Personally, I'm just slightly curious as to how they could afford the trip in the first place. Some birthers like to shout CONSPIRACY at the fact that Obama went to a private school, despite his family not having a lot of money.
How the hell they would then be able to afford a trip to sub-Saharan Africa in 1961 beats me. Airline travel in that era was NOT cheap.
Indeed. Airline travel was not cheap, nor direct. Just think of the difficulties even in 1961 of getting from Hawaii to Kenya and than put a pregnant woman into the situation.
Honalulu to where? Japan or Hong Kong? Hong Kong/Japan to Indonesia? Indonesia to India (Bombay?), India to Kenya?
Maybe Honalulu to LA, LA to New York, New York to London. London to? Were their direct from London in1961 or did you have to go through some place else?
She's lucky she didn't have the baby on the plane.
Problem two.
She gets to Kenya but she doesn't stay in Kenya. She travels (one must assume relatively poor infrastructure outside of Nirobi) to Mombassa (so the story goes) which at the time was not part of British Kenya, but British Zanzibar. Now, the Brits for all of their wonderful colonial infrastructure and adminstrative abilities, were also not particularly keen on race mixing. So a white American teenager (she was 17) married to an older Black and seemingly anti-coloinial moslim/marxist activist (if we follow D'Suza's view of it) goes into a hospital (presumably run by colonial authorities) in Mombassa and has a mixed race baby. Yet, that apparently didn't strike anyone as so memerable an event that they noted it down anywhere.
Next, this 17 yearold white mother with her infant half race child decides to return to the United States (reverse the air line route issues noted above, not to mention travelling again, presumably, to Niarobi). Her black husband who was on a student visa and left the United States, presumably must get some kind of new entry document to return to the United States. She, with an infant, must presumably go either to the U.S. embassy and put the baby on her passport or go to the British Civil authorities and put the baby on Sr.'s passport. You can't just bring an undocumented baby into the country, even in 1961, and especially if that baby was half black and half white.
But, oddly enough, not only are their no visa records or passport office records of this occurance, no one in either the British colonial serive or the American counselor service, remembers the strickingly strange case of a 17 year old woman from Hawaii married to an black African student trying to register her newborn son on a British or American passport to transport the kid back to Hawaii. I know Counselor Service people see strange things all the time, but I'm pretty sure that would have been one of the strangest cases to walk in the door. I would bet it would have been a case that they would have used to train Counselor officials about what they might encounter in the field...in short, it would have been written up.
Next, there is the whole getting back home problem. See above.
Now, she enters the United States in New York? Honolulu? In either case she has to go through Immigration with this child. Is he on her passport or his? They don't pull aside the teenage mother and ask her about her mixed race baby? Where she got it? They don't check with GrandMa back in Hawaii to see if the marriage was legal? Rember, this isn't today, this is 1961 and even in more moderate places like New York and Honolulu, race mixing is still pretty shocking, rare and subject to suspicion and controversy.
No one notes this down, however, she just breezes through immigration in three places (maybe more -- but at least Kenya, Great Britain and the U.S.) without comment or expressions of concern or interest for the story of a 17 yearold Hawaiian married to a black African and their mixed race child. Yep, I'm buying it.
Next, she gets back to Hawaii...however she accomplished that. She ONLY than, apparently thinks: Ah, I want my baby to be assured all of the benefits of U.S. citizenship, I'm concerned (though she likely wouldn't have known the law) that he won't be because of being born in Kenya.
Actually, it is more likely that she would have made a very easy mistake and assumed that because she was a citizen she passed her citizenship onto her born out of the U.S. son and never worried about he question again...rather than knowing the rather arcane part of the citizenship laws that suggest that a U.S. citizen who is a minor might not be able to automatically pass citizenship along to a child born outside of the U.S. It isn't a well known section of the law.
In any event, she or her husband decides to ensure Barak's citizenship. How do they do it? Not by going to Immigration. Not by consulting a lawyer or the INS (or its 1961 forerunner version) but by faking up a newspaper article and a birth certificate.
Rather than obtain for their son a specific document attesting to his citizenship (a far more important document to a person born overseas than any birth certificate would have been), they choose to have the birth announced in the paper and tell everyone that the child was born in a hosptial in Hawaii...not the far more interesting story which isn't bad or nafarious about their wonderful trip to visit his family in kenya where she unexpectedly had the baby and all of the administrative mumbo-jumbo they had to go through to get the baby back home and on Mama's passport.
Their son, his future presidential ambitions burning early (oddly, had he been overseas, President would have been essentially the only public job he couldn't have held...he could have been a governor, mayor, Senator, Congressman, sat on the Supreme Court or been a Cabinent Secretary), than makes a career out of denying not only his family history but faking up a birth record in a state where he wasn't even a resudebt (I hadn't realized how powerful a State Senator from illinois could be to have the reach to get the public records administration of a state where he had only a few ties to, to get the records hidden. His grandmother must have been an intensely and secretly powerful woman in Hawaii to have had this done).
Yes, it all makes sense. What I've written above seems so much more plausable, likely and provable than Hawaii issuing a certified birth certificate authenticated by the state's Secretary of Health.
