State Department Documents and Publications

November 9, 2010

Indonesia Visit Recalls Obama's Formative Years

BYLINE: Stephen Kaufman, Staff Writer

SECTION: NEWS FROM AMERICA.COM AND THE WASHINGTON FILE

LENGTH: 803 words

Washington -- Barack Obama said it felt "wonderful" to return to Indonesia as president of the United States many years after he had lived in the country for four years as a boy, and he thanked the Indonesian government for posthumously awarding his late mother a gold medal for her research into the role of women and microcredits in Indonesian villages.

"The sights and the sounds and the memories all feel very familiar, and it's wonderful to be able to come back as president and hopefully contribute to further understanding between the United States and Indonesia," Obama said November 9 in a press conference with Indonesian President Susilo

Bambang Yudhoyono.

"I feel great affection for the people here," he said, adding that the trip, curtailed slightly by the eruption of Mount Merapi, was "a shorter visit than I would like."

At a state dinner following the press conference, Yudhoyono presented an award honoring Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, who had brought her family to Indonesia and conducted research that led to "a scientific paper of high quality regarding the role of women and microcredits in the villages," Yudhoyono said.

Obama said the honor "speaks to the bonds she forged over many years with the people of this magnificent country" and said his mother believed that by educating women "we are, in fact, developing the entire country."

OBAMA RECALLED "JOYOUS TIME" IN MEMOIRS

In 1967, 6-year-old Barack and his mother left their home in Hawaii for Jakarta. They came to join his new stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, who had been forced to abandon his studies at the University of Hawaii when he was conscripted into the Indonesian army. The future president was soon enrolled in a local public school and became known to friends as "Barry Soetoro." Taller, foreign and of a different ethnicity than his friends and classmates, Barry stood out, but he soon made friends, and his mother encouraged him to learn Indonesian and rapidly acculturate to his new surroundings.

When then-Senator Barack Obama wrote his book The Audacity of Hope, which was published in 2006, he reflected on the four years he lived in Indonesia as "a joyous time, full of adventure and mystery."

"We lived in a modest house on the outskirts of town, without air-conditioning, refrigeration or flush toilets," Obama wrote in Audacity. His best friends were "the children of farmers, servants, tailors and clerks," and his years in Jakarta were "days of chasing down chickens and running from water buffalo, nights of shadow puppets and ghost stories and street vendors bringing delectable sweets to our door."

He joined an Indonesian Boy Scout troop and played soccer, or football, which would not become popular in the United States until years later. The future president also displayed a naughty schoolboy side, getting in trouble for crashing through a bamboo fence at school.

But young Obama's life in Jakarta also exposed him to a sense of poverty, suffering and natural disaster that many Americans were unacquainted with. "The world was violent, I was learning, unpredictable and often cruel," Obama later wrote in his 1995 book Dreams from My Father.

Compared to many of his Indonesian neighbors, Barry was relatively well-off. His stepfather surveyed roads and tunnels for the army, and later got a job with Mobil Oil. His sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, was born in Jakarta, and his mother earned additional income for the family by teaching English to Indonesian businessmen at the U.S. Embassy. Obama said his mother's ties to Indonesia never diminished, despite her decision to separate from Soetoro and move back to the United States in 1972. "For the next twenty years she would travel back and forth, working for international agencies for six or twelve months at a time as a specialist in women's development issues, designing programs to help village women start their own businesses or bring their produce to market," he wrote in Audacity.

With the help of his sister, Maya, their mother's doctoral dissertation, Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia, was revised and published as a book by Duke University Press in 2009.

wrote that his upbringing and exposure to a new culture "made me relatively self-sufficient, undemanding on a tight budget, and extremely well-mannered when compared to other American children."

But his mother ultimately decided to send him back to Hawaii to continue his schooling. "She now had learned ... the chasm that separated the life chances of an American from those of an Indonesian. She knew which side of the divide she wanted her child to be on. I was an American, she decided, and my true life lay elsewhere," he wrote in Dreams.

