Shortly before the 1976 Ohio presidential primary, Kansas City AZA No. 2 original Phil Klutznick and a few of his Chicago developer pals stopped by the Chicago City Hall offices. They were there to meet with Chicago Mayor Richard Daley to discuss redevelopment of the Dearborn area when the conversation on this particular day – like many of their previous meetings – was interrupted by the buzz of a secretary notifying the mayor of an incoming call.

“But one particular buzz differed from the rest,” Klutznick wrote in his 1991 autobiopgraphy, Angles of Vision. “Daley turned to us and said, ‘Would you mind if I bring in a man who believes he is going to be the next president of the United States? I will talk to him for only a short while and you need no leave.’ We said we wouldn’t mind in the least. There was a signal to the secretary, and presently in walked Jimmy Carter, well groomed and smiling. That was the first time I met him.”

The meeting that day in City Hall was just the beginning of a long-standing relationship between Klutznick, who helped form the second chapter in the order of Aleph Zadik Aleph in 1924, and Carter, who would (as predicted) become the 39th president of the United States. On Sunday, Carter died at the age 100.

Just two years later after their brief City Hall encounter, Klutznick – as president of the World Jewish Congress – worked closely with Carter to broker the Camp David Accords, agreements between Israel and Egypt signed on September 17, 1978, that led in the following year to a peace treaty between those two countries. It was the first such treaty between Israel and any of its Arab neighbors. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat were awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1978 for their contributions to the agreements.

Then, in the summer of 1979, after U.S. Secretary of Commerce Juanita Krebs submitted her resignation, citing family reasons, Carter turned to Klutznick, a Democrat, to serve as her successor. Klutznick, who died in 1999, had previously served the federal government under seven presidents, including as a commissioner of the Federal Public Housing Authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt, a United Nations delegate under Dwight D. Eisenhower and as ambassador to the U.N. Economic and Social Council under John F. Kennedy.

“I did not know what was in prospect until early November when Robert Straus, then chairman of the Democratic National Committee, flew to Chicago, for some speech-making,” Klutznick writes. “On the way back to Washington he disclosed to a mutual friend seated next to him in the plane that I was being mentioned for the Commerce post. If I were offered the appointment, did my friend think I would accept it? I learned that my friend sensibly answered that the only way to find out was to ask me.

On the morning of November 14, while in Omaha, I received a telephone call from Stuart Eisenstat, White House economic adviser to President Carter. The president, he said, wished to see me as soon as possible either that day or the next. I explained that I was due to attend a formal dinner that night in Omaha given by Creighton University, my alma mater, where I was to be awarded its Manresa Medal, the third recipient in more than 130 years. I said I would come to Washington the next day.

In Washington I met successively with Eisenstat, Juanita Krebs, and Vice President Mondale. Each talked only about the post of Secretary of Commerce, and each also voiced the hope that I would accept it if it were offered me by President Carter.

Toward the end of the working day I saw the president in his office. He spoke first of his achievements and hopes. He also spoke of his problems. These included the recent seizure of the U.S. embassy in Teheran, the Soviet military push in both Africa and Afghanistan, and the constraints facing his administration as it grappled with inflation, budget deficits, deregulation, a buildup of defense forces, and sagging U.S. world trade. When he turned to the matter immediately at hand, he said I was ‘nearly everyone’s candidate for the post of Secretary of Commerce’ and that the appointment had not been offered to anyone else.

After questioning me about my experience at all level of government, including service under Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Ford, he asked if I ‘liked administration.’ I replied that few people I knew really liked the grind of administration, but it had been my experience that there was no escape from topside drudgery if ‘a job was to get done.’ Carter, with disarming candor, admitted that at the outset of his presidency he had allowed himself to be bogged down in the details of hands-on management. He had since been impressed with the need to unload as many tasks as he could delegate either to his White House aides or to the heads of executive departments and agencies.

