Obama love letters to be made public
Print Edition
A young Barack Obama questioned his place in the world and his racial identity, agonized over whether he’d make enough money as a community organizer, and lamented his incompatibility with his ex-girlfriend in 30 pages of letters he wrote in the 1980s that are now being archived by Emory University in Atlanta.
The nine letters, sent by Obama to his college girlfriend, Alexandra McNear, are being made public to researchers through Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library.
The letters give a peek into Obama’s psyche as he sought out a path that would lead him in the White House as the United States’ first black president.
“My ideas aren’t as crystallized as they were while in school, but they have an immediacy and weight that may be more useful if and when I’m less observer and more participant,” Obama said in 1984.
The “very lyrical, very poetic” letters will be useful to researchers trying to craft a picture of Obama the college student and recent graduate.
“They tell the journey of a young man who is seeking meaning and purpose in life and direction,” said Rosemary Magee, the Rose Library director. Obama is “trying to find what his distinctive place would be both in that time and going forward.”
The letters span 1982 to 1984, when Obama was at Columbia University in New York City, in Indonesia, and working at Business International Corporation, “with everyone slapping my back,” in a job for which he had no passion.
Obama, who wrote for the newsletter Business International Money Report, said, in 1983: “Salaries in the community organizations are too low to survive on right now, so I hope to work in some more conventional capacity for a year, allowing me to store up enough nuts to pursue those interests next.”
Emory University professor Andra Gillispie, director of Emory’s James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference, said the letters are not overly romantic as they span the end of the pair’s relationship.
“I think of you often, though I stay confused about my feelings,” Obama wrote to McNear in 1983. “It seems we will ever want what we cannot have; that’s what binds us; that’s what keeps us apart.”
But the letters aren’t all angst, Gillispie said. Obama — “clearly a person of the mind,” she said, — once ripped out a New York Times book review of Rachel M. Brownstein’s book, “Becoming a Heroine,” and sent it McNear, something that amused the professor.
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