[Vision2020] Who Wrote Dreams From My Father?

[No Weatherman]

Who Wrote Dreams From My Father?
By Jack Cashill

Prior to 1990, when Barack Obama contracted to write Dreams From My
Father, he had written very close to nothing. Then, five years later,
this untested 33 year-old produced what Time Magazine has called —
with a straight face — "the best-written memoir ever produced by an
American politician."

The public is asked to believe Obama wrote Dreams From My Father on
his own, almost as though he were some sort of literary idiot savant.
I do not buy this canard for a minute, not at all. Writing is as much
a craft as, say, golf. To put this in perspective, imagine if a friend
played a few rounds in the high 90s and then a few years later,
without further practice, made the PGA Tour. It doesn't happen.

And yet, given the biases of the literary establishment, no reviewer
of note has so much as questioned Obama's role in the writing, then or
now. As the New York Times gushed, Obama was "that rare politician who
can write . . . and write movingly and genuinely about himself." These
accolades matter all the more because Obama has built his political
persona around his presumably superior intellect, Dreams being exhibit
A.

Shy of a confession by those involved, I will not be able to prove
conclusively that Obama did not write this book. As shall be seen,
however, there are only two real possibilities: one is that Obama
experienced a near miraculous turnaround in his literary abilities;
the second is that he had major editorial help, up to and including a
ghostwriter.

The weight of the evidence overwhelming favors the latter conclusion
and strongly suggests who that ghostwriter is. In that this remains
something of a work in progress, I am willing to test my hypothesis
against any standard of proof and appreciate any and all good leads.

In my career in advertising and publishing, I have reviewed the
portfolios of a thousand professional writers, all of them crowded
with writing samples, but only a handful of these writers would have
been capable of having a written a book as stylish as Dreams. I have
also written a book on intellectual fraud, Hoodwinked, and examined
any number of bogus biographies that excited the literary left to the
point of complicity, Edward Said's and Rigoberta Menchu's prominent
among them, Menchu winning a Nobel Prize for hers. Obama's ascent
seems to follow a century-old pattern.

Tracing Obama's literary ascent is complicated by what Politico.com
calls a "scant paper trail." That trail begins at Occidental College
whose literary magazine published two of Obama's poems — "Pop" and
"Underground" — in 1981. Obama calls it some "very bad poetry," and he
does not sell himself short. From "Underground":

Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance . . .

It would be another decade before Obama had anything in print and this
an edited, unsigned student case comment in the Harvard Law Review
unearthed by Politico. Attorneys who reviewed the piece for Politico
described it as "a fairly standard example of the genre."

Of note, Politico reporters Ben Smith and Jeffrey Resner observe that
"the temperate legal language doesn't display the rhetorical heights
that run through his memoir, published a few years later."

Once elected president of the Harvard Law Review — more of a
popularity than a literary contest — Obama contributed not one signed
word to the HLR or any other law journal. As Matthew Franck has
pointed out in National Review Online, "A search of the HeinOnline
database of law journals turns up exactly nothing credited to Obama in
any law review anywhere at any time."

A 1990 New York Times profile on Obama's election as Harvard's first
black president caught the eye of agent Jane Dystel. She persuaded
Poseidon, a small imprint of Simon & Schuster, to authorize a roughly
$125,000 advance for Obama's proposed memoir.

With advance in hand, Obama repaired to Chicago where he dithered. At
one point, in order to finish without interruption, he and wife
Michelle decamped to Bali. Obama was supposed to have finished the
book within a year. Bali or not, advance or no, he could not. He was
surely in way over his head.

According to a surprisingly harsh 2006 article by liberal publisher
Peter Osnos, which detailed the "ruthlessness" of Obama's literary
ascent, Simon & Schuster canceled the contract. Dystel did not give
up. She solicited Times Book, the division of Random House at which
Osnos was publisher. He met with Obama, took his word that he could
finish the book, and authorized a new advance of $40,000.

