Endless books with limitless details have been written about most U.S. presidents. Even our earliest leaders have been the subject of modern video biopics. We know where George Washington slept – in the 18th century, no less.

You could, indeed, fill a library with everything we know about them.

But after two of his own terms, and having skulked in the background of a third, what do we really know about Barack Obama?

“I think there are things we could say more definitively about Zachary Taylor than we can about Barack Obama,” Kansas City author Jack Cashill tells The Heartlander.

Cashill, who has written 17 books of his own and ghostwritten twice as many, has researched and written about Obama as much or more than anyone else on the planet.

And yet, he admits, “Obama still is something of a mystery.”

Indeed, an online summary of Cashill’s 2011 book Deconstructing Obama writes of “deciphering Obama’s shrouded past, his fragile psyche, and his uniquely cryptic political life. … In fact, much of Obama’s life story appears to be a wholly constructed fabrication …” 

This gravity-eating black hole in the public’s knowledge of Obama certainly isn’t due to a lack of public interest: “When I write about him on my Substack page,” Cashill says, “I get about four times the reader response as I do to any other subject. 

“And that continues to amaze me, because he’s pretty much faded from public view.”

Did he even write his memoir?

A bombshell Cashill says he discovered in 2008 – and which he made public just before the election, to a collective media yawn – is that it’s highly unlikely Obama wrote either of his much-ballyhooed books: 1995’s Dreams From My Father and 2006’s The Audacity of Hope.

Yes, Cashill says, it’s quite common for politicians to have books ghostwritten. But normally they at least credit the writer.

In fact, Obama did the absolute opposite: He made a point of boasting authorship of his books during the 2008 election cycle, no doubt to contrast his literary prowess with presidential rival John McCain’s co-authored memoir.

“I’ve written two books. I actually wrote them myself,” Obama told a crowd of teachers to much laughter in 2008, according to Cashill’s summary.

“During the 2008 presidential campaign,” Cashill’s summary continues, “Obama supporters pointed to the first of those two books, the 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father, as proof of Obama’s superior intellect. Time magazine called Dreams ‘the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.’”

Cashill says he was suspicious of Obama’s claims of authorship after just a few pages of Dreams. After an extensive literary analysis, Cashill surmised with a high degree of certainty that Obama “definitely had help” writing it.

Moreover, his analysis turned up an astonishing likely co-author: Bill Ayers, who is described as co-founder of “the far-left militant organization the Weather Underground, a revolutionary group that sought to overthrow the United States government,” and whom Cashill’s summary refers to as a “terrorist emeritus.”

“Nothing in Obama’s history suggested he was capable of writing either Dreams or his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope,” Cashill’s online summary argues.

Cashill had an epiphany in September 2008 when he read Ayers’ memoir Fugitive Days.

“I was about a third of the way into the book and I said ‘Bingo, here it is.’ 

“My initial thought was, ‘Oh, they had the same ghostwriter.’ But then the more I read about Ayers, the deeper I got into it, I realized that Ayers was the ghostwriter. 

“That’s not to say he wrote [Obama’s] whole book, ‘cause some parts of the book are kind of lame. The whole Africa part he actually plagiarized from a woman named Kuki Gallmann, who lived in Kenya for many years. But the major chunks of the book were clearly written or edited heavily by Bill Ayers.”

‘No other explanation’

Cashill acknowledges plagiarism hunting was more art then than the science it’s become today with computer software and AI, but he counted “53 matching metaphors” between Ayers’ and Obama’s books. Especially telling were the signature nautical references so rife in Ayers’ compositions.

“Some of them so specific, there could have been no other explanation,” he says. “And there were about six or eight different parallels, in terms of either themes, subject matter, incidents, that appear in both books.”

After some publicity about his hypothesis, other amateur sleuths around the country came to the same conclusion as Cashill.

“Anyone who reads my book Deconstructing Obama, in which I go through this, comes away saying, ‘Yeah, absolutely. There’s no other explanation.’”

Moreover, Cashill says a rather fawning biography, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage, by Christopher Andersen, came to the same conclusion as Cashill – that Ayers played a major role in Obama’s writing.

When confronted about his relationship with a former domestic terrorist, Obama famously described Ayers as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” and “not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis.”

Of course, no one of any prominence who reviewed Andersen’s biography mentioned “the one newsworthy item in Andersen’s book,” Cashill laments.

Deconstructing Obama

As important as all of that, however, Cashill has found huge discrepancies in Obama’s life story.

“We cannot even say where or when he was born,” Cashill says. “I mean, for a president that’s amazing, considering the fact that he’s been out of office now for eight years.”

Indeed, Obama’s birth certificate from Hawaii was the subject of massive debate before his first election, with some arguing he was actually foreign-born and was once a foreign exchange student.

Cashill is more focused on Obama’s storied claim that Barack Obama Sr. left his home when the younger Obama was 2. The truth, Cashill says, is that Stanley Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother, is said to have returned to Seattle from Hawaii to attend the University of Washington when Obama was a mere infant – and that Obama Sr. never joined them.

“In fact, his father was never in his home. His presumed parents never lived together. They never spent a night under the same roof,” Cashill says definitively. “We know he was in Seattle for the first year of his life.”

And why is that important, if true?

“The significance of that is that it drives home the fact that the marriage between Barack Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham was always a sham. It was a fraud,” Cashill says. “The whole essence of his best-selling memoir Dreams From My Father is based on a fabrication. …

“I’m convinced that he’s not the natural father of Barack Obama.”

While it seems every other president’s every move has been catalogued and dissected through the centuries, the media simply had no interest in exploring the cavern of riddles in Obama’s past.

‘Didn’t want to go there’

Whether or not one buys Cashill’s conclusions – despite his extensive research – it’s remarkable that so much about a president’s life is so subject to dispute. And that few in the media or in academia seem interested in settling it.

It wasn’t for a dearth of opportunity: Knowing he had a tiger by the tail, Cashill tried to hand the Obama expedition off to some famous investigative authors and journalists, to no avail.

“All of them just didn’t want to go there. None of them said ‘You’re wrong.’ They just didn’t want to go there.”

Will future historians go there?

“That’s an excellent question,” Cashill says. “ It’s one that I’ve been curious about.”

In the meantime, as the Obama presidential library is being built, albeit haltingly, the question becomes: What in the world would such a shadowy figure put in his presidential library?

Cashill laughs at the question. “Well, if you put in just the books he wrote himself, there’d be nothing.  

“No, they’ll fill it up with bull—-.”