Biographer of Obama’s father says Barack wouldn’t be president if not for absent dad

Roy Olmstead, one of the Puget Sound’s largest ever bootlegger (Image courtesy PublicAffairs)

The author of a new biography about President Barack Obama’s father says she believes the junior Barack would likely not have become president if his father had been present in his life.

“The elder Barack was a very brilliant, but very self absorbed person. He was not a nurturer in any respect of the word. He did not really take care of any of his eight children. I think the consequences of that might have been very profound on Barack, and he probably would not have become the president,” said Sally Jacobs, author of “The Other Barack: The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama’s Father.”

Jacobs tells 97.3 KIRO FM’s Ross and Burbank Show that the president only saw his father once after parting ways with his mother, and over the years the president learned his father was “quite a different character, than he had been told by his mother.”

Listen to interview: Author Sally Jacobs

Barack Obama Sr., killed in a drunk-driving accident, was known to many to be a heavy drinker.

“He was known as “double-double” due to his drinking tendencies. His favorite drink was Johnny Walker Black and when he went into a bar, he ordered a double round of shots, two drinks followed by a chaser of two more, so that would be an opener of four shots. Some of his friends said he could do that four times meaning he’d end up with 16 shots and that was pretty standard fare for him, but he kept right on going and could walk out of the bar on his own,” says Jacobs.

She says Obama Sr. had a very promising beginning, considered to be one of the front-runners to be a prominent leader in his native Kenya.

“He was to be one of the movers and shakers in Nairobi at the time of independence in 1963. One estimate is that there were only 500 people, 500 young men and women who had college degrees, meaning they would be the people that would create Kenya out of its colonial history, and Obama with a degree from the University of Hawaii and Harvard would have been at the head of the line,” Jacobs says.

Obama Sr. was very close to completing his PhD at Harvard, but Jacobs says a few things got in the way.

“The number of wives he had was a source of great mystery to many people, including officials and his own wives. At Harvard, they began to look into how many wives he had and they weren’t happy. He was married to multiple people,” says Jacobs. “He was a Luo. This was quite normal, it’s a polygamist tribe, what he did was quite typical of the culture he came from, but Harvard didn’t like it.”

Jacobs doesn’t know whether the president has read her book, but she thinks even he will find things he didn’t know about his father.

“My book has great volumes of information, details about his jobs, about why he lost his jobs, about his marriages, that I don’t think the president probably knows in such detail,” says Jacobs. “There were volumes that had never been told about the elder Barack, and it seemed to me during the campaign that this was a story that really needed to be told.”