And that is where the story gets interesting: Harvard plans to welcome the 26-year-old Texas native as a graduate student in business this fall, despite the fact that Gottesman left California’s Claremont McKenna College after his freshman year to join the Bush campaign.<\/p>\n
Of course, the leader of the free world — who snagged his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School in 1975 — helped out with a written endorsement. As an alum, the president also made a friendly call to Harvard on his aide’s behalf, as did former White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, Gottesman’s first boss in the [tag]White House[\/tag], who counts a number of Harvard officials among his home-state friends.<\/p>\n
Gottesman briefly dated Jenna Bush when he was a high school junior in Austin and she was a freshman, and her dad was governor. When Bush decided to run for president, Gottesman put college on pause. What he thought might be a brief interlude turned into a seven-year hitch. The president’s nicknames for his $95,000-a-year special assistant have evolved from “Mini-Me,” to “Soldier” and “Private” and “Peanut,” to the more recent “Johnny Harvard,” eventually simplified to “Harvard.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
First of all, the Harvard Business School application instructions state that an M.B.A. candidate must have completed a four-year undergraduate degree “or its equivalent in another country.” Bush’s letter for Gottesman must have been pretty good.<\/p>\n
And second, the real-life Charlie makes 95k?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you’ve ever seen NBC’s “The [tag]West Wing[\/tag],” you may be familiar with [tag]Charlie[\/tag], the character who served as the president’s personal aide for the first several seasons. [tag]Bush[\/tag] has a Charlie — his name is [tag]Blake Gottesman[\/tag]. National Journal’s Alexis Simendinger had an interesting report on Gottesman yesterday, explaining that, in White House lingo, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7531\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}