Jack White figured the baby was Jesse Jackson’s but, like others, just couldn’t pin it down.
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White is a Time magazine columnist who has covered Jackson since the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign. In addition, he knows Karin Stanford, the former Operation Push official with whom Jackson had an extramarital affair.
Word had been around for more than a year about a Jackson mess. The general outlines were whispered about: the bright political science PhD had moved to Los Angeles with the child and some sort of financial deal brokered by the father.
But she wasn’t talking, the birth records were sealed from public view (due to privacy rules) and nobody in the Jackson inner circle would state flatly for publication that the whisperings were true. Now a tabloid has forced Jackson to fess up.
“I think this is absolutely devastating for both Jackson personally and for the black Americans he speaks for,” said White. “And the timing could not be worse, given the demonstrations he was going to lead in Florida,” protesting what he views as disenfranchisement of minorities in the presidential election.
“What a lack of judgment, what egomania!” White said. “To have unprotected sex with this woman, a subordinate of his! The parallels with Clinton and Lewinsky are stunning. And there he was, counseling Clinton. I think he is finished.”
Really?
An African-American, White was at least being somewhat unpredictable in his dire assessment. Overall, initial reactions to the Jackson mess tended to follow partisan political lines, as now tends to be the case on virtually everything here, whether it’s missile defense, late-term abortion or President Clinton’s embarrassing admission of deceit Friday to end the Lewinsky legal saga.
Those on the right, especially the diehards on talk radio, were outraged and pilloried him for hypocrisy, while those on the left were perhaps a bit disappointed but generally stoic, even dismissive of the matter’s relevance.
So what does it all amount to, if anything?
On one level, it’s the latest in a string of awful publicity for Jackson. The past year had already brought his rushes to judgment in what he thought was a case of a black youngster’s lynching in Mississippi (it was suicide) and the Decatur, Ill., school violence controversy. Even old white liberal allies rolled their eyes.
He seems, at least on the surface, somewhat at sea, freelancing here, there and everywhere during an era without a galvanizing social backdrop. Even his weekly CNN television show is getting worse, which didn’t seem possible. He appears to be winging it more often than not but, lucky him, management may not have the nerve to pull the plug–as well as a tidy six-figure salary for scant work–and risk his possible public cries of racism.
He is, after all, Jesse Jackson.
He is the most favorably rated black political figure among blacks, according to David Bositis, senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington. In Bositis’ last survey, done last fall, Jackson’s favorable ratings were 83 percent, which put him ahead of Colin Powell but still behind Bill Clinton.
“Is organized labor going to back off him?” said Bositis. “No. He has been their friend. Other liberal organizations? Farm organizations where he has spoke out for family farmers? No. Like Clinton, he will weather the storm.”
“He is like Clinton. If successful, people will put the other stuff in the background,” said Ron Walters, the Distinguished Leadership scholar at the University of Maryland and, coincidentally, Stanford’s thesis adviser at Howard University.
“I think he is the latest victim of a tendency to take a problem a person has, put a megaphone up to it, then analyze the person’s political capabilities,” Walters said. “I have thought that ever since the Gary Hart episode. The more this happens, the more cynical I get about the whole trend.”
“I think Jesse has been discredited already,” said Colin Greer, president of the New World Foundation. “He is not a leader anymore. He is admired but can’t really make much happen. In a way, he’s the old civil rights leadership. Young black activists may admire him, but they don’t look to him for leadership.”
Greer, an educator, author and social activist, noted how so much of what one finds in public policy discussions these days is bereft of any surprise. Pundits play prescribed roles. Guys on the left say one thing and guys on the right say another, and it is rare that somebody is willing to concede that the other side might have a good point. Greer’s deriding Jackson in any fashion is notable because on most issues they would be joined ideologically.
“How do you have a discussion of morality outside this very partisan battle?” Greer wondered. “We do have a vacuum to be filled morally but are allowing it to be filled by two armies engaged in battle.”
Greer sees us as living in a distinctly cynical period. Public officials accuse one another of breaking standards of public morality when they may well know that they themselves are culpable. But the utilitarian rules, meaning that if you can get away with it, then it’s permissible.
Our notions of morality also seem narrow. Yes, there is fooling around sexually. But what about a politician’s being on a corporate payroll two minutes after leaving public office, then exploiting previous relationships as a public official to get rich?
We keep fragmenting our definitions of right and wrong to a point that we don’t seem to have any even vague consensus on what we might have once deemed a public morality.
“If Jeb Bush were to be revealed to have had an affair, that should not diminish his credibility as a governor,” Greer said. “We shouldn’t equate the standard of morality they live by with the quality of assessments [service] they give us. If the president of General Electric was fooling around, shareholders wouldn’t say get rid of him, since they’re making a good profit.”
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The Jackson disclosure was of particular curiosity to Marshall Frady, author of “Jesse” (Random House), a well-received and sympathetic biography, and a transplanted Southerner who became part of the New York intelligentsia and now lives in Los Angeles. The news, he said, was “a testimonial to how profoundly mixed these moral apostles are.”
During Jackson’s presidential campaigns, Frady noted, the lore about his extracurricular adventuring “was absolutely rampant, with a galaxy of attachments.” To that extent, in ways Jackson would not be quick to claim, “he has wound up Dr. [Martin Luther] King’s heir,” said Frady, who has just completed a King biography and was alluding to King’s womanizing.
“With King, he was said to be an expansively emotional being and not practiced in applying economies to his emotions,” said Frady, utilizing a rich turn of phrase. Imagine being caught in the sack and declaring to a chagrined spouse, “Dear, I am simply not practiced in applying economies to my emotions!”
Perhaps it is the same with Jackson, who at least accepted responsibility (belatedly). I then mentioned Jackson’s own illegitimacy to Frady and the certain fitting, if unseemly, nature of all this.
“Indeed, Jackson has always doted on pointing out the synchronicities in time, the great poetic circle closings, and coming back around with these rhymings of irony,” Frady said. “And, boy, does that apply to this!”
Oh, boy, it does. As for a flattening of Jackson’s moral stature, I suspect that will happen, at least in a small fashion and probably only for a brief period. His life will be awkward for a while. He best not sermonize soon on certain topics, such as safe sex or marital fidelity, lest his wife chain him to an empty Chicago River tourist boat and push him onto a stormy Lake Michigan.
And there will be inevitable mention of how Jackson counseled Clinton on his Lewinsky travail at the same time Stanford was pregnant. But perhaps Clinton was better off with Jackson than with some virtuous monk.
“My God,” said Frady, “who better to counsel him than someone who has traveled through those moral territories?”