Obama’s review of Ayers’ book says, “A searing and timely account of the juvenile court system, and the courageous individuals who rescue hope from despair.”
Posted on 10/18/2008 8:21:55 PM PDT by Alouette
On December 21, 1997, Barack Obama wrote a short review of William Ayers’ book A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court, which had recently been published by Beacon Press. Here’s a photo of how the review appeared in the Chicago Tribune:
Obama’s review of Ayers’ book says, “A searing and timely account of the juvenile court system, and the courageous individuals who rescue hope from despair.”
I had seen mentions of the existence of this review in a very few media outlets, including CNN, National Review, American Spectator, and a handful of others. But because the review was published before the Chicago Tribune began digitizing and archiving its articles online, there was no direct Web link to the review itself — only citations of it. So, out of curiosity, I took it upon myself to visit a library in San Francisco, and using the library’s Lexis-Nexis access and its archive of microfilm versions of major newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, I finally tracked down a copy of the actual review itself.
(Excerpt) Read more at zombietime.com ...
I have been assuming that O is an empty suit with Ayers being the brains but maybe O is more involved than I had believed.
Yes, Alouette. Good job indeed.
I think at a very young age, he was an acute and accurate observer of people. He had to be. There wasn’t a mother She was our la-de-dadaing amongs dirt poor rurual people that dreamed of being dishwashers in Detroit, and whom she did her best to keep them in their hell that she saw as some anti-capitilistic idylic paradise free or white people. His father couldn’t leave him fast enough. No brother or sister. The only uncle Frank Marshall Davis was a drunk, child molesting pervert who may be Obama’s real father.
Check this:
http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2008/10/why-obamas-colu.html
It may explain another reason for a tie between Obama and Ayers in New York in the early eighties.
He looks a little older than 8 in that photo.
Obama studied political science. Ayers had a degree in American studies and was going for an advanced degree in education.
Obama was at Columbia College. Ayers was at the Bank Street College of Education. It's in the same area as Columbia, but not part of the university.
Obama and Ayers could have known each other then, but it wouldn't have been as easy or as likely as you suggest.
Obama lived off campus.
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various sources.
Columbia at that time did not guarantee university housing for all students, so Obama lived off campus. He claims to have spent his first night sleeping in an alley near the corner of 109th and Amsterdam Avenue and washing with the homeless next to an open fire hydrant. He eventually moved into a walkup on E. 94th St., in East Harlem, where he would "chat with his Puerto Rican neighbors about...the sound of gunfire at night".[2]
When he was on campus, he concentrated on academic work, spending most of his time in Butler Library "like a monk", and made few friends. He also took up jogging and "stopped getting high". The racist and anti-Semitic graffiti he sometimes encountered on bathroom walls on campus (how times never change!) helped him form his ideas about race and class. He wrote of "the almost mathematical precision with which America’s race and class problems joined; the depth, the ferocity, of resulting tribal wars; the bile that flowed freely not just out on the streets but in the stalls of Columbia’s bathrooms as well".[3]
Obama claims to have participated to some extent in anti-apartheid activities with the Black Students Organization, but no one is quite sure.
Federal law limits the information that Columbia can release about Mr. Obama's time there. A spokesman for the university, Brian Connolly, confirmed that Mr. Obama spent two years at Columbia College and graduated in 1983 with a major in political science. He did not receive honors, Mr. Connolly said, though specific information on his grades is sealed. A program from the 1983 graduation ceremony lists him as a graduate."
But besides these few facts, gleaned from the scant references in his autobiography Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, little else is known about his time at Columbia.
In his book, Obama recalls, “I spent a lot of time in the library. I didn’t socialize that much. I was like a monk.” Nowhere in his book is any reference made to friends, apart from his unnamed roommate, and he skips quickly over this period of his life.