(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: rica.gov)

The Guardian (London) - Final Edition

May 22, 2004

Obituary: Melvin Lasky: Cold warrior who edited the CIA funded Encounter magazine

BYLINE: Andrew Roth

SECTION: Guardian Leader Pages, Pg. 23

LENGTH: 1048 words

Melvin Lasky, who has died aged 84, was, as editor of the magazine Encounter from 1958 to 1990, and of Der Monat (the Month) for 15 years, a combatant in the struggle to keep western intellectuals in the United States' cold war camp.

But in 1967, it was disclosed that both Encounter and Der Monat had been covertly financed by the US Central Intelligence Agency and Mel's reputation shrivelled. But it was to be another 23 years before Encounter closed.

Mel had been an anti-Stalinist combatant long before it was fashionable. It was certainly no secret from me, having shared seven years of secondary and higher education with him in New York. Those surprised by the CIA's use of Trotskyists - and Mel had been one - forget the agency's cynical realists knew that the most dedicated enemies of the Communist party were those who hated it long before the cold war.

The leading CIA fingerman in the international trade union movement was Jay Lovestone, US Communist party general secretary before he turned anti-Stalinist. Encounter's first co-editor was our classmate Irving Kristol, known at college as a "Lovestonite".

If I could greet Mel with restrained warmth, being a neutral in the cold war to which he was so committed, it was because of our shared history. Mel was born near me in the central Bronx at Crotona Park, on whose frozen lake my mother taught me to skate. We both wound up in the huge new all-boys academic high school, De Witt Clinton, and then at the free College of the City of New York (open to the top tenth of New York's high school graduates.)

The 1500 students entering in 1935 endured the most turbulent four years, while swotting to get some of the few jobs going in the depression. Almost half of its students were the sons of Jewish immigrants who had left their families behind in Hitler's path. At that time, Mel seemed an intellectual Trotskyist, espousing the dissident anarcho-syndicalist POUM in the Spanish civil war. In his first autobiographical pamphlet, he describes himself as initially a social democrat, a term which did not have its contemporary meaning. In that time, within NYC's Russian-Jewish community it referred to the embittered remnants of the Russian party, which had been smashed by the Bolsheviks. Mel's origins in the anti-Communist Russian-Jewish community help explain why, at 22, he became literary editor of the New Leader, an organ of anti-Communist Jewish liberals. He held the post from 1942 to 1943. In 1944, Mel belatedly signed up, as a US Army combat historian in Europe.

Postwar, with the cold war, Der Monat was launched in Berlin in 1948 with Mel as editor, a job he did until 1958 and again from 1978 to 1983. His intellectual and linguistic abilities were never in question, and in 1958, as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament took off, Mel replaced Irving Kristol - co-editor since 1953 with poet Stephen Spender - on Encounter. At that time, many British intellectuals had clustered around Kingsley Martin's New Statesman, which tended towards a cold war neutrality. US government thinking was that if a Labour government were returned to power, dissident left-wing MPs would make it difficult for the US to retain Britain as a secure ally.

Encounter's function was to combat anti-Americanism by brainwashing the uncertain with pro-American articles. These were paid for at several times the rate paid by the New Statesman and offered British academics and intellectuals free US trips and expenses-paid lecture tours. There was no room for the objective-minded in this cold war to capture intellectuals.

Enormously industrious, Mel doubled up by running publishing houses for his masters. The premise was that they published pro-American books knowing that the bulk of each edition would be purchased by US agencies to donate to book-starved libraries in the third world.

Even at its peak Encounter had never claimed a circulation above 40,000. Its spider's web began to come apart in 1966-67 with publication of pieces in the New York Times and the radical magazine Ramparts. And Thomas Braden, previously a CIA divisional chief, confirmed in the Saturday Evening Post that, for more than 10 years, the CIA had subsidised Encounter through the Congress for Cultural Freedom - which it also funded - and that one of its staff was a CIA agent. (Lasky had been the CCF's sometime executive secretary). The magazine also covertly received British government money.

