CAMPAIGN ’88 : ‘Peacemaker’ Role for Jackson Adviser

Democrats worried that their Atlanta convention in July could turn fractious and get their standard-bearer off on the wrong foot in the general election campaign can take encouragement from the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s choice to lead his forces at the party conclave.

Jackson’s convention manager will be Washington attorney Ron Brown, an unofficial but close adviser to Jackson during his drive for the nomination. Of particular importance to party leaders, Brown is someone with credentials as an insider rather than a reputation as a trouble maker, and he also has ties to their presumptive nominee, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis.

Indeed, Brown served as deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1981 to 1984. And before he agreed to sign with Jackson as his convention generalissimo, friends say, Brown first insisted on assurances that Jackson did not intend to be a divisive factor at the moment when the national television audience will be getting its first sustained look at Dukakis.

Asked about prospects for improving the rapport between Jackson and Dukakis, Brown said: “I don’t think it’s bad now. It’s good enough for the contacts they need to make.”

Brown himself is on good terms with Dukakis as well as Jackson, having known the governor since the days when both were at the Institute for Politics at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Dukakis then was recovering from defeat after his first bid for reelection as governor and Brown was recovering from his own losing experience--serving as an aide to Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s abortive 1980 drive for the presidency.

Brown acknowledged that Jackson and Dukakis have not had the sort of easy relationship that Jackson had with Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore Jr. with whom Jackson frequently talked while Gore was himself running for president.

“I think Gore is a more effusive kind of guy than the governor,” Brown said.

For the near future Brown expects most contacts between the two campaigns to be at a staff level, with Brown himself as a principal go-between.