I just worry a lot. I’m a worrier. Michelle and Barack are really dear to me. I mean, I love them. And I don’t want to see them get hurt. Just the nature of politics is hurtful. So every time they are hurt, I get hurt. It’s a lot to ask of people, and it’s a lot to see your friends go through. It’s hard not to get emotional. – Valerie Jarrett

Every American who has paid any attention at all to the goings-on at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, knows who Valerie Jarrett is.

Valerie Jarrett was born in November 1956 to American parents in Shiraz, Iran, where her well-known physician father ran a children’s hospital. When Valerie was five, her family moved to London for one year before arriving in Chicago’s elite Hyde Park neighborhood in 1963.

Jarrett’s maternal grandfather was a Chicago Communist named Robert Taylor, who was involved in the 1940s with the Communist Organizations, the American Peace Mobilization and the Chicago Civil Liberties Committee.  Also a member of these groups was Frank Marshall Davis.

Frank Marshall Davis (1905 – 1987) was an author, liberal activist, Stalinist agent, and self-admitted pedophile (Would you let your children hang around him?) . Davis was involved in Chicago’s South Side Community Art Center, “a meeting place for young African-American writers and artists during the 1940s”. Coming out of the New Deal Federal Art Project, the Art Center was a hangout for the “Culture Group,” a circle of Communist Party members and sympathizers including Richard Wright, Margaret Burroughs, Marion Perkins and Arna Bontemps.

Jarrett’s mother (Robert Taylor’s daughter) is early childhood education author Barbara Taylor Bowman. She was a co-founder of a Chicago-based graduate school in child development known as the Erikson Institute, named after the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. Back in 1950, Erikson became a hero to the Radical Left when he resigned from professorship at the University of California, rather than submit to sign an anti-communist loyalty oath as the school required.

Additional evidence of the Erikson Institute’s Radical Left political orientation is the make-up of  its board of trustees, which has included, along with Bowman, Tom Ayers (father of Marxist Bomber Bill Ayers (the man Obama called “just a guy in the neighborhood”) and Bill Ayer’s wife, Bernardine Dohrn. Bill Ayers referred to Bowman as “a neighbor and friend” in his 1997 book “A Kind and Just Parent”, in which he wrote that his neighbors also included Louis Farrakhan and “writer Barack Obama”.

Jarrett received a B.A. in psychology from Stanford University in 1978, and a Juris Doctorate from the University of Michigan Law School in 1981. In 1983, she married Dr. William Robert Jarrett, son of the Chicago Sun-Times reporter Vernon Jarrett. Vernon Jarrett was a pioneering black journalist who in the 1940s wrote columns for the communist-influenced Chicago Defender extolling Communist poet Langston Hughes and lifelong Stalinists W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson. Also in the 1940s, Mr. Jarrett was a leader of the Chicago chapter of American Youth for Democracy—youth wing of the Communist Party USA. He also served on a publicity committee for the Packinghouse Workers Union, a Chicago-based entity dominated by the CPUSA.  During his time with each of these Communist Organizations, Mr. Jarrett had close contact with Frank Marshall Davis.

The plot sickens.

Jarrett worked as a Freelance Writer at Kansas City’s The Call from 1954-58, then returned to Chicago to become the first nationally syndicated black columnist for the Chicago Tribune, before going to write for the Chicago Sun-Times. Mr. Jarrett once sat on a union publicity committee (for the communist-controlled Packinghouse Workers Union) with Frank Marshall Davis. When Vernon Jarrett died in 2004, he was saluted in the pages of People’s Weekly Worker, the house organ of the Communist Party USA.

Valerie Jarrett began her political profession by jumping into Chicago politics in 1987. She accepted a position as Deputy Corporation Counsel for Finance and Development in the administration of Harold Washington, the city’s first African-American mayor. Jarrett’s father-in-law, whom The Washington Post called “a key influence in [Harold] Washington’s decision to run for the Chicago mayoralty,” is rumored to have been the “Kingmaker” responsible for Valerie’s rise through Chicago’s political ranks.

Following Mayor Washington’s death in 1987, Valerie Jarrett worked for his successor, Richard M. Daley, as his Deputy Chief of Staff. In 1991, Jarrett and her colleague Susan Sher recruited to Chicago’s City Hall Michelle Robinson (the future Michelle “Mooch” Obama), who was engaged to Barack Obama. Jarrett quickly became a trusted confidante of both the Obamas.

SIDE NOTE: ***In the summer of 1988, while still at Harvard, Barack Hussein Obama (mm mmm mmmm) landed a job as an intern in the Chicago office of the influential law firm of Sidley Austin. ( How does a first-year law student get an internship at such a prestigious law firm?)  He was dating Michelle Robinson, a young lawyer from a working-class family in the South Shore area of the South Side.  She also just happened to be his mentor at the firm. The lovebirds got married in 1990, and settled in the Hyde Park neighborhood on the South Side along the lakefront.  Built around the University of Chicago, both black and white  affluent families lived among the middle class and the poor.  Hyde Park boasts a strong base of independent voters who are committed to political reform, which influenced Obama’s political message.***

Jarrett was Commissioner of the Department of Planning and Development from 1992 through 1995. After that, she chaired the Chicago Transit Board from 1995 to 2005.  Then, from 1995 to 2008, she was the CEO of The Habitat Company, a real estate firm headed by Daniel Levin (cousin of Senator Carl Levin and Representative Sander Levin of Michigan). Marilyn Katz, an activist/public-affairs consultant with close ties to City Hall (and a former Students for a Democratic Society radical) introduced Jarrett to Daniel Levin.

During the years 2000 to 2007, Jarrett was a board member of the Chicago Stock Exchange. She still serves as Chairman of the University of Chicago Medical Center’s Board of Trustees; Vice Chairman of the University of Chicago’s Board of Trustees; a Trustee of Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry; and a Board of Directors member of USG Corporation, a Chicago-based building-materials company.

In 2008, Jarrett was the co-chair of the Obama-Biden Transition Project.

In appreciation of her hard work (and the fact that she was a “bud”), she was appointed to the position of  Senior Advisor and Assistant to the President for Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs in the Obama Administration.

Jarrett swiftly became one of President Obama’s (and Mrs. Obama’s) closest and most trusted advisers. According to what an Obama 2008 campaign official told the New York Times,

If you want [Barack Obama] to do something, there are two people [he’s] not going to say no to: Valerie Jarrett and Michelle Obama.

Also in 2008, Susan Sher, who had helped Jarrett recruit Michelle Obama to the Chicago Mayor’s Office in 1991, made a point to emphasize “how incredibly instrumental [Jarrett will] be in virtually everything” in the White House.

Barack Obama thinks that Valerie Jarrett hung the moon and stars.

In July 2009, Obama informed New York Times reporter Robert Draper that,

I trust her completely … She is family.

Obama trusts Jarrett “to speak for me, particularly when we’re dealing with delicate issues.”

The president readily admits that he runs every decision by her.

Concerning her relationship with President Obama, Jarrett says that

We have kind of a mind meld. And chances are, what he wants to do is what I’d want to do.

***The information contained in Today’s Blog may be found at Discover The Networks and “The Great Disconnect: The Whole Ugly Truth About Barack Hussein Obama”***

Next : Part 2 – The White House Years

Until He Comes,

KJ