excerpt:
The hunt for Obama’s senior “thesis” began with a throwaway line in a newspaper article last October. The New York Times story, on Obama’s early New York years, mentioned in passing that the presidential contender had majored in political science at Columbia and had spent his time “writing his thesis on Soviet nuclear disarmament.”
Journalists began hounding Columbia University for copies of the musty document. Conservative bloggers began wondering if the young Obama had written a no-nukes screed that he might come to regret. And David Bossie, the former congressional investigator and “right-wing hit man,” as one newspaper described him, took out classified newspaper ads in Columbia University’s newspaper and the Chicago Tribune in March searching for the term paper.
Bossie came up dry, but said the effort was well worth it:
“A thesis entitled Soviet Nuclear Disarmament, written at the height of The Cold War in 1983, might shed some light upon what Barack Obama thought about our most pressing foreign policy issue for 40-plus years (U.S.-Soviet Relations),” he wrote in an e-mail to NBC News.
http://deepbackground.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/07/24/1219454.aspx
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Here is the passage from the New York Times that the above article refers to:
"He barely mentions Columbia, training ground for the elite, where he transferred in his junior year, majoring in political science and international relations and writing his thesis on Soviet nuclear disarmament. He dismisses in one sentence his first community organizing job — work he went on to do in Chicago — though a former supervisor remembers him as 'a star performer.'"
[snip]
"he [Obama] declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years.
'He doesn’t remember the names of a lot of people in his life,' said Ben LaBolt, a campaign spokesman."
Obama’s Account of New York Years Often Differs From What Others Say
By JANNY SCOTT, October 30, 2007:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/us/politics/30obama.html?ex=1351396800&en=631bf83f428647f9&ei=5089&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss
Obama's 1983 College Magazine Article
["Breaking the War Mentality"]
"In 1983, at the height of the cold war, Barack Obama, then a senior at Columbia University, wrote in a campus newsmagazine about the vision of "a nuclear free world." The article in the Sundial profiled two campus groups: Arms Race Alternatives and Students Against Militarism."
http://documents.nytimes.com/obama-s-1983-college-magazine-article#p=1