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Vernon Jordan: ‘It’s not a crime to be close to Wall St’
The White House and Wall St powerbroker on race, his friends the Clintons and being a Beltway insider
JBCSCAugust 17, 2018
We have barely sat down and the mobile phone of one of the most connected men in America is ringing. Vernon Jordan and I have just arrived at San Pietro, the homey Italian power lunch spot in Midtown Manhattan where he is a regular. He apologises but really must take this call. Is it perhaps a senator or captain of industry? By the time the call ends San Pietro is humming with Masters of the Universe, and I soon have to move to Jordan’s side of the table to hear him above the din. My back is to the throng, but occasionally I turn my head and confirm that — yet again — he is the only black person in the room.
It is Thursday, and Jordan will later take the train back to his home in Washington. Now 83, he splits his time between the two cities that have defined his life for almost five decades. His career has taken him from the White House to Wall Street and back. From Monday to Thursday, he is in New York at Lazard, the venerable investment bank he joined nearly 20 years ago. On Fridays, he can be found at Akin Gump, the Washington law and lobbying firm to which his mentor, the super-lawyer and Democratic party grandee Bob Strauss, lured him over 35 years ago.
Jordan is, strictly speaking, neither attorney nor banker. Rather he is a whisperer to the powerful, the man who can make the introduction, give the straight talk and soothe the egos of business titans. His powerbroker persona is most manifest in his decades-long friendship with Bill and Hillary Clinton. To jaded voters on the left and right, he is the ultimate Washington insider, a man whose seamless waltz between business and politics has fuelled resentment at an incestuous system. Yet his successes in the boardroom and the smoke-filled backroom have, by now, obscured a distinguished role in the civil rights movement — and an upbringing in the segregated Deep South. Born into a world that had little use for his talents, Vernon Jordan would make himself indispensable.
Henry Louis Gates, the celebrated Harvard historian, tells me he regards Jordan as the man most responsible for breaking down the colour barrier in corporate America. “Historians will remember Vernon Jordan as the Rosa Parks of Wall Street,” he says.
We have a corner spot against the window facing 54th Street, a relatively quiet section where Jordan can take the whole scene in. Nibbling at the crudités on our table, Jordan asks if I’ll have a drink. I stick to mineral water, as does he. “I’ve been going to 21 for a long time but the food is better here,” he says, referring to the fabled 21 Club, his other favourite haunt just down the street.
This will be our second lunch together. The first came during my time as an MBA intern at Lazard, when our group would gather each week in the partners’ dining room to meet the firm’s heavy-hitters. Vernon’s easy manner at San Pietro is familiar from that June day in 2005. Dressed as impeccably as ever in a blue suit and monogrammed dress shirt, his handkerchief folded neatly in his breast pocket, he is also showing his age: the 6ft 4in frame is leaner, the stride slower, and the booming baritone voice that won oratory competitions as a teenager has softened considerably.
I wonder how Jordan compares Washington with New York, where he first moved in 1970. “One is a company town, Washington. There is only one conversation,” he says. “New York, on the other hand, is about business. But it’s also about culture. It’s about entertainment. And I feel like as I go back and forth between the two, that I have the best of both worlds.”
In the weeks after our lunch, reports of payments made to Donald Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen by companies such as AT&T and Novartis revived memories of how the president railed against the nexus of politics and big business during his 2016 campaign. As one of the smoothest operators on Washington’s K Street, does Jordan think the seamy culture of influence-peddling that Trump labelled “the Swamp” is a real phenomenon? “The word ‘swamp’ is an insult to dedicated public servants who chose to go to Washington and serve,” he says. “I think ‘the Swamp’ negates that dedication.”
It’s a curious answer. I point out that the term is generally taken to refer less to the civil service than to the lobbyists, consultants and grifters who relentlessly advocate on behalf of moneyed interests. “I think they’re all part of the process and they’re on every side of every issue,” the Akin Gump man replies, unruffled.
The proprietor arrives at our table to hand us menus. But San Pietro is a place where insiders know you have to order from the specials, and there are enough to fill what seems like five minutes of description. Jordan listens patiently and decides on the asparagus to start and then the sea bass. I go with a green salad and grilled salmon.
