The Blaze:
Editor’s Note: This week, the DVD of the movie “2016″ will be released. A key premise of the film is that Barack Obama has his own set of five “founding fathers” — five key people who shaped his worldview. This week, TheBlaze will examine one of those individuals each day. Yesterday we examined Bill Ayers. Today we will explore the life of Obama’s devout-Communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis.
Be sure to join writer Tiffany Gabbay, TheBlaze Editor-in-Chief Scott Baker and “The Communist” author Paul Kengor as they discuss this article live on a one-hour BlazeCast beginning today at 12:00pm ET:
As TheBlaze continues its series examining President Obama’s “Founding Fathers,” one man stands out above the rest as the president’s earliest, and perhaps for this reason, most influential mentor, the devout Communist, Frank Marshall Davis.You might recall details about Frank Marshall Davis from TheBlaze’s extensive review of “The Communist,” a scholarly book authored by Dr. Paul Kengor chronicling the controversial figure’s path from oppressed black, to Republican advocate, to a fully-fledged card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA.
A young Frank Marshall Davis (Photo source: LetsRollForum)
In fact, imagine an American man so staunch in his Marxist ideals, that during the Cold War he made the FBI’s security index as a high risk person. This meant that if an armed conflict were to have escalated between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union, Davis could have been apprehended on charges of potential treason. Now, imagine that that man is not the character of a James Bond movie, nor simply a relic of the 1960s radical past, but rather the primary role model, father figure even, of the adolescent who would one day go on to become the leader of the free world.
(Related: Guilty as Sin, Free as a Bird: Meet Obama Mentor #2, Bill Ayers)
Kengor, along with other experts have agreed for some time that Davis was one of the president’s earliest mentors and that the “Frank” mentioned no less than 22 times in the print-version of Obama’s 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father” was none other than the infamous Communist agitator. To illustrate just how influential the Marxist-radical was to Obama, it should be noted that “Frank” appears in all three sections of “Dreams,” and at each milestone and pivotal moment of Obama’s life as detailed in the book.
Scrubbing the past
Curiously, despite being such a key influence in a young Obama’s life, author Jack Cashill, along with Kengor, noted that “Frank” had actually “disappeared” from the 2005 audio version of “Dreams,” which was narrated by Obama himself. After re-listened to the entire audio book in September 2012 and comparing it to the unabridged print-edition, Kengor confirmed that the audio version had indeed been scrubbed of all references to Davis.“Every reference to ‘Frank’ everywhere in the book, from every section—and there are many of them—are gone,” Kengor told TheBlaze in an email.
The omissions are of particular import when one considers that 2005 was the year following Obama’s now-famed speech at the Democratic National Convention which propelled him to stardom. It is perhaps safe to surmise that since he was a relative unknown in 1995, when “Dreams” was first published, few would have taken notice of the book’s references to a 1960s Marxist-radical mentor. After 2004, however, when it was clear Obama would become a fixture on the national political scene, greater scrutiny of the aspiring politico may have prompted him to take action and conceal the more questionable aspects of his past.
As noted in TheBlaze’s earlier article on the suspicious purging of the book’s key text, the Random House website reveals that all audio versions of “Dreams,” along with Obama’s subsequent book, “The Audacity of Hope,” are only available in the abridged format. But if Davis was important enough to erase from the pages of Obama’s history, who, exactly was he?
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