From the Los Angeles Times
Sunday, April 22, 2001

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

Memoir: 'People look at me and believe I was born Jan. 20, 1993,'
the former first friend says. 'My life was defined long before that.'

By GERALDINE BAUM, Times Staff Writer

NEW YORK--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."