Photo by The Obama-Biden Transition Project, via Wikimedia Commons

We’ll try not to make too much about it, but the basic fact is undeniable:

A 1958 article from The Saturday Evening Post is responsible for President Barack Obama’s father coming to the United States. If it hadn’t been for this article, Obama’s father might never have come to this country; he certainly wouldn’t have met his American wife; and his son—our president—would never have been born.

What was so special about this magazine article?

Not so much on the face of it. It was a travel story about Hawaii. It began as just another assignment for Frank J. Taylor—one of 82 articles he wrote for the Post. His idea was to cover the 50th anniversary of the University of Hawaii, and get some vacation time in his beloved Hawaii.

As David Maraniss points out in his book Barack Obama: The Story (Simon and Schuster, 2012), Editor Ben Hibbs approved the story. “I think it will make a rather unusual education piece for us,” he told Taylor.

These coeds represented only a few of the Islands

Betty Mooney, who ran the library, read the article and passed it along to a Kenyan student, Barack Obama, the father of the man who would become the future president. She knew Obama was interested in studying in America, but was worried about racial unrest in the states. The University of Hawaii, as described by Taylor, seemed an ideal alternative.

From his first paragraph, Taylor emphasized the multicultural atmosphere the University nurtured. Following is an excerpt:

The physical setting itself is picturesque enough, but what really sets the University of Hawaii apart is the multi-racial make-up of its student body.

Physicist Walter Steiger lectures in an aloha shirt.

Because the undergraduates come from so many different racial strains, new students were for some years asked on the entrance blank to indicate their ethnic background—Polynesian (Hawaiian or otherwise), Caucasian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Filipino.

Every so often, however, a card would turn up on which a student had checked not one, but perhaps four or five of the races named. At first the registrar suspected undergraduate levity, but upon making cautious inquiry, he discovered it was nothing of the kind. Some students were indeed a blend of several races.

The university rose to the occasion. It added a new race, Cosmopolitan, and stopped keeping records of racial background.

Beach party at Waikiki. The hula is basic training for island-raised girls, and many of the coeds are experts.

The students, however, found the idea of a seventh race much too good to pass up, and the Cosmopolitan category is perpetuated in an annual … beauty contest staged by the editors of the student yearbook.

As the happy Hawaiians see it, only a campus insensible to the finer things of life would settle for a single beauty queen when there’s a perfectly good excuse to have seven of them in a row.

Accordingly, the … contest elects a separate queen for each of the seven different racial groups.

These campus-queen contests … on what is known locally as the Rainbow Campus, help point up the fact that the university’s 6,700 day students, plus 7,000 adults in night classes, in effect, bridge the Pacific racially.

The University had also been successful in building a diverse faculty.

Caption from 1958: "Few other campuses offer such exotic extracurricular activities as sailing off Diamond Head in February."

These latter students proved to be intent on their studies.

Students in the Sinclair library.

Indeed, the university’s students are such dedicated scholars that the faculty worries about them and conspires to divert them from book learning now and then.”In mainland colleges, you’re always putting the brakes on student exuberance,” explained Susan Daniels, the lively New Englander who supervises student activities. “Out here it’s just the opposite. It is such a cherished privilege to have an education that these young people have to be prodded into having fun.”

Obama, Sr., was duly impressed. A magazine article had pointed to a unique educational opportunity. He enrolled at the University of Hawaii in 1959. In 1960, he met Stanley Ann Dunham. They married in 1961. Their son, Barack Obama II, was born in Honolulu in 1961 and, 47 years later, was sworn in as the 44th president.

We’re all aware that the Post is an influential magazine. But sometimes the magnitude of its influence stuns even those of us who work here!

The Post Produces a President The Saturday Evening Post

President Johnson requested a President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy within weeks of the shooting. Months later, the Commission presented its report which confirmed the official version offered by the Justice Department: A lone, crazed gunman, acting alone, killed the president.

America wasn’t buying it. Even before the Commission met for the first time, the majority of Americans no longer believed a lone shooter was responsible. A 1963 poll showed 52 percent of Americans believed a conspiracy was behind the assassination. Over the years, America’s faith in the Commission’s findings has fallen so low that a 1998 survey showed 90 percent of Americans believed a conspiracy was involved.

How wrong could the Commission be to earn such disregard? Was it incompetent, corrupt, or both?

In the Post article “The Kennedy Assassination” published in 1967, Richard J. Whalen addressed some of the reasons why the Report was so widely discounted.

