Dunham befriended communist Frank Marshall Davis,
mentor of future president
By Jerome R. Corsi
 Frank Marshall Davis |
The FBI previously released some 600 pages of the FBI file of Frank Marshall Davis, the Chicago-based journalist and poet who as a member of the Communist Party USA retired in Hawaii and befriended Dunham.
Obama frequently sought advice from Davis during the future president's elementary and high school years.
Until the FBI's response to the FOIA request, there was no public disclosure of the existence of a file on Obama's grandfather.
The file raises the question whether the FBI considered Dunham to be a national security risk, possibly because of his association with Davis.
WND previously reported Davis, frequently accompanied by young Obama and his grandfather, sold marijuana and cocaine from a Chicago-style hot dog cart Davis operated near his home on Kuhio Avenue in Waikiki in the early 1970s
Cliff Kincaid, president of American Survival, filed the FOIA request, only to be informed by David M. Hardy, FBI section chief for record/information dissemination in the records management division, that no information was available on Dunham's file because it had been destroyed. Kincaid is also editor of Accuracy in Media's AIM Report.
WND contacted the FBI but received no response to a request for comment on this story.
Grandpa introduced Obama to Davis
London Telegraph Washington correspondent Toby Harnden reported in an Aug. 22, 2008, article that Dunham first introduced Obama to Davis when Obama was only 10 years old.
As WND previously reported, the Obama 2008 campaign admitted in a published response to the New York Times No. 1 best-selling book "The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality" that Davis was the "Frank" that Obama mentioned in his autobiography "Dreams from My Father."
The 2008 Obama campaign's published reply to "The Obama Nation," titled "Unfit for Publication," objected that Davis was not a "mentor" to the future president, arguing "Dreams from My Father" characterized Davis "as a figure from his youth who 'fell short' and whose view of race was 'incurable.'"
However, in "Dreams from My Father," Obama himself tells readers he was listening to Davis' advice right up until the time Obama left Hawaii to attend college in California.
Davis told Obama college was "an advanced degree in compromise," insisting that if he went to college, he would be "trained" into a white middle class world of "corner offices" and "fancy dinners."
"Until you want to actually start running things, and then [white people will] yank on your chain and let you know that you may be a well-trained, well-paid n-gger, but you're a n-gger just the same," Obama reports Davis saying regarding whether or not to attend college.
Obama said Davis ultimately relented, agreeing Obama should attend but advising him to "keep your eyes open" and to "stay awake."
Obama consulted Davis after the shock over learning his grandmother had been frightened not because a panhandler approached her, but because the panhandler was black.
Obama, on page 91 of "Dreams," shares with readers some of Davis' wisdom.
"She understands that black people have a reason to hate," Obama quotes Davis as saying. "For your sake, I wish it were otherwise. But it's not. So you might as well get used to it."
Communist ties
The 600-page FBI file on Davis documents his membership in the Hawaiian Communist Party dating back to the early 1950s.
On Dec. 5, 1956, Davis appeared in executive session before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee investigating "the scope of Soviet activity in the United States," one of the McCarthy-era committees seeking to expose communists considered to be a security threat.
Invoking his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, Davis refused to answer a direct question asking if he was then a communist. A year earlier, in 1955, a Commission on Subversive Activities organized by the government of the Territory of Hawaii identified Davis as a member of the Communist Party USA.
The committee singled out several articles Davis published in the Communist Honolulu Record that were critical of the commission.
The commission also found objectionable a 1951 story Davis published, "Hawaii's Plain People Fight White Supremacy," in the November 1951 issue of a New York City communist tabloid.
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Jerome R. Corsi is a senior staff reporter for WND. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in political science in 1972 and has written many books and articles, including his best-sellers "America For Sale," "The Obama Nation" and "The Late Great USA." Other books include "Showdown with Nuclear Iran," "Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity and the Politics of Oil," which he co-authored with WND columnist Craig. R. Smith, and "Atomic Iran."
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