Making History with Silo Sam

By GARRY WILLS

Standing over my seat in the airplane, he shadowboxes with the empty aisle just darkened for takeoff: "It's like a fighter who's got his guard up high, looking over at 'the Bear' " -- his head periscopes over his hands -- "and you expose yourself to these terrible body blows. Drugs." His midsection abruptly gives under the imagined punch, but the hands stay up. "Debt." He buckles again. "The purchasing of America. Energy." It is Jesse Jackson's analysis of the gut dismay he finds in contemporary America. He is an ecumenical collector of dismays.

"I start my policy toward Russia from here, from the hurt" -- he holds his aching fighter's sides -- "and move on out toward them." Protecting against the body blows, he argues, will make America stronger against the Russian Bear. "We've been leading with our left, with our left" -- he jabs, repeated, automatic. "Always military first, not economic, not diplomatic."

His aides complain that reporters cover his style, not his message. But he is remarkably successful in phrasing a message that others understand -- "keepin' the grass down where the goats can get at it," in the famous advice George Wallace gave him. ("We can't have no goats jumpin' in the air after grass," Jackson says.) Certainly his rivals have grasped his message, especially Richard Gephardt, who dramatized his anticorporate populism in a series of ads that led Michael Dukakis to say "That's Jesse's line." Jackson, picking up on that in a Des Moines debate, said he could not afford the slick ads, but sure enough, "That's my line. That's my line."

One aspect of Jackson's populism is not imitated by others -- certainly not by Gephardt with his xenophobic pitch. Jackson can establish emotional ties with the troubled, with dispossessed farmers, striking workers, the sick and the elderly. This empathy with white misfortune was the surprise in Iowa, where his flamboyant gentleness disarmed farmers and won improbable allies. More than any other candidate, he sends people away from his speeches happy, proud that they are somebody.

His populism can keep itself in motion without the prods of rancor. Even the villains of his moral fables -- the barracudas who devour little fish of all sorts ("barracudas swim very deep, where it's very dark; they can't even tell whether they are swallowing white fish or black fish") -- are not so much evil in their own waters, but mainly when they swim back at us from Taiwan. GE is attacked for selling goods made overseas with jobs the company took from America in the first place. Jackson's solution is to keep GE at home with a combination of tax penalties and tax incentives.

Purists of the left attack Jackson for his readiness to deal with capitalists (even, in the past, to adopt President Reagan's idea of enterprise zones). He is voraciously inclusive, and thinks no one should go away from a party without his or her piece of the cake. "Let's make a deal" is the constant offer of this hyperactive opportunist and optimist. His original civil rights project, Operation Breadbasket, began as a demand for higher black employment by corporations, but Jackson added "What can we do for you?" and established "covenants" endorsing firms for black consumers. On that basis he made further demands for blacks in managerial positions, in what looks to some like economic coercion but is thought of by Jackson as economic statesmanship. Everybody gets something -- bosses get cooperation and customers; workers get some control over their working conditions.

Jackson is an includer, not an excluder. He likes to be liked; he hates to lose any audience (which makes him run perpetually late, lingering with every group to complete his sale). Jackson is a performer, and, like Reagan, to whom he bears some unexpected resemblances, he is a master at wrapping a deeply felt conviction inside a one-liner. And he is bad at firing anyone. His receptiveness to anybody who will join him can be ludicrous, as when he took a wrestler named "Silo Sam," who claims to be seven-foot-seven, along on several stops the day after he met him, accepting Silo's public endorsement at a Teamsters' meeting, along with Billy Carter's, as a sign of his support from "ordinary people."

