Hamilton Jordan: Looking Back

The only time I ever was really scared was in the hostage affair, because you do things that affect people's lives. I had this feeling that there were maybe 52, 53 human beings' lives directly linked to how well we negotiated and whether we made the right decision. I felt the kind of human responsibility that I had never felt before in my life.

Q. Was that your greatest disappointment -- that Bani-Sadr never got the people out?

A. That was the worst day of my life. Well no, the worst day of my life was when the rescue mission failed -- both because it failed and those people were killed over there. It's a terrible feeling.

Q. What are you proudest of?

A. Of the fact that Carter came to the White House at a difficult time in our country's history and engaged issues that had been side-stepped or only partially dealt with by previous presidents.

Q. And you personally?

A. Well, it's hard to say. There are two or three things that meant a lot to me. When everybody else was advising against it, I strongly favored the president's following his instincts in going to Egypt and Israel to try to hold together the peace process that was falling apart. I think I probably played a fairly influential role in his decision to do that.

I was proud of my personal involvement in the ratification of the Panama Canal treaty. But I think my greatest disappointment is that, although we consummated the SALT treaty, we never had a chance to ratify it. It's the greatest substantive disappointment. The greatest emotional disappointment was the rescue mission.

Q. You get on pretty well with a number of people in the press. But you got a terrible press. Talk about that for a minute. . .

A. I hate to sound whiny, but you know when I had a damn convicted fellow like Vesco saying he had paid me off, and there was not a thread of evidence, and I had these two guys in the cocaine thing make these allegations against me -- and I realize that because I sit there down the hall from the president, allegations have to be covered -- still I never saw from my personal relationships with the people in the media any benefit in terms of my word or my denial being accepted over the word of people who were convicted and had obvious motivations.

You know, a week or so after the story about the coke, the Studio 54 thing, there was a picture of me in Newsweek with a Coca-Cola and there was a little line under it; it said, "Ham with Coke," or something like that. It was so tacky. I used to see people from the news mags regularly, and John Osborne. But when it came to a question of was I telling the truth or not, did I do something that was measured against the word of fairly scurrilous people, my relationship with these people in the press counted for nothing. Am I wrong? Am I exaggerating?I mean, if I was helped by the personal relationships I had with the people of the press, my God, I hate to think what they would have done to me if I hadn't had those relationships.

Q. What happened to the reelection campaign?