This week's cover story on the drive to enhance and focus black political power in the 1984 campaign is the product of reports from TIME correspondents across the country. The most demanding and rewarding assignment fell to Correspondent Jack White: covering the point man and catalyst of much of this political activity, the Rev. Jesse Jackson. It was, White says, "exhilarating, but also exhausting, getting close to Jesse Jackson. He is a man perpetually in motion." White began last month in Atlanta at the annual convention of Operation PUSH (People United to Serve Humanity), founded and led by Jackson, who also appeared on TIME'S cover in 1970. Jackson set a fleet pace as he spoke at nearly every session and constantly talked with reporters in crowded lobbies and hallways and in his 70th-floor suite. A few days later White joined Jackson en route to Los Angeles, and the real marathon began.

"Over the next seven days," says White, "Jackson took me along as he met with black clergymen backing his efforts, was interviewed for network news shows, and accepted the congratulations of well-wishers as he walked along the Los Angeles streets." White, who previously profiled the black middle class for a 1974 cover story and reported much of the 1976 special issue on the South, found Jackson eager to be accessible. "He carried me along, outlining his ideas all the way, to places where an interview subject normally wants his privacy," says White. These included a shopping trip, a visit to the podiatrist and a call on his ailing son Jonathan, 17, in a Chicago hospital. At the preacher's home in a pleasant black section of Chicago, White watched a brisk basketball game between Jackson and his aides. "His best shot is a kind of rising set shot, fired from not quite off his toes," reports White.

Jackson even rousted White out of bed at 5 a.m. one day to hear some points he was making on an early-morning television interview. During their final talk, on a flight to Washington last week, White took notes as Jackson "mused in obvious pain about what he considers unfair criticism from those who read his zeal to increase black political influence as a desire for personal gain. It was a rare introspective moment. After more than 20 hours of exclusive conversations, I felt that I had finally seen the core of the man." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.