Admirers look at Mr. Jackson and see a man unbound by convention, ''a man against the grain, against all odds, for 20 years,'' in the words of Roger Wilkins, a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal research center in Washington, and an old friend of Mr. Jackson's.

Detractors say that his soaring words are rarely matched by deeds - that he gets the headlines, but does not do the groundwork and organizing that would convert his inspirational vision into solid accomplishment.

''Jesse's not very good on follow-through,'' says David Wallace, a medical missionary in Tennessee who worked with Mr. Jackson in Chicago during the mid-1960's on programs to improve the economic lot of blacks. ''His mind doesn't seem to work that way. It was Jesse's temperament to go on to new things, new targets, new concerns.''

These are not new observations about Jesse Jackson. In high school, his French teacher used to tease him about being an ''I'' person. His independence so irritated his mentor, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that he complained about his young lieutenant's ego problem.

Mr. Jackson's political power will probably grow as the Democratic convention approaches, and as it does, so will the central question about the self-inventing Presidential candidate: To what end will he use his growing influence? Will he use it to feed his substantial appetite for attention, or to advance the cause of blacks, the poor, the displaced, the disenfranchised - all those he says he represents. His successful, provocative, often controversial past has made him an American political phenomenon. But it has also led people to wonder whether Jesse Jackson is out for the principles he so eloquently espouses. Or whether Jesse Jackson is out for himself.

THERE'S JUST SOME-thing there and it won't go away,'' said the Rev.

Alvin Pitcher, an enthusiastic supporter who has known Mr. Jackson since their days working in the civil rights movement more than 20 years ago. ''I'm aware of the legacy Jesse's been fighting all his life, trying to overcome. And you know, sometimes it gets in the way.''

What Alvin Pitcher was alluding to was Mr. Jackson's out-of-wedlock birth in Greenville, S.C. To so many who know Mr. Jackson well, nothing looms as large in his life - and nothing has had more to do with driving him to prove himself - than the circumstances of his birth. ''Simplistic. That's simplistic, somebody else's romance of my life,'' says Mr. Jackson.

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''A simple explanation of what makes Jesse run,'' echoes his wife, Jacqueline.

The two are sitting in the living room of their Chicago home, surrounded by family portraits and poster-size photographs charting the transformation of Jesse Jackson from a young civil-rights worker in afro and dashiki to a Presidential candidate in business suits.

The house, in a suburban-like, black neighborhood, is large and could be comfortable, had it not become something of a way station for an always traveling candidate and family, including three sons and two daughters, ages 12 to 24.

Barking guard dogs do battle with their wire fence outside. Aides and an armed security man mill about inside, opening and shutting unseen doors, answering the constantly ringing telephones. Yellowing plants crowd a window seat in the sun room, where the floor is littered with luggage and the shelves are filled with books ranging from ''Election Laws 1969'' to Judith Krantz's ''Scruples.''

The conversation has turned to his childhood in Greenville, and Mr. Jackson is explaining that he was 5 or 6 years old when he learned that the father he was living with was not his natural father. ''It was interesting, but it was not traumatic,'' he says. ''Because I was never fatherless or an orphan.''

Jesse Jackson, then called Jesse Burns, was born Oct. 8, 1941 - the son of Helen Burns, a high school student, and Noah Robinson, a 33-year-old married man who lived next door. When Jesse was about a year old, his mother married Charles Henry Jackson, now dead, a post office maintenance worker, who later adopted Jesse.

''My very first recollection of life on earth was waking up in bed with my mother, and she was showing me a picture of my father, Charles Jackson, with a group of soldiers,'' says Mr. Jackson. A moment later, he refers to Noah Robinson, a retired cotton grader still living in Greenville, as ''my father,'' and he continues to use the same term for both men.

Noah Ryan Robinson, Jesse Jackson's half brother, says Mr. Jackson considered the senior Noah his father. ''Jesse would turn to him and say, 'Somebody was bothering me,' or 'I need some money for school or for clothes,' '' says the younger Mr. Robinson, a wealthy Chicago businessman. ''The only thing he didn't do was live with Dad and he didn't travel with us when we were on our family vacations.''

