Jordan, George, and the Establishment
Lemann, Nicholas
Jordan,Georgia, and the Establishment by Nicholas Lemann The aide was in Washington for a Jordan,Georgia, and the Establishment by Nicholas Lemann The aide was in Washington for a boss. an...
...On issues, however, and on last-minute moves like deciding to let everything ride on the Pennsylvania primary, Jordan relied on his antennae...
...To the people who had joined up under Watson’s auspices in ’76, Watson was a responsible and attractive person and Jordan a remote, hostile boor...
...He was born in September 1944 and raised in Albany, a city of 75,000 in south Georgia...
...Peter Bourne and Mary King (they were the most prominent Washingtonians in Carter’s campaign, and got a lot of publicity...
...He wasn’t wearing them just on the White House court (where he was, it’s true, spending a lot of time), or in his office, but even at meetings where everybody else was dressed somberly...
...He’s not...
...He entered the university in the fall of 1962, and, he told Aaron Latham of Esquire, “I crammed four years of college into five years, almost six...
...The establishment is guilty of smugness and condescension as much as its opponents are guilty of paranoia and hostility...
...from now on, Jordan will pass on all White House Mideast initiatives...
...now they are the President’s assistant for health issues and deputy director of ACTION, respectively...
...That Jordan and Powell don’t press the point is evidence that they’re insecure too, but they’re more openly hostile than Carter, especially Jordan...
...There was Greg Schneiders (he had become the man personally closest to Carter, or so he said...
...He was always in a good mood...
...For those who don’t think snobbery plays a role in government, recall that Averell Harriman said, in the spring of 1976, about Jimmy Carter, “How can he be nominated...
...Hamilton said we’ve got to do it...
...But on the other, he suggested that the panjandrums of The New York Times could be brought into Carter’s column through a little lobbying by the candidate’s cousin, Don Carter, a Lexington, Kentucky newspaper editor...
...His rival campaign managers lived in Washington and had the inside track, but relentless work and planning and an instinctive feel for the public mood were what put Carter in front . Running the Office What Jordan wasn’t good at was day-to-day administration...
...The alleged cause of the controversy is a series of social gaffes Jordan has committed lately, but it really goes deeper than that...
...He’s known, among the small portion of humanity that gets to see him regularly, for being open to argument, lowkey, and judicious...
...Jordan s friends-and the White House reporters, most of whom he has charmed- say another of his endearing traits is that he’s fun-loving, meaning that he likes to go out after work, take a drink or two, and have a good time...
...We always thought he was the most likely from our school to be governor one day...
...He’s one of the most charming people I ever met, just tremendously charming,” one Carter campaign worker remembers...
...I remember on the Panama Canal, talking to him- it’s got no constituency, I told him, and how the devil are we going to get it through...
...Of course hostility is rooted in insecurity, and it’s insecurity that is the real problem of the Carter administration...
...He was known among his friends there as an unusually cordial young man, a Southern gentleman...
...The Jordan they know is not just warm and friendly but unusually and remarkably so- cordial, gracious, unaffected, a man who regularly goes out of his way just to be nice to people...
...These titles may look impressive to the untutored eye, but to people who were at the top of a successful presidential campaign, they don’t represent the fulfillment of any fondest dreams...
...For one thing, Carter himself is as predictable as a grandfather clock and as straitlaced as a . Bible instructor, which leaves Jordan as the receptacle of people’s natural curiosity about the White House...
...He said, no, this is how it’s gonna be, so let’s figure out how we’re gonna do it...
...Just as a high-school boy meeting his date’s parents can react with either sullen hostility or fawning obsequiousness but can’t be relaxed and natural, it’s impossible for outlanders to confront the establishment with equanimity...
...On the other hand, Carter is obviously a man whose resentment for the credentialed and the anointed is mixed with awe, and in the early days he effectively turned over the substantive work of his administration to the technicians who populate the policy staffs of Stuart Eizenstat and Zbigniew Brzezinski...
...H.R...
...If Jordan’s specific beliefs are passed on to him by Carter, Carter’s are passed to him by these people...
...He became notorious for his eagerness to freeze them out...
...For another, Jordan, rather than Carter, has come to stand for the Us against Them aspect of the administration, and that’s a matter of deep emotional significance both to Us and to Them...
