DAVID GREGORY INTERVIEWS AUTHOR DAVID MARANISS

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WASHINGTON, D.C. - June 18, 2012 - Following Sunday's "Meet the Press" roundtable conversation, David Gregory sat down with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Maraniss for an extended post-show conversation about his new book, "Barack Obama: The Story."

Video of Sunday's "Meet the Press" roundtable featuring Maraniss is online here: http://on.msnbc.com/Kuh63y

The full "Take Two" transcript is below and embeddable video is online here: http://on.msnbc.com/KwcVnQ

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Transcript: "Take Two" with David Maraniss
Mandatory Credit: NBC News

DAVID GREGORY: I'm David Gregory with our Meet the Press Take Two Web Extra. We're joined once again by David Maraniss, author of "Barack Obama: The Story." It's great to have you here David, it's such an interesting book.

DAVID MARANISS: Hey, thanks.

GREGORY: You've written about President Clinton, you took on this project. What did you learn about Barack Obama, along the way?

MARANISS: Well, I approach a book like everything's a surprise. Even though you know, I'd written about him in 2008, and had read his memoir already, my approach as a biographer is I don't know anything. So I try to learn everything. And this book took me 50,000 miles around the world - you know, he's a global figure, and an American. So I went to Kenya, to find the roots of his father's family there, and discovered among other things that the character that Barack writes about in his memoir, Mama Sarah, and sort of elevates: She now has this huge compound, where there are satellite dishes, and guards, and you have to get past factotums to get in - she's not even a real blood relative. And I found the real blood relatives about forty miles away, living in mud huts down around Lake Victoria. So, you know, a book is full of surprises when you start to really research it and go the places of someone's life.

GREGORY: Now he's a writer -

MARANISS: Yes.

GREGORY: And one of the things you do in this book, is point out where, in his own autobiography, things weren't right, things were not accurate. How did he react to that?

MARANISS: Well, I let him read the introduction before I interviewed him. And in the introduction, I point out that even though in his memoir he says that, he acknowledges that he compresses time and uses composite figures, he says he just did it to streamline the story -- and I point out it's a little more than that; that it really is a way for him to advance the themes he wants to in the book. So, he read the introduction, he said, 'David, you know it's a really interesting introduction, but you call my book fiction.' And I said, 'No Mr. President, I actually compliment it; I called it literature.' And then we went through various of the points in his book where he took some liberties, and he acknowledged all of them in the end.

GREGORY: Is he comfortable with this project, with this examination?

MARANISS: You know, he was more comfortable than President Clinton was, I think partly because he is a writer. And perhaps also because even though his life is, his family's life is full of these fascinating dysfunctions, his own life is a little less so. So perhaps the least comfortable parts of it to him were old girlfriends, and his marijuana smoking in high school - even though he wrote about that in his own book, not in the detail which I found.

GREGORY: But a lot of this is your own interest in sort of, getting to the story of his struggle with his own identity. Which is a very involved story. One of the things you write is, quoting him: 'The only way I could have a sturdy sense of identity of who I was depended on digging beneath the surface differences of people. The only way my life makes sense is if regardless of culture, race, religion, tribe, there is commonality, these essential human truths and hopes and moral precepts that are universal.' Is that him speaking?

MARANISS: That's him in a letter, to one of his old girlfriends. And in many ways David, it's a precursor to his 2004 address at the Democratic National Convention about, 'not red states or blue states but the United States.' He has, because his father was never around, because his mother - as much as she sort of inculcated her conscience into him - she was not around a lot either, particularly in his formative high school years; she was working in Indonesia and he was in Honolulu. So he had to really find his own way. And because he's what they call in Hawaii a 'hapa' - half one race, half another; half black, half white -- all of these sort of contradictions in his own life, he had to figure out, he couldn't really choose. And that doesn't always help - you know it helped him get elected, it helps him possibly become great. But it's very difficult when you can't just focus on one sort of way of being; he has to be it all. And that sort of represents both the promise and the struggle of Barack Obama.

GREGORY: And yet so much dysfunction in his young life. You talk about the importance of women in his life, strong women in his life. And yet here he grows up, he's President of the United States, he's got by all appearances an incredibly stable family life -- he seems to have resolved a lot of the difficulties in his life.

MARANISS: I did -- and one of - you know, all narrative stories in a sense are a journey, and this one, it's the arc towards home. He starts in Honolulu without a father, and with his mother gone, in this place that's further than any landmass, than anywhere in the world. Then he goes to Los Angeles to start college, it's not quite right for him. New York, he doesn't quite find it. The arc leads him to Chicago. There he's finally embraced. Personally he finds comfort in the black community for the first time. And inevitably Michelle is there as well. So it's all that arc towards Chicago and home.

