Campaign Portrait

By Robert Ajemian

The only repeat runner among the Democratic candidates, Jesse Jackson is pushing hard to broaden his appeal beyond black America. This is one of a series of occasional profiles of major 1988 contenders.

Something positively weird is going on with the political career of the Rev. Jesse Jackson. The angry outsider, the superheated maverick who used to beat up on the Democratic Party just four years ago, no longer seems angry. His shrillness has almost vanished. Sometimes he is even in danger of being bland.

Instead of threatening to bolt the party, he embraces it. At a gathering of Democrats in Atlanta, Jackson declared that while the party has both a conservative and a progressive wing, it needs two wings to fly. Democrats let out a sigh of relief. During a debate among the presidential candidates, the preacher sounded so reasonable he was almost irrelevant. His supporters argue this is a more mature Jackson. But the skeptics wink at that. They say Jesse is singing white music to get white votes.

In a Manchester, N.H., motel room one afternoon last month, Jackson rested under the sheets of a king-size bed. There was something sultan-like about him as he sat propped up, arms folded across his chest, wearing a white undershirt. His voice was the tip-off to his great pleasure as he told of large white audiences that turned out to see him around the country. 'There's a real phenomenon going on out there," Jackson said. Organizations that shunned him in 1984 now urge him to visit. The Montana state legislature gave him a standing ovation. He described how the faces of Iowa farmers and Louisiana energy workers changed from defeat to hope as he spoke to them. Suddenly Jackson began laughing, burying his face in the sheets. "A lot of them are real rednecks," he chuckled. They let Jackson know they didn't give a damn about civil rights. But they were thrilled at his cry about how their suffering should end. "No other candidate can bring groups like that together," he boasted.

Now Jackson climbed out of bed, pulled his dark pinstripe trousers up over his knee-high blue socks. He ran a wide comb through his hair. At 45 he has become puffy around the neck and middle. But his tall, erect frame and penetrating gaze are still imposing. His zeal for credibility includes wearing no jewelry or flashy clothes. "People want authenticity," he said. "I'm authentic."

Small wonder that Jackson has a somewhat enlarged view of himself. Last month, while speaking to voters in a New Hampshire living room, he was called to the telephone. He returned to tell the group that the nation of Angola was holding a white American pilot and wanted to return him only to Jackson. The impressed voters fell silent. Like some giant gypsy moth, Jackson is drawn to crises, which offer him splendid opportunities for public exposure. Last fall when a race riot erupted at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, he was asked to come help calm the campus. When the controversy over too few blacks in baseball management surfaced, Jackson quickly called Commissioner Peter Ueberroth and invited himself to address the owners. Ueberroth acquiesced.

Much of his early life was taken up in an endless quest for recognition. For years Jesse Jackson has been a man on a hunt for respect.

The son of an unwed teenager, Jesse learned early that his real father, Noah Robinson, lived right next door. This was in Greenville, S.C., and big Noah was a local hero, a handsome, hardworking man no one dared challenge. If pushed too far, Noah Robinson would flatten adversaries, even whites, with his fists. "He was a black Lone Ranger," recalls a half brother of Jesse's, Noah Robinson Jr. "Jesse loved our father, but he felt totally rejected." When he was nine, Jesse used to stand in the yard and gaze across at his father's ) house. If a face appeared in the window, the boy would turn and run away. When big Noah took his own family on a trip, Jackson's biographer Barbara Reynolds has reported, Jesse grieved to go with him. In the neighborhood the young Jackson was taunted by other boys about having no father. At the Baptist church, moralistic parishioners made his mother feel like an outcast.

His sense of shame had a positive side. Jesse always tried harder, teachers and coaches recall. Remembers Jackson: "People don't laugh at you when you get A's." But always there was a feeling of being locked out. Today Jackson still thinks of Noah Robinson as a hero. Occasionally he drops in on him, and he calls him on Father's Day.

Jackson's need for respect still shows. He bristles at slights. At a recent fund raiser, a white contributor stood up to pledge a sum of money and lectured Jackson in hard language that he'd have to be more cooperative. Jackson swore back at him and told him to keep his money. Recalls Jackson: "He thought his cash gave him that right." Questions that call attention to his broad black support bring an edge of anger to his voice. He points to another candidate. "Does Mike Dukakis worry only about Greeks?"

Jackson suffered another terrible emotional blow in 1968. At 26 he was a promising young member of Martin Luther King's civil rights team. Considered pushy by some, the young Jackson impressed and amused King, who particularly appreciated his ability to get business firms to cough up contributions. Even if Jesse did crowd into pictures with the leader, King tolerated it with a smile. When King was shot and killed on a motel balcony in Memphis, Jackson was standing below in a courtyard. Somehow he managed to end up with King's blood smeared over his shirt. Early the next morning, Jackson turned up 500 miles away on television in Chicago still wearing the bloodied shirt and implying he had held the dying King in his arms. His behavior horrified King's lieutenants, who viewed it as profound opportunism. Coretta King could barely conceal her disgust, and for years she would not even speak to Jackson.

