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'The Amateur', Barack Obama in the White House, by Edward Klein
Excerpts from the 2012 hardcover edition:
Inside the dust jacket front flap
"In this stunning expose, best selling author Edward Klein -- a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, former foreign editor of Newsweek, and former editor-in-chief of the New York Times Magazine -- pulls back the curtain on one of the most secretive White Houses in history. He reveals a callow, thin-skinned, arrogant president with messianic dreams of grandeur supported by a cast of true-believers, all of them united by leftist politics and an amateurish understanding of executive leadership."
Page 20
(Douglas Baird, dean of the University of Chicago Law School said): "I asked him, Do you have an interest in teaching law?' and he said, 'No. My plan is to write a book on voting rights.' And I said, 'Why don't you write that book here at the University of Chicago. I can give you an office and a word processor and make you a Visiting Law and Government Fellow.'
'He accepted', Baird continued, "and several months after he arrived, he came to my office and said, 'Boss' -- he called me boss -- 'that book I told you about -- well, it's taken a slightly different direction. It's my autobiography.' I was astonished. He was all of thirty years old and he was writing his autobiography!"
Pages 20-21
For the next twelve years, Obama taught at the Law School -- first as a Lecturer, then as a Senior Lecturer. ... He was by all accounts, a ghostly presence on the faculty -- rarely seen and virtually never heard from.
"You just never saw him at a lunch or at a workshop," said Richard Epstein, who was made interim dean of the Law School in 2001, while Obama was still there. "I did not see any signs of intellectual curiosity or power. He did not have a way of listening to you that drew you in. But it was rarely the case that you could figure out what he thought. An inaccurate story was published that claimed Obama was given a tenured offer to join the faculty. But it never came to the faculty for approval. How could you make a tenured offer to a man who had never written a scholarly article?
"At the time," Epstein continued, "Obama saw himself as a serious intellectual, which he definitely was not. His course was very popular and he was an engaging teacher, but not one with a serious academic set of interests.
To be continued -
Excerpts from the 2012 hardcover edition:
Inside the dust jacket front flap
"In this stunning expose, best selling author Edward Klein -- a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, former foreign editor of Newsweek, and former editor-in-chief of the New York Times Magazine -- pulls back the curtain on one of the most secretive White Houses in history. He reveals a callow, thin-skinned, arrogant president with messianic dreams of grandeur supported by a cast of true-believers, all of them united by leftist politics and an amateurish understanding of executive leadership."
Page 20
(Douglas Baird, dean of the University of Chicago Law School said): "I asked him, Do you have an interest in teaching law?' and he said, 'No. My plan is to write a book on voting rights.' And I said, 'Why don't you write that book here at the University of Chicago. I can give you an office and a word processor and make you a Visiting Law and Government Fellow.'
'He accepted', Baird continued, "and several months after he arrived, he came to my office and said, 'Boss' -- he called me boss -- 'that book I told you about -- well, it's taken a slightly different direction. It's my autobiography.' I was astonished. He was all of thirty years old and he was writing his autobiography!"
Pages 20-21
For the next twelve years, Obama taught at the Law School -- first as a Lecturer, then as a Senior Lecturer. ... He was by all accounts, a ghostly presence on the faculty -- rarely seen and virtually never heard from.
"You just never saw him at a lunch or at a workshop," said Richard Epstein, who was made interim dean of the Law School in 2001, while Obama was still there. "I did not see any signs of intellectual curiosity or power. He did not have a way of listening to you that drew you in. But it was rarely the case that you could figure out what he thought. An inaccurate story was published that claimed Obama was given a tenured offer to join the faculty. But it never came to the faculty for approval. How could you make a tenured offer to a man who had never written a scholarly article?
"At the time," Epstein continued, "Obama saw himself as a serious intellectual, which he definitely was not. His course was very popular and he was an engaging teacher, but not one with a serious academic set of interests.
To be continued -