Thunder in America: the improbable campaign of Jesse Jackson. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Feb, 1987 by Taylor Branch

Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms. Thunder in America: The Improbable Campaign of Jesse Jackson.

Both these men spend a lot of timein churches castigating devils, including each other. In the spring of 1984, presidential candidate Jesse Jackson flew to Raleigh to support Gov. Jim Hunt, then challenging incumbent Jesse Helms in the most expensive campaign in Senate history. "With 200,000 more blacks registered, Jesse Helms could be put out of work,' Jackson declared. He toured black churches, then flew out of the state and left the registration work largely to Hunt. In direct response to Jackson, Jesse Helms toured the white churches of North Carolina with Jerry Falwell and a honey-voiced preacher named Lamarr Mooneyham, whose Moral Majority workers managed to register more Helms conservatives than Hunt registered Democrats.

Helms won narrowly, running well behind theReagan landslide. These books* suggest that his margin of victory lay in mobilized white antipathy to Jesse Jackson. Similarly, in five states where Jackson's freedom train inspired a massive upsurge of black registration, adding some 400,000 new black voters, white registration jumped 1.2 million. The obvious lesson is that in primitive contests of racial solidarity, the numbers tell heavily against American blacks. Jackson, while drawing as much as 85 percent of the black vote, never received more than 9 percent of the white vote in a presidential primary. This is why those Democratic politicians who look eagerly toward a Jackson re-run in 1988 tend to be from districts that are overwhelmingly black. No one else can afford the psychic boost.

* Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms. Ernest B. FurgursonNorton, $18.95.

* Thunder in America: The Improbable Campaign of JesseJackson. Bob Faw and Nancy Skelton. Texas Monthly Press, $16.95.

The two Jesses are outsiders of oppositestripes. Helms holds real power--he has built a national money machine, he practically writes the Republican platforms, he owns a score of ambassadors and an oversized toehold in the Senate--and yet clings to his self-image as a victim. He protests against persecution by the "elite media,' appeasers of communism, and faint-hearted conservative pragmatists. He fillibusters. He stands on his hind legs. Whereas the Reagan administration projects pained tolerance for South Africa and Pinochet, Helms loves them. He pushes his position to an obstreperous extreme and then complains of the result. Ernest Furgurson is at his best in showing what a lifelong achievement it has been for Helms who began his career as the spokesman for North Carolina's banking industry and always since has made alliance with privilege to pass himself off as an underdog. For 35 years, Helms's most consistently effective tactic in this charade has been to cry out over the travail of the white race, which he sees oppressed by liberals, secular humanists, and minority leaders such as Jesse Jackson.

Bedding down with the Lumbee

Jackson came by his outsider credentials morenaturally. As the bastard son of a poor teenage mother, he battled against pariah status even within the black leadership class, let alone amongst the majority whites. He represents a poor constituency in a rich nation, the left on a spectrum where the left is largely extinct. By way of consolation, these long odds offer Jackson a freedom from constraint that he often has used imaginatively. Unlike Helms, whose chutzpah is dull and colorless, Jackson entertains even his enemies. He wiggles and winks, flies off to Cuba and Syria on impossible missions of shocking common sense, beds down his Secret Service squad with Lumbee Indians near Pembroke's Chicken Road, and lures Fidel Castro into church for the first time in three decades. Although he often speaks in Muhammed Ali doggerel, which is tiresome and condescending, he also possesses a rakish wit and the gift of cross-cultural perception. Like Malcolm X., Jackson teaches as well as amuses when he explains, for instance, why he thinks none of the American television networks maintains a bureau anywhere in black or Arab Africa.

These two books are narrow politicalbiographies, variations on Theodore White's genre of post-campaign analysis. As such, they proceed relentlessly from speech to meeting to poll to speech. Furgurson in particular stretches political argument into biography, giving more ammunition than enlightenment. Driven by his argument, he sees no leavening merit anywhere in Helms's record, not even in his quixotic effort to save the hapless seaman Medvid from the Russians and the Reagan bureaucracy. The few attempts at personal interpretation, such as the assertion that journalism school would have corrected Helms's right-wing screed, are hamhanded and specious. In conventional terms that might be applied equally to Jackson, Furgurson attacks Helms as a radical, an emotionalist, a threat to stability, a stranger to institutional respect. Both books take the pundit's usual view that because most of the votes are in the center, these two fringe politicians can only hope to move the center--that neither can be the center, hold power.