A New Job for Ham Jordan

The chief idea man starts to think out the campaign

"I've spent almost half my life working for Jimmy Carter, "says Hamilton Jordan, 35, the President's idea man and Chief of Staff. His off-hours behavior drew such heavy criticism that Jordan decided a year ago to drop out of public view. Now he will re-emerge from the White House to work on Carter's reelection. TIME Washington Bureau Chief Robert Ajemian talked to Jordan and wrote this report:

It happens often to a good idea man: the boss becomes attached to him, and so dependent that he installs him in the wrong job. So it was with Jimmy Carter and Hamilton Jordan. Jordan is an extraordinary thinker, a man who drags concepts out of thin air, but is a terrible administrator. He has the toughness to handle the most difficult assignments, but he hates details. He has been a poor White House Chief of Staff. Now the boss, convinced that his campaign badly lacked any positive theme or concept, has turned once again to his favorite thinker. "It's time," said Carter to Jordan, "for you to go off and write one of your papers."

They are an odd couple, Carter so tidy and pious, Jordan so disorganized and irreverent. That irreverence has caused Carter more than his share of embarrassments. He has looked in disbelief at the various bumps in Jordan's personal life but never lectured him. Carter's affection for his young aide has several levels, and this year in particular the President has more than a parental interest in Jordan. He knows that his campaign will be far different from the one in 1976, that his public is unimpressed and cynical. Jordan's ideas and advice will be needed.

Sometimes the President finds it difficult to follow that advice. Jordan has been urging Carter, for instance, to resist attacking Ronald Reagan, to leave such criticism to the media. But the President has already started condemning his opponent. Carter and Jordan have had another disagreement over the Republican candidate. To the President's acute discomfort, Jordan hopes that Reagan will move well ahead of Carter in the polls. In Jordan's view, the Californian still has never been studied closely, and once Reagan is out in front he will not be able to stand the pressure. Says Jordan: "Such big forces converge to stop a man from becoming President. Look at Ted Kennedy and George Bush and what that exposure did to them." Then the Georgian had another thought. "It makes me appreciate all the more what Carter pulled off in 1976," he said.

A restless man with a short attention span, Jordan is unable to sit still long, and now he paced the floor restlessly. He was wearing blue tennis shoes and white shorts, his shirttail hanging out. His body is thick and hard, his face tanned from daily jogging and tennis. He hasn't changed much in four years, still frisky, fresh-faced.

His one-room studio apartment is filled with contrasts, much like the man himself. The charcoal walls are covered neatly with contemporary art, lithographs by Rouault and Picasso, several Warhols. An unmade bed, the black velour cover twisted on top, sits low in the corner of the room. The modern glass tables are stacked with art books. There is a small balcony off the eleventh-floor studio, but Jordan is afraid to step out. He fears heights. When one of his girlfriends wants to sit outside, Jordan will sometimes edge onto the balcony, pressing against the wall, and sit nervously with his back against the building.

Until recently, after charges of using cocaine were dropped, he seldom left his apartment after work. If he did go out, he always took a few friends to be witnesses in case someone confronted him and started a scene. He heartily dislikes the pretenses of politics, and has made no close friends in Washington. He likes to be with women but ends up spending a lot of time alone.

Jordan's needs are simple. He cares little about clothes, often wears the same suits until they wear out, and is almost as indifferent to food. Unable to sleep beyond 6 o'clock in the morning, he has only a bowl of cereal for breakfast. He stopped eating red meat five years ago, convinced that it is unhealthy, and sticks to fish and chicken. He hasn't been to a movie in five months, watches only news and old movies on television, seldom reads for pleasure. He spends enormous amounts of time on the telephone.

Jordan remains naturally cheerful even though he has been badly tarred. Mostly he blames himself. "I set myself up as a target for all the people who disliked Carter," he says. Jordan deep down wishes people took him more seriously, but he says it mockingly: "People think I'm some kind of a buffoon," he says, "and I really can't blame them after all they've read." He feels that his troubles have reflected badly on Carter's reputation and has apologized to him several times. The morning after the cocaine story broke in the papers, he waited early for Carter in the Oval Office and offered to resign.

Jordan is no longer stimulated by his White House job and is elated about handing over his chores there to Jack Watson. He prefers an undisciplined schedule that gives him time to do what he's best at: thinking and planning. As Chief of Staff he was usually late to meetings, returned few phone calls. He still hides when he can, and even the President gets impatient about his disappearances. He rises to big challenges, and only three events in the past year, he says, have really stirred his blood: helping Carter get rid of Cabinet Officers Joe Califano and Mike Blumenthal, thwarting Ted Kennedy, and working on the release of the hostages. He gets worked up when he talks of meetings with the Shah, recalling the monarch's piercing eyes staring suspiciously at him, refusing to believe that no country except Panama would accept him. He dealt covertly for months with the Iranians, and they had their own name for this American who might break the impasse: the Cowboy.

Now Jordan is ready to fix Reagan in the center of his imagination. He already has his own core view of the campaign: Carter must continue to rely on the South as his base, no matter how hard Reagan challenges him there. "If we can't win in Kentucky and Alabama," says Jordan, "then we're going to lose Michigan and Illinois. It means bad news everywhere." Holding the South, contends Jordan, will depend largely on Carter's capacity to turn out the black vote. If the blacks and Hispanics decide to stay at home, Carter will lose states like Texas and California.

Jordan says he is not bothered by the candidacy of John Anderson. He believes that the liberals who are attracted to Anderson now will recoil when they learn more about his conservative voting record. Jordan sees another edge. "We know Republicans are helping him, and that will backfire. We may have to lump them together, run against both of them."

Jordan was not unnerved by Kennedy either. He remembers the panic at the White House the moment Kennedy announced he was running. Only Carter and his inherent cockiness kept things steady. "If he hadn't shown that confidence of his," says Jordan, "the whole thing could have come apart."

Jordan has a hard time concealing his dislike of Kennedy. He was the only man at the White House, including Carter, who was convinced a year ago that Kennedy was going to declare. He wrote the President one of his canny memos about it, in January 1979, which said: "The absolute worst thing we can do is behave in a way that suggests we fear a Kennedy candidacy." Jordan instead recommended juggling the 1980 schedule of primaries so that several Southern states voted early. Wrote Jordan to Carter: "If we win the early contests, it is difficult to see how anyone could defeat us for the nomination. If we lose early, it is difficult to see how we could recoup and win the nomination." That strategy turned out to be right.

But for all the excitement that political wars hold for him, Jordan is looking ahead to going home. He wants one day to return to the South. In his early years he had hoped to become a doctor, and that failed. Now he has the urge to write, not only of Jimmy Carter's presidency, but of his own Georgia days, of his segregationist grandfather, of an uncle who fought that system, and how all of that shaped him.

When he does look back, it will not be on great concepts of state he laid down or great world events he managed. Instead, country boy that he is, he will remember the political duels, the infighting. "What a legacy for us," Jordan said mischievously to a friend, "to have beaten Lester Maddox, George Wallace, Kennedy and now Reagan." It would be nice to go home with that.

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