There are literally thousands of men and women who consider themselves "Friends of Bill" but, according to those close to President Clinton and the Washington lawyer Vernon Jordan, their friendship is on a different plane.

When the Clinton family friend and White House aide Vincent Foster shot himself in 1993, Mr Jordan joined President Clinton to visit Mr Foster's wife and then stayed up into the small hours of the night with the President, back at the White House.

When Clinton wanted to know whether Colin Powell would consider taking the job of secretary of state in 1996, he asked Vernon Jordan to run the idea past the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

And just last month, sources said, Mr Jordan arranged a job interview at a New York public relations firm for Monica Lewinsky, the 24-year-old former White House intern caught in the middle of sex and perjury charges threatening to envelop the Clinton administration. That job interview, along with allegations that he was enlisted to persuade Ms Lewinsky to deny having had an affair with the President, now make Jordan a key figure in the newly expanded investigation by the independent counsel Kenneth Starr.

The President and Mr Jordan holiday together on Martha's Vineyard, golf together and, with their wives, often eat, socialise and spend Christmas Eve together. Their friendship goes back to 1973 when Mr Jordan, then head of the National Urban League, met the political neophyte Clinton during a trip to Arkansas.

Over the past 17 years Mr Jordan, who is 62, has emerged as the top practitioner of his generation in the bread-and-butter business of Washington: brokering power.

Consistently courteous, Mr Jordan returned a reporter's inquiry last week with a polite demurral: "I understand what you are doing [but] I'm not commenting." He has reportedly hired two of Washington's legal specialists in handling highly public and controversial cases, Brendan Sullivan and John Dowd, to represent him.

Since Mr Clinton has taken office, Mr Jordan has supplanted Robert Strauss (79), who once held the title of Mr Democrat, as the most influential unelected potentate in town. Mr Strauss recruited Mr Jordan to the legal firm of Akin, Gump in 1981, and now the two are the only members designated as "senior" partners.

Political favours have been one of his specialities: Mr Jordan, for example, is the man who helped to take care of President Clinton's friend Webster Hubbell, the former associate attorney-general, with a $100,000 consulting contract while Mr Hubbell was under investigation and out of a job.

And when the Democrats were facing big trouble in the 1994 elections, he and his wife, Ann, hosted a fund-raiser that set records.

Mr Jordan, simultaneously charming and secretive, has reached a pinnacle of influence in the nation's capital. He and his wife between them serve on 17 corporate boards, with annual payments exceeding $800,000. He is not only a black success story in a white-dominated elite, he has left his competitors, white and black, in the dust.

Born in 1935 in a black West Atlanta housing scheme, he now drives to work in a red Cadillac convertible, sporting shirts handmade in London. He went to Howard Law School in Washington and worked his way up the ladder of moderate civil rights groups, including the NAACP, the Voter Education Project, the United Negro College Fund and the National Urban League.

It was during his years as a civil rights activist, in 1973, that he first met Mr Clinton, travelling through Arkansas as head of the Urban League.

Robert Strauss, who recruited Mr Jordan to join Akin, Gump in 1981, said Mr Jordan knew how "to socialise, he's a very attractive man and good company". Mr Strauss said most of the firm's members would readily concede that "we are both contributing members to the partnership: that is a reasonable understatement".

Some others, however, are far more critical. Randall Robinson, president of TransAfrica, wrote in his recently published book,Defending the Spirit, about the "Vernon Jordan disease, a degenerative condition among blacks of privilege that results in a loss of any memory of what they came to privilege to accomplish".

But Jordan's defenders say the Democrat remains a loyal friend, even to those who don't live in Georgetown. Donna Brazile, who was an aide in the 1988 Dukakis campaign, got in trouble toward the end of the contest, angrily attacking the press for failing to explore President Bush's private life.

"I'm not on his A, B or C list, but [Jordan] called me up and said, `Ann and I want to take you out to supper anywhere you want to go'."