Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson.

"Great things happen in small places. Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Jesse Jackson was born in Greenville."

--Jesse Jackson, 1988 interview

Had there been no Jesse Jackson, it would have been necessary to invent him. As it happened, he invented himself. Or, in keeping with time-honored American traditions,, he reinvented himself.

No phase of that reinvention was more controversial than the "bloody shirt" incident. Just after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Jackson, then a 27-year-old aide to King, appeared on national television and spoke to the Chicago City Council wearing a shirt stained with King's blood, while other still-shaken Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) officials prepared for the funeral. He did not exactly say that King died in his arms, but neither did he do anything to discourage the notion.

Journalist Marshall Frady's reconstruction of the episode in his new biography, Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson, is riveting. The slain leader's blood was puddled so heavily on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel that the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, King's closest aide, was able to scoop it up with a piece of cardboard from a laundered shirt and pour it into a jar. ("This is Martin's precious blood," Abernathy cried. "His blood was shed for us.") The earnest and ambitious Jackson already had worked his way quickly into the upper ranks of the SCLC, propelled in part by his restless desire to take charge--sometimes without the advance approval of his superiors.

As another King aide (and future Atlanta mayor), Andrew Young, described it to Frady:

"I can see Jesse going over and leaning down

and placing both his palms down flat in that pool of

blood, and then standing up and, like this"--and

Young slowly passes both his hands down his

chest--"wiping it down the front of his shirt ..."

What are we to make of this scene? Was it bizarre opportunism? Many thought so. Among them were Coretta Scott King and others who would not speak to Jackson for years to come.

Or was it a sincere attempt by Jackson, in this moment of stunning, profound grief, to assume the mantle he felt obliged, even destined, to take? Frady, like Young, casts this astonishing moment in a remarkably favorable light, as he casts Jackson's other similarly questionable actions, but here his defense of Jackson is persuasive. Frady quotes some whose anger with Jackson over the bloody shirt episode remains alive years later. But he also quotes other soldiers in the cause who are more willing to excuse Jackson's act and his unwillingness to talk about it, even to the editors and ghostwriters who have tried over the years to help him write the autobiography he has yet to complete. He may not remember all that went on that day himself, they say. Young, a Baptist minister, offers a theological explanation: "We Baptists, you know, we believe there's power in the blood--power that's transferable."

The young Jackson already had established a reputation for what Frady calls "a magnificence of spirit and an appalling crassness." Yet it was his penchant for impatiently seizing moments to his best advantage--while other, more cautious souls hesitated--that enabled him to breathe a new, hip, in-yo'-face style into the black liberation movement at the time King was trying, with limited success, to expand the fight for civil rights into the murkier battlefront of economic justice. By his own admission, Jackson was a less-than-perfect leader. But no one could match the young man's charismatic presence, his gift for rhyming epigrammatical oratory, and his ability to win concessions from powerful business and political interests. Quickly and decisively, Jesse Louis Jackson moved into that vacuum of need that creates, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu once described himself, a "leader by default." Alas, it took a leader of singular audaciousness to hold together a movement in a time that no longer offered the clear moral choices presented by the era of police dogs, firehoses, belligerent Southern sheriffs, and "white" and "colored" water fountains. "Absent the great moral dramaturgy of King's day," Frady writes, "Jackson was left to struggle in the vague spiritual flats of a more prosaic and middling season to find his apotheosis, his mountaintop."

In mapping out that vague moral landscape, Frady's pursuit of the bloody shirt question exemplifies his book's greatest strength and its one annoying weakness. He provides the most thorough and trenchant study of Jackson to date, effectively picking up where USA Today columnist Barbara Reynolds's seminal and definitive 1975 biography, Jesse Jackson: The Man, the Movement and the Myth, leaves off. Yet, he sometimes tries a little too hard to explain away the very weaknesses for which Jackson should be held most accountable, for they. most often have compromised his effectiveness. In the conservative backlash of the 1990s, his flaws have done more than that: They have left him (and to a disturbing degree his movement) adrift and, in Frady's words, "increasingly given to stray, darkening ruminations."