...The Majesty of the Office’ On it goes: Agronsky: “You cant help but relate the remarkable drop in the President’s popularity...
...The lawyers on the staff, the New Yorkers and the Washingtonians, the Ivy Leaguers, have stayed right where they are, thank you...
...now it became selling Carter’s programs...
...These are benign guises, although Jordan has less pleasant ones too...
...were ushered into Jordan’s office ‘for a scheduled appointment to talk politics...
...This whole stretch of Jordan’s life, curiously, is often recounted inaccurately...
...Or he plans campaigns like the one for the treaties, with much detailed manipulating of the press, politicians, and celebrities...
...Because I wasn’t friends with all their friends...
...In contrast to outside, Jordan seems to feel comfortable and secure there, partly because the hierarchy is unusually stable...
...In this role, he’s supposed to be astute, direct, and unpretentious...
...Divorces, it’s said, are triggered by minor and obvious were very angry,” says one person who was there...
...It was pulled open to halfway down his shirt, far past the point of comfort, as if to make a statement to the assembled diners-and indeed, most of them duly noticed...
...He’s not much of a self-aggrandizer or office politician, given the setting...
...Watson, now secretary to the Cabinet, was given a lot of time and money to prepare for the new administration, and Jordan and his kind weren’t part of the plans...
...There were other, smaller purges during that time, of people who were relegated to second-rank jobs after having behaved immodestly...
...Will weighs in first: “If he committed a sexual faux pas,” he says, “it wasn’t his first . . . it’s beginning to dapage the President...
...His overseeing of the Atlanta campaign headquarters left so much to be desired that a man named Paul Hernmann was brought in as “campaign administrator” to run the office...
...The Voice of God This nervousness .about the establishment, when it’s examined at all, is usually examined as a strange and needless neurosis: why in the world should presidents and their assistants feel the need to prove themselves to anybody...
...Jordan was left to fill political jobs, which he didn’t much like, administration, Carter had Jordan and Powell handling outside pressures, politicians and the press...
...He has also obviously wanted the world to think of him as a freewheeling, devil-may-care, Butch Cassidy type...
...Jordan has not yet learned that nobody in this town is so powerful-including the President-that he doesn’t have to try to ingratiate himself with some hostesses, with the press, and so forth...
...Carter won by emphasizing his close ties with George Wallace and Lester Maddox, and appealing generally to the dark side of populism, to get past the concerted opposition of the Atlanta establishment...
...He’s not somebody to give you a Robert McNamara six-point analysis of a problem,” says one persm who has been in meetings with Jordan...
...For another example, let’s tune in to the public-affairs television show “Agronsky and Company” on Satuday evening, February 18, the week of the Jordan/bar controversy...
...The America that Jordan isn’t part of the America of Washington, of the East, of fine universities-has at every turn sent Jordan a message of hostility, and he has responded in kind...
...In the Carter administration, the interplay between insiders and outsiderssometimes hostile, usually quite subtle-goes on not only in the drawing rooms and bars, but in the West Wing as well...
...he just pushed them to the front burner...
...The alleged cause of the controversy is a series of social gaffes Jordan has committed lately, but it really goes deeper than that...
...I didn’t make the grades...
...Barbara Blum (she had told the press, before she was supposed to, the composition of the White House staff...
...Throughout the show these wise pundits insisted that nobody is out to get Hamilton Jordan, but it sounded to me as if somebody was...
...He was always a leader,” says Spencer Lee, a close friend from boyhood...
...The photographs that came out of the West Wing almost always showed Jordan dressed in tennis clothes...
...He said, Jim, it’s right, I know it’s right...
...The same kind of insecurity is evident in Carter -after all, the Panama Canal treaties weren’t his idea, either...
...There was a feeling of his escaping responsibility, of ignoring detail...
...Will: “There comes a time when the office ought to be wrapped in majesty, not in blue denim...
...I think it’s very important...
...The Jordan they read about looks down women’s dresses at fancy parties, gets into nasty scenes at bars, won’t return phone calls or answer letters, and regularly alienates and offends people in Washington...
...There was no sense that any of these men had traveled their long road with a firm agenda in mind for what they would do when they got to the White House...
