Obama's ex-girlfriend: what her diaries reveal

As a recent college grad in New York, Barack Obama fell in love with a young white woman named Genevieve Cook. Passages from her diary appear in a new biography of the president, David Maraniss's "Barack Obama: The Story," excerpted in Vanity Fair.

It could be anybody's story — a young man's intensity, a young woman's fascination, and the slow unraveling of a relationship. Cook, an Australian who had also spent part of her childhood in Indonesia, dated Obama for about 18 months after he graduated from Columbia in 1983. In her diary she wrote of him: "Barack — still intrigues me, but so much going on beneath the surface, out of reach."

What she kept coming back to was how guarded he was. She found him "controlled," cool and distant even in the middle of a love affair. The relationship eventually collapsed, and Obama left for Chicago to become a community organizer. The rest, as they say, is history.

The diaries also helped settle one mystery. In his own memoir, "Dreams From My Father," Obama described a "New York girlfriend" without ever naming her. He later told Maraniss that the woman in the book was a composite — "a compression" of girlfriends from his New York and Chicago years — while Genevieve was the real New York girlfriend.

Genevieve Cook had her own premonition. She once told her diary that while she was not the woman for Barack Obama, "that lithe, bubbly, strong black lady is waiting somewhere."