Typical megalomanic with an inflated sense of self worth.
CHICAGO — The lion in winter walks into the room. His sideburns and mustache have gone gray. There is a little excess baggage beneath his chin. But Jesse Jackson’s stride is still firm and his handshake firmer.
His voice is quieter now, but the rhythms are the same, the hint of his South Carolina birthplace still an undertone in his speech.
He is 72. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at 39; Robert Kennedy at 42; John F. Kennedy at 46.
I ask Jackson if he expected to live this long.
“I did not,” he says. “We had the most death threats of any [presidential] candidate ever.”
When he ran for president in 1988, New York City resembled a war zone. Memories that are distant now were fresh then: the Howard Beach incident, the Bernhard Goetz incident, the Tawana Brawley incident.
Ed Koch, the voluble mayor of the city, was relentless in his attacks on Jackson. One day during the New York primary campaign, I see Jackson wearing an ill-fitting raincoat lined with body armor. I ask him why he is wearing it.
“Because this is the only place in the country where a major political leader, the mayor, has created a climate of violence,” Jackson says.