Hamilton Jordan, Chief of Staff

William Hamilton McWhorter Jordan (September 21, 1944 – May 20, 2008) was Chief of Staff to President of the United States Jimmy Carter.

• Hamilton Jordan MSNBC video
  
• "A Boy From Georgia" by Hamilton Jordan YouTube
  
• Time Magazine: The President's Boys Monday, June 06, 1977
  

Jordan was born in Charlotte, North Carolina. He grew up in Albany, Georgia. He attended the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, where he was a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. Jordan graduated with an A.B. in Political Science in 1967. After being disqualified from military service due to leg problems, he worked as a civilian volunteer in Vietnam during the war there, assisting refugees.

In 1970, at the age of 26, Jordan ran Jimmy Carter's successful gubernatorial campaign, which included a Democratic primary election fight against former Governor Carl Sanders and a less eventful general election against the Republican Hal Suit. While serving as Governor Carter's executive assistant, Jordan wrote a lengthy memorandum detailing a strategy for winning the 1976 Democratic Primary.Years later, Jordan's memo served as the "game plan" for Carter's 1976 presidential bid.

Jordan was a key advisor and strategist for Carter during the 1976 presidential campaign and during Carter's administration, serving as White House Chief of Staff in 1979–1980 (Carter, who took office in 1977, had previously not seen the need formally to appoint an aide to such a post). Jordan played a powerful role in the formulation of election strategies and government policies.

In 1976 Jordan's youth and casual style gave him a media reputation as a fun-loving, partying, unsophisticated "good ole boy." This turned into a problem during the last year of the Carter administration, when Jordan became a lightning rod for critics of the president across the political spectrum. The media repeated rumors of coarse and even criminal behavior by Jordan, including supposed cocaine usage and anonymous sex at the infamous Studio 54 disco in New York City. Though extensive legal investigations failed to substantiate any of the rumors. Jordan later recalled this as a particularly painful time in his life.

According to one often repeated story from this period, Jordan stared at the breasts of the Egyptian ambassador's wife at a Washington reception and remarked, "I have always wanted to see the pyramids". The story was told in various versions, all based on anonymous sources. Jordan denied it ever took place in his memoir No Such Thing as a Bad Day. CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite later recalled that the network's coverage of the cocaine allegations against Jordan was the "worst story he had ever broadcast."

(Jordan's associate, Timothy Kraft, the 1980 Carter campaign manager, was accused of cocaine use at a party in New Orleans and left the campaign some five weeks before the general election. He was cleared in 1981 by special prosecutor Gerald J. Gallinghouse, a Republican former U.S. Attorney who had earlier prosecuted corruption in the Louisiana state government.

In 1986, Jordan ran for the Democratic nomination for one of Georgia's seats in the United States Senate. He lost the primary to Representative Wyche Fowler, who went on to win the general election against the Republican incumbent Mack Mattingly.
In 1992, he became a high-level staffer on the presidential campaign of independent candidate Ross Perot. In later years he served both as a member of the founders council and as an important public advocate for Unity08, a political movement focused on reforming the American two party system.

Jordan was portrayed by Kyle Chandler in the 2012 film Argo.

Jordan was chief executive of the Association of Tennis Professionals when they took control of the professional men's world tennis tour in 1990. His nephew, R. Lawton Jordan, served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs during Bill Clinton's administration. Jordan authored the book No Such Thing as a Bad Day in 2000.

He and his wife Dorothy, a pediatric oncology nurse, founded a camp for children with cancer – Camp Sunshine – and a camp for children with diabetes – Camp Kudzu – in Georgia.[citation needed] He was an honorary board member of the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation. An earlier marriage, to Nancy Konigsmark, ended in divorce.

His son, Hamilton Jordan Jr., is a member of the experimental metal band Genghis Tron. His two other children, Kathleen and Alex, both attended Kenyon College. Alex, Kathleen and Hamilton Jr. helped to complete their father's memoir about growing up in the 1950s South, A Boy From Georgia. Jordan wrote about 90% of the work, with Kathleen, a TV/film comedy executive, penning the balance. Jordan's original title for the memoir was Meet the Gottheimers, a reference to the fact that he had discovered, not until he was in college, that his maternal grandmother had been Jewish.

Jordan died on May 20, 2008, aged 63, from peritoneal mesothelioma, which he believed resulted from his exposure to asbestos during his volunteer service in Viet Nam. He had survived several other forms of cancer earlier in his life, including diffuse histiocytic non-Hodgkin lymphoma, melanoma, and prostate cancer. His body was cremated. Source

NYTimes obituary

Hamilton Jordan's Discovered Jewish Ancestry

Hamilton Jordan New Georgia Encylopedia

Time Magazine: The President's Boys Monday, June 06, 1977

In the long drive to get their man elected President, William Hamilton Jordan, 32, and Joseph Lester Powell Jr., 33, broke most of the rules of politics. Now that Jimmy Carter has reached the White House, the two young men —just call 'em Ham and Jody—are still breaking the rules.
Jordan, the top White House aide, and Powell, the press secretary, dress as they please, ridicule pretense, joke incessantly, talk back to the boss, shun lunch at Sans Souci and rarely turn up at social functions . . . Continued

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Hamilton Jordan's Jewish family

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Hamilton Jordan, President Jimmy Carter’s wunderkind adviser and chief of staff, discovered at age 20 that his family’s story wasn’t a straightforward Christian Southern experience. At the cemetery service for his maternal grandmother, Helen, Jordan was puzzled to discover her plot was nestled alongside that of a Jewish family. They weren’t strangers; they were his ancestors.

A bit of digging revealed that his beloved grandmother was herself Jewish. She had married his Baptist grandfather in the years immediately preceding the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank — a Jewish man who was framed for a murder he did not commit — in a South that viewed Jews as unacceptably different. His own mother would never speak of her Jewish roots.

It’s largely tracking his moral journey in the context of race. I think a linchpin moment in the book and in his own life [was] realizing that he was the victim of persecution at age 20. Standing at that gravesite and realizing that his family was Jewish and that was a secret — and it was a secret for a reason.

Did he have an inkling? After he sees the gravesite, did he ask family members? He asks his mother about this three times. First she says, ‘Later. It’s too much.’ [Eventually she says] ‘Hamilton, I’ll never talk of this.’

Before my dad died and when he was working on the book, it blew our minds that he wasn’t going to ask his uncle about it. It was 2006 or 2007, and we said, ‘Are you kidding? You have the chance to hear his stories and feelings of persecution he experienced — or even marginalization.’ It seemed a very quiet kind of thing. A social thing.

Did learning he was Jewish inform the way your father thought about the world? Absolutely. He spent the rest of his life trying to connect with the Jewish community.

He was baptized Baptist. We grew up Episcopalian. But culturally he was drawn to it. And it had an impact on his relationship to the civil rights movement; I think it made it personal for him. It made civil rights even more personal.

Source

A Boy From Georgia: Coming of Age in the Segregated South,  By Hamilton Jordan - Google Preview