...These were times when not very many people outside of the family were on the Carter bandwagon, when people who wanted to be on a winner’s team were toiling in other vineyards...
...that, Carter has put in the hands of impeccably credentialed Easterners...
...The public Jordan has come into being in response to forces that are so strong they have made a kind and capable man powerfully ill at ease...
...He was no country boy-he came from a locally prominent and affluent family, one long active in politics...
...While Carter is impressively confident of his ability to rise to the top of the American heap, he’s not sure enough of himself to risk being thought of as dense or irrespon- sible by those whose respect is most important to him...
...Rooted in Insecurity In fact, Jordan has talents that go unrecognized by the establishment, which doesn’t share them-an understanding of the public will, a willingness to take a chance...
...Then Drew, who is more sympathetic than the rest, explains that “they feel that people are out to get them and that Washington in particular is...
...But it’s a sign of how indispensable Hemmann was to the Carter camp that he’s now the Secretary of Commerce’s representative in Atlanta, and a sign of how serious Jordan’s shortcomings were to his boss that he’s where he is today...
...Once they were about to hold a meeting in a room where I was, and they obviously didn’t want me there...
...Jordan has been made well aware of that attitude, and it has provoked its own mix of hostility and insecuritynot only in Jordan, but in Carter and in his administration...
...Hamilton Jordan is now the most reliably controversial figure in Washington, praised and damned with great vehemence...
...Agronsky: “George I think has in a Sense the most important point...
...Hamilton and Jody don’t have to prove themselves with Carter,” says one person who knows them both, “but when the suggestion arrives that they do have to prove themselves, that brings out their lesser traits...
...He walked into a state dinner wearing a tie that was-well, loosened, according to people who were there, just doesn’t describe it...
...Watson came over and talked to us and he was understanding, but what could he do...
...Washington isn’t our lifestyle...
...Jim King, a political pro who joined the Carter campaign in 1976, says that at their first meeting Jordan “enchanted me-he reminded me of myself...
...Whatever is the most important matter at hand-most recently, the coal strike-Jordan is coordinating the administration’s response, trying to make sure Carter will choose a course that works...
...Since Carter became president, only Robert Strauss’ duties have expanded dramatically, and Strauss is a glad-handing, political Mr...
...Many of these people offered Carter valuable expertise and fence-mending talents...
...He speaks in the Voice of God tone that Washington journalists develop after a couple of decades-a booming, slow, authoritative bass that Sidey and Agronsky also use...
...It was ‘Hamilton this’ and ‘Hamilton that.’ There were complaints and more complaints...
...In one infamous case, Stuart Eizenstat, the campaign’s issues director, brought in an old Humphrey hand from Washington named Ted Van Dyk to help Carter prepare for the debates...
...Most of the appointed class who are in the Carter administration could easily have been in somebody else’s administration, which often blinds them to the virtues of people who could never have been in any other administration, like Jordan...
...A possible race would be brought up, of a campaign issue, and Jordan would say, yes, that’ll work, or no, that won’t, the country is getting too conservative for that...
...Within two weeks Jordan had set up a “personnel advisory group” that really controlled the transition, while Watson was relegated to developing supplementary budget...
...Those who were helping that early won, in return for their efforts, Carter’s undying trust and affection...
...If you fell below a certain average in a quarter, then you couldn’t come back the following quarter...
...He may be a populist peanut farmer, but he has been anxious to explain to every interviewer who would be likely to pick up on it that he’s also able to quote Reinhold Neibuhr and Dylan Thomas at length...
...In 1972 Jordan, ever ambitious for his boss, ran a small and unsuccessful campaign to get Carter nominated for vice president on the McGovern ticket, and later that year he wrote his famous 72-page memo urging Carter to run for president and explaining how it could be done...
...Why...
...to incidents such as this...
...Now Jordan passes on virtually everything that comes out of the White House, chairs senior staff meetings, and sits in on Carter’s weekly meetings on foreign policy and intelligence...
...but many also acted as if, Carter’s lonely struggle having taken him this far, it was time for them, the pros and the experts, to take over and start calling the shots These people were shown only the bad side of Jordan...
...Our people aren’t that interested in impressing people, and not that impressed by people...
