60 Minutes - 5/22/2016: All in the Family, Inside Edge, Valerie Jarrett

Episode Date: May 23, 2016

Morley Safer visits the more than the five thousand acres of vineyards farmed by the Antinori family in Italy. Bill Whitaker takes listeners into the secretive, illegal, and lucrative world of insider trading. And Norah O'Donnell sits down with Valerie Jarrett, senior advisor to President Obama. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Our guide is a former stock market analyst named Rumi Khan. She made a fortune in illegal profits before she was caught and became a government informant in one of the biggest insider trading busts in American history. Two people knocked on my door and they flashed their badge. And my heart sank because I just was like, oh, my God. You are a senior advisor to the president, but you are also his best friend. I can't think of another example in a White House where there's been that kind of relationship since Bobby Kennedy and President Kennedy. It's a very unusual role. It is.

Valerie Jarrett is the only White House advisor who, at the end of the day, regularly joins the president in the private residence. She says she keeps the personal and political separate, but she earned the unflattering nickname Night Stalker because some at the White House felt she could influence his thinking. It's harvest time in the great vineyards of Italy, none greater than the 5,000 acres farmed by the Antinori family. They've been in the same line of work for six centuries now.

The Antinoris make wine, and the family's story reads like something a wine critic might write about their product. Complex, stylish, sophisticated, with a bouquet both elegant and earthy. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Nora O'Donnell.

I'm Steve Croft. Those stories, including one of Morley Safer's favorites, as we remember our friend on this edition of 60 Minutes. The new BMO VI Porter MasterCard is your ticket to more. More perks. More points. More flights. More of all the things you want in a travel rewards card. And then some. Get your ticket to more with the new BMO VI Porter MasterCard. And get up to $2,400 in value in your first 13 months.

Terms and conditions apply. Visit bmo.com slash viporter to learn more. We lost Morley Safer early Thursday morning. He slipped away barely a week after he announced his retirement from 60 Minutes. All of us here are saddened by the loss of a friend, colleague, and mentor. But we are grateful that Morley was able to watch last Sunday's tribute with his family and to be reminded of how much we admired and loved him. We'll rebroadcast that hour-long look at Morley's life and career on a future Sunday.

Tonight, we'll salute Morley with a toast, one of his favorite pieces shot in his favorite country about one of his favorite things. This is how Morley told the story back in 2008. As anyone who's sat through a Thanksgiving dinner can tell you, families can drive you nuts. And if you're bold or crazy enough to go into business together, beware. A recent study found only 15% of family businesses survive past the second generation, meaning if the whims of the marketplace don't catch you, familial rivalry or plain old-fashioned greed will,

which makes the Antinori family of Italy all the more remarkable. They've been in the same line of work for six centuries now. The Antinoris make wine, and the family's story reads like something a wine critic might write about their product, complex, stylish, sophisticated, with a bouquet both elegant and earthy. It's harvest time in the great vineyards of Italy, none greater than the 5,000 acres farmed by the Antinori family. Until recently, Italian business, especially the wine business,

was pretty much for men only. Girls normally in families like ours ended up to be married, possibly happily, and that's it, no need to work. But Albiera Antinori and her two sisters are the first women in 26 generations to play a major role in the family enterprise. Allegra Antinori.

I feel part of the land, you know. I think I'm owned by that land. It's something very, very strong. From the fields to the cellars, you'll find the Antinori women at work, hoping, as vintners have for centuries, that this year the balance of sun, soil and rain will produce a vintage for the ages.

Alessia Antinori. People use these wonderful words to describe taste. There's personality. What else? The elegance. The wine has to be elegant. And so you say, how do you describe elegance? You can't. It's like an elegant woman. How do you describe her? It's personal. You know it when you see it.

