Social Chemistry: Decoding the Patterns of Human Connection

Book Preface

Not long before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, a young Vernon Jordan interviewed for a sales internship at the Continental Insurance Company. The recruiter made Jordan, a sophomore at DePauw University, an offer. He was told to report to his new job in the firm’s Atlanta office at the beginning of the summer. When he showed up—dressed in his best suit—and announced to the receptionist that he was ready to start his summer internship, there was a problem. The receptionist made a quick telephone call to the person in charge of interns, and asked him to step in.

Here’s how Jordan describes what happened next:

The supervisor, a tall fellow who looked to be in his midthirties, came out. I introduced myself. “I’m Vernon Jordan. I was hired to be a summer intern in your office.”
His reaction was not unlike the receptionist’s. But he quickly composed himself and took me inside his office. An awkward moment passed before he said, “They didn’t tell us.”
“They didn’t tell you what?” I asked, even though I suspected where he was heading.
“They didn’t tell us you were colored,” he replied. At that time we had not yet become
“black.” “You know,” he went on, “you can’t work here. It’s just impossible. You just can’t.”

And he didn’t. Jobless, Jordan was determined to find a summer position despite the fast-disappearing prospects as his college break wore on. Finally he landed a job as a chauffeur to a former mayor of Atlanta, Robert Maddox, who was in his eighties.
Jordan’s own eightieth birthday party was on Martha’s Vineyard, an island dotted with gingerbread cottages that has long been favored by aristocrats. During the party, Bill and Hillary Clinton boogied to soul music. President Barack Obama, the actor Morgan Freeman, Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., and American Express CEO Ken Chenault all showed up to fete the renowned civil rights leader and power broker.
Over the ensuing decades, Vernon Jordan had become a close confidant to presidents and was christened the First Friend by The New York Times. He had also built an enviable network of contacts in the business world—sitting on nine corporate boards including Dow Jones, Xerox, and Callaway Golf. As John Bryan, the former CEO of Sara Lee, said, “Vernon probably knows more corporate executives than anyone in America.” To jaded detractors, Jordan is emblematic of the problems created by the coziness of Wall Street and the White House. His rebuttal is that it is “not a crime to be close to Wall Street . . . If you are a politician, you have to have relationships with every kind of entity.”
Jordan lies at the center of the inner circle, a name given by Wharton professor Michael Useem to describe the connections between corporations created by the business elite. The shortest route between any two companies on the S&P 500 was Vernon Jordan. According to Johan Chu, at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, “This network remained highly connected throughout the twentieth century, serving as a mechanism for the rapid diffusion of information and practices and promoting elite cohesion.”
Jordan represents both the power and the perceived problems of networks. His unparalleled ability to network allowed the grandson of a sharecropper to become “one of the most connected men in America.” Jordan was the civil rights movement’s ambassador to boardrooms. Henry Louis Gates predicted that “historians will remember Vernon Jordan as the Rosa Parks of Wall Street.” But many find the backroom handshakes that his career has been built on morally dubious.
How exactly did Vernon Jordan land at the epicenter of the professional and political elite? He gives a hint in a 2012 commencement address in which he quotes Melville:

We cannot live for ourselves alone
Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads And along these sympathetic fibers
Our actions run as causes and return to us as results.

To understand Vernon Jordan’s transformation, we need to be able to trace the thousands of invisible threads he spun together.