President Obama: "Pipe Dreams about My Father"

A rare photo of Barack Sr. and Barack Jr.

Washington DC, Jun 19, 2011. In his weekly radio address, President Barack Hussein Obama, D-Kenya, reflected on Father's Day, calling fatherhood “my hardest, but always my most rewarding job.”

The president detailed how the absence of his own father has inspired him to be a better parent.

“I grew up without my father around," he said. "He left when I was two years old, and even though my sister and I were lucky enough to have a wonderful mother and caring grandparents to raise us, I felt his absence. And I wonder what my life would have been like had he been a greater presence. That’s why I’ve tried so hard to be a good dad for my own children.”


However, being abandoned by his father did not prevent Barack Obama Jr. from glorifying and praising his father in both of his autobiographies.

In Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama paints a heroic picture of his father as a simple goat herder who emerged from a poor Kenyan village to become a Harvard-educated economist and then returned to Africa to fulfill his destiny. Unfortunately, the reality is much bleaker than the tall tale Obama spins in his book.

The President's maternal Grandmother, Sarah Omar

After being educated at Harvard, Obama Sr. returned to Africa,   abandoning Barack and his mother, to live the life of a chronic alcoholic.

He ultimately killed himself in a drink-induced car accident, tragically driving drunk on the streets of Nairobi.

Obama begins his Dreams from My Father with a scene from 1982, where Obama, having just turned 21 a few months earlier, is shaken, in his New York apartment, by a phone call from Africa telling him his father has been killed in a car accident.

His narrative omits the fact that that Obama Sr. killed himself while driving drunk.

A few pages later, Obama traces his father's history in Kenya back to the time his father herded goats while attending the local "British colonial school."

Obama claims his father showed such "great promise" that he won a scholarship to study in Nairobi and then, "on the eve of Kenyan independence, he had been selected by Kenyan leaders and American sponsors to attend a university in the United States."

Kezia Obama, abandoned when pregnant

Obama carefully omits the underside of the story, that when his father headed off at age twenty-three to a university education in Hawaii, he was abandoning an African girl named Kezia, whom he had married at age eighteen. Nor does Obama mention that Kezia was then pregnant with his father's first child.

Obama magnifies his father's time in Hawaii, claiming he arrived at the University of Hawaii as the institution's first African student. Obama then boasts that his father "studied econometrics, worked with unsurpassed concentration, and graduated in three years at the top of his class."

The President omitted any mention of his father's continued success with women, his chronic alcoholism or the drunk driving incident that eventually claimed his life.