The other day I complained that Obama's election-night speech didn't show any of the personal authenticity of his first book, Dreams From My Father, and a friend sent me this link to Kansas City writer Jack Cashill's theory, now wild on the rightwing blogosphere, that Obama didn't write the book, William Ayers did–Ayers being an accomplished author in his own right. I read Cashill's claim and find it plausible.
In fact, of all the dogs that have been unleashed on Obama in the last six months, from Rev. Wright to being Muslim to palling with terrorists, this literary issue is the only dog I've seen that can hunt. I think it might end up as an ongoing shadow narrative about Obama for a long time for several reasons: it won't be proved one way or the other; it serves the Obama-haters, who are legion; and it has some real meaning.
I remember watching this sort of process with Bill Clinton, back when the Arkansas stories bubbled up. In fact, I threw myself into them as a journalist, going out to Arkansas a number of times. They became one of the leading storylines in Clinton's career because they revealed something important about him: his political machine threatened people who were going to go public about his women, including some of the women themselves, and that's what propelled the impeachment saga, as far as I'm concerned.
But I'm not going to throw myself into this one. I don't think it's important. Obama has great things to do and I believe he has the capacity. This story is a rattling tin can, sort of like the theory that Ted Sorensen wrote JFK's Profiles in Courage–of course with the Ayers twist. Though I must say I find this theory thrilling.
Cashill's theory is plausible to me because it so reflects my own experience as an Obama reader.
A few months back I read Dreams From My Father and was blown away. It is often beautifully written and is propelled by a wrenching Huck-Finn-like drama of fatherlessness. I love the themes, progressive ones about race in America and a fluid global identity in the age of self-invention.
Even as I read it, though, I had an undercurrent of disturbance. The book is too good. Myself, I've written 7 or 8 books all told, and published two. It's hard to write a book. This book was superbly, effortlessly crafted. The way the action jumped forward from one chapter to the next, skipping three and four years at a time, was highly sophisticated. The tripartite structure–Origins, Chicago, Kenya–was elegant and powerful. And though Obama had done very little other writing in life, the prose was lovely and supple, and the emotional self-awareness was very high. I found this most surprising of all. Any writer will tell you it's hard to write about yourself. You have to have a lot of self-awareness to shape yourself into a character, to figure out how much to make fun of yourself or take yourself seriously. Your ego and vanity and self-deception get in the way all the time. That's why most writers write about other people.
Obama didn't have that problem. He seemed to understand himself and his journey from a distance. And he had no trouble talking about it. In Jane Austen's dichotomy of sense and sensibility, the book was all sensibility. And the man on the campaign trail has been all sense.
The combination of literary achievement and self-awareness raised another puzzle for me: Anyone who writes this well has gotta be a writer. I didn't understand how Obama could have thrown himself into scratch-and-bite Chicago politics if he had such literary gifts: the path of literary glory would have beckoned. I tried to tell myself that he just had other gifts, other values. Though it also didn't make sense to me that his next book, The Audacity of Hope, was so wooden that I couldn't get more than a few pages in. Like Obama in his press conference today, using the phrase, "with he and I." Politicians talk like that. Writers don't.
One other thing worked at me: the lack of acknowledgement. Any book that required so much from someone's spirit would have had a few helpers. I will never be convinced that he did not get at least some help of a story-doctoring/taperecording/crafting character, but while he acknowledged "friends" for their "generous readings," he named only one. Way too opaque for me. (When I saw that he quoted 18 lines from the play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf,
by the poet Ntozake Shange, and did not give her any credit in the book, not even naming her, I found it similarly unsettling. A real writer loves writing, wants to give the writers he admires credit.)
