Davenport, Iowa, is the kind of town where adults at the dinner table will say, with a straight face, "I never saw one until I was eight or nine. And then I jumped for fright." They are speaking of black people. The Jefferson Elementary School sits in a depressed pocket of Davenport, so about half of its student body is now black or Hispanic or Asian. One day this fall, the Reverend Jesse Jackson came to visit. The teachers had the children all lined up. Each one held out a drawing festooned with crepe paper, saying, "I'm proud of you, Jesse Jackson" or "You're nice, Jesse Jackson" or "Welcome to Jefferson School, Jesse Jackson."

Their faces were a mural of smiles. But talking to them individually, one soon found that while some kids saw Jackson as a hero, others didn't want to discuss him at all. I sat in the auditorium next to a freckle-faced redheaded boy, just a squirt, eight years old. In front of us were two black girls. As a local white pastor preceded Jackson down the aisle, one of the girls turned to ask, "Is that him?"

"No, he's black," I said.

Her mouth fell open and her fingers hooked over her lower teeth. Heaven had opened up. To the group around me, I addressed the question "Do you think that Reverend Jackson could be president?"

"Yeah! Yeah! We think so," everyone squealed. "Why not? That'd be cool. He could be."

"No way."

Startled, I turned to see the hard words had come from the freckle-faced boy. "What makes you so sure?"

"If a black man gets to be president, white folks would be slaves," he announced.

"Where did you hear that, sweetheart? At home?"

He said, "That's right." Then his mouth clamped shut above his hard little set-back chin.

Down front, Jesse Jackson connected immediately with the kids. He put out amusing parables from his own boyhood and then bore down with his motivational pitch. "Running the race of life is never like a hundred-yard dash—who can get there the fastest. Because there are traps, and there are tricks, and there are land mines. If you are trying to get to graduation and you stop off for liquor, you really can't get there. If you're trying to get there and you stop off for drugs, you really can't get there. If you're trying to get there and you stop off and choose to practice basketball three and four hours a day, and don't spend any time on reading, and writing, and counting, you really can't get there. So you must make the decisions this day."

"People called me a bastard and rejected me."

This is the kernel of a psychodrama Jackson has been performing in schools several times a week for the last fifteen years, the basic tool of his PUSH-Excel program for motivating minority youth. The 1988 version hits hard on drugs.

"How many of you, in this room, know someone who is in jail because of drugs? Stand." As usual, several students stand. "If you know someone who is dead because of drugs, stand." Again, a handful of students stand. When he asks the last question, "If you tried drugs, be fair unto yourself and stand," it starts with ten, then grows to twenty. Finally, he makes what is known in the church as an altar call. "If you have the will to say no to dope, if you have the will to change your disposition, I wish you'd come forward. Talk to me, don't hide, come forward."

In a high school of five hundred students he can bring a hundred kids out in front of their peers, shuffling and sobbing. Teachers watch, flabbergasted. All look up to this man, this mysterious dark angel who can do what none of the parents or teachers or town police can do, as he directs the kids to join hands in prayer and commit themselves to stop drugs and start learning.

"Tell me you're going to make your school the only drug-free school of academic A students," he exhorts the Jefferson Elementary School kids. "Say 'I am.' "

Kids: I am.

Jesse: Oh, you're just a little too quiet for me. Say "I am."

Kids: I am!

Jesse: Somebody.

Kids: Somebody!

Jesse: My mind.

Kids: My mind!

Jesse: Is a pearl.

Kids: Is a pearl!

Jesse: I can learn anything.

Kids: I can learn anything!

Jesse: In the world.

Kids: In the world!

He has every child in the hall standing tall, chanting at the top of his lungs, flushed with self-importance, completely transported—the freckle-faced boy among them. In closing, Jackson comes back to the phrase he has shouted so often one wonders if it isn't a poultice for some long-ago, private wound of pride: "I am."

Kids: I am!

Jesse: Somebody.

Kids: Somebody!

Jesse: God bless America.

Kids: God bless America.

Over the din of applause, I inquire of the freckle-faced boy, "Did you like him a little better than you thought you would?"

"He's O.K." The kids are still howling.

"Would you like to meet him in person?"

"Yeah!" His eyes light up.

And so, as Jackson is coming down the aisle, I signal to him. "Reverend, would you say hello to this young man? He's heard that if a black person becomes president, white people become slaves."

Instantly, Jackson bends over and clasps the boy's arm and croons, "Oh, that's not true. I love you very much, buddy. O.K.? All right?"

Tears gush out and the boy buries his face, his whole world of thought-stultifying prejudice suddenly in collapse. "Feel better," soothes Jackson. "God bless you, brother. I love you, buddy, O.K.?"

There isn't a dry eye all around us.

Jesse Jackson has always had a feel for the hurting ones. Some call it empathy; others believe there is divinity in the man. He also has one eye out at all times for the limelight. Within an hour of this moving encounter, Jesse Jackson, Democratic front-runner in the presidential race, is bragging to reporters about how beautifully he handled it.

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Jesse Jackson may be the hungriest man in the world. He is as hungry for the crowds as they are for him. The distortions of segregation in the South in the forties left their mark, to be sure, but behind his tropism for the limelight, underneath all the braggadocio that is mistaken for arrogance, lies Jesse Louis Jackson's greatest longing in life—the lust for legitimacy.

His personal psychological need happens to coincide with the black experience in America, a tremendous yearning to be affirmed as full-fledged members of the national constituency. All these years Jackson has been tunneling up, and in the long climb he has clung tenaciously to everything he could use, stepped over warm bodies, greedily dipped his fingers in the blood of his hallowed predecessor, Martin Luther King Jr., shaken down businessmen, black and white, absorbed some of the tactics of Boss Daley, and brought with him baggage that is decidedly distasteful. He has never held a conventional job or stood for elective office. The organizations he has created and spearheaded—PUSH and the Rainbow Coalition—have functioned, above all, as personality cults for Jesse Jackson. Yet with his superhuman drive and charisma, and the verbal pyrotechnics that allow him to move from lofty oration to tub-thumping money raising, he has carved out a unique position for himself in American political life and earned the attention of the whole world.

Respect comes harder. No one ever gave Jesse Jackson respect that he didn't demand or command. His achievements force acceptance. And now, finally, he has surfaced under the banquet table of the Democratic Party and demanded a seat. The party claims to be looking around for an extra chair, and Jackson is being terribly polite. He has made adjustments, cuffs on his pants and clodhopper shoes, plus a conscious effort to slow down his speech to a safe white drone. Image, Noah, proper image, he keeps telling his half-brother.

"Polite" is the word the Reverend Jesse Jackson equates with being a politician. He admits now, at least in private meetings with members of the Congressional Black Caucus, that he didn't do enough courting in 1984. The big ego, the loose cannon, seeking after the limelight at the expense of substance—"I know those are some things I might be accused of," he candidly acknowledges in meetings with his campaign advisers. But he is not completely willing to give those things up. And so he is in transition. Indeed, he seems to be in the middle of at least three passages at once: personal, political, and historical. 

He has lived all his life as an outsider and learned to capitalize on it. Now he is within reach of what he has always wanted, to be accepted. But there are hints that becoming an insider is not as desirable as he anticipated it would be. He is also in transition from preacher to politician. After being the song-and-dance man who livened up a dull act in the '84 debates, he is determined this time to be taken as a deadly serious candidate who brings a message: What we have in common is so much more important than what divides us. He is spending his time in Iowa and the other early-primary states, like any other candidate. And through Super Tuesday he will continue to concentrate on the white community—working the margin.

There may be a historic shift in the making as well. The retreat from equality that began under the Reagan administration was dangerously polarizing the nation by 1984. While everyone was arguing about racial or sexual rejection, Jackson pulled out of his hat something called the Rainbow Coalition. Though only token whites and Hispanics and the rare Asian or Native American appeared onstage among his backdrop of black faces, Jackson did plant a seed.

And the seed flowered. Among eighteen- to twenty-five-year-old black males, the voter turnout was 25 percent; turnout among white male voters of the same age was only 22 percent. Jackson's unforgettable political baptisms helped to foment in the South a new coalition of activated blacks and scared white officeholders. Together, they helped give the Democrats control of the Senate in '86, and led the resounding rejection of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. By spinning out an illusion of American prosperity while hunger, disease, homelessness, and greed all flourish, Ronald Reagan has set the stage for a messiah. Enter the Reverend Jesse Jackson. 

"The world around us has changed," he observes optimistically. "Who would have thought, this time twenty years ago—try four years ago—that I would be leading in the polls? That Bill Gray would be chairman of the House Budget Committee? Or that Bill Cosby would be the number-one entertainer?"

Still, there is the asterisk problem. Front-runner status—if you happen to be black—comes with an asterisk next to your name that means "not seriously expected to win." "Jesse wants the media to pronounce that he's legitimate, bona fide, that he can win," I'd been told by one of his intimates. "He wants to be known as one who can fly, leap tall buildings—he wants to be seen as Superman."

So let's take his campaign at face value. Would a color-blind America elect Jesse Jackson?