First were the commissioners themselves: stolid, deliberate people—three senators, a congressman (Gerald Ford), a former head of the CIA, a former head of the World Bank, and the chief justice of the Supreme Court. It was a group unlikely to favor fantastic premises, or indulge their imaginations. According to Whalen, “The Chief Justice was understandably reluctant to assume the task forced on him by the President, for he was miscast. In a unique situation, demanding a supple and pragmatic, yet unswerving, truthseeker, he was a figure of granitic rectitude and decorum.”

Next was the questionable evidence. Medical records from the hospital disappeared, reappeared, then disappeared again. Some witnesses were ignored, others questioned at great length. Witnesses contradicted each other, and appeared inconsistent with what could be seen in the Zapruder film.

"The Kennedy Assassination"
by Richard J. Whalen
January 14, 1967

Then the Commission began to divide over the “single-bullet” theory, which asserted that a single bullet caused multiple wounds to Kennedy and Texas governor John Connally.

“The arguing within the commission over the single-bullet theory continued until the Report was in its final drafts. Sen. Russell, Sen. John Sherman Cooper and Congressman Hale Boggs remained unpersuaded, and were at most willing to call the evidence ‘credible.’ Dulles, John J. McCloy, and Congressman Gerald R. Ford believed the theory offered the most reasonable explanation: Ford, for one, wanted to describe the evidence as ‘compelling.’ The views of the Chief Justice are unknown. [Pennsylvania Senator Arlen] Specter, Norman Redlich and other members of the commission staff unsuccessfully opposed the attempt to straddle this crucial question. They realized only too well, being closer to the evidence and the dilemma it posed, that it was indeed essential for the commission to find that a single bullet had struck both victims if the single assassin conclusion was to be convincing. Finally McCloy suggested a compromise [in wording]—“very persuasive —and this fundamental difference of opinion was fuzzed up in the final language of the Report… The shaky evidence beneath the commission’s findings goes deeper than the hedged and flatly contradictory expert testimony on the single-bullet theory. The very foundation of the commission’s account is built on disputed ground, the autopsy performed on the President, the actual number and location of his wounds.”

Whalen’s conclusion echoes the frustration many Americans felt with the report.

“The mysteries left unresolved in the Warren Report are chiefly the result of the failure to ask obvious questions during the investigation. The single-bullet theory was left in limbo, never completely accepted or rejected, because the commission declined to confront the disturbing possibility that the strong case against Oswald might not be the only explanation. “The critics who allege a cover-up of the ‘true facts’ by the Warren Commission can as easily argue their case on the basis of the appearance of concealment as they can on the ground of actual conspiracy. The commission, all too often, permitted such an appearance to exist unnecessarily. “The autopsy documentation—or the lack of it—can be used to raise suspicions of a gigantic cover-up.

“The evidence against Oswald remains as ‘hard’ as it was when Ruby’s bullet killed him. Every piece of ‘soft’ evidence … tends to support the possibility of a second assassin. Why not, then, face in that direction and weigh every shred of evidence, old or new? The appropriate forum for such an airing of dissenting views might be a special joint committee of Congress, or perhaps a ‘citizens’ panel’ of independent investigators, with unlimited access to official records, to be appointed by the President without concern over how long it sat and when it issued a Report. The alternative is to remain imprisoned by the Warren Report, which was an interim account intended to meet an immediate need.”

It seems a modest, reasonable request. America only wants the truth. Give us the facts. But the facts in this case never seem to come together. Instead of yielding answers, questions only produced more questions. The cliché “Time will tell” doesn’t seem to work in this case. Time isn’t telling. In fact, time is saying less and trying to retract some of its earlier statements.

In 1979 the United House Select Committee on Assassinations conducted a new investigation of Kennedy’s death. It concluded a conspiracy might have existed, but said no more on the matter. Congress began releasing this Committee’s internal files to the public in 1992. Yet no revelations have appeared. We have uncovered new possibilities, but no further certainties.

The explanation the Warren Commission offered is fantastic: A lone gunmen seizes an opportunity to shoot the president, and succeeds, is arrested, but is killed by another lone gunman while in police custody. It hardly inspires faith. Yet the alternative explanations are even more fantastic.

Given the country’s emotional state at the time, the Warren Commission probably could not have succeeded. It was trying to answer the question “Who shot the president?” when the country wanted to know “How could this happen?”

The stubborn denial of the report and the endless spinning of new theories can be attributed to a nagging doubt: How could a government that was incapable of protecting its chief executive from murder at the hands of a solitary maniac ever hope to gather all the important evidence of his death into an explanation the country would believe?

Click here to read “The Kennedy Assassination” by Richard J. Whalen, January 14, 1967 (PDF).

