THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 23, 1996 TAG: 9606210716
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY TIM WARREN
LENGTH: 90 lines
JESSE
The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson
MARSHALL FRADY
Random House. 552 pp. $28.50.
There are hundreds of wonderful anecdotes and vignettes in this vivid biography of Jesse Jackson, but my favorite concerns a photograph that Jet magazine ran of the young Jackson at a pulpit, with a photo of Martin Luther King below him and a crucifix hanging above him. King is said to have looked at the picture and remarked, ``Well, at least he had the good grace to place himself below the Savior.''
King was a father figure, mentor and hero to Jackson, yet he well understood what biographer Marshall Frady terms the ``hugely contradictory nature'' of King's ambitious protege. Few others have been able to do this: Jackson may be one of the most complex American public figures of the last half-century.
Born poor and illegitimate in Greenville, S.C., on Oct. 8, 1941, he became a leading figure in the civil rights movement, then a controversial presidential candidate in the 1984 and 1988 campaigns. To some, he is an inspirational, courageous and far-thinking leader; to others, he is a dilettante or a demagogue.
Though Jackson is a non-player in this presidential election year, he remains a made-to-order subject of a biography. Frady, author of excellent biographies of George Wallace and Billy Graham, tries mightily to get a handle on Jackson, and for the most part he succeeds. Frady is too forgiving at times and his prose tends to get purply, but one gets a good sense of who Jackson is and what drives him.
Frady's approach is bound to irritate some readers. He spent seven years following Jackson for this book, and evidently had no problem getting Jackson to talk - he notes that his subject ``possesses an inextinguishable loquacity verging on logorrhea.''
Like Jackson, Frady is a Southerner - the two grew up only 26 miles apart in South Carolina in the 1950s, though in entirely different worlds. He understands better than most white writers the context of race in American society, which is the only way to understand Jackson - who is, for better or worse, a contemporary flash point of racial relations.
Frady also allows that he first knew of Jackson through covering the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and ``still retained a certain romanticism about that time and its figures; it was an experience that has since assumed . . . an almost mythic magnitude.'' Thus, while his explorations of Jackson's youth in a segregated South and his lightning-quick ascension through the civil rights movement are superb, there are times in this sprawling book when Frady should have lowered his sights. Not everything needs to be seen through the prism of myth or tragedy.
And though Frady tries to be fair, one gets the sense that when he's considering Jackson's flaws, he writes more out of sorrow than anger. For instance, regarding his subject's widely rumored womanizing, Frady questions Jackson and his wife, Jackie. He reports that they won't go into details, but say their marriage is their business and nobody else's. That's fine, but Frady should have pursued the question of whether a ``moral leader,'' a role in which Jackson frequently casts himself, can be pious in the public arena but not in private life. Some people call that hypocrisy.
But on the whole, this is a stirring and compelling book. For all his flaws - enormous ego, often brutal insensitivity to those closest to him, a constant frittering of his talents - Jackson is a charismatic man. And he's unafraid, a welcome quality in today's play-it-safe politics. Jackson, after all, was noting the ``economic violence'' of U.S. businesses' overseas moves long before Pat Buchanan made this an issue in the 1996 Republican primaries. He championed health-care reform well before Bill Clinton appropriated the issue in 1992.
While Jackson remains America's most recognizable black leader, he is without an operational base. The Democratic Party, in truth, would rather he go away, despite his dutiful campaigning for its presidential candidates after he was thwarted in '84 and '88. He was a failure as a TV talk-show host (which, come to think of it, is no shame at all).
Jackson still isn't sure whether he wants to be a reformer on the outside or a political player on the inside, and when he tries to be both, he can be neither effectively. Frady explores this theme effectively throughout the book, and concludes:
``So it could come, ultimately, to a parable of a prodigiously gifted outsider who, precisely because of his enduring sense of not belonging despite all his huge gifts, simply tried too much, asserted himself too ungently and extravagantly, to be accepted as wholly genuine by that general American community to which he had hoped histrionically to belong by becoming a moral-heroic figure in its life.'' MEMO: Tim Warren is a writer who lives in Silver Spring, Md. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Jesse Jackson by CNB