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'Hello, Miss Gail." He takes my hand and, from a distance, kisses it. Courtly. Southern. A subtle put-on. He is charming but aloof. "So, we finally meet," he says. I had been trying to catch up with him for two and a half weeks. Until Jesse gives the word you're O.K., a journalist who calls his headquarters for his schedule would do better to check the newspaper. There is a staff, but they function as factotums. Nothing happens unless the Reverend says so. Following his campaign is like broken-field running in a football game. It begins to make sense only when you start to think the same way Jackson does, like a quarterback. He agrees: "One side is cheering, the other side is jeering, everything's in motion, and all eyes are on the one who's got the ball.'' But no sooner do you think you know the play than Jesse calls an audible at the line of scrimmage—huh, what's happening, why is that man running the other way?—and there he goes, having changed the play at the last second within earshot of only a handful of teammates. For all the frustrations, following the Jackson campaign is never dull.

Is Jackson a great leader? Or a genius hustler? He has been making up the rules as he goes along.

"Can I explain to you what kind of story I want to do?" I ask him.

He nods.

I tell him that my focus is finding the people and events that have made a lasting impression on character and shaped an individual's uniqueness. I hand him a list of names that will grow, ultimately, into over fifty interviews. He looks startled, then adds a few. When I ask for help in contacting his half-brother Noah Robinson Jr., he backs off, vaguely suggesting that Noah has moved from Chicago to New Mexico. (In fact, Robinson still runs his multimillion-dollar business operations out of Chicago and is currently involved in a black gangland murder investigation.)

And so we were off on a six-week jet stream. The chaotic, high-risk Jackson campaign is at the other extreme from the movable country club on George Bush's Air Force Two, with one's name card over the seat and the minute-by-minute breakdown of the day on a computerized dance card—ho hum, another filet mignon luncheon, starting at precisely 1:02.

Jackson is a walking affront waiting to happen. He has come so far, yet he looks out and sees a world that has so far to go. He travels to South Africa and recasts the story of his childhood as living under apartheid. He meets with Palestinians and identifies with people denied a homeland. He forces us to think, nettles us to change. One senses the slow seething just below his surface. Publicly the extroverted boaster, privately he is an introverted brooder. Quick to cry but slow to love, he is a snappish, sleepless, noctambulant, driven man.

For millions he is the only flame of hope. For others, especially whites, he is an extremely threatening figure. Among the black professionals and politicos he has worked with, some are suspicious of his personal motives. The doubt that has dogged Jesse Jackson all along remains today: What is it all for—Jesse or the movement? Jesse or the party? Jesse or the American people?

As we settle, that first day, into his chartered plane, he begins spinning out his philosophy of survival. His large, meaty hands move like a quarterback's. Never a smile. Eyes straight ahead. Cold. Calculating. Looking for the edge.

He can't help reading over my shoulder as I study an old review of Barbara Reynolds's 1975 biography of Jackson. Then a Chicago Tribune reporter, Reynolds had idolized Jackson. After five years of following him—finding that the man did not live up to the myth— she became his most severe critic. When Jesse Jackson: America's David was published, a campaign of censorship began: first threatening phone calls to her publisher, then the cancellation of her book party. After hitting No. 4 on the local best-seller lists, the book suddenly disappeared from Chicago bookstores. Reynolds confirmed that then, as now, Jackson expected black journalists to be black first, journalists second.

"How old is that!" he demands. The clip is from 1975. He begins speaking in sesquipedalian words. He winds up with a little lecture on Shakespeare's Tempest: "Now, there was a writer. It isn't enough to have skills." Both his meaning and manipulation are clear when he adds, "To be a great writer, you have to have a great subject."

No one ever gave Jesse Jackson respect that he didn't demand or command.

Greenville, South Carolina, is a dozy town tucked along the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains between the more dynamic cities of Charlotte and Atlanta. By the mid-thirties it had peaked as the textile capital of the world. The 15 percent of the population then called Negro, though poor by white standards, lived mostly in one-family frame houses, "kept their place," and pulled together in a tightly knit social fabric centered on their churches. Into this narrow social wedge was born a boy, child of a passionate but misbegotten moment.

Helen Jackson was a beauty. "Tall, long-haired, and stacked," recalls Clenty Fair, who went to the same hairdressing school. She was aggressive for her day. And her voice was such a gift that five music colleges had offered her scholarships. Helen's illiterate mother, who worked as a maid for an affluent white family, poured all her hopes into her single angel of a daughter. Truth told, Helen was one of the "outside children," born without a father, who are not the least uncommon in the South.

The day the sixteen-year-old Helen announced she was pregnant brought her mother's hopes down in a rage. Their churches expelled both the girl and the baby's father, a married man almost twenty years her senior, who lived—oh, the iniquity of it!—right next door, with his wife and three stepchildren. He was a boxer of some repute, a tall, handsome, golden-skinned man. The two lovebirds ran off to Chicago.

They soon returned. Helen confessed, "I've sinned against the church," and was restored. But her mother's rage was not dissolved, is not to this day. The cycle of shame had repeated itself. "It's your responsibility," she said of the baby to come. And washed her hands of it.

"I gladly accepted," Helen Jackson told me during a long interview at her lovely suburban home in Greenville. "I said, O.K., that singing career is over. I was committed to being a real mother."

The boy born to Helen on October 8, 1941, had a face as broad as the moon and a twirl of black hair at the back of his neck. Alma Smiley, one of Helen's pals, watched the baby from her house across the street. "He was a charmer from the start. Always casing everything. He'd give you a little old sexy smile. I couldn't stand it. I'd run up those steps and bite him."

Jesse's first memory of Charles Jackson was from a picture his mother showed him at about the age of three. "Your father's coming home soon," she said. He stared at the soldier in uniform and was proud. It was when he was five, near as Jackson himself can remember, that the taunts began.

"Children oftentimes are cruel," he says now. "But it always comes down to their parents." Your dad-dy ain't none of your dad-dy. You ain't nothing but a no-body, nothing but a no-body. That taunt came from the boys playing in Happy Hearts Park.

"We finally told him," says his mother. Helen had married Charles Henry Jackson on October 2, 1943, when Jesse was almost two years old. From then on, Jesse called the man in his house "Charlie Henry."

By the age of five, Jesse—nicknamed "Bo-Diddley"—was a mischievous child, always impatient and quick to lose his temper, but never, ever, a bully. How did he fight back? I asked his mother. "He cried a lot. He would try to be very brave. He never came home and repeated the things they said—you had to read the expression on his face."

The most favored black residents lived in another section of Greenville. One house in particular, on the generous corner lot at Gower and Douthit streets, attracted sightseers from all over town. A fieldstone suburban home with a brick wall running all around it, and pillars, and a basketball court in the backyard, and a brook running under a big oak, it took black folks' breath away. On the chimney was a wrought-iron R for Robinson. Here was the palace of Jesse's blood father, Noah Robinson.

One day when Noah Robinson Jr. was seven years old and playing at the far end of his yard, something happened after which nothing would ever be the same. "I saw this kid come up from the playground, came to look at me," Noah told me. "I waved at him first—I took the initiative. He waved, and then he ran away."

At the dinner table that night Noah junior spoke up. "Today I saw a little guy across the street, looked just like me." The slurp of soup stopped. His mother choked. His father spat out the word "Shit."

Mrs. Robinson went into the hospital that night to deliver another child. Noah Robinson Sr. sat down with his namesake and told him the whole story. "You have a brother," he said, and he broke into tears.

Today, Noah Robinson Sr. is seventy-nine and comfortably retired after forty years as a cotton grader. He gave me his own version of the affair. "I didn't have any children by my own wife. Helen, she was pretty, she was a baby—we just got to liking each other, and it all started. Then Helen said to me, 'I'll have a child for you.' I said, 'Hell, you know I'm married. I can't do that kind of thing.' Well, it happened. Everybody in town knew. That kept me kind of shameful. But not shamed enough to ever deny. Before he was born, I owned up to it."

"A lot of people aspire to the presidency. But they don't take the time to think presidential."

His voice went to a hush. Tension still hovered in the house, with his wife sitting in the next room. "I told my wife, 'I'm not going to deny Jesse, because he's my very own. First, I'm going to ask your forgiveness.' " When she said she could accept the situation, he told her, "I'm going to try and see him, and give him everything he asks for." Robinson Sr. lifted his spectacles and brushed away the tears.

No one in town commanded the respect from both the black and white communities that Jesse's blood father did. Noah is a mulatto, his grandmother a slave of part Cherokee blood and his grandfather an Irish sheriff. He enjoyed a "passport" from his employer, John J. Ryan, that was tantamount to an individual manumission. Moreover, according to Noah junior, "few whites got funny with Daddy. He'd punch them out."

Robinson Sr. would slip around to peek at Jesse in the schoolyard. "I'd want to be with him so bad," he sighed. But there were always arguments with his wife over the money he tried to slip to Jesse. ("Little nickels," Jesse called the handouts.) At Thanksgiving and Easter, a basket would arrive with no card. But Mrs. Robinson forbade the half-brothers to play together, and Noah junior was sent off to an expensive Catholic school.

