For Obama, the Hitch Was Not WHERE He Was Born, But WHEN

The Real Reason Perkins Coie Fought to Conceal BHO's Birth Certificate

Although much about Barack Obama’s birth certificate remains in dispute, there is no denying that Obama’s law firm, Perkins Coie, fought strenuously—and at considerable expense—to keep it under wraps. But that reason is not what everyone thinks.

Despite all the media attention, the holes in Obama’s life story still loom larger than the story told. Obama has not helped fill them. In his 2020 memoir, A Promised Land, the omissions persist. One such omission involves the city of Seattle. Seattle, not Kansas, is where his mother, Ann Dunham, spent her formative years. Seattle, not Hawaii, is where Obama spent the first year of his life. Despite the city’s importance to Obama’s life story, there is no mention of “Seattle” in this later memoir or in his earlier memoir, Dreams From My Father.

Obama’s most serious biographers—the three Davids, all Pulitzer Prize winners: Remnick, Maraniss, and Garrow—report the Dunham family’s move from Kansas to Seattle in 1954 or 1955 when Ann was about twelve. There is little controversy here. Altogether less clear is why the Dunhams abruptly moved to Hawaii in 1960 when Ann was seventeen.

Although the three biographers disagree on the details, they agree that Ann went unwillingly in the summer after her high school graduation. The putative reason for the move was a new opportunity for Ann’s father, Stanley Dunham, in the retail furniture business, but little is said of “Toot,” Ann’s mother Madelyn. At the time of the family’s departure, Madelyn was working as an escrow officer at a local bank. She promptly found a job in Honolulu doing much the same thing and worked her way up to become one of the bank’s first female vice presidents.

In A Promised Land, Obama speaks of Toot glowingly. She was the earner in the family, the one willing “to carry the load in front of her” to provide for Barack and Stanley, who had abandoned the furniture business by the time we meet him in Dreams. One suspects that Toot was no more enthused about the move to Hawaii than her daughter was, and yet she went, ostensibly so her Willy Loman of a husband could have one more shot at pursuing his humble dreams.

I think there may have been another reason, and here, I speculate. In high school, Ann proved to be something of a rebel—a liberal and wannabe beatnik who hung out at jazz bars and once even hit the road with a friend Kerouac-style. As Garrow reports, while still in high school Ann saw the celebrated Franco-Brazilian film Black Orpheus and “may have been especially struck by the film’s male lead, black Brazilian actor Breno Mello.”

Obama speaks about his mother’s reaction to this film at length in Dreams. In the summer before his senior year in college, Ann visited him in New York and dragged him to see Black Orpheus at a revival house. Obama was bored. Ann was not. She explained that she had first seen the film in the summer before her senior year in high school while working as an au pair in Chicago. “I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen,” she tells her son. An embarrassed Obama considers her enthusiasm “a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white middle-class girl from Kansas.”

Obama underestimated his “Kansas” mother. She was not exactly Dorothy. The one possibility that makes the most sense of the facts surrounding Obama’s birth is that she had a black lover on the mainland. In 1960, parents routinely sent their pregnant daughters to visit an “aunt” in some distant city before they started to show. In 1960, if the baby’s father were black, a white mother-to-be could go no place more welcoming than Hawaii. There, a biracial child had a decent chance of growing up without stigma.

In the official story, Ann meets the Kenyan Barack Obama in a Russian class. This much is likely true. Much more suspect is the notion that the Kenyan falls in love with Ann. In this regard, Garrow is the most honest and unsparing of the biographers. He writes, “In truth, as one scholar would acutely put it, Barack Hussein Obama was only ‘a sperm donor in his son’s life.’”

Barack Obama’s official date of birth is August 4, 1961. Presuming a normal pregnancy, Ann would have conceived the child in early November, an estimated six weeks after starting class. Rebellious and infatuated with exotic men, she could have met and promptly seduced or been seduced by Obama. Just as likely, she and her father could have been on the lookout for someone willing to put his name on the birth certificate.

