The full exposure of Rev. Jesse Jackson's civil-rights crusade for what it is – an extortion racket – has to be one of the most welcome developments of this or any other year. Yet it is paying off in another way: the sudden rise in stature of the National Enquirer. Yes, that sultan of supermarket sludge is strutting mighty tall these days. What kind of newspaper this side of Fleet Street would have the cojones to reveal that lawyer Hugh Rodham, brother of former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, bagged $400,000 in legal fees to provide the groundwork for her husband's issuance of last-day presidential pardons? The same kind of paper, in two separate cover stories this year, that would reveal Jesse Jackson had sired a love child with an academic groupie, and then paid her to relocate and keep quiet, that's what kind.
The recent travails of Rev. Jackson present an opportunity to count the blessings of gossip. I don't mean just the printed word either. For gossip in any medium just may be the great unsung engine of liberty. But a good deal of context is first necessary.
The National Enquirer a couple months ago broke the news that Jackson had arranged a payment of $35,000 to cover relocation and living expenses of mistress/acolyte Karin Stanford. Apparently, Ms. Stanford had approached Jackson in relation to researching her doctoral dissertation topic, Jackson's influence on U.S. foreign policy. That Jackson has had an influence is itself a scandal, but let us focus on the juicy stuff, please. Jesse long has had a reputation as being available to women other than his wife. More than two decades ago it was a pretty open secret that he and singer-songwriter Roberta ("Killing Me Softly") Flack had been regularly getting it on.
Old habits were hard to break. Jackson and Ms. Stanford commenced an affair within a few months, and eventually Jesse in 1997 asked her to head his Washington office. By the following March, Stanford informed Jesse she was pregnant with his child. Livid, Jesse ordered her to get an abortion — which she did, as she had to undergo chemotherapy treatments for breast cancer anyway. Five months later Karin was pregnant again with his love child, and this time she chose to give birth (she ascertained Rev. Jackson's paternity by secretly saving a sample of his sperm for a DNA test – very resourceful!). Rumors of the affair reached Jesse's wife, Jackie, who, less than happy, pointed a gun at him. Sufficiently warned, Jesse paid Ms. Stanford in the fall of 1999 to relocate to California. The full payoff figure turned out to be $450,000; the $35,000 initially reported was the portion that came from the coffers of a Jackson-friendly labor union, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees.
Jackson hasn't challenged the veracity of any of this. But he's working on the assumption that the less the affair comes up in conversation, the more likely people will block it out of mind. That career move has worked, at least in the upper reaches of the chattering classes. Jackson received a hero's welcome on a recent visit to Wall Street, and CNN informed him he could have his talk show back any time he wants. His overt admirers — and they are a hardy bunch – have written off the revelations as mere gossip. Very well, consider the virtues of gossip.
At its simplest level gossip is any conversation of a personal nature about someone else not present. Typically, this has negative connotations. People who gossip, humorless moralists constantly admonish us, are shallow, and lack in decency and fortitude in the act of "talking behind someone else's back." The Talmud warns against idle gossip (as opposed to what — working gossip?), as sound a reason as any to engage in it, as far as I'm concerned. More broadly, gossip is any communication of information between two or more people, written or verbal, about things that could affect another person's reputation. Gossip may be false, whether deliberately or not, in which case the subject of the gossip has every right to confront the source and offer a clarification, demand an apology or file a lawsuit. But as an antidote to gossip's excesses that we engage in self-censorship would give far more carte blanche to thugs and charlatans. That the Enquirer pays tipsters does not undermine the truth of its articles; au contraire, more likely it induces those who know private truths to reveal them.
Celebrity gossip, of course, is what most readers crave. Subjecting entertainment figures to gossip is a mixed blessing. It can be delicious fun, but in its own voyeuristic way it also can irritate the hell out of people who have the right to expect a little privacy. Somehow I gather if you were going through the kind of divorce that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman are facing, you wouldn't want the great multitudes poring over your bedtime secrets either.
The real virtues of gossip, at least in its printed form, can be best appreciated in the political realm, where tyrants like Jesse Jackson take nearly for granted their aura of infallibility. For unlike President Clinton's sexual escapades, the revelation of Jackson's provides entrée into a long pattern of irregularities in raising and spending money, and at the expense of the most productive members of our society. Removing Jackson from his informal "office" would do a lot more good for this country than removing Clinton ever would have.
Reverend Jackson's shady financial doings were known long before the Enquirer got into the act. In 1971 Jackson's rival for leadership at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, ordered an investigation into the finances of a "Black Expo" convention Jackson had organized. Though the inquiry revealed serious financial mismanagement, resulting in Jackson's suspension for a few months, later that year Jackson split from the SCLC to form Operation PUSH. Taking his adoring followers, he went about building an empire. In the late 70s and early 80s Jackson received about $4.9 million in federal money and $4.2 million in private donations for PUSH/Excel, a project he'd started to raise self-esteem among inner-city kids. Yet a series of consultant's evaluations for the federal government released in the early 80s (led, by the way, by a not-yet-famous Charles Murray) revealed that the program, to the extent the data could yield any conclusions at all, had an insignificant effect on academic performance. What's more, federal auditors separately concluded that of the nearly $5 million Jackson received in federal funds, $866,713 had been misspent and another $1,302,951 had been "questionably" spent. Yet the government made no accusations of legal wrongdoing, and sought instead to work out a repayment schedule with Jackson and other PUSH/Excel officials.