Frady, a seasoned journalist who met Jackson as a Newsweek reporter in the late 1960s, writes that the Jackson he experienced during two years of traveling with him was far more talkative than the man of three decades ago. Frady suspects Jackson's legendary loquaciousness (columnist Mike Royko once observed that Jackson "looks on a defenseless ear the way William `Refrigerator' Perry eyes a roast chicken" may have been further invigorated by the happenstance of Frady's having grown up only 26 miles away from Jackson's hometown, Greenville, S.C., at about the same time. Frady was the child of a Southern Baptist minister and attended Furman University, the white school just across the street from the black neighborhood where Jackson was raised. Jackson's grandmother had taken in laundry from Furman fraternity boys. "But here we are," Frady says Jackson implied to listeners on a number of occasions. "He's running around following me after I've run for president two times, reporting on what I'm doing now..."

Frady went on to distinguish himself at a variety of publications, most recently The New Yorker, and television programs. His two previous biographies, Wallace, about George Wallace, and Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness, serve as appropriate prologues for the saga of Jackson, another powerfully charismatic and complicated Southerner whose story Frady tells with an appropriately Faulkneresque sensibility.

Jackson was born out of wedlock to a teen mother. His married father lived next door with his legitimate family, yet refused to acknowledge the fatherhood everyone in the neighborhood knew about. Frady reads from this what Reynolds did, not only that Jackson is driven by the need to prove he truly is "somebody," as he chants, but also that he cannot fight the feeling that he is a perpetual outsider, someone who must speak continually ("a voice for the voiceless," says Jackson) for other outsiders.

Jackson was an aspiring football player until he came under two important influences at all-black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro. One was the students who participated in the historic sit-ins that desegregated the lunch counter at the local Woolworth's. The other was his girlfriend, Jackie, another daughter of poverty whose Castro-loving politics were more radical than Jackson's. Once he felt called to join the civil rights movement and to preach, he approached it with the zeal of a running back. He has not stopped running since.

After King's death, the SCLC under Abernathy reassigned Jackson to head Operation Breadbasket in Chicago, a Northern beachhead for the organization. But by the early 1970s, Jackson's "buy black" campaigns, his crusades for economic justice, his celebrity-studded Black Expo, and his sheer boldness made Breadbasket more famous and attractive to a new generation of black youths than the mother organization was. Disputes would drive Jackson to break away and form Operation PUSH in 1972.

His self-help project, PUSH for Excellence (PUSH Excel), founded four years before Ronald Reagan would campaign for president under the same "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" theme in 1980, attracted millions in federal dollars, thanks to former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey. On his deathbed, Humphrey saw a profile of PUSH Excel on "60 Minutes" and called Health, Education, and Welfare Secretary Joseph Califano, who quickly agreed that, yes, it would be a good idea to kick a few million federal dollars Jesse's way.

Federal money dried up a few years later, a turn Frady blames on Reagan administration auditors and conservative Charles Murray, more recently the author of The Bell Curve. Murray was then a young sociologist who wrote a scathing report on PUSH Excel for the Department of Education, which resulted in the cutoff of funds. But as I wrote in the The Washington Monthly in 1980 (in an article Frady dutifully lists in his bibliography), PUSH Excel collapsed mainly because no one knew whether it was working. It fell prey to Jackson's notorious scattershot administration and lack of follow-through. Devoid of strong guidance at the top, local programs varied widely in content and effectiveness. Jackson's visits electrified students, but the electricity usually faded as soon as he left. "I'm a tree shaker, not a jelly maker," Jackson would rationalize. He would come to regret that line when it followed him through his two presidential campaigns.

Yet that line is the most piquantly perceptive of any Jackson has delivered about himself. Like Tom Paine, Che Guevara, and James Carville, Jackson is far more interested in agitating and organizing than in administering the day-to-day operations once the revolution is done. Unfortunately, his frenetic style left important projects like Breadbasket, Black Expo, PUSH Excel, and others to float on their own without adequate administration until they sank. Frady spends too few words on these failures and the reasons for them, compared with his lengthy descriptions of Jackson's taking Fidel Castro to church and other moments of symbols-over-substance.

