“I’ve had a lot of great jobs,” says Vernon Jordan, in a slight understatement. They range from civil rights lawyer to corporate board member to senior partner at Akin Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld—not to mention Jordan’s less official role as confidante to former President Bill Clinton—but Jordan, 79, is perhaps best known as one of Washington, D.C.’s preeminent power brokers.
Jordan, who grew up in an Atlanta public housing project, attended law school at Howard University, then took a clerkship with Atlanta civic rights icon Donald Hollowell, who had sued the University of Georgia for refusing to admit African-American students. When the case was finally won, in 1961, Jordan escorted the school’s first two black students—Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes—to the admission office through a jeering white mob. “I was saying to myself, ‘This is why I went to law school,’” recalls Jordan.
