美国总统是怎样炼成的
The Making of the President
美国总统是怎样炼成的
During his 2008 campaign, Barack Obama so often stressed the improbability of his story that we have grown inured to how unlikely it really is. Everyone knows that his name, along with his inexperience, was an electoral handicap; that his mixed-race background made his victory historic; and that his transformation within five years from local Illinois politician to the most famous person on earth (and first incumbent president since Woodrow Wilson to win the Nobel Peace Prize) has no obvious parallel. The great virtue of David Maraniss’s huge and absorbing new biography is to demonstrate that Obama’s saga in its full and previously unexplored detail is more surprising and gripping than the version the world is familiar with.
在2008年的总统选战中，巴拉克·奥巴克常常强调自己的经历有多不寻常，于是我们渐渐习惯了他不凡的过去。大家都知道，因为他的名字，因为经验不多，在竞选中他并不占优势;大家也知道他的混血背景使得他的成功具有历史意义;并且仅仅花费五年就从伊利诺伊州的地方政客变成了地球上最有名的人(他还是继伍德罗·威尔逊之后第一个在任内获得诺贝尔和平奖的总统)，这样的经历几乎无人能及。大卫·马拉尼斯(David Maraniss)的这本新传记恢宏、引人入胜，它的出色之处在于通过详尽的、首次公开的细节来呈现奥巴马的传奇经历，书中所讲述的故事与世人熟知的版本相比，称得上更扣人心弦。
The engrossing parts of “Barack Obama: The Story” are not the ones that created the most pre-publication buzz: the diary entries from one of Obama’s girlfriends in his New York days in the early 1980s. This was Genevieve Cook, a white Australian, who let Maraniss quote the notes she made during her infatuation with Obama and eventual estrangement — including the judgment that for all his initial charm, he proved to be too cool and distant. In the context of current politics, that may seem a relevant insight. But in the context of this book, those entries are almost ho-hum, precisely because they could have come from any troubled “it’s not about you . . . ” relationship. The rest of Maraniss’s chronicle, which very minutely traces the president’s African and American lineages back for more than a century, is far more unusual.
《巴拉克·奥巴马：他的故事》(Barack Obama: The Story)最吸引人的，并不是尚未出版就引来最多热议的那部分内容： 1980年代初，奥巴马在纽约时的一个女友写了日记。她叫吉娜维芙·库克(Genevieve Cook)，是澳大利亚白人，她允许马拉尼斯在书中引用了自己与奥巴马相恋到最终分手期间的日记内容——当中包括了她对奥巴马的评价，开始的时候她认为他很有魅力，但事后证明他为人过于冷淡漠然。放到当今政治的上下文来看，这个判断似乎有些洞察力。不过比起整本书其它内容，这些日记几乎没多大意思，因为这些话可以来自任何一段不开心的、 无疾而终的恋情。马拉尼斯这部总统编年史的其他部分要有意思得多，他详细追溯到了一个多世纪前总统在非洲和美国的家族谱系。
Maraniss, a Washington Post veteran and author of a celebrated biography of Bill Clinton and other works, has (with assistants whom he credits) applied a version of the Robert Caro treatment to a politician who, unlike Caro’s Lyndon Johnson, is still in his functioning prime. The book begins with people Barack Obama never met and certainly knows less about than Maraniss does, his great-grandparents on both sides. Nearly 600 pages later it ends with the current president, at age 27, driving a used yellow Datsun away from Chicago, where he had been a community organizer, to Harvard Law School and what Maraniss presents as the end of his search for identity and the beginning of a purposeful political career.
