Leading from Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide for Him - Softcover

Miniter, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250031389 ISBN 13: 9781250031389

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2013

Synopsis

Barack Obama has never been fully vetted―until now.

In Leading from Behind, New York Times bestselling investigative journalist Richard Miniter presents the first book to explore President Obama's abilities as a leader, by unearthing new details of his biggest successes and failures. Based on exclusive interviews and never-before-published material, Leading from Behind investigates the secret world of the West Wing and the combative personalities that shape historic events.

Contrary to the White House narrative, which aims to define Obama as a visionary leader, Leading from Behind reveals a president who is indecisive, moody, and often paralyzed by competing political considerations. Many victories―as well as several significant failures―during the Obama presidency are revealed to be the work of strong women, who led when the president did not: then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; and Valerie Jarrett, his closest adviser and an Obama family confidante, whose unusual degree of influence has been a source of conflict with veteran political insiders.

In Leading from Behind, you will learn:

· Why Obama's relationship with Israel was poisoned years before he met Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu

· The real reason for Valerie Jarrett's strong hold over both Barack and Michelle Obama

· ObamaCare wasn't Obama's idea. It was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's. And the real reason he danced to her tune.

· Obama delayed and canceled the mission to kill Osama bin Laden three times and then committed an intelligence blunder that allowed dozens of high-level members of al Qaeda to escape.

· Why Obama destroyed a secret budget deal with House Speaker John Boehner that would have reformed entitlements, slashed spending, and reduced the national debt―without raising taxes

· Why Obama is determined to save Attorney General Eric Holder, even though he has lied and stonewalled Congress about "Operation: Fast and Furious"

· Why Obama removed an elected Christian president of Ivory Coast and replaced him with a Muslim leader who had lost the election

· Why Obama let a U.S. citizen rot in a Cuban prison when Cuban dictator Raul Castro wanted to release him

· Why Obama decided to defy the Tea Party and ditch his plans to end earmarks

In Leading from Behind, Richard Miniter's provocative research offers a dramatic, thoroughly sourced account of President Obama's White House during a time of intense domestic controversy and international turmoil.

About this title

About the Author:

RICHARD MINITER is the author of two top-ten New York Times bestsellers, Losing Bin Laden and Shadow War, as well as Mastermind, the first biography of 9/11 planner Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. He writes a column for Forbes.com. A former editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal in Brussels, member of the investigative team at The Sunday Times in London, and editorial-page editor of the Washington Times, Miniter has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, as well as The Atlantic, Reader's Digest, Newsweek, The New Republic, and National Review. He has appeared on CNN, C-SPAN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC. He has won awards from the National Press Club and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (shared). He lives in Arlington, Virginia.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

CHAPTER 1
THE WOMEN
 
 
 
You can be stylish and powerful, too. That’s Michelle’s advice.
 
