It’s generally poor form to speak ill of the recently deceased, but the problem with holding your tongue is that it often allows revisionism to congeal as history.
No doubt, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Jr. has a complicated legacy. We shouldn’t judge people’s lives, not even high-profile leaders, by their worst moments. But Jackson had many bad moments, and yet if a person only saw the obituaries at legacy news outlets, they might come away believing this charismatic civil rights leader with a talent for alliteration, turns of phrase, and self-promotion was a beacon of decency, a defender of life, and a uniter of people.
Most of these hagiographers omitted some important biographical information. Admittedly, some of Jackson’s biggest controversies seem quaint by today’s ugly standards. His dubbing of New York City as “Hymietown” comes to mind. For decades, however, the reverend helped pull the Democratic Party toward the socialistic, America-reviling, developing nations-loving ideological positions that are now common among progressives.
Jackson spent a lifetime praising tyrannies and disparaging his own country. Cuba, he said after one of his visits, was marching “toward democracy, peace and reconciliation.” Worse, he declared “Long live President Castro!” at a rally while tens of thousands of political prisoners languished in camps. Jackson also argued that the communist Sandinistas were doing a better job than the Founding Fathers, men he would never stop demeaning.
African dictators? As Special Envoy for the Promotion of Democracy in Africa, Jackson legitimized a gaggle of them, including Charles Taylor, who would later be convicted for crimes against humanity. Hugo Chavez? Jackson not only championed the dictator’s “presidency,” he spoke at his good friend’s funeral. The honorable reverend was the first U.S. leader to embrace Egyptian terrorist mastermind Yasser Arafat, later contending that “Zionism is a poisonous weed that is choking Judaism.”
At home, no one exploited racial tensions as successfully as Jackson. Though the reverend never had an actual flock, he did have Operation PUSH, a shakedown operation that saw many corporations sending millions his way. Harold Doley Jr., one-time funder of Jackson, accused his former friend of using “African Americans to enrich himself.”
OBAMA IS IN NO POSITION TO LECTURE US ABOUT DECENCY
Begrudgingly, I always admired Jackson as a talented pugilist. His brand of ruthless attention seeking was only matched by an otherworldly chutzpah. Not by a long shot was the reverend the first religious leader who turned out to be a hypocrite on matters of fidelity. But how many of them had the nerve to serve as the spiritual adviser to the president of the United States, in this case, the serial philanderer Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, while carrying on with their own affair with a young staffer?
Jackson, a minor player in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, became an overnight celebrity after appearing on television the day after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination with a blood-soaked shirt, claiming to have been the last person to speak to the civil rights icon. This story was almost surely a case of Jackson’s myth making. Nevertheless, from then on his influence endured more or less until he was caught on mic fantasizing about cutting Barack Obama’s “nuts out” for “talking down” to black people in 2008.
One imagines Jackson was deeply envious of the latter’s rise to prominence and later the presidency, a perch he could, thankfully, never reach.
