As president, Barack Obama is many things — many
unprecedented things. There’s the commendable: the truly
historic achievement (with apologies to Bill Clinton) of being the
first black president. There’s the dubious: the lamentable
distinction (christened by Newt Gingrich) of being the first “food
stamp president.”
But here’s an intriguing, provocative thought: Is Barack Obama
our first “Red Diaper Baby” president? Gee, that would be
unprecedented.
Now, before deeming the question over-the-top, out-of-bounds,
and unnecessarily incendiary, hear me out:
I come at this question as a Cold War historian and as the guy
who wrote
the book on Obama’s mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, a hardcore
communist. And the thought is not my own. It was posed to me last
week by an emailer, and I’m surprised the thought never once
crossed my Cold Warrior mind, particularly given the daily
questions that I field about Obama’s past, the communists in
Obama’s past, and even whether Obama himself is a communist. I’ve
heard them all. I’ve considered those questions from every angle,
and yet, this one never occurred to me.
Moreover, a critical clarification: If Barack Obama is a Red
Diaper Baby, it doesn’t mean he’s a communist. I’ve met many
conservative anti-communists who were born and raised Red Diaper
Babies, only to flee their parents’ politics like the plague. They
contact me, “Hi, professor Kengor, my name is [fill in the blank]
and I’m the classic Red Diaper Baby. Let me tell you my
story….”
There have been studies and books (some by university presses)
on Red Diaper Babies. One of them,
Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left, an edited
volume by Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro, includes chapter
contributions from the likes of Carl Bernstein, the Washington
Post reporter of Watergate fame. Bernstein is not a
communist.
So, the question of Obama’s red diapers was just posed to me. I
discussed it with Ron Radosh, a fellow historian of the Cold War
and communism. Radosh himself, in his youth, was a communist. He
wrote a terrific memoir called
Commies. Radosh knew Red Diaper Babies by the
nursery-load, and he understands the phenomenon not only personally
but historically and as a scholar.
“I and everyone else who uses the term ‘Red Diaper Baby,’” says
Radosh, defining his terms, “do so to define anyone whose parents
were either CPUSA members or fellow-travelers, and who therefore
grew up in the milieu of the Party and its front groups.” Radosh, a
professor emeritus of history at the City University of New York,
adds: “Obama fits that definition.”
Indeed, Obama seems to fit that definition. Consider:
Barack Obama’s mother and father met in a Russian language class
at the University of Hawaii in the fall of 1960. Their choice of
study was a reflection of political interests. As one sympathetic
biographer, Sally Jacobs, said of Barack senior, “Obama had an
abiding interest in the Soviet Union.”
Jacobs has published the preeminent biographical work on the
senior Obama. Among those she quotes is Naranhkiri Tith, a
prominent Cambodian who became professor of international economics
at the prestigious Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International
Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Tith was a classmate of Barack
senior at the University of Hawaii. The two had frequent, spirited
debates over subjects like communism, an ideology that would ravage
Tith’s native Cambodia, where Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge slaughtered 1-2
million out of population of 5-7 million in just four years.
“Obama and I were on opposite poles,” says Tith. “I did not
believe communism could save the world. It was too good to be true
and I gave examples of what I had seen. Obama senior was the
opposite. He was always glorying about how communism had liberated
Africa and Cuba. He had no idea what communism was all about. For
him, communism was going to save the world. Capitalism was going to
collapse.”
The senior Obama found a more receptive audience in Ann Dunham.
A radical leftist, Dunham questioned the American way. As Sally
Jacobs put it, Dunham was given to questions like: “What was so
good about democracy? What’s so bad about communism? And why was
capitalism so great?”
It appears that Obama’s mother was, at the least, a fellow
traveler.
Of course, young Obama spent much time with his mother but
virtually no time with Barack senior, which brings me to another
source: Frank Marshall Davis.
In the fall of 1970, a nine-year-old Obama was introduced to
Frank Marshall Davis by Obama’s grandfather, Stanley Dunham, who
himself was on the far left. Dunham connected the two because his
grandson was lacking a black-male role model. Dunham chose a
curious pick as a mentor for his grandson. As I’ve noted in a
lengthy profile for The American Spectator, Davis was
a literal, card-carrying member of Communist Party USA (card number
47544). He edited and wrote for Party-line publications such as the
Chicago Star and the Honolulu Record. Davis did
outrageous pro-Soviet propaganda work. In December 1956, the
Democrats who ran the Senate Judiciary Committee summoned Davis to
Washington to testify on his activities. He pleaded the Fifth
Amendment. Even more remarkable, Frank Marshall Davis’s political
antics were so radical that the FBI placed him on the federal
government’s Security Index, which meant that he could be
immediately detained or arrested in the event of a national
emergency, such as a war breaking out between the United States and
USSR.
Young Obama met with Davis far more often than he met with the
senior Obama. I’ve been told by one source that they met weekly, a
claim I cannot substantiate. We know they met often, and in
lengthy, late-night sessions. David Maraniss, whose source may be
Obama himself, contends that Davis and Obama met upwards of 15
times, a conservative estimate that nonetheless would be 15 times
the number of times that young Obama met his Kenyan father.
To sum up: Between Obama’s mother, grandfather, Kenyan father,
and Frank Marshall Davis, those are some pretty extreme political
influences. Some of them were interested in communism, sympathetic
to communism, fellow travelers, or even downright Communist Party
members. For a young Obama — who I actually feel bad for — this
would seem to meet the standards of a Red Diaper Baby environment.
And as I lay out in my book, citing especially the testimony of Dr.
John Drew, who states that he knew Obama at Occidental College as a
fellow Marxist, these political pilgrims produced a kindred spirit
who left Hawaii for the wider world in 1979. Today he sits in the
Oval Office.
I can hear liberals now: So, if Obama is our first Red Diaper
Baby president, but not currently a closet card-carrying communist,
why does this matter? That’s nonsense, the typical liberal red
herring. Of course, it matters.
It matters just as any biography of any president or leader
matters. None of us (liberals included) would ignore the
ideological upbringing of any other president. This information
gets to the core of the intellectual and political development of
our current president, the most powerful man in the world, the man
in charge of the mightiest economic engine in history. This man is
the product of many radical influences that helped forge him into
what he is today. If that man was raised a Red Diaper Baby, then it
had some form of meaningful impact that’s worthy of our
consideration. Let’s discuss it like adults.
