Hamilton Jordan Made Private Battles Public

May 21, 2008— -- Hamilton Jordan, the architect of Jimmy Carter's presidency, leaves behind a towering political legacy that may be exceeded by contributions to a field far from the campaign arena: cancer research.

Jordan, who died Tuesday at age 63, made his private medical battles public with the same passion he brought to the Carter White House.

Over the course of his last 22 years, while fighting lymphoma, then melanoma and then prostate cancer, he helped countless others fight and cope with their diseases -- bringing the analytical approach that vaulted a peanut farmer to the White House to help find new ways of defeating cancer.

"Hamilton really cared about people, and he was truly -- it's hard to say this about somebody in politics -- but he really meant it when he paid attention to you," Gerald Rafshoon, a longtime friend who served alongside Jordan in the Carter White House, said in an interview.

"He saved a lot of lives -- that's a pretty good legacy," Rafshoon said.

As a colorful, sometimes outspoken political operative, Jordan engineered Carter's 1976 White House run and became the president's chief of staff at age 34.

He never really left politics. He ran for a Senate seat in 1986 and was a top strategist for the 1992 Ross Perot campaign; just this year he was a leading voice in the Unity '08 push for a bipartisan presidential ticket. But he made his main post-White House mark in the world of medicine, as a renowned and animated anti-cancer voice.

With his wife, Dorothy, he founded Camp Sunshine, a summer camp for kids with cancer that has grown to serve more than 700 families a year in Georgia. Largely outside the national spotlight, he lobbied for billions of dollars in federal and state cancer research -- and freely dispensed volumes of advice to all who sought him out, and many whom he sought out.

"There was no better spokesperson for us nationally," said Vicki Riedel, a board member of Camp Sunshine, who first met Jordan in the early 1990s, when her daughter was diagnosed with leukemia.