American Rhapsody (42 page)

In 1961, as a twenty-four-year-old law clerk, he accompanied Charlayne Hunter, the first black admitted to the University of Georgia, to class. News footage showed a tall Hollywood-handsome young black man using his body as a shield and a wedge to get the frightened Hunter through a sea of crazed, spitting white faces screaming, “Die, nigger, die!”

At a moment in history when racial violence threatened to engulf America, Vernon Jordan was forming his own philosophy. He rejected the Panthers and Rap Browns and Stokely Carmichaels, who urged picking up the gun and cried, “Burn, baby, burn!” Vernon Jordan believed in political power as the road to equality, in voter registration, and in the economic boycott. He believed in the brain and not the firebomb. He believed in the idea of a black intellectual elite of social activists who would fight verbally in courtrooms and boardrooms to ease the burden of the less educated. He believed in the ballot box, not the soapbox. “You've got to have an intellectual, working black elite,” he said, “and you can't get that standing on the corner.”

He joined the NAACP and traveled all over the South, calling for economic boycotts of companies and industries that wouldn't hire blacks and coordinating voter registration drives. He became director of the voter education project of the Southern Regional Council. He worked relentlessly, driving himself, sleeping in church halls,
forcing
black people by sheer will to register to vote. By 1968, the South had nearly 2 million new black voters, the number of black elected officials had jumped tenfold, and Vernon Jordan was a nationally known civil rights leader.

Author Taylor Branch remembered him: “He had an aura of being luminous and glamorous as he was supervising people registering voters five years after it had gone out of fashion.” The Reverend Ralph Abernathy called him “one of the ablest and articulate voices in the civil and human rights movement.” Vernon Jordan was so well respected within the movement, even by black nationalists, that he became a high-level mediator within the movement itself.

When he was about to run for Congress in 1970, he was asked to become head of the United Negro College Fund. He gave up his own political ambitions to further the cause of black education—which he felt was perhaps the worst of black people's problems. A year later, when Whitney Young, executive director of the National Urban League, drowned, he was asked to replace Young. He accepted.

Vernon Jordan believed that the struggle was shifting from the South to the ghettos of American cities and believed the Urban League could do something to help. He believed that for white corporate America, the Urban League was a much easier alternative than dealing with the more incendiary cries for black power. Vernon Jordan hammered the white corporations for job training and early-education programs. He saw the Urban League as a bridge between white executives and the urban poor.

As Drew S. Days, former director of Civil Rights in the Justice Department, said, “He was able to make an important link between the Civil Rights Movement and the corporate world. He was hard-nosed in showing corporate leaders why it was often in their interests to provide support.” A corporate leader who worked with him at the time said, “Vernon cannot be manipulated. He's a tough customer. You can never get Vernon to do something because you want him to do it. He knows how to say no.”

Vernon Jordan soon had a $100 million budget to work with, supplied by corporate America and the federal government. “If I do a good job here,” he said, “black people are not the only beneficiary, so is the country. The country has a vested interest in black people doing well.” When he was not in boardrooms, hammering corporate execs, he was making speeches across America, urging Americans to do something about the nightmare of existence in the inner city.

One of those speeches took place on May 29, 1980, at the Marriott Inn in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where the Fort Wayne Chapterof the Urban League was having its dinner. In his speech, he condemned “the blind enthusiasm of the country's move to the right, especially the move toward a balanced budget at the expense of social programs.” At the dinner afterward, he met thirty-six-year-old Martha C. Coleman, a member of the Urban League's Fort Wayne board of directors, a secretary at International Harvester, a white divorcée who had been married to a black man. After the dinner, Vernon Jordan went to Coleman's house, where, according to her, they had coffee and played the stereo.

At two o'clock that morning, she drove him back to his room at the Marriott. On the way there, stopped at a red light two miles from the hotel, a car full of white teenagers pulled up next to them. They started screaming obscenities and racial epithets at the interracial couple and drove off. Coleman drove him to the hotel, and when Vernon Jordan got out of the car, a .30-06 bullet (the kind used to hunt bear and deer) struck him in the lower back, just left of the spinal cord.

