Customer Reviews

Jesse:: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson

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"Jesse" is a compelling examination of the fascinating life and times of an American original, civil rights leader and two-time presidential contender Jesse Jackson. This detailed, nuanced biography benefits from the author's nearly thirty years covering Jackson as a journalist, as well as the access Frady was granted his subject as a frequent traveling companion and from many interviews with Jackson, his family and colleagues. As a result, Frady has been able to create a intimate account of his subject's life and thought which seemingly allows the reader to get inside Jackson's head and understand his motivations and actions. Striving for a balanced portrayal, Frady does not shy away from Jackson's faults; commendably, he deals with them in a frank, fair manner while avoiding sensationalism. Ultimately, Frady suggests, all of Jackson's activities, from his early work with PUSH and Operation Breadbasket in Chicago, to his presidential campaigns and his incessant world travels, have been motivated by a common spirit of "gospel populism" and a desire to be seen not simply as a black leader but as a moral leader with a vision that transcends racial, cultural and economic boundaries. "Jesse" is not a perfect book; it seems at times a bit lengthy, and often Frady devotes seemingly endless attention to minor or obscure events and breezes over major ones (example: we repeatedly hear references and anecdotes about Jackson's 1989 trip to earthquake-stricken Armenia, but his 1988 speech at the Democratic National Convention - probably his most memorable public moment - is cursorily dispatched in two sentences). "Jesse" is probably not, as one reviewer suggested, the definitive biography of Jesse Jackson, but it is an important key to understanding the man, and in the absence of a definitive portrait, it will no doubt be the best Jackson biography available for a very long time.

Although this book is 15 years old, Marshall Frady, writing with great brilliance and depth of insight into the American racial character, has perhaps penned one of the most important if not the best American biographies of the past two decades. This book, subtitled "The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson," explains why, in a fit of alarm during the 1988 campaign, Michael Dukakis (speaking of Jackson as a looming primary threat) told reporters that he was up against an "American original." If as Dukakis correctly assessed, that Jackson is indeed an American original, the question that will immediately come to the reader's mind after reading this book is why America chose Barack Obama as its first Black President instead of the more seasoned, battle-hardened and battle-tested, Jesse Jackson?

Was Jackson, despite his hard-hitting "on target" populist rhetoric, still a bit too edgy for mainstream America; and Obama just round-edged enough and cool enough to be non-threatening? Was it the nation's anxiousness to get rid of (and then get as far away from) the village idiot as possible? And did not Obama represent the greatest distance possible from Bush II at the time? Was it the hope and believability of Obama's soaring Red-Blue State rhetoric, and his clean cut Ivy League persona when viewed against Jackson's rough edges and unpolished exterior? Or was it just as it has always been in American politics: a matter of timing and just another choice between the lesser of two evils, both in the primary (against Machaivellian diva Hillary Clinton) and in the general election (against the inconsistent political bad boy John McCain)?

If one reads Obama's very well-written and well-rehearsed (but still very thin and rather self-serving) autobiographies and compare them here against Frady's independently researched and much more objective analysis of Jackson's lifetime of achievements, our 44th President's record comes up very short indeed, and seems like a dim rhetorical photocopy of Jackson's more robust and more meaty life experience on America's political and racial battlefields.

In short, when measured against Jackson, even with his Harvard and Columbia degrees, and "pre-awarded" Nobel prize, Obama seems like a more stripped-down, sleeker-looking, more pricey, but still much more tamed, defanged, fragile version of the Jackson model of an American 21st Century politician. It is jackson who is the American original and Obama whose is the Hawaiian interloper. And while Obama "presented well" in the run up to the 2008 primary, he, like Jackson, was not found without flaws.

Just as Jackson's womanizing tainted his image, Obama's flack with Rev. Wright, his Minister of 20 years, also left a permanent bad taste in the mouths of most Americans, especially in the mouths of working-class White Americans. And although after reading Obama's two books one may think that the resumes of the two men seem eerily similar -- both grew up poor (one in the South, the other in Hawaii and Indonesia); and both were college trained (one in private prep schools and in the Ivy league halls of Harvard and Columbia, the other at a State College in South Carolina); and given that both were community activists (one the founder of Chicago's rainbow coalition, "Operation Push," the other (went through the motions of "filling-in" his resume at Chicago's Altgeld housing project); one was on a pilgrimage to educate America about what is happening to it (arguably a mission designed to change America for the better); while the other had embarked on a carefully crafted political strategy (arguably to triangulate his way into the presidency (of which he succeeded)); both were granted a platform at the democratic national convention and both used it with equal proficiency, hitting home runs with their soaring oratorical skills (Obama with the now famous "Red state-Blue state speech," and Jackson with his ["Give Hope a chance speech"])," yet, only Obama was admitted to the club of America's political inner sanctum; and only Obama was elected as President, the first black President.