Coach J. D. Mathis was as close to the young Jesse as anyone. Being an "outside child" himself, he identified. "It was shocking to realize that this man [Robinson] cared nothing more than as if Jesse was one of his bam horses. 'That's one of mine,' he'd say—such arrogance. There was plenty and affluence over his fence. If your father says my blood is your blood, but really you're denied, it has to affect you on the inside. If you've got a lot of pride, and Jesse has that, this can get painful. I think that was the driving force behind whatever he's done."

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Those who suffer shame as children often cover it up with a false superiority. A sense of shame drives some people to build an inflated self-image through the pursuit of fame or excessive amounts of money, hoping to convince themselves of their lovability. The emotion, ignored by psychology until very recently, is now seen as a "master emotion." If it is carved in early, it is father to all the other emotions. For Jesse, its child was envy.

The Crescent was the finest of trains. No Negroes allowed. But Mr. Ryan gave Noah Robinson Sr. tickets for his whole family to ride in a double bedroom on the Pullman car. "He's a colored boy, but he's got principles just like a white man," Mr. Ryan told the shocked ticket agent. There were stories in the papers about the first Negro family to ride the Crescent. Every summer thereafter, Noah senior and Noah junior and the other sons would pass right onto the grandest train in the South and ride in high style all the way to Philadelphia. Bo-Diddley was left behind to cry.

For Jesse, once he'd seen how his own other half lived, his was not a fine childhood at all. His nose pressed to the glass, he watched Noah junior's privileged existence. In truth, Jesse had a wonderful mother and a more-than-serviceable stepfather. The sting was in the difference between the status of his half-brother—a prince who could move back and forth between black and white worlds at a time when the color barrier was monolithic—and the stepson of a postal worker.

"You sense these distinctions,'' Jackson acknowledged to me. "You long for the privileges other people have.''

And so young Jesse began to boast. He boasted about his clothes, strutting to school in suits and ties and showing up at church weddings in a tuxedo jacket and spotless white pants. He bragged on about the jobs he had, the "little jewelry" he would buy his mother. As early as the age of five, he made a stunning boast to his blood father, according to Robinson Sr. " 'Didi,' he said—he never would say Daddy—'one of these days I'm going to preach.' I said, 'You talking about preaching, you don't even know your ABC's.' But he said it again. 'My Granddaddy Jesse's a preacher, ain't he?' "

Many times thereafter, defiantly, Jesse would tell his blood father, "Just you watch, I'm going to be more than you think I can be." By the second year of high school, he talked about a dream. He was leading his people across the river. "I'm a born leader," the adolescent boy announced.

When I asked Jackson about his childhood, he was at first defensive. "I never was motherless or fatherless, or hungry. I was never orphaned. I was [legally] adopted when I was a teenager."

But did he feel, as a boy, that he deserved to be born with a father he could call his own?

A shudder went through him. "Our genes cry out. For confirmation." He was glad of Noah Robinson Sr. and the antecedents Noah could hold up to his son— five preachers in the previous generation—but as far as love and affirmation from his blood father, those were beyond reach and would remain so for as long as it mattered.

The press of segregation only added fuel to Jesse's already overheated engine. "I went to catch a bus with my mother and the sign abpve the bus driver's head said,  COLORED SEAT FROM THE REAR. . . . My mother had to pull me to the back. I said I wanted to sit up front. She said, 'Let's go.' She pinched me. She was conditioning me to reduced options."

He admits that he had a lot of negative motivation. "You had to figure out how to get out of this situation."

I tried out on Jackson an anthropological observation that had come to me from comparing the subculture of the segregated black South with the core culture. A child who is gifted and receptive, who picks up on everything that you give him, is singled out by the community to be "saved" for better things. Everyone—the neighbors on the street, who will give him a licking for misbehavior in place of his mother, the pastor, the coach, the teachers, even the older kids—they all look out for him so that he doesn't get into any trouble. No one wants this child harmed, in body or reputation. Helen and Charles Jackson, for instance, often went out to fight Jesse's battles for him, while the boy stayed home and cried. And adults reinforced the child's sense of specialness by holding him to a higher standard. They boosted the boy onto their shoulders, and Bo-Diddley just kept tunneling up. His grandmother cajoled the boy, "For God's sake, Jesse, promise me you'll be somebody." Soon everyone knew Jesse was designated to be saved.

"I think that's true," Jackson said. "We use a different kind of language biblically. We say someone's been blessed, set aside, touched."

He was a big, clumsy boy, pigeon-toed, and he stuttered. (When he overcame the speech defect, he gave the credit to God.) On Noah junior had settled the lighter skin, pencil-line lips, and delicately bridged nose of his father, while Jesse's nose was soft as gingerbread, his eyes bulgy, his head big, and too much of his lower lip turned over to hope he'd ever be taken for a black aristocrat. Noah, however, couldn't run the length of a football field without wheezing. Jesse was powerfully built.

"He stood head and shoulders above everybody at the age of six, and he could talk," says Coach Mathis, smiling. "I told him he was going to be the heir apparent to great things." Together, coach and starter hammered Jesse's physical advantage into the competitor's iron will. Jackson became a superior baseball player and the school's star quarterback. Mathis also taught the boy about "putting the bend into the truth."

It was hard to miss young Jesse's talents. Consider a child so verbal, often dealing with adults unable to read or write, who, when the first TVs arrived in the neighborhood, offered to read the news off the screen for the adults. "You want to know? Give me a dime." But it was his willfulness that would have caught people's attention, because everybody knew that only the strivers could overcome segregation and racism.

Tunneling up.

The two healthiest ways to overcome shame are through humor and a sense of purpose. A schoolmate, Horace Nash, never forgot how Jesse made up jokes about whites. About "how foolish and stupid they were.... He used to turn things around.... He actually looked down on white people, and in those days that was unusual." And Jesse believed he was set aside by God for a purpose—one of the hallmarks of the victorious personality.

Talking publicly today about his own rejection, Jackson can become intensely personal. "When I was in my mother's belly, I had no father to give me a name," he says. "People called me a bastard and rejected me."

What is that thing inside that keeps you going? I asked Jackson after our first long interview.

His answer was vague.

Do you think your ambition started with just trying to get out, to make yourself worthy, and then began to feed on itself?

"At one level it starts as survival." He began stuttering uncomfortably. "In my instance, it started from personal denial. Then group denial." He sounded like a man thirsting, his pitcher needing to be constantly refilled, but the pitcher bottomless. "I've always been loved," he affirmed. "But there's always been an air of expectation, a higher demand of me than from other people."

Long after Jesse Louis Jackson had convinced others of his worth, there was and always will be that most disparaging of taunters to face—himself—demanding new and more dazzling forms of proof.

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As the time approached for him to make his getaway from Greenville, Jesse's hunger for legitimacy hardened into his vaunted ambition. However desirable the prizes people held out to him, he always had a bigger, bolder leap in mind. No one in Greenville could figure out why he would spurn a $6,000 contract to play professional baseball, for instance. Six thousand dollars was twice what his daddy made in a year. And, oh, what excitement when the Giants scouts came to town and Jesse was invited to the tryouts. It was the first time a black player had had the chance to be matched against a white on the segregated ball field.

The scout tells Jesse to pitch to Dickie Dietz. This guy is reputed to be a great hitter. Jesse steps up on the mound and blazes the ball past him. Dietz can't even tip the ball. Jesse strikes him out three times. Whereupon Dietz is offered $10,000 to join an A team and Jesse is offered $6,000 to go to a B team. All the kids are cheering, "Yea, Jesse!"

Jesse says, "I don't want this."

Just you watch, I'm going to be more than you think I can be.

"Six thousand seems big, but it can go fast," as he now describes his strategy. "I knew a college education would be less risk and greater returns." So he held out for a football scholarship to a Big Ten school. And got it.

What he was not prepared for, when he entered the University of Illinois, was the rejection. In the dormitory, the classroom, and on the football team, where Negroes were allowed only to be linebackers, he was humiliated. "It was traumatic for me," he admits, "black players being reduced to entertainers." And so he turned his back on the fine white northern school and entered North Carolina A&T, then a mediocre black land-grant college.

There he met Jacqueline Lavinia Davis, an outspoken leftist who exuded the rock-solid confidence he wanted. The daughter of Florida migrant workers, Jackie had been smothered with protection by her mother. Thrilled to be on her own for the first time, at seventeen she became a very active student. "I was pompous and vain. Anyone who sat with me was just very fortunate. Big lips, nappy hair, the whole bit, yet I thought I was the loveliest, most exciting person in the whole world—and still do to a certain extent."

I asked Jackie if that is what Jesse coveted in her, the air of superiority. She nodded. Why, then, did she leave college instead of becoming Angela Davis? Was it because she got pregnant?

"Yes," she said. "I think Jesse did it to catch me. Because he kept asking me, 'Are you feeling sick?' " Jackson had been her first boyfriend. "A baby? I hadn't thought about a baby."

"You should ask him about it," Jackie suggested. The Reverend Jesse Jackson said it was too personal a subject to discuss, but he did characterize it as a victory: "We got married. Established family security. We broke the cycle."