Illegitimacy was not uncommon when he was a boy, and Jesse Jackson insists he did not ''dwell on it.'' Still, he remembers being taunted by other children, and knows that his mother had to stand in front of her church and ask forgiveness, her infant son in her arms.

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''Jesse has an insatiable urge - which is an asset when you consider it as a fuel - to achieve, to be respected and to be recognized,'' says his half brother. ''I think being born out of wedlock bothered him disproportionately to the way it did anyone else we grew up with. The thing that drives him is a subliminal longing for respect and recognition that he is somebody.''

The Jackson drive is also a legacy of Greenville. The town was small and quiet. And it was black and white. ''I remember being taught my place,'' says Jesse Jackson. He remembers the first time his mother led him to the back of the bus. He remembers the two water fountains at Claussen's bakery, where he worked on Saturday mornings. He remembers the differences between the white elementary school and his school: ''There was no grass in the yard. I couldn't play, couldn't roll over because our school yard was full of sand. And if it rained, it turned into red dirt.''

Still, it was the way things were and most people in Greenville just lived with it, until the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, when Jesse Jackson was 14.

''That was when we began to understand things don't have to be the way they are,'' recalls Owen Perkins, a childhood friend of Jesse Jackson's who is now the associate dean of students at Greenville Technical College. ''We learned in school there was a new law that segregation in commercial transportation was illegal. So Jesse and I got on the bus and stayed in front. It was our first challenge. But nothing happened. Everybody was real nice to us.''

Not that Mr. Jackson was a troublemaker. He was a model student and a model son, a tall, handsome young man who worked hard and did well, the good little boy who used to earn pennies by reading newspaper articles to the adults.

''You could not but like Jesse, respect Jesse,'' says Xanthene Norris, his high school French teacher. She recalls that if a football game took him out of town, he would - alone among his teammates - ask for his assignments in advance. ''Noah had more natural ability, but Jesse was motivated. I always teased him that he's first person singular, not plural. Always an 'I' person. I am somebody. That's something that's always been with Jesse.''

Jesse Jackson has, in the past, described his upbringing in dire terms. ''I was born in a slum, but the slum wasn't born in me,'' he told South Carolina prison inmates in 1984. ''I had to steal to survive,'' he said on a 1973 Chicago television show.

But neither the Haynie Street area, where he was born, nor the other Greenville neighborhoods he lived in later were what would be called slums, his relatives and childhood friends say today. They remember a comfortable home, better than most, a freezer on the porch and plenty of food around for his visiting friends. ''He wasn't poor, he had a good family,'' maintains his father, Noah Robinson. And Jesse Jackson, he adds, was always special.

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''Jesse was an unusual kind of fella, even when he was just learning to talk,'' Mr. Robinson remembers. ''He would say he's going to be a preacher. He would say, 'I'm going to lead people through the rivers of water.' ''

HE MAY BOW MORE TO reality now, but a dramatic, almost messianic fervor still imbues Jesse Jackson's rhetoric. ''Grasshoppers have a strange complex,'' Mr. Jackson is telling an audience of supporters at a Chicago motel auditorium. ''They wallow in the grass. They change color with the grass. . . . They're scared of shoes. They panic when they hear lawnmowers.'' Pause. ''Grasshoppers have complexes.''

Mr. Jackson is shouting, wooing, chanting, persuading, using a voice he trained away from a childhood lisp to deliver his patented version of fire, brimstone and get-out-the-vote. ''Giants should not be wallowing in the grass,'' he continues. ''And dodging the wind. Running from shoes. Panicking when they hear lawnmowers. . . . Giants must stand tall, act tall, and behave tall.''

The crowd is yelling, ''Right on, Jesse!'' and the applause is thunderous. Jesse Jackson has shown once again that he knows how to rouse an audience. He wields his words like javelins, hurling sleek, memorable phrases that pierce to the heart of complex issues.

