Hamilton Jordan: Looking Back

Hamilton Jordan, President Carter's chief of staff, talked about his four years in the White House the other day with Meg Greenfield, editorial page editor. Here are excerpts from that conversation.

Q. You're going to write a book?

A. Yes, I'm talking to some publishers. But I don't want it to be a traditional me-and-Jimmy Carter scrapbook. I've always wanted to write. I realize that the only natural interest anybody has in me as a writer now is this experience with the president, which, you know, I appreciate. But I want to use my writing as a kind of catharsis, and I want to write a book that kind of puts all this behind me and then look to the future. I don't want to live in the past the rest of my life.

I went up to see Ted Sorensen [on campaign business] in 1975. He is a decent human being, a really good guy. But his whole office is just full of Kennedy memorabilia, and probably because Kennedy was assassinated, he's more this way. I said to myself: my God, if we make it and if we ever get there, I want to be able to walk away from it all and do something different.

Q. Talk about Hamilton Jordan for a minute. There is the guy sitting in this office, among boxes, about to clear out, whom some of us knew during these four years, and then there is this figure. . .

A. Hannibal Jerkin.

Q. Hannibal Jerkin, right. How do you feel about that? What happened?

A. Well, I don't know. I suppose a couple of things happened. Somebody said that maybe I'd come to Washington with a chip on my shoulder and Washington knocked the chip off. And I said I didn't think I came to Washington with a chip on my shoulder, but, if I did, Washington had knocked my whole shoulder off. I didn't come here with a proper appreciation of the public responsibility of a person who serves in the White House. I didn't come here desirous of having a high public profile, and certainly never dreaming that I'd be so controversial a figure and, to a large extent, a figure of ridicule.

Maybe some of it was inevitable; maybe some of it was my fault. Maybe if I had it all to do over again, I'd become a socialite here in Washington, but I don't think so. I mean, it's just not my nature. I recognize that there are benefits to being part of the social scene, wining and dining; but I came here to work and to think. I'm just not like that, you know. Maybe that was a mistake. And then I got myself in a situation where -- your own publication as a matter of fact -- a couple of things were said about me that were just completely untrue. But once they were said, I was stuck with them.

After the drug stuff came up in the summer of '79, I just became a recluse. Some of it was probably my fault in terms of not appreciating the extent to which I had a public responsibility. Some of it was the fact that I became a very vulnerable target for the gossip columnists, and for other columnists. I think I tended to symbolize all the concerns that people had about Jimmy Carter. This guy's young, he's from Georgia, he doesn't understand Washington, unconventional, and I think it was a little bit of all, and then all these other crazy stories.

I realized it was an embarrassment to the president. So that's why, the last year or so, I've just really gone underground.

Q. People felt, I think, that you symbolized a kind of go-to-hell-Washington attitude. . .