Obama Told NY Times ‘Born In Hawaii’ Year Before ‘Born In Kenya’ Bio

According to Peter Osnos — the publisher of Random House’s Times Books division from 1991-1996, during which he published Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father – Obama’s first and long-time literary agent Jane Dystel discovered Obama via a February 6, 1990, article in the New York Times (“First Black Elected to Head Harvard’s Law Review“). Wrote Osnos in 2006:

At Harvard Law School in February, 1990, Obama was elected president of the law review, and the New York Times did a profile of him as the first black leader of the publication. The article caught the attention of a young literary agent named Jane Dystel.

As revealed by Team Breitbart, from 1991 until 2007 Jane Dystel employed a short bio of Obama that referred to his being “born in Kenya.” A protestation of a “fact-checking error” to the contrary, Barack Obama was overwhelmingly likely to have been the source of the “born in Kenya” nugget.

Perhaps adding weight to the conjecture that “born in Kenya” was a conscious marketing decision by Obama and Dystel, the New York Times article that drew the interest of Dystel the year prior mentioned a Hawaiian birth:

The new president of the Review is Barack Obama, a 28-year-old graduate of Columbia University who spent four years heading a community development program for poor blacks on Chicago’s South Side before enrolling in law school. His late father, Barack Obama, was a finance minister in Kenya and his mother, Ann Dunham, is an American anthropologist now doing fieldwork in Indonesia. Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii.

Read More at pjmedia.com By David Steinberg.

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