Barack Obama hoped that his biographer would never read letters that the former US president wrote to his ex-girlfriend, David Garrow claimed. The letters were written by Barack Obama to his former girlfriend Sheila Miyoshi Jager- the woman he once hoped to marry before he met Michelle Obama.
“Barack made it clear to me that he hoped I would never read them, I can put it that way. I think if the letters to Sheila ever become public, I think that will be a signal event,” David Garrow told Fox.
“Those letters would detail just how extremely serious and extremely intense a relationship that was and that it continued off and on into his Harvard Law School years,” David Garrow, who authored the lengthy 2017 biography “Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama”, said. While writing the book, the biographer had several off-the-record conversations up into 2016 with the former president.
On the Obama marriage, the biographer said that it is genuine and loving but it wasn’t wrong to say that a mixed-race marriage could have made life difficult for Barack Obama at the time. Barack and Michelle Obama married in 1992. He was later elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996 and was elected to the US senate from Illinois in 2004.
“The one aspect that I will endorse or that is inescapably true is that by 1988, he knew he wanted to run for public office in Chicago. And he knew… that having a wife like Sheila Jager, half-Dutch, half Japanese, would not cut it in Black Chicago… Having a non-Black spouse 25, 35 years ago was an active political problem for a Black candidate,” David Garrow said.
“There’s no resemblance between their lives today and who they were 20 years ago. And when I was doing most of my interviewing across Black Chicago in like 2010, 2011, 2012, even then, folks could see this sort of ‘desire to hang with celebrities’ theme building in the White House,” he explained.
“Some of the folks weren’t surprised that Barack was going that way, but they were really painfully upset that Michelle had seemingly lost her grounding because they viewed her as just the epitome of a hardworking, working-class South Side Chicago Black family,” he continued.