A friend died this week, and I want to try and do him some justice in this pandemic time, with no memorials or gatherings and old social expectations gone down. He was a singular man, a profound presence in many lives, and I keep thinking of the simple old phrase, “the pleasure of his company.”
Vernon Jordan was variously called a civil-rights leader, Washington insider, Wise Man, power broker, deal maker, rainmaker, Wall Street banker and, as an interviewer put it a few years ago in the Financial Times, “the most connected man in America.” He was all those things.
He relished the tale of how far he’d come. Born in Atlanta in 1935, father a postal worker, mother a cook and caterer, raised in public housing, waited tables at his mother’s events. He saw local white establishments up close and thought, as a friend put it Wednesday, “I’m gonna be that, only I’m gonna show them how to do it right.” He went to college and law school; as a young lawyer he helped desegregate the University of Georgia. On to civil-rights leadership with the NAACP, United Negro College Fund, National Urban League. In 1980 he was shot by a white supremacist and almost died. After three months in the hospital and a long recuperation he took a turn. Others would work on voting rights and the schools, and he would help, but he was going to bring the movement into the boardrooms of America. He joined a great Washington law firm, lobbied, advised CEOs and political figures, became an investment banker. He told me he wanted to make money and support his family, but he didn’t feel he’d left the civil-rights movement, he brought it with him into every powerful room he entered.
I want to describe the special quality of his friendship. He took the most serious and active interest in the lives of those within his ken. It takes time to do what he did, to answer every call, make yourself available, really listen. “Attention is the beginning of devotion,” the poet Mary Oliver said. That is what he gave. He drilled down, reduced problems to their essentials, discussed concrete ways out and through. His advice was considered, serious. Loyalty was central to his nature. People confided in him, knew they could. The head of a New York cultural institution said this week, “You could share everything, and he would never trade on it. He was honorable and discreet. As effective as he was at connecting and building alliances, he didn’t trade on what he knew. It was not transactional.”
I knew him since the late 1990s; as a longtime friend of the Clintons he sought me out to explain I was wrong in my criticisms of them. Over the decades we had lots to disagree on, and lots to agree. When he’d call you’d pick up and hear a deep Southern baritone: “This is Jordan, like the river.” He was raucous, teasing, sometimes profane. He often talked about his faith; he was a Christian, had been brought up in a Bible culture and liked to think aloud about what that meant. He wrote me once that “friendship is the medicine of life.” He signed off, “I am on Martha’s Vineyard with the liberals.”
Vernon was a singular figure in that he was a true and honest partisan, declared and convinced, a liberal Democrat, but he didn’t only tolerate the other side; he had deep affection and respect for the other side, for those he judged deserved it, and there were many. This attitude is so old-school, a throwback. It was convenient for him to think this way—political differences don’t help deals get made—but it was also what he thought. He was of that generation of Washington people who, as bipartisan figures, function as the glue that keeps things from falling apart.
“Political differences must be subordinated to common humanity,” he said in a commencement speech at Syracuse University in 2017. He meant it. After he was shot and came out of surgery, the first telegram he read was a warm and encouraging one from George Wallace, the famous segregationist. It meant a lot to Vernon when, a few years later, Wallace asked to be wheeled over to him for a warm conversation. Life is full of such marvels, Vernon thought. Be open to them.
I remember he was exasperated in early 2015 that more wasn’t being made of the election of South Carolina’s Tim Scott —the only black man ever elected to the Senate from that state. That was Strom Thurmond’s seat! Why isn’t this getting more attention? Vernon, I said, he’s a Republican, the press sees it not as a clean breakthrough but a vague setback. I asked why he was so moved by the rise of a conservative. “I didn’t expect when we were crossing the Edmund Pettus bridge that we’d all agree on everything when we got to the other side.”
He had a yearly lunch at home in Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood to mark the Alfalfa Club dinner, and it was even more exclusive. Those lunches summoned—they required—a cordial bipartisan spirit. You never knew who would be there, and everywhere you looked there was someone fascinating. Embedded unseen at the dozen round tables were dozens of small kindnesses, and some judgments you didn’t know he’d made. If you were a journalist and it would do you good to understand economic issues better, you were seated with Warren Buffett. If you were a progressive with an attitude you would be placed near the sweetest-souled and intellectually sharpest old Republican, who just might gently bop you on the head in a way you need bopping.
Vernon knew how establishment it all looked. He welcomed guests in January 2018 with “Welcome to the swamp!”
He was worldly in some old-fashioned way that was more than “at home in the halls of power” or “understood the ways of the world.” He was discerning about human nature and secretly charitable about who the humans are. He thought people were complicated, that you could never get to the bottom of them, that they could be mysterious but at the end of the mystery was a simplicity: Most people are doing their best within their limits. Maybe the action is in figuring out the depth and provenance of the limits.
He acted as if life was delicious, and if you were lucky enough to be here, you had a kind of moral responsibility to have fun. Take pleasure in your accomplishments, admit your mistakes, face problems, accept all the blows, but remember how delicious it is.
Once friends of his, a couple, had a big, fancy imported car they loved. Its plush seats were the only ones the husband, who’d long been ill, was comfortable in. But the wife feared it was ostentatious, and she was embarrassed people would think they were showing off, so she’d just sold it. Vernon turned to her and said, softly, “Did your husband steal the money for the car?”
She was startled. No, he was an honest man who worked hard.
“Then he earned it. Don’t be afraid, don’t worry about what people think, live your life.”
Good advice, no? Rest in peace, dear Vernon.