The Communist Family Tree of Valerie Jarrett

Front Page Mag – by John Perazzo

Barack Obama’s closest and most influential adviser, Valerie Jarrett, has never been an enigma. She was, after all, the person most responsible for bringing the revolutionary communist Van Jones into the Administration six years ago, so her bona fides as a radical extremist have long been obvious to anyone who wasn’t afraid to notice. But a newly released report from Judicial Watch, which examines key FBI documents related to Jarrett’s many family ties to hardcore Communists, brings bold color to what previously were gray areas. The effect is nothing short of breathtaking, when we consider that the twice-elected President of our nation chose this woman—and no one else—to serve, essentially, as his co-president.  

Valerie Jarrett’s late father—a physician named James Bowman—had a lengthy FBI file showing that he was a Communist who often collaborated with other Communists based principally in Chicago. In 1950, for instance, Bowman communicated with a paid Soviet agent named Alfred Stern, who later fled the U.S. to Prague when he was indicted on espionage charges that were ultimately confirmed beyond doubt—specifically, he had conspired to transmit military and political information to the Soviet Union. Bowman was also a member of the Association of Internes and Medical Students, a group that, according to his FBI file, engaged in un-American activities and “has long been a faithful follower of the Communist Party line.”

So much for dear-old-Dad.

Valerie Jarrett’s mother is the early-childhood-education author Barbara Taylor Bowman (born 1928), who in 1966 co-founded a Chicago-based graduate school in child development known as the Erikson Institute, named after the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. In 1950 Erikson became a hero to the Left by choosing to resign from his professorship at the University of California rather than sign an anti-Communist loyalty oath as the school required. The Erikson Institute’s radical orientation is reflected in the fact that its board of trustees has included such figures as Bernardine Dohrn, wife of the former Weather Underground terrorist and lifelong Marxist Bill Ayers, and Tom Ayers, father of the same lifelong Marxist.

Okay, so much for Mommy.

Jarrett’s maternal grandfather was a Chicagoan named Robert Taylor, the first African-American head of the Chicago Housing Authority. In the 1940s he was involved with such Communist fronts as the American Peace Mobilization and the Chicago Civil Liberties Committee. A fellow member of these groups was Frank Marshall Davis, the Communist journalist who in the 1970s would mentor a young Barack Obama. An FBI documentshows that Taylor, like Valerie Jarrett’s father, was believed to have been “in contact” with the aforementioned Soviet agent Alfred Stern “on a number of occasions.”

Oh dear. So much for Grandpa.

Well, how about Grandma? Remember going to your own grandmother’s house on Sunday afternoons, years ago, for fresh-baked pies, sweet jam, and lots of hugs? Valerie Jarrett’s maternal grandmother, Dorothy Taylor, was an activist with Planned Parenthood in its early years. Planned Parenthood was founded in 1942 byMargaret Sanger, a member of the New York Socialist Party and a eugenicist who favored the use of use birth control to limit the reproduction of society’s “least intelligent and fit” members. Toward that end, Sanger in 1939 created the so-called “Negro Project” specifically to prevent black people from breeding. Her Birth Control Reviewmagazine once published an article emphasizing the “urgent need” for “eugenic sterilization.” That piece was penned by none other than Ernst Rüdin, who, as Jonah Goldberg points out, was Adolf Hitler’s director of sterilization and a founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene.

Okay Grandma. Thanks for the pie and revolutionary politics. See ya next Sunday!

Eventually, the time came for Valerie to explore love and marriage. In 1983 she wed Dr. William Robert Jarrett, son of the Chicago Sun-Times reporter Vernon Jarrett. And Valerie got along just splendidly with her new father-in-law, who surely must’ve reminded her very much of Daddy and Gramps.

You see, in the 1940s Vernon Jarrett had been the first nationally syndicated black columnist for the Communist-influenced Chicago Defender, where he wrote pieces extolling the Communist poet Langston Hughes andlifelong Stalinists like W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson. Also in the ’40s, Vernon Jarrett was a leader of the Chicago chapter of American Youth for Democracy—the youth wing of the Communist Party USA. Moreover, he served on a publicity committee for the Packinghouse Workers Union, a Chicago-based entity dominated by the Communist Party. In each of these endeavors, Vernon Jarrett had close contact with the Communist Frank Marshall Davis—who, as noted above, later became Barack Obama’s mentor.

According to his FBI files, Vernon Jarrett was a leading Chicago-based Communist. “For a period of time,”reports Judicial Watch, his name “appeared on the FBI’s Security Index and [he] was considered a potential Communist saboteur who was to be arrested in the event of a conflict with the [USSR]. His FBI file reveals that he was assigned to write propaganda for a Communist Party front group in Chicago that would ‘disseminate the Communist Party line among … the middle class.’”

There were lots of tears when Vernon Jarrett died in 2004, but also many laudatory remembrances. Not the least of those was a glowing salute in the pages of People’s Weekly World, the house organ of the Communist Party.

These, then, are the people who raised and most heavily influenced a young Valerie Jarrett; the people who made her who she is today. Is it any wonder, then, that she gravitated so quickly and eagerly to Barack and Michelle Obama when she first met them in the late 1980s? Is it any wonder that when Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, he appointed Jarrett to a prominent position in the new Administration: Senior Advisor and Assistant to the President for Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs?

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank tells us that Valerie Jarrett’s connection to Obama is “deep and personal,” calling her “the real center of Obama’s inner circle.” Milbank describes Jarrett as someone in a “position of unparalleled influence over the president.” Obama himself has acknowledged that he solicits Jarrett’s input on every decision he makes.

Jarrett, for her part, puts it this way: “We have kind of a mind meld. And chances are, what he wants to do is what I’d want to do.” “I kind of know what makes them [the Obamas] who they are,” she adds.

Truer words have never been spoken.

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