Ever since, Jackson has tried in vain to win back the approval of his old associates in the movement, by then his extended family. It was another massive rejection. His half brother Noah says of the Memphis incident, "Now Jesse was zero for two. He's still begging for their acceptance." Only a few months ago, Coretta King turned down a request for support, as did Atlanta ^ Mayor Andrew Young, who was one of King's aides. The Atlanta team still distrusts Jackson, though they are unwilling to criticize him publicly. Says one of Jesse's colleagues who knows the story of the assassination: "They have no idea how much it haunts him. It's a drop of poison in his glass." Jackson shrugs off the animosity and explains it away with a religious reference. "Everybody wanted a piece of the cloth," he says.

Over the years, Jackson's motives have been difficult to fathom. He works out his anxieties alone. He is a masterly manipulator and loves to turn people on and off. One minute he melts listeners with his charm, the next he withdraws. He describes himself as bicultural. He grew up on the black side of the tracks, but worked across town for whites. His language can change rapidly from moralizing preacher to street hustler. He lets no one too close. Most white political leaders have little confidence in his word. No matter what the brooding preacher promises, no one is ever certain that he will deliver.

Jackson has his own quick method of detecting motives in others. "I can look into a person's eyes," he says, almost preening, "and tell what he's really up to." His jousting manner intimidates people, and Jackson swiftly spots the signs. In 1984, by Candidate Walter Mondale's wandering eyes and hurried speech, Jackson knew that Mondale was afraid of him.

Jackson's message may be less immediately threatening this time, but the candidate himself is much the same. Still hopelessly disorganized, he drives himself to exhaustion seven days a week. Jackson gets constant reinforcement. Crowds swiftly collect around him. He is treated like a monarch. A snap of the finger brings him a newspaper. A nod of the head brings a glass of lemonade. Oblivious of the hour, he rouses people with phone calls from 6 in the morning to long after midnight. Often he holds planes until the last minute before he arrives to take his first-class seat. He neither drinks nor smokes and customarily requests nearby passengers to put out their cigarettes. He takes pleasure in mimicking aides. When one of them recently kidded about wanting a salary increase, the needling Jackson pretended he had heard the word celery and promised more carrots and greens.

He is prickly about his family's privacy -- he got hundreds of death threats in 1984 -- as is his wife Jackie, 43. A strong and opinionated woman and mother of their five children, she challenged reporters, during the recent upset over candidates' privacy, to leave her husband alone. "If my husband has committed adultery," she said, "you better not tell me, and you better not go digging into it. I'm trying to raise a family and won't let you destroy it."

Jackson is in a better position than in 1984, when he received nearly 20% of the Democratic primary vote but only 10% of the delegates. Under today's revised rules, the same vote will earn him far more delegates. They will be a disciplined bloc. In a tight convention, Jackson could be in a strong position to broker the outcome.

Even though pollsters claim that three-fourths of the nation's blacks want Jackson to run again, most black political leaders remain opposed. With Ronald Reagan out of the way, black politicians visualize a Democrat in the White House. They insist that Jackson's candidacy will deter other candidates from pursuing the black vote. Jackson counters that blacks will have more clout with the eventual winner if they unite behind one man. But black leaders dislike the idea of a single broker, especially the unaccountable Jackson. His dominating presence over the years and his presidential bids have helped squelch the emergence of other black figures. Still, black politicians are reluctant to oppose Jackson publicly. "Jesse's getting a private spanking," says Tyrone Brooks, a Georgia legislator who ran Jackson's state campaign in 1984. He openly urges Jackson not to run: "It's a terrible mistake."

Now the peripatetic candidate sat in an airliner headed for Baton Rouge, La. He wore a red-striped shirt with white collar, and kept popping tiny Tootsie Rolls into his mouth. Jackson was due to deliver a Sunday sermon at the local Mount Zion First Baptist Church. In 20 years, he recalled proudly, he had not once failed to fill a church to overflowing. Jackson believes his 1984 campaign lifted blacks and other minorities toward more power. "There are more blacks trying for office today, sheriffs, legislators, tax assessors," he pointed out.

These days he pounds away at American business. Corporate behavior must change, declares Jackson. "They're getting slave labor abroad," he says, "at the expense of jobs here." He urges federal penalties and incentives to force corporations to stop. Audiences like the argument. So effective is Jackson with America's workers that organized labor, long hostile to Jackson, is beside itself. His bravado raises a tough question: How much does Jackson really know? He has no ready information supply, but rather sucks up ideas and facts as he goes along. Jackson's grasp of voters' emotions is uncanny and exceeds that of any of the other candidates. Highly intelligent, bold and innovative, he understands issues that cut. In the end Jackson relies on his own long and remarkable experience.

Looking at him, one has to wonder why Jackson is thinking of running at all. His presidential quest seems doomed, he has never been elected to any office, and most of his party wishes he would go away. Any Democratic nominee is sure to keep him at a safe distance, and will not want him as a running mate. Even Jackson's new success with white voters is probably transitory. Many of them have said they applaud his words, though they could never vote for him.

But Jackson seems to feel that he has no choice except to run. Being the nation's preeminent black activist is not enough. Nor would it be enough merely to focus his energies on the causes he cares most deeply about and fight for them as a powerful leader. No matter how much respect he would get from that, it would not equal the respect he craves.