Jesse L. Jackson glanced out the tinted windows and saw the future overtaking the past.
It was a gray Saturday afternoon in November and he was bound for Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, in a chauffeured limousine as big and luxurious as the President’s.
He settled his 6-foot-3 frame into the plush wine-red rear seat, stretched his legs across to the jump seat and talked quietly of another time, another trip into Montgomery escorted by fear and a pursuing car full of angry white men.
Twenty-two years earlier he had come down this same highway with other young disciples of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., one anxious eye on the rear-view mirror and another watching for road signs to Selma. They were rushing through the Dixie night to join demonstrations demanding equal rights for blacks. The car behind them was a menacing reminder of how far they still had to go.
‘Long, Dark Night’
“We had been driving all night and they had been following us all the way to Montgomery,” Jackson said, his gaze drifting out to the blur of the passing landscape. “All night. A long, dark night. The fear made it darker.”
But in 1987 Jackson was returning to Montgomery as a candidate for President, leading five white candidates in many national polls for the Democratic nomination. His limousine rolled toward Montgomery and a waiting Civic Center audience half black and half white.
The limousine sped past a golf course with green fairways stretching through trees ablaze with the oranges of autumn. Suddenly, Jackson sat forward, pointing:
“Look there–you see that? See that black guy and white lady out there playing golf together?” He sat back, silent for a moment.
“We’ve come a long way . . . and now politics is catching up.”
It was clear on this gray afternoon on the road to Montgomery that few in modern America have come further faster than Jesse Louis Jackson.
A Powerful Force
From the back roads of a South Carolina mill town, he has emerged as a powerful political force, America’s preeminent black leader.
But for Jesse Jackson, politics probably isn’t catching up fast enough. He may be the front-runner now, but few people–even few of his supporters–realistically believe he has a chance of winning the Democratic presidential nomination.
His supporters say latent racism is the problem. To a degree, that may be reflected in Jackson’s high negative rating in opinion polls. In a Los Angeles Times poll this fall, 68% said they would not consider voting for him.
But there is something more: This 46-year-old minister makes people uncomfortable.
A four-month study of Jackson, including dozens of interviews with friends and foes and travels with him through a dozen states and five foreign countries, yields a bundle of contradictions.
“There is a good Jesse, and a bad Jesse,” said one friend who has known Jackson since his college days. “The two sides of him are often in conflict.”
The good Jesse is the brilliant and courageous man willing to take personal and political risks in pursuit of lofty goals, a man of boundless energy and broad intellect whose political instincts are matched by awe-inspiring oratory, a man who remembers his roots even as he projects a bold vision for a better America.
The bad Jesse is the schemer, the man always looking for the angle to win personal or political advantage, the man who has invented stories or shaded the truth to meet his immediate needs, the man whose actions sometimes seem to say: “Your rules don’t apply to me.”
For all his strengths, for all his successes, Jackson’s future is clouded by the clash within.
For most politicians, such lack of abundant trust by the public would spell their ruination. That is what makes Jackson so remarkable. By most accounts, he is at the height of his powers, broadening his appeal, likely to march to the Democratic National Convention with enough delegates to be a major player in deciding the future of his party and its candidate for President.
Sometimes, Jackson talks about his campaign as if attaining the presidency is secondary to a life mission of peace, prosperity and justice for all. But at the same time, he dismisses talk that he can’t realistically expect to win the office.
“They say, ‘Well you’re leading but you can’t win.’ That’s irrational.”
With a flicker of annoyance in his eyes, he sighs: “You learn to live with being under-counted, under-estimated, under-respected. But you don’t let it break your spirit. Just because it rains you don’t have to drown.”
Jesse Jackson, said Dr. Alvin F. Poissaint, a Harvard psychiatrist and long-time friend, is “fascinated by his own success and by the possibilities of accomplishing more and more, to prove that he can go to the mountaintop, as Dr. King used to say.
“It’s more than ‘I am somebody,’ ” Poissaint said, quoting a phrase that became a familiar litany in Jackson’s speeches through the past decade.
