The White Girlfriends Obama Erased from His Past: How the President Airbrushed His Romantic History to Burnish His Credentials as a Black Leader

When Genevieve Cook first met Barack Obama in the kitchen of a mutual friend’s New York flat, he was wearing jeans, a T-shirt and a dark leather jacket.

It was 1983, and she was impressed when this cool, self-assured young man could tell immediately she was Australian.

In those days most Americans, even supposedly cosmopolitan New Yorkers, couldn’t tell a Cockney from a Kiwi.

But Obama had met many Aussies while living in Indonesia as a young boy with his mother and stepfather, and it turned out he and Cook — the daughter of a prominent diplomat — had lived in the country at the same time.

As the night wore on, they sat close together on an orange beanbag in the hall while Cook swigged Baileys Irish Cream straight from the bottle.

They were amazed at how much they had in common: both were children of divorced parents, both had lived all over the world and had never felt truly at home anywhere.

They exchanged phone numbers and the self-assured Obama didn’t waste time. Within days, he was cooking her dinner at his apartment.

‘Then we went and talked in his bedroom,’ Cook recalled. ‘And then I spent the night with him.

‘It all felt very inevitable.’

The U.S. president and his First Lady sometimes seem so well-suited to each other that it’s hard to imagine there ever having been any woman in his life other than the formidable Michelle, whom he met while working for a Chicago law firm in 1989.

Obama has reinforced this notion by making only fleeting mention of ex-girlfriends in his carefully calibrated memoirs, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.

He gives the impression of a man in such a hurry to save the world that he had no time for such distractions as romance.

But now, in a blistering new biography, Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist David Maraniss has pulled his exes out of the shadows.

In so doing, he has revealed an unflattering picture of a president so desperate to sell an image of himself as a pioneering race warrior that he has air-brushed many of the ‘white’ elements from his life — including that string of well-heeled, well-educated white girlfriends.

Obama’s version of events, in his autobiography, is a moving story of a mixed-race child struggling to find his black identity after being deserted as a young child by his Kenyan father.

It tells how his grandfather was imprisoned by the British for helping the Mau Mau rebels in Kenya — an assertion that Obama’s step-grandmother later embellished with claims he was also tortured — for which Maraniss found no evidence.

Delighted Republican opponents are picking over the inconsistencies (38 at the last count) between Obama’s own memoirs — published in 1995 as he prepared to launch his political career — and the facts uncovered by Maraniss.

Time and again, Obama, who has had to fight hard to convince other African Americans of his ‘black credibility’, appears to have burnished his radical credentials, not least by playing up the roles of black people in his life and playing down the roles of the white.

And nowhere is this more apparent than in his romantic life.

For Genevieve Cook — to whom admittedly the President alludes in his memoirs — wasn’t the first white girlfriend in his life, nor the last.

As a young student in the early Eighties at Occidental College, a small arts university in Los Angeles, Obama developed a serious crush on another student Alexandra McNear, who was co-editor of a college literary magazine which published two of Obama’s poems.

McNear, described by Maraniss as ‘lithe and mysterious, with the face of a young Meryl Streep and a literary bohemian air’, had just the sort of rarefied upbringing that might impress an ambitious young man.

Both her parents were established writers and her father, Erskine McNear, was the scion of a property empire. In the summer of 1981, Obama and McNear moved to New York, she to do a theatre course, he to finish his degree at Columbia University, so he could explore his black identity in a more African American city.

Far away from family and friends, Obama’s first summer in the Big Apple in 1981 might have been lonely but, suggests Maraniss, for the presence of McNear.

She recalls admiring his intellect, his sense of humour and his good looks.

After a first date at a dimly lit Italian restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, they embarked on a two-month affair.

She remembers it as a ‘summer of walking miles in the city, lingering over meals at restaurants, hanging out at the apartments, visiting art museums and talking about life’.

McNear, described by Maraniss as ‘lithe and mysterious, with the face of a young Meryl Streep and a literary bohemian air’, had just the sort of rarefied upbringing that might impress an amibitious young man.

Both her parents were established writers and her father, Erskine McNear, was the scion of a property empire. In the summer of 1981, Obama and McNear moved to New York, she to do a theatre course, he to finish his degree at Columbia University, so he could explore his black identity in a more African American city.

Far away from family and friends, Obama’s first summer in the Big Apple in 1981 might have been lonely but, suggests Maraniss, for the presence of McNear.