Exactly, exactly. Their domain stretches from the legendary vineyards of Tuscany and Umbria to their property in California's Napa Valley. Antinori is perhaps the oldest family business on earth. The first document which we have, which proves that an ancestor of mine was involved in the wine production, dates back to 1385. The patriarch and still the godfather is Piero Antinori. He's 70 and bears the noble title of Marchesa. He works behind an antique desk that dates to the Renaissance. When we have to take some decision regarding the family, we have them here. And my father used to do the same thing. And in his birthplace, Florence, the city that gave birth

to the Renaissance, that flowering of art, science, and the good life, he leads a visitor to a small window to the past. It looks like a confessional. Hundreds of years ago, an Antinori cellar master sat waiting for customers to knock. The cellar master would pass a bottle of Chianti wine and he would receive

the money back. This has been in operation until a couple of centuries ago. Recent history by your standard. For 623 years, various Antinori have kept the business going despite war, plague, political intrigue, and the shifting tastes of consumers. The family tree shows a bumper crop of Antinori who made their mark, not just in wine, but in every aspect of Italian life. In business, in politics, in church. So the family always made sure back then that all bets were covered, correct?

I think it was a bit the concept, yes. There were poets and priests, rogues and rascals. In 1576, Francesco de' Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, had one Antinori strangled for his undue attentions to Bianca, the Duke's wife. In the 1700s, another Antinori cultivated Pope Clement XII as an important customer. The pontiff, who commissioned the building of Rome's Trevi Fountain, decided to throw a few coins the Antinori's way. We have some correspondence saying that the Pope used to like very much the wines of our family and he wanted to order more. A pretty good recommendation, correct? Especially

in the 18th century. Yes, no doubt. But the family history lining the shelves of the Marquesa's office says precious little about the wives and daughters in the Antinori family tree, a fact not lost on Albiera, Allegra, and Alessia. Are there any interesting women in those 26 generations? I'm sure there are some women, but women in history in the past time, even if unless they were special, they were not considered to be mentioned. It's true because when I went to agricultural university

in Northern Italy, Milan, we were two women. The rest were all men, very lucky. For six centuries, command of the Antinori Empire was passed from father to son. But with no male heir, the Marchesa, some years ago, sold a major stake in the business to Whitbread, a British company whose fortune was based on beer making. It was the period when I didn't know exactly if my daughters would be interested or not to be involved in the business. And so for me, that was a way to guarantee a continuity also

to the company. But the partnership produced mainly grapes of wrath. It was a vintage clash between the foaming suds of quick profits and Piero insisting he'd sell no wine before it's time. This marriage of inconvenience ended when Piero bought back the shares, keeping Antinori all in the family. I think he saw us interested and said, why not? What's wrong with guns? And so he took his chance, expecting his daughters to fall in love with the business.

And that they did. Now all three travel the countryside and the world helping to grow, promote, and market Antinori wines. They sold 17 million bottles last year, $200 million worth, making a healthy profit. And though the business now involves spreadsheets and science, the basics still come, as they have for centuries, from down on the farm. Even with all this tradition and history and everything else, the family still regards itself as farmers, yes?

Yes, absolutely. This is our origin still now. In modern times, we are basically farmers. We appreciate the nature and the countryside more than the glamorous city life. You're three country bumpkins. Yes, exactly. Well, hardly.

Elegance is the rule at Palazzo Antinori, the family home in Florence. Since the family's wives must be sampled often to ensure quality control, every lunch at the Palazzo is a kind of business lunch. The Marchesa, his wife Francesca, their daughters and sons-in-law, and the grandchildren all may have a say. Any family arguments at this table? Come on, secrets. I want secrets revealed here. Yes, sometimes we start with an argument, but after three or four glasses of wine... Everything disappears.

This palazzo has been in the family since 1506, both the headquarter of the business and also the residence of the family. When an Antinori wishes to seek solace or a place for quiet contemplation or even a place to confess his earthly sins, it's hardly difficult to sleep at Palazzo Antinori, and traffic notwithstanding, cross the Piazza Antinori, and within minutes arrive at the Capella Antinori, the Antinori family chapel, where they might visit the tomb of Alessandro Antinori, one of the founders of the dynasty, and perhaps a nod to any number of Antinoris

buried beneath the chapel floor. If wealth and history can buy you one lasting pleasure, it is convenience. Marchese Antinori, for instance, commutes by air to his most famous vineyard, Tignanello, in the Tuscan countryside south of Florence. Here, the family develop the red wines for which they're famous. At his villa here, this is the view the Marchese wakes up to every morning. We have the vineyards, the landscape.

But as the experience with the British partners showed, it's no business for the impatient or for those who have a taste for the quick buck. Ten years can pass from the time a new vine is planted until its wine comes to market. You have to be patient and to wait until the wine is good enough, the vines are old enough to produce a good wine.