“It’s more than ‘respect me,’ ” he added, quoting another phrase used in those speeches–a phrase many journalists have seized upon in an effort to explain Jackson’s boundless drive.
“It’s more like, ‘I am going to show you what I can do, even against all odds,’ ” Poissaint continued. “And that has always been his case. Some of it, and I think Jesse himself recognizes it, has a lot to do with his feelings about being a child born out of wedlock to a teen-age mother, that he was poor, that he was disgusted by the segregation he saw.
“That is very much in his psyche.”
And yet it is in searching for Jackson’s psyche in the crucible of his childhood that the contradictions begin.
The truth in the broadest sense is simple enough. He grew up in the segregated South, neither poor nor rich, neither firebrand nor Philistine.
But over the years, that truth was not enough for Jesse Jackson. He later made up events to suit the needs of the moment and to enhance his mystique.
To demonstrate his radical credentials in 1969, he said he showed his contempt for white customers he served as a teen-ager in a hotel coffee shop by spitting in their food in the kitchen. “I did not do that, and I really shouldn’t have said it,” he says now.
To enhance his bona fides as a victim of poverty, he told a Chicago television interviewer that “I used to run bootleg liquor and buy hot clothes. I had to steal to survive.” But his stepfather Charles Jackson remembered it differently. As a Post Office employee in the 1950s he earned a salary equivalent to a teacher’s, and told Jackson biographer Barbara Reynolds: “We were never poor. We’ve never been on welfare. My family never went hungry a day in their lives.”
To demonstrate the personal hurt of racial discrimination, Jackson has allowed to stand uncorrected an account in three biographies and numerous profiles that he left the University of Illinois in 1960 because coaches told him he could not play quarterback–only whites could call the signals.
But university records show that the quarterback for Illinois that year was Mel Meyers, a black. Jackson left after being placed on academic probation during his second semester, according to the late Ray Eliot, then head football coach.
Other Jackson recollections that bolster his credentials as one who knows first-hand the horror of society’s boot on his neck cannot be independently verified.
One such scene in his hometown of Greenville, S.C., about 1950, he would say many years later, was “my own most frightening experience . . . a traumatic experience I’ve never recovered from.”
As an 8-year-old, he said, he hurried into a neighborhood grocery store operated by a a white man named Jack. Other customers were crowded around the counter. “I was in a hurry. I said, ‘Jack, I’m late. Take care of me.’ He didn’t hear me so I whistled at him. He wheeled around and snatched a .45 pistol from a shelf with one hand and kneeled down to grab my arm in his other fist.
“Then he put the pistol against my head and, kneading my black arm in his white fingers, said, ‘Goddamn it! Don’t you ever whistle at me again, you hear?’ ”
The other black customers in the store did nothing, Jackson said. “That was the nature of life in the occupied zone.”
Is it real or a respinning of history? Jackson didn’t tell his parents at the time, he said, for fear his father “would kill Jack or be killed.” None of the grocers who were around then and could still be located can remember a white grocer named Jack who kept a .45 on a shelf.
In one sense, the veracity of the stories may not matter. Jackson recounts them emotionally, conveying the real fear and degradation of the time. As a spokesman for the underprivileged, few can doubt his credentials.
It was a boyhood with “a lot of pain,” Jackson said a few months ago. “Bitterness for awhile. I grew out of the bitterness, and I attribute a lot of that in some sense to Dr. King, who argued that we should get better not bitter.”
Some of the pain and bitterness revolved around the fact he was born out of wedlock–feelings he says he came to grips with years ago.
His mother, Helen, was a high school student living with her mother, Matilda Burns, in 1941 when she became pregnant by Noah Robinson, a married man who lived next door. Robinson had three stepchildren but “wanted a man-child of his own,” Jackson has said many times. “His wife would not give him any children. So he went next door.”
It was a neighborhood scandal that brought schoolyard taunts: “Jes-se ain’t got no dad-dy, Jes-se ain’t got no dad-dy.” And it was an experience that Jackson would cite many years later in inspirational, you-are-somebody speeches to young black audiences:
“You are God’s child. When I was in my mother’s belly, I had no father to give me a name . . . . They called me a bastard and rejected me. You are somebody! You are God’s child!”