Last winter, I told my wife that I didn't believe Obama had written the book by himself. She said she would divorce me/cut off my nuts if I tried to write that up. I cheated. I decided to look into a piece on Obama's literary achievement, which after all was his rocket ship to the top–the keynote speech in '04. My old friend Peter Kaplan at the Observer said I could make calls using the Observer's name. The piece never ran because the Times did something like it right after I got going, but I spoke to both Peter Osnos, Obama's erstwhile publisher (who has been critical of the "steely" way Obama conducted his book deals), and Henry Ferris, who was his editor. I'm not going to dig out the notes now, but Ferris said that Obama was a true writer, Ferris didn't have to do very much at all with the prose, it came in remarkably clean. When I asked about the great pacing and structure of the book, Ferris said: That was Obama's achievement. Ferris told me he'd already gotten some of these questions from reporters: after Obama borrowed lines from a Gov. Deval Patrick speech in Massachusetts last year, sans credit, reporters wondered about the book.
I relate my narrative because it intrigues me that Cashill independently had a very similar response. He's a writer too, and evidently a right wing nut, but he knows how books are made, and his investigation began with similar misgivings. One of the more inculpatory facts he's come up with is his assertion that something like 3 percent of the sentences in Dreams From My Father are passive voice, but 8 percent of the sentences in Obama's next book, The Audacity of Hope, are passive. Cashill and I agree that the more you write the less you use passive voice. You get better, you notice that kind of thing and overcome it. Obama took a big step backwards to his second book.
I'm not going to go into Cashill's evidence and computer modeling. Frankly, I don't care that much. For what it's worth, I find the Hudson River flowing north anecdote, which appears in both an Ayers book and Obama's book, mildly suspicious, as I do a lefty lesson both books offer about education versus training. Some of the lush reflective passages in the two books have faint echoes. Judge for yourself. I'm just saying it's plausible, and unprovable. Ayers is a smart guy who's been thru the wars. Here's his blog. I don't think he's going to get involved in this.
The reason I don't think it matters politically one way or the other is that politicians use others' words all the time, and professional writers help them write books. Hillary Clinton hit this buzzsaw a long time ago. So did JFK. And anyone who's worked in media as long as I have knows that "authorship" is often the product of a lot of rewriting by a nameless editor.
Though the controversy speaks to a real issue with Obama, which I wrote about many months ago, he's not much for giving credit. He grew up on his own, with parents half way around the world from him, and seems determined to prove to everyone that he can do things on his own. Real impressive; I never saw him crack once in 18 months. I do hope he opens up a little more, lets us in.
And why am I thrilled by this theory? One of Cashill's plausible scenarios is that a bunch of lefties in Hyde Park, Chicago, used to help each other with their books. He says Rashid Khalidi got help from Bill Ayers on one of his books, and thanked him lavishly. If I had been in that neighborhood, I would have been in that group myself, or wanted to be. They're my people, smart lefties on the outside in urban academic/bohemian/diverse communities. People who've led interesting independent lives. Before I moved to the woods, I lived in communities like that for years, in Minnesota, Philly, and New York. I love those places. I've never been a revolutionary, but I've often had radical sentiments and hung out discussing them, sometimes with herb, mostly with beer or hard liquor. My best friends have always been on the left. I'm gratified to think that Obama comes out of a progressive world and that it stamped him as it stamped me.
And I say it's about time the culture turned with rampant curiosity to lefty intellectual milieus–as opposed to Orange County, Halliburton, carbon-pig ranches, Georgetown dinner parties, or airconditioned Martha's Vineyard vacation houses, as the backstory backdrops for our leaders. We're an important, even romantic, part of the culture.
The Bill Ayers stuff of course makes the rightwing nuts–and yes, potentially makes Obama a liar; though I wonder how careful he's been on this score. If Cashill's theory is true, this story has the dark redemptive drama of Dickens's best narrative, Great Expectations, in which respectable, achievement-oriented Pip owes his
elevation to a criminal, Abel Magwitch. Oh what a shadow! This would be the American version. Magwitch did terrible things, and struggled to undo them, and earned Pip's love.