Tignanello is but one of the Antinori postcard-perfect estates. Castella della Sala is another, halfway between Rome and Florence. Here, Albiera went to work after high school, living at the family's grand 14th century castle, but learning the wine trade from the bottom up as a field hand in the vineyards. You got your hands dirty. Yes, I got my hands dirty.

It was the first place where I really started to understand what was going on in the whole process. But it's not all dirt and business. There's that other estate, Guadalatazo, on the Tuscan coast. I did my own stable, my own training track in the middle of the vineyards. I go riding there every morning. It's beautiful, I love it. It's a very good life you've described.

Are you spoiled? Yes, I am very spoiled. But I think we appreciate what we have. And they are constantly reminded that in this line of work, nature always has the last word. The Antinori found the 2002 crop wasn't up to par and didn't bother bottling most of it. You cannot force things, you cannot force nature. If you have a bad vintage, tough luck. We can wake it up for a second

before we put it back to sleep. Every few months, they check on the progress of their wine, fast asleep in the cellars. The verdict? Let it sleep a while longer. You see it's still very young, very rough, has to stay in there for a little while. Another family meal, another bottle of wine or two. Every once in a while, someone offers to buy them out, but this farmer and his daughters politely decline on the theory that if family ownership was good enough in 1385, it's good enough today. It is really our intention to remain a family business

because we think that this is the best solution for us. For at least another 500 years. At least. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s,

including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Insider trading is one of the hardest crimes to detect. It happens in whispers and phone calls behind closed doors. But we have been given a rare look at how it actually works through the experiences of one woman, a former stock analyst named Rumi Khan. She made a fortune in illegal profits with inside information that she and her colleagues called the edge, the inside edge, using company secrets to make winning investments in the market.

But she got caught and became a government informant in one of the biggest insider trading busts in American history. Rumi Khan helped the government bring down one of the world's largest hedge funds, the Galleon Group, and send its billionaire co-founder Raj Raj Ratnam to prison. Rumi Khan's story reveals how she got involved in insider trading and how easy it was to do. You are pushed and pushed to get this information. You know, you get the high fives after the trade. I was sent flowers after one of the trades.

Big thank you, a huge bouquet. Thank you. It sounds like you guys are in a bubble trading all this information while we sit and look at it and say, well, that's breaking the law. Absolutely, that we were breaking the law. Breaking the law by obtaining confidential information from friends in Silicon Valley connected to Google and Polycom and other tech companies. In two years, Rumi Khan made one and a half million dollars from illegal trades alone. Her friends and associates made an additional $25 million

off her tips, investigators found. It was easy money. It is like if you are taking an exam tomorrow and somebody hands you what's going to be on the test, it's easy to get an A+. Rumi Khan shared her tips with self-made billionaire Raj Raj Ratnam, who built one of the biggest hedge funds in the world, the $7 billion Galleon Group. Federal authorities said Rajaratnam made more than $72 million from

illegal tips from Rumi Khan and other sources. The two met back in the 1990s when she was working at Intel as a product marketer and had access to proprietary company information. Raj Ratnam tapped her for the inside information so he could trade on it. And he started asking me about how's business. And I used to have access to Intel's top customer, microprocessor bookings. I started giving him this information. So you started feeding him inside information from Intel. Absolutely. Rumi Khan was so brazen, she used Intel's fax machine to send him confidential

data about product demand. She says Rajaratnam referred to inside information as the edge. She was such a good inside source, she said he offered her money to stay at Intel. He said, listen, I'll give you 100K just to stay there. I don't remember the number he offered me, but he did offer me money to just stay there and keep giving me information. And keep feeding him this inside information.

Rumi Khan came to the United States from Delhi, India on a scholarship at age 23. She earned three graduate degrees before joining Intel. But she longed for the action of Wall Street and set out to build her own fortune. At the height of her success, she says she was worth $50 million.ahn moved into this $10 million gated estate in the heart of Silicon Valley. She was living the life she wanted, where money was no object. Jewelry, painting, anything that you can think of.

You had it all. We had it all, yes. The high life. Absolutely. Sort of life we see in the movies with the hedge fund investors. Probably. Probably. One purchase from that time The sort of life we see in the movies with the hedge fund investors. Probably. Probably.