But if Mr. Jackson's way with words has brought him attention at every step of his life, it has also fueled reservations that, as a former captain of his college football team put it, ''the guys felt maybe he talked more than he played.''

An athletic scholarship sent Mr. Jackson from Greenville to the University of Illinois, one of college football's Big Ten. ''The promised land,'' says Jacqueline Jackson, sarcasm in her voice. ''Yeah, the promised land,'' repeats her husband.

Mr. Jackson spent one year at that predominantly white university. Then he transferred to North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College in Greensboro, where he became active in the civil-rights demonstrations that roiled the town during the early 1960's. While there, he also met Jacqueline Lavinia Brown. They were married in December, 1962, when - Mrs. Jackson volunteers - she was two months pregnant.

Mr. Jackson says he left the University of Illinois because of discrimination. But it is often difficult to separate reality from his reminiscence. For example, he states flatly that he did not make quarterback at Illinois because he is black. But, while bigotry certainly plagued black students' lives at the school, another black player was already the team's starting quarterback that year, and several former teammates suggest Mr. Jackson was passed over for better players.

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There is no doubt that Mr. Jackson was shaken by the kind of racial bias he confronted up north in Illinois -''that typical, subtle prejudice,'' in the words of Michael Summers, a black teammate of Mr. Jackson's and now an alderman in Evanston, Ill. But Mr. Jackson's tales resonate with exaggeration, a persistent trait.

''It's part of the movement style, of making things larger than life for purposes of a protest,'' says Don Rose, a Chicago political consultant who has known Mr. Jackson since the mid-1960's. ''It's also an inability to admit error.'' While many of Mr. Jackson's efforts at exaggeration seem little more than innocent chapters in a revisionist autobiography, his self-aggrandizing has alienated more than a few associates. In Chicago, despite some victories - successfully mediating a 1980 fireman's strike, for example - the political establishment tended to dismiss him as a publicity-seeking gadfly. Many of the city's Democrats still talk about the way Mr. Jackson dominated television coverage the night another black, Congressman Harold Washington, won the 1983 Democratic primary victory for Mayor. Mr. Jackson, whose Presidential ambitions got a boost from his network exposure that night, did not even play a central role in Mr. Washington's campaign.

There is no more telling example of Mr. Jackson's predilection for self-promotion than his behavior following the death of his mentor, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Jesse Jackson was in college when he decided to become a minister. He saw that the men who were changing the world were a new breed of politically active preachers, men like Dr. King and his colleague, the Rev. Dr. Ralph Abernathy. So, after graduating from A.&T. in 1964 with a B.S. degree in sociology, he entered the Chicago Theological Seminary on scholarship. But Mr. Jackson never graduated; he was ordained by the minister of a Chicago church after he dropped out to work for Dr. King.

They'd met in 1965, when Mr. Jackson - married, a father and working part-time in Chicago civil-rights organizations - went with a group from the seminary to the Selma march. He did not go unnoticed.

''He immediately took charge,'' recalls Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, then a top deputy to Dr. King. ''It was almost like he came in and, while people were lining up, he wouldn't get in line. He would start lining people up.''

Dr. King, impressed with Jesse Jackson's drive, named him director of Operation Breadbasket, the economic arm of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Mr. Jackson stood out from Dr. King's other lieutenants, a striking figure in bell-bottom pants and turtleneck shirts who took it upon himself to announce a protest march that Dr. King had not approved, who gave stem-winding talks that sometimes sounded more like Dr. King than Dr. King himself.

Dr. King was amused by and encouraging of his young aide. Others in S.C.L.C. were not. In running Breadbasket's finances without consulting the S.C.L.C.'s leaders in Atlanta, he was acting too independently, they argued. ''They felt he was freelancing too much, that he was a loose cannon,'' recalls Don Rose, the Chicago consultant.

