Rev. Jesse Jackson charmed the great and the infamous, trying to make a difference

Rev. Jesse Jackson, 1982 (Chicago Sun-Times file photo)

     The Century Shopping Centre at 2828 N. Clark Street was built inside the old Diversey Theatre, a defunct 1925 vaudeville house. It has an interior atrium, sort of Water Tower Place Lite, and a winding ramp, past seven stories of shops.
     My then wife-to-be and I were wandering there, years ago, heading up the ramp, when we encountered a mass of people coming the other way. Rev. Jesse Jackson, with a knot of shoppers, photographers and media. Campaigning for Eugene Sawyer, if I recall correctly.
     "I'd like to meet him!" my future spouse said.
     I brought her up to Rev. Jackson and made the introduction.
     "May I kiss you?" he asked, to my surprise, and hers. But she agreed. The kiss occurred.
     We parted ways, the famous civil rights leaders and his entourage heading one way, my significant other and I heading another. Someone needed to say something. A thought came to me.
     "Congratulations," I said. "You just kissed Yasser Arafat by proxy."
     That neatly summarizes the dilemma of Rev. Jackson, who died Tuesday. He met the Dalai Lama and the bloodstained leader of the P.L.O. He hung out with Martin Luther King and Robert Mugabe, responsible for the deaths of 20,000 Zimbabweans. A moral man, generally, who met highly immoral people and sometimes held their hands and prayed. He visited Saddam Hussein, Hafez al-Assad and Fidel Castro.
      "Jackson has made a career of giving dictators such as Slobodan Milosevic a chance to show their gentler side by releasing captives at his request," a Time magazine columnist noted in 1999. "It’s not mere ego tripping, as some cynics charge, or an expression of Jackson’s deeply held belief in nonviolence. It’s almost Faustian. I think he needs the rush that only bargaining with evil can provide."
     Another dilemma for Rev. Jackson. To draw media attention to particular problems, prisoners, picket lines, he needed to draw attention to himself. It wasn't supposed to be about him. Yet it was.
     Rev. Jackson was master of firing torpedoes that circled back and impacted into his own vessel. He mounted the first viable presidential campaign by a Black candidate in 1984, then hired Louis Farrakhan to do his campaign security and called New York "Hymietown" in the presence of a newspaper reporter, who Farrakhan later threatened to kill for spilling the beans.
     The "man of contrasts" summation might be a cliche. But with Rev. Jackson, it was true. He could whipsaw you with it. In 2008, when Barack Obama was elected president, Jackson made the rounds of editorial offices, humbly pointing out that it was pioneers such as, ahem, himself, who made Obama's triumph possible.

     Then Jackson immediately said, into an open Fox News microphone, that he'd like to castrate Obama. Which puffed away the cloud of revered pioneer respect he was trying to fog around himself

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