Reynolds, in her 1975 book, “Jesse Jackson: The Man, The Movement, The Myth,” recounted a poignant scene in Jackson’s childhood: A young Jesse standing for hours in the backyard of Noah Robinson’s house, looking in the window. When Robinson came to the window, Jesse would run away.
Now, on Father’s Day, Jackson calls Robinson on the telephone. And when the candidate gave CBS’ Mike Wallace and a crew from “60 Minutes” a tour of Greenville several months ago, he took them to visit Robinson. “Two fathers,” Jackson said. “I was blessed. I was blessed.”
Stepfather Charles Jackson was a quiet, hard-working, church-going man whom his mother married when the candidate was a toddler and “who adopted me and gave me his name, his love, his encouragement, discipline, and a high sense of self-respect,” Jackson wrote in the dedication of a recently published collection of his speeches and writings, “Straight from the Heart.”
When he was a teen-ager, the family moved to Fieldcrest Village, which the city directories of the 1950s called “a housing project for colored located at the end of Greenacre Road.”
It was a community, Jackson recalled, where people cared for one another:
“There were two or three people in the neighborhood who just kept big pots of vegetable soup on. When folks didn’t have any food, they couldn’t go to the Salvation Army because they were black. They couldn’t get Social Security; they couldn’t get welfare. But folks had a tradition of being kind to one another, because that was our roots.
“We didn’t have a neighborhood, we had a community. There’s a difference between a bunch of neighbors . . . and a community that’s made out of common unity where there’s a foundation.”
And often from the pulpit or political lectern he speaks of the strength brought to his childhood by the church and by his grandmother, Matilda Burns, now 80 and living with his mother in a comfortable house on Greenville’s tree-shaded Anderson Street–a house Jackson purchased several years ago.
“My grandmother doesn’t have any education,” he says. “She can’t read or write, but she’s never lost. She knows the worth of prayer . . . . To the world she has no name, and she has no face, but she feels like she has cosmic importance because there’s a God she communicates with in the heavens who is eternal. And so she knows that every boss is temporary, that every rainy day is temporary, that every hardship is temporary. She used to tell me, ‘Son, every goodby ain’t gone. Just hold on; there’s joy coming in the morning.’ ”
And so, despite the pain, Jackson grew, and succeeded.
At all-black Sterling High School in the late 1950s he was elected class president, Student Council president, Honor Society president, state president of the Future Teachers of America. He also was the star quarterback on the school’s football team–big, aggressive and smart, his coach recalls.
His athletic ability landed him a scholarship to the University of Illinois. After his first year he transferred to North Carolina A&T;, a predominately black school in Greensboro. There not only was he the starting quarterback but also the student body president. And there he got his first taste of the civil rights movement and a whiff of Democratic Party national politics.
Lunch counter sit-ins had begun in Greensboro months before Jackson arrived in 1960, but he soon emerged as a leader of student civil rights protests there. In June, 1963, he led a column of students to block a busy street in front of City Hall and was arrested for inciting a riot. He was recorded as telling his followers: “I know I am going to jail. I’m going without fear . . . I’ll go to the chain gang if necessary.”
There were no chain gangs in North Carolina at the time, biographer Reynolds said, noting that even in college Jackson “was developing his proclivity for overstatement.”
At A&T;, Jackson noticed a pretty, slender coed from Florida who would march in Greensboro’s civil rights demonstrations. She was Jaqueline Lavinia Davis and, years later, she recalled that she first thought Jesse Jackson was a bit too fast, a bit too full of himself for her taste. But he sought her out for advice on a term paper–”Should Red China be Admitted to the U.N.?”–and a serious romance blossomed.
Their first child was born six months after their marriage in 1962–a fact they never concealed.
With a wife and daughter, Jackson found himself at a career crossroads when he graduated from A&T; with a degree in sociology in 1963: He could go on to law school at Duke University in North Carolina or he could accept a Rockefeller Foundation grant to attend Chicago Theological Seminary.