In his rare moments of genuine humility, Jackson appears willing to acknowledge, if begrudgingly, that his own shortcomings have damaged his ability to achieve his desired goals. One such moment came under the spotlight of his magnificent speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco: "I am not a perfect servant. I am a public servant doing my best against the odds. As I develop and serve, be patient. God is not finished with me yet."

Yet after reaching the mountaintop of seven million votes in the 1988 primaries, Jackson has been in descent. Compared with his glory days in the '60s in the front ranks of the civil rights movement, in the 70s growing his own Operation PUSH into an economic, self-help, and international force, and in the 80s as the first viable black presidential candidate, Jackson in the '90s has faded back from the cutting edge. His stunning refusal to run for mayor of the District of Columbia, a job that was his for the asking after he moved to Washington in 1989, left many of his own supporters disenchanted and echoing privately what the Los Angeles Times reported District Mayor Marion Barry said: "Jesse don't know how to run anything but his mouth."

With the 1994 conservative Republican takeover in Congress, Jackson's luster faded further. He hosted a CNN talk show that hardly anyone watched. He dropped hints here and there that he might mount a third campaign/crusade for president, but hardly anyone outside the Clinton White House cared. At the Million Man March, 11 years after unintentionally introducing Louis Farrakhan (who provided security for Jackson's 1984 presidential campaign) to the national spotlight, Jackson found himself as just another warm-up speaker to the Nation of Islam minister's main event.

Frady completed his reporting about the time Jackson's 31-year-old son, Jesse Jr., won the South Side Chicago congressional seat Mel Reynolds had held until his conviction for having sex with an underage girl. Days after Junior's election, Jesse Senior announced he was moving his base of operations back to PUSH headquarters in Chicago. Although announced in a spirit of triumph, it was also an unspoken admission of defeat. His move to Washington, a city with more black leaders per capita--from the Congressional Black Caucus to the District Building--than any other in the country, had not turned out as planned. Perhaps back in Chicago, a turf largely claimed in his absence by Farrakhan but his most effective base of operations in the past, he can re-establish his moral leadership on a grand national scale once again.

"People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard," F. Scott Fitzgerald's Amory Blaine says in This Side of Paradise. "But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher--a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche--than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over." Many have gotten sick of hearing Jackson's name over and over, yet the cross-currents of criticism have yet to wash him away, for one simple reason: His eat-your-broccoli message may not always be wanted, but it is seldom unneeded.

Consistently, Jackson has kept King's message and moral leadership alive. He is the tree shaker in the march with schoolchildren in Chicago, family farmers in Iowa, meat packers in Wisconsin, farm workers in Texas, or hospital workers in Manhattan. He is the peacemaker with street gangs in Chicago, looters in Los Angeles, or disgruntled black delegates at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. His audacity rankles. He shoots from the lip. He sometimes barges into situations before he has been adequately briefed. But, as Jackson might say, he holds on to "moral authority" by virtue of his loyal constituency--"the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised." Voices for the voiceless are created by the times in which they live. After King, came Jackson's time. the only question now is, has Jackson's time come and gone?

Frady has written a hagiography worthy of Jackson's important place in history. But I suspect the "country preacher's" final chapters have yet to be written. As Chinese leader Liu Shao-ch'i said in the 1940s, there is no such thing as a perfect leader. Despite his imperfections, Jackson fills a need, not only for African Americans but, increasingly in the '90s, for America's political left, the stalwarts Jackson in 1988 dubbed the Democratic Party's "Jackson action faction."

Love him or hate him, he justifiably boasts an admirable moral consistency in his public life. Even when he has offended other embattled minorities, such as the Jews, he has endeavored to heal the wounds, which is more than can be said for some other leaders in these times. "All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: It was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time," John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote. As long as there are moments of great social anxiety--urban unrest, black church bombings, black families run out of white neighborhoods--there will be moments for Jackson, leader by default, to seize. One suspects that, as he told the 1984 Democratic National Convention, the Lord is not finished with him yet.