Then suddenly, somehow, the muse descended on Obama and transformed
him from a struggling, unschooled amateur, with no paper trail beyond
an unremarkable legal note and a poem about fig-stomping apes, into a
literary superstar.

To be sure, it is not unusual for successful politicians to hire
ghostwriters — John McCain gives due credit to Mark Salter for his
memoir, Faith of My Fathers — but it is highly unusual for unknown
young Chicago lawyers to hire ghostwriters.

I have attempted to contact Dystel by phone and email without success.
It is highly unlikely she refashioned the book, and Osnos admittedly
did not. If my suspicions are correct, the ghost on this book shared
many of Obama's sentiments, spoke his language and spent considerable
time reworking the text.

I bought Bill Ayers' 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, for reasons unrelated
to this project. As I discovered, he writes surprisingly well and very
much like "Obama." In fact, my first thought was that the two may have
shared the same ghostwriter. Unlike Dreams, however, where the high
style is intermittent, Fugitive Days is infused with the authorial
voice in every sentence. What is more, when Ayers speaks, even off the
cuff, he uses a cadence and vocabulary consistent with his memoir. One
does not hear any of Dreams in Obama's casual speech.

Obama's memoir was published in June 1995. Earlier that year, Ayers
helped Obama, then a junior lawyer at a minor law firm, get appointed
chairman of the multi-million dollar Chicago Annenberg Challenge
grant. In the fall of that same year, 1995, Ayers and his wife,
Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn, helped blaze Obama's path to political
power with a fundraiser in their Chicago home.

In short, Ayers had the means, the motive, the time, the place and the
literary ability to jumpstart Obama's career. And, as Ayers had to
know, a lovely memoir under Obama's belt made for a much better resume
than an unfulfilled contract over his head.

For simplicity sake, I will refer to the author of Dreams as "Obama."
Without question, he contributed much of the book's raw material,
especially the long-winded accounting of events and conversations,
polished just well enough to pass muster. The book's fierce, succinct
and tightly coiled social analysis more closely matches the style of
Fugitive Days, a much tighter book.

Ayers and Obama have a good deal in common. In the way of background,
both grew up in comfortable white households and have struggled to
find an identity as righteous black men ever since. Just as Obama
resisted "the pure and heady breeze of privilege" to which he was
exposed as a child, Ayers too resisted "white skin privilege" or at
least tried to.

"I also thought I was black," says Ayers only half-jokingly. As proof
of his righteousness, Ayers named his first son "Malik" after the
newly Islamic Malcolm X and the second son "Zayd" after Zayd Shakur, a
Black Panther killed in a shootout that claimed the life of a New
Jersey State Trooper.

Tellingly, Ayers, like Obama, began his career as a self-described
"community organizer," Ayers in inner-city Cleveland, Obama in
inner-city Chicago. In short, Ayers was fully capable of crawling
inside Obama's head and relating in superior prose what the Dreams'
author calls a "rage at the white world [that] needed no object."

Indeed, in Dreams, it is on the subject of black rage that Obama
writes most eloquently. Phrases like "full of inarticulate
resentments," "unruly maleness," "unadorned insistence on respect" and
"withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage" lace the book.

In Fugitive Days, "rage" rules and in high style as well. Ayers tells
of how his "rage got started" and how it evolved into an
"uncontrollable rage — fierce frenzy of fire and lava." Indeed, the
Weathermen's inaugural act of mass violence was the "Days of Rage" in
1969 Chicago.

As in Chicago, that rage led Ayers to a sentiment with which Obama was
altogether familiar, "audacity!" Ayers writes, "I felt the warrior
rising up inside of me — audacity and courage, righteousness, of
course, and more audacity." This is one of several references.

The combination of audacity and rage has produced two memoirs that
follow oddly similar rules. Ayers describes his as "a memory book,"
one that deliberately blurs facts and changes identities and makes no
claims at history. Obama says much the same. In Dreams, some
characters are composites. Some appear out of precise chronology.
Names have been changed.

