Was Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro the link to Ayres and Dorhn?

Memories of Obama's Mother Nicole Brodeur Tuesday, February 5, 2008 - Page updated at 12:00 AM

Box called her friend "Stannie," a nickname for Stanley. She was named for her father, who wanted a boy — and the girl knew it. As a result, their relationship was strained.

"He was hard on her, in that he picked on her," Box said of Stanley Dunham, a furniture salesman in downtown Seattle.

Dunham's mother, Madelyn, a bank employee, was "very quiet and serious" and often protected her daughter from her husband's sarcasm, Box said. (She is still alive, but the Obama campaign has not made her available for interviews).

Box last saw her friend in 1961, when she visited Seattle on her way from Honolulu to Massachusetts, where her then-husband was attending Harvard.

"She seemed very happy and very proud," she said. "She had this beautiful, healthy baby. I can see them right now."

Obama's mother known here as "uncommon" By Jonathan Martin Tuesday, April 8, 2008 - Page updated at 12:50 PM

One respite was found in a wing of Mercer Island High called "anarchy alley." Jim Wichterman taught a wide-open philosophy course that included Karl Marx. Next door, Val Foubert taught a rigorous dose of literature, including Margaret Mead's writings on homosexuality.

Those classes prompted what Wichterman, now 80 and retired in Ellensburg, called "mothers' marches" of parents outraged at the curriculum.

"As much as a high-school student can, she'd question anything: What's so good about democracy? What's so good about capitalism? What's wrong with communism? What's good about communism?" Wichterman said. "She had what I call an inquiring mind."

She also showed her politics, wearing a campaign button for Adlai Stevenson. And despite flirting with atheism, she went to services at East Shore Unitarian church, a left-leaning congregation in Bellevue.

The marriage was brief. By 1962, Dunham had returned to Seattle as a single mother, enrolling in the UW for spring quarter and living in an apartment on Capitol Hill. But friends said she got overwhelmed and returned to her family in Hawaii, and formally divorced Obama Sr. in 1964.

Over the next three decades, she became a well-traveled anthropologist, working in Indonesia, Pakistan and elsewhere.

In 1986 Ann Dunham worked on a developmental project in Pakistan. Later that year Ann and her daughter traveled the Silk Road in China. In 1992 she earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Hawaii. Her dissertation, "Peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia: Surviving and Thriving Against All Odds," was 1067 pages long. She worked for the Ford Foundation and promoted Microlending.

But consistent with the 1950s, there were undercurrents of turmoil. In 1955, the chairman of the Mercer Island school board, John Stenhouse, testified before the House Un-American Activities Subcommittee that he had been a member of the Communist Party.

At Mercer High School, two teachers -- Val Foubert and Jim Wichterman -- generated regular parental thunderstorms by teaching their students to challenge societal norms and question all manner of authority. Foubert, who died recently, taught English. His texts were cutting edge: "Atlas Shrugged," "The Organization Man," "The Hidden Persuaders," "1984" and the acerbic writings of H.L. Mencken.

Wichterman taught philosophy. The hallway between the two classes was known as "anarchy alley," and students pondered the challenging notions of Wichterman's teachings, including such philosophers as Sartre and Kierkegaard. He also touched the societal third rail of the 1950s: He questioned the existence of God. And he didn't stop there.

"I had them read 'The Communist Manifesto,' and the parents went nuts," said Wichterman, adding that parents also didn't want any discussions about "anything to do with sex," religion and theology. The parental protests were known as "mothers' marches

Daily Times - Leading News Resource of Pakistan - A mother’s unconventional life reflected within Obama

A mother’s unconventional life reflected within Obama

Saturday, March 15, 2008

Daily Times Monitor

Trained as an anthropologist, Barack Obama’s mother worked in Indonesia and Pakistan and encouraged her children to respect their absent fathers

In the capsule version of the Barack Obama story, his mother is simply the white woman from Kansas. The phrase comes coupled alliteratively to its counterpart, the black father from Kenya. On the campaign trail, Obama has called her his “single mom”. But neither description begins to capture the unconventional life of Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, the parent who most shaped Obama, according to a report published in The New York Times.

Kansas was merely a way station in her childhood, wheeling westward in the slipstream of her furniture-salesman father. In Hawaii, she married an African student at age 18. Then she married an Indonesian, moved to Jakarta, became an anthropologist, wrote an 800-page dissertation on peasant blacksmithing in Java, worked for the Ford Foundation, championed women’s work and helped bring micro-credit to the world’s poor.

The report says that Soetoro had high expectations for her children. In Indonesia, she would wake her son at 4 am for correspondence courses in English before school. She brought home recordings of Mahalia Jackson, speeches by Martin Luther King, and when Obama asked to stay in Hawaii for high school rather than return to Asia, she accepted living apart - a decision her daughter says was one of the hardest in her life. [This is the first time I have read that Obama asked to stay in Hawaii]

(snip)

But, in interviews, friends and colleagues of Soetoro shed light on a side of her that is less well known. “She was a very, very big thinker,” said Nancy Barry, a former president of Women’s World Banking, an international network of micro-finance providers, where Soetoro worked in New York City in the early 1990s. “I think she was not at all personally ambitious, I think she cared about the core issues and I think she was not afraid to speak truth to power.”

