Who is Valerie Jarrett?

Barack and Michelle Obama horse around in front of Valerie Jarrett. Photo by Pete Souza

VALERIE JARRETT was never one for timid choices. “Put yourself in the path of lightning,” her mother used to tell her. So when historian John Hope Franklin visited her junior high school in the late 1960s and glowingly described a university surrounded by verdant hills and dotted with palm trees, Jarrett decided then and there that she would attend Stanford. In the fall of 1974, having never seen the place, she arrived on the Farm and began what she calls “the best four years of my life.” More

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