She recalls admiring his intellect, his sense of humour and his good looks.

After a first date at a dimly lit Italian restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, they embarked on a two-month affair.

She remembers it as a ‘summer of walking miles in the city, lingering over meals at restaurants, hanging out at the apartments, visiting art museums and talking about life’.

She was three years older than him, and an assistant teacher at a private school in Brooklyn.

As Maraniss observes, ‘there had been girlfriends before her but none quite like Genevieve,’ who ‘engaged him in the deepest romantic relationship of his young life’.

Cook is mentioned in Obama’s memoirs as a mystery woman.

While never naming her, he wrote: ‘There was a woman in New York that I loved. She was white. She had dark hair with specks of green in her eyes.

‘Her voice sounded like a wind chime. We saw each other for almost a year.’

She shared many of Obama’s obsessions. The daughter of a former Australian ambassador to the U.S., and a moneyed art historian who later remarried into a prominent American family, Genevieve, too, religiously kept a diary.

And, like Obama, she had a burning passion to save the world.

Within two months of meeting, they were seeing each other every Thursday night and at weekends.

On Sundays, he would lounge around in his cheap, cockroach-infested flat in the less salubrious end of the Upper West Side, bare-chested in a blue and white sarong as he drank coffee and did the New York Times crossword.

His bedroom, she recalls, smelt of ‘running sweat, Brut spray deodorant and smoking’.

He loved to cook and they would read together and discuss writers into the night.

Like McNear, Cook was attracted by the ‘mental exhilaration’ of his intellect, marvelling at how mature he was at 22, but dismayed by his remoteness and wariness about commitment.

Needless to say, he was as self-obsessed as ever.

When she told him that she loved him, his response was not ‘I love you, too,’ but ‘thank you’.

Cook described him as ‘an uncommon, earnest young man’ and confided to her diary: ‘He is very beautiful — more than he thinks himself to be.’

But there was another side to him she found unsettling.

‘The sexual warmth is definitely there — but the rest of it has sharp edges and I’m finding it all unsettling,’ she wrote.

‘His warmth can be deceptive. Though he speaks sweet words and can be open and trusting, there is also that coolness.’

They often talked about race and Obama would confide that he felt like an ‘imposter’ as there was ‘hardly a black bone in his body’.

She eventually told him he ‘needed to go black’ (to date a black woman), whereas he countered that he would never find a black woman ‘he would feel truly comfortable with’.

They moved into a flat together but their intellectual discussions eventually turned into fights over issues like the washing-up.

In the end, Cook tired of his emotional ‘withheld-ness, his lack of spontaneity’, and broke up with him in 1985.

Cook insists she couldn’t have been more sympathetic about his confusion over his racial identity but that’s not how Obama portrayed it in his memoirs.

He recounts taking his New York girlfriend to see a black play after which she ‘started talking about why black people are so angry all the time’.

They had a ‘big fight’ in front of the theatre and she burst into tears and said she couldn’t be black.

All very dramatic but Cook insisted to Maraniss that it never happened.

The only play she saw with Obama was entirely different — British actress Billie Whitelaw performing a monologue written by Samuel Beckett, And there had been no row over race, she said.

Obama had to admit to Maraniss the incident happened not with Cook in New York but with someone else, though he wouldn’t elaborate.

Did it really happen? He mixed dates and places to protect former girlfriends’ identities, he said.

Soon after that period, he made strides in his career, moving to Chicago to work as a community organiser.

In a moment of acute foresight, Cook had told her diary that while she was not the woman for Obama, ‘that lithe, bubbly, strong black lady is waiting somewhere’.

She may or may not be ‘bubbly’, but ‘strong’ certainly sums up Michelle Obama.

However, before Obama met Michelle, he went on to have a relationship with another white woman in Chicago.

The woman, who like Cook was an anthropology graduate, was barely mentioned in Obama’s memoirs, but by then he was trying to establish his African-American credentials by toiling in an impoverished and predominantly black area of Chicago.

Maraniss does not identify this new woman either, but says the relationship was ‘serious’ and ‘ended much like the one with Genevieve, when Obama was ready to make his next career move’.

Within four years, he had met Michelle in Chicago and the rest we know. Obama finally had the partnership he wanted history to record — with a strong black woman, a descendant of slaves who had pushed her way up from humble roots.

But she, at least, is not a ‘dream’, unlike some of the other fantasies in his own autobiography.