...For another, Jordan, rather than Carter, has come to stand for the Us against Them aspect of the administration, and that’s a matter of deep emotional significance both to Us and to Them...
...In his recent row with a woman in a Washington bar, even taking the Jordan camp’s account of what happened at face value, he was involved in unpleasantries that ended with the woman slapping him-not the kind of fate that often befalls to a simple fun-lover...
...In the White House, where Jordan works out of H.R...
...The Carter administration is, in my opinion, getting the reputation of simply not having class...
...Before too long he’ll probably be managing his second presidential campaign...
...They were, a lot of them, Washingtonians and New Yorkers, veterans of Democratic Party politics, people who thought of themselves as deserving a place in any Democratic administration, no matter who was heading it...
...Peter Bourne and Mary King (they were the most prominent Washingtonians in Carter’s campaign, and got a lot of publicity...
...Jordan had two specialties-making instinctive political judgments and drawing up comprehensive plans of battle-that, along with his closeness to Carter, were his strengths then and remain so today...
...There were some tennis rackets stacked against a wall, classical music on the record player, people coming in and out...
...Carter’s second race for governor began just after his first one ended, and for a time Jordan traveled the 35 miles from Albany to Plains every day to help out in Carter’s driven routine of letter-writing and speechmaking...
...There followed a period of drift in Jordan’s life...
...The problem is, he’s being dragged down into the arena...
...I said, this is the big league, Hamilton...
...And ponder for a moment William Colby’s fond memory, in his forthcoming autobiography, of the early days of the CIA: “It attracted what nowadays we would call the best and the brightest, politically liberal young men and women from the finest Ivy League campuses and with the most impeccable social and establishment backgrounds...
...This attitude is partly admirable, but partly evidence of insecurity on Jordan’s part: why can’t he suggest that the Panama Canal be a priority of the Carter administration...
...He’s said to be so gentle with people that’s he’s incapable of delivering a tongue-lashing to someone who does a bad job...
...King and Blum, particularly, were blackballed by Jordan for job after job...
...Well, majesty, if you like, is the wrong word in a republic, but the President s h o u l d . . . be above it, as it were...
...He wanted to serve his country, and he really believed in the Vietnam war, though he wouldn’t for long...
...He is reputed to be genuinely idealistic, to care...
...he is now director of special projects in the White House...
...I don’t know him, and neither do any of my friends...
...Haldeman, in his memoirs, has Nixon telling him at the beginning of his second term, “None of them in the Cabinet, do you understand...
...So there’s a feeling-made up of mixed condescension and insecuritythat Jordan doesn’t deserve his job, that he should perform some functions and not others, that he should behave a certain way, that he may not be quite equal to it all...
...What they don’t seem to understand is that along with great power and along with great visibility . . . comes more attention and a certain kind of responsibility...
...Fixit who does the bidding of whoever his boss happens to be...
...Or Jordan holds meetings, where he listens quietly and attentively to everyone’s point of view and decides which way will work best...
...These titles may look impressive to the untutored eye, but to people who were at the top of a successful presidential campaign, they don’t represent the fulfillment of any fondest dreams...
...He clearly had some idealistic stirrings, if vague ones, and a strong interest in politics...
...King and Blum, particularly, were blackballed by Jordan for job after job...
...The U.S.Soviet statement on the Mideast came out of Brzezinski’s office and infuriated American Jews...
...Partly it is a matter of self-image: Jordan and Powell think of themselves as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Carter of himself as a cooly rational, reorganizing manager., but there is not an important place in either of these images for making the substantive decisions and policies of government...
...So Jordan came up to me and started to ask me questions-how was I, what did I think of this issue or that issue-and we were kind of strolling as we talked, and every time I looked up I was three steps closer to the door, until finally he had me out of the room entirely...
...Rolling Stone’s cover photograph of Jordan and Jody Powell dressed as Butch and the Sundance Kid hangs in the most prominent place in Jordan’s outer office, impossible for any visitor to miss...
...information (and, ultimately, to his present less-thancrucial job...
...It was ‘Hamilton this’ and ‘Hamilton that.’ There were complaints and more complaints...
...His casting about came to an end when his life found its direction in Jimmy Carter...