There have been numerous failed attempts by reporters, administrators, and the Columbia University College Democrats to get Obama to speak about his time at the University or to come for a visit since 2006. Former College Democrats President Seth Flaxman slipped a letter to the Senator at a meet-and-greet, and current president Joshua Lipsky attempted to personally lure Obama back to campus at the College Democrats of America Convention last July. According to Lipsky, Senator Obama responded, “Sure, I’d love to do it.” But as of yet, he has not followed up on the promise."
“Obama and Ayers could have known each other then, but it wouldn’t have been as easy or as likely as you suggest.”
How likely though that they would both just happen to wind up living in the same neighborhood in Chicago? To me it’s looking increasingly clear that at some point early on Ayers came into contact with Obama and quickly realized his enormous potential. He then decided to help nurture Obama’s growth as a politician, shaping his image (ghostwriting his book) and even launching his career from his own home. All for kindhearted reasons, i’m sure. All for America’s best interests.
Obama: Ayers’ gift to America. The Trojan One. He’s standing outside the gates as we speak. Should we vote him in?
Great link!
From the comments,...
"And even this from Obama: "I spent a lot of time in the library". On yesterday's BHO post I saw from a search that Bank Street College Records were transferred to Columbia's Teacher College Library, in 1984, the year Ayers graduated from Bank Street. (That transfer might be some conspiracy fodder in itself somehow.)
So we know that education college Bank Street had a connection to the extensive education library of Columbia, which Ayers presumably would have used to research his masters. Strange that Obama mentioned being in the library there. Hmmm.
I think we've got it."
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Why Obama’s Columbia Years Went AWOL
What did Barack Obama do while at Columbia from 1981 to 1983 and in the year after his graduation? That part of his life is scarcely mentioned in “Dreams From My Father”; the Wall Street Journal remarked in the mystery a month ago and the NY Times puzzled over it a year ago.
Let me just toss out the outlines of a theory that has just hit my inbox and left me agog. First, the usual disclaimers - this is speculative, there are gaps and leaps of logic, and nothing can be proven. However, that said... well, see if you are agog as well.
1. From Dreams From My Father and other sources we know that Obama was interested in South Africa divestment in the early 80’s. For example, he had a moment of awakening at Occidental College when he gave a brief but well-received speech to kick off an anti-apartheid demonstration. Other sources indicate he maintained that interest while at Columbia.
2. A major focal point of the anti-apartheid movement in the fall of 1981 was the Springboks rugby tour - they were an integrated South African rugby team on a “goodwill” tour of the US, creating controversy and drawing protests everywhere. Some of the protests were violent, including one at John F. Kennedy Airport (from whence the team departed, I believe), and bombs were exploded.
3. Did I say “bombs”? Yes, and here is the jaw-dropping connection - the Weather Underground was involved in some fashion and the Brinks robbery which left two police officers and a security guard dead was apparently undertaken to finance activities such as the Springboks bombings. A flavor from the Times:
The police said they had several links between the robbery suspects and other people associated with radical activities in the past. Federal officials said they were looking into possible links between the holdup gang and the Black Liberation Army, which, like the Weather Underground of years ago, has been linked more recently to bombings, attacks on police officers and other violence aimed at toppling ‘’the establishment.’’ Getaway Car Recovered
A yellow Honda used as one of the getaway cars, for example, was recovered and found to have been registered to Eve S. Rosahn, who was a Barnard College student in the late 1960’s and was arrested in radical demonstrations at Columbia University then and more recently at a New York City airport demonstration against the Springboks, the South African rugby team.
These are just dots and it may be impossible to connect them, but we have Barack Obama at Columbia working on South African divestment (as were many peaceful protestors) while other radical elements with a Weather Underground flavor are setting bombs, killing cops, and working on South African divestment. As a bonus, Bill Ayers is studying at Bank Street College a quarter mile from Columbia towards his Masters in Education and Kathy Boudin, one of the Brinks getaway drivers, was working at a progressive Upper West Side School. Eventually Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn raised Kathy’s child while she was in jail, so it seems a fair guess that they were close.
