Book Excerpt: Candidates share colorful histories

Such are the plot twists in the remarkable saga of the 2008presidential campaign, which is brimming with enough colorful characters to populate a Russian novel. The candidates’ personal backgrounds, which are little known to most voters, are described in the new book, “Meet the Next President.”

Obama, for example, has made no secret of the fact that he used marijuana and cocaine as a young man, but his flirtation with heroin has received virtually no media coverage.

In his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” Obama wrote that he went so far as to enter the freezer of a delicatessen with “my potential initiator,” a junkie who “pulled out the needle and tubing” for Obama.

“Right then an image popped into my head of an air bubble, shiny and round like a pearl, rolling quietly through a vein and stopping my heart,” recalled Obama, who got cold feet and declined the hit.

Furthermore, in what has to be one of the biggest coincidences of the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama, like Romney, is the great-grandson of a polygamist who had five wives.

Obama’s busy forefather, also named Obama, was born in 1895, orphaned as a young boy and grew up to become a farmer. His first wife died young, so Obama married her sister and, eventually, three other women, all of whom had children.

While the elder Obama was a Muslim who lived in Africa, the elder Romney was a Mormon who lived in Utah. In fact, that’s where Miles Park Romney married his first wife in 1862, two months before President Lincoln outlawed polygamy.

Romney defied the new law at the urging of Brigham Young, who succeeded Joseph Smith as president of the Mormon church. After spending years as an outlaw polygamist, Romney was forced in 1885 to flee to Mexico, where he married his fifth wife.

Five years later, the Mormon church reversed course and banned polygamy. Consequently, Miles Romney’s son Gaskell (Mitt’s grandfather) and Gaskell’s son George (Mitt’s father) were monogamous. So was Mitt, although he almost didn’t make it to his wedding in 1969.

That’s because a year earlier, while performing missionary work in France, 21-year-old Mitt Romney was involved in a horrific car crash. A Mercedes-Benz driven by a Catholic priest crossed the center line and slammed head-on into the Citroen driven by Romney. The impact killed a woman in Romney’s car.

“I was also pronounced dead,” Romney wrote in his memoir, “Turnaround.” “One of the gendarmes at the scene found me lying unconscious on the side and wrote, ‘Il est morte’ on my passport before moving on. The erroneous accident report was picked up by a news service that broadcast the report in the United States. My parents and Ann, my then-girlfriend and future wife, learned that I had expired.”

Romney’s primary Republican rival, Giuliani, has been married three times, a fact known to many Americans. But many do not know that Giuliani’s first wife, Regina Peruggi, was actually his second cousin (their fathers were first cousins).

“I’ve led a very complex life,” Giuliani said with a chuckle in an interview with The Examiner.

Normally, such a marriage would require dispensation from the Catholic Church. But Rudy and Regina never raised the issue of their common ancestry and were married in 1968 in a Catholic ceremony in the Bronx.

“I was under the impression that we were third cousins because I never calculated the lines of consanguinity,” Giuliani later explained to The New York Times. “I can’t tell you what Gina thought. I don’t think we ever discussed it in any great detail.”

The unusual union “raises questions about a ‘weirdness factor,’ ” according to a “vulnerability study” of himself that Giuliani commissioned during his New York City mayoral campaign in 1993. The study concluded that journalists viewed the marriage as “extremely bizarre.” It also recommended that “Giuliani refuse to discuss this issue out of respect for Regina’s privacy and because it is highly personal.”

Although Giuliani is running for the GOP presidential nomination, he was once a registered Democrat who idolized John F. Kennedy and voted for liberal George McGovern against Republican Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election.

Conversely, Democrat Clinton was once a die-hard Republican who rooted for Nixon against Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election, when she was still in the eighth grade. She was outraged by Nixon’s narrow loss, which was linked to voting irregularities in her native Chicago.

Four years later, young Hillary Rodham volunteered to work in the unsuccessful presidential campaign of influential conservative Barry Goldwater. The following year, she enrolled in Wellesley College, where she was elected president of the school’s Young Republicans Club.

In 1968, Rodham worked as an intern for the House Republican Conference in Washington. She parlayed the internship into a trip to Miami Beach, Fla., for the Republican National Convention. Rodham worked on behalf of liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller, who came up short in his third bid for the GOP presidential nomination.

“The nomination of Richard Nixon cemented the ascendance of a conservative over a moderate ideology within the Republican Party,” Clinton later wrote, even though she had once supported Nixon. “I sometimes think that I didn’t leave the Republican Party as much as it left me.”

Even less is known about other candidates. Democrat Bill Richardson, for example, was born in California, but only because his Mexican mother and Nicaraguan-born father, who had been living in Mexico for 20 years, wanted him to have American citizenship. So they crossed the border into the United States, brought forth the baby, and returned with him to Mexico City, where Richardson said he grew up thinking: “I’m a Mexican and an American trapped in one body.”

Although bilingual, Richardson “thought and dreamt in Spanish” and “was more comfortable with Spanish,” he wrote in his 2005 memoir, “Between Worlds.” As a teenager, Richardson moved to the United States to attend Middlesex School, an elite prep school in Concord, Mass. He later earned several degrees from Tufts University.

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About “Meet the Next President“