...They may resent this view- which is why Jordan behaves as he does-but it’s proof of its effect on them that the three demonstrably able, imaginative, risk-taking men at the top of the White House, at a time when the nation needs their skills badly, leave policy formulation to the cautious and the credentialed...
...A more secure Carter might now be feverishly implementing a program of fresh and unorthodox solutions to our problems, or at least surrounding himself with people who are eager to do that...
...The aide remembers being amazed that somebody could seem so different in two settings over such a short period of time...
...When he got well again, Jordan got a job he didn’t like at the Citizens’ and Southern National Bank...
...That he wag wearing tennis clothes isn’t as striking as that he wanted the world to think of him as wearing them...
...Early this year, for instance, Jordan, newly separated from his wife, flew to Saudi Arabia to join the Carter traveling party there, supposedly because not much was happening back in Washington...
...He went into this long emotional thing...
...His job is helping a man he totally believes in to act as a conduit for his own undefined feelings of altruism...
...During the course of this century in America the second group, the appointed, has come to have more power and prestige than the first, the elected...
...Jordan and his Kind ~~ The case where Jordan felt most threatened, and where he reacted most strongly, was that of Jack Watson, Harvard-trained Atlanta lawyer and protege of Carter’s friend Charles Kirbo, who ran the post-election transition...
...His biographer, Doris Kearns, quotes him as complaining to .her about “those liberals on the Hill squawking at me about Vietnam...
...After just a few months Jordan developed black water fever, and he came home to recuperate just before the Tet offensive...
...In the same way, the friends of Hamilton Jordan are amazed now at the difference between the Jordan they know and the Jordan they read about in the papers...
...There were other, smaller purges during that time, of people who were relegated to second-rank jobs after having behaved immodestly...
...Rowan: “The public perception is that he’s got a bunch of slobs in the White House...
...Hamilton Jordan is now the most reliably controversial figure in Washington, praised and damned with great vehemence...
...Members of the official transition team, who were more Washington than Georgia, became so frustrated at their inability to get through to Jordan (who had taken to working at home) and his staff that they held a meeting to air their gripes...
...The transition team, says one person who was in the campaign, “was all Harvard lawyers and people who knew each other from New York...
...Another thing most people noticed about Jordan in the early months of the Carter administration is that he was an avid tennis player...
...Our life in Atlanta was looser, freer, more casual...
...He’ll say, ‘I’m a little afraid of this or that...
...It’s worth noting that the memo was far more prescient in its gauging of the public mood than in its explanation of how to court the national powers that be...
...he is now director of special projects in the White House...
...Over the course of his life with Carter, Jordan has taken on his unattractive accretions at times when people were out to get him-when he was being urged to step aside and let the experts take over, when he was being called a dumb cracker, when people who had taken no risks while he had taken many wanted to take his place and ignore his talents...
...That doesn’t mean he was starryeyed, though- the successful 1970 campaign, which Jordan masterminded, was not a pretty thing...
...We entertained only with our friends...
...Even more important is that in some way Carter and Jordan and Powell seem to have bought the establishment view that policy should not be made by rural Southerners who did not redeem themselves by going to Ivy League schools...
...about the people of America and about humanity generally, but the specifics of his ideology all come from Carter...
...What’s more, when it’s somebody like Carter, this second wave is made up of people who are strikingly different from those in the first wave...
...During this time in the summer of 1966, Jordan met Jimmy Carter, then running as a racial liberal in his first race for governor of Georgia, and became youth coordinator for that Carter campaign...
...There are people in America, like Jordan and Carter, who have made their way upward by fulfilling the needs and wants of a lot of people...
...His father was an insurance man, but both his grandfathers had been politicians (one was mayor of Macon, the other president of the state senate), and his uncle and namesake, Hamilton McWhorter, is a former state senator and now secretary of the Georgia senate...
...There was a feeling of his escaping responsibility, of ignoring detail...
...On the one hand, Jordan saw long before Watergate became a first-rate burglary that public mistrust of government would be a major issue in 1976, and he knew New Hampshire and Florida would be the key pnmaries for Carter...
...Although they were working together in the same small group for several days, Jordan refused to speak a word to Van Dyk...
...But the truth is that the lack of equanimity cuts both ways...
...People bring matters to Jordan after they’re finished, and he looks at them and decides whether or not they’ll work politically...
