Plan B Forum

AUSTRALIA finally got a piece of a US President. Barack Obama was just out of law school when he began a two-year affair with Genevieve Cook, daughter of an Australian diplomat.



He was 22. She was 25. In 1983 she was teaching primary school children when she met him at a Christmas party in East Village. She brought a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream. And kept a diary!

Nearly 30 years later, some of it can be perused in an extract from a book, Barack Obama: The Story by David Maraniss, published in Vanity Fair magazine.

Among the unpresidentially juicier entries:

First date - ''I'm pretty sure we had dinner maybe the Wednesday. I think maybe he cooked me dinner. Then we went and talked in his bedroom. And then I spent the night. It all felt very inevitable.''

A certain fragrance - ''I open the door, that Barack keeps closed, to his room, and enter into a warm, private space pervaded by a mixture of smells that so strongly speak of his presence, his liveliness, his habits - running sweat, Brut spray deodorant, smoking, eating raisins, sleeping, breathing.''

A warning sign - ''The sexual warmth is definitely there - but the rest of it has sharp edges and I'm finding it all unsettling and finding myself wanting to withdraw from it all. I have to admit that I am feeling anger at him for some reason, multi-stranded reasons. His warmth can be deceptive. Tho he speaks sweet words and can be open and trusting, there is also that coolness.''

Don't look back - ''Barack leaving my life - at least as far as being lovers goes … In the same way that the relationship was founded on calculated boundaries and carefully, rationally considered developments, it seems to be ending along coolly considered lines … Obviously I was not the person that brought infatuation. (That lithe, bubbly, strong black lady is waiting somewhere!)''

Genevieve Cook was a fairly unusual Australian.

Her father, the Geelong Grammarian Michael Cook, was a career diplomat appointed by Malcolm Fraser as top spook - director-general of the Office of National Assessments - and who became ambassador in Washington.

Her mother, Helen Ibbitson, came from a Melbourne banking family and was an art historian. Soon after a Jakarta posting they divorced and their daughter went to the US where her mother had married Philip Jessup, counsel to the National Gallery of Art.

She completed secondary education at Emma Willard School, the gothic, private and academically rigorous prep school for young women in Troy, New York State, before attending college in Philadelphia and New York.

In 1983 she was an assistant teacher for second and third graders at Brooklyn Friends School when she met the POTUS-to-be.

Maraniss's book also traces Obama love letters written earlier to a classmate, Alex McNear.

In his best-selling autobiography Dreams of My Father, Obama admitted to ''compressing'' girlfriends.

He wrote of a woman who ''had dark hair, and specks of green in her eyes. Her voice sounded like a wind chime.''

Must have been the Australian accent.



Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/voice-li ... z1tqpFtRoG

That lithe, bubbly, strong black lady is waiting somewhere!