Through the preachers' network, Jackson got into the Chicago Theological Seminary. Noah junior claims that Jackson was "absolutely, positively not religious as a boy." Jackson's response: "He didn't know me." A Johnny-come-lately to the civil-rights movement, Jackson caught up with Martin Luther King by jumping the line as a mere volunteer on the Selma march in 1965. He demanded the movement people find a role for him.

Dr. King was looking at Chicago as a possible beachhead in the North. Jackson became a student in nonviolent-protest workshops run by the Reverend James Bevel, who recommended the articulate apprentice to Dr. King for a major job. King began complaining to Bevel that the young seminarian was too ambitious. Bevel argued it was only immaturity, but King saw another, more alarming dimension to Jesse: "the ability to prostitute a race for one's own self-aggrandizement," as Bevel described it to me, "to build an empire at the expense of your people."

Another civil-rights leader who hired Jackson to help organize in Chicago found him exceptionally smart and hardworking, but contentious and manipulative. "The joke was you could probably lead Jesse off any bridge in town by just pointing an empty TV camera at him and saying 'Back up.' " He also found one couldn't trust an agreement made with Jackson behind closed doors. Only when Jackson stepped out into the shower of klieg lights, and only then, did one know what he was going to say.

Of these and other charges of self-glorification, the "bloody shirt" incident raises the most serious questions about Jackson's character.

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The disciples of Dr. King were always jockeying for position. Dr. Ralph Abernathy had been designated by King as his successor, and Andy Young was Abernathy's understudy. All the others, at least in the presence of Dr. King, contained their aspirations.

Jackson came in and broke for the top. He seized his chance in 1968, on the evening King was assassinated. A week before, Dr. King had held a staff meeting to talk through his ideas for the Poor People's Campaign. None of the staff were really enthusiastic about the campaign, but they were "amening Doc." Jackson openly challenged him. Jesse saw Dr. King not as mentor but as competitor. According to David Garrow's biography of King, Bearing the Cross, the leader became emotional and stalked out of the meeting to go see his girlfriend at their hideaway apartment. Jackson began to follow, but King turned on him: "If you are so interested in doing your own thing that you can't do what the organization is structured to do, go ahead. If you want to carve out your own niche in society, go ahead, but for God's sake don't bother me!"

On April 4, the staff was gathered at a Memphis motel, waiting for King to come downstairs to go to a big rally. Bevel was horsing around with the Reverend James Orange and Andy Young in the courtyard under King's balcony, according to Orange. Jackson stood nearby.

At 5:59 P.M., King came out and called down to Jackson, "I want you to come to dinner with me." All those present remember marking the personal invitation as King's way of making up with Jesse. Jackson called up to introduce a Chicago saxophonist, Ben Branch. King leaned over: "I want you to play my song tonight, play 'Precious Lord.' Play it real pretty."

At 6:01 a noise split the night. All at once King's feet were dangling over the balcony. "Oh my God, Martin's been shot," howled Ralph Abernathy from inside Room 306. Jackson, along with the others in the courtyard, hit the ground. "Dr. Abernathy was already down over King when Andy got upstairs," recalls Orange. An unidentified white man fitted a towel over the wound in King's jaw. Abernathy cradled the dying leader in his lap.

Below, Bevel was crouched six feet from Jackson when Dr. Abernathy called down to ask him to go over to the temple where King had spoken, and calm the people. "I asked Jesse to go with me," Bevel says, because the others were lifting King onto a stretcher to go to the hospital. Jesse told Bevel, "Man, I am sick. I got to go to Chicago and check into the hospital. This has really shot my nerves."

Bevel dismissed his young staffer. But at 6:25, when camera crews from the three networks began to arrive, Jackson was still there, and called out to the others, "Don't talk to them." Hosea Williams was shocked to hear Jesse then tell the TV people, "Yes, I was the last man in the world King spoke to."

That night, while all the other disciples wept and discussed funeral arrangements, Jackson was missing. The next morning, as they prepared to pick up King's body, Jesse was making news on the Today show in Chicago with a story the others found preposterous.

That day and for years after, the press reported that Jackson had been on the balcony when King was shot, and that he had cradled the dying man in his arms. But it was what Jesse said later the same morning before the Chicago City Council that embittered King's other followers. Still wearing the tan turtleneck he claimed was smeared with the blood of King, he excoriated Mayor Daley and his machine, crying, "This blood is on the chest and hands of those who would not have welcomed him here yesterday."

Jackson tells different stories, even to the same journalist. He told me that blood was splattering everywhere and that's how it got on his shirt. Other participants flatly reject that description. "There was one pool of blood," says Bevel. Ben Branch, the saxophonist, told Barbara Reynolds, "My guess is Jesse smeared the blood on his shirt after getting it off the balcony... .All I can say is that Jesse didn't touch him."

Jackson's explanation for why he left that night is also lame. "A number of the staff members went back to Atlanta that night because that was where they lived. I went to Chicago because that's where my family and my organization were." In fact, everyone else remained overnight in Memphis.

Don Rose, a Chicago political consultant who met with Jackson the day after King's assassination, recalls, "There was a deliberate decision to launch an image-making process."

"That to me is the most gruesome crime a man can commit," says Bevel today, "to lie about the crucifixion of a prophet within a race." Another prominent Chicago leader says Jackson used "the moment of the death of the leader as a vehicle to anoint himself. People were bitter about that." On the cynical level, the political leader admits, "there's no question it worked for him."

The healthy drive of Greenville's pushy little Jesse had been transmuted into a blind, almost involuntary desire for advancement. Jackson must still wrestle with himself over his decisions in the wake of King's death. But he is loath to look back. He reminds me of Jacob, the son of Isaac, who obtained his father's blessing by fraud, and who wrestled with God until daybreak and then bragged, "I have seen God face to face, and have survived."

Few of the slain leader's other disciples today like to come right out and call Jesse a liar, mainly because the lie is by now in his head and helps him to believe in the divinity of his own destiny. More and more, Jackson seeks out biblical analogies and snaps them down like safety catches over the loose ends of his earlier life. In the early seventies, he was introduced as the "Black Messiah" at functions in Chicago. He often tells students, "Great things happen in small places. Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Jesse Jackson was born in Greenville."

Jackson is often compared disparagingly with Martin Luther King Jr. But King had the opportunity to develop in ways that few southern blacks ever did. His natural intellectual ability was nurtured in an upper-middle-class Atlanta aristocracy, and he went to college at fifteen. "He saw all the ambiguities," recalls Eleanor Holmes Norton, first woman director of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, "and that's why he was tormented and sometimes indecisive. That's the difference between him and somebody like Jackson, who is a deprived son of a teenage mother. These are just two different fish."

More important, the civil-rights agenda Dr. King activated had been waiting for a hundred years. Jackson was not so favored by history. When he emerged in the seventies, a brash young talent burning with ambition, there was no fresh movement waiting for a leader. Older disciples in King's crusade perceived a basic spiritual distinction between the two men.

"Jesse, you have no love," Dr. King himself used to tell the young spitfire. But Jackson has his own kind of brilliance. It is immediately absorptive of new and even esoteric material, and makes wildly creative connections between these seedling ideas, which then sprout forth in charming bouquets of language. So in the absence of passion or cause, Jackson made up his own movements. Breadbasket Commercial Association focused on black capitalism. When Jimmy Carter became president, prominent blacks were suddenly getting jobs in the administration, but the Atlanta crowd controlled that patronage and they locked Jesse out. So he came up with the idea of motivating black youth—PUSH-Excel. And later, when he needed it, he named a movement—the Rainbow Coalition. He made it stand for everything from futuristic foreign-policy views to issues of the most interior concern to black Americans.

Coming out of the Baptist-preacher mold made it much easier to improvise. The Baptists have no hierarchy and no educational requirements for the pulpit. Anyone with good lungs and a protest to faith can become a preacher. "Black ministers are notorious chauvinists," says Julian Bond. "This guy is God's representative to you. So when the Reverend says, 'I want to talk to you in my study, Sister,' what can she do?" Bond and Young, and other new-generation southern black activists who were choosing the electoral route, were suspicious of power wielded over the masses simply because of the title "Reverend." "We felt you had to prove leadership," says Bond.

Is Jackson, then, a great leader? Or a genius hustler? He has never held a fulltime pastorate and often describes what he does as a "mission." In the private and the religious spheres, as well as in the political arena, Jackson has been making up the rules as he goes along.

Eleanor Holmes Norton believes "you've got to line him up along with the remarkable American political figures who manage to capture the public imagination—all the way from F.D.R. to Huey Long. These men are vastly different. But people were fascinated with their public personalities as they are fascinated with Jackson's, because it's one of a kind." She affirms that his need for public recognition equates with his yearning for personal legitimacy. "And it's insatiable. He'll never have it. That's why he has to keep about this pursuit. It's almost existential."

St. Albans, an elite private school in Washington, D.C., is playing a public school in suburban Virginia. It is a fresh, clear September night. Jackson's third son, Yusef DuBois, already a powerfully built 220 pounds, scores a touchdown for St. Albans minutes before his mother arrives from Chicago.