Bill Ayers was given a path to the ruling class by birth; he was the son of the CEO of Commonwealth Edison. But the Vietnam War was evil; and he went to teach-ins and demos. He had an epiphany at age 21 when someone challenged him, "How will you live your life so that it doesn't make a mockery of your values?" Unquestionably he went about this in the wrong way. I don't approve of what he did. But I approve of commitment and political seriousness, and opposition to human-rights abuses and hateful wars that destroy hundreds of thousands of darkskinned peoples' lives. Ayers has since become a professor of education and served the community in honorable ways. And I gather he's a hell of a writer.
Brilliant post, Phil. You are the most committed iconoclast in American journalism, and let's face it, an iconoclast is what all good journalists should strive to be.
I love the way you continually tear down your own shibboleths.
Passive voice is how politicians express themselves, so it's hardly surprising that Presidential hopeful's 2006 book was different from the Hyde Park state senate hopeful's 1995 book. For example, Ronald Reagan was a competent op-ed columnist in the 1970s, with a very direct style, but when he got in trouble in the 1980s, he'd say things like, "Mistakes were made."
But here is another part of the puzzle, that you aren't getting about Bill Ayers. Ayers is as establishment as they come. Truth be told, the Weather Underground was packed full of FBI narks, and guess who was their number one informant.
Before the charges were dropped against Ayers for various innocuous bombings in which no one was hurt, some people broke the Media, PA branch of the FBI, and guess what they found out about Ayers.
Cashill's assumption that Obama didn't show a literary bent before publishing "Dreams from My Father" seems odd. Obama published poetry when he was at Occidental (one of which, "Pop" about his maternal grandfather, very much prefigures parts of "Dreams"); kept a journal from Columbia onward; and wrote unpublished fiction in the 1980s, which probably got incorporated into "Dreams from My Father." Byron York wrote in National Review on June 30, 2008:
"Everyone knows Obama wrote a memoir, Dreams from My Father, covering his time in Chicago. What fewer know is that during his years as an organizer Obama was also working hard on fiction-writing. "He wrote stories about the people he was working with," Mike Kruglik [one of Obama colleagues in the community organizing business] told me, "fiction that was beautiful, beautifully crafted, fantastically evocative about what it was like to be in that community, including how bleak the landscape was, how threadbare some of the institutions were, what it looked like and felt like." I asked Kruglik if he had read the stories. "Yeah," he answered. "[Obama] gave them to me. They were about what a pastor was doing with his church." Kruglik says he can't remember much beyond that–this was years ago–but given the prominent role that Obama's pastors and his church have played in the campaign, there would probably be a great deal of interest in the stories today. But you won't get them from Kruglik, who says he gave the stories back to Obama without making any copies."
There's no market for short stories and very little for traditional quasi-autobiographical first novels. There is, however, a market these days for memoirs, so it's common for planned novels to get turned into memoirs, such as "A Million Little Pieces" and "Jarhead."
This is not to say that Obama didn't have help. He does than a few people in the Introduction to Dreams:
"When I’ve strayed, I’ve been able to look to my
agent, Jane Dystel, for her faith and tenacity; to my editor, Henry Ferris, for his gentle but firm correctives; to Ruth
Fecych and the staff at Times Books, for their enthusiasm and attention in shepherding the manuscript through its
various stages; to my friends, especially Robert Fisher, for their generous readings; and to my wonderful wife,
Michelle, for her wit, grace, candor, and unerring ability to encourage my best impulses."
Bill Ayers is not on the list. Maybe Ayers should have been. I don't know, but I don't see much evidence for it and
I am certain that Ayers was one of the informants for the Weathermen, but I also think he is a good and honest critic of American imperialism. Things are never clear cut in such matters.
The thing that distinguishes both he and Khalidi from people like Chomsky or Edward Said, however, is that Ayers and Khalidi are actually quite moderate. That said, each one understands what the critiques of US imperialism are. My hope is and always has been that Obama did spend a lot of time with Ayers and Khalidi– I hope the rightwingers are right about their association, and I hope those two had a lasting impression on him. And I am hoping that they were not as moderate as I fear they were. Because if they did have a lasting impact on Obama, then there is hope for him yet, in spite of the Emanuel appointment.
