Barry O is Harvard's real plagiarist-in-chief
Two weeks ago in this space I documented the good company in which Harvard President Claudine Gay finds herself as an aspiring plagiarist.
Harvard worthies Doris Kearns Goodwin, Laurence Tribe, Charles Ogletree and Fareed Zakaria have all been forced to wear the Scarlet P just in the last 20 or so years.
One Harvard plagiarist, however, has managed to escape scrutiny, at least from the mainstream media. But then again, former President Barack Obama escaped scrutiny on all fronts in his miraculously "scandal free" White House years.
Although I have documented Obama's perfidy in the past, I raise the issue again, not only because the subject is in the air, but also because others on the right have been raising it without attribution.
If I might offer friendly advice to my allies and imitators, it is wise to avoid even the appearance of plagiarism when scolding others as being plagiarists.
I worry less about credit for myself than for my informal research associate, Shawn Glasco. It was Shawn who first alerted me to Obama's pillaging of Kuki Gallman's 1994 memoir, "African Nights," for his 1995 memoir, "Dreams from My Father."
In his mid-40s at the time, Shawn worked in construction, did some surveying and served as a ski resort jack-of-all-trades in Colorado.
Doing research when not working, Shawn had earlier helped me with my investigation into Bill Ayers' involvement in "Dreams." Shawn, too, had deduced that the young Obama's poem, "Pop," was about his creepy communist mentor Frank Marshall Davis.
At the time, the world's literary critics were insisting the poem was about "Gramps," Obama's grandfather. Shawn and I were right.
At the local library in 2013, while researching books about Kenya, Glasco stumbled upon Gallman's books, "I Dream of Africa," later made into a movie, and "African Nights."
Published just a year before "Dreams," "African Nights" may well have saved Obama from ruin. According to "Dreams" publisher Peter Osnos. Obama met with him and editor Henry Ferris in 1994 to review progress on his much-delayed book.
Wrote Osnos, "He was determined, he said, to finish the book, which would involve a trip to Kenya for research about his father, who had died there in a car accident."
According to official accounts, Obama made only two trips to Africa before his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004. The first one in 1988 he discussed in"Dreams."
The second trip he took with Michelle in 1992. A third trip to research Kenya would have had to take place in 1994 as "Dreams" was published in 1995.
In his 2013 Obama biography, "Barack Obama: The Story," David Maraniss reported that the draft submitted to editor Ferris did not include the lengthy Kenya section of the book.
This material, claimed Maraniss, came from notes Obama made in his journal during the 1988 trip to Kenya. "I almost transcribed my journal into the book," Obama told Maraniss.
Maraniss had earlier interviewed Ferris, who told Maraniss, "Obama in fact traveled to Kenya a second time for further research before turning in the last part of the book."
The language strongly suggests that Obama traveled to Africa after the first submission of the book to Ferris in 1994 but before the final one later that year.
In his interview with Maraniss, Obama seemed to back Ferris's account. "The second trip was essentially me doing more background on things like Kenyan history," Obama told Maraniss. "That was as close as I came to fact-checking, was that second trip."
In his 2017 Obama biography,"Rising Star," David Garrow reported that Obama was able to flesh out the Kenya portion thanks to copies of letters he sent during a Kenya trip in 1988, later provided to Obama by an old girlfriend.
A Pulitzer Prize winner like Maraniss, Garrow had access to Obama as did editor Ferris. Ferris believes Obama went back to Kenya in 1994 to do research.
Maraniss implies he might have made that trip but argues Obama took the Kenya material from his journals. Garrow reports that this material came from letters Obama sent to an old girlfriend.
Shawn Glasco, who has no Pulitzer Prize and no access to the president, figured out on his own how Obama likely got the Kenya chapter finished.
Instead of going to Africa, Obama may have spent his six-week leave from his law firm copying passages from "African Nights"
Glasco found scores of phrases and words in Obama's"Dreams" that also show up in "African Nights": Baobab (a tree), bhang (cannabis), boma (an enclosure), samosa (a fried snack), shamba (a farm field), liana (a vine), tilapia (a fish), kanga (a sheet of fabric), shuka (decorative sashes).
Both books feature women "wrapped" in their kangas and "dressed" in "rags." The women in both books wear shukas, head shawls, head scarves and goatskins, and they balance baskets on heads graced with "laughing" smiles.
Men in both books spearfish in "ink-black" waters and hunt by torchlight. Elephants are seen "fanning" themselves, birds "trill," insects "buzz," weaver birds "nest," and monkeys "mesmerize."
The books share a veritable Noah's ark of additional fauna: crickets, crocodiles, starlings, dragonflies, cattle, lions, sand crabs, vultures, hyenas, "herds of gazelle," and leopards that can hold small animals "in their jaws."
On the flora front, the shared references are just as compelling: roadside palms, yellow grass, red bougainvillaea, pink bougainvillaea, fig trees, shady mango trees, thornbrush, banana leaves, Baobab trees, liana vines, tomatoes.
The landscape, occasionally "barren," is rich in "undulating" hills whose "grazing lands" are dotted with the occasional "watering hole." The "mud-and-dung" houses feature "thatched" roofs, "verandas" and "vegetable gardens."
People seem to be carrying "straw mats" everywhere. The stars "glint" and people "waltz" underneath them. Eyes "glimmer" in the light of campfires.
Children sing in "high-pitched" rhythms, and girls endure "barbaric" circumcisions. Obama, like Gallmann, travels to the Great Rift Valley and stands at its edge. Both visit the small trading town of Narok.
Claudine Gay, says Obama, hold my beer.
Jack Cashill's new book, "Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America's Cities," is available in all formats.
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