As a control, allow me to introduce my own book, Sucker Punch, which
is no small part a memoir about race, specifically in my relationship,
at great remove, with Muhammad Ali and the world of boxing. In the
book, I describe my own unreconstructed coming of age in racially
charged Newark, New Jersey as it happened. I change no names, create
no composite characters, alter no chronologies. Most memoirs observe
the same conventions. Dreams and Fugitive Days, however, are both
suffused with repeated reference to lies, lying and what Ayers calls,
in his pitch perfect post-modern patois, "our constructed reality."

"But another part of me knew that what I was telling them was a lie,"
writes Obama, "something I'd constructed from the scraps of
information I'd picked up from my mother."

"That whole first year seemed like one long lie," Obama writes of his
first year in college in Los Angeles, one of at least a dozen
references to lies and lying in "Dreams," a figure nearly matched in
"Fugitive Days."

The reader knows that Ayers — with some justification — has much to
hide. He senses that Obama does too, but he is never quite sure why.
This presumed poetic license leads to the frequent manipulation of
dates to make a political point.

"I saw a dead body once, as I said, when I was ten, during the Korean
War," writes Ayers. This correlation is important enough that Ayers
mentions it twice. The only problem is that Ayers was eight when the
Korean War ended.

Obama tells us that when he was ten, he and his family visited the
mainland. On the trip, back in their motel room, they watched the
Watergate Hearings on TV. The problem, of course, is that those
hearing started just before Obama turned twelve.

One could forgive a single missed date, but inconsistent dates and
numbers appear frequently in both books and often reinforce some
moment of lost innocence. In the same spirit, both books abound in
detail too closely remembered and conversations too well recorded.
These moments in both books occasionally lead to an awareness of the
nation's seemingly ineradicable racism.

In 1970, for instance, the 9-year-old Obama alleges to be visiting the
American embassy Indonesia. While waiting, he chances upon "a
collection of Life magazines neatly displayed in clear plastic
binders."

In one magazine, he reads a story about a black man with an "uneven,
ghostly hue," who has been rendered grotesque by a chemical treatment.
"There were thousands of people like him," Obama learned, "black men
and women back in America who'd undergone the same treatment in
response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person."

Obama's attention to detail is a ruse. Life never ran such an article.
When challenged, Obama claimed it was Ebony. Ebony ran no such article
either. Besides, black was beautiful in 1970.

In a similar vein, Ayers tells of hitching a ride in Missouri with
"Bud," the driver of a "brand-new Peterbilt truck." The man proceeds
to regale Ayers with a string of dirty jokes — at least two of them
retold word for word — before reaching under his seat and pulling out
a large pistol, his "N****r neutralizer."

"White people can never quite remember the scope and scale of the
slavocracy," Ayers reminds the reader again and again, writing as
though he were not a member of this benighted race.

These parallels intrigue perhaps, but they prove little. To add a
little science to the analysis, I identified two similar "nature"
passages in Obama's and Ayers' respective memoirs, the first from
Fugitive Days:

"I picture the street coming alive, awakening from the fury of winter,
stirred from the chilly spring night by cold glimmers of sunlight
angling through the city."

The second from Dreams:

"Night now fell in midafternoon, especially when the snowstorms rolled
in, boundless prairie storms that set the sky close to the ground, the
city lights reflected against the clouds."

These two sentences are alike in more than their poetic sense, their
length and their gracefully layered structure. They tabulate nearly
identically on the Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES), something of a
standard in the field.

The "Fugitive Days" excerpt scores a 54 on reading ease and a 12th
grade reading level. The "Dreams'" excerpt scores a 54.8 on reading
ease and a 12th grade reading level. Scores can range from 0 to 121,
so hitting a nearly exact score matters.

