Former President Barack Obama’s first chief of staff did not want the then-president-elect to hire his longtime friend Valerie Jarrett for a position in the White House, Jarrett writes in her new book.
In Finding My Voice: My Journey to the West Wing and the Path Forward, released Tuesday, Jarrett writes that after she accepted a position as senior adviser, “a bit of drama followed” with Rahm Emanuel.
“Rahm was very open with me about the difficulty of having Hillary Clinton so involved in her husband’s administration. That experience had left him wary of having anybody in the White House closer to the president than he,” she writes of Emanuel, who currently serves as Chicago mayor and was a senior adviser to former President Bill Clinton.
During a meeting Obama had with former Democratic presidential chiefs of staff after the 2008 convention, another person, who Jarrett does not name, also advised against bringing “any of your friends from Chicago” to the White House.
Amid the pushback from Emanuel, Jarrett said she told Obama she was having second thoughts about joining his administration. But Obama told her he would have her back.
“Two days later, on my fifty-second birthday, after a last-minute effort by Rahm to scuttle my appointment, President-elect Obama publicly announced that I would be joining his White House team. Not a bad birthday gift from a dear friend who was about to become the most important man in the world,” she said.
Emanuel is now the outgoing mayor of Chicago.
Jarrett had also been pitched on throwing her name in the ring to fill Obama’s Senate seat in Illinois. A few weeks before Election Day in 2008, she said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., asked her to consider it.
“I was ambivalent, but he went on to make a compelling case for why I should think about doing this,” she writes. “With Barack in the White House and the Democrats in control of the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid could use another person he could trust from the president’s home state.”
A few days after the election, Jarrett said she met with the head of one of Illinois’s local unions, who said he heard then-Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was interested in appointing her to the seat, but he wanted to be Obama’s secretary of the Health and Human Services Department.
“That’s ridiculous,” she said.
Blagojevich was removed from office in 2009 for soliciting bribes for political appointments, including Obama’s seat after he was elected president. He was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
