The World

On 21 August, Brezhnev sent 200,000 troops to crush the Prague Spring, gaining Stalin’s empire another twenty years. In America too, the loving feast of the Sixties was spoiling. Martin Luther King was bombarded with threats: in Memphis, on 3 April 1968, he talked about his death. ‘I just want to do God’s will,’ he preached. ‘And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you.’ Next day, on the balcony of his motel, MLK was assassinated by an attention-seeking criminal. RFK denounced ‘this mindless menace of violence’, saying, ‘No martyr’s cause has ever been stilled by his assassin’s bullet.’ Three months later, in June, Kennedy, forty-two years old, close to clinching the Democratic nomination, spoke at the LA Ambassador Hotel where, walking through the kitchens, he was shot by an unbalanced Palestinian. ‘Everything,’ he said as he lay dying, ‘is going to be OK.’ But it was not.

On 5 July 1969, in Nairobi, Tom Mboya, exuberant finance minister serving the ageing President Kenyatta, was walking down Government Road when he bumped into his protégé Barack Obama. He had tried to help Obama, but that irrepressible maverick had criticized his policies, then lost other jobs, becoming an abusive alcoholic. While driving drunk, he killed his passenger and best friend, the first of several car crashes, while his marriage broke up. Now he chatted with Mboya and moved on. Moments later he heard shots: Mboya, the Luo, had been assassinated by a Kikuyu. Before he was hanged the killer asked, ‘Why don’t you go after the Big Man [Kenyatta]?’ Kenyatta liked to say, ‘T. J. [Mboya]’s my favourite son,’ but his Kikuyu courtiers may have ordered the hit, which, like the shootings of RFK and MLK in America, marked the start of a harsher, more tribal politics in Kenya. It also accelerated the decline of Dr Obama: he was convinced his next booze-fuelled car crash was a hit ordered by Kenyatta. As his family later told his son, Kenyatta dominated Kenya – ‘That’s where it all starts. The Big Man’ – and Obama ‘forgot what holds everything together here’.^* But he had not forgotten his American son: ‘I left a baby bull in America. Someday I’ll go get him.’

One day, Obama, now thirty-seven, turned up in Hawaii to see his long-lost son, who was back there after his time in Indonesia. Ann was still married to her Indonesian husband and had a job in Jakarta. Aged ten, Barry went to stay with his grandparents in Hawaii to attend the best prep school in the state. Later Ann joined him. Now the boy encountered his famous father once again: ‘a tall dark figure … thinner than I expected’, sporting ‘a blue blazer and white shirt, scarlet ascot, horn-rimmed glasses’, limping with an ivory-headed cane. He taught Barry to dance – and addressed his class at school. But he had come to take Ann and Barry back to Nairobi. Ann refused.

Barry and his father never met again; his mother, only eighteen years older than him, was everything to him – ‘the kindest, most generous spirit I’ve ever known,’ he wrote; ‘what is best in me I owe to her.’

In Nairobi, Dr Obama was given a job at the Finance Ministry, finally finding the respect he deserved, while Barry studied in LA before getting into Columbia Law School. On 23 November 1982, Dr Obama, just forty-eight, was killed in a car crash. ‘After my twenty-first birthday, a stranger,’ wrote Barack Obama junior, ‘called to give me the news.’ He craved to know the real story of his father and to construct his family history: he had a dream of his father, and looked to Africa to define himself.

As Obama started his studies and his search for himself, America was at its lowest ebb, divided at home, stalemated by Soviet Russia, haemorrhaging men and prestige in Vietnam. ‘You think you’re the most powerful leader since God,’ an exhausted LBJ told his successor, Richard Nixon, reluctantly welcoming him into the Oval Office, ‘but when you get in that tall chair, as you’re gonna find out, Mr President, you can’t count on people.’

THE APHRODISIAC OF POWER: KISSINGER AND NIXON’S TRIANGULAR GAME

Nixon was just as hard-scrambled as LBJ but slightly more polished. The prickly, awkward, misanthropic, emotionally strangulated son of a mean-spirited bankrupt grocer, his mother ‘a Quaker saint’, Nixon had overcome defeat by JFK, then run disastrously for California governor. ‘You won’t have Richard M. Nixon to kick around any more,’ he told the press after the latter failure. But then, watching LBJ’s Vietnam fiasco and the national divisions it sparked, he reinvented himself as the representative of ‘the silent majority’. His first challenge on taking office in January 1969 was how to get out of Vietnam.

‘My rule in international affairs,’ he said to the Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, ‘is “Do unto others as they would do to you.”’