Obama had no use for dad on Father's Day

In a weekend New York Times article that has gotten a good deal of attention, reporter Rachel Starnes tells how an archivist at the Schomburg Center in Harlem stumbled upon a trove of letters from Barack Obama, Sr.

What has shocked the archivists and the Times is that President Barack Obama has expressed little or no interest in the letters.

"A senior White House official said President Obama would be interested in seeing the documents after he leaves office next year," Starnes reported, "but declined to comment on why administration officials had not responded to the letter or to follow-up correspondence."

This is all the more shocking to Starnes because Obama built his literary reputation on "his sense of loss and longing" as expressed in his 1995 memoir, "Dreams from My Father," a book she describes as "his quest to learn more about the man who shared his name."

Had Starnes or her editors known a little more about the genesis of that memoir, they would not have been quite so shocked.

As I have argued on these pages since 2008, terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers served as Obama's muse in the creation of "Dreams." He breathed creative life into this ungifted amateur who had written nothing of note before, and nothing since, and reconceived him as a literary prodigy.

See the full selection of Jack Cashill's blockbuster books in the WND Superstore!

Not content to merely edit, however, the highly skilled Ayers appears to have woven the rough strands of Obama's life with tales from Homer's "Odyssey." In the resulting narrative Obama emerges as the Telemachus figure in desperate search for his missing father.

The evidence strongly suggests that the search for father was pure literary construct. Originally, Obama contracted with Poseidon, a small imprint of Simon & Schuster, to write a book on race and voting rights. He couldn't finish it and forfeited his advance.

Even after Obama got Ayers involved (for details see "Deconstructing Obama"), the African part of what became "Dreams" seemed something of an afterthought.

According to David Maraniss, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Barack Obama: The Story," Obama submitted the first draft of what was now a memoir to Crown editor Henry Ferris.

The draft did not include the final section of the book, which would cover Obama's 1988 Kenya visit. Before completing the book Obama returned to Kenya, or so he appears to have told Ferris.

Writes Maraniss, who interviewed Ferris, "Obama traveled to Kenya a second time for further research before turning in the last part of the book."

The language here is clear. Obama traveled to Africa after the first submission but before the final one. This trip could have been no earlier than 1994 and not much later. "Dreams" was published in July 1995.

In gathering information for his Obama biography, Maraniss was able to question Obama in the Oval Office. Obama confirmed the visit to Kenya, which he said was a "fact-checking" trip that enabled him to do "more background on things like Kenyan history."

Maraniss left a potentially revealing story on the table. According to all accounts, Obama made only two trips to Africa before his election to the Senate in 2004: the first one in 1988 recounted in "Dreams" and the second one with Michelle in 1992.

Obama lied to Ferris about making a return trip to Kenya, possibly to show how serious he was about writing the book and getting his facts straight.

Instead of going to Africa, Obama – or his muse – may have contented himself with going to the local library and pillaging the memoirs of longtime Kenya resident Kuki Gallmann.

The clues to this unlikely literary history may well be contained in a manuscript obtained by Gotnews.com editor Charles Johnson from Obama's half-brother Malik.

Get the hottest, most important news stories on the Internet – delivered FREE to your inbox as soon as they break! Take just 30 seconds and sign up for WND's Email News Alerts!

Documentarian Joel Gilbert had earlier secured sample pages from Malik, and both Jerry Corsi and I had written about their implications.

According to Corsi, Malik had charged that Barack Obama exploited the family in Kenya for political purposes and now has abandoned them. In a similar vein, Obama seems to have exploited and abandoned Barack Obama Sr., his presumed father.

With my new TWA 800 book debuting in two weeks, I have not had time to probe the manuscript in depth. That said, I have seen enough to know that "Claims of Inheritance" – Obama's preferred title – is a genuine draft from late in the editing process. The African material has been added, but much more refinement would follow.

Johnson believes, as do I, that Obama's handwritten notes – especially the sticky notes that say "not by O" or "ink by O" – strengthen the case that he had major assistance with a book he claimed to have written himself.

Johnson is hoping to raise raise $7,500 through his own crowd funding service to enable him to release the text to all comers in a readable format.

"The goal of this bounty," says Johnson, "is to unmask Barack Obama as a literary fraud." Here is hoping he succeeds.