While the release of Barack Obama's birth certificate was the big news of the day, it wasn't the only new document about Obama's life published on Wednesday. A far more interesting trove of documents has also been unearthed by Heather Smathers, an investigative journalist writing in the Arizona Independent, a weekly newspaper.

Smathers made an Freedom of Information Act request for the US immigration service file on Obama's father, Barack Obama senior – and it contains a disturbing picture of Obama senior's treatment by government and university officials.

As early as 1961, a memo in the file notes a statement from a Mrs McCabe, a foreign student adviser at the University of Hawaii:

Mrs McCabe further states that Subject [Obama senior] has been running around with several girls since he first arrived here and last summer she cautioned him about his playboy ways. Subject replied that he would 'try' to stay away from the girls.

The memo also considers Obama senior's earlier Kenya marriage, and after noting that "polygamy is not an excludable or deportation charge," it recommends that "the Subject be closely questioned before another extention is granted – and denial be considered."



The documents show that official enquiries in 1961 were satisfied that the current president was indeed born in Hawaii, as Smathers reports:

A memo dated August 31, 1961 from William Wood of Immigration and Naturalization Services indicates that Barack Obama, Sr, was attending the University of Hawaii on a student visa and that a son, Barack Obama, II, was born in Honolulu on August 4, 1961.

Looking at the documents – posted online in full by Smathers – Obama senior is described within as "a slippery character," his relationships with several women are discussed and investigated, while the question of Obama senior's "marital problems" are repeatedly raised – in an era when interracial marriage was still illegal in many parts of the US.

In the memos, immigration officials press for more details on Obama senior's marriages and relationships, while in a memo dated 19 May 1964 an immigration service official appears to be conspiring with Harvard University to get rid of the student:

Obama has passed his general exams, which indicates that on academic grounds he is entitled to stay around here and write his thesis; however [Harvard] are going to try to cook something up to ease him out.... They are planning on telling him that they will not give him any money, and that he had better return to Kenya and prepare his thesis at home.

Another immigration memo, from June 1964, records that Harvard officials were trying "to get rid of him" and "couldn't seem to figure out how many wives he had."

Writer Andrew Rice has read the documents and sees a theme:

What I think the documents reveal, though, is a subtle, institutionalized conspiracy that in a way seems more insidious than overt cross-burning racism, because almost surely none of its participants thought of their actions as discriminatory at all. In that sense, the file is an instructive artifact, not just of our president's biography, but of our nation's history of conflicted attitudes about race, foreign cultures, intermarriage and sex. Hard as it may be to believe today, it seems clear from a close reading of the the file that the president's father was driven from this country because of his messy personal life. And reading between the lines, it's not hard to see a subtext of miscegenation.

It's worth remembering that state laws banning interracial marriage in the US were only overturned by the US Supreme Court in 1967, at which time 17 states had "anti-miscegenation" laws – including Maryland, Delaware, Oklahoma, Missouri and Virginia.