"Here comes my baby," Jackson hums as his wife, Jacqueline, appears.

A five-foot-one, lusty, busty, fiery woman swaggers closer. He gives her a quick hug. She has dimples, full cheeks, flawless skin, and—incongruously—braces. Jackie Jackson is opulently dressed for a football game, diamonds blazing on both hands, chandelier earrings, and black high heels under her trousers. Jesse Jackson goes back to pacing the field, hands plunged into his jeans pockets, shouting "Go, Yusef." When Jackie shouts in her husky voice, even louder than he, he roars with delight.

Jackie makes it clear she is her husband's chief bodyguard against the character cops. She starts right in with the several women journalists present, warning them that if the subject of her husband's private behavior is raised, she will go on the warpath in her own speeches, "and I will win." She says, "You've been around the circuit, you know what goes on during these campaigns—it's life. But nobody comes into my house or my bedroom."

The Jackson home, in a posh integrated section off South Shore Drive in Chicago, has two faces. Official visitors pass under its chocolate-trimmed Tudor peaks and stained-glass windows to enter through the front door into a formal parlor. Initiates come through the back door into a dining room of funky dishabille, where golf clubs and silver tea trays teeter against Jackie's ubiquitous hatboxes and half-refinished antiques. Flunkies bide their time reading tabloids around the long, lace-covered table. Jackson rarely tires, but when he does, a mild sickle-cell-anemia trait keeps him to his bed. There he holds court. The phone is his most constant companion. At two or three or five in the morning he'll have a brainstorm and start dialing. His nocturnal calls used to drive the deliberate Walter Mondale crazy. His own wife simply refuses to answer the phone after midnight anymore.

Jackie talks teasingly and lovingly about Jesse, and refers to him possessively as "my husband." The early years of their marriage were stormy: Jesse was rarely there. Bogged down with five children, Jackie fought being the wife of this prominent man. In recent years, she has decided she likes it. "I took a degree in Jesse Jackson," she tells me. "A Phi Beta Kappa," Jackson corrects.

That weekend, the impressively bright, polite Jackson children are flying in from private schools all over the country for a trio of birthday celebrations. They don't gather as a family often. The oldest daughter, Santita, aged twenty-four, who is an English major at Howard University, arrives just as the game is over. There is tension; she is obviously here under pressure. But after a perfunctory squeeze, her father lays his head on her shoulder in a gesture of affectionate, put-on penitence. She, of course, melts.

Jesse junior, recently graduated from his father's alma mater, is committed to a year of helping the campaign. He handles with grace and humility the role of trainee under his father, who believes in administering verbal lashings to the son in front the campaign staff. His father calls the twenty-three-year-old "Little Jesse." He refers to his father with awed respect as "the Reverend."

When I arrive for a lengthy interview with Jackie Jackson, Sunday afternoon after the Jackson birthday gala at the Washington Hilton, she is sleepily rubbing cream into her face. She was up until four. "I have to stay around to hear what beefs people have, because my husband leaves early."

Three plastic containers of birthday cake sit on the table, unopened. Jackie sits hugging a pillow, tinted glasses pushed up over her full tousled head of hair, and chain-smokes. She starts out waxing philosophical. "If I got pregnant, it was the right time to be pregnant. I don't understand people who plan things. Life is not about how far you fall, but how long it takes you to bounce back." She goes off on a long tangent about children and how things are falling apart these days. "How did I get on this?

"It's difficult to understand my relationship with my husband, because most women do not see themselves as partners," she continues. "They see some romantic notion they bought on the television."

Asked about jealousy, she has said, "My portion of him is mine. I can't spend too much time worrying about other women if I am to develop myself; then I would be chasing all around this country." Alternatively, she has visited Lebanon and Nicaragua and more than thirty other nations and has spoken out loudly against American intervention in some Third World countries. Often carrying backchannel messages from her husband, she travels without press, meets with dissenters, and seeks out prominent women. "In every culture, women reflect the level of suffering, so you can get a feeling of what is happening."

As Jackie is talking to me in a Washington hotel room, Jesse is about to go into a demanding military-policy debate in Iowa. The phone rings. "Excuse me, that's my husband."

Her voice prods with gentle maternalism. "Have you done what you were going to do? Mmmm, well, just say a little prayer, because you need it. I love you much. O.K. O.K. What did you want to do with your clothes?"

Friends circulate in and out, helping her children to pack. Jackie calls out, "What time is it? What's the date today?" Life happens around her. This poetic, freespirited, often profound woman differs dramatically in her relationship with her husband from Coretta King. Mrs. King "saw for herself a public role as a substantive figure that Dr. King didn't accept or agree with at all," according to one intimate. "Coretta was most certainly a widow long before Dr. King died."

Rumors that Jesse Jackson has had affairs have dogged him all of his married life, linking him to such famous singers as Nancy Wilson, Roberta Flack, and Aretha Franklin. In the last four years, as reported by the Atlanta Constitution, he has been tied to two prominent women in Washington-based black organizations, as well as a woman now involved in his campaign. (No bimbos.)

A close family friend says the black community knows all about Jackson as a womanizer, but he has cleaned up his act considerably in the last four or five years. He is discreet enough so that campaign followers don't buzz about noticeable promiscuity, the way they did with Hart. "Almost every woman he's met has thrown herself at him," says the friend. "How strongly he resists is problematical."

The most persistent rumors surround his close relationship with Roberta Flack. The singer recorded a torrid love song in 1973 entitled "Jesse." In 1974, Jackson told a reporter, "Until such time as I'm ready to concede some formal relationship, I refuse to deny the rumor, or to be intimidated by it." Last August, Flack sang at a Jackson benefit, and in September the Chicago Tribune listed her as one of his leading fund-raisers.

King's well-publicized affairs with other women did not undercut his moral authority. My guess is the issue won't hurt Jackson with his natural constituency either, especially if they get the impression the white press is picking on Jesse. In '84, for instance, just around the time that his links with Black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan raised a storm of criticism, Jackson's black support began to build.

The hidden impulse behind many of Jackson's moves throughout his years in Chicago, 1970 to 1982, was the rivalry between himself and his half-brother Noah. Money is Noah's god. He was a business whiz with a degree from the Wharton School of Finance and $326 in his pocket when Jesse wooed him to Chicago. To Noah, at that time, Jesse Jackson was a big shot he saw on TV and the cover of Time. Anointed by the media as heir to King's movement, Jesse was then running the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Operation Breadbasket in Chicago. He dazzled Noah by taking him to dinner with Diana Ross.

"I wanted to help him," Jackson admitted to me, "and please my father as well." Now it was Jesse who had the power and who was in the position to dispense largess. Finally, he persuaded his brother to join him in running the commercial arm of Operation Breadbasket. Noah, who doesn't hesitate to describe himself as a hustler, tried to entice his brother into exploiting the movement to make money. "I told Jesse, 'If you just do the talking for us—and I handle the financial operations—we can rival the Rockefellers in riches.' "

Breadbasket Commercial Association was set up to offer marketing and management services to minority-owned businesses. Underwritten by some of the nation's leading black entrepreneurs, B.C.A. also sought funds from smallbusiness people, white and black. Jackson hadn't studied his nemesis, the mayor of Chicago, for nothing. Where Boss Daley extracted political patronage, the nascent boss of black Chicago began to demand economic patronage. With Jesse doing the talking, and Noah wheeling and dealing, B.C.A. obtained over $16 million in contracts for member businesses in the first six months of 1970. It was the heady pulse of success that stirred bad blood. The two boastful half-brothers clashed and split. Noah's motivation from then until now, he told me, has been revenge. Noah and Jesse became Chicago's Cain and Abel.

The currents of love and rivalry boiled under everything Noah said about Jesse during our interview. I asked how often they see each other today. "We run into each other in airports," said Robinson. But when Jackson wants to stage a fundraiser in Chicago, to gather the same businessmen the two have cultivated or intimidated over the years, he still gives Noah a call.

A slight, slip-through-the-door sort of man, with a narrow mustache and goatee, Noah Robinson Jr. normally has a toothpick dangling jauntily from his lips. Close your eyes and listen to the familiar singsong rhyming cadence and you would swear it was Jesse talking. Both men have a penchant for self-dramatization, are easily insulted and vindictive, and seem absent the gene for humility. "We are both able and energetic," says Jackson enigmatically.

Noah tells the story of their business association to me and Linda duBuclet, my research assistant. "Jesse brought me into the movement through the back door. His staff resented me for my success. I overran them all."

Calvin Morris, Jackson's number two at Operation Breadbasket until 1971, recalls, "We were told to try to contain Noah or he'd run off with the church." When Noah heard this, he was stunned. "That was Jesse's management style, to pit the opposing forces in the organization against each other. I went to Jesse and pulled back the curtain: 'Is it you?' First he denied it, then he confirmed it. 'Noah,' he said, 'you're the first person I've ever had to share the stage with.' 'Me! I'm backstage clapping. That's crazy.' "

When Noah and Jesse got together in Chicago in 1970—at ages twenty-eight and twenty-nine, respectively—it was the first time that they had gone over their childhood demons. "I didn't know about the other Jesse Jackson, the fearful one," recounts Noah. "I just remembered this guy from high school, then I saw him grow into this star on TV. He seemed so confident. But the inner Jesse has an insecurity, an overwhelming need to reaffirm he is good, better, best. It's a fear, in here"—he points to his heart—"that fuels his drive." The chant "I am somebody," says Noah, is the closest thing to a confession you'll get from Jesse.