A small, small world in which Obama never met any of these people despite their shared passion for justice in South Africa. Never heard them speak at a rally, never heard anyone describe the Weather Underground to him, and felt comfortable assuming that Bill Ayers had been rehabilitated by 1995. In fact, a world so small that Obama won’t talk about it now.
Frank Marshall Davis, who wrote about seducing an 'Anne' in his porn book, and whom Obama wrote a poem about, titled 'Pop'.
Baby Obama.
See post #50 for a possible link.
btt and read later
“See post #50 for a possible link.”
Thanks for the heads up. Very interesting read. Getting curiouser and curiouser, as they say.
I’m reminded of what McCain himself said at a rally a couple weeks ago, something to the effect that although Obama has written a couple autobiographies, his life isn’t exactly an open book. He wasn’t kidding. So many questions, so much for the media to dig into but don’t have the time because they’re much too busy at the moment carrying their Chosen One across the finish line.
Good find. I don’t know how many reviews or intros Obama has written for books, but I would think someone would remember writing an intro, even if not well acquainted with the author.
Obama certainly may have had a ghost writer, or a book doctor. That's not based on the poems he wrote at 19 or 20 but on his failure to satisfactorily complete an earlier book deal. But would Ayers have been a likely ghost writer for Obama's book?
Ayers was a true believer, and apparently still is -- somebody who's youthful rebellion against his privileged White parents became his whole life. From what I've heard of Obama's first book, there's an ambivalence or irony or criticism of Obama's mother's radical '60s generation, that doesn't go well with Ayers's celebration of his own '60s radicalism.
Even if Obama and Ayers agreed about politics, the generational angle in the book cuts against Ayers's way of thinking about himself and the world. That's why I don't think Ayers, who is still gung-ho about the Sixties, wrote the book. He doesn't sound like somebody who could modulate his tone in that way.
Did Ayers pick up Obama as a protege at Columbia? Maybe, but I'm thinking for that to happen, Obama would have had to attract the attention of other radical students, at least at the beginning, and that didn't happen. He'd have gotten more of a reputation at the school than he actually did.
The other alternative is that Obama was already committed to secretly worming his way up through the system as a radical mole when he got to Columbia, and sought out Ayers on his own. That doesn't sound very likely either. Either he really was holed up in the library all the time, or he was making a variety of contacts that aren't as familiar to us as the Ayers link.
We may think that anybody who went from reading Alinsky and being a community organizer to becoming a major party nomination for President has to be somebody's mole, but the truth may be closer to the surface than we think. It may seem to us like Obama's way was Ayers's way and that '60s revolutionaries and '80s activists believed the same thing, but closer up there are differences that we don't at first notice.
I'm not saying that it couldn't have happened, but I'd like to see more evidence.
“I’m not saying that it couldn’t have happened, but I’d like to see more evidence.”
I agree. More evidence is needed which is why it is such a disgrace that we already seem to know more about the past of a plumber than we do that of a guy running for President. Still, when it becomes apparent that Barack had at the very least greatly downplayed his relationship with Ayers, if not outright lied, then it opens up the door to looking askance at any other possible connections between the two rather than to give Obama the benefit of the doubt. At least that is my view.
As to the book, you make a good argument but at the same time i still see a collaboration with Ayers as very likely. On another thread someone pointed out that Ayers had an open door policy of helping writers in the neighborhood: that they could come over to see him if they needed assistance. So with that in mind, perhaps Obama came up with a basic outline for the book and then Ayers fleshed it out with well-turned phrases and then tied everything together into a very professional, very polished package.
Further, given Ayers background in education (his school projects and his years as a professor) i think it probable he’s learned a thing or two about tamping down his overtly radical views, when necessary, in order to get away with much subtle propaganda. Therefore, the fact that Obama’s book may have contained some slight criticism of the 60s radical movement might only prove a smart political ploy to masquerade Obama as a safe mainstream guy and not a radical himself.
In other words: if you’re dressing up a Trojan Horse, put a friendly smile on his face, not an angry sneer. Then later let his angry comrades go to work while he continues smiling prettily for the public even as everything starts falling apart around them.
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