“Are you a big eater?” Jordan asks. “I love eating,” he beams. “My mother had the best catering business in Atlanta when I was growing up.”
Jordan was born in the Georgian capital just six years after another eminent Atlantan, Dr Martin Luther King Jr. His father was a postal worker who frowned on his son’s ambition, with his mother serving as his ultimate inspiration. As a teenager, he waited tables at events where she was working. He was mesmerised by the world of the white lawyers and businessmen he served.
When Jordan left Georgia for DePauw University in rural Indiana in 1953, he was the only black student in his class; he recalls that at the time of his arrival, the town had no barbers willing to cut a black person’s hair. His segregated education left him unprepared for college too: “We were reading the history of civilisation and my classmates, who’d gone to private schools and fine township high schools, were on chapter six; I was struggling to get out of the preface.” But he persevered and went on after graduation to Howard University, the historically black university in Washington that was the training ground for many of the era’s finest civil rights lawyers.
In 1960, by then married and with a child, he returned to Atlanta to work for a civil rights attorney, Donald Hollowell, for $35 a week. It was a galaxy away from San Pietro. He remembers defending a young black man arrested and sentenced to death in a rural Georgian town where no restaurant served black customers; Jordan and his colleagues would go to the market to buy a loaf of bread, cold meat and a soft drink, and retreat to the parking lot.
Working for Hollowell, Jordan helped win the 1961 legal challenge that desegregated the University of Georgia. In a scene that played out across the south, angry white crowds demonstrated as black students attempted to enrol. Jordan escorted his client Charlayne Hunter through the mob, a moment captured in a now-famous photograph. Later that year, he became Georgia’s field office head for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and then moved on to the Southern Regional Council and the Voter Education Project. This was dangerous work, criss-crossing Georgia organising black voter registration efforts, running the risk of lynchings by the Ku Klux Klan.
@FTLifeArts on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first. Subscribe to FT Life on YouTube for the latest FT Weekend videos
Subscribe to read | Financial Times
Vernon Jordan: ‘It’s not a crime to be close to Wall St’
The White House and Wall St powerbroker on race, his friends the Clintons and being a Beltway insider
JBCSCAugust 17, 2018
We have barely sat down and the mobile phone of one of the most connected men in America is ringing. Vernon Jordan and I have just arrived at San Pietro, the homey Italian power lunch spot in Midtown Manhattan where he is a regular. He apologises but really must take this call. Is it perhaps a senator or captain of industry? By the time the call ends San Pietro is humming with Masters of the Universe, and I soon have to move to Jordan’s side of the table to hear him above the din. My back is to the throng, but occasionally I turn my head and confirm that — yet again — he is the only black person in the room.
It is Thursday, and Jordan will later take the train back to his home in Washington. Now 83, he splits his time between the two cities that have defined his life for almost five decades. His career has taken him from the White House to Wall Street and back. From Monday to Thursday, he is in New York at Lazard, the venerable investment bank he joined nearly 20 years ago. On Fridays, he can be found at Akin Gump, the Washington law and lobbying firm to which his mentor, the super-lawyer and Democratic party grandee Bob Strauss, lured him over 35 years ago.
Jordan is, strictly speaking, neither attorney nor banker. Rather he is a whisperer to the powerful, the man who can make the introduction, give the straight talk and soothe the egos of business titans. His powerbroker persona is most manifest in his decades-long friendship with Bill and Hillary Clinton. To jaded voters on the left and right, he is the ultimate Washington insider, a man whose seamless waltz between business and politics has fuelled resentment at an incestuous system. Yet his successes in the boardroom and the smoke-filled backroom have, by now, obscured a distinguished role in the civil rights movement — and an upbringing in the segregated Deep South. Born into a world that had little use for his talents, Vernon Jordan would make himself indispensable.
Henry Louis Gates, the celebrated Harvard historian, tells me he regards Jordan as the man most responsible for breaking down the colour barrier in corporate America. “Historians will remember Vernon Jordan as the Rosa Parks of Wall Street,” he says.
