Jesse Jackson (born 1941) is the American civil rights leader, Baptist minister and twice-unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. John Kiriakou raised his hospitalisation unprompted in November 2025, as one of two things he had wanted to mention from that morning’s papers.[1]
The two diagnoses
Kiriakou began with a disclosure of his own view — “I never particularly cared for him” — and then set out the medical history in detail.[1]
Jackson had been diagnosed in 2015 with Parkinson’s disease, and had said at the time that it was a disease that had afflicted his father as well, because it runs in families. Kiriakou noted at that point that his own father had it, and that lots of his relatives had it.[1]
Two years before the broadcast, Jackson had been diagnosed with something more severe — progressive supranuclear palsy, which Kiriakou glossed as “like Parkinson’s on steroids.” He had been hospitalised in Chicago the previous day at the age of eighty-four.[2]
The prognosis
Kiriakou’s assessment was direct and unconsoling: the prognosis is not good, and there is no cure.[2]
He then described the usual endings, again from within his own family. If you do not fall and hit your head — “which is how my dad died” — you end up choking to death because you lose the ability to swallow, or dying of pneumonia because saliva collects in the lungs and cannot be cleared.[2][3] His conclusion was that he feared Jackson would not be around much longer.[3]
The political record, and an allegation
Rall interjected before the subject could be dropped, to insist on the scale of Jackson’s political achievement: an insurgent Black left-wing candidate who carried majority-white states in the 1984 and 1988 primaries, standing, in Rall’s estimate, to the left of Bernie Sanders. Rall also disclosed that he had voted for him in the 1988 primary.[3][4]
An allegation about the assassination of Martin Luther King was then aired on the programme — that Jackson had put his hands in King’s blood at the Lorraine Motel and smeared it on his shirt, appearing on television the following morning still wearing it, and that Coretta Scott King never forgave him for it.[5][6]
Asked in the chat whether Jackson had been the FBI’s informant inside King’s circle, Kiriakou declined to claim knowledge and gave what he had read instead: that it was not Jackson, but “the older guy uh from the from the Southern” Christian Leadership Conference.[6][7]