Letters written by a young Barack Obama to his then-girlfriend have been made public, revealing his thoughts on love, relationships and sex.
The nine letters, sent by Obama to his college girlfriend Alexandra McNear were unveiled by Emory University where they will be placed in an archive.
Written in the 1980s, the future president tells McNear about his feelings on making love, racial issues, money struggles and his plans for a political future.
The pair broke up in the mid 80s and McNear went on to work in green energy and marry a Serbian boxer. Obama moved on to his second love Genevieve Cook before marrying Michelle.
In one of the letters – from September 1982 – he writes: ‘I trust you know that I miss you, that my concern for you is as wide as the air, my confidence in you as deep as the sea, my love rich and plentiful,’ before signing it ‘Love, Barack.’
The ‘very lyrical, very poetic’ letters will be useful to researchers trying to craft a picture of Obama the college student and recent graduate, Emory officials said
‘I think of you often, though I stay confused about my feelings,’ Obama wrote to Alexandra McNear (circled above) in 1983. ‘It seems we will ever want what we cannot have; that’s what binds us; that’s what keeps us apart’
The following month, he writes to her about the challenge of ‘forging a unity, mixing it up, constructing the truth to be found between the seams of individual lives. All of which requires breaking some sweat. Like a good basketball game. Or a fine dance. Or making love.’
‘We will talk long and deep, Alex,’ he says, ‘and see what we can make of this.’
Emory University professor Andra Gillispie, director of Emory’s James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference, is using the letters in an upcoming book about Obama. She said 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.’
In April of that year, he remembers time they have spent together: ‘A young black man with his arm behind his head, staring at the ceiling with moist eyes, and a young white woman resting her head on his arm, alone and facing the swirling expanse, outside the room, inside themselves, separate in the eye of the storm.’
The letters provide a fascinating insight into Obama’s relationship with McNear, who is now a mother-of-one last known to be running a green energy company and living in a $2million mansion in Sag Harbor, New York.
Rather than moving into the White House, however, she wed a rather less glamorous figure – a Serbian boxer who once tried to rob $60,000 from a bank.
McNear married Bob Bozic in a ceremony which appalled her mother and brought a former vagrant and onetime bookmaker into their upper middle class family.
They divorced after seven years.
McNear and Obama met at Occidental College in California and had a summer romance at the age of 20 in New York in 1981 when he transferred to Columbia to finish his studies.
McNear married Bob Bozic (pictured) in a ceremony which appalled her mother and brought a former vagrant and one time bookmaker into their upper middle class family
Early in the series of letters, he discusses his very mixed feelings about starting college.
He writes: ‘School. What intelligent observations can I glean from the first two weeks? I pass through the labyrinths, corridors, see familiar faces, select and discard classes and activities, fluctuate between unquenchable curiosity and heavy, inert boredom.’
At one point Obama – who graduated with a political science degree – tells McNear his favorite class is a physics course for non-mathematicians.
He explains: ‘Thinking in purely scientific terms, and dealing with scales far removed from the human world, gives me a release and creative escape from the frustrations of studying men and their frequently dingy institutions.
‘Of course, the fact that the knowledge I absorb in the class facilitates nuclear war prevents a clean break.’
The future president then begins to discuss class in America, noting that one of his friends is taking over the family business while another is managing a supermarket and buying new cars and TVs.
‘I must admit large dollops of envy for both groups, my American friends consuming their life in the comfortable mainstream, the foreign friends in the international business world,’ Obama writes.
‘Caught without a class, a structure, or a tradition to support me, in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me.’
He adds: ‘The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions, classes, make them mine, me theirs. Taken separately, they’re unacceptable and untenable.’
Writing in 1982, he discusses ‘choice’ – and whether he really has any say in who he becomes.
‘I use the word ‘choice’ as a convenient shorthand for the way my past resolves itself,’ he writes.
‘Not just my past, but the past of my ancestors, the planet, the universe.’
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
In February 1983, he wonders about the notion of resistance while reflecting on society.
He writes: ‘I watch men and women pouring into the present mold, siphoned this and that way, and it worries me, the weight and momentum of these fluid lives sluiced into serving a distorted system, adding that he ‘can see and taste the possibility of switching the gates, channeling the energy towards something of vitality and dignity’.
He goes on to say most people are ‘busy keeping mouths fed and surroundings intact. It is left to the obsessed ones like us to make the alternatives more tangible, the contours of life’s possibilities more defined, so that resistance and destruction arrive in the form of creation.’