In 1961, Africans had higher status in America than African Americans. An African who wanted to have his student visa extended could see the merits in marrying a pregnant American girl even if he did have a wife back in Kenya. What cannot be denied is that Obama and Stanley Dunham became buddies. A photo captures them arm-in-arm when Obama leaves for Harvard a year and a half after he allegedly knocked up Dunham’s underage daughter. One other variable: Ann does not enroll for the second semester at the University of Hawaii. If she were just a couple months pregnant there would be no reason not to. Mumus cover a lot of sins.

As Garrow notes, Ann and Barack reportedly flew to Maui on February 2, 1961, and were married there. He admits, however, that no contemporary documents have ever been located. Even less helpful is the account by Janny Scott, the New York Times reporter who spent two years researching her 2011 biography of Ann Dunham, A Singular Woman. Although Scott spends thirty pages documenting Ann’s high school years in Seattle, she spends just two pages covering her courtship with Obama, the marriage, and birth.

As to the wedding itself, Scott can tell the reader no more than Garrow can. She also fails to comment on Ann Dunham’s whereabouts from the day of the alleged wedding in February 1961 to Obama’s reported birth in August 1961. Not a single word. There are no credible witnesses to any kind of relationship. There are no photos of a pregnant Ann or of a newborn Obama.

This brings us back to Obama’s Seattle problem. In his 2012 biography Maraniss finally concedes what the alternative conservative media had first reported in 2008, namely that Ann Dunham emerged in Seattle with her baby in time to register at the University of Washington for the fall semester of 1961.

“Within a month of the day Barry came home from the hospital,” Maraniss writes of baby Obama, “he and his mother were long gone from Honolulu, back on the mainland, returned to the more familiar turf of Mercer Island and Seattle and the campus of the University of Washington.” Garrow acknowledges the same. Somehow, Obama’s official campaign biography, Remnick’s biography, Scott’s bio of Ann Dunham, and Obama’s Dreams all either botched the timeline or missed the Seattle sojourn altogether.

Parents who moved abruptly to Hawaii to protect their daughter’s reputation would have had little compunction about registering a home birth six months after it actually happened, the final step in a well-executed plan to save face and give their grandson an identity. If my suspicions are right—and I do not rule out other alternatives—the real issue may not be where Obama was born, but when. It’s possible that Ann fled Hawaii in late August 1961 with a baby who was just a few weeks old, but her decision to leave would seem much more prudent if the baby had been born six months prior.

Until the time Obama ran for president, he may have believed the origins story his mother and grandparents fed him since childhood. He certainly seemed to believe it when he gave his breakout speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. As Obama told the story, his father had grown up in Kenya “herding goats.” His mother he traced to Kansas, as he always did. “My parents shared not only an improbable love,” Obama continued, “they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation.”

From 2004 on, Obama and his operatives invested enormous political capital in what biographer Remnick calls his “signature appeal: the use of the details of his own life as a reflection of a kind of multicultural ideal.” If, in fact, the Kenyan were not his father, the whole ideal would be shot. The “improbable love” would have seemed no more substantial than Kamala Harris’s job at McDonald’s.

Obama might not have learned the real story until after he declared for president. In any campaign, the candidate’s staffers do a dumpster dive on their candidate to head off the opposition. Upon learning the truth, candidate Obama may have heard from his handlers what Senator Ranse Stoddard, Jimmy Stewart’s character in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, heard from his: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Once printed, that legend had to be protected. A birth date in January or February would have stripped Obama of his political identity. To this day, not one reporter in a hundred knows that Obama spent the first year of his life in Seattle with his single mother, and none has questioned the timeline of his birth.

The widespread ignorance on this subject would not much matter save for the fact that Big Media, most prominent Democrats, and Obama himself still pillory Donald Trump as a racist for having questioned Obama’s origins. It was Trump’s persistence in 2011 that finally coerced Obama to send Perkins Coie to Hawaii to “find” the original birth certificate. Five years later, this same law firm was commissioned to produce the equally dubious Steele dossier.

See The Law Firm Behind the Steele Dossier Also "Found" Obama's Birth Certificate

By 2020, when his second memoir was published, the Obamas had salted away their millions. They had nothing to worry about. Fabulation wasn’t a crime. In an honest memoir, Obama could have told how he learned of the emptiness at the core of his family fable and why he persisted in sustaining it. But if your readers, even your reviewers, prefer the legend, I suppose there is not much incentive to print the facts.

For the most comprehensive account of January 6, please see Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6