Vernon Jordan’s Creed: ‘Michelle, I’m Too Old To Let Race Get In The Way of Friendship’

Vernon Jordan during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary was facing the same exquisite pressures that many African Americans were.

As a veteran civil rights leader, he had been waiting for decades for the kind of triumph Barack Obama’s victory would represent. At the same time, he had known Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton since the late 1970s. There was no real doubt that he would endorse her, and genuinely mean it.

Michelle Obama, as Jordan later recounted the story, was a bit sour about the choice. “Michelle,” he said, “I’m too old to let race get in the way of friendship.”

Race, friendship, and intense ambition to be a player at the highest levels of American political and corporate power were the three great themes of Jordan’s life, which began with a modest boyhood in segregated Atlanta, survived an assassination attempt by a racist gunman at 44 and ended at age 85 on Monday at his home in an elite enclave of Washington.

Journalists are well-acquainted with the phenomenon of the eminent personage who is disappointing in person. Jordan was the rare person for whom the opposite was true. His height (reported as 6 foot 4 in obituaries), a deep baritone voice and a seemingly endless collection of well-polished stories in which his own life intersected with important history—all these allowed him to project an aura of effortless command.

I was not remotely an intimate. But I knew Jordan a little from my role as a journalist covering the Clinton presidency. Over the past decade or so, he’d occasionally give me an audience over breakfast or lunch. The occasions were every bit as entertaining as one hoped. (The quote about race and friendship comes from one of those meals, and he gave slightly different incarnations of the tale in other contexts over the years).

Starting from his position as leader of the National Urban League, and later as a Washington attorney and New York financier, he knew most presidents from Lyndon B. Johnson onward. His role as the preeminent confidant and outsider to one of them, Clinton, vaulted him to a status that made him the unofficial first African American of an unofficial category: Washington Wise Man. He fit within a tradition that stretched way back, from financier Bernard Baruch of a century ago to Tommy Corcoran in the post-New Deal era to Robert Strauss in more recent times.

Those earlier figures, of course, were living in an age when the private passions and personal frailties of politicians were an appropriate subject for after-hours gossip but did not intersect with mainstream journalism or criminal investigations. In Jordan’s case, his effort to help Clinton paramour Monica Lewinsky secure a job did become enmeshed with the scandal that led to Clinton’s impeachment in 1998 and his acquittal in early 1999.

When that was over, he told me, there were big publishing offers for him to tell his Clinton-era stories in a memoir. But there weren’t big bucks being waved around for the kind of memoir Jordan wanted to write. That was one that told the story of his childhood and rise to prominence, that didn’t get into the Clinton-Lewinsky saga at all. Jordan, who had plenty of money already, signed on with a smaller publishing imprint, PublicAffairs, and told what turned out to be a more absorbing tale in his autobiography, “Vernon Can Read.”

It tells the story of an especially sharp young Black man who learned early on how to navigate confidently among accomplished white people. In college, on breaks from DePauw University in Indiana, he worked as a driver and waiter for former Atlanta Mayor Robert Maddox. “Vernon can read” was Maddox’s surprised and condescending announcement to his family at dinner after seeing his employee browsing books in the family library. Later in life, Jordan would be squired around town by a driver of his own.

“I’m fascinated by class,” he observed. That was obvious, not simply from his memoir, but from an unabashed style of questioning as he tried to place his subject on a spectrum of advantage: Where did you grow up? What did your parents do? Where did you go to school? What neighborhood do you live in now?

At one lunch, he described running into an old high school friend a few days earlier at the Atlanta airport. He shared his thought bubble during the encounter: “Why are you shining shoes and I am flying in first class?”

His answer was education and self-discipline. It was also clear that as Jordan became more educated he was helped at every turn by his ability to forge for connections and strategic alliances. With his gift for earning the confidence of older mentors of both races, he rose rapidly in a variety of civil rights organizations. He became president of the National Urban League in 1971, and remained there for a decade.

During Jordan’s tenure, the group’s strategy was to advance Black progress in part through alliances with enlightened white civic and corporate leaders. Jordan took positions on corporate boards and became friends with prominent CEOs such as C. Peter McCullough of Xerox, with which Jordan maintained a long association.

In Jordan’s view, networking was inextricably linked to the pursuit and use of power. He once spoke disdainfully of political figures who profess disdain for Washington social rituals. “If you come to Washington, there isn’t a choice,” he said, “you have to go to the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, the Gridiron Dinner, the Alfalfa dinner.”

Certainly Jordan was a regular at those. At a recent Gridiron media dinner, he gave a bear hug to another civil rights icon—Atlanta Braves slugger Hank Aaron, who himself died just six weeks ago at age 86.

But if Jordan was an assimilationist, he was not always an accommodationist. He and Jimmy Carter had been friends from Georgia days. But in his memoir he described how the relationship briefly ruptured, and never fully recovered its old rapport, when he made a major speech during Carter’s first year in office lambasting the new administration for putting the priorities of Black people on a back burner.

It was at the end of Carter’s term that Jordan, in Indianapolis, nearly lost his own life in a shooting in a hotel parking lot. “The pain was indescribable, brutal beyond all measure,” he wrote. Avowed racist Joseph Paul Franklin was acquitted at trial, though he later admitted he had done the crime, and was eventually executed in Missouri in 2013 after a conviction for murdering two Black joggers.

Oddly, for all of Jordan’s gift for storytelling, I wondered whether there was ambivalence in his feelings about Martin Luther King Jr., six years older, who came to power in Atlanta not long before Jordan. His memoir makes many references to King but tells no revealing stories, and when I sometimes fished for recollections Jordan seemed to glide over the subject with little detail. This contrasts to the pain he shares in his book about the 1963 assassination of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, “one of the most impressive men I’ve ever met.”

Unlike some of these legendary contemporaries, Jordan lived long enough to become somewhat of an anachronism. His definition of African American success seemed to be based heavily on creating more stories like his own: Black people who became prosperous and well-connected enough not just to move among powerful people but to be powerful themselves.

Even though he didn’t win Jordan’s endorsement in 2008, no one demonstrated that more potently than Obama himself.

In the last year of his life, however, Jordan saw the Black Lives Matter movement highlight an increasingly obvious paradox: Class is nearly as formidable a barrier as race, and even a couple generations of success by outstanding achievers like Jordan and Obama has only glancingly improved the lives of many people with backgrounds like George Floyd. Even many Black people who have the educational and professional attainments Jordan prized so highly say they can still face obvious discrimination, even after climbing impressive ladders.

Even so, the racial progress of the next generation will be more attainable in the wake of progress of the past two—achievements with which Jordan’s life was inextricably intertwined.