Obama admits smoking ‘NINE cigarettes a day when president’ and only gave up when daughter Malia caught him
BARACK Obama admitted he sometimes smoked nine cigarettes a day when he was in the White House, and only quit when his daughter Malia caught him.
The former president, 59, made the admission in his forthcoming memoir, A Promised Land, which details his early political career up through his first term in the White House.
Early excerpts from the book, due out on November 17, also detail the strain the presidency had on his relationship with his wife, Michelle.
Obama admitted that the stress of the job made it difficult for him to kick his habit, according to CNN, and he'd sometimes smoke eight, nine or even ten cigarettes a day.
The former president admitted he would often look for a "discreet location to grab an evening smoke."
He wrote that Malia, now 22, got him to quit after she "frowned" at him after "smelling a cigarette on my breath."
Obama also admitted to "ceaselessly" chewing nicotine gum to help kick the habit.
In the past, Obama has spoken about his struggle to quit smoking - a habit he picked up as a teen.
"As a former smoker, I constantly struggle with it," he said during a 2009 press conference. "Have I fallen off the wagon sometimes? Yes."
"Am I a daily smoker, a constant smoker? No. I don't do it in front of my kids. I don't do it in front of my family - and you know, I would say that I am 95% cured, but there are times where I mess up," he said.
While much of Obama's memoir focuses on politics and his experience as a president, there are also some personal stories sprinkled throughout the 768-page work - including the toll being the first lady took on his wife.
"Despite Michelle's success and popularity, I continued to sense an undercurrent of tension in her, subtle but constant, like the faint thrum of a hidden machine," Obama wrote.
"It was as if, confined as we were within the walls of the White House, all her previous sources of frustration became more concentrated, more vivid, whether it was my round the clock absorption with work, or the way politics exposed our family to scrutiny and attacks, or the tendency of even friends and family members to treat her role as secondary in importance."
The former president said he would occasionally think of "those days when everything between us felt lighter, when her smile was more constant and our love less encumbered," and worry that "those days might not return."
In the memoir, Obama also touches on the current political climate - saying the Republican party changed in response to the first black president, eventually leading to the presidency of Donald Trump.
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"It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted," Obama wrote.
"Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started peddling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and thus an illegitimate president."
"For millions of Americans spooked by a black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety."