AUTOBIOGRAPHY - President Carter's Chief of Staff

"How a boy from segregated South grew up to be Jimmy Carter’s chief of staff" PBS NewsHour 11/26/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Before he was Jimmy Carter’s chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan was just a boy living in a deeply segregated south.  For a decade, he worked on an autobiography about growing up in that place and time, before passing away from mesothelioma.  His daughter, Kathleen Jordan finished the book, and speaks to Judy Woodruff about the work.

HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour):  They were known collectively as the “Georgia mafia” — Washington outsiders who played key roles in the Jimmy Carter presidential campaigns, and in the White House.  Among them, Hamilton Jordan, who was the president`s Chief of Staff and top confidant.  He died of cancer in 2008.  He left behind a mostly finished memoir.

His daughter Kathleen has edited and completed the book, “A Boy from Georgia: Coming of Age in the Segregated South.”  She talked to Judy recently.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  So let me — I have to ask you first, it looks like Hamilton Jordan, Kathleen Jordan, but it`s “Jerden;” where did that come from?

KATHLEEN JORDAN, Editor, “A Boy From Georgia”:  You know, my dad always said it`s the Southern pronunciation of the surname.  If you hear it in old spirituals, you`ll hear it pronounced the “River Jerden.”  So I think it`s a long-standing tradition of the South.  At least that`s what we were told and we've taken that forward with us.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  I knew your father, Hamilton Jordan, because he worked for Jimmy Carter.  I covered Carter as governor of Georgia, then as President of the United States.  Your father was a strategist, he was chief of staff, but this book really is about his growing up in South Georgia, growing up in the segregationist South, isn't it?

KATHLEEN JORDAN:  When political junkies hear that my dad has a new book out, they`re excited because they think it may be about the Carter years, and what I say to those people is that it may not necessarily be about his political years, but it`s about his early indoctrination into politics, and kind of learning about politics from the people around him and about the formation of his political skills.