By 1982 federal involvement in PUSH/Excel was pretty much over, especially with Reagan now in the White House. Jackson responded by focusing more attention than ever on cultivating relationships with business. Alternately bullying and snuggling up to publicity-conscious corporate officials, Jackson has managed to receive large sums of money from various companies.
This year the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Los Angeles Times each published exposes on Jackson's method of bankrolling his activities. It would appear he has perfected a three-step plan: 1) target an allegedly racist company for a potential boycott or negative publicity; 2) extract a cash "donation" from the company to one or more of his organizations to keep the peace; and 3) publicly congratulate the company for its positive commitment to diversity. Through the proceeds from such companies as Ameritech, AT&T, Boeing, Pepsi Bottling Group and Viacom, Jackson has been able to fund a perpetual affirmative-action campaign. The few executives who have refused to play along, like Cypress Semiconductor's T.J. Rodgers (a Randian, at that), have found themselves the targets of Jackson's wrath. Jackson and his people operate a lot like a mobster protection racket, except they try to break careers instead of legs.
Once Jesse receives his money, he doesn't like anyone poking around as to how he spends it. In his 1988 book, Jesse Jackson & the Politics of Charisma, Ernest R. House summarized Jackson's idea of accountability in action:
"…PUSH encountered legal difficulties several times, usually because of careless bookkeeping. Finances were kept entirely secret; they simply were not anybody else's business, in the view of PUSH leaders. Neither were criticism and dissent welcomed inside this autocratic structure. Critics were soundly denounced, and Jackson used his influence to curtail reporters who were critical of his work…"
In this light Jackson's hush money to Karin Stanford years later was an accident waiting to happen. But all the while, despite Jackson's widely known credibility problem, how has he managed to exact more corporate tribute than ever? How does he continue to jet around the country in high style, spending a reported $614,000 on personal travel in 2000 alone?
The source of Jackson's power, as House explains, is his charisma. Charismatic authority derives far less from holding formal office than from displaying personal traits that project a nearly superhuman quality. The charismatic leader succeeds in getting followers to see in him things they want to see rather than things they actually do see. At his worst, such a leader, through carefully stage-managed gestures, can coax unconditional loyalty and compliance. Even if exposed as inhuman (to say nothing of "only human"), the leader is adroit in creating the illusion that his accusers, vengeful lesser beings all, are "persecuting" him.
Jesse Jackson, unlike his accusers, has charisma to spare. No policy analyst or journalist, however damning the revelations, can match Jackson's facility with rhyme, Biblical metaphor, and moral urgency. None of his critics have his gift for alternately hectoring and inspiring. Remember how many white delegates at the 1984 Democratic national convention in San Francisco were literally reduced to tears following Jackson's speech? His potential opponents know all too well his power to mobilize a crowd in his favor. That's why most CEOs and other natural enemies may privately seethe, but eventually they cave into Jackson's demands. They are scared, dudes. Minus an event or accusation so powerful as to trigger a backlash, or at least some skepticism, among followers, charismatic leaders of this sort are nearly unstoppable.
But, ah, something does exist to throw the charisma of the corrupt for a loop. Call it counter-charisma, an unflappably hot style of crusading that revels in toppling the high and mighty from their perches with bombshell revelations. Let's call that something gossip. That's right — raw, lurid, sexy, steamy, sensational, catty, chatty gossip, the kind that glories in shocking as many people as possible. Without discounting the necessity of mainstream investigative journalism, the Enquirer has dimmed Jackson's aura of infallibility to an extent that the other newspapers, by their nature, could not.
Admit it, isn't it a comfort to know that hundreds of millions of Americans, including many who wouldn't dream of paying $1.89 for a newsstand copy of the Enquirer, are now aware of just how sleazy Rev. Jackson and his cronies have been all along? Don't you get a nice glow knowing that this sanctimonious extortionist is less popular than ever, at least among those smart enough to be wary of him in the first place? His social reputation damaged (though regrettably not beyond repair), Jackson will find mobilizing a boycott or lawsuit against innocent prey less inviting. CEOs with weak knees and deep pockets, aware of this, may be less likely to capitulate.
Lest we get carried away with the positive functions of gossip, let us admit it is a mixed blessing. It can and does appeal to those of low intellect and extreme malice. And an endless diet of articles with titles on the order of "Jodie Foster in Sizzling Lesbian Love Triangle," and "Eddie Murphy Flees Alien Abductors" won't bring anyone to the palace of wisdom. But to write off gossip, whether believable or not, as nothing but coarse titillation misses a key point: Gossip, or more accurately the fear of its damage to our reputations, forces us to walk a straight and narrow path, and just as important, weakens the ability of the worst to get on top. Thanks to our fully exercised freedom to gossip, prominent anti-market extortionists like Jesse Jackson now will have to walk more cautiously.
Personally, I can't wait to see what the tabloids are going to dish up on Rev. Al Sharpton.
Suggested reading: Dave Shiflett, "The Enquirer Way," The American Spectator, April 2001, p. 98; Noah Oppenheim, "Follow the Money," The Weekly Standard, April 2, 2001, pp. 22-25; Patricia Shipp, Richard Gooding, Mike Hanrahan, "Jesse's Mistress Tells All," National Enquirer, April 10, 2001, pp. 36-37, 41; Ernest R. House, Jesse Jackson & the Politics of Charisma: The Rise and Fall of the PUSH/Excel Program, Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1988.
April 14, 2001
Carl F. Horowitz formerly served as a policy analyst with the Heritage Foundation and as a Washington correspondent for Investor's Business Daily. He is currently a Washington, D.C.-area consultant.
