Chauffeur turned titan on Wall Street
Longtime confidant to Bill Clinton
Vernon Jordan, a civil rights pioneer and Washington power broker who was a behind-the-scenes force in former president Bill Clinton's administration, has died. He was 85.
Jordan died Monday evening, his daughter, Vickee Jordan, said in an emailed statement.
An activist and a longtime confidant to Clinton, Jordan was a rare person to straddle Wall Street and Washington in prominent positions and break racial divisions along the way. He grew up in Jim Crow Georgia and worked as a chauffeur to a white banker, before rising to become one of the most significant advisers to corporate boards in America.
Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. has previously called Jordan the “Rosa Parks of Wall Street.”
“Vernon Jordan began life in one of the first public housing projects in America and ended life as a fixture in our country's halls of power,” President Joe Biden said in a statement. “Along the way, he became a foot soldier for civil rights, a trusted friend and counsellor to presidents,” he said.
Dubbed Clinton's “first friend” by the press, Jordan addressed diplomatic and administrative difficulties for the then-president but never accepted the cabinet post that was rumoured to be his for the asking, according to a 1998 article in Time magazine. He co-headed Clinton's 1992 transition team.
“Vernon Jordan brought his big brain and strong heart to everything and everybody he touched. And he made them better,” Clinton said in an emailed statement. “He was a wonderful friend to Hillary, Chelsea, and me, in good times and bad. We worked and played, laughed and cried, won and lost together.”
For more than three decades beginning in 1982, Jordan was a partner and counsel at the Washington office of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, where he oversaw the law firm's extensive lobbying efforts. He also was a senior managing director at Lazard, and a partner at the firm since 1999.
One source of Jordan's influence was his many corporate board memberships — among them American Express Co., Xerox Corp., Revlon Inc. and Lazard.