Alphonso Jackson: The Pinup and the Papa

The girls had wet lips, chasmic cleavage and hair that a man could get lost in. Their pictures hung on the wall above Brandon Rawlins's bed, at the Howard University freshman dorm.

"These girls are potential mentors," Rawlins said, smiling at his classmate, Jerell Blakeley.

The young men walked out of Rawlins's room and into Blakeley's.

"Who's that?" Rawlins asked, furrowing his brow at the blown-up photographs above Blakeley's bed.

"The secretary of housing and urban development," Blakeley said. "He's my mentor."

"Where's he live?"

"In D.C.," Blakeley said. "He's a Cabinet secretary."

Rawlins blinked. "What made him be your mentor?"

When Blakeley was a high school sophomore, he saw Alphonso Jackson give a speech. "I asked him a question, and he was really angry. I thought we should get an apology for slavery, and he disagreed. I said, 'Being a black Republican is an oxymoron.' "

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jackson had heard it before, but when Blakeley confronted him, Jackson said, he saw something rare. Blakeley seemed angry, like many young black men, but also "extra intelligent." Six months later, Jackson sent Blakeley a note. Three years and many conversations later, Jackson wrote him a reference to Howard University. By the end of Blakeley's first semester, Jackson had brought him to the White House.

"Hey, give him my number," said Blakeley's friend Nick Owen. "Spread him around."

Jackson, 60, grew up in Texas the youngest of 12 children, the son of a foundry worker, the product of St. Peter's Academy for Coloreds, and the bearer of his own load of anger. To Jackson, becoming a Republican as a young man meant trading self-pity for self-reliance. He attended law school and then served as public housing director in St. Louis, in Washington, and in Dallas, where he befriended George W. Bush. Now he runs a $34 billion agency and relaxes by playing golf at his vacation home in Hilton Head, S.C.