He chose the seminary–”I thought I might flunk out at Duke,” he later admitted to Reynolds in a comment uncharacteristic of his usually bountiful self confidence. At the seminary, he thought “it would be quiet and peaceful and I could reflect.”
But with peace and quiet at the seminary came network television scenes of the racial violence in the South–blacks were being tear-gassed by police, beaten with night sticks, poked with electric cattle prods. Jackson decided he had to head South.
Betty Washington, then a reporter for the Chicago Daily Defender, recalls the scene outside Brown’s Chapel Church in Selma. Hundreds of marchers were camped on the grounds and members of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference staff were taking turns making speeches to bolster their spirits. “Up popped Jesse,” she says. “I thought it was strange that he would be making a speech, when he was not on the SCLC staff and had not been included in any of the strategy meetings. He just seemed to come from nowhere . . . but he spoke so well.”
Other SCLC staffers thought this seminary student was too pushy, but when Jackson volunteered to work as an organizer in Chicago, King accepted. Jackson soon impressed King with the way he rallied Chicago’s black ministers behind SCLC’s Operation Breadbasket, a campaign to get more jobs for blacks in bakeries, milk companies and other firms with heavy minority patronage of their products.
Within months King named Jackson to head Operation Breadbasket and doubled his salary–from $3,000 to $6,000 a year. And in the spring of 1967, when King reorganized the SCLC staff, he appointed Jackson to head the new labor and economic affairs department with instructions to expand Operation Breadbasket into a national program.
But as Jackson moved into SCLC’s hierarchy, tension began developing. David J. Garrow, a professor who has written three books about King and the SCLC, said some on the SCLC staff wondered aloud about Jackson’s motives: “Is it for Jesse or for the movement?” The professor said King himself expressed concern about Jackson’s ambitions and his spirituality. King “used to tell Jesse: ‘Jesse, you have no love,’ ” Garrow quoted a former SCLC executive as saying.
At one SCLC staff meeting, Jackson raised questions and objections to a planned march on Washington and suggested instead that SCLC do more to expand his Operation Breadbasket, Garrow said:
“King railed at the staff’s disunity and finally announced he was going to leave . . . . As King headed for the door, Jackson started to follow, but King turned and delivered a personal blast: ‘If you are so interested in doing your own thing that you can’t do what the organization is structured to do, go ahead. If you want to carve out your own niche in society, go ahead, but for God’s sake don’t bother me.’ ”
And the spring evening before King’s assassination in Memphis in 1968, Garrow said, the civil rights leader was openly expressing frustration and annoyance with Jackson. Citing interviews with SCLC staffers, the professor reported that “King again berated Jackson . . . he said, ‘Jesse, just leave me alone’ . . . Jackson responded, ‘Don’t send me away, Doc. Don’t send me away.’ ”
The next day, King was felled by a sniper as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Jackson’s actions in the minutes and hours following the assassination have remained in dispute ever since.
Scores of media accounts of the assassination described–generally without attribution–how Jackson was the last person to whom King spoke and how Jackson cradled the mortally wounded civil rights leader in his arms before an ambulance arrived.
Others who were at the scene say Jackson was the source of the stories, and they are insistent that it didn’t happen that way–that King spoke his last words to another assistant on the balcony, and that the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, not Jackson, held King’s head before the ambulance came.
Twenty years later, it is virtually impossible to pin down exactly what Jackson said in that heated period. Television film of his appearances then was not stored.
Some facts are not in dispute: Jackson was in the courtyard below at about 6 p.m. when King was shot. In the hours after King was pronounced dead, Jackson flew back to Chicago, was interviewed the next morning by NBC’s “Today” show and later that day spoke at a meeting of the Chicago City Council, wearing a sweater he said was stained with King’s blood.
Jackson now says he rushed from the courtyard to the balcony after King was shot. “When I got there blood was everywhere . . . I reached down, as did a couple of other people . . . I tried to console him, you know, ‘Doc, we’re with you. Hang on . . . ‘ I remember hearing somebody say an ambulance had been called. I stood up and wiped my hands off and went to the phone and called Mrs. King.”
