London, June 24 (ANI): A blistering new biography has revealed Barack Obama's relationships with well-educated ex-girlfriends including Genevieve Cook and Alexandra McNear.
The U.S. president and his First Lady sometimes seem so well-suited to each other that it's hard to imagine there ever having been any woman in his life other than the formidable Michelle, whom he met while working for a Chicago law firm in 1989.
But now, in a new biography, Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist David Maraniss has pulled his exes out of the shadows.
In so doing, he has revealed an unflattering picture of a president so desperate to sell an image of himself as a pioneering race warrior that he has air-brushed many of the 'white' elements from his life - including that string of well-heeled, well-educated white girlfriends.
For Genevieve Cook - to whom admittedly the President alludes in his memoirs - wasn't the first white girlfriend in his life, nor the last.
As a young student in the early Eighties at Occidental College, a small arts university in Los Angeles, Obama developed a serious crush on another student Alexandra McNear, who was co-editor of a college literary magazine which published two of Obama's poems.
McNear, described by Maraniss as 'lithe and mysterious, with the face of a young Meryl Streep and a literary bohemian air', had just the sort of rarefied upbringing that might impress an amibitious young man.
Both her parents were established writers and her father, Erskine McNear, was the scion of a property empire. In the summer of 1981, Obama and McNear moved to New York, she to do a theatre course, he to finish his degree at Columbia University, so he could explore his black identity in a more African American city.
Far away from family and friends, Obama's first summer in the Big Apple in 1981 might have been lonely but, suggests Maraniss, for the presence of McNear.
After a first date at a dimly lit Italian restaurant on Manhattan's Upper East Side, they embarked on a two-month affair.
When she went back to Los Angeles, their relationship continued, largely through an exchange of passionate if pompously intellectual letters.
A few months later, while Obama was visiting his mother in Honolulu, he wrote to inform McNear with cold detachment that he felt their relationship was changing from romantic love to 'the more quotidian, but finer bonds of friendship'.
McNear went on to scandalise her family by marrying a former Serbian boxer and convicted bank robber called Bob Bozic.
Next for Obama was Genevieve Cook, whom he met at that mutual friend's flat at a Christmas Party in 1983.
Obama had graduated and was in a dull office job as he worked out what he wanted to do with his life. She was three years older than him, and an assistant teacher at a private school in Brooklyn.
Cook is mentioned in Obama's memoirs as a mystery woman.
She shared many of Obama's obsessions. The daughter of a former Australian ambassador to the U.S., and a moneyed art historian who later remarried into a prominent American family, Genevieve, too, religiously kept a diary.
Like McNear, Cook was attracted by the 'mental exhilaration' of his intellect, marvelling at how mature he was at 22, but dismayed by his remoteness and wariness about commitment.
Needless to say, he was as self-obsessed as ever.
When she told him that she loved him, his response was not 'I love you, too,' but 'thank you'.
They often talked about race and Obama would confide that he felt like an 'imposter' as there was 'hardly a black bone in his body'.
She eventually told him he 'needed to go black' (to date a black woman), whereas he countered that he would never find a black woman 'he would feel truly comfortable with'.
They moved into a flat together but their intellectual discussions eventually turned into fights over issues like the washing-up.
In the end, Cook tired of his emotional 'withheld-ness, his lack of spontaneity', and broke up with him in 1985.
Soon after that period, he made strides in his career, moving to Chicago to work as a community organiser.
In a moment of acute foresight, Cook had told her diary that while she was not the woman for Obama, 'that lithe, bubbly, strong black lady is waiting somewhere'.
She may or may not be 'bubbly', but 'strong' certainly sums up Michelle Obama.
However, before Obama met Michelle, he went on to have a relationship with another white woman in Chicago.
The woman, who like Cook was an anthropology graduate, was barely mentioned in Obama's memoirs, but by then he was trying to establish his African-American credentials by toiling in an impoverished and predominantly black area of Chicago.
Maraniss does not identify this new woman either, but says the relationship was 'serious' and 'ended much like the one with Genevieve, when Obama was ready to make his next career move'.
Within four years, he had met Michelle in Chicago and the rest we know. Obama finally had the partnership he wanted history to record - with a strong black woman, a descendant of slaves who had pushed her way up from humble roots. (ANI)
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