In August 2008, back when it mattered, the Washington Post ran a 10,000-word article by its Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Maraniss titled, “Though Obama Had to Leave to Find Himself, It Is Hawaii That Made His Rise Possible.” For reasons that will soon become clear, Maraniss should have excused himself from this assignment once he discovered the identity of the man in Hawaii who made that rise possible.
Barack Obama referred to this man in his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father,as “Frank.” If there was any mystery to Frank’s identity, Gerald Horne, a leftist scholar from the University of Houston, dispelled it in a March 2007 speech. Horne identified “Frank” as “an African-American poet and journalist by the name of Frank Marshall Davis.”
Davis, Horne acknowledged, “was certainly in the orbit of the CP – if not a member.” Horne was pulling his punches. “Here are the facts and they are indisputable,” wrote historian Paul Kengor in his insightful 2012 book, The Communist — Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor. “Frank Marshall Davis was a pro-Soviet, pro-Red China, card-carrying member of Communist Party (CPUSA). His Communist Party card number was 47544.”
The Communist
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As Kengor observed, Obama dedicated 2500 words in Dreams to Davis, who “surfaces repeatedly from start to finish, from Hawaii to Los Angeles to Chicago to Germany to Kenya… from the 1970s to the 1980s to the 1990s.” Indeed, the two were sufficiently close that the young Obama wrote two poems about Davis — a story I broke in February 2010 — and Davis appears to have written one poem about Obama. I should add that in addition to being a card-carrying communist, Davis was a bisexual pornographer with at least a fictional taste for sex with minors.
Horne did not deny Davis’s influence; he called it “decisive.” In fact, Horne implied that Obama “decamped to Chicago” as a way of “retracing the steps of Davis.” The Davis name had lingering resonance in Chicago, Davis’ adopted city. When Obama first arrived there in 1985, the city’s most influential columnist was Davis protégé Vernon Jarrett. His daughter-in-law Valerie emerged, of course, as Obama’s closest adviser.
The Davis-Obama relationship should have mattered. It did to Horne. Said Horne in the conclusion of his 2007 speech, “At some point in the future, a teacher will add to her syllabus Barack’s memoir and instruct her students to read it alongside Frank Marshall Davis’ equally affecting memoir, ‘Living the Blues.’” That future would have to wait at least until after Obama was elected and reelected. Until then, it was all quiet on the mainstream front.
No journalist risked more of his reputation in this conspiracy of silence than did David Maraniss. Incredibly, in his August 2008 article on Obama’s Hawaii years, the only “Davis” Maraniss cited was Miles Davis, the jazz great who allegedly made Obama’s adolescent playlist. Maraniss had no excuse for not knowing. New Zealand blogger extraordinaire Trevor Loudon picked up the Davis story immediately after Horne opened the door on it in March 2007, and Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media, among others, followed up on the work of Horne and Loudon.
