In 1991, a young lawyer walked into Chicago mayoral aide Jarrett’s office and asked for a job. That meeting with the future Michelle Obama started a friendship that would last for decades. Over the years, the Obamas have regularly asked Jarrett for advice and she has been a part of almost all of their major decisions.
That didn’t change when Barack Obama decided to run for president. Obama sought Jarrett’s counsel throughout the campaign, describing her as the ultimate “utility player,” or someone who could step into any role. “I trust her completely,” Obama says. The two talked every day during the campaign, and she often urged him to follow his gut when pollsters and political strategists had other advice, the Chicago Tribune reported.
A lawyer with a background in real estate, Jarrett worked in city government for nearly a decade before moving to The Habitat Co., a for-profit company that controls much of Chicago’s low-income housing.The company was involved in some controversy over its strategy of demolishing large housing projects and replacing them with smaller, mixed-income units…
…Like Obama, Jarrett has a somewhat unusual life story, something they bonded over when the two first met in 1991.
Jarrett’s father was a doctor, and in the 1950s, he and his wife, Barbara, who is an expert in early childhood development, moved to Shiraz, Iran, about 500 miles south of Tehran. He was part of a program that sent American doctors and agriculture experts to developing nations, and Jarrett was born in 1956 at Nemazee Hospital, the brand-new hospital her father for which he father worked. They lived in Iran for six years, and moved to England for one year before returned to Chicago and settling in Hyde Park. “I had no awareness of race until we returned to the United States,” Jarrett says.
Despite her transient childhood, Jarrett is actually part of one of Chicago’s power families. Her maternal grandfather, Robert Rochon Taylor, was the first black man to head the Chicago Housing Authority, and his father was the first African-American to graduate from M.I.T., eventually becoming an architect and the vice principal of the Tuskegee Institute. Jarrett’s father, James Bowman, was not only the first black person to be a resident at St. Luke’s Hospital but also the first to receive tenure in his department at the University of Chicago…
…In 1995, two years after Michelle left city hall, Jarrett got out as well, becoming the executive vice president of The Habitat Company, one of Chicago’s largest for-profit development firms, which oversees all of the city’s non-elderly public housing.(5) She became CEO of Habitat in 2007, and serves on a variety of boards and committees: including, the University of Chicago Board of Trustees, the school’s Medical Center board, and the committee chairing Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics. She also was the chairwoman of the Chicago Stock Exchange and was on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and that of the Chicago Urban League.
One of the most connected people in Chicago, Jarrett has also long been an adviser to Michelle and Barack Obama. They stayed friends as each forged their professional paths, and Jarrett’s parents lived on the same street as the Obamas in Hyde Park. “She’s always one of the people that he and I talk to when we’re about to make a move,” Michelle Obama has said…
…She is one of the most connected people in Chicago, and now national, Democratic politics. She is still close to Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, whom she worked with for years, and she counts Chicago entrepreneur Penny Pritzker, Obama’s 2008 national finance chair, among her closest friends. She is closely tied into Obama’s Chicago network. Her father mentored Eric Whitaker and Anita Blanchard at the University of Chicago Medical Center. Both are good friends with the Obamas, and Blanchard is married to Martin Nesbitt, another close Obama friend, who served as the 2008 campaign treasurer. She served on the board of the University of Chicago Lab School with Michelle Obama, Martin Nesbitt and John W. Rogers, a friend and the former husband of Social Secretary Desiree Rogers…
Ms. Jarrett will accompany the President to Denmark this week to solicit the International Olympic Committee to hold the 2016 Summer games in Chicago. Her entire biography is here.
