Obama memoir filled with misrepresentations

It's a given that politicians aren't always accurate when they speak, but it's another thing when they are inaccurate in their own memoirs. Yet, that's precisely what biographer David Maraniss claims in his book "Barack Obama: The Story." 

LONDON, ENGLAND (Catholic Online) - As reported in the Daily Mail, "Maraniss catalogues dozens of instances in which Obama deviated significantly from the truth in his book 'Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance'." The book is another account of Obama's life based on a comprehensive set of interviews with a variety of individuals. 

According to Maraniss, one of Obama's largest myths is the claim that his paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama was imprisoned and tortured by the British in Kenya in 1949. 

According to Obama, his grandfather was targeted by the British for assisting local rebels in their efforts to cast off British colonial rule. His grandfather was imprisoned for six months in a detention camp and he was routinely beaten and tortured. 

However, Maraniss conducted interviews with people who know Obama's grandfather during the time and none of them recall such a thing. Furthermore, they insist that had something like that happened, he would have never found a subsequent career in civil service. 

According to the Daily Mail article, of the individuals Mariniss interviewed was John Ndalo Aguk, who was a former coworker of the elder Obama. Aguk said he knew nothing of such an imprisonment. The same thing was stated by Zablon Okatch, who worked with Obama after Aguk. "Hussein was never jailed," he said. "I know that for a fact. It would have been difficult for him to get a job with a white family, let alone a diplomat, if he once served in jail."

 A number of other individuals made identical claims. 

Maraniss concludes in his work that Obama has tailored the facts to fit an image of himself that he finds acceptable. The Mail article says, "Obama himself, Maraniss finds, deliberately distorted elements of his own life to fit into a racial narrative. The author writes that Obama presents himself in his memoir as 'blacker and more disaffected' than he really was." 

How this translates into Obama's leadership is incalculable, but a willingness to fabricate stories about oneself cannot be a positive trait for the leader of the free world. Alas, it may be the norm. Maraniss also did a biography of Bill Clinton and claims in that book that the former president did the same as Obama. 

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