obama Senior from the United States with the active collusion of immigration authorities and Harvard officials, who appear to have jointly concluded the Senior's behavior was so unacceptable as to merit termination of his visa and his residence in Cambridge. They struck me with particular force because I spent well over a decade in residence at the very same Harvard Center for International Affairs that found Obama Senior's behavior wanting. See, for example:

I entered Harvard a mere 5 years after Senior's departure in 1964, and cannot imagine how bad Senior's behavior must have been to engender the sort of issues raised by the authorities. Graduate students were very much on their own when it came to personal life. There would have had to be complaints, or failures to academically perform. There was absolutely no concept of in loco parentis when it came to graduate students. The International Office provided help in finding apartments and the like, but all the foreign students I knew (and I knew many, as I was studying Japanese and Chinese languages and histories) lived their personal lives in private. Now I acknowledge that standards no doubt changed in the turbulent 60s years that separated Obama Senior and me at Harvard. But for a graduate student's private social behavior to come to the attention of academic authorities there must have been some flagrant academic problems or actual complaints.

Note that BHO Senior did complete his oral examinations, which means that he was what was called an ABD -- all but dissertation. The fact that he never completed his thesis bespeaks a level of either discouragement or lack of academic rigor. It is far from unusual for people to fail to finish their dissertations, but normally they receive some sort of support or encouragement from their faculty advisors. The fact that Senior was forced to leave the United States with the active collusion of Harvard demonstrates that he was, in effect, written off by them as a hopeless case, despite the fact that he was originally expected form part of the leadership cadre that would propel newly-independent Kenya forward.

I cannot help but be reminded of the tale told by Jack Cashill in Deconstructing Obama, where BHO Junior found himself unable to complete the manuscript for Dreams from My Father, and turned over his notes and tapes to Bill Ayers for ghosting completion, a fact corroborated by the apolitical biography of Obama Junior published by Christopher Anderson. Like putative father, like son?