马拉尼斯在《华盛顿邮报》工作多年，比尔·克林顿那本著名的传记等等都是他的作品(在其他共同作者的协助下)。在这本传记中他运用了罗伯特·卡罗处理政治人物的手法，不过跟卡罗笔下的林登·约翰逊不同，他笔下的主人公仍在执政生涯鼎盛时期。本书的序幕始于巴拉克·奥巴克父母的曾祖辈，这些人恐怕连奥巴马本人也从未遇见，甚至了解的还不如马拉尼斯深入。之后作者又用了近600页篇幅，以时年27岁的奥巴马开着一辆二手黄色达特桑离开芝加哥作结。这一年，他结束了社区组织者的工作，前往哈佛法学院读书，在马拉尼斯笔下，奥巴马在此时终于结束了对个人身份的探求，开始了他志在必得的政治生涯。
To my taste the book has two imperfections. First, details pile up in encyclopedic volume sometimes unrelated to their significance. One example, of a large number I noted: It is important to know what Obama’s American grandfather and great-uncle did in combat during World War II, less so to see a list of people from the same Kansas county who were killed. Perhaps Maraniss wanted to leave no doubt about the thoroughness of his research, but even at half the book’s length that would have been clear. Also, when Maraniss departs from narrative and steps in to “tell” rather than “show,” his presentation of themes can sound balder than the subtle complexities evident from the tale itself. For instance, about Obama’s Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama: “There were times, foreshadowing the circumstances of his American grandson, when he was dismissed by some of his own people for acting white, or not seeming black enough.” The “foreshadowing” part is evident without belaboring.
在我个人看来，这本书有两个不足之处。首先，那些如大百科全书般堆起来的种种细节，有时过于琐碎。比方说，我注意到：了解奥巴马的美国外祖父和舅姥爷曾参加过“二战”的确重要，但看一长串来自堪萨斯州同一个郡的烈士名单，就没那么重要了。也许，马拉尼斯希望自己的调查在深入透彻方面不留任何把柄，不过哪怕这本书只有现在篇幅的一半，这方面也已经体现得很清楚了。此外，当马拉尼斯偏离叙事，进行“讲述”而非“展现”时，他对主题的呈现比故事本身微妙的复杂性来得更为大胆。举例来说，在谈到奥巴马肯尼亚的祖父侯赛因·奥尼扬戈·奥巴马(Hussein Onyango Obama)时他说：“有时，他会因为表现得像白人或者看起来不是那么黑，而遭人不屑，这为他孙子在美国的遭遇埋下伏笔。”“埋下伏笔”这部分显然是过度阐释了。
Nonetheless, this is a revelatory book, which anyone interested in modern politics will want to read, and which will certainly shape our understanding of President Obama’s strengths, weaknesses and inscrutabilities. Every few pages Maraniss offers a factual nugget that changes or enlarges the prevailing lore. For example: Obama’s Kenyan grandfather, who had five wives, was apparently not involved in Kenyan insurgencies or ever tortured by British colonialists during the Mau Mau era. (Indeed, he remained a trusted figure among white Kenyans — and although himself a convert to Islam, he sent his son to a Christian school.) Similarly: Obama’s mother was named Stanley Ann Dunham not at the perverse insistence of her father, Stanley, but because her mother was taken by the sophistication of a Bette Davis character, a woman named Stanley, in the movie “In This Our Life,” which she saw while pregnant.