In any case, my main concern with Obama is that he turns out to be something of an empty suit, a Zelig figure that will conform to and mold himself to those that surround him. On the other hand, if he spent enough time with that radically intellectual Chicago crowd, then maybe he does have some backbone and maybe there is some hope for him afterall.
This is a very interesting post, Phil. Thanks. I haven't read either of Obama's books, so I have no opinion either as to their literary quality or whether they read like the work of the same writer.
The problem with being suspicious is that it takes a LOT to manage, in order to be ethical simultaneiously.
If ethics are important.
In a world in which one's words ARE one's actions, "manners" is the place that ethics occur.
I am paid to worry, to identify risk, to inquire into if the perceived risks are accurate, and if so, to assertively convey that.
I CAN'T express every worry/suspicion without my subsequent voice being dismissed. I actually have to figure out if its true first.
Thats tough in the journalistic world, in which being first to "I told you so", is a measure of one's relevance.
But, there are moral ambiguities associated with every profession. We're great at pointing at others'.
And, I can't even just "censor" myself on the basis of if an identified risk is true. I also have to determine if its important.
Interesting ruminations, though for a topic about which you say you "don't care," you managed 1,800 words!
Audacity of Hope is Obama's obligatory campaign '08 book. OF COURSE it's going to have more passive voice: you use it when you want vagueness, with fake authority. Tried and true politics-speak.
OK — the acceptance speech was a little flat, but listen to other speeches, such as his last rally in Virginia on Nov. 3. Obama has a gift with language. The fact that this is in dispute in spite of so much documented evidence is… conspiratorial.
Apparently Cashill thinks that Obama is more nurture than nature.
Great article by Phil–true to the bone about writing "faction."
Also great thread comments by all.
these comments are great and helpful to me in thinking about it. thank you. Steve I didn't know the literary history. Richard one thing i was told about investigative journalism: you have to have a low threshhold for outrage. as you observe, it doesnt serve a person well in life! Phil
I actually just realized that Phil, earlier in this discussion.
I took some heat from a family member that I mentioned here, for doing so a little while ago, that they feared they might bear some consequences of (remote but still I respect their perspective and will never mention a colleague in any way that is identifiable again).
The times that I've mentioned family, I've done it to attempt to make real, what is otherwise abstract politics, ie real life examples that have contributed to my own understanding as my own understanding.
I sense that Phil is doing that similarly. For me, it has confused me. While others might have understood the comments in nearly strictly political terms, I took them more in personal terms, as being about the individuals more than humbly as examples.
For every Palestinian that has experienced any harrassment or violence at anyone's hands (including at the hands of factions), that is real. And inferences that suggest that their experience didn't occur, or is invalid, are current insults, salt on wounds.
For every Jew that has any connection with those that experienced the holocaust directly, and the post-war harrassment in Europe, that is real.
Any inferences that suggest that the experience didn't occur (their experience OF it, not only the objective), or is invalid, are also current insults, salt on still wounds.
I actually wish Phil would allow posts like this to stay at the top for longer.
I must admit: I would never have even considered it possible that Obama did not actually write Dreams, but this post and Cashill's article make a convincing case (even if I find the other stuff posted on Cashill's politics unappealing).
Once again, I just wish this site was arranged differently so this could be the topic of more discussion, rather than moving on to a top ten list in the abominable New Republic.
If Ayers had written his memoir first and Obama had read it and gone to him for help, I could understand the theory. But Obama's memoir came out in 1995, and Ayers's in 2001.
I'd really have to read both books to see how closely they correspond, but most of what I've seen so far doesn't look very convincing. It's a matter of words that appear in both books. But people in the same social/intellectual/cultural/political atmosphere tend to use the same words to discribe things. And some of the similarities probably wouldn't strike the person in the street as particularly strange.