Eventually, Dr. King began to lose patience with his colleague, too. Five days before his assassination, heartsick that violence had marred his Poor People's March in Memphis, Dr. King convened his staff in Atlanta. There was dissension at the meeting - a lot of it from Jesse Jackson, who kept asking what Dr. King would do if his impending march to Washington failed. Dr. King did not want to consider alternatives, because ''we were going for broke,'' recalls Dr. Abernathy. ''We said we would go to jail, we would be killed if we had to.'' The younger, more pragmatic, Mr. Jackson kept interrupting. Finally, Dr. King stalked out of the room followed by Dr. Abernathy.

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''As we swang down the steps and turned to go down the next flight,'' says Dr. Abernathy, ''Jesse Jackson came to the stairs and said, 'Doc!' And Dr. King whirled in anger. He looked up and pointed his finger and said, 'Jesse, it may be that you will carve your own individual niche in society. But don't you bother me.' And Jesse was left with his mouth hanging. And we continued down the stairs.''

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On April 4, 1968, Dr. King was assassinated as he stood on the balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The gunshot set off a sequence of events that would drive a wedge between Jesse Jackson and many of Dr. King's followers.

Mr. Jackson was a floor below when the shots rang out; he and several colleagues ran up to the balcony. After the fatally wounded Dr. King was taken to the hospital, reporters converged on the motel.

''And Jesse was saying, 'I was the last person in the world he spoke to,' '' recalls the Rev. Hosea Williams, an Atlanta city council member and former King associate who was also at the motel. ''I saw the blood on Jesse's shirt and I know Jesse had not been near Dr. King.''

That night, Mr. Jackson flew to Chicago. The next day, he had Don Rose book him on two local television talk shows; he also appeared that morning on NBC's ''Today Show,'' wearing the same blood-stained turtleneck that he had worn the day before. He told reporters he was the last to talk to Dr. King, who died, he said, cradled in his arms.

But none of that is so, according to several King aides, who remain bitter about the incident and still ask why Mr. Jackson did not change his shirt.

''Trauma. And it was in part defiance and anger and hurt,'' explains Mr. Jackson, who both stands by his story and alters it a bit. Today, he does not say that he cradled the dying man's head, only that he ''reached out for'' him. His wife supports his explanation. ''I think he had the same clothes on for two or three days,'' says Jacqueline Jackson. ''I think it was psychological.''

Not many of Dr. King's colleagues are mollified. ''I hope God has forgiven him,'' says Dr. Abernathy, one of the few close King associates who says he will support Mr. Jackson's Presidential bid. ''He has had time to pray. He is a different man now. It would be wrong from me to hold it against him.''

THREE YEARS after Dr. King's death, Mr. Jackson broke away from the S.C.L.C. and formed Operation PUSH -People United to Save Humanity (since changed to the less ambitious People United to Serve Humanity). It would take him very, very far.

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PUSH has been called everything from an economic self-help group to Mr. Jackson's political pulpit. He gave up its presidency when he began his 1984 Presidential campaign but remains its guiding spirit and sometimes delivers Saturday morning sermons in PUSH's headquarters, an old former synagogue on Chicago's South Side. Through the organization's educational arm, PUSH-Excel, he exhorts inner-city students to study and to stay off drugs. The heart of PUSH's economic program is its effort -through boycotts of white-owned companies or the threat of them - to win franchises, supply contracts and jobs for blacks. The group has signed agreements with a number of major corporations, among them Coca-Cola, Heublein, Burger King and Seven Up.

But PUSH and Mr. Jackson's leadership of it have come in for considerable criticism. As his friend Don Rose says: ''He's an inspirational force. But very few of his campaigns have taken root, become anything.''

A 1982 report on PUSH-Excel issued by the National Institute of Education, a Federal organization that studied education policy and programs, concluded that, because PUSH lacked an administrative structure, ''the stage was set for a real letdown among students.'' One parent quoted in the report summarized the problem:

''Jackson's a real magnet. Basically, he has a very good idea. What I am seeing, his ideas are not being implemented. There were some changes in our son and they just fell flatter than a pancake. PUSH was like a last straw for him.''

