Hands-On Ministry

The Reverend Jesse Jackson died this week, prompting tributes from far and near:

Former president Barack Obama said Jackson "laid the foundation for my own campaign to the highest office of the land".

So his principal contribution was as Obama's warm-up act? One begins to understand why the Rev was so eager to "cut his nuts off". So poor Jesse had to make do with being (as I used to call him back in the Nineties and Oughts) President-for-Life of the Republic of Himself. The pansies of The Orange County Register refused to print that phrase, which is why I no longer appear in their pages, if indeed they still have any.

Still, he had a good run, and one must respect that. For my own part, my favourite phase of his long celebrity was a blessed forty-eight hours a quarter-century ago. Here's how I put it in The Spectator of February 10th 2001. You won't find this in the New York Times obit:

~I have been on a short vacation. Well, not that short as it turned out. Apparently, I was away so long I missed the entire duration of Jesse Jackson's withdrawal from public life. Citing his need to 'revive my spirit and reconnect with my family', the Reverend Jackson withdrew from public life on Thursday, 18 January. He returned to public life on Saturday, 20 January. I missed the whole thing. Two complete days without the Rev Jackson on TV! No fewer than forty-eight — count 'em! — hours without the Reverend standing in the street shouting lamebrain anti-Dubya jingles like 'Stay out the Bushes!'

On the subject of staying out the bushes, all I can say is: physician, heal thyself.

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Thanks for posting that link. This I had never heard of. I will repost it in case that there are other Freepers who aren't aware of this story:

Lies about Dr. King’s Assassination

Jesse Jackson Sr. clashed with Martin Luther King Jr. on a number of occasions during the Sixties, and he has often overstated the closeness of his relationship to King—even claiming to have been the last person King spoke to after he had been mortally wounded by an assassin’s bullet on April 4, 1968. Specifically, Jackson claimed that he was on the Memphis balcony with King immediately after the latter had been shot, and that he cradled the dying civil-rights leader in his arms as he took his final breaths. But in fact, at the moment King was shot, Jackson was actually in a nearby parking lot talking to a group of musicians. Kenneth Timmerman describes what happened next:

“When the shots rang out, he [Jackson] fled and hid behind the swimming pool area and reappeared 20-30 minutes later when the television cameras arrived on the scene. That’s when Jesse Jackson told other Southern Christian Leadership Conference staffers, ‘Don’t you talk to the press, whatever you do.’ … Nobody had given him that job. He took that job. Call it ‘entrepreneurial instinct’ if you wish, but on the spot he realized that he had an opportunity to spin the events to create his own persona and create a possibility for him to become a leader in the black movement. He had no prospects at that point.”

A famous photograph showing Jackson and King together on the balcony in Memphis — supposedly moments before King was shot — was also a fraud. As Timmerman explains: “Jesse Jackson was not up on the balcony. They even tried to show the picture of Jesse Jackson up on the balcony with Martin Luther King. That picture was taken the day before. It was a publicity shot.”

The next morning, Jackson flew to Chicago to make a guest appearance on the NBC Today Show. In the few hours that had passed between the King assassination and Jackson’s flight to the Windy City, Jackson had already hired a public-relations agent to accompany him as he was transported from interview to interview in a chauffeur-driven car. Before a national television audience on the Today Show, Jackson donned a shirt that he claimed was smeared with the dying Dr. King’s blood. “He died in my arms,” Jackson lied.

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