That night, Jackson recalled, “I decided to go back to Chicago . . . the body was gone . . . the arrangements had obviously been made by the family. There wasn’t anything for the staff people to do. I caught an 11 o’clock plane that went through St. Louis, made a stop, got to Chicago at three in the morning . . . .
“I went home and laid across my bed. The “Today” show was calling. I got up and kept on what I had on . . . then the city council meeting . . . they put on a big memorial service . . . and I had on those same clothes.”
With King’s death, the SCLC became fragmented and ripped by conflict. Abernathy took over as president at the Atlanta headquarters but soon found himself eclipsed by Jackson, then in his late 20s, a striking figure with an Afro hair style and a penchant both for African garb and for publicity.
Jackson dropped out of the seminary with six months left in his studies to devote full time to civil rights work. He was ordained a Baptist minister in 1968 but has never held a full-time pulpit.
Within a year of King’s assassination, the New York Times called Jackson “probably the most persuasive black leader on the national scene.” Playboy hailed Jackson as “the fiery heir apparent” to King and spread an interview with him across 19 pages. Time, in a special issue on Black America in April, 1970, put Jackson on the cover and published a lengthy profile on the young man who, it said, modestly insisted he was but “one leader among many.”
Some within SCLC saw the surge of publicity as part of a deliberate attempt by Jackson to take control of the organization.
Tensions reached a breaking point when Jackson, without consulting SCLC’s headquarters, helped organize widely publicized trade fairs in Chicago for black businessmen. The SCLC’s board in December, 1971, suspended him for 60 days for “administrative impropriety” and for “repeated violation of organizational discipline.”
Jackson quickly resigned from SCLC, declaring, “I need air. I must have room to grow.” And he quickly gained the backing of a score of nationally known blacks–from singers Roberta Flack and Aretha Franklin to politicians Carl Stokes and Richard Hatcher–who gathered at New York’s Commodore Hotel to endorse Jackson’s plan to form his own organization.
“That was the politician in him, coming out back then,” said one participant in the New York meeting. “He knew he had to have some national support if he struck out on his own.”
On Christmas morning of 1971, Jackson unfurled the banner of a new civil rights operation: People United to Save Humanity, or PUSH. (The “save humanity” in the name was later changed to a less grandiose “serve humanity.”)
Like Operation Breadbasket, PUSH would concentrate on improving minority employment and bolstering minority businesses. One of its affiliates, PUSH for Excellence, would concentrate on improving ghetto schools.
Over the next dozen years, PUSH and its affiliates collected at least $17 million in government grants and private and corporate donations, according to public records. And Jackson collected a reputation as a man strong on inspirational oratory and ideas but weak on follow-through, a man with expensive tastes and a large ego but with little management skill and scant administrative discipline.
In city after city, from Los Angeles to Boston and Seattle to Miami, Jackson carried to ghetto school auditoriums a rousing message on the importance of self esteem, self confidence and self discipline. He invariably exhorted his audiences to respond in unison to his rhythmic chant:
“I am somebody . . . I may be poor . . . but I am somebody . . . respect me . . . I am somebody . . . “My mind . . . is a pearl . . . I can learn anything . . . in the world . . .
“Down with dope . . . up with hope . . .
“Nobody will save us . . . for us . . . but us.”
By the thousands, students signed pledges to turn off the television and do their homework, to avoid drugs and teen-age sex, to work hard, to excel.
Since Jackson has never held public office, journalists often have examined PUSH’s operations in search of a yardstick of Jackson’s management skills. Usually, they found those operations to be chaotic. So did the government when, five years after PUSH-Excel was launched, it hired experts to review the program. The experts also declared it short on documented accomplishments.
The program “turned out to be mainly paper,” said a report prepared by the American Institute for Research under government contract.
More criticism came from Department of Education auditors, who contended PUSH-Excel failed to account for how it spent $1.2 million of $4.9 million in federal grants. PUSH-Excel’s managers disputed the claim and Jackson himself dismissed it as an argument between accountants.
