Whatever you do. Don’t ask him about his father.”
That was Bob Bauer, lawyer for President Obama, to biographer David Garrow as he prepared to interview the president for the Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, released in 2017.
“Barack Obama devoted dozens of hours to reading the first ten chapters of this manuscript,” Garrow says on page 1084, and had “remaining disagreements – some strong indeed – with multiple characterizations and interpretations” in the book. Garrow, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, has some rather strong disagreements with Obama.
