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Subject: VERNON E. JORDAN JR.=Ex-Urban League Chief, Boardroom Politician<By Lynne Duke
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 92 08:40:52 EST
Message-ID: <13.1992Nov7.084053@AmeriCast.com>

VERNON E. JORDAN JR.=Ex-Urban League Chief, Boardroom
Politician<By Lynne Duke and William Claiborne=

President-elect Clinton, who ran as a Washington outsider seeking
change, tapped a consummate Washington insider and power lawyer
when he chose Vernon E. Jordan Jr., yesterday to chair his tran-
sition team.

Jordan, once the president of the National Urban League who was
severely wounded by a sniper while sitting in a car with a female
acquaintance in Fort Wayne, Ind., 12 years ago, is a senior
partner in the Washington office of Akin, Gump, Hauer & Feld, a
large Texas-based law firm that used to be home to Robert S.
Strauss, a Democratic Party stalwart and now U.S.  ambassador to
Russia. Jordan also sits on the boards of some of the nation's
largest corporations.

"Vernon Jordan is an old hand," said Mary Frances Berry of the
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, who has known Jordan for several
years. "He knows the issues. He knows what the political problems
are. He knows the people who have experience and he should be
able to help Clinton get a good fit between those important
things. He knows where the bodies are buried. He knows all that."

Jordan, 56, who also ran the transition of Mayor Sharon Pratt
Kelly in 1990, has moved easily between worlds, partisan and ra-
cial, and is celebrated for his charm and savoir faire. Though on
opposing sides on civil rights issues, Jordan lunched regularly
with President Bush, especially during negotiations over the
Civil Rights Act of 1990, said William T. Coleman, a senior
partner at the O'Melveny & Myers law firm who was involved in the
negotiations.

Bush vetoed one version of the bill, calling it a "quota bill,"
despite the protests by Jordan, Coleman and others. The bill, in
modified form, was signed into the law the following year.

Coleman said Jordan also had attended meetings of the Bilderberg
Group, which sponsors annual policy discussions among leaders and
top policy analysts in Europe and North America.

At Akin, Gump, Jordan is known as a skilled prospector of clients
among the nation's large corporations and a confidant of chief
executive officers from coast to coast, especially skillful at
boardroom politics.

"The last thing you'd want is to have Vernon spending time on
routine matters of law. He's more like a senior partner in New
York law firms.  He advises lawyers on board matters," said David
Hardee, a former senior partner at Akin, Gump who worked closely
with Jordan until he moved to Los Angeles in July to set up an
investment partnership. Strauss, a former partner in the firm,
brought Jordan aboard in 1982.

"He's on more boards than you can shake a stick at. He spends a
lot of time at board meetings, and he get a lot of business for
the firm," Hardee said.

Among the companies on whose boards Jordan serves are American
Express Co., Bankers Trust Corp., RJR Nabisco Corp., Revlon
Corp., Sara Lee Corp., Xerox Corp. and Union Carbide.  A measure
of Jordan's powers of survival is that after three takeover coups
at RJR, he is still a member of the board.

Earlier this year, Jordan launched an effort to better integrate
the upper echelons of Washington's legal profession, where 2 per-
cent of the partners in the city's largest law firms are black.

Jordan, who grew up in Atlanta public housing, took over the helm
of the Urban League, the nation's oldest civil rights organiza-
tion, from Whitney Young in 1971 and instituted the league's most
well-known annual endeavor, the State of Black America Reports.

Among Jordan's subordinates at the league during that time was
Ronald H. Brown Jr., now Democratic National Committee chairman,
who worked in the league's Washington office until 1979.  Jordan,
who was married at the time, found himself snared in controversy
in 1980 when he was shot by a sniper while sitting in a car with
a female companion who was white. Joseph Paul Franklin, an avowed
racist who already was serving four life sentences for the sniper
slayings of two black men at the time of his 1982 trial in the
Jordan shooting, was acquitted of U.S. civil rights violations in
the case.<02:11 11-07C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

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