The World

His father, Hussein Onyango Obama, was a Luo farmer, elder and medicine man, living in western Kenya, near Uganda, so restlessly intelligent the villagers joked he had ‘ants up his anus’. But he had a son, Barack, by his fourth wife, Akumu. Educating himself, Hussein moved to Zanzibar, served in the British King’s African Rifles in Burma and returned at fifty with a gramophone. ‘How can the African defeat the white man,’ he asked, ‘when he can’t even make his own bicycle?’ Arrested and released by the British during the Mau Mau rebellion, he became friends with Mboya. Hussein adored Barack ‘because he was so clever’ but could not tolerate his independence, beating him when he was expelled from school. Barack married a local girl, Kezia, but hated the clerk’s job his father arranged for him in Mombasa. After his father threw him out, he attend independence rallies, was arrested and released. He became close to Mboya, who had just got back from America, where he had been welcomed by the American Committee on Africa, led by Eleanor Roosevelt, meeting Sidney Poitier and Martin Luther King and, at the family compound at Hyannis Port, a young senator and Democratic candidate called Jack Kennedy, who agreed to fund student exchanges.

Mboya chose Obama, who left for Hawaii; Kennedy won the presidential election.

NIKITA AND JACK, MIMI AND MARILYN

Joe Kennedy was still pulling the strings but he had faced unbearable blows: his eldest son Joe had been killed in the war; his daughter Kick perished in a plane crash; and Jack was (secretly) cursed with ill health, suffering back pain, Addison’s disease and hyperthyroidism, treated with steroids, amphetamines and hormones.

His father guided him into Congress straight after the war. In 1953, just after Jack’s election as senator, he married an elegantly ice-cool socialite, Jackie Bouvier, with whom he had a boy and a girl, but soon after his marriage he underwent massive back surgery. Ill health and Kennedy machismo encouraged a life of risk taking and womanizing; he often joined his friend Sinatra – supercool maestro of Swing – and his Rat Pack of actor pals, including Kennedy brother-in-law Pat Lawford and African-American Sammy Davis Jr – in Vegas, where singer and senator shared girls and jinks. Kennedy was already the best-prepared candidate for the presidency: a Harvard graduate who had studied at the LSE, travelled all over the world and met everyone, war hero and Pulitzer-prize winning author. Yet he had never run anything, his sex life was recklessly priapic, his health dubious, and his career had been funded by his rich father. He was already running for president when he first encountered Khrushchev.

In September 1959, the Russian visited the US, the first Russian leader to visit the continent. He had learned from the Suez crisis that nuclear threats won him respect and an invitation from Eisenhower. His pugnacious joviality – after the morose, saturnine Stalin – amazed the Americans. On the trip, he saw into the future when he visited the research campus of International Business Machines, IBM, but characteristically was more impressed by their canteen than their technology and understandably more excited by meeting Marilyn Monroe. But he also met Kennedy.

After the successful visit, Khrushchev’s detente with Eisenhower was destroyed by his discovery of US spy flights over the USSR. Outraged, he went on a hypomaniacal rampage that made his own comrades wonder if he was completely sane. He ordered a U2 spy plane shot down but then ranted at the Americans. When Macmillan visited Moscow to mediate, Khrushchev screamed at him, afterward boasting that he had ‘fucked the prime minister in the arse with a telephone pole’. At the UN, he banged his fists on the table and then smacked it with his shoe (to the embarrassment of his own comrades). ‘It was such fun!’ he said afterwards. Loathing Eisenhower and his vice-president Richard Nixon, he believed his strength had undermined the latter’s campaign, not only welcoming the election of the Massachusetts princeling but claiming, ‘We helped elect Kennedy.’