Vernon Jordan’s Tell-All Will End Where Years With Clinton Began

The memoir the New York publishing world wanted Vernon Jordan to write certainly would have been titillating.

Publishers were eager for the handsome Washington power broker to peddle gossip about his friend Bill Clinton or about back-room deal-making in the nation’s capital. If he could dish, he could publish, Jordan was told.

But Jordan was not about to have his legacy further eclipsed. There would be no tabloid headlines: “Presidential Pal Tells All.” The essence of Vernon E. Jordan Jr., he says, is to “never apologize, never explain” and, above all things, never betray a friend.

And so he found a serious black female lawyer to be his coauthor and an independent white publisher of quality nonfiction willing to let Jordan write his version of his life in a memoir that ends the day President Clinton is inaugurated.

“People look at me and believe that I was born Jan. 20, 1993,” the day Clinton took office, Jordan said during a recent interview. “That is not true. My life was defined long before that. I had done many very interesting and exciting things.”

“Vernon Can Read! A Memoir” still is a work in progress but is expected to be published by Public Affairs in October. It is not likely to sate the gossips or dissuade his critics, who see Jordan as a black man who lost his soul on the way to stratospheric success.

“I’m not looking for consensus for what I did,” he says. “But I would like for someone to be encouraged, inspired, instructed to do as well.”

What Jordan would like to offer up is an inspirational story of an African American man rising to power and influence far beyond the politics of the black community. He also seems eager to reclaim the heroic parts of his life that might have been overshadowed by five appearances before a grand jury after he was accused of aiding in the cover-up of Clinton’s affair with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky. In the public’s mind, Jordan became the guy next to Clinton in a golf cart; surely his 65 years add up to more than that.

Much of the memoir is devoted to Jordan’s early life and career--his growing up in segregated Atlanta and his parents’ influence, particularly his entrepreneurial mother, who saw great things for her son. The title came from an episode in his youth when a white employer was astounded that he could read. In the book, he apparently will detail the first 20 years of his career championing blacks as a civil rights lawyer in Georgia and later as president of the pro-business National Urban League.

But still unclear--even in Jordan’s mind--is whether the memoir will offer much insight into the second 20 years of his career.

Cheating Death, Then a Death in the Family

In 1981, a year after a gunman nearly took his life, Jordan moved to Washington to join Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, one of those omnivorous law/lobbying firms. In the next few years he became a director of a dozen blue-chip corporate boards and foundations, lost his first wife, Shirley, to multiple sclerosis and married Anne Dibble.

Jordan’s transition from advocating in public to brokering in private was more logical than those who accuse him of selling out suggest.

His job at the Urban League involved a lot of hobnobbing--playing golf, schmoozing, attending football games--with white executives at the same time that he was reminding them to help black job-seekers and to not forget the underclass.

Just as activists threatening boycotts could not be the only influence on the white establishment, Jordan sought to prove that civil rights leaders kneeling in Selma, Ala., did not have to be the only models for black success.

“I wanted to parlay my experiences--in the Urban League, in corporate America, in philanthropy, in government grants--into something else,” he says. “I wanted to be able to do that in the same way that white people had, and I wanted to prove that it could be done.”

He more than proved it. With his people skills and imposing presence, Jordan forged relationships with everyone who is anyone in elite government and business circles. If he chose to, he could name-drop like few others.

While the Clinton era might have tainted his public image, it did not ruin him professionally. To the contrary, with even more friends in high places, Jordan levitated to a new plane in the 1990s. A year before Clinton left Washington, Jordan became a senior managing director of Lazard Freres, a top New York investment banking firm in Manhattan.

Still at the epicenter of social and political Washington on Fridays and weekends (yes, he also has Republican “friends”), Jordan camps out Mondays through Thursdays at the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue.

Now that they both are in New York, Jordan will not say whether he is spending much time with Clinton. Their offices are 75 blocks apart. In a few weeks, Clinton is moving into his new digs on 125th Street in Harlem, while Jordan has spent the last year nurturing deals and opening doors for Lazard on the 62nd floor (three down from the Rainbow Room) of Rockefeller Center, where he has a millionaire’s view of lower Manhattan.

“You have to do ‘well’ before you can do ‘good,’ ” Jordan says, when asked which is more important to him. “I have tried never to stop doing good. Its manifestation nowadays is different than when I was at the Urban League or when I was practicing law. But it’s still there.”

Often the Lone Black Voice in the Room

The tension throughout his life between personal ambition and his desire for social change may not come through in this memoir. Yet it may offer a window into what it has been like for him, often the lone black man in the boardroom. One of his indelible memories is a remark confided to him during a meeting of angry shareholders. Jordan was a director on the corporate board.

“Vernon, have you noticed something?” another director whispered to him. “The only shareholders out there raising hell are the Jews.”

Jordan faced the white director and remarked sarcastically, “No [kidding],” using a much more blunt term.

To Jordan, the incident reveals that the director “forgot that he was not sitting next to just another Andover guy who went to Princeton with him. That’s kind of the way that board was, and it had changed.”

Will this story be in the memoir?

“I’m not sure yet,” Jordan says with a gleaming smile that hints that he does not like to be pinned down, not even about a book that is supposed to be mostly finished.

The boardroom incident surely is evidence of Jordan’s ability over the years at getting the white elite to forget that he is a 6-foot-4 black man with a Southern country drawl.

The harshest view of what he has become is expressed by other blacks. One author has described Washington as a place where powerful blacks fear “Vernon Jordan disease,” which was characterized as a “degenerative condition” that results in a loss of memory of what they came to the capital to accomplish.

Parallels Seen to Jefferson’s Life

Jordan brushes off these barbs as the price of the “mantle of leadership.” He will not address them in the book.

But Annette Gordon-Reed, Jordan’s coauthor, says the criticisms illustrate a misunderstanding among blacks about Jordan’s contributions in his later years to their cause.

“He has not taken any public positions in recent years on issues that involve blacks,” Gordon-Reed says. “But he has exercised his beliefs privately and within the context of how he lives.”

After months of tape-recording Jordan’s memories and forging them into a book, Gordon-Reed, a law professor who wrote a book about Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, is awed by Jordan’s Horatio Alger life.

“Like Jefferson, Jordan did a lot in his early life that defined him for many years later, and he also had to deal with celebrity when he didn’t want to,” Gordon-Reed says.

Even Jordan is awed at times by the trajectory of his life--particularly when he winds up back in Atlanta and greets boyhood friends shining shoes at the airport. “I say to myself, ‘But for the grace of God go I.’ Then as I’m going to get into my first-class seat I think about why it is I’m going to be in first class and they’re shining shoes.”

If there is an answer, it may lie in his boundless self-confidence (bestowed, he says, by his mother).

Seldom is that confidence--not to mention his reputation as a ladies’ man--more evident than in his musings about Jefferson’s life, which fascinates Jordan, particularly the love affair with Hemings.

“He never married her, but I really believe that he loved Sally Hemings and she loved him,” Jordan says. “But I guess I was also thinking, if I was working in the big house too, I would have taken Sally Hemings away from him.”