Hamilton Jordan left lasting impression on Albany

ALBANY — Dougherty County Attorney Spencer Lee tells the story about his and wife Lacy’s friend Hamilton Jordan with a chuckle, relishing the unexpected punch line.

“During the time Hamilton was in Washington, I’d hear from people all the time complaining, ‘Hamilton won’t return my calls,’” Lee, who became close to Jordan when both were students at the University of Georgia, said. “They were insulted. But there’s this great story about (former House Speaker) Tip O’Neill visiting Jimmy Carter at the White House. Carter asked O’Neill what he needed, and the speaker said, ‘Could you get Hamilton Jordan to return my calls?’”

Jordan, who was born in Charlotte, N.C., but grew up in Albany, is credited with devising the strategy that propelled Georgia peanut farmer Jimmy Carter into the White House as America’s 39th president. When Carter was elected in 1976, beating Republican Gerald Ford, Jordan — then in his 20s — became one of the youngest chiefs of staff to ever serve a U.S. president.

“No other human being affected my life and career more beneficially than Hamilton Jordan,” Carter said during his eulogy at Jordan’s funeral in 2008. “I loved Hamilton like my own son, and I will miss him for the rest of my life.”

Jordan authored two books before succumbing to cancer, the 1982 political memoir “Crisis: The Last Year of the Carter Presidency” and the 2000 personal memoir “No Such Thing as a Bad Day.” He was working on two books when he died, one a collection of stories from his days growing up in Albany and a second that was to have been the definitive book on the Carter presidency.

Jordan’s 26-year-old daughter, Kathleen Jordan, a TV writer/producer who lives now in Los Angeles, took her father’s work on the first of the two books and edited it into a dynamic narrative of his childhood. That collection, “A Boy From Georgia: Coming of Age in the Segregated South,” has been released in hardback by University of Georgia Press.

Kathleen Jordan, who with her brothers Hamilton Jr., a San Francisco attorney, and Alex, a Washington lobbyist, visited Albany recently, will hold book-signing events Thursday at the Albany Museum of Art and Friday at the Albany Civil Rights Institute.

“This was definitely a labor of love,” Kathleen Jordan said of Jordan’s book during her visit. “Dad had been working on it off and on for more than 10 years, but he really got serious about it over the last three years of his life. When I started editing his work, I pretty much left his writing alone. I wanted this to be his story.”

Carter wrote the foreword for “A Boy From Georgia.”

“This book is not about the years (Jordan) spent working for me but rather about the years that led him to me,” Carter wrote. “… Much is known about Hamilton as the architect of my presidential campaign and chief of staff. This book shows the foundation of his ability and the journey of his development into the bright, committed young man who changed my life forever.”

Along with Spencer and Lacy Lee and Albany marketing executive Tina Harden, Jay Beck is another of Jordan’s friends who fondly remembers his Albany days. Beck, who has served as a consultant with The Carter Center in Atlanta for more than 20 years, said he met Jordan when they were 4 years old.

“We met in Sunday School when we were 4, and we were together through grammar school, junior high, high school and college,” Beck said. “In fact, we were college roommates. After we left the University of Georgia I had an advertising agency in Albany, and I worked with the so-called ‘Peanut Brigade’ that helped get Jimmy Carter into the White House.

“When President Carter won, I asked Hamilton casually if there was a place for me in Washington. He told me to come on up, that they’d find a place for me.”

Beck worked as one of three deputy assistants charged with helping develop a plan to reorganize the federal government.

“One of the things Carter had done in Georgia when he was governor was reorganize the government here,” Beck said. “It was obviously on a much grander scale, but he did the same thing when he got to Washington. We worked hard to reorganize in a way that would eliminate waste and bring about efficiency at the top levels of the federal government.”

Among Carter’s and his staff’s accomplishments were combining as many as 20 disparate agencies to create the Department of Energy, which cut oil imports in half during the first considerable oil crisis in America, streamlining the Department of Education and finding ways to incentivize production of new energy sources such as solar, geothermal and wind power.

“I got involved in deregulation, of trucking, breaking apart Ma Bell and many other sectors,” Beck said. “We put watchdog groups in place to oversee these processes, but subsequent legislation removed them. With no one looking over their shoulder, we saw what happened in the S&L (savings and loan) and Housing industries.”

Beck said he and Jordan were often amazed at where life had taken them.

“Man, here were these old country boys up there in Washington at the White House helping develop policy that shaped our country,” Beck said. “But we had the advantage of working with Hamilton, who had one of the best strategic minds this country’s ever produced. A lot of that was based on the values we both grew up with in Albany.

“I look at the political gridlock that exists in Washington now, and Lord, no, there’s no way I’d want to be there. But during President Carter’s administration, about 80 percent of the legislation he sent to Congress passed. I believe there’s only one other president — Kennedy or LBJ — who had a higher rate. A lot of that was because of Hamilton.”

Spencer Lee also worked with the Peanut Brigade during Carter’s campaign and was elected as a delegate from Georgia’s Second Congressional District to serve as an elector when Carter won the presidency. The Dougherty County attorney said few doubted Jordan would become involved in politics.

“From middle school to high school to college and beyond, Hamilton had a love for politics, a love for information,” Lee said. “When people read Hamilton’s book, they’ll realize that they had very similar experiences as Hamilton. The thing about him, though, was that he did things on a much more wide-ranging scale. Lacy saw that in him in high school, and I saw it at Georgia.”

Lacy Lee said Jordan organized campaigns in high school to elect certain qualified classmates.

“Hamilton was a natural leader,” she said. “People liked him, and that quality continued throughout his life. When I announced Spencer and I were getting married while still in college, my mother was not exactly happy with the idea. Spencer wrote her a personal letter telling her what a decent person Spencer is. That’s the kind of man he was.”

The Lees said Jordan’s personality did not change after he left politics behind.

“People have little knowledge of the man behind the fun, the wild-and-crazy Hamilton,” Lacy Lee said. “Spencer and I were privileged to know another side of him. He was the most extraordinary father, putting his three children above all others.”

Jordan ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for a U.S. Senate run in 1986 and briefly served as a campaign strategist for Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot’s third-party presidential bid in 1990. He was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 1985, and he battled various other forms of cancer before his death from the disease in 2008. Part of his lasting legacy is the Camp Sunshine facility for children with cancer.

“I had Hamilton speak for me on a couple of occasions, and I remember him telling the story of a little boy named Corey whose last wish was to go back to Camp Sunshine,” Lacy Lee said. “Hamilton told that story with such detail, and when he talked about how the helicopter that was transporting Corey from the camp lifted off and he died as it was leaving, Hamilton just broke down and cried.

“That’s the Hamilton I’ll always remember.”