“As soon as the projectile entered, there was an explosive effect like nothing I've ever seen before,” an emergency room doctor said. “It was purely a miracle that it missed the spinal column. Had it exploded a millionth of a second later, there would be absolutely no chance for survival.” The gunshot ripped a fist-size hole in Vernon Jordan's back. He underwent five surgeries.

Fort Wayne police, seeing that he had been with a white woman and knowing she had been married to a black man, called it “a domestic-type thing.” They made much of the fact that he had spent hours alone with Coleman at her house “with the stereo playing.” John E. Jacob, executive vice president of the Urban League, held a press conference, saying the organization had “grown increasingly disturbed over the diversion of public attention away from the horrible nature of the crime and onto matters of speculation, innuendo, and gossip.”

Characteristically, in one of his first public statements after the shooting, Vernon Jordan said, “It is significant to note that, since over the years many blacks died on a highway because no hospital would take them because they were black, here in 1980 I would get shot in a little town like Fort Wayne and be rushed to a hospital where the internist in the operating room was black, the anesthesiologist was black, and the surgeon was black. Now what that suggests is that there has been some progress.”

The man who'd waited for two hours on a grassy knoll to shoot Vernon Jordan was a thirty-year-old drifter from Mobile, Alabama, who'd renamed himself Joseph Paul Franklin—in tribute to Benjamin Franklin and Paul Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister. He was a sometime member of the American Nazi party and the Ku Klux Klan. He had the grim reaper and the American eagle tattooed on his forearms.

He had already sent a threatening note to President Carter and had visited Chicago, hunting for Jesse Jackson. He would say many years later that he “just happened to be” in Fort Wayne when he heard that Vernon Jordan would be speaking there. His intent was to start a race war in America, and he was so angry that Fort Wayne police were calling Jordan's shooting a “domestic-type thing” that he quickly drove to Cincinnati and gunned down two black teenagers.

Born James Clayton Vaughn, he was unable to see with his right eye at birth. Both his parents were alcoholics. He rarely went to school. “I made very low grades. The only time I got an
A
was in conduct. I was one of those really quiet kids.” At eleven, staying with his uncle in Georgia, he was already carrying a loaded rifle as he roamed the woods. “I was just pretending like I was shooting, but I wasn't really shooting it.” At twelve, he shot a pistol for the first time. At sixteen, his brother gave him a 16-gauge shotgun, took him into the woods, and taught him how to hunt.

For the rest of his life, he “always had a gun.” He watched hundreds of television Westerns and would make believe that he was a cowboy. He never liked the sheriff; it was the outlaw he felt himself to be. He liked to dress up as a cowboy, but he always dressed in black—black cowboy hat, black boots, black jeans. In his midteens, he started reading Nazi literature. “Once you consciously go over the stuff over and over again, it just goes down in your conscience and you begin to think that blacks and Jews aren't even people at all.”

By the time he left Mobile, at seventeen, he had developed a deep hatred for blacks, especially those who were dating whites. He got married twice. Both marriages lasted a year. Both wives said he'd beaten them.

On September 21, 1976, he turned up in a Washington suburb. He saw a black man and a white woman walking down the street and sprayed them with chemical Mace. He jumped bail and never stood trial.

Early in 1977, he set a bomb that destroyed the Beth Shalom Synagogue in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He was also connected a month later to the bombing of a Washington home belonging to an Israeli lobbyist.

He started robbing banks like the outlaws in his Westerns to support himself. Before he was caught, he'd robbed sixteen of them.

Later in 1977, he was driving his 1972 Capri through Madison, Wisconsin. He was stuck in traffic. The car ahead of him was driven by a black man. A white woman was sitting next to the man. They got through the traffic, but the same car was still ahead of him, driving slowly. He kept honking at them to speed up. The man pulled over to the side and came to Joseph Paul Franklin's car. Franklin had just robbed a bank. He had a stolen gun with him. “That was done on the spot of the moment. I hadn't planned it. I just whipped the pistol out and shot him right there.” He shot the woman, too, and drove off. “It just happened to be two people I totally hated. Once whites begin having sex with blacks, they aren't even human.”

Still in 1977, he shot and killed a Jewish man outside a synagogue in Missouri.

In February 1978, he shot and killed an interracial couple strolling through an Atlanta neighborhood.

In July 1978, he shot a black man in Chattanooga as the man was speaking to his white girlfriend outside a pizza parlor.

