The Return of the Rabble Rouser

Under fire, Van Jones resigned from the Obama Administration. But he's found a new cause: rallying liberal groups on behalf of the Occupy protesters

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Daryl Peveto / LUCEO for TIME

A portrait of Van Jones at his home in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles, October 23, 2011.

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Jones likens the Occupy campers to the four black students who staged the sit-ins at a whites-only Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., in February 1960, the tip of a much bigger iceberg. Those students didn't change the country alone, Jones points out, but they were quickly followed by lawyers and church organizers and later by Congressmen who pushed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That's the space Jones is now trying to fill: the army behind the first wave. "You don't get young people like this every day," he says.

Back to His Grassroots

It's hard two years on to recall just how toxic Jones became in the late summer of 2009. He worked for the White House to implement the Recovery Act as a midlevel staffer, without a West Wing office or personal access to the President. But he had arrived at his government job by way of San Francisco street activism, having for a time embraced the Marxist label when he worked as an organizer against police brutality, and that label stuck. At town-hall meetings across the country, Tea Party types denounced Jones as an avowed communist and Marxist. He became a regular talking point for conservative pundits on Fox News. "What are we doing with communists in the White House?" one outraged voter shouted at Representative Chet Edwards, a Texas Democrat, at a town hall that August. "He has the ear of the President!" Edwards, like many other people in Washington at the time, had never heard of Jones. A year later, the Congressman lost his race for re-election by 25 points.

Born Anthony Jones in Jackson, Tenn., to middle-class schoolteachers, Jones has always been provocative: as a student at Yale Law School, he was known to walk to class wearing combat boots and carrying a Black Panther book bag--almost a quaint relic by the early 1990s. "I am a very candid guy with a very colorful past," he says. In the years that followed, he moderated his approach and the issues he focused on. His 2008 book, The Green Collar Economy, earned praise from the Democratic establishment for laying out a vision of environmental change that would lead to new jobs in the inner city insulating homes and installing solar panels. It was hardly the stuff of Les Misrables, but Jones always had his cheerleaders. "Van Jones has made it his life's work to speak truth to power," House minority leader Nancy Pelosi says.

But even as Jones traded in his bullhorn for a briefcase, he continued to be attacked for his past. In 2009 a video surfaced showing his use of an unprintable word to describe Republicans, and his name was found on a 2004 Web page he says he never read or endorsed implicating the Bush Administration in the Sept. 11 attacks.

And so in September 2009, Jones resigned from the Obama Administration. "It was the best six months of my life followed by the worst two weeks," Jones recalls. He disappeared from public life and spent his time trying to figure out how an organic wave of conservative populism had so suddenly disrupted his career and thwarted Obama's agenda. He took a part-time teaching job at Princeton and gave himself what he called "a Ph.D. on the Tea Party." "I started thinking, How the heck did we go from hope to heartbreak so fast?" says Jones, for whom conversation is often an opportunity to audition catchphrases. "We went from having a movement to a movie."

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