In the cover for a 1991 promotional booklet written by Barack Obama’s then-publisher claims that the President was” born in Kenya”—giving new support to “birthers” who say that he’s not a U.S. citizen and so not entitled to be elected to the White House.
The booklet, written by Acton & Dystel as part of a listing of its client roster, says that the future President “was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.” Miriam Goderich, who now works at partner company Dystel & Goderich, is listed as the pamphlet's editor. D & G is a literary agency.
"This was nothing more than a fact-checking error by me--an agency assistant at the time," Goderich said in an email to Yahoo! News. "There was never any information given to us by Obama in any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii...This was a simple mistake and nothing more."
A later biographical sketch, written by the agency after Obama became a U.S. senator, contains the same information: “Barack Obama is the junior Democratic senator from Illinois and was the dynamic keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He was also the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. He was born in Kenya to an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister and was raised in Indonesia, Hawaii, and Chicago."
The conservative website Breitbart.com, which released a photocopy of the text, said that its founder, the late Andrew Breitbart, did not believe that Obama was born in Kenya. But, the website said, it was releasing the booklet to show how “Barack Obama's public persona has perhaps been presented differently at different times.”
The question of Obama’s birthplace has dogged the President for years, and although he has released a copy of his birth certificate showing that he was born in Hawaii, the issue hasn’t been put to rest. In releasing his birth certificate, Obama acknowledged that. 'I know that there’s going to be a segment of people for which, no matter what we put out, this issue will not be put to rest.”
With these new details, the debate may get hotter than ever.