...she is now deputy director of the Environmental Protection Agency...
...The show is a panel discussion in which several leading Washington journalists mull over the issues of the day- tonight they’re Martin Agronsky, the host, Hugh Sidey of Time, Elizabeth Drew of The New Yorker, and the columnists Carl Rowan and George Will, and the lead item is Jordan...
...It takes immense self-confidence to push hard for new ideas because it means risking the enmity and derision of the appointed class...
...The original energy plan was the product of James Schlesinger, and it didn’t fly...
...I was amazed to perceive that in him,” says Jim King, who for a year worked with Jordan in the White House...
...Partly as a result, the friction between them is immense, especially in a place like Washington, which is the repository of the ambitions of many players of the appointive game as well as the elective...
...An Honorable Tradition That’s sounds like what’s at the heart of the matter-the latest version of that honorable White House tradition, fear of the Eastern establishment...
...The latter role he hasn’t taken on because everyone-including Jordan himself-seems convinced that it’s not his kind of thing...
...At the same time, the proven ability of a Jordan to bring off a wild long shot is disconcerting to people who have planned their lives so as to avoid wild long shots...
...During the national campaign Jordan also began a period of rough sledding within the Carter organization, whose roots lay in a simple phenomenon: after it becomes obvious that a man is probably the next president of the United States, a lot of people are going to try to get under his tent...
...During the campaign, his specialty had been selling Jimmy Carter politically...
...A Cordial Young Man In the late summer of 1967, having been deemed unfit for military service because of flat feet, Jordan joined the International Voluntary Services and went to Vietnam as a volunteer...
...A month later Carter announced, and Jordan was a campaign manager again...
...The campaign for the Democratic nomination was worked out with sufficient forethought that Carter alone was canvassing Iowa in February 1975 and studying the logistics of Madison Square Garden right after the New Hampshire primary...
...Now it’s Rowan’s turn...
...There’s not much chance of anyone’s responsibilities changing...
...The classic victim of it was Lyndon Johnson...
...On the other hand, Carter’s governorship was much more of a shining moment-his racial liberalism was by far the strongest and most discernable true belief of his careerand Jordan was the chief aide then, too, with the title of executive secretary...
...Sidey: “There is something in political leadership called class...
...an out-of-town politician...
...Meeting the Goals But Jordan is still very much a non-expert, a man of instinct and common sense, someone who helps the Carter administration meet its goals rather than helping to formulate those goals...
...There was Greg Schneiders (he had become the man personally closest to Carter, or so he said...
...Haldeman’s old office, he is by all accounts remarkably immune to the officiousness that usually comes with his job...
...The Carter administration’s one great political triumph -the apparently assured passage, after a long uphill battle, of the Panama Canal treaties-was completely a Jordan production, orchestrated with all the meticulous care of Carter’s presidential campaign...
...now they are the President’s assistant for health issues and deputy director of ACTION, respectively...
...Watson came over and talked to us and he was understanding, but what could he do...
...Whereas the usual approach at moments like that in a campaign is to say, ‘get the hell out of this room.’ ” “I never saw a mean streak in him,” says Steve Stark, a member of the Carter issues staff in 1975 and 1976 and now a law student...
...Even discounting the way someone in a job like Jordan’s tends to be deified by his acquaintances, it’s striking how often people’s first impressions of him are centered around his niceness...
...I think the major problem with Ham Jordan,” says Rowan, “is that he is probably the last hold-out of that old Carter notion that they would come to town and be aloof from the Establishment...
...it’s usually written that he was a senior in college when he met Carter in 1966 and that he spent two years in the IVS, so that the period from 20 to 25 takes on an orderliness that it didn’t really have...
...Jordan was a bright and outgoing young man, though not, McWhorter says, overly studious...
...Jordan is relaxed and selfconfident when he’s playing to an audience of his boss of the last 12 years and his trusted co-workers, but in most other settings he seems to be a man in search of an image...
...Later on, Jordan’s affinity for planning took on a baroque elaborateness that produced a 25-point scale for rating vice-presidential prospects and an unbelievably complicated “per cent of effort” point system for allocating fall campaign time in the states...
...A couple of times I just got tired of it and went home, and other times I had to...
...future energy policy will go through Jordan before it goes out to the public...
