Jackson Is a Friend of Life's Victims
New York Times, 18 April 1988, 23 (88.2)
In the spring of 1977 when Ed Koch was beginning his first successful campaign for Mayor, I gave him a small fund-raising party. Ed always took nice cognizance of that. He showed up at my wedding; he invited my wife and me to dinner a couple of times at Gracie Mansion, and he was helpful to PEN when we had the 48th International PEN Congress in New York. Koch and I were never that close politically, but I liked him. I still do. It is just that now I cannot forgive him.
Koch’s statement that any Jew who would vote for Jesse Jackson is “crazy” may have succeeded in blasting the last rickety catwalk of communication between Jews and blacks in this city. That is unforgiveable. I write these words as one of those crazies who will support Jesse Jackson for President.
It is not only that Jackson is the sole candidate who can wage both an effective battle against drugs and give black people the conviction that this country can belong to them as well, but, paradoxically, I believe he will yet be good for the Jews in the best and highest sense, even if the Jews, with some justice, will never be able to trust him completely.
Let me hope to explain this last remark. Since World War II, I have lived, like every other Jew, with the fundamental ill of the Holocaust. Hitler succeeded in wiping out more than one-third of the Jewish population in the world, and upon the rest of us he left a fearful curse: The legacy of Nazism, now in its fifth decade, is still there to poison one’s finer moral substance.
What made us great as a people is that we, of all ethnic groups, were the most concerned with the world’s problems. If we had come out of centuries of ghetto life with profound psychic scars, there was, nonetheless, a noble spirit alive in enough of us to permit the feeling that we were the first children of the Enlightenment. We understood, as no other people, how the concerns of the world were our concerns. The welfare of all the people of the world came before our own welfare.
Hitler succeeded in smashing such generosity of spirit. After the Holocaust, a natural terror descended on world Jewry. If somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of all the Jews living in Europe — half of the Jews on earth at that time — could be destroyed in a few years, then we were the most endangered of the human species. Survival took on a new order of magnitude for us.
The imperative to survive at all costs — which is the external face of certified nightmare within — left us smaller, greedier, narrower, preternaturally touchy, and self-seeking. We entered the true and essentially hopeless world of the politics of self-interest. “Is this good for the Jews?” became, for all too many of us, all of our politics.
Now, we are relatively wealthy, powerful and accepted. Yet, we are still oppressed. Perhaps more than ever. It takes no great insight to recognize that oppression of the spirit is the meanest poverty of them all. We have descended from Shakespeare’s parlous defense of the Jew as being able to bleed to Ed Koch’s inaccurate assumption — I hope it is inaccurate — that we are, by now, by and large, conditioned reflexes — that is, machines, buttons for a politician to press. If-any-Jew-who-votes-for-Jackson-is-crazy proves to be a useful political button, then I say we Jews have become machines and can no longer look at serious matters by their true merits, or face up to fundamental problems.
The fundamental problem facing America today is not our sagging spasmodic economy (although that is bad enough), nor the abyss of our drug population, which contributes to our economic lassitude vis-a-vis the Japanese. No, the problem beneath other problems is that the gulf between blacks and whites has not begun to close. It is an incubus upon the energies of this nation.
It weighs upon us as much, I would suppose, as the gulf between the Communist Party and the Russian people stultifies the Soviet economy. We can see, looking across the divide, that the future of the Soviet Union depends on the ability of the Communist Party and the Russian people to be able to move toward one another across their divide. I wonder if in the Soviet Union they do not see us in similar fashion, blacks and whites, irretrievably apart.
I would propose to my fellow Jews in New York that they do not dwell on “Hymietown” and Farrakhan and Arafat to the exclusion of all else. Jackson has apologized for the first; he has withdrawn from the other two. I would propose that we do not even measure candidates by how hard and firm they are today on their pro-Israel meter. Israel’s history may yet rise to epic heights, fall into tragedy or end in some more conventional middle, but the avowed intentions of a politician running for high office have to count small against the multitudinous labyrinths and floodgates of the oncoming history of the Near East.
I offer a paradox: With the best or worst will in the world, no American politician can save Israel or destroy it. The wheels of history turn too powerfully. The fate of Israel is by now connected to the fate of the world. One does well not to choose an American President because he claims he will be good for Israel. The greatest reversals in history have come often enough from statesmen who began as hearty supporters of what they would eventually — by the logic of events — be obliged to betray. Israel is both larger than the will of politicians and more vulnerable than any program to secure it.
Besides, it is a dubious good for the Jews if Israel should become the largest issue in selecting a Democratic candidate for President. The real issue, I would repeat, is that we in America may not be able to solve any of our worst problems in organic fashion until a black man does become President. It may yet take an event of just such symbolic magnitude to give young black people the confidence that American society exists also for them.
I remember the importance of Jack Kennedy to my generation. A man who was not altogether unlike ourselves, young, ambitious, with a taste for adventure, was now President. What extraordinary possibilities lay ahead. He was not perfect, our Jack, but he brought light into the lives of my generation.
Jesse Jackson is not perfect. I have no idea if I would like him if I knew him. (Of course, the same may be said for Bush, Dukakis and Gore.) I do not know if I trust Jackson altogether. So what? The same may be said for Bush, Dukakis and Gore. What does count for me is that Jackson offers a cogent sense of sympathy for human suffering. He can appreciate the paucity of identity among the underprivileged. Of all our candidates, he speaks to our powerful passion for human promise and improvement.
Already, he has come the longest way of all the candidates. He has had to be a man of more-than-ordinary courage or he would never have dared to run. His victory could open a great counterattack against the metastases of the drug problem; a nation goes over to drugs when it ceases to believe in its collective purpose.
The seed of any vital American future must still break through the century-old hard-pack of hate, contempt, corruption, guilt, odium and horror, but the seed is there, the potential love of black and white for one another.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt grew in the Presidency, as did Truman, and Eisenhower in the last days of his Administration. John Kennedy certainly grew in the Presidency, and Nixon grew when it was time to go to China. Reagan surprised us with his accommodation of glasnost. Jesse Jackson, elected as President and growing in stature, could illumine our lives and give us dignity again as Americans.
I want to believe in that. I am tired of living in the miasma of our indefinable and ongoing national shame.