We have a corner spot against the window facing 54th Street, a relatively quiet section where Jordan can take the whole scene in. Nibbling at the crudités on our table, Jordan asks if I’ll have a drink. I stick to mineral water, as does he. “I’ve been going to 21 for a long time but the food is better here,” he says, referring to the fabled 21 Club, his other favourite haunt just down the street.
This will be our second lunch together. The first came during my time as an MBA intern at Lazard, when our group would gather each week in the partners’ dining room to meet the firm’s heavy-hitters. Vernon’s easy manner at San Pietro is familiar from that June day in 2005. Dressed as impeccably as ever in a blue suit and monogrammed dress shirt, his handkerchief folded neatly in his breast pocket, he is also showing his age: the 6ft 4in frame is leaner, the stride slower, and the booming baritone voice that won oratory competitions as a teenager has softened considerably.
I wonder how Jordan compares Washington with New York, where he first moved in 1970. “One is a company town, Washington. There is only one conversation,” he says. “New York, on the other hand, is about business. But it’s also about culture. It’s about entertainment. And I feel like as I go back and forth between the two, that I have the best of both worlds.”
In the weeks after our lunch, reports of payments made to Donald Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen by companies such as AT&T and Novartis revived memories of how the president railed against the nexus of politics and big business during his 2016 campaign. As one of the smoothest operators on Washington’s K Street, does Jordan think the seamy culture of influence-peddling that Trump labelled “the Swamp” is a real phenomenon? “The word ‘swamp’ is an insult to dedicated public servants who chose to go to Washington and serve,” he says. “I think ‘the Swamp’ negates that dedication.”
It’s a curious answer. I point out that the term is generally taken to refer less to the civil service than to the lobbyists, consultants and grifters who relentlessly advocate on behalf of moneyed interests. “I think they’re all part of the process and they’re on every side of every issue,” the Akin Gump man replies, unruffled.
The proprietor arrives at our table to hand us menus. But San Pietro is a place where insiders know you have to order from the specials, and there are enough to fill what seems like five minutes of description. Jordan listens patiently and decides on the asparagus to start and then the sea bass. I go with a green salad and grilled salmon.
“Are you a big eater?” Jordan asks. “I love eating,” he beams. “My mother had the best catering business in Atlanta when I was growing up.”
Jordan was born in the Georgian capital just six years after another eminent Atlantan, Dr Martin Luther King Jr. His father was a postal worker who frowned on his son’s ambition, with his mother serving as his ultimate inspiration. As a teenager, he waited tables at events where she was working. He was mesmerised by the world of the white lawyers and businessmen he served.
When Jordan left Georgia for DePauw University in rural Indiana in 1953, he was the only black student in his class; he recalls that at the time of his arrival, the town had no barbers willing to cut a black person’s hair. His segregated education left him unprepared for college too: “We were reading the history of civilisation and my classmates, who’d gone to private schools and fine township high schools, were on chapter six; I was struggling to get out of the preface.” But he persevered and went on after graduation to Howard University, the historically black university in Washington that was the training ground for many of the era’s finest civil rights lawyers.
In 1960, by then married and with a child, he returned to Atlanta to work for a civil rights attorney, Donald Hollowell, for $35 a week. It was a galaxy away from San Pietro. He remembers defending a young black man arrested and sentenced to death in a rural Georgian town where no restaurant served black customers; Jordan and his colleagues would go to the market to buy a loaf of bread, cold meat and a soft drink, and retreat to the parking lot.
Working for Hollowell, Jordan helped win the 1961 legal challenge that desegregated the University of Georgia. In a scene that played out across the south, angry white crowds demonstrated as black students attempted to enrol. Jordan escorted his client Charlayne Hunter through the mob, a moment captured in a now-famous photograph. Later that year, he became Georgia’s field office head for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and then moved on to the Southern Regional Council and the Voter Education Project. This was dangerous work, criss-crossing Georgia organising black voter registration efforts, running the risk of lynchings by the Ku Klux Klan.
@FTLifeArts on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first. Subscribe to FT Life on YouTube for the latest FT Weekend videos
Sujeet Indap?
