Thread: Files suggest elder Obama forced to leave Harvard

Files suggest elder Obama forced to leave Harvard

By BOB SALSBERG
Associated Press
Published: Friday, Apr. 29, 2011 - 3:14 pm
Last Modified: Friday, Apr. 29, 2011 - 3:31 pm

BOSTON -- President Barack Obama's father was forced to leave Harvard University before completing his Ph.D. in economics because the school was concerned about his personal life and finances, according to newly public immigration records.

Harvard had asked the Immigration and Naturalization Service to delay a request by Barack Hussein Obama Sr. to extend his stay in the U.S., "until they decided what action they could take in order to get rid of him," immigration official M.F. McKeon wrote in a June 1964 memo.

Harvard administrators, the memo stated, "were having difficulty with his financial arrangements and couldn't seem to figure out how many wives he had."

An earlier INS memo from McKeon said that while the elder Obama had passed his exams and was entitled on academic grounds to stay and complete his thesis, the school was going to try and "cook something up to ease him out."

"They are planning on telling him that they will not give him any money, and that he had better return to Kenya and prepare his thesis at home," the memo stated.

In May 1964, David D. Henry, director of Harvard's international office, wrote to Obama to say that, while he had completed his formal course work, the economics department and the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences didn't have the money to support him.

"We have, therefore, come to the conclusion that you should terminate your stay in the United States and return to Kenya to carry on your research and the writing of your thesis," Henry's letter stated.

Obama's request for an extended stay was denied by the INS. He left Harvard and - divorced from president's mother - returned to his native Kenya in July 1964. He did not complete his Ph.D.

The immigration memos, contained in the elder Obama's Immigration and Naturalization file, were given to a Boston Globe reporter in 2009 through a Freedom of Information request. The papers were first made public Wednesday by The Arizona Independent, a weekly newspaper. The Associated Press obtained copies of them on Friday.

Harvard issued a statement Friday saying that it could not find in its own records anything to support the accounts given in the INS memos.

"While we cannot verify accounts of conversations that occurred nearly 50 years ago, a review of our existing files did not find any support for either the language or the implied intent described by the U.S. government official in the government documents," the statement read.

When Obama was attending Harvard, the school faced serious constraints in financing research by international graduate students, the university also said.

Department of Homeland Security spokesman Matt Chandler declined to comment Friday, saying the department does not comment on specific immigration cases.

Concerns about Obama's personal life while he had been studying in the U.S. had been raised previously, according to the INS documents.

In 1961, while he was an undergraduate student at the University of Hawaii, the school's foreign student adviser called an immigration official and said Obama had recently married Stanley Ann Dunham - the president's mother - despite already having a wife in Kenya.

According to a memo written by an INS official in Honolulu, the adviser said Obama had been "running around with several girls since he first arrived here and last summer she cautioned him about his playboy ways."

Obama told the adviser that he had divorced his wife in Kenya. He told the president's mother the same thing, though she would later learn it was a lie.

Obama worked for an oil company and as a government economist after returning to Africa, but his personal and professional life would later deteriorate. He died in a car crash in 1982, when the future president was 21 and a student at Columbia University.

http://www.sacbee.com/2011/04/29/359021 ... orced.html

The immigration memos, contained in the elder Obama's Immigration and Naturalization file, were given to a Boston Globe reporter in 2009 through a Freedom of Information request.

Why would anyone wait this long to report on this info?

That's a really good question. TWO years have elapsed since the reporter making the request got the goods, and it's not even the Globe which is running with the story. It's the Arizona Independent newspaper, from which the Associated Press is also hiving off with a story.

It's pretty amazing what those original documents show, too. The 55 pages are worth a read.

Obvious that the I.N.S. regarded Obama, Sr. as a bigamist and "but for" his not being an immigrant but rather, only a temporary resident while a student, they might have pursued his deportation on that basis. The term "undesirable alien" might still have been floating around in the culture of that era.

There's a memo in the block of documents where it appears that Obama Sr. might have gotten a fellow Kenyan student, in the USA on a student visa, into some kind of trouble which she had to travel to England to solve. She lost her ability to regain entry to the USA after that trip. And there's another memo where the mother of a female (possibly Wife #3???) was contacting the immigration people and getting frantic about her daughter going off to Africa and chase after a man with too many wives already.

Tracked down a little more of an answer.

Person who filed the FOIA appears to be this Globe reporter:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaki ... raise.html

Sally Jacobs, Globe Staff

Apparently referring to herself, she explains she got the documents as research for a book.


For Obama, then 30 and widely expected to be a key player back home in newly independent Kenya, Harvard's decision was disastrous. Lacking the degree for which he so yearned, Obama embarked on an erratic career path that never lived up to his early promise. The INS documents, released to this reporter through a Freedom Of Information Act request in 2009 in the course of research on a biography of the elder Obama, reveal Harvard's crucial role in the tumultuous course of Obama's life. The documents were made public Wednesday by the weekly newspaper The Arizona Independent.

So she wasn't working under deadline pressure for a news story, but rather, working on a book. But still ... the info is pretty interesting. Also interesting that OTHER reporters haven't sought it out or, if they have, that they haven't used it for news reporting. They can't ALL be working on no-deadline "books" ...

Obama's father forced out at Harvard
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/53968.html

BOSTON — President Barack Obama’s father was forced to leave Harvard University before completing his Ph.D. in economics because the school was concerned about his personal life and finances, according to newly public immigration records.

Harvard had asked the Immigration and Naturalization Service to delay a request by Barack Hussein Obama Sr. to extend his stay in the U.S., “until they decided what action they could take in order to get rid of him,â€

Looks like Daddy was a bad boy.