Sheila Miyoshi Jager, 53, Barack Obama’s former girlfriend is making headlines thanks to the countless interviews she conducted with biographer David J. Garrow for his new and controversial book entitled “Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.”
In the book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author claimed that Jager met Mr. Obama in the 1980s while he was a community organizer in Chicago, Illinois.
The pair dated, shared an apartment together, and in the winter of 1986, the Hawaiian-born lawyer proposed.
The then-couple was in their early 20s, and her parents told her she was too young to get married, so she turned down the wedding proposal.
She confessed: “In the winter of ‘86, when we visited my parents, he asked me to marry him.”
Jager, who is now married to historian Jiyul Kim, said despite the fact that she turned down Obama’s offer to become his wife, they continued dating and sharing a home.
After the wedding fiasco, Obama drastically changed and became obsessed with the idea of running for president.
Jager, who is of Dutch and Japanese ancestry, explained: “He became. . . so very ambitious, very suddenly… I remember very clearly when this transformation happened, and I remember very specifically that by 1987, about a year into our relationship, he already had his sights on becoming president.”
Before leaving for Harvard Law School, Obama asked Jager to marry him again and to move to Cambridge. She declined, and they went their separate ways but kept in contact.
In 1989, Obama met Michelle Robinson and Jager became some kind of a side chick.
Garrow wrote: “… Obama met Michelle… they soon found themselves in a serious relationship… However, Jager was not completely out of the picture as she was soon to arrive at Harvard on a teaching fellowship.”
Jager is an associate professor and the program director of East Asian Studies at Berlin College and is the author of “Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea.”
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