When the first half of Barack Obama’s long overdue memoir, Promised Land, is published on November 17, I expect to receive calls like the one I received in the spring of 2011. That call came from a fellow named Michael Cohen. I did not recognize the name at the time. Nor did I know how Cohen got my cell number. He explained that he was the attorney for Donald Trump — I did recognize that name — and he wanted to know what I knew about Barack Obama’s origins.
Ever since I first started questioning the authorship of Obama’s 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, I would occasionally get calls like this from people of a higher pay grade than mine. Having followed the birth certificate issue only from a distance, I recommended instead that Trump focus on the authorship question. As I explained to Cohen, although Obama claimed to have written both his books by himself, he definitely had help, much of it from terrorist turned educator Bill Ayers. This I deduced from my literary forensic work in the summer and fall of 2008.
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Mainstream biographer Christopher Andersen confirmed Ayers’s involvement in his Obama-friendly 2009 book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage. Andersen’s sources in Obama’s Hyde Park neighborhood told him that Obama found himself deeply in debt and “hopelessly blocked.” At “Michelle’s urging,” Obama “sought advice from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers.”
What attracted the Obamas were “Ayers’s proven abilities as a writer” as evident in his 1993 book To Teach. Noting that Obama had already taped interviews with many of his relatives, both African and American, Andersen elaborates, “These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes were given to Ayers.” Ayers himself took credit for Dreams on multiple occasions, usually, but not always, with a wink and a nod.
My conversation with Cohen reaffirmed that Trump was the un-Obama, a creature of his own creation: blunt, bombastic, and as subtle as a truck bomb. Unlike most on the right, Trump refused to be intimidated. He was eager and ready to vet the nation’s first unvetted president. On April 15, 2011, Sean Hannity of Fox News gave him the opportunity.
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“I heard he had terrible marks, and he ends up in Harvard,” said Trump in his inimitably artless style. “He wrote a book that was better than Ernest Hemingway, but the second book was written by an average person.”
“You suspect Bill Ayers?” said Hannity.
“I said, Bill Ayers wrote the book,” Trump replied.
Trump had made the claim earlier in a public forum. He doubled
down on Hannity’s show. For all the outrage about Trump’s questioning of Obama’s birth certificate, the mainstream media were noticeably silent about Trump’s much more tangible challenge to Obama’s literary skills. At the time, there was negligible pushback to his remarks about Dreams.