It’s a very common story: a father and daughter who live in the same city but could easily be a million miles apart, after growing apart for some reason.
However, this particular domestic rift is suddenly even more painful now, as the daughter in question is the vice president of the United States and in the running for the top job.
And while Kamala Harris campaigns from her West Wing office, her 86-year-old father, Donald J. Harris, owns a home less than a mile away.
However, despite the proximity, there is no record of Donald meeting his famous daughter at the White House.
His name does not appear in any of the publicly available visitor logs during his three-and-a-half years in office.
While Kamala Harris campaigns from her West Wing office, her 86-year-old father, Donald J. Harris (right), owns a home less than a mile away.
Yet despite the proximity, there is no record of Donald meeting his famous daughter (pictured, in his arms, aged one year) at the White House.
There are also no recent public photographs of the couple together.
Of course, it is possible that the vice president privately hosted her father in the government-provided home (at the US Naval Observatory in Washington DC), where visitor logs are not public.
But it is perhaps more likely that Donald has kept a deliberate distance, determined to stay away from what he has described as the “political hoopla” surrounding his daughter, whose controversial comments he once criticised as “a farce”.
For her part, Harris has previously described their relationship as “not close.”
And at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week, when Harris formally accepted the party’s nomination, she made a brief but perhaps revealing mention of her father.
After telling the crowd that her father had encouraged her to be “fearless,” she added: “It was mainly my mother who raised us.”
And while the cameras focused on her self-described “big blended family” in the audience – including her stepchildren, her husband Doug and even Doug’s ex-wife – Donald Harris was conspicuously absent.
It was not clear whether he had been invited or decided not to come.
But Kamala would have had good reason to expect him to stay away.
Her father, who turned 86 the day after his daughter gave the most important speech of her life, is a former economics professor whose policies do little to persuade Democratic critics that Kamala is not an advocate of far-left beliefs.
Forged in the academic world of the 1960s, its aggressively Marxist outlook makes it a target for Republican attacks.
Donald has also used his qualifications in later life to offer economic advice to Jamaica’s systematically corrupt government, something his daughter’s campaign will no doubt find unfortunate.
But whatever the real reasons, Donald Harris remains strangely absent from the public story of his daughter’s life.
And even if she wins the election in November and he becomes the “first father,” theirs is a relationship that is unlikely to improve.
The rift between them dates back to Kamala’s early childhood.
Donald used his academic qualifications later in life as an economic advisor to the systematically corrupt government of Jamaica.
In 1962, he met Shyamala Gopalan (pictured left), a 19-year-old cancer researcher from India. They married the following year and had Kamala in 1964 while living in Oakland.
Born in 1938 in Browns Town, Jamaica, in Saint Ann’s Parish (Bob Marley’s birthplace), Donald studied in London, before earning a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley.
It was there that he met Shyamala Gopalan, a 19-year-old cancer researcher from India, in 1962. They married the following year and had Kamala in 1964 while living in Oakland (her sister Maya arrived three years later).
Donald then obtained prestigious teaching positions at two universities in Illinois, where the family moved.
But while he was enjoying professional success, his family life was beginning to fall apart.
According to Kamala’s 2019 memoir, her parents “stopped being nice to each other” around that time and, when she was just five, they separated.
Donald remained in Illinois while Shyamala and the two girls moved back to California. They officially divorced when Kamala was seven.
According to Donald’s account, he was not happy with the arrangement.
In a 2018 essay for the website Jamaica Global, he recalled how “the first phase of interaction with my children came to an abrupt halt in 1972.”
She blamed the California court system, writing: ‘After a bitter custody battle in family court (…) the context of the relationship was placed within arbitrary boundaries imposed by a court-ordered divorce agreement based on the State of California’s false assumption that the parents are unable to handle parenting.
‘Despite everything, I persisted and never gave up on my love for my children or reneged on my responsibilities as a father.’
Donald also spoke glowingly about his daughters in another article for Jamaica Global.
Alongside a photo of them together, she wrote: “So here we are now. All grown up, Kamala is making her way in America and Meena is doing the same on her own (just like her mother Maya).”
However, this particular domestic rift is suddenly even more painful now, as the daughter in question is the vice president of the United States and in the running for the top job.
Donald was a professor at Stanford and one of his published communist works was dedicated to his daughters.
But it wasn’t long before those warm feelings seemingly turned sour.
Later that year, Donald made his only public intervention in his daughter’s political career to date: brutally scolding her for comments she had made about marijuana.
While promoting her memoir, the then-senator dismissed the idea that she opposed marijuana legalization, saying in a podcast interview: “That’s not true. And look, I joke about it, half-jokingly: Half my family is from Jamaica, are you kidding?”
That “half of his family” is his father’s side, and Professor Harris was not amused by the apparent reference to the stereotype of the marijuana smoker.
In a statement to a Jamaican media outlet, he fumed: “My dearly departed grandmothers, as well as my late parents, must be turning in their graves right now. Speaking on behalf of myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically disassociate ourselves from this farce.”
There was no public response from his daughter or his campaign team, but the family’s broadside was shocking. Professor Harris was soon forced to moderate his anger.
In a statement to Politico, he said: “I have decided to stay out of all the political hoopla by not participating in any media interviews.”
Kamala’s true feelings toward her father remain opaque. In 2021, the vice president told the Washington Post that they were on “good terms.”
Two years later, a statement to the San Francisco Weekly was more nuanced: “My father is a nice guy, but we don’t have a very close relationship,” she said.
Donald, like his daughter, has enjoyed professional success.
He taught for more than two decades as a professor at Stanford, where one of his published works – Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution – was dedicated to his daughters.
In 1974, Stanford’s student newspaper described him as a political “radical” and a “magic piper who leads students astray from neoclassical economics.”
In 2009, Kamala suffered a personal blow when her mother (pictured in 1970 with her daughters), with whom she was particularly close, died of colon cancer at age 70.
It is unclear whether he was paid for his additional work as an adviser to the Jamaican government on economic policy, but Donald took early retirement in 1998.
In 2009, Kamala suffered a personal blow when her mother, with whom she was particularly close, died of colon cancer at age 70.
Despite being her only surviving parent, there is no record of Donald being present when Kamala was sworn in as vice president at Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2020.
Donald’s second wife currently lives on the same Washington property as Professor Harris, according to public records.
Professor Harris’s remaining relatives in Jamaica told DailyMail.com that he no longer has a home on the island but continues to visit.
Clearly proud of Kamala’s success, her relatives told the Mail they had watched her acceptance speech together at their hilltop property in Browns Town, above Harris Quarry, which they have run for two generations producing crushed limestone and bricks.
Donald’s first cousin, Sherman Harris, said: “We are so proud of Kamala and can’t wait for her to move to the White House.”
It is unlikely, at best, that her father will congratulate her in the same way in November.