One purchase from that time still makes her light up. The 17-carat famous diamond ring. The famous diamond ring. Yeah. Cost how much? I think it was $1.7 million. She explained to us just how the biggest money could be made when the predictions of Wall Street were at odds with the inside information. So most money you make is when your analysis is totally opposite to what your edge is telling you.

The inside information. If you have a really great source. Rumi Khan had a really good source who knew what was going on inside Google, a friend who worked for a firm that prepared Google's press releases and who told her the company's quarterly income would be lower than expected. And she told me they were going to miss the quarter. And you made money off of it. I did. I made half a million dollars. She shared the information with Galleon chief Raj Raj Ratnam, who made $8 million betting against Google just before the price dropped. And you're making

good money, but he's making far more. What's your motivation? Well, I had access to Raj. So I had that access to the billionaire biggest hedge fund on Wall Street. And that was worth a lot to me. Her relationship with the hedge fund titan would be worth a lot to the government, too. Rumi Khan didn't know the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC, had launched an investigation into Rajaratnam. Former SEC attorney Andrew Michelson was tracking his texts and trades. We did see in Mr. Rajaratnam's instant messages communications where he would say AMD's revenues are going to be X before AMD itself announced them.

And they were accurate. Mr. Rajaratnam's predictions were accurate. Michelson joined the SEC in 2006, and this was one of his first cases. He remembers combing through stacks and stacks of Galleon's trading and phone records, instant messages, and e-mails. How many documents are we talking about? Hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Sometimes you'd have to sit there with a ruler

to make sure you're getting exactly who is talking, what phone number is calling which phone number at what time. So you're connecting the dots. We're connecting the dots. And then the next dot to connect is, well, where's Raj Raj Ratnam getting this information? Finally, after six months of searching, they found the needle in the haystack in a single, careless, instant message from Rumi Khan. I texted him, and I said, don't buy Polycom. In writing?

It was a text message. In electronic writing? Yes. And it said, till I check the guidance. You're saying, don't do anything until I call my inside guy and get this inside information. Right. It was the piece of evidence FBI Special Agent B.J. Kang thought he could use to turn Rumi Khan into an informant against Rajaratnam. She was an insider. She knew all the players. She worked for Galleon. She knew Raj.

He paid her a visit in November 2007. Two people knocked on my door, and they flashed their badge. And my heart sank, because I just was like, oh my God. She knew we were dead serious. She knew why we were there. She knew this wasn't going to go away. Kang showed her the Polycom message she had sent to Rajaratnam. And when they showed me this text message, I knew this was over

because it was very easy for them to connect me to the executive at Polycom. She knew she had to cooperate. Starting in late 2007, she began to educate the feds on the hidden world of some of Wall Street's biggest players. We didn't have a very good understanding of what the hedge funds were doing, right? So you didn't understand completely what you had? Absolutely not. She kind of drew out the roadmap for us to say,

this is what they're doing. This is how they're doing it. This is the language that they use. And here you go. As part of her cooperation, she also reluctantly agreed to secretly record her phone conversations with her colleagues. And turned out to be a good liar.

And turned out to be a good liar. And turned out to be a good liar. There are some people who can't do that very well, who can't get on the phone and lie to their former colleague on the phone. And, you know, that's, she was good at that. But Jonathan Streeter, a former assistant U.S. attorney who was the trial counsel on the case, said Rumi Khan also lied to federal investigators. Rumi had multiple instances, one after another, where she had withheld information while she was cooperating or she had had her gardener get a cell phone so that she could have secret phone calls with people. Why would you do this? I don't know. I was just so, I just couldn't, I just couldn't tell on all these people. I told her that if she didn't tell us the truth about this,

I was going to make it my mission in life that she would spend a long time in jail. Ultimately, Rumi Khan gave prosecutors what they wanted, enough evidence of insider trading that a judge allowed the government to tap Rajaratnam's cell phone. The investigation was the first time wiretaps were used in a significant way in an insider trading case. Without Rumi, you don't have a wiretap. And without a wiretap, you don't have a whole lot of other evidence. What you have is some circumstantial evidence that Rajaratnam made some well-timed trades and that he spoke to some people before he made those trades. But you don't have him on the phone talking about inside information. In one wiretap, Raj Ratnam bragged to a colleague

about getting valuable inside information from a Goldman Sachs board member just two minutes before the market closed. I got a call at 358, right? Yeah. Saying something good might happen to Goldman. That something good was a $5 billion investment in Goldman by Warren Buffett that hadn't yet been announced to the public. Rajaratnam's hedge fund purchased more than 200,000 shares in those last minutes and made $840,000. In another wiretap, he told a different colleague that he'd gotten inside information Goldman's earnings would be below market expectations.