During the year the brothers worked together, Jackson had failed to consult with the S.C.L.C. board about B.C.A. or Robinson. Finally, he was called on the carpet and dethroned by the Reverend Ralph Abernathy. He left the conference to form his own, rival organization, PUSH, stripping B.C.A. of its economic base of ministers-cum-businessmen. But not before trying to get the board to fire Noah.

Noah had his bags packed, ready to be run out of town. "I was too ashamed to tell Dad that Jesse fired me—it would open up old wounds." So he vowed to stay in Chicago and fight his brother for turf.

"We didn't speak to each other for five years," says Noah. "Most traumatic experience of my whole life. His people would picket one of my sites, then my people would counterpicket." Fat was thrown on the fire when the S.C.L.C. rehired Robinson to fill his brother's shoes at Operation Breadbasket. Jackson had the preachers on his side. In exchange for the preachers' supplying troops to stage boycotts, the businessmen would give the churches money. But then, as now, PUSH staggered from payroll to payroll. Noah, meanwhile, had discovered a milk cow in the movement. He began by taking advantage of minority set-asides from the Nixon administration. He crows unashamedly, "As a minority subcontractor, I made more money than most of the prime contractors, because I kept getting 10 percent of this, 20 percent of that." The ugliest part of his success was the shunting of taxpayers' money, intended for the development of minority businesses, to white contractors. The whites made profits faster, and cut him and his relatives in, earning Noah the reputation of a successful "movement pimp."

"I've had thirty different operations," Robinson brags. "Whenever I saw an opportunity, I grabbed it." When the Chicago Tribune went after him, stirring up the first of many federal, state, and local investigations into Robinson's activities, Noah thumbed his nose. "That was my first public notoriety," he preens before me. "I wasn't ashamed of making millions. And I don't intend to change my ways."

It was in 1975, five years after their split, that Jesse called Noah junior out of the blue. Noah hadn't heard his voice since 1971 except on radio and TV. He was stunned. When the brothers came face-to-face, each wearing a vest and medallions and bell-bottoms, the mirror image unnerved them both. Noah kept reassuring himself, "I'm worth three or four million, he's probably worth thirty cents."

"I'm preaching brotherhood, but I'm not practicing it," Jackson began. His voice trembled. He told Noah he wanted to make peace with his God. He said he didn't know if he could ever really forgive Noah, but he could no longer live in hypocrisy.

Behind that noble motive Jesse was also considering his image. He was planning a trade fair, with a family-day theme, for Black Expo. Calvin Morris believes the reconciliation was also in anticipation of an eventual run for the presidency. Jesse would need Noah junior and his biological father to provide a picture of family unity. Always, with Jesse, it's the picture that counts.

What of the brothers Jackson/Robinson today? Both are still hyperstrivers, though the principles that guide them are very different. Jesse craves legitimacy; Noah's goal is to enter the 1990s as the hundred-million-dollar man, and to lord it over his brother. Eerily, their associations have run parallel for many years. Jesse runs a boycott of Coca-Cola and pushes it to sign a "moral covenant"; Noah comes along behind and locks up the first black distributorship with Coca-Cola. Jesse challenges fast-food chains into signing covenants with PUSH to hire and distribute proportionally to their black customers; Noah turns up with a chain of Wendy's, Bojangles, and Church's Fried Chicken in both Chicago and New York. Jesse makes diplomatic missions to Arab countries; Noah's name comes up in an investigation of Chicago gang members—some of whom he has employed—on trial for taking a contract from Libya to commit terrorist attacks in the U.S.

Most recently, Noah's name has surfaced in the middle of a federal murder investigation. Robinson has employed members of the notorious El Rukn Chicago street gang over the past three years, as well as violent drug dealers. One of them, Leroy "Hambone" Barber, a childhood friend from the days in Happy Hearts Park, was first hired by Robinson in 1977 after being paroled following the shooting of two Greenville policemen. Robinson knew of his reputation as a drug dealer, and allegedly used him to beat up debtors. In 1981, Barber landed back in prison— for the attempted robbery of one Noah Robinson Jr. After Barber was sprung in 1984, Robinson hired him back, but claims that he fired him in November 1985, and that the "attempted murderer" followed him to Greenville. They came to blows in a pool hall in a shopping plaza owned by Robinson. Less than two weeks later, Barber was called to a pay phone in a dimly lit area of the plaza and shot in the head.

Investigators suspect Robinson wanted the rubout. A top-ranking El Rukn member, now a federal informer, has told authorities that El Rukn leader Jeff Fort ordered gang members to kill Barber because he was "bothering" Robinson. Fort—who once worked for Jackson at PUSH—is currently on trial for activities relating to terrorist acts under contract to Libya. Two of the other suspected killers were Robinson's employees. Federal and local authorities are looking into Robinson's ties to other drug dealers, such as Thomas Allen Burnside, who was listed as one of New York's top one hundred narcotics suppliers. Another old Greenville pal, Burnside testified that his job was to count the money in Robinson's fast-food franchises. He and his runners placed sixty-one telephone calls to Robinson's home in Chicago and temporary digs in Albuquerque before they were convicted in 1984, Burnside as kingpin of a heroin ring operating in four states. Noah acknowledges that he continues to send money to the family of Burnside, who was sentenced to fifty-four years in jail.

As this article goes to press, Robinson is also being investigated by a Chicago grand jury on matters related to his frequent appearances in bankruptcy court. The same white businesses he cut in on federal grants are now suing him for fraud.

The U.S. attorney in Chicago, Anton Valukas, told me straight out: "Whatever we have under inquiry has nothing to do with Jesse Jackson." Jackson is categorical in his own defense. "All the businesses I created—franchises, distributorships—I don't have a stake in any of them. I could have." Whatever Noah gets, he insists, whether or not he uses Jackson's name to get it, is Noah's affair. "I am not in business with him, never have been. We relate warmly and respectfully, which is really all I can say."

Blood is thicker than water, to be sure. But if a blood relation is mixed up with drug dealers, murderers, and terrorists, why doesn't a man in Jackson's position put an unequivocal distance between them? It may be that Noah knows too much about Jesse's weaknesses, and holds that telltale power over his brother. Noah is the chink in the façade, and they both know it.

Indeed, after their rapprochement in 1975, Jesse once more introduced Noah around as the good brother, and announced that Robinson would be his business manager. The two appeared at a luncheon together, where Robinson announced that he and a syndicate of black businessmen had acquired a large milk company, and Jackson named twenty companies selected as new targets for PUSH.

Jackson has had his own problems, with money and organization. Between 1978 and 1982, after Hubert Humphrey urged government support for PUSH, it received $5 million in grants and loans from at least three federal agencies. But an April 1980 government report found that the Reverend Jesse Jackson had failed to convert his inspirational message into a workable public-school program. A PUSH chapter would open in a new town with considerable fanfare, and Jackson onstage, but there would be no follow-up. "PUSH didn't push, except Jesse," claims the formerly idealistic director of a Harlem youth center, who repeatedly asked for program guidelines after meeting Jackson in 1972, but never got a response. Jackson has been most effective in challenging corporations to open up white-only distributorships and franchises to blacks. An experienced former assistant secretary of labor, Ernest Green, has been helping him in that effort. But many of the able people Jackson has hired for PUSH find his authoritarian management style impossible, and leave.

When Jackson refused to let federal officials audit the PUSH books, funds were cut off. Eventually he agreed to an audit. But by then investigators could find no records. Jackson maintains he never signed any PUSH checks. According to a Department of Education spokesman, "Our problem is that the man keeping the records died, and the records don't seem to exist. The case is now in commercial litigation with the Justice Department." It emphasizes that there is no question of a criminal investigation, and that such referrals from other agencies are not unusual.

Jackson's response to the investigations, however, "puts a bend into the truth." He denounced the Reagan administration for trying to "discredit and destroy PUSH"—never mind that the Carter administration had prepared the critical report. "I never sought the government grant," he now says scornfully. "I did not want to get bogged down in the politics of government bureaucracy. The government wanted to identify with a success story. I anticipated what was going to happen." Since government spigots to PUSH have been shut off, Syria has funneled at least two legal $100,000 donations into PUSH-Excel.

In late '83, according to Noah, Jesse said, "Noah, I got an idea. You oughta get a piece of this. I think I'm going to run for president of the United States."

Noah said, "Well, we agree you're more qualified than the present occupant. But what's your political base?"

Jesse told Noah that he had helped every black elected official in the country, paving the way for dozens of black politicians to become mayors and congressmen. Noah shot holes in his rationale: "Like John the Baptist, you made these guys Jesus. Now you're going to go back and say you want the throne. They'll resent that. They won't abdicate."

