The Vetting - Exclusive - Obama's Literary Agent in 1991 Booklet:
'Born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii'
By Joel B. Pollak

Andrew Breitbart was never a 'Birther', and 'Breitbart News' is a site that has never advocated the narrative of 'Birtherism'. In fact, Andrew believed, as we do, that President Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961. Yet Andrew also believed that the complicit mainstream media had refused to examine President Obama's ideological past, or the carefully crafted persona he and his advisers had constructed for him. It is for that reason that we launched 'The Vetting', an ongoing series in which we explore the ideological background of President Obama (and other presidential candidates) not to re-litigate 2008, but because ideas and actions have consequences.

It is also in that spirit that we discovered, and now present, the booklet described below;  one that includes a marketing pitch for a forthcoming book by a then young, otherwise unknown former president of the Harvard Law Review.

It is evidence - not of the President's foreign origin, but that Barack Obama's public persona has perhaps been presented differently at different times. Breitbart News has obtained a promotional booklet produced in 1991 by Barack Obama's then literary agency, Acton & Dystel, which touts Obama as "born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii."

The booklet, which was distributed to business colleagues in the publishing industry, includes a brief biography of Obama among the biographies of eighty-nine other authors represented by Acton & Dystel. It also promotes Obama's anticipated first book, 'Journeys in Black and White', which Obama abandoned, later publishing 'Dreams From My Father' instead.

Obama’s biography in the booklet is as follows:

Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. The son of an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation. He served as project coordinator in Harlem for the New York Public Interest Research Group, and was Executive Director of the Developing Communities Project in Chicago’s South Side. His commitment to social and racial issues will be evident in his first book, 'Journeys in Black and White'.

The booklet, which is thirty-six pages long, is printed in blue ink (and on the cover - silver/grey ink), using offset lithography. It purports to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of Acton & Dystel, which was founded in 1976. Jay Acton no longer represents Obama. However, Jane Dystel still lists Obama as a client on her agency's website. According to the booklet itself, the text was edited by Miriam Goderich, who has since become Dystel's partner at Dystel & Goderich, an agency founded in 1994. Breitbart News attempted to reach Goderich by telephone several times over several days. Her calls are screened by an automated service that requires callers to state their name and company, which we did. She never answered.

The design of the booklet was undertaken by Richard Bellsey, who has since closed his business. Bellsey, reached by telephone, could not recall the exact details of the booklet, but told Breitbart News that, "It sounds like one of our jobs, like I did for [Acton & Dystel] twenty years ago or more." Acton, who spoke to Breitbart News by telephone, confirmed precise details of the booklet and said that it cost the agency tens of thousands of dollars to produce. He indicated that while 'almost nobody' wrote his or her own biography, the non-athletes in the booklet, whom the agents deal[t] with on a daily basis, were probably approached to approve the text as presented.

Dystel did not respond to numerous requests for comment, via email and telephone. Her assistant told Breitbart News that, "Dystel does not answer questions about Obama." The errant Obama biography in the Acton & Dystel booklet does not contradict the authenticity of Obama's birth certificate.  Moreover, several contemporaneous accounts of Obama’s background describe Obama as having been born in Hawaii. The biography does, however, fit a pattern in which Obama, or the people representing and supporting him, manipulate his public persona.

David Maraniss's forthcoming biography of Obama has reportedly confirmed for example, that a girlfriend Obama described in 'Dreams From My Father' was, in fact, an amalgam of several separate individuals. In addition, Obama and his handlers have a history of redefining his identity when expedient. In March 2008, for example, he famously declared: "I can no more disown [Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother." Several weeks later, Obama left Wright's church and according to Edward Klein's new biography, 'The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House', allegedly attempted to persuade Wright not to do any more public speaking until after the November [2008] election. (51).

Obama has been known frequently to fictionalize aspects of his own life. During his 2008 campaign, for instance, Obama claimed that his dying mother had fought with insurance companies over coverage for her cancer treatments. That turned out to be untrue, but Obama has repeated the story, which even the Washington Post called 'misleading' in a campaign video for the 2012 election. The Acton & Dystel biography could also reflect how Obama was seen by his associates, or transitions in his own identity. He is said, for instance, to have cultivated an 'international identity' until well into his adulthood, according to Maraniss. Regardless of the reason for Obama's odd biography, the Acton & Dystel booklet raises new questions as part of ongoing efforts to understand Barack Obama, who despite four years in office, remains a mystery to many Americans, thanks to the mainstream media.

