Barrack Obama Snr was forced out of the United States in the 1960s following concerns raised about his "playboy ways" and that he was a man of many women.
The revelations contained in government documents made available to a US journalist came even before the the dust could settle on the controversy over US President Barack Obama's birth certificate.
The documents indicate that officials at Harvard University, where Obama Snr was a PhD student, told US immigration officials they would "cook something up" to force him to return to Kenya in 1964.
The immigration file, which was released under freedom of information laws, contains records of Obama Snr's time as a student at the universities of Hawaii and Harvard between 1959 and 1964.
The documents have been obtained from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service through a Freedom of Information Act. The documents show Harvard wanted "to try and cook something up to ease him (Barack Obama senior) out" since school administrators "were having difficulty with his financial arrangements and couldn't seem to figure out how many wives he had".
An April 1961 memo said a University of Hawaii employee called to report that Obama Snr had already married Stanley Ann Dunham and that they already had a son.
The university employee warned that he was already married to a woman in Kenya and had been "running around with several girls" since arriving in the US and that he had been warned to curb his "playboy ways".
Obama Snr and Dunham divorced in January 1964, by which time he had already left Hawaii and was studying for his PhD in Economics at Harvard.
The file said concerns were also raised over Obama Snr's relationship with a Kenyan high school student on an exchange scheme in Boston, who abruptly traveled to England. “The suspicion exists that she may have gone to London for [redacted],” the Telegraph quoted the March 1964 document as saying. It is unclear what the next word is.
According to the documents, Harvard was contacted by US immigration officials in May 1964 and reported that while Obama Snr had passed his exams, the university would “try to cook something up to ease him out”.
Obama Snr, also described as a “slippery character" in the documents, was told that funding for his studies had run out and that he must complete his thesis in Kenya.
According to the documents, the immigration officials then received a call in July 1964 from a mother distressed that her 27-year-old daughter had agreed to marry Obama Snr.
The woman is presumed to be Ruth Nidesand, who became Obama Snr's third wife and was a white woman, like Dunham. At the time several US states still had laws banning inter-racial marriage. Nidesand reportedly left the US to be with Obama Snr the following month.
Yesterday, Harvard University spokesman Jeff Neal denied university officials worked with the US immigration officials to deny Obama Snr student visa extension, “While we cannot verify accounts of conversations that occurred nearly 50 years ago, a review of our existing files did not find any support for either the language or the implied intent described by the US government official in the government documents,” Neal said.
Neal said that university documents indicate “the University’s Center for International Affairs faced serious constraints in providing financial support for research by international graduate students in Cambridge, and that these students were required to secure and demonstrate independent and sufficient sources of funding in order to remain on campus”. The documents released show that after returning to Kenya in 1964, Obama Snr tried to return to the US in 1965.
A letter from then Harvard University Registrar Robert Shenton written to Obama Snr on November 16, 1965, says that since he had not registered his thesis title with the Department of Economic, the university could not authorize the issuance of the I-20 — the document issued by a college for a student so that the student may obtain a student visa — to allow him to return to the country.
Neal said the university could only confirm that Obama Snr was a student at Harvard from 1962-1964, and earned a Master’s degree in Economics.
Following the release of the documents, speculation online was that Barack Obama Snr was in the US government radar because he was a CIA asset. Obama Snr was among the 280 students from East Africa flown to study in the US under the airlift programme organised by the late Kenyan politician Tom Mboya. He and Obama's mother met at a Russian language class that she was taking at the University of Hawaii.
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