I heard yesterday from somebody who was on the board of Goldman Sachs that they are going to lose $2 per share. The street has been making $2.50. That was quite possibly my favorite of the wiretap calls. So he's admitting he has a piece of inside information from a board member that's clearly different from what the rest of the world thinks. Right there, ticking off the elements of insider trading, he's given us a bunch of them. And in October 2009, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara announced the arrests of Raj Rajaratnam and his colleagues.

They may have been privy to a lot of confidential information, but there was one secret they did not know, and that is that we were listening. Thirty-two people were charged criminally or civilly in the case, including members of Raj's inner circle. Many were members of the business elite of South Asian descent, including Anil Kumar and Rajat Gupta, the former head of the McKinsey Consulting Group. The courts imposed more than $250 million in fines and penalties. In 2011, Rajaratnam was convicted of insider trading crimes and sentenced to 11 years in prison. One of the astonishing things is that

Raj was not caught earlier. He would boast about how he got inside information from corporate sources. Anita Raghavan is a journalist who introduced us to Rumi Khan. She wrote a book about the Galleon hedge fund, The Billionaire's Apprent's apprentice that tracked the downfall of Rumi Khan and her colleagues. What did the fall do to Rumi? Everyone in the trading community distanced themselves from Rumi. They didn't want to have anything to do with her. She was the rat. She was the cooperator. She was a pariah.

She was a pariah. Though she cooperated, Rumi Khan was sentenced to a year in prison for insider trading and for obstruction of justice because of her lies. Released in 2014, she now lives in Florida, where she's struggling to rebuild her life. She's been unable to find a job. For all her early success, her advanced degrees, her multi-million dollar fortune, Rumi Khan says she allowed her ambition to get the better of her. As I look back, you know, I'm aghast at the choices I made. I had all the right breaks. I was so fortunate I landed in the United States.

I was very fortunate. And then I threw it all away. There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile, different is calling. Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $4.

New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. Rarely does one person in the White House have the influence that Valerie Jarrett has had. She holds the job title of senior advisor, but she's more than that. The president has said she's his best friend. She told us she's involved in nearly every decision that's made, including the choice of his chief of staff or who should sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. And that has sometimes caused friction in a White House that prides itself as being no drama.

As the president enters his final months in office, we talked with Valerie Jarrett about her role, the president's legacy, and one of the biggest pieces of unfinished business on their agenda, the future of the U.S. Supreme Court. Today, I am nominating Chief Judge Merrick Brian Garland to join the Supreme Court.

Valerie, this is probably one of the last big fights of the president's term in office. And he can't even get Senate Republicans to give him a hearing. Most Republicans won't even meet with Judge Garland. Does that say something about President Obama's inability to reach across the aisle, to have friends on the other side? Absolutely not. I don't think this is about friendship. This is about politics. I think the Republicans have made the political determination that in this election year, in this very toxic election year, I would add, that it's in their political advantage not to do so. But in two terms, seven years, why hasn't the president been able to find a Republican that he can call up and say, help me out on this? Does he have

any Republican friends? Oh, absolutely. He can call them and they want to help him out. But the fact of the matter is their leader won't let them. Their leader in the Senate, Republican Mitch McConnell, has told President Obama there will be no hearing on his Supreme Court choice. Despite the fact that Garland was confirmed to the D.C. Circuit, considered the second highest court in the land, back in 1997, with the majority of Senate Republicans voting for him. Isn't that part of the president's job, is to convince people on the opposite side to do something like this, to get a judge up on the Supreme Court?

Well, the way you convince them is to try to put enough political pressure on them so they'll do the right thing. And I think that that momentum is building from the American people, and that's where the pressure will come. So that's the strategy. That is the strategy. So since the president doesn't have a personal relationship with Republicans, instead you're going to go to the American people and put political pressure on them. It's a campaign. It's a political campaign.

