A Team of Expatriates

II. The fact that Valerie Jarrett spent her early childhood in Iran made it easier to bond with Barack Obama. The subject came up the first time the two met, at a restaurant in the Loop area of downtown Chicago in 1991. Obama had grown up overseas—spending four years in Indonesia as a boy—and Jarrett was born in the ancient city of Shiraz, where her American father, a medical doctor, helped found the city's first modern hospital. Valerie's early languages were Farsi, French and "a little bit of English." To this day, her favorite foods include lamb and rice with Persian spices. "If I walk into a house and I smell saffron, I'm happy," she says.

In that first encounter, Jarrett recalls discussing with Obama how their years overseas helped shape their world views. "I guess the most basic way is by being around people who have such a broad diversity of backgrounds," she says.

For Jarrett's family, who traveled extensively even after they returned to the United States when Valerie was six, that meant socializing with people from Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. "You appreciate and are maybe more open to different perspectives," she says.

It's a common point among Obama's top aides, a surprising number of whom grew up in other countries—the insight they developed by seeing America from the outside in. The former expats include retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones, the incoming national-security adviser, who lived in France for most of his childhood; Timothy Geithner, the nominee for Treasury secretary, who grew up in Zimbabwe, India and Thailand; retired Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration, a child of missionaries in Africa who is a leading contender to become the new NASA administrator; and Jarrett, a close personal friend of the Obamas' who will serve as a top domestic-policy adviser.

Obama has identified his years in Indonesia, and later travels in Pakistan, as critical to shaping his views on America's role in the world. "If you don't understand these cultures, then it's very hard for you to make good foreign-policy decisions," he told an Iowa campaign crowd in 2007. "The benefit of my life of having both lived overseas and traveled overseas … is I have a better sense of how they're thinking and what their society is really like."

Most of the world doesn't associate that kind of understanding with Americans, and with some reason. Even now, only about 22 percent of Americans have passports, while in many Western European countries the number is much higher—reaching 71 percent in the United Kingdom. But as the world shrinks, the numbers of Americans working and studying outside of the country is rising. In 2006–07, more than 241,000 Americans studied abroad, up from less than 100,000 who did so a decade earlier. The State Department estimates that more than 5 million Americans live overseas. For the generation of Americans coming of age now, some of the most significant opportunities—for work, investment, recreation and learning—will be global.

Gration left America in 1952, when he boarded a ship called the African Lightning and steamed out of New York harbor at the age of about 18 months. His parents were missionaries with the Africa Inland Mission. They were heading to the Kenyan port of Mombasa, and then inland by car to the Congo. Three times the family had to flee the Congo—after independence and a military coup in 1960, after the execution of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961 and lastly during civil war in 1964. The family lost everything then, and settled in Kenya before returning to the United States in 1967. "You spend some time [in a country] and all of a sudden you can't stay in your house because the rebels are coming," says Gration. "Life itself is a gift and now you realize that freedom and life, those things we [Americans] take for granted, those values you can't put your arms around, are so precious and worth dying for."