So I'm left thinking: which is more likely, that Barack Obama's experience of the world was so impoverished that Bill Ayers would be a likely ghost writer for his memoir, or that people's understanding of Obama's life is so patchy that Ayers is the only possible collaborator who comes readily to mind?
A politician keeps his life patchy on purpose. That's the nature of the animal. Obama didn't write that book. That said, I voted for him.
His VP is known as an outright plagiarist. The other side had even less to offer.
I read a little of Ayer's 2001 memoir and it's definitely breezier in style than Obama's ponderous 1995 memoir.
Keep in mind that Dreams from My Father was a failure in the marketplace (selling no more than 10,000 copies) because it so long and monotonous. It's hard to imagine any ghostwriter wouldn't have pepped it up a lot with interesting anecdotes about prominent people Obama had met. So, however, much help Obama had, the vision of the book of the book is clearly his.
Another thing to keep in mind is that Obama and Ayers almost certainly would have read some of each other's books, either before or after publication. They became colleagues on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge about six months before Dreams from My Father came out. Obama was Ayers' nominal superior on this big money pit project, so he, at minimum, would have wanted to read up on the Chairman of the Board's life story. We know Obama read a 1998 book by Ayers, which he blurbed in the Chicago Tribune, and that a 1998 book by Ayers mentions Obama as his neighbor, calling him "the writer Barack Obama" rather than "the State Senator Barack Obama" or "the law professor Barack Obama.
Thus, the ten pages of Ayers' 2001 book I read _did_ have one conceptual overlap with Obama's book, so that's interesting, although it's hard to guess which way influence, if any, flowed. It could be Ayres's 2001 book was influenced by Obama's 19995 book.
You can try to fit these facts into various conspiracy theories, but it's fair to say they each had literary influence of some degree on the other.
There are sophisticated methods of authorship attribution analysis that can be used to resolve such questions pretty definitively (if a large amount of text is available) – and this is an area in which I have developed a fair amount of expertise.
First, here's a link to a stylometry analyst who looked at this question two weeks ago:
G:
Thanks so much for that information. Could you explain to us what program Cashill's analysis relies upon, and could you speculate on why he didn't use the better programs that you used?
One other thing: your analysis of his personality is also very interesting, although not exactly reassuring.
Madrid,
Stylometry analysis is a complex field with a steep learning curve. Making decent inferences/judgments in this area also requires a considerable background in statistics (from some of his statements, it's pretty clear that Cashill doesn't have such a background).
Cashill seems to have mainly relied on some similar phrases he spotted (in Dreams and in Ayers' writing), and on what I'll call "conceptual links" – e.g. for Cashill, the line "served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair" in Dreams seemed more congruent with Ayers, since Ayers once had a job as a merchant seaman (while Obama had no such experience). I've personally found the "similar phrases plus conceptual links approach" to be misleading unless the matches are very extensive (e.g. entire lines that match verbatim – word for word, or recapitulation of the same stories, etc.).
Where Cashill relied on other stylometric methods, there were flaws in approach and interpretation – for more details on this, see the link: link to philocomp.net
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The link reviews the different approaches/programs that he used, and where his analysis went wrong.
Without immersion in the field (i.e. reading, understanding, and integrating over the vast scientific literature on authorship attribution) it wouldn't be possible to appropriately judge which approaches were superior to others, and what the limitations of each method were. Moreover, someone wouldn't be able to make sense of this literature without a heavy background in statistics and machine learning. Even among people who have published papers on authorship attribution – some are better (people who are more knowledgeable and practicing better methodology) and some are worse. So it's not surprising to me that a brief foray by into this field by a novice would go off track. Cashill wouldn't have had the background to assess the relative merits of different methods.
Philip, Thank you, sir. The evidence you have seen is the tip of the proverbial iceberg. With the pressure of the election off, I and my merry band of elves are building an airtight case. Please contact me, and I will share the work in progress with you. This is not an open invitation. JC