I like Jimmy Carter so it stands to reason that I would like people he likes. Carter says of his presidential campaign strategist and White House chief of staff: "His judgment, insight, and wisdom were excelled only by his compassion and love of our country."

Another reason for me to like Hamilton Jordan is because he is related to Clarence Jordan, founded Koinonia Farms in Americus, Georgia, and author of The Cotton Patch Version of Matthew and John.

It was Hamilton Jordan who wrote an 80-page master plan for Jimmy Carter that was followed in the four years prior to Carter’s election on November 2, 1976. Hamilton Jordan was 34 when he became Jimmy Carter’s chief of staff. He had grown up in a small, segregated Georgia community. A pivotal point in his view of race relations came when he was a teenager and his father took him to watch a civil rights march. He saw the police surround the black demonstrators and drive them into an alleyway. He heard screams from blacks and approving shouts from whites. Jordan wrote: “Later I would mark that day as a moment of moral failure in my life."

Hamilton Jordan died Tuesday evening—another victim of cancer.