The report says Soetoro’s parents were from Kansas - her mother from Augusta, her father from El Dorado, a place Obama first visited in a campaign stop in January. Stanley Ann - her father wanted a boy so he gave her his name - was born on an army base during World War II. The family moved to California, Kansas, Texas and Washington in restless pursuit of opportunity before landing in Honolulu in 1960.

(snip)

The marriage was brief. In 1963, Obama left for Harvard, leaving his wife and child. She then married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian student. When he was summoned home in 1966 after the turmoil surrounding the rise of Suharto, Stanley Ann Soetoro and Barack followed.

Her second marriage faded, too, in the 1970s. She wanted to work, one friend said, and Lolo Soetoro wanted more children. He became more American, she once said, as she became more Javanese.

According to the report, Soetoro was back in Honolulu by 1974, a graduate student and raising Barack and Maya, nine years younger. Barack was on scholarship at a prestigious prep school, Punahou. When Soetoro decided to return to Indonesia three years later for her field work, Barack chose not to go.

Fluent in Indonesian, Soetoro moved with Maya first to Yogyakarta, the center of Javanese handicrafts. A weaver in college, she was fascinated with what Soetoro-Ng calls “life’s gorgeous minutiae.” That interest inspired her study of village industries, which became the basis of her 1992 doctoral dissertation.

She became a consultant for the United States Agency for International Development on setting up a village credit programme, then a Ford Foundation programme officer in Jakarta specialising in women’s work. Later, she was a consultant in Pakistan; then she joined Indonesia’s oldest bank to work on what is described as the world’s largest sustainable micro-finance programme, creating services like credit and savings for the poor. After her diagnosis, Soetoro spent the last months of her life in Hawaii, near her mother. (Her father had died.) She died in November 1995, as Obama was starting his first campaign for public office.

Barack Obama's mother,
Stanley Ann Dunham

"[Stanley Ann] Dunham moved to Hawaii to attend the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she studied anthropology. There she met Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., a graduate student from Kenya and the school's first African student, in a Russian class.[2]"
-Scott, Janny (2008-03-14). "A Free-Spirited Wanderer Who Set Obama’s Path", New York Times. Retrieved on 2008-03-21.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Dunham#cite_note-freespirit-1

From the Chicago Tribune, March 27, 2007:
"In a recent interview, Obama called his mother 'the dominant figure in my formative years... The values she taught me continue to be my touchstone when it comes to how I go about the world of politics.' "
Article: Barack Obama: Mother not just a girl from Kansas
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-0703270151mar27,0,1310554.story?page=2

From AsiaTimesOnline, Feb 26, 2008
Article: Obama's women reveal his secret

Excerpt from page 1...

"Naivete" is a euphemism for Ann Dunham's motivation. Friends describe her as a "fellow traveler", that is, a communist sympathizer, from her youth, according to a March 27, 2007, Chicago Tribune report. Many Americans harbor leftist views, but not many marry into them, twice. Ann Dunham met and married the Kenyan economics student Barack Obama, Sr, at the University of Hawaii in 1960, and in 1967 married the Indonesian student Lolo Soetero. It is unclear why Soetero's student visa was revoked in 1967 - the fact but not the cause are noted in press accounts. But it is probable that the change in government in Indonesia in 1967, in which the leftist leader Sukarno was deposed, was the motivation. ..."

From page 2 of 2...

Barack Obama received at least some instruction in the Islamic faith of his father and went with him to the mosque, but the importance of this experience is vastly overstated by conservative commentators who seek to portray Obama as a Muslim of sorts. Radical anti-Americanism, rather than Islam, was the reigning faith in the Dunham household. ...

Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America with his mother's milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and career. He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American culture, although not their religion. He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is practicing not on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States.

There is nothing mysterious about Obama's methods. "A demagogue tries to sound as stupid as his audience so that they will think they are as clever as he is," wrote Karl Krauss. Americans are the world's biggest suckers, and laugh at this weakness in their popular culture. Listening to Obama speak, Sinclair Lewis' cynical tent-revivalist Elmer Gantry comes to mind, or, even better, Tyrone Power's portrayal of a carnival mentalist in the 1947 film noire Nightmare Alley. The latter is available for instant viewing at Netflix, and highly recommended as an antidote to having felt uplifted by an Obama speech. ..."

Article: Obama's women reveal his secret
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JB26Aa01.html

Stanley Ann Dunham's high school days...

"At Mercer High School, two teachers -- Val Foubert and Jim Wichterman -- generated regular parental thunderstorms by teaching their students to challenge societal norms and question all manner of authority. Foubert, who died recently, taught English. His texts were cutting edge: "Atlas Shrugged," "The Organization Man," "The Hidden Persuaders," "1984" and the acerbic writings of H.L. Mencken.

