Rarely seen in the spotlight, the Ace of Spades was always observing . . . whispering . . . backstage. He didn’t much like the glare of the spotlight, turning down Bill Clinton’s offer to be the first black attorney general of the United States, turning down a seat on the Foreign Intelligence Committee, turning down being commissioner of the National Football League. When IBM needed a new CEO, they went to Vernon Jordan—to tell them whom to hire.
He was comfortable in the offstage tabernacles of the powerful and the wealthy, like the Century Club in New York or the Bohemian Grove in northern California, though he had a wicked sense of humor, which he displayed at these moneyed white places. The first time he ate at the long-segregated Century Club, he ordered watermelon. Asked to give the headliner Lakeside Talk at the Bohemian Grove, he titled his speech “The Coming Revolution”: “I figured that would interest people or scare them enough to boost attendance. There was always the possibility that some people might think I would show up wearing bandoliers and carrying grenades. But I was with the Urban League, not the Black Panthers.” He was the Ace of Spades, hobnobbing with the powerful and the privileged but letting them know that he knew that white boys were the ones he was dealing with.
With the possible exception of deputy White House counsel Bruce Lindsey, Vernon Jordan was Bill Clinton’s best friend. As former White House counsel Lloyd Cutler put it, “Presidents need to have someone they can relax with. He is a good, loyal friend.” William Coleman said, “He is as close to the president as anyone I know since Bobby Kennedy was so close to his brother.”
Their friendship went all the way back to the seventies, when Vernon Jordan traveled around Arkansas as the head of the National Urban League and met Bill Clinton at a fund-raiser. After his election, Bill Clinton’s first dinner in Washington was at Vernon Jordan’s home. The Clintons and the Jordans had Christmas Eve dinner every year there, as well. The Ace of Spades and the president golfed together all the time, chatted twice a day. Vernon and Ann and Hillary and Bill even vacationed together. Vernon ran Bill’s 1992 transition team and Ann was cochairman of Bill’s 1996 inauguration.
It was the Ace of Spades to whom the president turned when he wanted to find out if Colin Powell was interested in being his secretary of state . . . when he needed a representative to attend the inauguration of Taiwan’s first democratically elected president . . . when the way had to be smoothed for Les Aspen’s resignation as secretary of defense . . . when Lloyd Cutler had to be approached to replace Bernie Nussbaum as White House counsel . . . when Web Hubbell, about to resign as associate attorney general to face criminal charges, needed a job. When Vince Foster committed suicide and Bill Clinton went down to his widow’s house, it was Vernon Jordan who went with him and who then stayed with him in the White House until two o’clock in the morning.
Even White House staffers knew how much clout the Ace of Spades packed. When George Stephanopoulos wanted an office in the White House closer to the president’s, directly within the Oval Office suite, he didn’t ask Bill Clinton; he asked Vernon Jordan, and Vernon Jordan got the office for him. (Stephanopoulos called him “our wise man.”) Perhaps the closeness between Vernon Jordan and Bill Clinton—the brotherhood between them—was most vividly portrayed in the photograph of the two of them that Vernon Jordan often showed friends. They were standing shoulder-to-shoulder, singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often called “the black national anthem,” and Bill Clinton had inscribed it: “From the only WASP who knows the lyrics.”
Vernon Jordan and Bill Clinton were also best friends on a male level. “What we talk about mostly is pussy” was Vernon Jordan’s response to a reporter who asked him what he and the president talked about on the golf course. He was as sexual a man as Bill Clinton; long known as a “lady-killer,” who was sometimes overheard at banquets mock-whispering about some young woman’s finer points. He could be heard at those same dinners chortling over titillating gossip or letting his voice soar in the telling of a bawdy tale.
He didn’t seem all that concerned about his reputation: “I like people. I’ve always liked people. I like all kinds of people and I’m not going to stop liking people. The interpretation of people’s thoughts about that has absolutely nothing to do with my professional responsibilities.” Arms folded and scowling, he had another response, too: “I know who I am. I am the custodian of my morality and ethics. I am, on that, answerable to myself.” His wife didn’t seem to mind his reputation, either: “I’m sure women find him attractive. I do.”
Sometimes Vernon Jordan just laughed about his reputation and said, “Nothing wrong with a little locker room talk.” His reputation extended to his interest in finding work for young people, especially young women. “Much is required of those to whom much is given,” Vernon Jordan said about his job-placement efforts.
A young woman for whom he’d gotten a job said, “When you’re a woman, an attractive woman, and Vernon does something for you, there is an expectation that there will be some extracurricular activities.” Another young woman said, “He’s flirtatious. That’s just his style. I don’t remember anybody hostile saying, ‘Vernon hit on me.’ I just can’t think of a time people were angry about it. People roll their eyes and say, ‘Oh, that’s Vernon.’ ” Even Monica felt his sexual power. “Give him a hug for me,” she told Jordan, talking about the president. “I don’t hug men,” Vernon Jordan told her.
