A Woman Powerful and Wise

...But through the process of amendment, interpretation and court decisions, I have finally been included in 'We the people.'" For the first time, but hardly the last, millions of Americans heard from an exceptional politician—who, at the start of her career, swapped bawdy jokes with the low-lifes in the otherwise all-male, allwhite Texas Legislature...

...love...

...She got to know her subject at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, where they were colleagues until Jordan's death, at age 59, in 1996...

...Two decades later she would be the commencement speaker at the exalted campus, and would be awarded one of her 31 honorary degrees...

...love...

...Working well within the system, she won the support of the white male party leadership to begin her elective career...

...the surprise star in 1974...

...It was a very emotional moment...

...She wanted to find a fresh purpose, and that presented itself when the Dean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs in Austin invited her to become a professor there...

...By the next fall, with the John F. Kennedy-Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential campaign getting under way, she was stuffing envelopes for the Democratic Party...

...Nevertheless, hers proved to be a voice of deep eloquence and clear reason on the Democratic-led Judiciary Committee...

...Born to a deeply religious family in an all-black Houston neighborhood, Jordan never wed...

...In the morning, I say: 'What is my exciting thing for today' then I do the day...

...Rogers, who at one time was involved in state politics, currently heads the public television station in Austin...

...Periodically she re-emerged on the national scene— memorably in 1992 when candidate Bill Clinton asked her to keynote the Democratic National Convention in New York, as a reprise of her appearance there 16 years earlier in the same capacity for Jimmy Carter...

...And yes, love...

...She spoke now with the authority of an Old Testament prophet, using her rich vocal shadings, impeccable diction and studied cadences to considerable effect to extinguish Nixon's already dim prospects of remaining in office...

...In short, Jordan learned how to keep her mouth shut when the votes were not to be had and how to turn aside the frequent blatant racism of her colleagues when they were...

...To her credit, she chooses to go against the present biographical grain by keeping personal details to a minimum...

...Reviewed by Andrew J. Glass Senior correspondent and columnist, Cox Newspapers As the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment hearings against William Jefferson Clinton advanced, both Republican and Democratic members came to believe they could add some sizzle to their dreary discourse by invoking, for quite different purposes, the impeachment proceedings against Richard Milhous Nixon in the same chamber a quarter of a century earlier...

...I think it was the nearest experience on this earth to the pastor's giving a sermon with God in the audience...

...The wallet held one other equally fitting item: a tiny edition of the U.S...

...She belted scotch with the "boys," went along with them on their East Texas hunting trips, and struck deals for her lowly black constituents whenever the infrequent opportunity arose...

...She could also continue to speak on national issues...

...But she was not about to become a name on some firm's stationery...

...I was nervous enough as it was," Clinton told the assembled mourners...

...Following only three terms in the House (1972-78), she felt she could no longer hide her multiple sclerosis and retired from politics, although not from public life...

...Eplwibus unum was a good motto in the early days of our country, and it is a good motto today...

...She felt "lonely and lost" there, and came to realize how "separate but equal" schooling had denied her the education her white classmates had received...

...Part of it was the tone and tenor of her voice," Mary Beth Rogers, her longtime friend and the author of this Jordan biography, recently told the Austin American-Statesman...

...Her BU degree in hand, Jordan returned to Houston in the fall of 1959, but she found practicing law unfulfilling...

...No one of the tabloid-addicted lawmakers on the present panel, however, could lift his or her vapid exercise in the political arts to the level attained by the late Barbara Jordan (D.-Tex...

...Each day I look for a kernel of excitement...

...Of her final difficult, disease-ridden period, Jordan said: "I live a day at a time...

...During two years of research, Rogers found that Jordan was "soulmates with no one but herself and her God, and even her concept of God was truly her own private territory...

...And I walked out into that vast arena, and there were 17,000 people there...

...But when that document was completed on the 17th of September in 1787, I was not included in that 'We the people.' I felt for many years that somehow George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake...

