Clinton's Crisis: The Master Fixer in a Fix

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Beneath the practiced politesse of his delivery, Vernon Jordan's eyes were blazing. His sonorous voice was edged with contempt for the very idea that a roomful of reporters could question his honor. Standing under the hot lights last Thursday, Bill Clinton's close friend and unofficial adviser made it clear that this media circus meant little to him. "Never apologize, never explain"--that had been his motto for 17 years, ever since he left the presidency of the National Urban League after a racist gunman nearly took his life, going on to become Washington's most powerful back-room fixer. Now he had to violate that principle and offer a partial explanation of his role in the tawdry matter of Monica Lewinsky. "After I shall have read my statement," he said, wrapping himself in a protective layer of syntax, "I will not take questions. I'm going to leave and go back to work."

But this was the essence of Jordan's work--doing what he could to help a powerful friend. Only this time, Jordan was forced to do it in public, which broke the cardinal rule of the big-time Washington operator. Jordan, like other dealmakers before him--Clark Clifford, Edward Bennett Williams, Jordan's partner Robert Strauss--is a larger-than-life figure. But unlike them, he chooses to be virtually invisible--a self-protective mechanism he put into place after he was shot. He makes few speeches, shuns TV, grants almost no interviews and never, ever discusses his friendship with Clinton--with anyone. That discretion magnifies his value because Jordan appears at Clinton's side at the direst of times. He was with Governor Clinton in 1980 after the young pol's bitter electoral defeat. He was with President Clinton on the night of Vincent Foster's suicide, the day of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's fatal plane crash, and the night consultant Dick Morris was thrown overboard at the 1996 Democratic National Convention because of a sex scandal. He knows how to clean up a mess. "The last thing he'd ever do is betray a friendship," Clinton once told the New York Times. "It's good to have a friend like that."

Jordan wields enormous influence over Clinton, yet sees no conflict when one of the 11 blue-chip corporations of which he is a director ends up profiting from a decision he helped the President make. He oversees a staff of close to 100 registered lobbyists but provides little or no public disclosure of his own influence-peddling activities. He earns $1 million a year from a law practice that requires him to file no brief and visit no courtroom, because his billable hours tend to be logged in posh restaurants, on cellular telephones, in the tufted-leather backseats of limousines--making a deft introduction here, nudging a legislative position there, ironing out an indelicate situation before it makes the papers.