One former PUSH official said the criticism of the content and accountability of the program came as no surprise. “While Jesse was flying around the country,” said this former official, who asked to remain anonymous, “things in Chicago were in absolute chaos. We stumbled from one crisis to another.”
Part of the problem, this former official said, was, “Jesse didn’t always have the best and brightest people running things. The key staff people were put there on the basis of their loyalty to him, not on their ability. Loyalty, absolute loyalty, was always the most important thing to him, not whether you could do the job.”
In the early 1980s, with PUSH-Excel’s sloppiness and weakness coming under increasing scrutiny and criticism, Jackson shifted his focus from education programs to negotiating promises of increased minority hiring, promotions and contracts with major corporations. In a three-year period, PUSH signed agreements–called “covenants”–with such firms as 7-Up; Coca-Cola Co.; Heublein Corp.; Southland Corp., which operates 7-Eleven stores; Burger King Corp. and Adolph Coors Co.–often after threatening boycotts by blacks unless agreements were reached.
Corporate executives reacted to Jackson in dramatically different ways.
Jeffrey Campbell, now chairman of the Pillsbury Co.’s restaurant division, was president of Burger King when Jackson and PUSH opened negotiations with the fast-food chain in 1983. “Before they came in, my view was that we ought to fight them, that this guy Jackson was a monster, and I had the backing of my bosses to walk out if necessary,” Campbell said from his skyscraper offices in Minneapolis.
But Campbell said he quickly changed his mind about the “very impressive man” on the other side of the negotiating table. “He handled himself very professionally, and he got to me very quickly, without me realizing it, when he started talking about fairness. He would say: ‘What is fair? Blacks give you 15% of your business–isn’t it fair that you give 15% of your business, your jobs, your purchases back to the black community, the black businesses? You tell me, isn’t that fair?’ ”
“That little seed began to grow in the back of my mind,” Campbell said. “It was the right question to ask me.”
Before long, Burger King signed a $460-million minority opportunity program with PUSH. “It has turned out to be a very positive experience for me,” Campbell said. “Twenty years from now, when I sit back and think of the things I’m proudest of at Burger King, one of them will be the impact we were able to make through this covenant.”
But, in another executive suite in another city, a starkly different picture of Jackson’s operations is painted by a corporate official who declined to be identified.
“We had been doing a very good job of hiring and promoting blacks and giving our business to minorities, and they marched in and ignored all that we had done and began demanding we do this or we do that,” this executive said.
“It seemed like a shakedown to me. They had lists of people they wanted us to do business with, lists of things they wanted us to do, donations and things like that.”
When Jackson carried PUSH’s campaign to St. Louis in 1982 and sought contributions from black businesses to finance an investigation and possible boycott of Anheuser-Busch Co., he ran into opposition from local black organizations and a black-owned newspaper, the St. Louis Sentinel. The newspaper said that when Jackson demanded $500 from each businessmen by saying “you must pay to play” he was taking a “kickback approach.”
In an editorial headlined “Minister or Charlatan?” the newspaper accused Jackson of defrauding the black community and having a “million-dollar commitment to himself.” Jackson promptly filed a $3-million libel suit against the newspaper but later dropped the case when a judge granted the newspaper’s request to inspect PUSH’s financial records.
Part of those records came to light in early 1984 and caused problems for Jackson’s first presidential bid, a campaign which had received a boost a short time earlier when he flew to the Middle East and dramatically negotiated the release of a downed Navy pilot held by the Syrians.
After newspaper disclosures, Jackson and his lawyer acknowledged that in 1981 and 1982, PUSH affiliates received $200,000 in contributions from the Arab League, a confederation of 21 Arab states and the Palestine Liberation Organization. They also confirmed the organizations got an anonymous $350,000 donation but said they did not know who the donor was.
The contributions from the Arab League upset some Jewish leaders, but Jackson said a “double standard” was being applied: “If the Arab League can contribute to Harvard and Georgetown and other institutions of higher learning, can they not contribute to the PUSH Foundation?”
It was not the first chapter in the saga of uneasy relations between Jackson and Jews. Nor would it be the last.
