Here’s the Guy Rudy Is Talking About: Frank Marshall Davis, Communist Party no. 47544
Media turns blind eye to key self-admitted Obama mentor.

By Paul Kengor – 2.22.15

“This is your work that Rudy is talking about!”

So emailed a friend of mine on Saturday morning, sending me a link to the Drudge Report, which led with a scandalous New York Daily News article apoplectic and incredulous that Rudy Giuliani could launch the hysterical, Neanderthal, McCarthyite claim that our president, Barack Obama, had been influenced as a young man by a literal communist. I quickly read the piece and nodded to myself. Not only did Rudy have the communist right, but he even had Obama’s exact age (nine) right when he was first introduced to the communist.

The next morning, I had more emails. The New York Post did a piece that was also atop the Drudge Report. It quoted Rudy. “From the time he was 9 years old, he was influenced by Frank Marshall Davis, who was a communist,” Giuliani said. The ex-mayor added that Obama’s grandfather introduced him to Davis, who the Post gently called “a writer and labor activist.”

I can’t say for certain that Rudy Giuliani read my book, which is titled, The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor, but he has those facts absolutely right. If I may, I’d like to add some crucial detail:

Frank Marshall Davis (1905-87) was a hardcore communist, an actual card-carrying member of Communist Party USA (CPUSA), who spent time with a young Barack Obama throughout the 1970s, right up until the moment Obama left Hawaii for Occidental College in 1979.

Davis joined the Communist Party in Chicago in the early 1940s. CPUSA members swore an oath to “ensure the triumph of Soviet power in the United States.” They were dedicated to what CPUSA leader William Z. Foster had openly called “Soviet America.” Notably, Davis joined CPUSA after the Hitler-Stalin Pact, a time when many American communists (especially Jewish communists) had bolted the Party in disgust that their Soviet Union had allied with Hitler.

As we know from Davis’s declassified 600-page FBI file (and other sources), his Party card number was 47544. He was very active. In 1946, he became the founding editor-in-chief of the Chicago Star, the Party-line newspaper for Chicago. There, Davis shared the op-ed page with the likes of Howard Fast, a “Stalin Prize” winner, and Senator Claude “Red” Pepper, who, at the time, sponsored the bill to nationalize healthcare in the United States.

Davis left the Star in 1948 for Hawaii, where he would write for the Party-line organ there, the Honolulu Record. His politics remained so radical that the FBI had him under continued surveillance. The federal government actually placed Davis on the Security Index, meaning that in the event of a war between the United States and USSR, Barack Obama’s mentor could be placed under immediate arrest.

Frank Marshall Davis’s targets were Democrats more than Republicans, given that it was Democrats like Harry Truman who held the White House and opposed Stalin’s Soviet expansion at the time. In December 1956, the Democrat-run Senate Judiciary Committee called Davis to Washington to testify on his activities. Davis pleaded the Fifth Amendment. No matter, the next year, the Democratic Senate published a report titled, “Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States,” where it listed Davis as “an identified member of the Communist Party.”

Frank Marshall Davis would eventually meet a young Barack Obama in 1970, introduced by Obama’s grandfather, Stanley Dunham, for the purpose of mentoring. The boy’s grandfather felt that the fatherless boy was in need of a black-male role model. For that, Dunham chose one of the most politically radical figures in all of Hawaii. He introduced the two in the fall of 1970. An eyewitness, a woman named Dawna Weatherly-Williams, who knew Davis so well that she called him “Daddy,” was present the first time Obama and Davis met. She described the relationship as very influential, with Davis impacting Obama on “social justice,” on “life,” on “what’s important,” on no less than “how to use” his “heart” and “mind.”

Read more: The American Spectator