Former President Bill Clinton and Vernon Jordan, former adviser to President Clinton, appear together in 2014 at the LBJ Presidential Library.
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He was known and known of. I realized recently that we met once, briefly, in Little Rock. I came to appreciate him with an in-awe-of curiosity. He was Vernon Jordan Jr. And with his faith kept and his finish of a race well run, on March 1, Mr. Jordan has received exemplary eulogies, warm remembrances and laurels for his life, respect and admiration.
Jordan had Arkansas connections. He was a confidant, adviser and true friend to both President and Secretary Clinton. But long before meeting Bill and Hillary individually, introductions separated by four years, Jordan came to Arkansas. He wrote about it in his 2001 memoir, “Vernon Can Read!”
As field director for the Georgia chapter of the NAACP, headquartered in Atlanta, Jordan was offered in 1963 the job of executive assistant to the director of the Southern Regional Council. The SRC is considered the oldest interracial organization in the South.
Part of Jordan’s SRC duty was writing reports and presentations. He also wrote articles expressing his own social-justice ideas: putting things on paper, he explained in his life story, “pushes the mind toward clarity.” That clarity would be used to successfully solicit funds for the continuation of the SRC’s work.
While at the SRC, Jordan made another try at the bar exam. Rather than re-take the bar in Georgia, he arranged to come to Arkansas and take the bar here. It was 1964. He passed.
“One of the advantages of taking the Arkansas bar exam in those days was that the results were available within a week after the test was given, in marked contrast to the months it took in other states,” he said. A week after taking the exam, Jordan was an Arkansas lawyer.
It was in that same year that Jordan met Hillary Rodham. He was at Colorado State University to speak to the League of Women Voters. Rodham introduced herself. Jordan said, “We liked each other at once.” (He has shared that after then-Gov. Bill Clinton lost his first re-election bid in 1980, it was Jordan who suggested to Hillary that she take Clinton’s name.)
Jordan was speaking under the auspices of the Voter Education Project, an SRC project. The VEP, which received Jordan’s considerable attention, was run by Wiley Branton Sr., the Arkansas attorney who represented the “Little Rock Nine” in the 1957 Central High School integration crisis. The project funded local groups, including in Little Rock, actively registering Black voters.
In 1971, Jordan was offered the job of president of the National Urban League. After a speech to the Urban League of Arkansas in 1973, he met “an up-and-coming, young politician named Bill Clinton.” Jordan said he was instantly struck by Clinton’s intelligence and ambition.
The meeting occurred in Little Rock at the dawn of Clinton’s campaign for Congress representing Arkansas’s 3rd Congressional District. It was his first run for public office. He lost.
Bill Clinton’s 1974 and 1980 losses were learning experiences, steeling his public-service ethic and ambition for higher office.
When the presidency was achieved in 1992, Jordan was there for balanced advice and welcomed friendship. His keen yet humble demeanor was never more evident than in a speech delivered in December of that year to the Little Rock Chamber of Commerce, an appearance secured by Mack McLarty, President-elect Clinton’s newly announced White House Chief of Staff.
Jordan’s relatedness to Arkansas had scope.
The counsel Jordan gave to the Clintons and countless others is, for the most part, unknown. It was personal; confidential.
And that advice was mostly asked for, rather than offered, but freely given only when requested. What’s more, as has been prominently included in recent accounts, Jordan’s friendships and service — at the highest corporate, nonprofit and government levels — were characterized with honesty, humility and trust.
Vernon Jordan Jr. was an influencer. Not in the present-day, social-network sense. But traditionally, defined as “the capacity to have an effect on the character, development or behavior of someone or something.”
He influenced without pressure or coercion. But always with a sense of integrity, equanimity and love. Some of those traits were developed and nurtured in Arkansas with Arkansans.
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