Despite his alacrity for inclusion, he has been rebuffed by repeated exclusions in the past. Ann Lewis, the Democratic strategist, remembers one of her first endeavors with Jackson. They were at the Japanese embassy in Washington, part of a delegation to protest racially condescending remarks made by Premier Nakasone. "Before we went out to meet the press," she recalls, "Jesse gathered us together and said, 'We cannot contribute to any further racism. These people do not know how much trouble they are in, and we must not add to the flames by our remarks.' " Then, as Jackson drove Lewis home, he complained of a party-sponsored dinner in 1986 that had included all the former Democratic presidential candidates yet pointedly excluded him. "He was hurt by that," says Lewis. "But I said he could not let them define themselves as the party. We are all the party."

Back in the '60s, Jackson was treated as a Johnny-come-lately to the civil rights movement, given minor and thankless tasks. As a result of David Garrow's important book Bearing the Cross, we now know that the civil rights movement was internally riven by the time Jackson joined it. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was being shoved out of its original nest in Atlanta and was meeting resistance from established black preachers in Chicago. Jackson, who was not even a minister yet (and therefore less of a threat) was given Operation Breadbasket to operate on indeterminate territory partway between SCLC and Chicago's local pastors. The group met, as its successor Operation PUSH still does, on Saturday mornings, so as not to invade the sacred turf of the Sunday preachers. Jackson was "included out" from the beginning.

Yet when Andrew Young got up to speak to the San Francisco convention about the platform, he was booed by younger delegates loyal to Jackson. At a black caucus, summoned to calm black delegates' angers, Coretta King was booed when she spoke for Young. "That was yesterday," some delegates called up to her. "What have you done for us today?" Young slipped out the back door. Only when Jackson arrived and made an emotional plea for unity did all those onstage lock arms and sing We Shall Overcome. Jackson rebuked his followers: "When I think about the roads I've walked with Andy, and the leadership of Mrs. King -- her home bombed, her husband assassinated, her children raised by a widow -- she deserves to be heard." Those who talk about a "changed" Jackson in this campaign, less strident and more conciliatory, were not watching that tense moment in the 1984 campaign.

During the 1970s, while other movement leaders went into local politics or burned themselves out, Jackson became the only national black leader. He alone traveled the length of the nation, addressing a new generation in school after school, attacking drugs, calling for academic excellence, preaching self- discipline (a message that had few allies then, with the embarrassing exception of the Black Muslims).

The charge against Jackson in those days was that he was inspiring, he gave good speeches, but he had no follow-through. (The same charge, Garrow reminds us, dogged Dr. King all his days). Yet Operation Breadbasket, that orphaned program, was expanded into Operation PUSH, and that turned into the "rainbow coalition," which became the 1984 campaign and has led on to Jackson's strong showing in the current presidential race. The argument that Jackson is not a builder masks the fact that he has found new ways to build a movement, going beyond the civil rights organizations (which, in their day, departed from older political structures).

Jackson is forming a movement to go beyond civil rights toward economic justice, which means going beyond black and white politics. It is true that the worst domestic crises that afflict America -- unemployment, debt, blighted inner cities, drugs, fatherless children, AIDS -- are especially wounding to black citizens. Jackson speaks for these victims but not exclusively for them. Blacks and whites must participate in the solution to problems they both created. The trick, as Bert Lance puts in it in Southern terms, is to "combine a minority of the majority vote with a majority of the minority vote" -- as happened in the 1986 election of Southern Democratic Senators, following on Jackson's campaign and registration efforts of 1984. Those elections, giving the Democrats control of the Senate, made possible the rejection of Robert Bork. "We did it under the ((Judiciary Committee)) chairmanship of Senator Biden," Jackson says. "We couldn't have done it under the chairmanship of Senator Thurmond."

In 1986 young black voters reversed a historic pattern and turned out in greater numbers than young whites. When Jackson went to visit Alabama's Senator Howell Heflin on the Bork nomination, Heflin said he did not want to do anything to discourage the "new voters," and thus opposed Bork. Jackson, solemn in the meeting, chuckles afterward at the circumlocution: "The 'new votuhs'! Don't you just love it?" But it was more than black voters who stood in Bork's way. The combination that defeated him -- minorities, women's groups, civil liberties activists -- looked like the rainbow coalition.

