>>6068398
>>6068408
https://www.c-span.org/video/transcript/?id=56098
Male: Did you end up having troubles with House Unamerican Activities Committee and the FBI?
Frank Marshall Davis: Oh, yes, naturally.
Male: What happened?
Frank Marshall Davis: Well, I had an FBI agent who I learned had been my personal agent until I think it was around the early '60s told me that, "I notice you used to be a Communist, but what made you change your mind? Why did you leave the party?" And I said, "Wait a minute, if I say I had left the party that would indicate that I had been a member of the Communist Party and I have never told anybody that."
LAMB: How does he fit in?
GARROW: Frank Marshall Davis, by the time that Barack is a young child in Hawaii, is living there in Honolulu. Frank, earlier in his life, had been a very prominent black poet in Chicago. Frank had married a wealthy white woman in the late '40s and they decided to move to Hawaii because they were going to experience a whole lot less racial discrimination as an interracial couple in Honolulu than in Chicago. By the mid-1960s, one of Frank Marshall Davis' best friends in Honolulu is Barack's grandfather, Stanley Dunham.
LAMB: And Madelyn.
GARROW: Yes. Stanley and his wife Madelyn, Barack's maternal grandparents, pretty much raised Barack in a very modest, small apartment in an apartment building in downtown Honolulu. Stanley was an amateur poet himself, a man who enjoyed dirty limericks, and he and Frank Davis would hang out together. And Stanley was very conscious of having a grandson who was half-black and Stanley went out of his way to introduce his grandson, Barry, back at that time, to Frank Davis. And for Barack, Frank Davis was really the first adult African-American male whom he knew, again, someone the age of a grandfather and they never became as close as Barack did to, for example, Jeremiah Wright 20 years later.
But Barack as a young man when he's in high school, when he's in college, is writing poetry or trying to write poetry, some people might say. And there's no question that Frank Davis did have some formative impact on Barack. But Barack no more knew that Frank Marshall Davis had actually been a Communist in the 1940s, than he knew that Bill Ayers, later a good friend in Chicago, had been involved in planting bombs. Barack in neither instance is it a reflection upon who Barack is, what people had done years earlier.
LAMB: Do I remember right, Frank Marshall Davis took photographs of Barack Obama's mother?
GARROW: No, I do not. That's an allegation that is out there. I believe it to be entirely without foundation.
LAMB: There are pictures on the Internet though and I remember seeing some tabloid stories about this. Did you …
GARROW: I believe those photos are 500 percent fake PhotoShops. Frank lived a very colorful life. He published a sexual autobiography under a pseudonym, but that part of Frank's life has no bearing on Barack's interaction with him.