Obama also jokes about his degree in the February letter, explaining that he has been searching for a woman ‘upon whom my graduation depends’.
‘She’s a madwoman who lures unsuspecting undergraduate papers into her home and then burns them, or uses them to line the bottom of the gold finch cage,’ he jokes. ‘But despite this mild anxiety, I stay in a piece, workin’ my magic.’
He speaks also of how Western men have subjugated others, adding: ‘The ideology they present is backed by a very real power; it’s a symbiotic relationship that, in a limited time frame, can be said to ‘work’ for them.’
School. What intelligent observations can I glean from the first two weeks? I pass through the labyrinths, corridors, see familiar faces, select and discard classes and activities, fluctuate between unquenchable curiosity and heavy, inert boredom.
He also reflects on the questions surrounding the long-term plausibility of his relationship with McNear, writing that his uncertainty about it is linked to his uncertainty about ‘everything I believe’.
‘I feel sunk in that long corridor between old values, actions, modes of thought, and those that I seek, that I’m working towards,’ he adds.
The future commander-in-chief notes: ‘I don’t distinguish between struggling with the world and struggling with myself. … I enter a pact with other people, other forces in the world, that their problems are mine and mine are theirs … The minute others imprint my senses, they become me and I must deal with them or else close part of myself off and make myself and the world smaller, lukewarm.’
When he heads to Indonesia to see his mother and sister, he speaks about his struggles with identity.
‘I can’t speak the language well anymore,’ he tells his girlfriend. ‘I’m treated with a mixture of puzzlement, deference and scorn because I’m American, my money and my plane ticket back to the U.S. overriding my blackness. I see old dim roads, rickety homes winding back towards the fields, old routes of mine, routes I no longer have access to.’
He also speaks frankly of his relationship with McNear, which can be seen transitioning into something else in Obama’s letters.
‘I am not so naive as to believe that a distinct line exists between romantic love and the more quotidian, but perhaps finer bonds of friendship, but I can feel the progression from one to the other (in my mind),’ he writes.
He also mocks his earlier writing style, explaining: ‘When I sit down to write, I no longer feel the need to bleed for brilliance on the page; I trust the strength of our relationship enough that I can show myself with curlers in my hair, my will sapped, my confidence shaken, a bit peevish perhaps, a bit dull.’
The ‘very lyrical, very poetic’ letters will be useful to researchers trying to craft a picture of Obama the college student and recent graduate, Emory officials said. Pictured: Obama with wife Michelle
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.
‘This is part of his courtship strategy. Okay … Who rips out book reviews to send to their girlfriend?’ Gillispie laughed. ‘I think it is a sign of his proto-feminism but it is more of a, ‘Wow, this is a really cerebral relationship’, but I personally like the idea of a cerebral relationship. I’m a nerd too, so the nerd in me was like, ‘That was real cool’.’
‘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 wrote in 1984 to McNear, who was a student at a California college attended by Obama had attended before moving to Columbia.
The ‘very lyrical, very poetic’ letters will be useful to researchers trying to craft a picture of Obama the college student and recent graduate, Emory officials said.
Parts of the letters from Obama have already appeared in books about Obama over the last few years.
‘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,’ Obama wrote in 1983
‘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. During that time, Obama was at Columbia University in New York City, in Indonesia, and finally working at Business International Corporation, ‘with everyone slapping my back,’ in a job for which he had no passion.
Obama wrote for the newsletter Business International Money Report.
He explains that he has ‘cultivated strong bonds with the black women and their children in the company, who work as librarians, receptionists, etc.,’ with ‘the only black men [working as] teen messengers.’
Obama writes: ‘The resistance I wage does wear me down – because of the position, the best I can hope for is a draw, since I have no vehicle or forum to try to change things. For this reason, I can’t stay very much longer than a year. Thankfully, I don’t yet feel like the job has dulled my senses or done irreparable damage to my values, although it has stalled their growth.’
He adds: ‘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.
‘I have tried to tie down the stakes of life out of school, starting with employment and housing, before winter turns humorless.’
Money is clearly a problem for the young graduate. He explains: ‘One week I can’t pay postage to mail a resume and writing sample, the next I have to bounce a check to rent a typewriter.’
The future president’s letters were penned in a combination of careful cursive and ‘Dear Alex’ in print.
Emory has had the letters since 2014 but could only make them public now, officials said.
He wrote them on stationery as well as ripped-out yellow and white, college-ruled notebook paper. At least one was sent in Business International Money Report envelopes with the business’s address crossed out and ‘Barack Obama’ written above it.