For Washington insiders, there was one public moment that was all-revealing about the intimacy of the relationship between the president of the United States and the Ace of Spades. It happened at a state dinner in 1995. The president was sitting next to a hot young blonde, and sitting next to her was Vernon Jordan. The president observed the Ace of Spades flirting with her and said, “I saw her first, Vernon!” And Vernon Jordan and Bill Clinton laughed and laughed.
“Vernon knows a lot of stuff about the president and his personal life,” former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers said. “But he’ll never trade on it. Vernon understands how power works better than anyone I know. He talks to the president about everything, I think, but it would diminish his power if he talked about it. He protects the president, his friend.” Mary Frances Berry of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights said, “Vernon is an old hand. He knows the issues. He knows what the political problems are. He knows where the bodies are buried.”
This was the extraordinary man . . . Bill Clinton’s brilliant, battle-scarred, distinguished, hard-nosed, sexual, loving black brother . . . whom Kenneth W. Starr was counting on to finger the president of the United States for obstruction of justice.
He was named for George Washington’s Mount Vernon home . . . lucky that he wasn’t named, like one of his brothers, for Warren Harding. He grew up in Atlanta’s segregated projects—his father was a mail clerk for the army. His mother ran Mary Jordan’s Catering Service for the wealthy whites of Atlanta. He was his mother’s son. “If you got some money,” she told him, “you can do most anything you want . . . . Never forget your base, never forget where you came from. But even if you were born in the projects, always carry your smile, and that smile will carry you a long way.” When Vernon Jordan came back from someplace, his mother would ask him, “What did you see? What did you hear? What did you learn?”
As a little boy, he stayed close to the projects. “You knew there was colored water and there was white water,” he would say later. “You knew you sat upstairs in the theater and it was a way of life. You understood that. It never meant you accepted it.” When he was ten, he saw the white world. Vernon Jordan went with his mother to the homes of the prominent wealthy, where she catered parties. He either bartended or helped her in the kitchen. He would sneak out of the kitchen sometimes to watch the wealthy white people. Watching a group of lawyers at Atlanta’s white Lawyers’ Club made a lifelong impression on him. “I liked the way they dressed. I liked their manners. I admired their bearing, the way they articulated the issues, if not the substance of their positio
ns.”
The schools he attended were as segregated as the bathrooms, the streetcars, and the lunch counters. Vernon Jordan studied hard, got excellent grades, and played basketball. He was accepted at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. He was the only black in his class, one of five in the school. He appeared in the school play and even wrote a play about white racism. He continued playing basketball. He was vice president of the school’s Democratic Club. He was a political science major, with a minor in history and speech. He won first prize for oratory in a state contest. He graduated with distinction. He wanted to go to law school but didn’t have the money. He went to Chicago and became a bus driver, working sixteen hours a day, and got into Howard University.
Graduating with honors from Howard, he got job offers from many of the big East Coast white law firms. He turned them all down. He went back to Atlanta. He hurled his formidable intelligence and energy into being a part of the civil rights movement. He became a clerk in the law office of distinguished civil rights attorney Donald Hollowell. His personal hero was another Atlanta black civil rights attorney, A. T. Walden, who for years had argued doomed cases in front of white racist judges. “I can remember him standing erect and tall. To see him was to want to walk like him and talk like him.”
In 1961, as a twenty-four-year-old law clerk, he accompanied Charlayne Hunter, the first black admitted to the University of Georgia, to class. News footage showed a tall Hollywood-handsome young black man using his body as a shield and a wedge to get the frightened Hunter through a sea of crazed, spitting white faces screaming, “Die, nigger, die!”
At a moment in history when racial violence threatened to engulf America, Vernon Jordan was forming his own philosophy. He rejected the Panthers and Rap Browns and Stokely Carmichaels, who urged picking up the gun and cried, “Burn, baby, burn!” Vernon Jordan believed in political power as the road to equality, in voter registration, and in the economic boycott. He believed in the brain and not the firebomb. He believed in the idea of a black intellectual elite of social activists who would fight verbally in courtrooms and boardrooms to ease the burden of the less educated. He believed in the ballot box, not the soapbox. “You’ve got to have an intellectual, working black elite,” he said, “and you can’t get that standing on the corner.”
He joined the NAACP and traveled all over the South, calling for economic boycotts of companies and industries that wouldn’t hire blacks and coordinating voter registration drives. He became director of the voter education project of the Southern Regional Council. He worked relentlessly, driving himself, sleeping in church halls, forcing black people by sheer will to register to vote. By 1968, the South had nearly 2 million new black voters, the number of black elected officials had jumped tenfold, and Vernon Jordan was a nationally known civil rights leader.
Author Taylor Branch remembered him: “He had an aura of being luminous and glamorous as he was supervising people registering voters five years after it had gone out of fashion.” The Reverend Ralph Abernathy called him “one of the ablest and articulate voices in the civil and human rights movement.” Vernon Jordan was so well respected within the movement, even by black nationalists, that he became a high-level mediator within the movement itself.