The Unanswerable Question The Saturday Evening Post

Here’s what he’d say: “I told you so!” Franklin, after all, both created the job of president and promoted the abolition of slavery, so Barack Obama’s inauguration represents the final conjunction of two of Franklin’s most significant contributions to life in America.

Franklin first proposed a central government for British North America during the Albany Congress in 1754, fully 27 years before the U.S. Constitution incorporated his ideas in our founding document. The head of this central government would be a president-general, appointed by the British monarch. In this way, Franklin hoped the constant feuding between the 13 colonies would end, easing trade.

Regarding slavery, as a young Philadelphia businessman, Franklin owned a slave couple, which he later sold because they were too costly to maintain. Moreover, his Pennsylvania Gazette frequently advertised slaves for sale. The justification for slavery in North America revolved around the status of Africans as either “beasts” or infidels — heathens who didn’t know Christian teachings and hadn’t been baptized. This stance led to heated debates about what happened when Africans became Christianized.

Gradually the notion took hold among certain sects that blacks who converted to Christianity should be freed from bondage. Quakers were among the first to insist on this principle, excommunicating meeting house members who held Christianized slaves. This, in turn, fueled missionary zeal among those who saw slavery as ungodly. They set up schools to teach blacks the reading skills needed to study and absorb the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

In 1758, a school for Negroes was opened in Philadelphia. Many slave owners disparaged such schools, claiming that Africans were incapable of learning to read or write. Franklin, however, came to the opposite conclusion. In 1763 he visited one such school and wrote about the experience to a British friend, saying that he had “visited the Negro School … and had the Children thoroughly examin’d.” Franklin reported, “They appear’d all to have made considerable Progress in Reading for the Time they had respectively been in the School, and most of them answer’d readily and well the Questions of the Catechism; they behav’d very orderly, show’d a proper Respect and ready Obedience to the Mistress, and seem’d very attentive.” Franklin concluded, “From what I then saw, [I] have conceiv’d a higher Opinion of the natural Capacities of the black Race, than I had ever before entertained. Their Apprehension seems as quick, their Memory as strong, and their Docility in every Respect equal to that of white Children.”

Franklin, during the 1787 U.S. Constitutional Convention, was effectively governor of Pennsylvania and head of his state’s delegation to that assemblage. Shortly after the convention ended, however, Franklin returned to private life, at least for a while, retiring from Pennsylvania’s presidency on November 5, 1788. By then, Franklin was already president of an organization started 10 years earlier by righteous-minded Quakers called The Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage and for Improving the Condition of the African Race. The group’s stated objective was “to use such means as are in their power, to extend the blessings of freedom to every part of the human race.”

As soon as his government duties ended, Franklin got down to the business of abolishing slavery. He used his considerable energy, skill, and prestige to make things happen. He thus became the leader of the abolitionist movement.

Franklin approached the antislavery project with a level of commitment equaling his dedication to civic achievement during his earlier tradesman days. In November 1789, Franklin issued “An Address to the Public” in which he called slavery “such an atrocious debasement of human nature” that eliminating it without proper preparation could “open a source of serious evil.”

Franklin’s antislavery campaign ultimately led to America’s Civil War. Our nation’s new constitution put off for 20 years any laws limiting slavery. This would allow congressmen to set the matter aside and deal with more pressing questions, such as how to pay off national debts and whether to maintain a standing army during peacetime.

However, Benjamin Franklin, the nation’s patriarch, sent a petition to the First Continental Congress soon after it convened. This document, from Franklin’s pen, raised religious and moral issues to condemn slavery.

Franklin’s petition reminded Congress that they had been given power for “promoting the Welfare and securing the blessings of liberty to the People of the United States” and declared “that these blessings ought rightfully to be administered, without distinction of Color, to all descriptions of People.” The document asked Congress for “the Restoration of liberty to those unhappy Men, who alone in this land of Freedom are degraded into perpetual Bondage … groaning in servile Subjection.” Franklin’s signature at the bottom of the petition, seemingly larger than usual, insured open debate on the subject. And debate they did: The discourse laid out the issues that continued to come up with increasing animosity for the next 70 years.

Indeed, Franklin opened a can of worms that Congress could not close. At the time, however, the balance between free and slave states shackled progress towards emancipation. The debate in our nation’s capital over the contentious issue of slavery, however, eventually split the country in two.

Abraham Lincoln was, in effect, carrying out Benjamin Franklin’s objective when he emancipated slaves in the conquered regions of the South.

If Ben Franklin came back to life today, he’d burst with pride over the outcomes of two of his favorite projects: the abolition of slavery and the formation of a national American government. However, he’d wonder why it took more than 230 years for these two objectives to coalesce in the election of a black president of the United States of America.

America’s First Black President Barack Obama The Saturday Evening Post