What did David Garrow publish about Barack Obama’s letters and how have historians evaluated his claims?
Executive summary
David Garrow published a sprawling 2017 biography, Rising Star, that included transcriptions and paraphrases of young Barack Obama’s love letters and a claim—based on letters held at Emory and described by Garrow in interviews—that one paragraph described fantasies about “making love to men” [1] [2] [3]. The revelation produced a mix of attention: some outlets amplified the detail widely, others treated it as sensational and unproven, and established reviewers and historians generally criticized Garrow’s framing and the book’s epilogue even as they acknowledged the volume’s extensive archival research [4] [5] [2].
1. What Garrow published: letters, redactions and a contested paraphrase
Garrow’s Rising Star draws on a trove of material from Obama’s early years, including letters Obama wrote to college girlfriends; Garrow has said one correspondent, identified as “Alex,” redacted a paragraph when she shared the letters with him and later paraphrased its content, which Garrow summarizes in his book and in subsequent interviews as describing repeated fantasies of “making love to men” [1] [3] [2]. Garrow has further recounted sending a colleague, Harvey Klehr, to the Emory archives to manually transcribe the redacted passage because photographs were not permitted, and that transcription work is the basis for his reconstruction in print and interviews [3] [6].
2. How mainstream reviewers and some historians responded to Rising Star
Major reviewers and fellow historians reacted to Rising Star with ambivalence: many conceded Garrow’s prodigious archival work but criticized the book’s tone, length and especially its intemperate epilogue; Michiko Kakutani’s New York Times review called the book “bloated” and “ill-considered,” while other prominent commentators publicly disparaged the memoir’s sensational framing—responses that contributed to the book’s mixed reception among establishment critics [4]. At the same time, commentators such as David Samuels and some conservative outlets argued the media had not sufficiently interrogated Obama’s record and gave Garrow credit for surfacing material others had ignored, underscoring a partisan split in how the work was received [2] [7].
3. The factual status of the “fantasies” claim and how journalists evaluated it
Multiple news organizations traced the provenance of the letters to former girlfriends and to archives at Emory University, reporting Garrow’s account that Alex sold the letters to Emory and that certain passages were redacted when first shared with Garrow [3] [8]. Fact-checking outlets and some journalists cautioned that the specific sexual fantasy allegation circulated largely through Garrow’s paraphrase and interviews rather than an independently published photograph of the redacted text, and noted that later social-media amplification turned the detail into an unproven claim about Obama’s sexuality that was seized upon by partisan outlets [5]. In short, reporting shows provenance for the letters at Emory and Garrow’s reliance on a colleague’s manual transcription, but the most salacious line was not published verbatim in an unrebutted, photographed source in the mainstream press [3] [5].
4. Historians’ broader evaluations: archival rigor versus sensationalism
Among historians and reviewers there is a split between those who praise Garrow’s archival diligence and those who fault his interpretive choices: several acknowledge that Rising Star is the most document-rich biography of Obama’s early years but criticize Garrow for emphasizing lurid personal details and for an epilogue that many found polemical or politically motivated [4] [9]. Critics argue that surfacing private letters demands cautious contextualization to avoid speculative leaps about motive or identity, while defenders of Garrow maintain that the letters and other documents legitimately enlarge the public record about a major political figure [2] [10].
5. The downstream effect: amplification, doubt and the limits of historical claims
After Garrow’s interviews in 2023 revisiting these passages, conservative outlets and viral posts revived the “fantasy” claim widely, prompting fact-checkers to remind readers that the assertion rests on Garrow’s account of redactions and transcriptions rather than an indisputable, independently published primary image, and that the controversy reflects how archival findings can be refracted by modern media dynamics [5] [6]. Scholars who work with sensitive personal materials stress that archival evidence can be compelling yet still open to interpretive disagreement, and the debate around Garrow’s portrayal of the letters illustrates the fault line between documentary scholarship and sensational public narratives [2] [4].