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Louis Caldera ’87 to lead White House Military Office: Caldera, who served as the 17th Secretary of the Army during the Clinton administration, will again play a leading role in Washington as Director of the White House Military Office, which is responsible for all military support for White House orders. Caldera, who was born to Mexican immigrants in Texas and raised in California, earned his bachelors at West Point and served at Fort Dix in New Jersey before earning a JD/MBA from Harvard, where he met his wife, Eva Orlebeke Caldera ’89. He later worked for O’Melveny & Myers, was Deputy Counsel for Los Angeles County, and served as a California State Assemblyman. After his stint as Army Secretary, Caldera worked in the California public university system before becoming president of the University of New Mexico. He currently teaches at the university’s law school.
Robert Malley ’91 back as Middle East advisor: A controversial former advisor to Barack Obama ’91 during the Democratic primary, Malley has been invited back into the fold of Obama’s transition team, dispatched shortly after the election as an envoy to Egypt and Syria. The campaign severed formal ties with Malley in May, when, as part of his role as Middle East and North Africa Program Director for the International Crisis Group, he met with Hamas. The meeting brought down a firestorm of speculation about Obama’s purported views on Palestine.
Malley was the second leftist foreign policy advisor to be thrown under the bus by the campaign; Samantha Power ’99 had been forced to quit two months earlier, after calling Hillary Clinton a “monster”. The campaign – and, later, the transition – appeared to have taken a more hawkish turn since, but the return of both Malley and Power (see article above) raises questions about that designation. Malley, who, in addition to his HLS education, earned a PhD in political philosophy as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, clerked for Justice White and later served in the Clinton administration on the National Security Council and as Special Assistant for Arab-Israel Affairs.