Obama's father was forced out of Harvard
President Obama's father was forced to leave Harvard University before completing his doctorate in economics because the school was concerned about his personal life and finances, according to public immigration records. Harvard administrators, the memo stated, "were having difficulty with his financial arrangements and couldn't seem to figure out how many wives he had."
BOSTON — President Obama's father was forced to leave Harvard University before completing his doctorate in economics because the school was concerned about his personal life and finances, according to public immigration records.
Harvard had asked the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to delay a request by Barack Hussein Obama Sr. to extend his stay in the U.S., "until they decided what action they could take in order to get rid of him," immigration official M.F. McKeon wrote in a June 1964 memo.
An earlier INS memo from McKeon said that while Obama had passed his exams and was entitled on academic grounds to stay and complete his thesis, the school was going to try and "cook something up to ease him out."
In May 1964, David Henry, director of Harvard's international office, wrote to Obama to say the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences didn't have the money to support him.
Obama's request for an extended stay was denied; he left Harvard and — divorced from the president's mother — returned to Kenya in 1964. The immigration memos were given to a Boston Globe reporter in 2009 through a Freedom of Information request. The papers were first made public Wednesday by The Arizona Independent.
In 1961, while Obama was an undergraduate student at the University of Hawaii, the school's foreign student adviser called an immigration official and said Obama had recently married Stanley Ann Dunham — the president's mother — despite already having a wife in Kenya.
According to a memo written by an INS official, the adviser said she "cautioned him about his playboy ways." Obama said he had divorced his wife in Kenya. He told the president's mother the same thing, though she would later learn it was a lie.
He died in a car crash in 1982 |
