Obama wary of letters to ex-girlfriend Sheila Miyoshi Jager becoming public: Biographer

Barack Obama did not want letters written to his former girlfriend Sheila Miyoshi made public, said his biographer David Garrow in an interview with a US-based news outlet on Saturday. Garrow, who wrote a biography of the former United States President titled Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama in 2017, said Obama was particularly concerned about the letters he wrote to his former girlfriend Sheila Miyoshi Jager, a woman who he had intended to marry, before he met Michelle. 

"Barack made it clear to me that he hoped I would never read them, I can put it that way. I think if the letters to Sheila ever become public, I think that will be a signal event," Garrow told Fox News on Saturday.  

"Those letters would detail just how extremely serious and extremely intense a relationship that was and that it continued off and on into his Harvard Law School years,” he added. Garrow’s 2017 book dissected the former President’s relationship with Jager to a great extent. One of his analogies even suggested that Obama’s courtship with Michelle Robinson was “politically calculated” to win favours among the Black Community in Chicago. 

However, Garrow’s analogy was criticised by many who stated that this was not the case. In the interview with Fox, the author made it clear that while the two share a marriage which is “genuine and loving,” a mixed-race marriage would have made things difficult for Obama.

"The one aspect that I will endorse or that is inescapably true is that by 1988, he knew he wanted to run for public office in Chicago," Garrow said. "And he knew… that having a wife like Sheila Jager, half-Dutch, half-Japanese, would not cut it in Black Chicago… Having a non-Black spouse 25, 35 years ago was an active political problem for a Black candidate,” he added. 

The letter to former girlfriend Alex McNear is now owned by Emory University, Image: AP

‘Making love to men daily...’

Meanwhile, in another letter written to Alex McNear, a 21-year-old Barack Obama reportedly wrote about his "androgynous" mind and suggested that he "makes love to men daily" but in his imagination. “In regard to homosexuality, I must say that I believe this is an attempt to remove oneself from the present, a refusal perhaps to perpetuate the endless farce of earthly life. You see, I make love to men daily, but in the imagination,” the former US President reportedly wrote. 

“My mind is androgynous to a great extent and I hope to make it more so until I can think in terms of people, not women as opposed to men. But, in returning to the body, I see that I have been made a man, and physically in life, I choose to accept that contingency,” the letter obtained by The New York Post further reads.

The letter in question is currently owned by Emory University, which for the longest time did not allow the letter to be photographed.