Joseph A. Califano Jr., who was Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare for President Jimmy Carter, and who helped to channel Federal funds to PUSH, agreed. ''The problem with Jackson's program,'' he wrote in ''Governing America,'' his 1981 book, ''was his inability to sustain its momentum when he was not present, its dependence on his charisma.''

PUSH has also been accused of benefiting a small circle of black businessmen, not the larger black community. For example, Mr. Jackson's half brother, Noah Ryan Robinson, received business from both Coca-Cola and Heublein after PUSH boycotts. ''When the markets open, Noah, like other business people, walks in the door,'' says Mr. Jackson.

PUSH is currently boycotting Revlon, the giant cosmetics firm. Revlon has been mounting a major effort to compete with black-owned companies for the lucrative black hair-care market. PUSH initiated the action against it last year, after one of Revlon's executives said in an interview in Newsweek that the black cosmetics companies made inferior products and would soon be bought up by white companies. With the boycott under way, PUSH has demanded that Revlon increase the representation of blacks in its hierarchy and stop doing business in South Africa.

Cosmetics-industry officials, who will not speak for attribution, argue that PUSH is less interested in winning concessions from Revlon than in boosting the position of several black-owned cosmetics companies whose top executives are among Mr. Jackson's biggest financial supporters. Officials of Revlon, which has agreed to stop doing business in South Africa, complain privately that they have been unable to pin Mr. Jackson down on specific terms for a settlement. But Mr. Jackson insists that PUSH is dealing in good faith with Revlon. He also rejects any suggestion that he is using the organization simply to help his contributors, although he maintains ''it's just fair and proper'' for PUSH to get contributions from companies that benefit from its campaigns.

''To me that's wonderful,'' says Mr. Jackson. ''That's so sensible. It's so logical. Why shouldn't the beneficiaries of our work contribute to the organization that's the benefactor? Is that not the way that every political organization operates?''

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Many of the complaints about PUSH are politically motivated, as are Federal audits of PUSH-Excel's finances, Mr. Jackson says. He also dismisses criticism of his management of the organization, calling himself not a manager, but a motivator. ''I'm a tree shaker,'' he likes to say. ''Not a jam maker.''

IT IS NOT A DESCRIP-tion that most successful black politicians would embrace. Mayors Andrew Young of Atlanta and Tom Bradley of Los Angeles and Congressman William H. Gray 3d of Philadelphia, for example, came up through the system and are part of it. Not Jesse Jackson, who has never held elective office.

To many public officials, black and white, his lack of experience is a serious liability. ''I just think there's a major difference'' between running for office and running a movement, argues Mr. Young. ''I think Jesse can legitimately say he's run movements.''

Mr. Young says he will not be supporting Mr. Jackson's candidacy. But a lot of other black politicians who backed Walter Mondale in 1984 are in the Jackson camp this time - partly because they see no other candidate with as blatantly liberal a record, and partly because Mr. Jackson has proved his strength with black voters, winning approximately 80 percent of the black vote in the 1984 Democratic primaries, according to election analysts. (Mr. Jackson received 3,282,431 primary votes, or 18.2 percent of the total, in 1984.) Mr. Jackson guaranteed himself a large measure of attention between his 1984 race and today through his canny use of the press. ''He's got an enormous innate sense of the media,'' says David Axelrod, a political consultant in Chicago now working on the Presidential campaign of Illinois Senator Paul Simon. Mr. Jackson's impromptu dialogue about the plight of Soviet Jews with Mikhail S. Gorbachev during the Reykjavik summit last year; his threat to lead a boycott of major league baseball last spring unless upper management ranks were better integrated; even his lecturing of students about the dangers of drug abuse - all have garnered him the attention he needed to keep his political aspirations viable.

At the same time, Mr. Jackson has tried assiduously to move into the mainstream. He cut his hair, started dressing more conservatively and has stopped talking almost exclusively about American racism on the campaign trail.

