Lessons from the Fringe

...Ernest B. Furgurson...

...In direct response to Jackson, Jesse Helms toured the white churches of North Carolina with Jerry Falwell and a honey-voiced preacher named Lamarr Mooneyham, whose Moral Majority workers managed to register more Helms conservatives than Hunt registered Democrats...

...It might well have gained him nothing but a tepid reception among blacks...

...In conventional terms that might be applied equally to Jackson, Furgurson attacks Helms as a radical, an emotionalist, a threat to stability, a stranger to institutional respect...

...Numerous Jackson advisers adopted a bilious attitude of "fuck the Jews," and Jackson himself deeply resented the assumption that he would embrace apology more warmly than, say, Ronald Reagan or Ariel Sharon...

...Similarly, in five states where Jackson's freedom train inspired a massive upsurge of black registration, adding some 400,000 new black voters, white registration jumped 1.2 million...

...Many old Jewish leftists have turned into neo-conservatives...

...The few attempts at personal interpretation, such as the assertion that journalism school would have corrected Helms's right-wing screed, are hamhanded and specious...

...Texas Monthly Press, $16.95...

...Long before Jesse Helms, leaders short on vision and substance learned to make good use of devils...

...Zion, Ebenezer, Mt...

...Jackson allowed race to swallow up his effort to revive an American left as an alternative to the sagging center...

...Bedding down with the Lumbee Jackson came by his outsider credentials more naturally...

...Readers put off, as I was, by the prominently advertised "Foreword by Dan Rather," will find a pleasant surprise of artful prose and vivid characters...

...Cornered, he settled for a campaign to harvest the available acclaim...

...These books* suggest that his margin of victory lay in mobilized white antipathy to Jesse Jackson...

...Like Malcolm X., Jackson teaches as well as amuses when he explains, for instance, why he thinks none of the American television networks maintains a bureau anywhere in black or Arab Africa...

...It is no accident that the vast majority of American black churches take their names from the Old Testament—Mt...

...With 200,000 more blacks registered, Jesse Helms could be put out of work," Jackson declared...

...Jackson's feud with American Jewish leaders appears as a tragedy that resonates far beyond the ethnic rivalries of a single presidential campaign...

...By way of consolation, these long odds offer Jackson a freedom from constraint that he often has used imaginatively...

...He wiggles and winks, flies off to-Cuba and Syria on impossible missions of shocking common sense, beds down his Secret Service squad with Lumbee Indians near Pembroke's Chicken Road, and lures Fidel Castro into church for the first time in three decades...

...Time in office made it harder for Helms and Reagan to run as "aginners ." More importantly, they were betraying conservatism's most appealing premise of self-discipline, its steely respect for facts and limits...

...LESSONS FROM THE FRINGE by Taylor Branch What moderates can learn from Jesses Jackson and Helms B oth these men spend a lot of time in churches castigating devils, including each other...

...Not only were the yarns of the Old Testament more accessible to those denied literacy, as was the quest of Moses riveting to a people in slavery, but the political, theocratic role of Moses was adopted by black preachers in a society that permitted no black institution of authority other than the church...

...As this is hardly news, the books might appeal only to those specially interested in Helms or Jackson...

...Furgurson reported that Helms's technocratic, direct-mail money machine was spending 98.6 percent of revenues on itself...

...The Jewish utopian tradition has virtually vanished in American thought, such that candidate Jesse Jackson found himself leading not only blacks but an atrophied political left, which he optimistically called the Rainbow Coalition...

...Both blacks and Jews remain minorities acutely sensitive to the historical cycles of persecution...

...These two books are narrow political biographies, variations on Theodore White's genre of post-campaign analysis...

...Their sketch of the ferociously wounded candidate's wife, Jacqueline Jackson, is sadly convincing...

...He buried dollops of fresh Rainbow Coalition in a thousand choruses of "Our time has come" Perhaps this was inevitable, as the twin burdens of race and ideology worked against each other...

...Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms...

...Thunder in America...

...This is a bigot's dream—deepseated hatred between minorities...

...Moriah, and so on...

...He toured black churches, then flew out of the state and left the registration work largely to Hunt...

...However, if one holds that the political center is sinking—that the moral and economic health of the country is being mortgaged steadily beyond repair—then the books offer valuable lessons about failures on the left and right...

...Bob Faw and Nancy Skelton...

...To devise and hold steadfastly to a political program based on universal standards touching the legitimate aspirations of all peoples would have required not only genius in Jackson, but also superhuman patience...

...Ties between blacks and Jews rest on too much history and common sense to be so easily discarded...

...Perhaps because their story is so complex, they make no pretext of imposing a politically correct viewpoint, and the happy result is a book that rings true...

...The Improbable Campaign of Jesse Jackson...

...They identify with the powerful rather than the oppressed, even though it is the powerful who have hurled down the historical repressions of Jews...

...Jackson, while drawing as much as 85 percent of the black vote, never received more than 9 percent of the white vote in a presidential primary...