Mel's co-editor, Professor Frank Kermode, resigned, proclaiming he had been misled by Mel. "I was always reassured that there was no truth in the allegations about CIA funds."

Mel admitted breezily that "I probably should have told him all the painful details." Spender also quit the monthly and many contributors pulled out.

The CIA funds, had, in fact been replaced in 1964 by Cecil King's International Publishing Corporation - the then owners of the Daily Mirror - which bought the magazine. King's deputy, Hugh Cudlipp, sprang to Mel's defence, insisting that "Encounter without him (Mel) would be as interesting as Hamlet without the Prince".

Encounter staggered on, while control in 1974 passed from IPC to the Carus Corporation. Mel remained its editor until 1990, Conrad Black provided some capital but the magazine folded in 1991. Lasky spent more time in Berlin than in his Chelsea home.

In those days when we shared an education together amidst the political turbulence of 1930s New York, Mel appeared as a very vocal poseur, anxious to become a fashionable critic like Edmund Wilson. When, much later, we occasionally bumped into each other at Gatwick airport, when I was returning from holidays and he was off to his main home in Berlin, I saw he had grown thinner on top and thicker about the middle, but what never altered was his sardonic half-sneer and nasal whine.

His books include Africa For Beginners (1968), Utopia And Revolution (1977), and The Use And Abuse Of Sovietology (1988). His autobiography, On The Barricades And Off, was published in 1989. He and his wife, Brigitte Newiger, were divorced in 1974. His partner Helga Hegewisch survives him, as do his son and daughter by his marriage.

Melvin Jonah Lasky, editor, born January 15 1920; died May 19 2004

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The Washington Post

April 4, 2009 Saturday

Regional Edition

Real-Life Dad Behind 'Eight Is Enough' Also Sparred With Buchanan on 'Crossfire'

BYLINE: Patricia Sullivan; Washington Post Staff Writer

SECTION: METRO; Pg. B05

LENGTH: 812 words

Tom Braden, 92, author of the memoir-turned-television series "Eight Is Enough" and a former CIA official who became the liberal voice on CNN's talk show "Crossfire" in the 1980s, died of cardiac arrest April 3 at his home in Denver.

Mr. Braden, a syndicated newspaper columnist, was best known for his autobiographical novel about his life as the father of eight children, which was published in 1975 and adapted as an ABC comedy-drama two years later. Mr. Braden was also one of the early practitioners of the televised arguments that masquerade as interview shows when he became the sparring partner of former Nixon adviser Pat Buchanan on "Crossfire" in 1982.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Mr. Braden's Chevy Chase home became an informal salon for the journalistic and political elite, where Henry Kissinger spent Christmas Eves, AFL-CIO chief Lane Kirkland spent Thanksgivings and Mr. Braden and his vivacious wife, Joan, entertained everyone from former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to next-door neighbor and NBC anchorman David Brinkley.

As a CIA official in the early 1950s, Mr. Braden was head of the International Organizations Division, which promoted anti-communism by secretly funding groups including the AFL-CIO and the National Student Association, sending the Boston Symphony Orchestra on a European tour and publishing Encounter magazine. After Ramparts magazine exposed the CIA's system of funding anti-communist front organizations all over the globe, Mr. Braden defended the program in an article in a 1967 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. He said the secret program was his idea.

Keeping secrets from Congress, he wrote, simply made good sense: "In the early 1950s, when the cold war was really hot, the idea that Congress would have approved many of our projects was about as likely as the John Birch Society's approving Medicare."

In 1977, Mr. Braden replaced former Robert F. Kennedy campaign aide Frank Mankiewicz on a nationally syndicated WRC radio spot called "Confrontation," paired against the conservative Buchanan. The radio show jumped to late-night TV on "After Hours" on the old WDVM with local broadcaster Gordon Peterson as the moderator.