While the ''new'' Jesse Jackson's rhetoric is more moderate than his strident 1984 approach, he remains a classic liberal in the tradition of the New Deal and the Great Society - with more than a dash of contemporary center-left social and economic policy thrown in. His positions fit him well, as if they emerge from his own feelings of powerlessness and frustration in a society that dared refuse to take him seriously.

Of the six declared Democratic Presidential candidates, Jesse Jackson is the most unabashed advocate of increased Government spending for social programs, from farm subsidies to housing. His foreign-policy talks are heavily laced with concern for the third world, from South Africa to South America, and he is the only Presidential candidate to support a Palestinian homeland. While other Democrats now reject industrial policy - the Government's direct involvement in American industrial management and investment - Mr. Jackson enthusiastically embraces the idea, supporting the establishment of an American investment bank that would draw on public pension funds (protected from default by Federal guarantees) to improve roads, bridges and transit systems.

Unlike most of the other candidates, who seem anxious to curry favor with the nation's business community, Mr. Jackson vigorously attacks multinational corporations - American companies that build plants in countries like Taiwan and Hong Kong, sending American jobs overseas. Although he stresses that he does not favor protectionism, he argues that the lack of trade unionism in the industrialized third world should be considered an unfair trade practice. This and other Jackson proposals could lead to tariffs or other penalties that would protect goods manufactured in America.

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His proposals are notably short on detail; he does not say how, precisely, he would pay for the increased public spending he advocates or how taxpayers and retirees could be insulated from risk if his national investment bank ran into trouble. But in a field of candidates who seem so similar ideologically, Mr. Jackson's ideas set him apart - and help him. As a repository for the philosophies of America's old-fashioned liberal-left, he has succeeded in this campaign in expanding his ''rainbow coalition'' beyond minority groups, picking up support from white voters who had rejected him in the past.

''Let's stop mergin' corporations, purgin' workers,'' he told the Teamsters at their annual convention last September. ''Let's shift, to REINVESTMENT in AMERICA!'' The overwhelmingly white audience roared its approval of Jesse Jackson, as most audiences he speaks to, black and white, generally do these days.

BUT IF MR. JACKSON has established his bona fides with progressive Democrats, he is still anathema to one key liberal constituency. His support for a Palestinian state, his 1984 labeling of Jews as ''hymies'' and New York as ''hymietown,'' and his continuing refusal to disavow the Rev. Louis Farrakhan, the Black Muslim leader who praised Hitler and called Judaism a ''gutter religion,'' upset much of the nation's Jewish community.

Prior to his 1979 meeting with Yasir Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Mr. Jackson had had a friendly relationship with Chicago's Jewish community. He was a favorite speaker at synagogues, Jews contributed to his civil-rights organizations, and PUSH and Operation Breadbasket were part of several black-Jewish social programs.

Rabbi Robert J. Marx, founder of the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs in Chicago, rejects simplistic explanations of Mr. Jackson's attitude toward the Jewish people. ''Everyone wants to say Jesse is an anti-Semite or is not an anti-Semite, but he's more complex,'' says Rabbi Marx, whose organization works on inner-city problems. ''He is a humanitarian. When Jews are attacked, he will rise to their defense. But his blind spot is his perception of Jewish power. He has a problem with thinking Jews have more power than they have.''

''I'll be at a meeting of 30 people, at which I'm the only rabbi present,'' continues Mr. Marx, ''and Jesse will say, 'We've got to form a coalition - isn't that right, Rabbi Marx?' In other words, he'll turn to me, single me out, as if there is some superhuman power the Jewish community has.''

Mr. Jackson has made a studied effort to improve his relationship with the Jewish community since 1984. He wants to ''heal wounds,'' he says. But they keep reopening. This fall, for example, he berated a black man who asked about his relationship with the Jewish community at a Los Angeles political event, telling him, ''Let the Jews speak for themselves.''

