As the sun sank over the Pacific Ocean behind him, Frank Marshall Davis looked up from his rickety front porch and saw his friend Stanley Dunham approaching. The grizzled old black man could see Dunham was at last bringing along his grandson, whom he had been waiting to meet – a caramel-skinned boy of nine called Barry Obama. It was the autumn of 1970.1
A visit from his father when he was 10 – the first time he had seen him since he was two and the last before Barack Sr was killed in a car crash in Kenya in 1982 – served only to unsettle him further. A talk by his father to his Punahou class shattered the myth Obama had carefully created that he was a young African prince whose name meant "Burning Spear".
Central to his appeal in his message of racial reconciliation, drawn largely from his own remarkable life story, and extended family spread across the globe.