When he was about to run for Congress in 1970, he was asked to become head of the United Negro College Fund. He gave up his own political ambitions to further the cause of black education—which he felt was perhaps the worst of black people’s problems. A year later, when Whitney Young, executive director of the National Urban League, drowned, he was asked to replace Young. He accepted.
Vernon Jordan believed that the struggle was shifting from the South to the ghettos of American cities and believed the Urban League could do something to help. He believed that for white corporate America, the Urban League was a much easier alternative than dealing with the more incendiary cries for black power. Vernon Jordan hammered the white corporations for job training and early-education programs. He saw the Urban League as a bridge between white executives and the urban poor.
As Drew S. Days, former director of Civil Rights in the Justice Department, said, “He was able to make an important link between the Civil Rights Movement and the corporate world. He was hard-nosed in showing corporate leaders why it was often in their interests to provide support.” A corporate leader who worked with him at the time said, “Vernon cannot be manipulated. He’s a tough customer. You can never get Vernon to do something because you want him to do it. He knows how to say no.”
Vernon Jordan soon had a $100 million budget to work with, supplied by corporate America and the federal government. “If I do a good job here,” he said, “black people are not the only beneficiary, so is the country. The country has a vested interest in black people doing well.” When he was not in boardrooms, hammering corporate execs, he was making speeches across America, urging Americans to do something about the nightmare of existence in the inner city.
One of those speeches took place on May 29, 1980, at the Marriott Inn in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where the Fort Wayne Chapterof the Urban League was having its dinner. In his speech, he condemned “the blind enthusiasm of the country’s move to the right, especially the move toward a balanced budget at the expense of social programs.” At the dinner afterward, he met thirty-six-year-old Martha C. Coleman, a member of the Urban League’s Fort Wayne board of directors, a secretary at International Harvester, a white divorcée who had been married to a black man. After the dinner, Vernon Jordan went to Coleman’s house, where, according to her, they had coffee and played the stereo.
At two o’clock that morning, she drove him back to his room at the Marriott. On the way there, stopped at a red light two miles from the hotel, a car full of white teenagers pulled up next to them. They started screaming obscenities and racial epithets at the interracial couple and drove off. Coleman drove him to the hotel, and when Vernon Jordan got out of the car, a .30-06 bullet (the kind used to hunt bear and deer) struck him in the lower back, just left of the spinal cord.
“As soon as the projectile entered, there was an explosive effect like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” an emergency room doctor said. “It was purely a miracle that it missed the spinal column. Had it exploded a millionth of a second later, there would be absolutely no chance for survival.” The gunshot ripped a fist-size hole in Vernon Jordan’s back. He underwent five surgeries.
Fort Wayne police, seeing that he had been with a white woman and knowing she had been married to a black man, called it “a domestic-type thing.” They made much of the fact that he had spent hours alone with Coleman at her house “with the stereo playing.” John E. Jacob, executive vice president of the Urban League, held a press conference, saying the organization had “grown increasingly disturbed over the diversion of public attention away from the horrible nature of the crime and onto matters of speculation, innuendo, and gossip.”
Characteristically, in one of his first public statements after the shooting, Vernon Jordan said, “It is significant to note that, since over the years many blacks died on a highway because no hospital would take them because they were black, here in 1980 I would get shot in a little town like Fort Wayne and be rushed to a hospital where the internist in the operating room was black, the anesthesiologist was black, and the surgeon was black. Now what that suggests is that there has been some progress.”
The man who’d waited for two hours on a grassy knoll to shoot Vernon Jordan was a thirty-year-old drifter from Mobile, Alabama, who’d renamed himself Joseph Paul Franklin—in tribute to Benjamin Franklin and Paul Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister. He was a sometime member of the American Nazi party and the Ku Klux Klan. He had the grim reaper and the American eagle tattooed on his forearms.
He had already sent a threatening note to President Carter and had visited Chicago, hunting for Jesse Jackson. He would say many years later that he “just happened to be” in Fort Wayne when he heard that Vernon Jordan would be speaking there. Hi
s intent was to start a race war in America, and he was so angry that Fort Wayne police were calling Jordan’s shooting a “domestic-type thing” that he quickly drove to Cincinnati and gunned down two black teenagers.
Born James Clayton Vaughn, he was unable to see with his right eye at birth. Both his parents were alcoholics. He rarely went to school. “I made very low grades. The only time I got an A was in conduct. I was one of those really quiet kids.” At eleven, staying with his uncle in Georgia, he was already carrying a loaded rifle as he roamed the woods. “I was just pretending like I was shooting, but I wasn’t really shooting it.” At twelve, he shot a pistol for the first time. At sixteen, his brother gave him a 16-gauge shotgun, took him into the woods, and taught him how to hunt.
For the rest of his life, he “always had a gun.” He watched hundreds of television Westerns and would make believe that he was a cowboy. He never liked the sheriff; it was the outlaw he felt himself to be. He liked to dress up as a cowboy, but he always dressed in black—black cowboy hat, black boots, black jeans. In his midteens, he started reading Nazi literature. “Once you consciously go over the stuff over and over again, it just goes down in your conscience and you begin to think that blacks and Jews aren’t even people at all.”
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