Genevieve Cook’s journal details an affair with Obama, then 22. 

By Lloyd Garrison

In his 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” Barack Obama wrote discreetly of his romance in New York with a young woman who took him one fall weekend to Norfolk. Obama, who withheld the woman’s name, wrote that he was struck by the natural beauty of Norfolk, but felt acutely out of place.

The woman in question, Genevieve Cook, chose to end the mystery, not with a torrid “tell all” exposé in the National Enquirer, but in “Becoming Obama,” a serious new biography of the president by Pulitzer Prize winning author David Maraniss. The book[RT1] , to be published June 19 in Vanity Fair, focuses on Obama’s youth, his college years and his time in New York and Chicago before entering Harvard Law School.

One chapter of the book reveals that Genevieve Cook was the daughter of Norfolk resident Helen Jessup by her first marriage to an Australian diplomat. Cook was interviewed by Maraniss and allowed him to print excerpts from her surprisingly insightful and sensitively written journal.

The relationship began with a chance meeting at a Christmas party in New York’s East Village six months after Obama’s graduation from Columbia. It ended without rancor 16 months later at the time of Obama’s decision to accept a job as a community organizer in Chicago.

The two took a Bonanza bus to Norfolk on a sunny autumn day in 1984. Helen and Phillip Jessup Jr. were in the house overlooking Tobey Pond when the couple arrived. In his memoir, Obama wrote that “the parents were there…very nice, very gracious.”

They found they had Indonesia in common. The Jessups had lived there when Phillip Jessup was general counsel with International Nickel, which had mining interests there, and Helen Jessup, a noted Asian art historian, was co-founder of the U.S. Indonesian Society. Obama had gone to school in Jakarta during his mother’s second marriage to an Indonesian.

“It was beautiful,” wrote Obama of the weekend in Norfolk. “There were woods all around us, and we paddled cross this icy lake full of small gold leaves that collected along the shore…the house was very old, her grandfather’s house…the library was filled with old books and pictures of the grandfather with famous people he had known — presidents, diplomats, industrialists. There was tremendous gravity in that room.”

Standing in that room, Obama realized there was a big difference between his world and that of “my friend.” He added: “I knew that if we stayed together I’d eventually live in hers.”

Such wariness was evident on her part as well. They saw each other only on weekends. She taught third grade in Brooklyn and studied for a graduate degree at Bank Street College. He did research at Business International. They went on long walks, laughed a lot, read the leading black authors of the day and spent a lot of time talking about race and identity.

Obama was clearly captivated. “She had dark hair and specks of green in her eyes,” he wrote in his memoir. “Her voice sounded like wind chimes. …just two people, hidden and warm …Your own language. Your own customs. That’s how it was.”

Shortly before he left for Chicago, she realized that, “in his own quest to resolve his ambivalence about black and white, it became very, very clear to me that he needed to go black.”

With uncanny foresight, she concluded that Obama would wind up seeking “a woman, very strong, very upright, a fighter, a laugher, well-experienced — a black woman I keep seeing her as.”

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 [RT1]The entire book zill be published+