“It was my mission. I just felt like I was engaged in war with the world. My mission was to get rid of as many evildoers as I could. If I did not, then I would be punished. I felt that God instructed me to kill people.”

In 1979, he shot a black cabdriver who was speaking to a white woman in Atlanta's Piedmont Park.

On May 29, 1980, hearing that Vernon Jordan was in Fort Wayne, he parked his car on the side of Interstate 69, raised the hood as though he was having car trouble, and walked up the hill to the grassy knoll facing the Marriott Inn.

In June 1980, he shot two black teenagers in Cincinnati, Ohio. In July 1980, he killed two black hitchhikers in West Virginia. In August 1980, he killed two black men and two white women jogging together in Salt Lake City, Utah.

On October 28, 1980, he was finally caught in Lakeland, Florida, after he'd sold his plasma to a blood bank for five dollars. His wanted poster had been sent to all blood centers. President Carter, whom he'd threatened earlier by mail, was due in Lakeland on a campaign stop hours after his arrest. Police officers said they “could not rule out the possibility” that Franklin's presence in Lakeland at the same time was “more than coincidence.”

All told, he would be charged with twenty murders.

In 1997, he was on death row in Missouri, still awaiting execution. Law-enforcement officials from across the country were coming to interview him, trying to tie him in to other killings. He seemed to enjoy the attention. “Blacks still aren't my favorite people,” he said. Prosecutors called him an “animal,” but he smiled and said, “I'm Jesse James or Billy the Kid. I look at myself as an outlaw of the Wild West. They didn't go around killing innocent women. I would never do that, either.”

Sometimes Joseph Paul Franklin seemed to be holding court. He told Atlanta detectives who wanted to visit him that he'd only talk to them if they brought a “pretty woman” for him to gaze at during the interview. They brought a female deputy and Franklin stared at her breasts and leered and licked his lips for two hours.

When Kenneth W. Starr's Mad Hatter folly finally came to fruition . . . when the preacher's son got the Ace of Spades up in front of his Republican congressional snipers, what happened was that Vernon Jordan
did to them
what sniper Joseph Paul Franklin had tried to do to him: He blew them away. He blew them to smithereens. He did not miss the spinal cord.

Q: Was your assistance to Ms. Lewinsky, which you have described, in any way dependent upon her doing anything whatsoever in the Paula Jones case?
A: No.
Q: And that is exactly the point, that you looked at getting Ms. Lewinsky a job as an assignment rather than just something that you were going to be a reference for.
A: I don't know whether I looked upon it as an assignment. Getting jobs for people is not unusual for me, so I don't view it as an assignment. I just view it as something that is part of what I do.
Q: During the course of the meeting with Ms. Lewinsky, what did you learn about her?
A: Enthusiastic, quite taken with herself and her experience. Bubbly, effervescent, bouncy, confident. Actually, I sort of had the same impression that you House managers had of her when you met with her. You came out and said she was impressive, and so we came out about the same place.
Q: And did she relate to you the fact that she liked being an intern because it put her close to the president?
A: I have never seen a White House intern who did not like being a White House intern, and so her enthusiasm for being a White House intern was about like the enthusiasm of White House interns—they liked it.
Q: Did she make reference to someone in the White House being uncomfortable when she was an intern, and she thought that people did not want her there?
A: She felt unwanted—there is no question about that. As to who did not want her there and why they did not want her there, that was not my business.

 . . .

Q: And sometime after your meeting on December 11 with Ms. Lewinsky, did you have another conversation with the president?
A: You
do
understand that a conversation between me and the president was not an unusual circumstance.
Q: I understand that.
A: All right.
Q: Let me be more specific. Did he [Clinton] indicate that he knew about the fact that she had lost her job at the White House, and she wanted to get a job in New York?
A: He was obviously aware that she had lost her job in the White House, because she was working at the Pentagon. He was also aware that she wanted to work in New York, in the private sector, and understood that that is why she was having conversations with me. There is no doubt about that.
Q: And he thanked you for helping her.
A: There is no question about that, either.
Q: And on either of these conversations that I've referenced . . . did the president tell you that Ms. Monica Lewinsky was on the witness list in the Jones case?
A: He did not.
Q: And did you consider this information to be important in your efforts to be helpful to Ms. Lewinsky?
A: I never thought about it.