Jews had been concerned earlier by the disclosure that PUSH had received a $10,000 check in 1979 from a Libyan diplomat. This donation led to a four-year-long Justice Department investigation of whether Jackson should have registered as a foreign agent for Libya. The department eventually concluded he did not have to.
And Jews were privately outraged in 1979 when, during a trip to the Middle East, Jackson was photographed embracing PLO leader Yasser Arafat.
Their anger exploded into public view with the “Hymie” incident.
What would become the greatest crisis of Jackson’s first presidential campaign began quietly. While waiting for his airplane at Washington’s National Airport in January of 1984, Jackson paused in the cafeteria to chat with Milton Coleman, a black reporter for the Washington Post who was covering his campaign.
“Let’s talk black talk,” the candidate is reported to have remarked. By this, his friends later said, Jackson meant that his comments were not for publication.
Three weeks later, the Post reported: “In private conversations with reporters, Jackson has referred to Jews as ‘Hymie’ and to New York as ‘Hymietown.’ ”
Suddenly, Jackson was facing a political firestorm. On national television interview programs and everywhere else he appeared, reporters were asking him to explain the remarks. He first denied making them–”It simply isn’t true”–and then began talking about a “conspiracy” to poison his relations with an important bloc of voters just before the crucial New Hampshire primary.
The crisis worsened when Black Muslim minister Louis Farrakhan warned Jews “if you harm this brother, it will be the last one you harm.” Jackson, standing a few feet away, said nothing.
More headlines, more shouted questions from reporters, more turmoil in the campaign.
Finally, three weeks after the original Post article appeared, a grim-faced candidate stood before an audience of national Jewish leaders at a synagogue in Manchester, N.H., and apologized. “In private talks we sometimes let our guard down and we become thoughtless,” he said. “It was not a spirit of meanness, an off-color remark having no bearing on religion or politics . . . . However innocent and unintended, it was wrong.”
Looking back several years later, one friend said Jackson failed to handle the “Hymie” crisis correctly. “He felt he was being attacked unjustly, unfairly,” this friend said. “He should have apologized right away, but his stubborn streak got in the way. He can be very stubborn sometimes, particularly when he feels he is being wronged.”
Another friend insisted that the “Hymie” controversy showed another side of Jackson. “He spent the rest of the campaign, in fact he is still doing it, reaching out to the Jewish community,” this friend said. “He has always done that. He has always tried to reach out. That’s the minister in him, the conciliator.”
Jackson finished third in the 1984 race for the Democratic nomination. Listening to him now, his first national campaign was a smashing success, a model of cost efficiency that carried him through to the convention while five other candidates dropped out.
Others remember the 1984 campaign differently. Veteran reporters called it the most chaotic, mismanaged campaign they had ever covered.
The candidate paid little attention “to the work that needs to be done in the trenches,” said one top official of the 1984 campaign. Another said Jackson regularly would berate in public his overworked aides and was “always telling you what you had done wrong, not what you had done right.”
Willie Brown, the California Assembly Speaker who has been involved in state and national politics for a quarter-century and now is Jackson’s campaign chairman, says it will be different in the 1988 campaign.
“We’re building an infrastructure to relieve him of the day-to-day responsibility of running his campaign,” Brown said from his Sacramento office.
“He has literally been a one-man operation, and if anyone would ever really report the story, they would see that Jesse Jackson is a phenomenon,” Brown added. “There is just no single national candidate who has ever done, or could do, what he has done.”
Jackson’s physical and mental stamina is indeed impressive.
He says he arises about 5:30 most mornings “for a quiet time of study and prayer.” His friends say he does more than study and pray during those early morning hours. “When the phone rings at 5 o’clock on Sunday morning and wakes us up, I look at my wife and we both say, ‘Jesse’s calling,’ ” laughs Harvard’s Poissaint. “And it is always him. He doesn’t say who it is, he’ll just start talking, ‘Poissaint, I have this idea . . . ‘ He never wastes a minute.”