—Barack Obama speaking to graduates at Barnard College, May 14, 2012
 
Every examination of a president should begin with the people and events that shaped him. In the case of Barack Obama, four strong-minded women, who intertwined their lives with his, were the most formative: his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham; his wife, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson; his mentor, Valerie Jarrett; and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. Nancy Pelosi, the former House Speaker, also has a starring role, as we will see in chapter 2.
Each continues to play an important part in presidential decision making—though, in his mother’s case, an indirect and perhaps unconscious one.
Stanley Ann Dunham
Her first name was Stanley because her father wanted a boy.
Or perhaps, as Obama’s mother later said, she was named after a Bette Davis character that her mother liked.1 Like many details of Stanley Ann Dunham’s life, the truth is hard to pin down.
Barack Obama’s mother was born in Kansas and moved through a series of American suburbs, from the Midwest to the West and Northwest, throughout her childhood. She inherited her father’s gypsy ways.
Stanley Ann’s father, a difficult man who often forced the family to move, only stayed in one place for the years when he fought in World War II. He had no real career, but a string of unrelated jobs. By contrast, her mother later rose from bank clerk to executive—a role model for her young and increasingly independent daughter.
In high school, Stanley Ann was “bookish” and prone to disappear with fast-driving boys who were willing to drive from Washington State to California for a weekend lark. Obama, himself, would later become an avid reader with a penchant for mysterious adventures, such as his 1981 trip to Pakistan. It wasn’t an official college trip and was not connected to any course of study. He had no friends there and the war-torn, poor country was hardly a tourist destination. He likely went for the same whimsical reasons his mother took sudden and strange trips in her teens and twenties: a desire for dramatic personal adventure.
Swept up in the progressive causes of the early 1960s, Stanley Ann attended Russian language classes at the University of Hawaii, where she met a foreign student from Kenya. His name was Barack Obama. He was interested in Soviet economics, smoked a beloved pipe, and spoke with a British-colonial accent. She found him romantic and exotic.
Shortly after John F. Kennedy’s election, Stanley Ann and Barack Sr. conceived a baby, Barack Jr., but they never lived together.
The union didn’t last. Barack Sr. went on to study at Harvard and later married an American woman he met there. They settled in Nairobi and had several children together. His career as civil servant ended abruptly when he published an article in an African academic journal, in which he faulted Kenya’s revolutionary leader, Jomo Kenyatta, for failing to adopt a consistent Maoist line on economic policy. (Kenyatta was initially fonder of Soviet thinking, as Barack Obama Sr. had been in his university days. And, the new leader of an independent Kenya didn’t tolerate criticism.)
Stumbling drunkenly, Obama’s father was struck by a car on a crowded street in Kenya’s capital city. As a result of his injuries, a surgeon amputated both of his legs. Two decades later, the gifted student of languages and economics died penniless. He did not live to see his son’s rise.
Meanwhile, Stanley Ann had moved on and had married another foreign student whom she met at the University of Hawaii, Lolo Soetoro. Within a year, the new family had decamped to Indonesia. Barack Jr. was just six years old.2
*   *   *
On that island archipelago, Muslim radicals and Maoist revolutions clashed while seeking to topple Indonesia’s iron-fisted dictator.
There was a clash inside Obama, too. He simply didn’t fit in there. Native children taunted him and sometimes threw stones. He was new, and his grasp of their language was poor.
The few strangers he could speak to in English were American oil executives who would come to his adopted father’s house to discuss deals over dinner. His mother didn’t like them and said they were shallow and materialistic. While they lived in compounds with servants, hers was a small house on a busy street in a native neighborhood. Young Obama was not encouraged to befriend the children of the American executives. He grew without the company of his countrymen or his extended family.
No part of his identity was solidly locked in place. He was neither white nor black; neither American nor Asian nor African; neither Christian nor Muslim. His adoptive father didn’t practice his own religion (Islam) and his mother (nominally Christian) mocked all religions. Obama’s former teacher in Indonesia, Israella Pareira, said: “His mother was white, his father was Indonesian, and here was a black, chubby boy with curly hair. It was a big question mark for us.”3
And it was for him, too, as Obama later wrote.
The little guidance he received from his mother about Christianity was dismissive. First, he attended a Roman Catholic school, an experience he later recounted: “When it came time to pray, I would close my eyes, then peek around the room. Nothing happened. No angels descended. Just a parched old nun and thirty brown children, muttering words.”4 The irreligious views of his mother were stamped on him early, and firmly.
He then moved to a Muslim neighborhood and attended a Muslim school.5 Obama sometimes attended the local mosque with his stepfather. Some of the president’s critics, both Democrats and Republicans, have focused on the fact that Obama’s school registration card, at both the Catholic and Muslim schools in Indonesia, identified him as a “Muslim.” They miss something more important: Obama was given no distinctive religious identity, nothing to hold on to. “Muslim” was assumed by form-fillers because his father was Muslim and nearly everyone else in Indonesia was.
Life in Indonesia was always changing. Obama shared a home with tropical birds, monkeys, and small crocodiles. When one pet died, another of a different species replaced it. Nothing continued or endured, except his mother.
When not in the care of his mother or stepfather, a nanny cared for him—one who was every bit as exotic as Obama’s pets.6 He was openly gay, dated the local butcher, and played street volleyball with a team of transvestites named the Fantastic Dolls.7
Soon, the nanny was fired. Nothing lasted.
Still, Obama tried to make a home there, and imagined a larger life for himself. When a visitor asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said, “Oh, prime minister.”8
But that was not to be. Stanley Ann Dunham’s marriage to Soetoro dissolved after barely seven years. She never remarried.
Obama returned to the United States in 1971, but not to any sort of stability.9
*   *   *
Stanley Ann Dunham and young Barack Obama returned to Hawaii and, briefly, moved in with her parents. She earned a master’s degree, in anthropology, at the University of Hawaii in 1974. She wanted to write a dissertation about iron-working techniques of rural Indonesians, though she had no plans to teach, and the esoteric subject had no commercial applications.
Yet, to complete her PhD, she had to return to Indonesia—without her son, who was just entering his combustible teen years. She later said leaving her son was the single hardest thing she had ever done.10
Still, she wanted to be alone with her books and her thoughts. After an internal debate, she left.
*   *   *
This decision undoubtedly shaped young Barack Obama. The only constant in his ever-changing life, in which people and countries suddenly disappeared in the oval-shaped window of a jet plane, had been his mother. Now she, too, was gone. He was barely ten.
Dunham’s biographer was an enterprising New York Times contributor named Janny Scott. “When people learned that I was working on a book on the president’s mother the question I encountered most often was: ‘Do you like her?’ Sometimes people asked, ‘Was she nice?’ The line of questioning puzzled me: Why were these the first things people wanted me to know? Gradually, it became apparent that those questions were a way of approaching the subject of Ann’s decision to live apart from her child. They were followed by ruminations on how a mother could do such a thing. As many Americans see it, a mother belongs with her child, and no extenuating circumstances can explain the perversity of choosing to be elsewhere. Ann’s decision was a transgression that people thirty-five years later could neither understand nor forgive.”11
Did this intensify Obama’s inclination to stand apart from people? Strangely, his mother’s biographer doesn’t consider the question. But it undoubtedly did.
Stanley Ann’s other child is Barack’s half sister Maya. “It was one of those things where she [Stanley Ann] felt like, ‘Well, life is what it is.’ She gained a great deal” in terms of personal discovery and intellectual development. “The transition may have been difficult, but look...”12
So Obama learned to live in his own head. It was safer there.
*   *   *
In Hawaii, he lived with his grandparents, whom he called “Gramps” and “Toot,” from the fifth grade until he graduated from Punahou, a private prep school, eight years later.13
Obama learned early that connections matter. He later wrote that...

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1250031389
• ISBN 13: 9781250031389
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304