Good man gone

It saddened me to read this morning of the death of Hamilton Jordan, the former chief of staff for President Jimmy Carter.

Jordan was famous for a few things, most notably his stormy time in the much-criticized Carter administration, and more important for founding Camp Sunshine, a camp in Morgan County, Ga. for children with cancer. He didn’t know when he founded the camp that he would later be struck by the disease, and it eventually killed him, too young at 63.

I didn’t know Jordan, but I did meet him once, in 1986, when he was campaigning for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate against Wyche Fowler. Fowler won, and Jordan disappeared for the most part from the political scene, though he later worked on Ross Perot’s failed presidential bid.

I was a young reporter in Griffin, 22 years old, just out of the University of Georgia, armed with a journalism degree but no real idea of how to be a reporter. The editor of the paper was a doddering old idiot who had worked at the paper forever and couldn’t write a grocery list, let alone a coherent news story. This was my mentor.

One day, not long after I started, he stuck his head in the newsroom and said “Mark, come in here to my office for a second. I want you to interview somebody.”

I must admit, I was not very excited. To this point in my journalistic career, my most important stories had been one about the problem of squirrels causing electric outages by climbing over live wires, and another exploring the problem of teen pregnancy (I was able to discover what causes it).

So I walked into the shabby little office and the editor said, “Mark, talk to Hamilton Jordan.” Then he walked out of the office, closed the door, and left me standing there looking like an idiot. Thankfully, I knew who Hamilton Jordan was, but I was not entirely sure why he was there, or what I was supposed to talk to him about. What with the electrified squirrels and the wanton teenagers keeping me busy, I had not kept up with the Georgia political scene.

To my great relief, he couldn’t have been nicer. He answered all of my stupid questions patiently, and treated me as if I was a real reporter. I asked him generic things, like “Why do you think you’d be a good senator?” and, “What’s your position on education?”, softballs that he could handle with ease. I wished later, when I learned more about him, that I would have asked him if he really snorted cocaine at Studio 54 (an allegation he always denied), or what was it like negotiating for the return of the hostages from Iran, in which he played a big part.

After a few minutes of talking, he shook my hand and moved on to the next little town and the next ignorant young reporter. I wrote some hapless story which is thankfully lost to history, but that was my first test at being a real journalist. At least I didn’t do anything stupid, like ask him if he believed Jimmy Carter really got attacked by that killer rabbit.

Later on that summer I met Wyche Fowler at a fundraising barbecue in town, and I didn’t find him nearly as charming. He was a bit sarcastic, condescending, and clearly annoyed at having to talk to a bumpkin like me. I’m not saying I blame him, but I came away thinking that Jordan was a better man, politics aside. The way he lived his life after that, and his tireless work for sick children and his optimism in the face of the cancer that was ravaging him, proved that I was right.