GREGORY: He's a politician -

MARANISS: Very much so.

GREGORY: He's the president; he's, no question, an ambitious figure; anybody who wants to be president is. Is that as central to who he is as, say, another figure you wrote about, Bill Clinton?

MARANISS: In a very different way. I mean Clinton needed people more than anything in the world. Clinton would invite friends over to his house in Hot Springs just to watch him do a crossword puzzle. I mean Obama can exist on his own. Clinton is hot, Obama's cool. You know, in Hawaii there's a saying: 'cool head main thing.' And that's sort of Obama; he can, he's integrated within himself. Clinton needed the affirmation of other people and the world, and that's what made him such a brilliant, preternatural politician. Obama's of a very different sort. But the one thing he shares is enormous willpower, and will to get where he wants to go, and that's obvious now. I mean, you can't be president without that.

GREGORY: And it's interesting: Without the sort of background he had, where his identity was something he had to resolve, had he resolved it earlier, had he not grown up in Hawaii and spent time overseas in Indonesia, would he have been president, do you think?

MARANISS: You know, I think not. I think Hawaii in particular was crucial to him, you know. And this is only viewing it through a racial lens. If he had grown up in Camden, or Philadelphia, or Los Angeles, or some other place, he would have had to have made that racial choice early and definitively, not just personally but politically, probably, to succeed. And because he came out of Hawaii, which is such a multi-glot place -- everybody there's a hapa, not that many African Americans, but when you looked at his high school class, it wasn't just Obama, it was Ohana, Owana - all the Japanese, Chinese - one of his friends in high school was a guy named Tom Topolinski, he was Chinese. You know, I mean it's that kind of place. That made it easier for him to sort of be that multiracial figure.

GREGORY: His grandmother was so important.

MARANISS: Very important.

GREGORY: What did you discover about her?

MARANISS: Madelyn Dunham was pragmatic, kept the family together. His grandfather Stanley was a dreamer - I call him sort of a Willy Loman-style salesman - selling furniture and insurance, and always having these big dreams and never accomplishing them; the grandmother kept him rooted. She was also though, very interestingly, a closet alcoholic. She had a lot of stress on her. When I interviewed the president, I found it fascinating, he said he watches Mad Men all the time in the White House. And he thought of his grandmother as Peggy -- the secretary who rises up in the firm. And his grandmother started as a secretary in a bank and became a vice president.

GREGORY: What did you learn out of this period in his life that tells us about the president he is: How he governs, how he leads, how he interacts and forges relationships.

MARANISS: You know, I think, without overstating it, you can learn so much about somebody's present and future from their past. And with Barack Obama, one central element is his desire to always avoid the trap; he's always looking a couple of steps ahead, he was throughout his whole life. He didn't want to get trapped in Honolulu, he didn't want to get trapped as a lawyer or judge or in business. He was always looking - he didn't want to get trapped in racial politics of Chicago; that's why he went to Springfield instead of getting into the city council in Chicago which would have just trapped him there. He's always looking for ways to avoid the traps. That can sometimes, it gets him to where he wants to go, but along the way it makes him seem very cautious. And that has certainly played out in his presidency.

GREGORY: This book ends, cinematically, he's driving off to Harvard, to law school. More to come here, right? Another volume?

MARANISS: There will be a second volume. I ended it right where I saw he'd figured it all out, in terms of where he wanted to go. In Chicago, he'd found his home, inevitably he would find Michelle there. He'd also found his study of power. As a community organizer in Chicago he realized there were limits to what he could do, to that sort of power. Studying Mayor Washington, the mayor of Chicago, he saw the charisma of elected power. And he had to go to Harvard to get his bona fides, and then his political career begins.

GREGORY: Finally, what has captured you about this subject, that you have devoted so much time and will devote so much more time?

MARANISS: You know, it's funny that there's all these questions about where Obama was born by certain right-wingers and so on. It is such a classic American story, because it brings the whole world, which is what America is. So it's everything - it's not just him and his own search, but everything that sort of encompasses the Barack Obama story that captured me, and that's why I got into it.

GREGORY: I want to end on this point though: All this birther controversy -- you have facts in the book here that really blow all this out right?

MARANISS: Well you know the interesting thing is, that, among many other facts, the Immigration and Naturalization Service was tailing Obama's dad that whole period he was in Honolulu; there's no way he could have left anywhere - they were trying to already kick him out. So the idea that he went to Kenya, they went to Kenya to have the baby and then came back, is just preposterous when you look at the INS documents.

GREGORY: David Maraniss, "Barack Obama: The Story" - good luck with it, thanks for being here.

MARANISS: Hey thank you, David.

GREGORY: Appreciate it.

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