May 19, 2012

Why Kenyan Birth Claim Was No 'Fact Checking Error'
By Jack Cashill

Let us start with the obvious. At the time, 1991, the Acton & Dystel agency listed 90 clients, Obama among its least significant. How likely is it that Goderich would have remembered enough about a 1991 'error' to know it was hers, especially since it went uncorrected through several revisions until changed in 2007?  To make this claim credible, there would have to be an existing paper trail leading to an Obama submission in which he lists an Hawaiian birth. I am confident that there is no such submission.

Former publisher Tom Lipscomb does not buy Goderich's explanation for a New York minute. "As someone who has run a number of top bestseller publishers, I think this is an amazing MIRACLE, "writes Lipscomb emphatically on Power Line. "It is the ONLY case I have ever heard of in which an editorial assistant INVENTED a biographical detail. I have heard of typos, wrong dates, misspellings of names. But to pick a really weird country of origin like Kenya for an author?"

The Breitbart people followed up with a piece by Steve Boman, a Jane Dystel client in the mid-1990s, who noted, "All material she used in our proposals came directly from me and my writing partner." This is standard. In the eight books I have written under my own name, I have reviewed all biographical information sent out about me either by agent or publisher. Like most authors, I have let a little fluff pass, but not much.

The most interesting 'tell' in the 1991 Acton & Dystel brochure relates to what was said about Obama's career in the business world. Obama, the reader learns, 'worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation'.

In Dreams From My Father, Obama inflated his stint at Business International even more and transformed it into a faux moment of racial awareness, one of at least a half-dozen concocted racial melodramas in the book. As Obama tells the story, a 'consulting house to multinational corporations' hired him and promptly promoted him to the position of 'financial writer'.

Here, he felt like 'a spy behind enemy lines', and a guilty one at that. "As far as I could tell," he adds, "I was the only black man in the company." He does not boast of his racial uniqueness. Rather, in full grievance mode, he considers it 'a source of shame'. Indeed, the whole experience troubled him:

"I had my own office, my own secretary, money in the bank. Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors-see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand and for a split second, I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve."

As early as July 2005, however, former co-worker and Obama fan, Dan Armstrong, revealed Obama's whole account to be a 'serious exaggeration'.  Obama worked at not a multinational corporation, but a 'small company that published newsletters'.  He was not the only black person who worked there. He did not, as he claimed, have his own office, wear a jacket and tie, interview international businessmen, or write articles. He mostly just copy-edited business items and slipped them into a three-ring binder for the company's customers.

Are we supposed to believe that Goderich not only changed Obama's birthplace from Hawaii to Kenya, but also transformed him from a grunt filling three-ring binders into a 'financial journalist and editor'?

When this discrepancy surfaced years later, pundits in either camp were confused as to why Obama would lie about such seemingly irrelevant details. There are two good, non-exclusive possibilities. For one, the exaggeration enables the reader to see Obama as he would like to see himself  -  'a spy behind enemy lines'.  For another, Obama's  co-author, Bill Ayers, once again took the framework of Obama's life and roughed in the details.

In Fugitive Days, Ayers' 2001 memoir, he uses the phrase 'behind enemy lines' almost literally to describe his and his comrades' quiet infiltration of the opponent's position. Wife, Bernardine Dohrn, has said the same in public. When the Weather Underground declared its state of war with the United States in May 1970, Dohrn warned that, "People fighting 'Amerikan imperialism' all over the world look to Amerika's youth to use our strategic position behind enemy lines to join forces in the destruction of the empire."

The bottom line is this: Obama has been creating and shifting identities his entire adult life.

If the agency brochure was a snapshot of the 1991 Obama, 'Dreams' captured him in his 1995 pose: hip, black, progressive wounded by racial slights but able to overcome them, just the man to lead Chicago into the 21^st century, then the extent of his and Ayers's ambition for him.

"I met Obama sometime in the mid-1990s," Bill Ayers would tell Salon, likely pushing the actual date back several years. "And everyone who knew him thought that he was politically ambitious. For the first two years, I thought, his ambition is so huge that he wants to be mayor of Chicago."

Friend Cassandra Butts traced that ambition back at least to Harvard. "He wanted to be mayor of Chicago and that was all he ever talked about as far as holding office," she would tell early Obama biographer, David Mendell.

No one would have challenged Obama's biography had he not gone beyond Chicago, but he did. And so where he was born matters, and whether he even wrote his own biography matters, too. As much as I know about Obama, I don't know or pretend to know the answer -- at least to the first of those two questions.