Eighteen- or 20-hour work days are common for Jackson. On Labor Day, for example, he was up before dawn in Pittsburgh’s Hyatt Regency Hotel, preparing for an appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning America” show.
Then it was on to a Catholic church for a special Mass, news conference and rally. On to downtown for a Labor Day parade, a flight to Cleveland for a motorcade through the city’s slums, and an address to a black-sponsored picnic at a crowded park.
Back to the airport for a flight to New York, a parade sponsored by Brooklyn’s Caribbean community, a speech from the steps of a museum and walking the picket line with striking union members outside NBC’s headquarters at Manhattan’s Rockefeller Plaza.
It was nearly midnight before he reached his $250-a-night room at Manhattan’s Grand Hyatt Hotel. At dawn the next morning, he was striding down a concourse at La Guardia Airport, on to the next stop.
Jackson has been hospitalized at least six times in the past 20 years, usually for what is described as exhaustion.
Asked about this, the candidate said, “Those are not all exhaustion. Bronchitis sometimes, or I was simply run down . . . I’ve gone in on occasion just to get a full checkup and all that stuff you do to get your body worked back up.
“When you travel in as many climates as I have, and you have sickle cell traits, not anemia but traits, sometimes it catches up with you.”
According to medical authorities, sickle cell trait is an abnormal gene carried by about 2 million black Americans, or about 8% of the black population. Sickle cell anemia afflicts about 50,000 black Americans who have inherited two copies of the abnormal sickle-cell gene.
Sickle cell trait was identified in one medical study as a common denominator in the sudden deaths of black Army recruits who collapsed during strenuous exercise. But one expert, Dr. Louis W. Sullivan of Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine earlier this year that “all available evidence suggests that sickle cell trait is a benign condition that, with rare exceptions in special circumstances, has no adverse effect on health.”
Few questions ever are asked about Jackson’s health–he’s gained a few inches around the middle but he still projects an athlete’s vigor.
More questions are asked about his personal finances, prompted by his apparently comfortable life style.
Since his first campaign for the presidency, Jackson’s reported annual income has more than doubled. Then, he released his 1983 tax return showing an annual income of $115,000. Now, according to a financial disclosure statement he filed in October with the Federal Election Commission, his annual income exceeds $250,000.
This included a salary of $192,090 from Personalities International Inc., a Chicago speaker’s bureau formed in 1984 by Jackson’s family; $18,750 in payments from his National Rainbow Coalition, and more than $33,000 in honorariums for speeches at colleges, conventions and churches.
The October report showed he had deposits or investments of between $97,000 and $235,000 in various banks and more than $250,000 in ICBC Inc., described as a New York-based inner city broadcasting company.
Jackson has told reporters this year he is receiving a $350,000 advance for an autobiography to be published next year, but it was unclear whether any of this advance was reflected in his most recent financial statement.
Other records disclosed that Jackson owns three homes–one in Chicago valued at more than $100,000, one in Washington purchased for $100,000 in 1985 and the house in Greenville where his mother lives, purchased in 1984 for $40,000.
In the past, Jackson has sounded a bit defensive when questioned about his income. “It’s hard to help hungry people when you are hungry,” he told reporters in his last campaign. “I have a wife and five children. My income, according to my talents and abilities, is modest.”
Even though he doesn’t like to talk about his personal finances, Jackson usually is far more open on that subject than he is on one other question: What he will do, what he will accept, what does he want if his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination falls short? Does he seek the vice presidential nomination?
Jackson usually brushes off the question with a non-answer. But on a spring evening this year, James P. Gannon, editor of the Des Moines (Iowa) Register, sat with the candidate on the deck of Jackson’s mother’s home in Greenville and coaxed an answer from him.
“I do not have a longing ambition for a certain position,” Jackson said when asked specifically about the vice presidency. “My sense of public service is much broader than that. I have an interest, for example, in ending the war in Central America, which I could do without an official position, as a special envoy . . . the right working relationship with the President would allow me to serve our nation in many ways, without having a certain position.”
It is an an answer that characterizes Jesse Jackson, the candidate whose ambition exceeds public office, and whose campaign seemingly knows no end.