...From the many, one...

...But I could only see one—Barbara Jordan, smiling at me...

...It was also the power of her personality and the wisdom of her words...

...Rogers reports that while Jordan's "pragmatism" often infuriated her core constituency, she spoke passionately of a "moral imperative to be effective...

...One of her deepest beliefs was in the value of the Constitution, and that came across...

...Jordan enrolled instead across the Charles River at Boston University...

...The President recalled that he last saw Jordan in the fall of 1995, when he gave a singularly unmemorable speech on race relations at the University of Texas in counterpoint to the Million Man March taking place the same day in Washington...

...I declined to do that in my work on Barbara Jordan, and decided to tell her story factually, as best I could...

...As a junior member of the Watergate panel, Jordan was seated on the far left of the dais, out of the usual focus of the television cameras...

...And there I was about to give a speech to her about race and the Constitution...

...It still identifies us—because we are Americans...

...In 1967, after losing two races for the Texas Senate, 31-year-old Barbara Jordan took her seat in its grandly Victorian Austin chamber...

...We the people,' it's a very eloquent beginning...

...Rogers says she wrote her book to explain why, long after a relatively brief stint in the House of Representatives, Jordan regularly wound up at the top of the public's list of "most admired" individuals...

...She did it as a legislator, a member of Congress, a teacher, a citizen.' To be sure, there was a good deal more to Jordan...

...Once Jordan announced that she would not run for office again in 1978, she received many offers of prestigious positions...

...Constitution before decidinghow to vote and what to say...

...Contemplating law school, she decided Harvard was too much of a stretch for someone from an all-black college...

...By then she understood the need to play an insider's game in what was still a club closed to blacks and women...

...In her Introduction she notes: "Speculation on the sex lives of public figures is a popular pastime...

...Earlier today, we heard the beginning of the preamble to the Constitution of the United States," she said...

...As she walked to her car, people rushed at her and cheered...

...Although Rogers' prose is serviceable, rarely does it attain the level of Clinton's eloquence at Jordan's funeral at the Good Hope Missionary Baptist Church in Houston, where her father had once preached...

...How," the author asks, "did she gain her status as an American moral hero at the end of the 20th century when so few of her political compatriots were able to stand at her side...

...a career and marriage, in her view, didn't mesh well...

...Don't ask me about tomorrow...

...Jordan's turn to speak came on the evening of July 25, near the end of the hearings' second day, when tensions in the room had risen to a nearly unbearable level...

...After being named "Girl of the Year" at Houston's segregated Wheatley High School, she went on to earn a BA at Texas Southern University...

...It would enable her to impart to bright young people what she had learned on the front lines...

...Constitution...

...She was shocked...

...Party regulars soon recognized that her commanding physical presence and powerful vocal cords made her a potentially valuable asset at a time of rising black political consciousness...

...Obviously she was persuasive, for within six years she was elected to her first term in Congress...

...She told a packed Madison Square Garden and huge television audience: "...We must profoundly change from the deleterious environment of the '80s, characterized by greed, selfishness, megamergers, and debt overhang, to one characterized by devotion to the public interest and tolerance...

...Having enjoyed the cooperation of Jordan's estate and been granted interviews with her former staff, family and friends, Rogers recounts the life in full measure, making apparent her own admiration along the way...

...In seeking to sum up Jordan's essence, Clinton observed: "Through the sheer force of the truth she spoke, the poetry of her words and the power of her voice, Barbara always stirred our national conscience...

...In keeping with her lifelong sense of high drama, she let it be known that she had stood in line at the National Archives with the tourists to read the original U.S...

...She does reveal, though, that upon Jordan's death, her wallet contained two photographs of her long-dead Grandpa John Ed Patten—the singular Houston junk dealer who had instilled in Barbara as a child the sense that she was somebody special, and had modeled for her a challenge to the conventions of the middle-class "cocoon of respectability...