...The nub of contention— Jackson's private reference to New York as "Hymietown" and his subsequent reluctance to apologize—emerges as only a pale reflection of the hositilities...

...In the spring of 1984, presidential candidate Jesse Jackson flew to Raleigh to support Gov...

...Only 1.4 percent went to favored candidates...

...He pushes his position to an obstreperous extreme and then complains of the result...

...The hostilities described between "Hymie' and "schwartze" seem both searing and petulant, real and contrived...

...For 35 years, Helms's most consistently effective tactic in this charade has been to cry out over the travail of the white race, which he sees oppressed by liberals, secular humanists, and minority leaders such as Jesse Jackson...

...Burying the rainbow The failure on the left is more complicates, and Faw and Skelton have responded with a more sensitive, discerning book...

...Helms won narrowly, running well behind the Reagan landslide...

...On the other hand, the book presents some evidence that black and Jewish leaders are inciting rather than accommodating mass hatred, in the manner of classical demagogues, and are much more hostile toward each other than are their respective followers, who tend to look on in puzzled sadness...

...The music of the spirituals is largely Old Testament music, and such things still run deep...

...No one else can afford the psychic boost...

...Furgurson in particular stretches political argument into biography, giving more ammunition than enlightenment...

...What has changed in the last twenty years—since Israel's Six Day War and the rise of black power—is that the leaders have created an illusionary world of surly self-sufficiency, competing among themselves in resentment against the need for alliances...

...Both books take the pundit's usual view that because most of the votes are in the center, these two fringe politicians can only hope to move the center—that neither can be the center, hold power...

...Helms holds real power—he has built a national money machine, he practically writes the Republican platforms, he owns a score of ambassadors and an oversized toehold in the Senate—and yet clings to his self-image as a victim...

...He represents a poor constituency in a rich nation, the left on a spectrum where the left is largely extinct...

...Jim Hunt, then challenging incumbent Jesse Helms in the most expensive campaign in Senate history...

...He stands on his hind legs...

...Furgurson, writing before the November elections and the recent Iran scandals, detected signs of a fatal weakness in the conservative movement...

...Practically speaking, the factors that transformed that cultural tie into a political alliance are still valid today...

...He protests against persecution by the "elite media," appeasers of communism, and fainthearted conservative pragmatists...

...Ernest Furgurson is at his best in showing what a lifelong achievement it has been for Helms who began his career as the spokesman for North Carolina's banking industry and always since has made alliance with privilege to pass himself off as an underdog...

...Driven by his argument, he sees no leavening merit anywhere in Helms's record, not even in his quixotic effort to save the hapless seaman Medvid from the Russians and the Reagan bureaucracy...

...He fillibusters...

...Norton, $18.95...

...Some Jewish leaders, for their part, are described as admitting that the "Hymie" remark was a pretext for deeper animosity, that they would have hated Jackson no matter how heartfelt his apology...

...Whereas the Reagan administration projects pained tolerance for South Africa and Pinochet, Helms loves them...

...As such, they proceed relentlessly from speech to meeting to poll to speech...

...As the bastard son of a poor teenage mother, he battled against pariah status even within the black leadership class, let alone amongst the majority whites...

...His course mirrors the insularism of black politicians who have little to offer their constituencies beyond vicarious participation in their own success as leaders, and of Jewish leaders who expect short, victorious wars...

...Taylor Branch, contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, is at work on a book on the life and times of Martin Luther King...

...This produced the Jewish utopianism that lay at the intellectual foundations of the political left all over the world, and it led to the civil rights movement...

...The obvious lesson is that in primitive contests of racial solidarity, the numbers tell heavily against American blacks...

...Their portraits of Jackson's advisers, vacillating between euphoria and disillusionment, and of politicians maneuvering between black pride and survival, build toward glimpses of revelation...

...In the last two centuries they placed their hopes in alliances with people of good will and in appeals to universal standards of justice...

...The Old Testament helps explain why the first black presidential candidate was a preacher instead of a banker...

...This is why those Democratic politicians who look eagerly toward a Jackson re-run in 1988 tend to be from districts that are overwhelmingly black...

...Unlike Helms, whose chutzpah is dull and colorless, Jackson entertains even his enemies...

...Although he often speaks in Muhammed Ali doggerel, which is tiresome and condescending, he also possesses a rakish wit and the gift of cross-cultural perception...

...The two Jesses are outsiders of opposite stripes...

...During Jackson's long speech at the San Francisco convention, several of his supporters are described as cursing him in despair over the elements of conciliatory statesmanship in that speech—for not telling the whites and the Democrats to shove it—until one saw whites crying in the convention hall and realized, " `My God, I'm part of something big.' " Through treacherously sensational material, the authors maintain not only their balance but also their humor...

...Against it, all the "market-tested devil figures" in the world could not save the conservative movement from self-indulgent corruption compounded by the usual arrogance...

...This was a standard of larceny unmatched by all but the most fraudulent of charities...