In 1988, as the Reverend Jesse Jackson was making his second presidential bid, I left the campaign trail, where I was covering the eventual Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis, to make a personal pilgrimage to Wichita, Kansas. I had come to see my sick grandfather, Ga-Ga, who was comatose in the hospital and seemed barely there. Day and night, I held his hand hoping he would make it. I knew he had admired Jackson’s first presidential bid in 1984 and the courage—some called it audacity—required