Meet the Australian Lover of US President Barack Obama

The Love Life of US President Barack Obama has been quite glamorous. This dates back to 1983 when he was 25 and was just out of Law School when he had a 2 year long affair with Genevieve Cook,daughter of an Australian diplomat as quoted in Sydney Morning Herald.

This was all revealed in a book The Story by David Maraniss, published in Vanity Fair magazine.

In 1983 she was teaching primary school children when she met him at a Christmas party in East Village. She brought a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream. And kept a diary! Nearly 30 years later, some of it can be perused in an extract from a book, Barack Obama:

Genevieve Cook was a fairly unusual Australian. Her father, the Geelong Grammarian Michael Cook, was a career diplomat appointed by Malcolm Fraser as top spook – director-general of the Office of National Assessments – and who became ambassador in Washington.

Her mother, Helen Ibbitson, came from a Melbourne banking family and was an art historian. Soon after a Jakarta posting they divorced and their daughter went to the US where her mother had married Philip Jessup, counsel to the National Gallery of Art.

She completed secondary education at Emma Willard School, the gothic, private and academically rigorous prep school for young women in Troy, New York State, before attending college in Philadelphia and New York.

In 1983 she was an assistant teacher for second and third graders at Brooklyn Friends School when she met the POTUS-to-be.  Maraniss’s book also traces Obama love letters written earlier to a classmate, Alex McNear. In his best-selling autobiography Dreams of My Father, Obama admitted to ”compressing” girlfriends. He wrote of a woman who ”had dark hair, and specks of green in her eyes. Her voice sounded like a wind chime.”