Chronicling a Man Out of Time

When author Marshall Frady began his long quest to understand the Rev. Jesse Jackson, he suspected there was much more to the two-time presidential candidate than his public persona.

There was, for all to see, Jackson the politician, Jackson the orator, Jackson the man forever seeking the lights of the television camera.

But Frady, in occasional brushes with Jackson over the years, sensed there was much more to this man who had been the first African American in the nation’s history to be a serious presidential candidate.

And so Frady began what became an epic journey of eight years, culminating this month with a biography titled, “Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson” (Random House).

It is a prodigious work, in which Frady used extended access to chronicle a life that has at times soared but at other times faltered to near-insignificance.

And Frady came away with the conclusion that Jackson, a man who accomplished much, is “miscast in time” without the great moral script of a Martin Luther King Jr. from which to work. He is “larger than the time he has tumbled into,” a man who would have flourished so much more had he reached his zenith in the turbulent ‘60s rather than the more mundane ‘80s and ‘90s.

And, in Frady’s view, Jackson is about to be consigned to the mothball closet of history if he does not do something to resurrect himself and soar again, perhaps even higher.

“He could wind up like a kind of apostolic Flying Dutchman,” Frady wrote, “forever roaming about in public life, looming imposingly from one tension after another in endless pursuit of his ultimate hour, that promise he has sensed ever since his youth.”

Witness the events of June 18, when Jackson was in Long Beach, rallying dockworkers displaced by the closure of the Naval shipyard.

“I promised I would be with you to the end and I will come see you again and again and again until you have new jobs,” Jackson told the crowd. “If they can find the money to build jails, then they can find the money to sustain you in your transition.”

It was, to Frady, vintage Jackson, a man who absolutely cannot forsake a crowd, large or small.

“A group of five can amount to him like a coliseum full of people,” Frady said. “It’s not arithmetic. I’ve seen him travail and exhort with three people in front of him.”

So just what does Frady think of Jackson after all those years of following him around?

“You can’t help but like him,” he said the other day while sitting on the veranda of his Sherman Oaks home. “But you alternate--at times being hugely fond of him, but at other times viewing his approach with profound groans. He can take up all the oxygen in a room or a situation. And even if you are there as a spectator, it can be wearying.”

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On this particular day, Frady was wearing a blue-and-white striped shirt as he sipped afternoon coffee and chain-smoked True cigarettes while his four cats lounged on the deck. The sense here was of being in a treehouse because the deck was halfway up a hill in the heavily wooded neighborhood. He moved to Southern California from New York in 1988 to explore a film project about a televangelist. What was supposed to be a brief stay has evolved into a permanent home. He and his wife, Barbara, will probably remain here until his next book, a novel about Jesus, is completed.

“Los Angeles has a way of unintentionally becoming home,” he said.

Frady, a native of South Carolina, has made a good bit of his living over the years by writing about some of the major players and events of the South. His works include biographies of former Alabama Gov. George Wallace and evangelist Billy Graham. And his 1993 piece in the New Yorker about the execution of convicted murderer Rickey Ray Rector in Arkansas is considered by some to be one of the finer pieces to appear in that magazine in recent memory.

But the Jackson book, in which he chronicles the civil rights leader’s rise from poverty and his attempt to become the nation’s social prophet, is by far the most ambitious.

In it, he traces Jackson the youngster, growing up in Greenville, S.C., only 26 miles from his own hometown. Frady grew up solidly middle class, a preacher’s son who attended Greenville’s Furman University. Jackson grew up poor and illegitimate, an outcast who appeared doomed to failure in that red clay region of the Deep South.

And yet, Frady said, Jackson succeeded against all those odds simply because the gifts had been planted--the mental gift, the oratorical gift, the physical gift of size and stature, all of which combine to make him one of the most electrifying speakers of his generation.

“He actually had the wherewithal to do it,” Frady said. “However rough the finish, it was there.”

Frady tells how Jackson’s quest began as a young minister and civil rights worker in the ‘60s. It describes his relationship with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., his rising influence in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, his ascendancy after King’s death and, ultimately, unsuccessful campaigns for the presidency in 1984 and ’88.

It was in 1988 that Frady picked up Jackson’s trail, a trail that would lead him back to what he does best: writing the printed word. For eight years Frady worked in television, putting together documentaries and working for a time on ABC’s “Nightline.”

He now refers to those years as “my electronic Babylonian captivity,” in which what he did for a living served up a sense of “ferocious vitality and enormous importance” that was more mirage than reality.

“It was like writing on the wind,” Frady said. “I took a look over my shoulder and there were no footprints there.”

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Frady began his writing career with Atlanta’s Newsweek bureau, then moved on to the Saturday Evening Post. In little time, his Faulknerian prose captured the attention of Harper’s magazine Editor Willie Morris, who included him in a stable of writers that were considered some of the best in the country at the time.

In Morris’ memoir, “New York Days,” Frady played one of the major characters of that brief era, which ended with Morris and most of the staff resigning in a dispute with the owners of the magazine.

Then came a stint with Life magazine before Frady switched to television. And then came the Jackson project.

In the midafternoon sunshine, Frady talked of how Jackson had paved the way for the likes of a Colin Powell to be a serious candidate for president, just as, in a way, George Wallace had for Jimmy Carter. But he also said there was always the question of just what did Jackson want.

“He had been careening about with increasing conspicuousness in our national experience since the early ‘70s, to the point where polls indicated he had become one of the most recognizable public figures in the land,” Frady wrote. “But [he is] a kind of familiar stranger whose exact nature remained unclear.”

And he also said that, even though Jackson now seems “on the back side of the moon,” he believes the day will come when that changes. Frady said the trick is for Jackson to find a project big enough and important enough to sustain him, to give him a loftier purpose than addressing picket lines or charging off to the Middle East when there is a flare-up.

Frady suggests that something on the order of reviving King’s Poor People’s Campaign might be a worthy possibility.

“He has seemed to have passed into eclipse more than once in the past and come flaring forth again. He’s almost like a primal force of nature. He just doesn’t give up.”