Wichterman taught philosophy. The hallway between the two classes was known as "anarchy alley," and students pondered the challenging notions of Wichterman's teachings, including such philosophers as Sartre and Kierkegaard. He also touched the societal third rail of the 1950s: He questioned the existence of God. And he didn't stop there.

"I had them read 'The Communist Manifesto,' and the parents went nuts," said Wichterman, adding that parents also didn't want any discussions about "anything to do with sex," religion and theology. The parental protests were known as "mothers' marches."

"The kids started questioning things that their folks thought shouldn't be questioned -- religion, politics, parental authority," said John Hunt, a classmate. "And a lot of parents didn't like that, and they tried to get them [Wichterman and Foubert] fired."

The Dunhams did not join the uproar. Madelyn and Stanley shed their Methodist and Baptist upbringing and began attending Sunday services at the East Shore Unitarian Church in nearby Bellevue.

"In the 1950s, this was sometimes known as 'the little Red church on the hill,' " said Peter Luton, the church's senior minister, referring to the effects of McCarthyism. Skepticism, the kind that Stanley embraced and passed on to his daughter, was welcomed here.

For Stanley Ann, the teachings of Foubert and Wichterman provided an intellectual stimulant and an affirmation that there indeed was an interesting life beyond high school dances, football games and all-night slumber party chatter.

Their high school class was an in-between generation. The Beat generation had passed, and the 1960s era of protest was yet to begin. Classmates of Dunham -- Wall, Blake, Hunt -- felt they were on the cusp of societal change, the distant early warning of the '60s struggles over civil rights, women's rights and war. "If you were concerned about something going wrong in the world, Stanley would know about it first," said Chip Wall, who described her as "a fellow traveler..." "We were liberals before we knew what liberals were."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-0703270151mar27,0,1310554.story?page=3

Barack Obama, from Dreams from My Father, Three Rivers Press, New York, Revised Edition, 2004, ISBN 1-4000-8277-3, p. 76-7:
"But by the time I met Frank [Frank Marshall Davis] he must have been pushing eighty, with a big, dewlapped face and an ill-kempt gray Afro that made him look like an old, shaggy-maned lion. He would read us his poetry whenever we stopped by his house, sharing whiskey with Gramps out of an emptied jelly jar."

___________________________________________________________

From Accuracy In Media | AIM.ORG

Obama’s Red Mentor Praised Red Army
AIM Report | By Cliff Kincaid | April 30, 2008

Barack Obama’s childhood mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, a member of the Moscow-controlled Communist Party USA, wrote a poem dedicated to the Soviet Red Army. “Smash on, victory-eating Red Army,” he declared. He also wrote poems attacking traditional Christianity and the work of Christian missionaries.

The “Red Army” poem goes beyond hoping for the communists to beat the Nazis in World War II and hails the Soviet revolution. It says:

Show the marveling multitudes
Americans, British, all your allied brothers
How strong you are
How great you are
How your young tree of new unity
Planted twenty-five years ago
Bears today the golden fruit of victory!

http://www.aim.org/aim-report/obamas-red-mentor-praised-red-army/

____________________________________

Frank Marshall Davis

Obama’s Communist Mentor
AIM Column | By Cliff Kincaid | February 18, 2008

excerpt...

"through Frank Marshall Davis, Obama had an admitted relationship with someone who was publicly identified as a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). The record shows that Obama was in Hawaii from 1971-1979, where, at some point in time, he developed a close relationship, almost like a son, with Davis, listening to his 'poetry' and getting advice on his career path. But Obama, in his book, Dreams From My Father, refers to him repeatedly as just 'Frank.'

The reason is apparent: Davis was a known communist who belonged to a party subservient to the Soviet Union. In fact, the 1951 report of the Commission on Subversive Activities to the Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii identified him as a CPUSA member. What's more, anti-communist congressional committees, including the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), accused Davis of involvement in several communist-front organizations."

Frank Chapman, a CPUSA supporter, has written a letter to the party newspaper hailing the Illinois senator's victory in the Iowa caucuses:

"Obama’s victory was more than a progressive move; it was a dialectical leap ushering in a qualitatively new era of struggle. Marx once compared revolutionary struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface. This is the old revolutionary 'mole,' not only showing his traces on the surface but also breaking through."
People's Weekly World (PWW), official newspaper of the Communist Party, USA

Source article: Obama’s Communist Mentor
http://www.aim.org/aim-column/obamas-communist-mentor

___________________________________________________________

Barack Obama's Marxist Mentor [Frank Marshall Davis]
By Trevor Loudon, NewZeal.Blogspot.com, March 29, 2007
http://newzeal.blogspot.com/2007/03/barack-obamas-marxist-mentor.html

Note: Trevor Loudon is apparently the person who first discovered the FMD-Obama connection. He posted on it 11 months before Accuracy In Media (AIM) did.

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