尽管如此，这仍是一本具有启发性的著作，任何对现代政治感兴趣的人都有必要一读，这本书必定会加深我们对于奥巴马总统的优点、缺点和深藏不露个性的理解。每隔几页，马拉尼斯就会抛出一点珍闻，改变或扩展了此前最普遍的认知。比方说，奥巴马在肯尼亚的祖父曾娶了五位妻子，在茅茅党(Mau Mau)时期，他显然并未参与肯尼亚暴乱，也没有遭到英国殖民者的酷刑(尽管他皈依了伊斯兰教，在肯尼亚白人中，他仍是个靠得住的角色，不过他把儿子送到了基督教学校读书)。还有这个：奥巴马的母亲取名为斯坦利·安·邓汉姆(Stanley Ann Dunham)，这并不是因为她父亲斯坦利坚持要给她取这个名字，而是因为她母亲在怀孕时看了电影《姐妹情仇》(In This Our Life)，结果喜欢上了剧中由贝蒂·戴维斯(Bette Davis)饰演的那个工于心计的角色——斯坦利。
The entire tale is too vast to summarize, but four narratives dominate. The most tragically self-destructive is that of Obama’s own father, who dazzled people in Africa and America with his intelligence and eloquence but ruined other lives and finally his own with his irresponsibility. He had a wife in Kenya, with two children, when at the University of Hawaii he met, romanced and impregnated the 17-year-old Stanley Ann Dunham in 1960. They married, but she went home to Seattle a month after the birth of “Barry” in 1961. (The book’s details about a doctor who remembered the case would change the minds of any “birthers” open to factual evidence.) Maraniss says that “perhaps the luckiest thing” in young Obama’s life was that afterward he saw almost nothing of his father, “sparing his mother and him years of unpredictability and potential domestic violence.” On his return to Kenya, the senior Barack Obama went into a debauched alcoholic spiral and was involved in countless car crashes before the one that killed him in 1982, when he was 48 and his son was 21.
这本书叙事之宏大以致无法概述，不过主要还是讲了四个故事。其中最具悲剧感和自毁性的，要属奥巴马的亲生父亲。他脑子聪明嘴又甜，在非洲和美国倾倒众人，但也因为他的不负责任，毁掉了别人以及自己的生活。他在肯尼亚有一个妻子，并育有两个子女，1960年，他在夏威夷大学认识了17岁的斯坦利·安· 邓汉姆，她爱上了他，怀上了他的孩子。两人结了婚，但在1961年，生下“巴里”(Barry)才一个月，她就回到了西雅图的家中(书中详细引述了一位医生关于此事的回忆，任何对奥巴马的出生存疑的人，只要愿意接受书中提供的证词，他们的态度都会改变)。马拉尼斯说，在小奥巴马的生命中，“或许最幸运的恰恰是如此”——此后他几乎再未见过父亲，“这让他母亲和他在未来几年里，免于遭受种种不可预知的事件，以及可能的家庭暴力。”老巴拉克·奥巴马回到肯尼亚后，滥饮成性，牵扯进多起车祸，最终在1982年因车祸去世。这一年，他48岁，儿子奥巴马21岁。
Obama’s two American grandparents, Madelyn Payne and Stanley Dunham, are also compelling figures. On the surface they are Greatest Generation stalwarts: he a combat veteran, she a bomber-plant worker, young sweethearts from small-town Kansas secretly married on the night of a high school banquet. (Grandfather Stanley, with his long face and big ears, is also the forebear with the most striking physical resemblance to Barack Obama; the president looks almost nothing like his African father.) Under the surface, the Dunhams’ life was tense. Stanley’s childhood had been shattered when his mother killed herself. As an adult, he was increasingly a big-talking but disappointed salesman, while his wife, who became a bank official, took responsibility for the family and for the grandson who came to live with them rather than his mother.
奥巴马的美国外公外婆，分别是斯坦利·邓汉姆和玛德琳·佩恩(Madelyn Payne)，他们同样是书中相当引人瞩目的角色。表面上看，他们是“最伟大一代”的中坚分子：他是参加过战争的老兵，她是生产轰炸机的工人，两人在堪萨斯小镇读高中时相恋，在高中的一次晚会之夜秘密结婚(外公斯坦利生着长长的面孔和大耳朵，巴拉克·奥巴马长得像他，与在非洲的父亲一点都不像)。深入表相之下，邓汉姆一家的生活却处于紧张之中。斯坦利的母亲自杀，粉碎了他的童年。成年后他担任销售员，只会夸夸其谈，事业让人失望，而他的妻子成为银行职员，接过了养家和照料外孙的重任——外孙并没有和妈妈一起生活，而是搬过来与外公外婆同住。
Maraniss’s portrayal of Obama’s mother, which complements that of Janny Scott in her 2011 book “A Singular Woman,” makes clear that even for her time Stanley Ann Dunham was a romantic and a risk taker. She sought adventure and was “afraid of smallness.” She married a Kenyan at 18 and an Indonesian at 22. She placed her son in elementary school in Jakarta — a school for the country’s academic elite, Maraniss shows, not an Islamic madrassa — and then sent him away, to her parents, as she delved deeper into Javanese culture. I will not be the only reader to finish this book feeling acute loss that Stanley Ann Dunham, who died of cancer at 52 before her son’s first run for any office, is not around to behold and explain the man he has become.