...But this explanation- Jordan as fun-lover-wears thin in the face of Jordan’s behavior in public, which is that of a man who is nervous, self-conscious, and resentful...
...None of those Harvard bastards...
...The matter of whether the course is a wise one, Jordan leaves to others...
...By 1970 Jordan was Carter’s campaign manager, and since then his position as intimate advisor and chief political strategist to Carter has been, as far as it’s possible to tell, unwavering...
...Because I never went to Harvard...
...He used to speak sometimes of his fondness and admiration for Jimmy Carter...
...Barbara Blum (she had told the press, before she was supposed to, the composition of the White House staff...
...The university’s records show him graduating in 1967, at 22, with a bachelor’s degree in business...
...The picture that emerges, then, is of a young man of intelligence and ability, of whom much was expected by family and friends, who had been casting about for a comfortable place in life...
...Newcomers aren’t fully trusted...
...He was known for being impossible to get in touch with, for never being on time, for staying away from the office for days at a time...
...Those Obscure Years Jordan’s relationship with Carter was forged in those obscure years, 1967 and 1968 and 1969, when nobody was paying much attention...
...He picked up the language quickly and loved to play with Vietnamese children...
...This was a different Jordan: relaxed, charming, softspoken, his feet up on the table, ticking off instinctive judgmefits about the aide’s boss’ political future...
...Divorces, it’s said, are triggered by minor and obvious that Washington is “an awful city...
...In those years of life when his future compatriots on the White House staff were polishing up their resumes at Yale or Harvard Law School, when his old friends from high school and college were settling comfortably into the kinds of business jobs that had made him restless, Jordan was off tilting at windmills...
...Orchestrating the White House But as the experts’ handiwork began to have trouble getting through Congress, and as Carter’s popularity began to drop, Jordan became more important...
...Because I wasn’t John F. Kennedy...
...He may have as his closest and most trusted aides two men from south Georgia, but they stay away from the development of substantive policy...
...That’s why...
...He leaked hostile items about the newcomers to the press...
...He may be self-confident, but he’s also the man who says the biggest disappointment of his life, besides the loss of the Georgia governorship in 1966, was being nosed out of a Rhodes Scholarship in his senior year in college...
...Because Washington’s appointed class doesn’t heap laurels on people with these qualities, they often become hostile, as Jordan has...
...Another mask Jordan likes to wear is that of an aw-shucksing dumb old country boy, which he uses when dealing with people he doesn’t want to open himself up to...
...As a senior in high school he was governor of the Key Clubs of Georgia, a junior branch of the Kiwanis, and he was president of his freshman class at the University of Georgia...
...and there are people who have succeeded by accumulating enough credentials and expertise to fulfill the needs and wants of one employer...
...He kept Washington insiders from getting jobs they had been promised by others...
...It was then, in another administration of outsiders, that Jordan first got his reputation as arrogant, as a rube, and as a noticeably sloppy dresserthe opposite of what he had been before...
...Shortly after the election, Jordan found that Watson had allotted him just one assistant for the period until January 20...
...He’s Gonna Win’ Spencer Lee remembers Jordan buttonholing him at the mini-convention in Kansas City in the fall of 1974 and telling him earnestly that Carter was running for president, that “I’m dedicated to the man and he’s gonna win and I want you to help...
...And Johnson’s successor was even worse...
...The majesty of the office -I really feel that matters so much...
...It is a complex story...
...No doubt some of these forces are psychological ones locked deep in Jordan’s childhood, but some of them are quite plain...
...Prominent and Affluent Jordan grew up different from what he now appears to be...
...she is now deputy director of the Environmental Protection Agency...
...People were very angry,” says one person who was there...
...For one thing, Carter himself is as predictable as a grandfather clock and as straitlaced as a . Bible instructor, which leaves Jordan as the receptacle of people’s natural curiosity about the White House...
...It was rare that he was in a bad mood...
...His idea of how to spend leisure time, his friends say, was forged in the Phi Delta Theta fraternity house at the University of Georgia, and that, along with a natural irreverance, is why he acts the way he acts...
...He was the best dresser of his group of volunteers, his Vietnamese pajamas always a little finer and fresher than his friends...
Vol. 10 • April 1978 • No. 2