Frady here allows us to make a much more in-depth analysis of the the whys of this phenomenon, allowing for a more careful side-by-side mental comparison between the two black political heavyweights. And I believe that any reasonable reader (of all three books) will conclude as I have, that: (not even taking in to account his lackluster performance as President, so far), our "pre-awarded" Nobel Prize winning President, should not have been allowed to hold a candle to, or to sit on the same stage with Rev. Jackson.

What Frady has helped us discover here in his six years of traveling with Jackson is that in retrospect -- and after two years of Obama's triangulating, hiding out in the oval office and diddling -- America may have made a colossal mistake? This book proves that with warts and all, Jesse Jackson is head and shoulders above Barack Obama, and that the first black President justifiably should have been Jesse Jackson! [Maybe its not too late? Maybe this mistake could be corrected in 2012?]

Before reading this book, I too had been conditioned to distrust Jackson; I too thought that Jackson was just as Bush I (and all of the "bought and paid for" Black Conservatives) had described him, as a towering self-obsessed megalomaniac, a voracious opportunist with an almost desperate need for media exposure, and "America's #1 Civil Rights Hustler." But here Frady in unravelling and unpacking the enigma that is Jesse Jackson, shows us that this view is a very jaundiced picture of one of America's finest home-grown political products. In the process he answers all the unanswered questions about the man, the politician, the visionary, the political and religious apostle to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Frady shows, without even intending to, that being an apprentice to Dr. King is moral training of a very high order and training not to be taken lightly in the American political cosmos.

Like King, Jackson sought a more humane reordering of American society. His passion and anxiousness may have betrayed the fact that he was "in it for the long haul." Jackson's greatest works were done on the interior regions of the American heart where pride and hope happens. He always believed (as the Existentialists do) that we were eyeball-to-eyeball with the tragic dimension of man. Embedded within his political calculus and catechism is a devastating home-spun political theory: "political strength does not come out of the barrel of a gun but out of moral authority." To him, our best national defense is "to get enough people wanting to make America better." Jackson thus believes firmly that the force of good should never be underestimated. That even tyrants want to do good? Like King, (but unlike Obama who ducks them), Jackson dealt in serious moral and political truths about the American condition. This often led to "polite but uncomfortable understandings" about the realities we face in the U.S.

For instance, in trying to pry working class Iowans away from the fantasy that they were the same as the elitist George H. Bush I, Jackson made the following comments on the campaign stump in Iowa in 1988: "I hear folks who don't have dental care or health care, can't buy enough groceries or pay their electric bill, talking about they somehow got something in common with Reagan and Bush? They say: Me and Bush, we both for the flag, against crime, for gun rights, believe in prayer. Both of us are conservatives? Naw, naw: One of you is rich, and one of you is poor!"

In that same speech, Jackson pointed out other cold facts of American life: that most poor people are not black; they are white, mostly female and young; that most poor people are not lazy, but go to work everyday and are not on welfare but still can't earn enough to feed their families? Jackson believes that a nation is judged as in the bible, by how it treats the least of those within its midsts. He then gives the real reasons why so many are poor in America: "Corporations are taking manufacturing jobs overseas, not for better labor but for cheaper labor and higher profits. The number one exporter in Taiwan he tells us is not Taiwan, but General Electric! Asia is not taking our jobs away from us, the American multinational corporations (and the corporate class) are taking our jobs to them! The same is true of farm prices. Its not the rural farmer taking advantage of the urban consumer, its the "corporate barracuda" taking advantage of them both.

"Urban America looks like its been bombed out; rural America abandoned like a plague just hit it. Family farms gone, jobs out, drugs in, profits up, wages down, workers abandoned. And yet they are playing us off against each other, trying to make us think that its because we are different kinds of people, playing those old race games with us when we need each other. Always some kind of scheme by the economic aristocracy to try to confound democracy."

And this is just a sample. This is a surprisingly good, stunningly well-written, thorough and important read. Five stars.

Neither a smear sheet or puff piece, this is a very objective and thorough look at the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Here you see both the good and bad. The infamous "King's blood" incident, the womanizing, the crudity and rudeness (that I've had the misfortune to expereince once), and the scandals are all here minus the Angela Parker case in 1971, oddly.

However, Frady does not let the reader forget the good that Jesse Jackson has done for society. We also him getting tearful Israeli and Palestinian children to come together in peace. We see him trying to unify poor Whites and Blacks in America (who even THINKS of doing that anymore?), we see him encouraging Black kids to forego delinquency and do better in school (I first saw him on one such occasion in 1978), and we see the successful instances in which he helped in the release of hostages. We also see that contrary to popular (mis)beleif, he has encouraged far more cooperation among the races than this far lesser contemporaries among what remains of "Black leadership."

Frady lets the reader know that in spite of Rev. Jesse Jackson's considerable and numerous flaws, the good that he has done cannot be dismissed.

In spite of this, there is a minor complaint. Frady gets to be a bit much with the dialect in trying to capture Rev. J/J's speech patters ("Yawl," "Great Gawd a mighty," "Looka heah," etc.).