The only members of the black political establishment who did not oppose Jackson in '84 were Mayor Richard Hatcher of Gary, Indiana, Mayor Marion Barry of Washington, D.C., and a lukewarm Kenneth Gibson in New Jersey. The rest supported Mondale.

Because of his style, the prayer meetings and little ditties of poetry, pundits predicted he would run a campaign of surface issues. Then Jackson had a brainstorm. Learning that the administration was doing nothing to free a black pilot downed in Syrian-held territory, Jackson sent a cable to President Hafez al-Assad. Next thing, he was stepping out of an official U.S.-government plane to pull off a sweet victory by sheer personal diplomacy.

The party's response to Jackson became even cooler. Walter Mondale never quite grasped the "Jackson phenomenon," but he knew he didn't like it. He cut off the voter-registration funds. These were new Democrats the Mondale forces didn't necessarily want. The party didn't invite Jesse to events. But few experiences prepare one for the long, grueling, demeaning process of running for president better than growing up black and poor in America. No matter how many times he was slapped in the face or counted out, Jesse Jackson kept on running—the consummate political survivor.

The deal Mondale's forces had extracted from union leaders fell apart at the rank-and-file level. Jackson won over 90 percent of black union members' votes. Tensions increased. The Mondale camp refused to accommodate Jackson on changing the rules by which delegates are committed. But being the instant innovator he is, Jackson determined to capture the masses at the convention with his words.

Robert Beckel, Mondale's campaign manager, went into intense negotiations with him over platform and publicity. It became clear to the Mondale forces that they weren't going to get a deal on the platform unless they offered Jesse prime time for his TV appearance at the convention. They relented and gave him the eight P.M. slot.

The night before Mondale's nomination, Beckel walked out onto the balcony of the Fairmont Hotel with Jackson. It was a loaded moment. "You know, Reverend, this speech you're going to give... "

"I knew they were braced for something negative," as Jackson tells it today. "They had stolen half my delegates and said they had rammed the platform down our throats." "Well, I'll tell you this, Beckel," he drawled that night. "You're either going to be a chimp, a chump, or a champ." Making 'em sweat.

Jackson's speech turned out to be a stem-winder; the public went wild. Afterward, he collected. He went to the Mondale people and said, "I'll go seven days a week, twenty-two hours a day, for you-all." He started to total up what it would cost to move him and three or four people around the country. Beckel began to sweat.

"We ended up agreeing to give him roughly half a million. It was more than anybody else cost us for a surrogate."

Last summer, the Democratic National Committee held a big gala and invited every past and potential presidential candidate to an intimate dinner—except Jesse Jackson. He was truly hurt. Ann Lewis, former political director of the D.N.C., told him, "They are not the party, we are. The reason there's a Democratic Senate is not six guys in a room in Washington in bow ties. If you give them the power to shut you out, you're giving them a power they don't have."

Without question, Jackson is having a more profound effect on the Democratic Party this time. To hear Dick Gephardt or Mike Dukakis talk about how he would fund the African National Congress is a measure of how influential his foreign-policy views have become. And since no one among this crop of candidates has a civil-rights record like Mondale's, "Jackson's candidacy basically freezes black elected officials," according to Ron Brown, who was deputy campaign manager for Teddy Kennedy. Even Chicago mayor Harold Washington, until recently a rival, has now enthusiastically endorsed him. Jackson expects all but a few members of the Congressional Black Caucus to do likewise. Looking ahead to Super Tuesday, as Bob Beckel says, Jackson is the only Democrat who can reserve hotel rooms in Atlanta now.

A Virginia suburb: Breathless white high-school kids reach out to touch him as if he were a rock star. Davenport, Iowa: A six-foot-nine trucker stomps onto the podium after Jackson's speech and lifts him off his feet in a bear hug—"There's never been a candidate that really stood up for truckdrivers!" Pleasantville, Iowa: Jackson has a hundred white people praying with him. A retired farmer stuffs money in an envelope and steps up. "The way things is going, breaking all the unions, and these big mergers, corporations paying no taxes, I'm just glad you're helping, Mr. Jackson." Little old ladies lay down their canes to get close to him. "I need your autograph, Jesse," says one. "Only if I can get a hug. Trade-off." He draws the seventy-year-old under his powerful shoulder. She sighs like a schoolgirl.

Even in the cool light, away from the magnetism of his personality, it should be remembered that not only the small South Carolina city of his birth but this republic itself was defined as an exclusively white enterprise. And now Jesse Jackson threatens all of that as he moves to join poorer whites with their black and brown coworkers and fellow union members as comrades in the underclass. He has real potential among the psychic wounded of the Vietnam generation, and disillusioned white farmers and blue-collar workers who have gone Republican before. He stings, nudges, needles, then adds the sweetener—what's in it for them, and for him—and leaves them feeling they hold a secret power through which they can stick it to the Establishment.

Some of his supporters claim that if Jesse Jackson were to wake up white tomorrow, he would be a ten-to-one favorite for the Democratic nomination. Would he? Or would he be seen as too extreme, too inexperienced, too opportunistic, and too blatantly the lover of the limelight?

If another politician had left the same images—Castro, Arafat, Assad, Farrakhan—in the public mind, would he or she be able to launch a serious presidential campaign? I asked Jackson.

"It depends how much kinship and credibility they had, if they could survive the attack. .. Who else challenged Gorbachev, heads up, on the question of Soviet Jewry before the whole world? No one else. Who challenged Ortega, heads up, to reopen the press and to meet with the church? No one else. I think people call that leadership." He had to postpone finishing his answer. A plane was waiting.

Jackson is softening his rhetoric, even talking from a prepared, statistic-dense text before august white groups like the Iowa Bankers Association. Pollsters have been struck by findings that Jackson's aggressive effort to court Iowa voters has earned him twice as much support among whites there as elsewhere. But some things change very little.

Before he announced, he asked at least a dozen people to be his campaign coordinator—Ron Brown, Bob Beckel, Carl Wagner, Paul Tully, and Basil Paterson among them—superprofessionals, white and black. They all turned him down. No campaign manager can control a man as willful as Jackson has been all his life. Nobody thinks that a manager would be allowed to do more than take orders. Jackson's press secretary is an inexperienced staffer from Ebony magazine who basically carries bags, and phones for charters when Jackson misses scheduled flights. The Jackson campaign is all in Jesse's head.

Few of his high-powered supporters even want to be identified as having a role in his campaign. Jackson told me his finance chairman is Percy Sutton, a former Manhattan borough president. Sutton says not. Jackson told me Basil Paterson, a sharp politico now in private law practice, is heading up his New York campaign. Paterson says not.

Having staged fund-raisers for Jackson, Paterson says, "I find him an absolutely exasperating person, one of the most undisciplined people I've ever seen in public life. Yet there's nobody on the public scene right now who comes up with ideas any better. He is a brilliant man."

The only time Jackson did share power was with Noah junior in Chicago. That lasted for about a year. Is there anyone around Jesse Jackson who can tell him when the emperor has no clothes?

''I tell him," insists Jackie Jackson. "We all tell him things. He's slow to act on them. He has to be stubborn."

Jackson's answer is more competitive: "Big egos are not a problem if it correlates with their intelligence. The only problem is if they have a Cadillac ego and a bicycle brain."

Another aspect of Jackson's campaign that hasn't changed is his method of fund-raising. It's often a cash-and-carry operation. When he missed a scheduled flight from Mobile to put the finishing flourish on a speech to striking paperworkers, a plate was passed to collect for his charter plane. It's often unclear whether fund-raisers are meant to help meet the PUSH payroll or to collect campaign funds.

But his evangelical fund-raising techniques are staggeringly effective. I watched him conjure money out of poor people in an impoverished parish house in Davenport, Iowa. He began biblically. "I often reflect on Jesus's first journey. He didn't have the budget either. If you go out amongst the people, they will feed you and clothe you." Having thus cast himself as a humble pilgrim with the same problems as the son of God, he then teased the crowd as only one who has known poverty could. "Poor folks often buy what they want and put off what they need, right?"

"Yes, sir."

"And they get a TV somehow?"

Giggles of self-recognition.

"And they get themselves a VCR?"

Their penchant for impulse spending laid bare, the audience was putty in his hands. He rolled out the heavy artillery: "If you will give or raise a thousand dollars for this campaign, stand." Two young black women rose. "Now, everyone who will give or raise $500, come down front here. . . " And so it went, until every soul in the room had been relieved of at least five bucks, and felt involved. From a gathering of thirty, Jackson walked away with cash or pledges of $6,000. He flew off to Washington, firstclass as always, and occupied two hotel suites for the weekend.

Finally, there has not been any positive change in Jackson's ulcerated relations with Jews. There is some context for his apparent anti-Semitism and his association with the anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan. When I asked how he'd heard whites refer to Jews in the South, he explained, "In Greenville I only knew black and white. There were no Jews or Poles or other distinctions in my sight. All white people's behavior toward black people was essentially legalistic."

