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Mercury Ink
July 2012
On Sale: July 17, 2012
400 pages
ISBN: 1451698097
EAN: 9781451698091
Kindle: B007Z4RYOO
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Political
In his memoir, Barack Obama omits the full name of his
mentor, simply calling him “Frank.” Now, the truth is out:
Never has a figure as deeply troubling and controversial as
Frank Marshall Davis had such an impact on the development
of an American president. Although other radical influences on Obama, from Jeremiah
Wright to Bill Ayers, have been scrutinized, the public
knows little about Davis, a card-carrying member of the
Communist Party USA, cited by the Associated Press as an
“important influence” on Obama, one whom he “looked to” not
merely for “advice on living” but as a “father” figure. While the Left has willingly dismissed Davis (with good
reason), here are the indisputable, eye-opening facts: Frank
Marshall Davis was a pro-Soviet, pro–Red China communist.
His Communist Party USA card number, revealed in FBI files,
was CP #47544. He was a prototype of the loyal Soviet
patriot, so radical that the FBI placed him on the federal
government’s Security Index. In the early 1950s, Davis
opposed U.S. attempts to slow Stalin and Mao. He favored Red
Army takeovers of Central and Eastern Europe, and communist
control in Korea and Vietnam. Dutifully serving the cause,
he edited and wrote for communist newspapers in both Chicago
and Honolulu, courting contributors who were Soviet agents.
In the 1970s, amid this dangerous political theater, Frank
Marshall Davis came into Barack Obama’s life. Aided by access to explosive declassified FBI files, Soviet
archives, and Davis’s original newspaper columns, Paul
Kengor explores how Obama sought out Davis and how Davis
found in Obama an impressionable young man, one susceptible
to Davis’s worldview that opposed American policy and
traditional values while praising communist regimes. Kengor
sees remnants of this worldview in Obama’s early life and
even, ultimately, his presidency. Kengor charts with definitive accuracy the progression of
Davis’s communist ideas from Chicago to Hawaii. He explores
how certain elements of the Obama administration’s agenda
reflect Davis’s columns advocating wealth redistribution,
government stimulus for “public works projects,”
taxpayer-funding of universal health care, and nationalizing
General Motors. Davis’s writings excoriated the “tentacles
of big business,” blasted Wall Street and “greedy”
millionaires, lambasted GOP tax cuts that “spare the rich,”
attacked “excess profits” and oil companies, and perceived
the Catholic Church as an obstacle to his vision for the
state—all the while echoing Davis’s often repeated mantra
for transformational and fundamental “change.” And yet, The Communist is not unsympathetic to Davis,
revealing him as something of a victim, an African- American
who suffered devastating racial persecution in the Jim Crow
era, steering this justly angered young man on a misguided
political track. That Davis supported violent and heartless
communist regimes over his own country is impossible to
defend. That he was a source of inspiration to President
Barack Obama is impossible to ignore. Is Obama working to fulfill the dreams of Frank Marshall
Davis? That question has been impossible to answer, since
Davis’s writings and relationship with Obama have either
been deliberately obscured or dismissed as irrelevant. With
Paul Kengor’s The Communist, Americans can finally weigh the
evidence and decide for themselves.
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