Vernon Jordan Writes Memoir

By C. Young

11/27/2001 at 11:29 AM EST

It wasn't the most revealing interview in the history of the Boston Globe, but it was a reminder of an ancient era in American history when the nation had nothing better to do than think about the President's sex life. Vernon Jordan, 66, formerly the Foremost Friend of Bill, currently an investment banker in New York at Lazard Freres & Co. hauling in a reported $5 million a year, has written a memoir entitled "Vernon Can Read!". But it doesn't serve much dish on the Clinton years. It's about Jordan's rise in the civil rights movement while working with such luminaries of integration as Medgar Evers, Constance Baker Motley and Roy Wilkins. Asked about why he didn't write about the night in 1980 when he was shot by a white supremacist while accompanying a woman who was not his wife, he replied stonily, "I don't need to clarify that. Why should I?" Was the memoir a defense of his career trajectory out of the movement and into the pursuit of wealth and power? "I'm not at all defensive about making money. I have always been entrepreneurial because I understood the connection between a dollar and dignity." His motto? "Never apologize. Never explain."