All this was prologue to the question, was I free to take the post of Secretary of Commerce if it were offered to me? I said that I had always been ready to serve many capacity, great or small whenever a president, Republican or Democrat, thought I could, perform useful services…

Around eight o’clock the next morning, the vice president telephoned me in my Chicago office to say, in the formal voice of a manifesto, ‘I am authorized on behalf of the president of the United States to tender you the office of Secretary of Commerce, subject to confirmation by the Senate of the United States.” Then he dropped the inflated tone and said simply, ‘Phil, please take it.'”

Klutznick accepted the offer, serving under Cater until the end of his presidency in 1981.

“Among the cabled congratulatory messages I received, one was from President Sadat and another was from Prime Minister Begin. American press reaction was favorable,” Klutznick writes.

“Because different sources ascribed different political motives to the president’s decision, I particularly welcomed a note struck by Carter personally. Much had been made about my age at the time of my appointment – I was 72. At the swearing-in ceremony, the president remarked that I was ‘’still young in every measurement of human life, still innovative, still dynamic, still aggressive, still filled with the wonder of life, still determined to stretch mind and heart to encompass new friends, ideas, and knowledge about God’s world.’

Some of my thoughts at the time of the swearing-in ceremony touched on family memories. Both of my parents had been dead for a number of years. My father, who had lived to see me appointed by President Roosevelt to the wartime post of commissioner of Public Housing and Administration, had been felled by a fatal heart attack while sitting in his beloved Beth Hamedrosh Hagodol in Kansas City. My mother, who survived him, had lived long enough to witness at least the early phase of my financial success with community development, starting with the building of Park Forest. But how would they have assessed what neither one lived to see? What would they have said about a society where the son of an immigrant father from eastern Europe, who first made a living in Kansas City by selling and repairing shoes – but whose real interest lay in volunteer work for the sick and the needy – could attain a post in a president’s cabinet? What would they have said about a society where the son of an immigrant mother from eastern Europe, who firmly managed the small resources of her Kansas City family so that none of its children were in want, could come to head a government department whose 4 5,000 employees served to promote the well-being of American business? I am certain they would have compressed their appraisal into two familiar words: Golden America.

Memories of my parents fused into reflection about AZA, the junior auxiliary of B’nai B’rith which had been brought to birth by a handful of Jewish boys from small and medium-sized Midwest towns. I could recite by heart the names of the ‘AZA boys’ of my generation who had gained distinction in American life. When I looked at members of a younger generation, I was struck by the extent to which AZA continued to be a training ground for Jewish youth destined for leadership in American life. Inside the Carter cabinet, when I faced Secretary of Transportation Neil E. Goldschmidt, I faced another ‘AZA boy,’ this one from Oregon.

I thought about how my lifelong concern with the needs of the Jewish community paralleled my concern as an American with the needs of general American society. I had never sensed a divided loyalty, because my strongest commitments – intellectual, moral, emotional, financial-spanned these dual reasons of my existence as a human being. I was, however, judged differently by some Jewish bystanders who saw me give up a post I held for a relatively short time as president of the World Jewish Congress in order to accept a cabinet appointment.

I was not indifferent to this criticism, yet it seemed to me that I had on my side the teachings of Judaism’s sages who stressed the importance of serving the welfare of the community as a whole. ‘Separate not yourself from the community,’ Hillel had said and other Jewish sages added: ”If the community is in trouble, a man must not say, ‘I will go to my house, and eat and drink’ … but a man must share in the troubles of the community, even as Moses did.’’ Under the roof of American pluralism, there are communities within communities, where people, with common backgrounds, needs, and interests pursue aspirations special to themselves and know  special troubles –  just as they share in the aspirations and troubles of the larger community of which they are a part. In my own case, on intellectual, moral, and temperamental grounds, I could no more separate myself from either the Jewish community or the larger American community than I could separate myself from the air that I breathed and yet live.”

Klutznick was Two’s second Aleph Godol. In 1925, he was elected Grand Aleph Godol of AZA.