[Deathwatch] Hamilton Jordan, political adviser, 63

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Hamilton Jordan: Political adviser to Jimmy Carter

Saturday, 24 May 2008

Long before Karl Rove and today's generation of hot-shot political
advisers, there was Hamilton Jordan. As an aide to Jimmy Carter, and
later as his national campaign manager, Jordan plotted the ascent of
the former peanut farmer and Georgia governor mockingly referred to as
"Jimmy Who?" to the world's most powerful office.

Politics was in Jordan's blood. His grandfather had been president of
Georgia's state senate, and when it came to high-school student
elections he was already in his element. "If he didn't run himself,
he'd run his cousin," his mother told Kandy Stroud, author of the 1977
book How Jimmy Won.

Jordan first met the future President of the United States in 1966,
while he was still at university and Carter was embarking on his first
run for the Georgia statehouse. Taken with Carter's intelligence,
ambition and relatively liberal views on race ? unusual in the South of
that era ? he signed on as unpaid youth co-ordinator for the campaign.

In 1966 Carter lost, but four years later he won. No sooner was the
26-year-old Jordan installed as the new governor's executive secretary
than he was building a plan to carry his boss all the way to the White
House, a strategy set out in a 70-page memo that remains a road map
today for any outsider seeking the Presidency.

The key, Jordan argued, was to run "against Washington" and to win the
first votes in Iowa and New Hampshire, thus gaining an unstoppable
momentum. Carter signed on to the plan ? and it worked.

After securing the 1976 Democratic nomination, he entered the general
election campaign with a 20-point lead over the Republican incumbent
Gerald Ford. The gap shrank steadily, but Carter hung on for a narrow
victory, in a year when voters plainly wanted to install a new
administration and thus purge the country of Watergate and its
aftermath, once and for all.

Jordan's reward was a place as one of the new President's closest
counsellors, an influence formalised in 1979 when he became White House
chief of staff, aged just 33. He was also a founder member of the
so-called "Georgian Mafia" around Carter that soon became infamous in
establishment Washington for its brash style, and its refusal to play
the game by the traditional rules.

With his sharp tongue and sometimes rough-hewn manner, Jordan could
give particular offence. At a state dinner he is said to have likened
the bosom of the wife of the Egyptian ambassador to "the Pyramids along
the Nile". He was also (falsely) accused of taking cocaine at a New
York nightclub, and of deliberately spitting his drink at a woman in a
bar. A scornful Tip O'Neill, the House speaker, used to refer to him as
"Hannibal Jerkin" ? a play on "Jerdun", as Jordan's surname was
pronounced in the South.

At the White House, he had his successes, notably the negotiation and
Congressional passage of the Panama Canal treaties in which he played a
key role. But like many outsiders before and since, Jordan and his
fellow Georgians found Washington an unfamiliar and unyielding place,
where governing was far more difficult than campaigning. Tensions
generated by their disrespectful style almost certainly added to the
administration's difficulties, before it sank to landslide defeat at
the hands of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

For a while thereafter Jordan left politics, to become chief executive
of the newly formed Association of Tennis Professionals. But old habits
were hard to break. In 1986 he ran for the US Senate from Georgia. But
he lost the Democratic primary to Wyche Fowler, who went on win the
seat.

Thereafter he became increasingly disenchanted with the existing US
two-party system. In 1992 Jordan signed up as co-director of the White
House campaign of the iconoclastic Texas businessman Ross Perot. But
despite waging the strongest third-party campaign in 90 years, Perot
did not carry a single state.

Rupert Cornwell

William Hamilton McWhorter Jordan, political adviser and official: born
Charlotte, North Carolina 21 September 1944; Chief of Staff to
President James Carter 1979-80; died Atlanta, Georgia 20 May 2008.


Many thanks to Deathwatch Central for posting this obituary