Jackson sees his campaigns as part of an ongoing process that is changing American politics: "It is important to watch what happens in elections at the county level, all over the nation. The impact of this election is going to be felt in the elections of 1990, when the census is taken, and in 1991, when reapportionment takes place." He wants to build from the consensus established to defeat Bork: "There were fears about letting new people into the process, whether we could handle all these women, or 18-year-olds, or blacks, or homosexuals. But they have all proved to be just as American as earlier voters. We have to redefine 'we.' " Inclusively.

After his shadowboxing in the airplane's aisle, Jackson, still standing up during takeoff, told me, "President Reagan said something that should have got more attention from the press. He said the last 40 years had not been good for the West. These last 40 years have been the most exciting and liberating for the world. Whole empires have fallen, new nations been created, people taken charge of their own lives. What Reagan meant is that all those little ss in the U.N. have been beating up on us for 40 years -- us, Somoza, us, Batista, us, Marcos. We've got to redefine 'us.' "

When asked about his lack of experience in office, Jackson says, "I've dealt with more world leaders than any of the candidates, and I met them when they were living ((a dig at Bush's errands to funerals of foreign dignitaries)). Take all the Democratic candidates, blindfold us, drop us anywhere in the world with a dollar in our pockets, and who do you think would lead the others out?"

"If we can have relations with Russia and China, certainly we can expand our influence in Latin America by negotiating with Castro. The Israelis and the Palestinians are in a death grip. They have their arms around each other and a knife at each other's back. They are hollowing each other out, afraid to let go for fear of being knifed in the face. They must be pried a-loose." The week Jackson said this, the Israeli journalist Wolf Blitzer wrote a long article in the Jerusalem Post, concluding, "Israel and its friends in the American Jewish community clearly have an important self-interest in establishing as decent a relationship with him as possible."

Whether Jackson poses a threat or offers therapy to his party, he constitutes something of an intelligence test for America. With his unashamed assertion of who he is, he flirts with prejudice, daring it out of its cave. He is the only presidential candidate who can say ain't without being considered ignorant except by the ignorant: "We makin' what ain't nobody buyin'." More than most politicians, he has a sense of the absurd in a campaign, and cannot resist making jokes as well as history (as he proved during his surreal day with Silo Sam). Though he has resolved not to criticize other Democrats, an occasional mocking touch comes through. At last year's Congressional Black Caucus, the master of ceremonies did an elaborate dance to slip a little platform in front of the microphone each time Governor Dukakis came up to it to answer a question. Jackson eyed the platform quizzically, stepped onto it for a moment, towering above the adjusted microphone, and softly said, "I've waited years for equal standing."

George Will, in the spirit of old crackers giving voting quizzes to blacks when they tried to register, earlier this year asked Jackson on television, "As a President, would you support measures such as the G-7 measures and the Louvre Accords?" (Like the red-neck quizzers, Will got the trick question slightly wrong -- the Louvre Accord was a G-7 measure). Jackson has survived cleverer ploys of exclusion than that, but can the rest of the country continue to indulge them?

Jackson likes to end speeches with the story of his grandmother, who took odds and ends of cloth ("not hardly fit to wipe your shoes with, some of them") and stitched them into a quilt that kept him warm as a child. Then, referring to different minorities or excluded parts of his audience, he tells farmers, or strikers, or Hispanics, that "you're right, but your patch ain't big enough." The minorities must unite to extend their influence. He does not reach the real conclusion of his parable -- that the white patch ain't big enough either; the majority cannot solve the nation's problems. If blacks do not participate in the solution to this country's difficulties, there will be no solution. It is going to take a thorough interweaving of minorities within majorities and majorities within minorities to deal with crime and drugs and jobs and health. So far, the most energetic piecer-together of the component strips of such an electoral quilt is Jesse Jackson, rhetorical, ecumenical, opportunistic, making history, making jokes.