At the same time, his new campaign manager, Gerald Austin, is Jewish, as are several top advisers, and Mr. Jackson makes an overt effort to talk about how he has changed. ''You live in Chicago and every day there's a new parade coming down the street, you know?'' he said during a recent campaign break. ''One day it's the Chinese New Year, next day it's Yom Kippur.''

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An instinctive politician, Mr. Jackson clearly understands that he must deal with his ''Jewish problem.'' But there is a distinctly undisciplined side to him that does not permit him to address crises, or anything else, quite the way others would. Sometimes his ad hoc style succeeds - he flew off to Syria on a moment's notice and gained the release of an imprisoned American flier -and sometimes it does not. But whatever Mr. Jackson does, he does as he likes. Including running his campaign.

''I think Jesse is his campaign,'' says Bert Lance, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget under President Jimmy Carter and one of Mr. Jackson's close advisers. ''There's no gray eminence in that campaign except Jesse. He knows what he's going to do next and why he's going to do it. That has pluses and minuses.''

One minus is that Mr. Jackson works all hours of the day and night, often driving his staff to distraction and himself to exhaustion. (He has been hospitalized several times for fatigue, which is exacerbated because he carries the trait for sickle-cell anemia.) Another is that his Presidential campaigns have been notoriously disorganized. When it was revealed this fall that he had signed an endorsement contract with the Allied Education Corporation, his staff was caught unaware. One key adviser said there had been no discussion between Mr. Jackson and members of his staff before the contract was signed, no consideration of the potential risks or embarrassment, not even a whisper over whether the schools merited Mr. Jackson's endorsement. ''There is no infrastructure,'' said the adviser.

Mr. Jackson's half brother, Noah Ryan Robinson, says that the campaign's troubles stem from Mr. Jackson's reluctance to surround himself with strong staff members. ''Since Jesse prizes loyalty so highly, he will have people around him that adore him but can't get it done,'' says Mr. Robinson.

Just two weeks ago, Mr. Jackson - who attributes his campaign difficulties to limited funds - moved to address his organization's weakness by making Mr. Austin, who ran two successful campaigns for Gov. Richard F. Celeste of Ohio, his new campaign manager. He also appointed Willie Brown, Speaker of the California Assembly, his campaign chairman. Mr. Jackson says that he is constantly reaching out for opinions, and lately has consulted, among others, the investment banker Felix G. Rohatyn and the political consultant David Garth (who remain uncommited in the race), and Carol O'Cleireacain, chief economist at District Council 37, the New York City public employees union, who has become Mr. Jackson's top economic adviser.

But ultimately, Mr. Jackson still relies very much on his own instincts. ''At some point,'' he says, ''leadership by committee is not strong leadership.''

BUT WHERE WILL HE chose to lead?

Jesse Jackson could arrive at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta next July with more delegates than any other candidate. Most political analysts give him little chance of being nominated - partly because he is black, partly because of his unretrenched liberalism. While he argues that he would be accepted as the front-runner if he were white, it is also possible that his race gives him an edge -that his politics, personal flamboyance and campaign flaws would long since have forced another candidate out of the race.

As any serious candidate would, Mr. Jackson insists that he can be nominated and elected President. But he has also said that he would consider the Vice Presidency or a position as ''special envoy'' to negotiate peace in Central America. He remains ambiguous about his ultimate goal.

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Less than a month ago, Mr. Jackson was asked to define himself. Without missing a beat, he offered up a stream of images, touching on Martin Luther King, the late Congressman Adam Clayton Powell of Harlem, even Moses. And himself. For black people, he said, he wants to be ''someone who can sit on television and argue their case.''

''Dr. King, he could argue their case,'' he continued. ''That was the whole thing with Adam. He could walk in the Congress or go in that White House and tell them. Or Moses. If Moses tells them let the people go, they'll let them go. So leaders, over time, they become a force in people's lives to which they look.''

''It's like you're speaking,'' Jesse Jackson said, ''and people say, 'Amen.' ''