A more reliable data-driven way to prove authorship goes under the
rubric "cusum analysis" or QSUM. This analysis begins with the
measurement of sentence length, a significant and telling variable. To
compare the two books, I selected thirty-sentence sequences from
Dreams and Fugitive Days, each of which relates the author's entry
into the world of "community organizing."

"Fugitive Days" averaged 23.13 words a sentence. "Dreams" averaged
23.36 words a sentence. By contrast, the memoir section of "Sucker
Punch" averaged 15 words a sentence.

Interestingly, the 30-sentence sequence that I pulled from Obama's
conventional political tract, Audacity of Hope, averages more than 29
words a sentence and clocks in with a 9th grade reading level, three
levels below the earlier cited passages from "Dreams" and "Fugitive
Days." The differential in the Audacity numbers should not surprise.
By the time it was published in 2006, Obama was a public figure of
some wealth, one who could afford editors and ghost writers.

The publisher of Dreams, the openly liberal Peter Osnos, tells how
this came to be. According to Osnos, Dreams took off during Obama's
much-publicized race for the U.S. Senate in 2004, nearly ten years
after its modest release. After winning the election, Obama dumped his
devoted long time agent, Jane Dystel, and signed a seven-figure deal
with Crown, using only a by-the-hour attorney.

Obama pulled off the deal before being sworn in as Senator, this way
to avoid the disclosure and reporting requirements applicable to
members of Congress. To his credit, Osnos publicly scolds Obama for
his "ruthlessness" and "his questionable judgment about using public
service as a personal payday."

Unfortunately, the technology is not currently available to do a fully
reliable authorship analysis. As expert in the field Patrick Juola of
Duquesne University observed, "The accuracy simply isn't there." He
cautioned that for high stakes issues like this one, "The
repercussions of a technical error could be a disaster (in either
direction)."

That much said, preliminary QSUM analysis supports an Ayers-Obama
link. Systems designer Ed Gold — with twenty years of high-level
experience in image and signal processing, pattern recognition, and
classifier design and implementation — volunteered to run a QSUM scan
on multiple excerpts from both memoirs. "I have completed the
analysis," he wrote me, "and I think you will be pleased with the
findings." In assessing the signature of sample passages from Dreams,
he found "a very strong match to all of the Ayers samples that I
processed."

Like Juola, Gold recognized the limitations of the process and of his
own resources. He has volunteered to make the raw data available to
more established authorship authentication experts, and I will be
happy to pass that data along. Gold saw the complementary value,
however, in text analysis, as did Juola, who encouraged me "to do what
you're already doing . . . good old-fashioned literary detective
work."

Given that advice, I dug deeper into both memoirs and established one
metaphoric thread that ties the two books together in a way I believe
is just shy of conclusive, a thread that leads back to Bill Ayers's
stint, after dropping out of college, as a merchant seaman.

"I'd thought that when I signed on that I might write an American
novel about a young man at sea," says Ayers in his memoir, Fugitive
Days, "but I didn't have it in me."

The experience had a powerful impact on Ayers. Years later, he would
recall a nightmare he had while crossing the Atlantic, "a vision of
falling overboard in the middle of the ocean and swimming as fast as I
could as the ship steamed off and disappeared over the horizon."

Although Ayers has tried to put his anxious ocean-going days behind
him, the language of the sea will not let him go. "I realized that no
one else could ever know this singular experience," Ayers writes of
his maritime adventures. Yet curiously, much of this same nautical
language flows through Obama's earth-bound memoir.

"Memory sails out upon a murky sea," Ayers writes at one point.
Indeed, both he and Obama are obsessed with memory and its
instability. The latter writes of its breaks, its blurs, its edges,
its lapses. Obama also has a fondness for the word "murky" and its
aquatic usages.

"The unlucky ones drift into the murky tide of hustles and odd jobs,"
he writes, one of four times "murky" appears in Dreams. Ayers and
Obama also speak often of waves and wind, Obama at least a dozen times
on wind alone. "The wind wipes away my drowsiness, and I feel suddenly
exposed," he writes in a typical passage. Both also make conspicuous
use of the word "flutter."