I have to interrupt you to say this is not about personal relationships. It has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not they're chummy. This has to do with whether or not they've made the political calculus, the raw political calculus, that it is in their self-interest not to give a hearing to Judge Garland. When they decide it is in their self-interest, they'll do it. And it is our job, yes, to launch a campaign to encourage them to do their jobs, just as the president did his. Nothing to do with personality, nothing to do with schmoozing, nothing to do with whether or not they're buddies. This is raw politics from their perspective and has nothing to do with what's in the best interest of the American people. Isn't politics about schmoozing, though? And isn't politics about friendship?

No, politics is about figuring out what you think. This kind of politics is about trying to figure out what you think you have to do to get reelected. And what we've seen, Nora, time and time again is the Republicans decide they can't even come to the White House and go through a receiving line. They can't even show up the White House and go through a receiving line. They can't even show up at a state dinner because they're afraid of what the consequences will be if they do. Maybe they don't feel welcome here. Oh, that's not true. And I think if you ask them, they would say, absolutely. They're more than welcome. They're more than invited. This has absolutely nothing, nothing to do with the president's willingness to reach out to them. He has time and time again, and he has on the Supreme Court.

Valerie, it's front-page news when the Republicans come here to the White House. That shouldn't be front-page news. No, they should be here all the time. And if they would accept the invitations, they would be here all the time. This has nothing to do with the president's style of leadership or his ability to reach across the aisle. I want to completely debunk this It's all the Republicans' fault. I want to completely debunk this notion that if the president were just simply more friendly and more outgoing and schmooze that this would change.

This is simply about the Republican making the political calculus that to be friendly to the White House is not in their interest. That's the decision that they made when he was first elected, and they've stayed steadfastly true to that for the last seven years, to the detriment of the American people. There's no stronger defender of the president than Valerie Jarrett. And in a town where power and influence are measured by proximity, few are closer to the president.

You can measure her importance by her address in the White House West Wing. Who else has had this office? The two that I am aware of are Hillary Clinton and Karl Rove. There's a lot of history then in this office. There is a lot of history, and I've tried to make a little bit of my own. Part of that history comes from Valerie Jarrett's unique position in the White House. It's different from Karl Rove's. He was known as President Bush's brain and served as his political advisor. She's got at least three formal job titles,

including senior advisor. But perhaps the most important part of her job description is the role that doesn't get listed, being first friend. You are a senior advisor to the president, but you are also his best friend. I can't think of another example in a White House where there's been that kind of relationship since Bobby Kennedy and President Kennedy. It's a very unusual role. It is. And doesn't that create a conflict? No, not at all. Not at all. I think it enables me to do my job really well. And everybody comes to the table with different strengths and different perspectives.

And so the fact that I've known the president, the first lady, for 25 years gives me a perspective that maybe others don't have. And a relationship that none of his other advisors has either. She's probably the only White House aide who calls the President Barack when they're off the clock. She also told us she considers the President and First Lady the siblings she never had. Valerie Jarrett grew up an only child in an extraordinary family, one of the most prominent African-American families in Chicago. Her grandfather, Robert Taylor, built much of Chicago's public housing. Her father, a doctor, helped integrate St. Luke's Hospital.

And her mother has a Chicago street named after her for her work in early childhood education. Jared, a lawyer, made a name for herself in Chicago politics, working for Mayor Richard M. Daley. And that's where she met Michelle Obama, who had recently graduated from Harvard Law and was looking for a job. I invited her in for an interview. It was supposed to be 20 minutes. It lasted about an hour and a half.

About halfway through, I realized I was no longer interviewing her, and she was now interviewing me. So a few days later, I called her up and I said, well, what do you think? We'd love to have you. And she said, well, my fiance doesn't actually think it's such a great idea. And I said, what? And so she said, yeah, that's right. So she said, but I really am interested. So would you be willing to have dinner with us? At that dinner, she met Barack Obama for the very first time. They shared an instant connection, in part shaped by a worldview by childhoods spent abroad. President Obama was born in Hawaii and lived for four years in Indonesia.