Southern blacks quickly learned that if they were to survive and prosper they would have to rely on their own collective efforts rather than on the benevolence or goodwill of whites. Farrakhan is a black brother who provided Jesse with physical security in 1984. Jackson may also feel he will lose some power among blacks if he bows and scrapes in apology to whites—and Jews are just another block of whites. This is a man who, according to a Delta Air Lines employee, refused service from a white cabin attendant and would accept refreshments only from a black attendant.

Notwithstanding the narrowness of his background, the fact remains that he has made statements derogatory to a minority, and if anyone understands the nuances of anti-Semitism, it should be one who understands racism. Yet most people re-educate themselves about their prejudices in private. Jackson has had to do it in the full glare of cameras.

At a Hollywood forum at the home of actor Tony Franciosa, with over a hundred former Hart supporters, Jackson was asked about his charge that "Jews support South Africa." He talked about holding Israel to a higher moral standard. He described a meeting with Anwar Sadat, who sent him to try to persuade P.L.O. leader Yasir Arafat to recognize Israel. "I'm convinced that several thousand deaths ago," Jackson told the group, "if somebody had taken the initiative to talk diplomatically, not just act militarily, many lives would have been saved. But we gave up the right to talk, and things between the Palestinians and Israel have degenerated."

Then he was asked to address the notion that he can't get elected, because he is black. "If Jesse Jackson can become president, a Jew can become president," he said. "If I can become president, anybody can."

It brought a laugh from some, offended others. Afterward, film executive Mike Medavoy and producer Robert Chartoff cornered Jackson and complained that his answers sounded phony. "Hey"—he put up his hands—"there's only so far I will go."

What does Jesse want? The question packs more punch than ever since the stock-market collapse boosted the Democrats' chances to take the White House. Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute thinks Jackson "wouldn't want any position that would require him to administer, or to be subordinate to the president. Being on a government payroll and possibly subject to Senate confirmation would open up a Pandora's box. What would work for him would be a roving troubleshooter. It puts him in hot spots and also gives him independence."

But would it work for a Democratic candidate? What Jackson wants will become an issue in the campaign. Some suggest a candidate could easily get away with saying, "Reverend Jackson has enormous prestige and influence in the Third World. If I find, as president, that he could be useful in talking to leaders or opponents who take his word, and that might save American lives, I would be crazy not to use him."

Wyatt Tee Walker, the Harlem preacher, who knows Jackson well, says, "This may surprise you: he doesn't want to be president." But, for Jesse, a presidential campaign is Nirvana, as Calvin Morris points out. "Everyday cameras following you, microphones recording your every word, Secret Service, limousines, sirens, charter planes—it's the glory he loves."

Consider how Jackson might play the scene in the smoke-filled room when the two other surviving Democratic candidates approach him on the eve of the convention. Mr. X and Mr. Y have two thousand delegates between them. But Jackson has racked up almost as many delegates as either, plus he's played it like a true party man. What can they offer him?

But wait. Jackson holds up his hands. "Friends, I'm going to make it easy for you—I don't want anything. All I ask is prime time to make the nominating speech." The nominee accepts, knowing the risk but helpless to protect himself. The speech Jackson makes is a spellbinder. He pledges to spend every waking moment campaigning for Mr. Nominee, the greatest president America could have because he's committed to A, B, D, F, and G. Jesse has just burdened the Democratic candidate with the Jackson agenda.

The danger lies in the possible public perception that Jackson wields too much power within the party. And that could destroy the chances for a Democrat to be elected in 1988. Not to worry, says Bert Lance, once President Carter's close adviser and a Jackson booster since '84. Jesse Jackson is not going to allow himself to be blamed by his party for losing the White House.

Jackson fancies himself an American Sadat, performing the most sensitive, high-profile diplomatic missions for the president but without the accountability of appointive office. He has often said he has no interest in a Cabinet post. So, it's glory he wants?

In six weeks of Jesse-watching last fall, it began to look to me as though Jackson would be happy running a perpetual campaign. Down with shame, up with fame. But then I began to see signs he'd been bitten by the power virus. Percy Sutton noticed it too. On a Phil Donahue show shortly after Gary Hart's departure from the scene, Jackson was asked if he would accept the vice-presidential slot. The Reverend replied imperially, "If I were to run a successful race and did not win, the vice-presidential option would be a serious consideration because it would be such an honor to serve our nation at that level." A friend and government insider who dared not be identified said, "Can you imagine anybody fool enough to take him as vice president? He must know better than anybody that he is ill-suited to be vice president. Therefore, he must crave power that much."

And according to Noah junior, Jesse's focus has shifted. "It's not preaching now, it's power. The power of the presidency. To govern the reallocation of resources, that's the real agenda. From the White House, Jesse can go beyond all their wildest dreams—Martin's dream, Marcus Garvey's dream, Malcolm X's dream."

In my judgment, Jesse Jackson is not qualified to be president. He has never stood for public office, never satisfactorily performed as an executive, never met a budget, set a legislative agenda, or accommodated differences within a political body. He is not knowledgeable about missile systems or the international flow of currency. He is careless about money and a dilettante when it comes to organization. What is more, Jackson in the Oval Office would be a caged bird. Imagine him stuck checking off budget items when he could be walking on the Gulf of 'Aqaba, mediating peace in the Middle East.

But he is uniquely qualified to be a historic candidate. While Jackson himself probably carries too much baggage and bitterness to engender the kind of confidence Americans would need to place in their first black president or vice president, he can prepare the path for the next, more traditional black political leader.

At 5:30 A.M. his time, Jackson rang me to wrap up some final questions. "Gail," the voice purred, "this is Jesse Jackson." But he had to interrupt the conversation to get on a plane. "Meet me in Mobile," he coaxed. My deadline was that day, and I was exhausted. But his hypnotic voice poured through the phone. "Just tell yourself, Gail, you must."

Seven hours later I'm pushing a luggage cart to the gate in New Orleans when I spot him running for the plane. "Hey, Miss Gail." Jackson grabs my luggage cart and starts pushing at a run. He has just spoken to several thousand health professionals and the adrenaline is running. He has a smile and charm-shake for the blonde flight attendant; he's signing autographs, shaking hands in pirouette; and before you know it we're on the Beechcraft headed for Mobile.

Jackson picks up mid-sentence from our pre-dawn conversation: ". . . and you were asking me about leadership. I'm convinced people look upon political leaders much like they look upon themselves. Reagan ran three times. He had to survive 'too extreme,' 'married twice,' 'doesn't love his grandchildren,' 'too old.' But his basic constituency said, 'Never mind, he represents our point of view, he's our guy.' The same with Nixon."

In an all-white Fundamentalist Pentecostal church in deepest Alabama, Jackson is welcomed by the pastor and four hundred locked-out paperworkers, black and white. He draws them all together with his economic-common-ground theme. ''When it's dark, we must turn to each other—"

"Hear ya!" shouts the audience.

"—not on each other."

"Right!"

People shout out seven months of bottled-up frustration. After Jackson finishes, a union man gets up. "Any doubts now?" The entire audience jumps to its feet and cheers.

Jackson comes out of that Pentecostal church high on his toes. He even extends his hand for me to congratulate him. "That was good for my psyche," he says.

We share a four-seater plane to Atlanta. He settles back, stockinged feet stretched out on the seat beside me, and discusses his strategy for survival—political and personal. Jackson believes the F.B.I. and the media were engaged in character assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. "Of course, when character-assassination attempts fail, there's physical assassination." He seems both haunted and intrigued by the very real possibility that he, too, might be martyred.

"I've had my anxious and fearful moments. But I've turned fear into a stimulus. When you seek change in a society, oftentimes you must pay the price—it's met with violence. I don't have any time to waste. Make it to Christmastime. Make it to Atlanta."

Could you ever be satisfied with elective office? I ask.

Soberly. "Yes."

Do you find yourself thinking like a president?

"More and more." His voice deepens. "You know, you really have to grow, to imagine life from that level." He begins rehearsing the role, speaking comfortably in the present tense. "In the Persian Gulf, I must somehow move the Security Council from being a war council, and back in its right role. I got to do that. I got to stop the sale of arms to Iran and Iraq. Secondly, I got troops in the water. I cannot run and leave my allies exposed..." He goes on, obviously warming to the exercise.

I ask if he now wakes up in the morning and puts himself in the mind of the president. "I've done that on Central America. On South Africa. On meeting with European leaders."

How long has he been thinking that way?

"More every day, frankly, over a period of time." He gazes dead ahead, his eyes gleaming softly like running lights on a night ship. "A lot of people aspire to the presidency. But they are so preoccupied with the day-to-day adjustments and maneuvering, they don't take the time to think presidential."

That last statement says a great deal about the vision and audacity of Jesse Jackson. He doesn't play the game by the normal rules, never has. He is a man willing to give himself time to think presidentially—the hell with the mechanics and the schedule.

I try to get him to explain the source of that vision and audacity, of the vaulting aspirations. "We can explain the norm, and teach the norm," he tells me, "but we cannot explain the abnormal. There is no rational explanation for the genius of personality." Beyond this stunning boast, there is a truth: the genius of personality is Jackson's power. But the very wizardry that permits him to project a symbolic persona greater than himself poses a conundrum.

Can he fill his own shoes?