Not surprisingly, Ayers uses "ship" as a metaphor with some frequency.
Early in the book he tells us that his mother is "the captain of her
own ship," not a substantial one either but "a ragged thing with fatal
leaks" launched into a "sea of carelessness."

Obama too finds himself "feeling like the first mate on a sinking
ship." He also makes a metaphorical reference to "a tranquil sea."
More intriguing is Obama's use of the word "ragged" as an adjective as
in the highly poetic "ragged air" or "ragged laughter."

Both books use "storms" and "horizons" both as metaphor and as
reality. Ayers writes poetically of an "unbounded horizon," and Obama
writes of "boundless prairie storms" and poetic horizons-"violet
horizon," "eastern horizon," "western horizon."

Ayers often speaks of "currents" and "pockets of calm" as does Obama,
who uses both as nouns as in "a menacing calm" or "against the
current" or "into the current." The metaphorical use of the word
"tangled" might also derive from one's nautical adventures. Ayers
writes of his "tangled love affairs" and Obama of his "tangled
arguments."

In Dreams, we read of the "whole panorama of life out there" and in
Fugitive Days, "the whole weird panorama." Ayers writes of still
another panorama, this one "an immense panorama of waste and cruelty."
Obama employs the word "cruel" and its derivatives no fewer than
fourteen times in Dreams.

On at least twelve occasions, Obama speaks of "despair," as in the
"ocean of despair." Ayers speaks of a "deepening despair," a constant
theme for him as well. Obama's "knotted, howling assertion of self"
sounds like something from the pages of Jack London's "The Sea Wolf."

In Obama's defense, he did grow up in Hawaii. Still, the short Hawaii
stretch of his memoir is largely silent on the island's natural
appeal. Sucker Punch again offers a useful control. It makes no
reference at all, metaphorical or otherwise, to ships, seas, oceans,
calms, storms, wind, waves, horizons, panoramas, or to things howling,
fluttering, knotted, ragged, tangled, or murky. None. And yet I have
spent a good chunk of every summer of my life at the ocean.

If there is any one paragraph in Dreams that has convinced me of
Ayers' involvement it is this one, in which Obama describes the Black
Nationalist message:

"A steady attack on the white race . . . served as the ballast that
could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from
tipping into an ocean of despair."

As a writer, especially in the pre-Google era of Dreams, I would never
have used a metaphor as specific as "ballast" unless I knew exactly
what I was talking about. Seaman Ayers most surely did.

One more item of interest. In his 1997 book, A Kind and Just Parent,
Bill Ayers walks the reader through his Hyde Park neighborhood and
identifies the notable residents therein. Among them are Muhammad Ali,
"Minister" Louis Farrakhan (of whom he writes fondly), "former mayor"
Eugene Sawyer, "poets" Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Alexander, and
"writer" Barack Obama.

In 1997, Obama was an obscure state senator, a lawyer, and a law
school instructor with one book under his belt that had debuted two
years earlier to little acclaim and lesser sales. In terms of
identity, he had more in common with Mayor Sawyer than poet Brooks.
The "writer" identification seems forced and purposefully so, a signal
perhaps to those in the know of a persona in the making that Ayers had
himself helped forge.

None of this, of course, proves Ayers' authorship conclusively, but
the evidence makes him a much more likely candidate than Obama to have
written the best parts of Dreams.

The Obama camp could put all such speculation to rest by producing
some intermediary sign of impending greatness — a school paper, an
article, a notebook, his Columbia thesis, his LSAT scores — but Obama
guards these more zealously than Saddam did his nuclear secrets. And I
suspect, at the end of the day, we will pay an equally high price for
Obama's concealment as Saddam's.

Jack Cashill is the author, among other books, of Hoodwinked: How
Intellectual Hucksters Hijacked American Culture. He has a Ph.D. in
American studies from Purdue University.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/who_wrote_dreams_from_my_fathe_1.html