在马拉尼斯笔下，奥巴马母亲的形象对于简妮·斯科特(Janny Scott)2011年的著作《奇女子》(A Singular Woman)是个补充。很显然，即使身处她那个年代，斯坦利·安·邓汉姆也称得上浪漫主义者，或者是一名冒险家。她追寻历险，“害怕渺小”。18岁时她嫁给了肯尼亚人，22岁嫁给印尼人。她让儿子在雅加达上小学——马拉尼斯解释说，这并非一所伊斯兰教学校，而是为该国培养学术精英设立的学校——之后又将他送走，送到了外祖父母身边，自己好潜心研究爪哇文化。斯坦利·安·邓汉姆52岁那年死于癌症，当时她儿子还未参与任何职位的竞选，她始终不在儿子近旁，也无法为儿子长成今日的模样作一个旁注。在得知了这位母亲的故事后，我想我应该不是唯一一个感到极度失落的读者。
And the narrative of her son: The evidence Maraniss has collected about this pre-law-school stage in Barack Obama’s life suggests a richer view of the man we have become familiar with, without really knowing. The years as a boy in Indonesia, where chubby Barry Soetoro (his stepfather’s last name) with his curly hair was assumed to be from Ambon or some other nearby island of darker-skinned people. Adolescence in Hawaii, where he was thought of as one of many hapa, or multiracial, people rather than placed on the unavoidable black-white grid of mainland America. Maraniss explains how Obama entered Occidental College as Barry and left as Barack, having decided on his first exposure to mainland culture that he must be black rather than white, a decision ratified through his time at Columbia and in Chicago. And yet, as Maraniss says, a “recurring theme is his determination to avoid life’s traps.” These include “the trap of his unusual family biography . . . in terms of stability and psychology. Then the trap of geography,” from being raised in Hawaii, and “finally the trap of race in America, with its likelihood of rejection and cynicism.” Anything that might have seemed odd in Barack Obama’s demeanor, from his studied unflappability to his sometimes unappealing coldness, seems instead a miracle of normality and adjustment after the story recounted here.
最后，是关于她儿子的故事。马拉尼斯搜集到了巴拉克·奥巴马读法学院之前的资料，让我们看到了一个让我们既熟悉又陌生的男人更为丰富的一面。他的童年在印尼度过，巴里·索托罗(这是他继父的姓)，这个圆乎乎的孩子长着一头卷发，人们想当然地认为他来自安汶或其他邻近的、肤色较深的人定居的小岛。他青少年时期住在夏威夷，人们并没有把他当成是美国大陆很常见的黑白混血，而是把他看成是hapa，也就是多种族混血儿。马拉尼斯解释了奥巴马在进洛杉矶西方学院(Occidental College)时是“巴里”，而在离开时则转变成为“巴拉克”——在初次受美国大陆文化影响后，他已经认准了自己应是黑人，而不是白人，在读哥伦比亚大学和芝加哥大学时，这个决定不断得到强化。马拉尼斯说，“在他的决心中，一个反复出现的主题是要避免生命中的陷阱”。这包括“他不寻常的家族陷阱……牵涉稳定性和心理层面。之后是地缘方面的陷阱”，这跟他在夏威夷长大有关，以及“最后是美国的种族陷阱，因为这有可能招致排斥与讥讽”。在巴拉克·奥巴马的态度中，从他刻意的镇静到有时令人反感的冷酷，看似奇怪，恰恰是他在应对传奇经历和各种变故中调整后的结果。