Valerie Jarrett was born in Iran and spent the first five years of her life there, where her physician father went to help start a new hospital. That bond that we had from having lived in cultures very different than our own and how that shaped our view of the world was a bond that we had that day. And I remember being struck by how talented the two of them were. Who impressed you more? They both impressed me. They impressed me individually and they impressed me as a couple. Michelle Obama took the job with the city and that began a quarter century long friendship. When did they buy this house? The Obamas bought a home on the same street as Jarrett's family.

So your house is like a block away from the president's house? A block away, yes. She's the only White House advisor who, at the end of the day, regularly joins the president in the private residence. She says she keeps the personal and political separate, but she earned the unflattering nickname Night Stalker because some at the White House felt she could influence his thinking. You've clashed with Robert Gibbs about the first lady. He's gone. Oh my gosh,

that's nearly seven years ago, Nora. You're going back to ancient history. Well, that's the point. Rahm Emanuel, the first chief of staff, you clashed with him. He's gone. Another White House chief of staff, Bill Daley, he lasted just about a year. You're one of the few advisors that's still here. Yeah, yeah. Is your relationship with the president more important than any other advisor? No, no. And as I have said to you many times. Oh, come on. No, I don't think it is.

And I think, look, there are many people with whom I have had great relationships who've left, much to my regret. Sorry to see many of them go. I think this is a real tough environment. Yeah, no, really. The word is that you were in part responsible for their leaving. Well, I think that the only, many of the people left on their own because of their own decisions. I'm single. My daughter's grown.

I live a mile away. I'm able to give this job my 24-7 in a way that many people aren't. And it's reasonable to say that people would burn out. But the president's had five chiefs of staff. He's had one. It's a tough staff. He's had a tough job. He's had one Valerie Jarrett. Yeah, yeah. My tenure is unprecedentedly long.

That's true as a senior advisor. But I came in knowing I was going to stay until the end if the president would have me. That's the commitment that I made to him. She's also made a commitment to push the issues she cares about. Every single day, families around our country share the bond of devastating grief caused by losing their loved ones to gun violence. In the president's second term, she helped write executive actions on gun control and immigration that went around Congress after the president failed to find common

ground. She's at the center of the administration's efforts to raise the minimum wage across the country and to expand paid parental leave. She's also pushed criminal justice reform, one of the few areas where the president has found bipartisan support. It's one of the few regrets of my presidency that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better. Does the president think he's contributed at all to that rancor? Not to the rancor, no. I think his tone and his approach has always been one of bringing people together. He's been the

unifier. He's one that focuses on what we have in common, not what our differences are. But he said it's one of his regrets. Well, it's his regrets that he wasn't able to break this terrible fever in our country among the Republican Party. So sure, he says to himself, you know, he came to Washington elected with this enormous optimism, which he still has about our country, but he's deeply frustrated and disappointed that he hasn't been able to get the Republicans to work with him on issues which were traditionally bipartisan. I keep thinking of the president's elections and those posters that said, hope, change. And in his final year in office, where's the hope and the change?

You can't even get a Supreme Court nominee a hearing. Well, the hope and change, Nora, doesn't come from Washington. The hope and change comes from the American people. And the president's still extraordinarily optimistic about the future of our country. I mean, just look at what's happened in the last seven years, our unemployment rate going from 10 percent down to five, our automobile industry back, ending two wars, 20 million people with health care, many for the first time. We have a great deal to be proud of in terms of our accomplishments. Valerie Jarrett is now helping to shape President Obama's legacy after being by his side for the last seven years.

She says if there's one thing she's learned, it's that the president needs a friend in the West Wing. What's the lesson, then, of your relationship with the president and the first lady? Well, I think my advice to the next president would be to make sure that in your circle of advisors, you have somebody you've known for a long time. People who can set the tone of being comfortable, pushing back, telling you when they don't think that you're right. The next president needs another Valerie Jarrett. I didn't say that. I said the next one good thing is the next president

gets to start all over again. In the mail this week, viewers wrote in appreciation of Morley Safer and our special hour marking Morley's retirement after 46 years with 60 Minutes. The broadcast came just days before Morley died. In a world where youth is revered, I love that a career as long as Mr. Safer's is given the tribute and respect it deserves. It makes me happy to see an informative and touching tribute to a great person while he and his family can enjoy it together. We're glad to report they did enjoy it together. Morley was 84. I'm Steve Croft.

We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.