Jack’s embarrassment was still fresh a few days later when Robert Kennedy came to town. On a radio interview program, Kennedy launched a broad attack on Robinson’s credibility. Kennedy accused Robinson of being William Black’s antilabor tool at Chock Full o’ Nuts, who “used his race to defeat a union shop there.” Black himself, according to Kennedy, was a longtime Republican (in fact, Black was a registered Liberal). In return, flinging vitriol of his own, Robinson denounced Bobby Kennedy as a man “who will not hesitate to use lies, innuendoes and personal attacks on those who disagree with him to get his candidate into the White House.” But Jack was on the defensive again when, on the floor of the Senate, John Kennedy questioned the propriety of the State Department’s involvement in the African students project and possible interference in the election campaign. Kennedy, in a position supported (to Jack’s consternation) by the African-American Students Foundation, argued that State had entered its bid only after his own foundation had pledged to support the airlift. In a column on August 29, hotly disputing this version, Robinson provided a detailed chronology that appeared to support his main point, that Nixon and State had offered their support before being aware of the Kennedy Foundation decision. In the process, however, Jack found himself admonishing a foundation on which he served as a trustee and accusing its leaders of “rewriting the sequence of events” with a “doctored version of what happened.” The episode tarnished Jack’s image and only added to Nixon’s reputation for deceit. Even the Post, in an editorial, offered the opinion that Robinson “still seems to be confused about where to place the blame” for the controversy.
A week or so later, however, Robinson took twin steps to underscore his commitment to Nixon. Deciding to campaign fully on his behalf, he arranged with Chock Full o’ Nuts for a leave of absence until the elections in November. Under pressure from the Post, he also set aside his column for the duration. On September 7, the Post carried, instead of Jack’s column, “A Note on Jackie Robinson.” The note read: “Jackie Robinson is on leave of absence from The Post while serving in Vice President Nixon’s campaign organization.”
Robinson knew that in taking this step into territory new to him he was also taking a risk. But as at other crucial moments in his life, when he found himself profoundly challenged to act, he could not sit on the sidelines but plunged into the fray. At whatever personal cost, he would throw his energies into supporting the Nixon campaign.
CHAPTER 14
A New Frontier
1960–1964
I have never been so proud to be a Negro.
I have never been so proud to be an American.
—Jackie Robinson (1963)
FOR ROBINSON, the 1960 presidential campaign was an exhilarating but also a bruising affair, in which he worked hard and at times effectively as an unpaid volunteer for Nixon and Lodge but also endured some harsh attacks. At least once, he came to the brink of quitting; but in the end he remained loyal to Nixon. “After what the Democrats did to me and tried to do to me on the road,” he told a reporter following Nixon’s defeat, “I’m just about ready to became a Republican myself.” Defeat did not change his views: “I still believe in Mr. Nixon and I still think he’s the better man.”
Beating the drum for Nixon across the country, from New York to California and even into the South, Jack showed a degree of dedication that surprised even Republicans. Everywhere he lauded the Vice-President for helping America make “more progress in the last seven years in civil rights than ever under the Democrats.” At the same time, especially before blacks, he hammered at Senator Kennedy, who “wants us to put him in office so he can learn about us there. I think he’ll learn about us from Johnson.” True, Kennedy might make a good President one day; but “let him go out and learn about the American Negro first.”
Joining Governor Nelson Rockefeller on campaign visits to four black churches in Brooklyn (including Nazarene Baptist, where the Robinsons’ friend Lacy Covington was pastor), Jack’s aggressiveness stood out. While Rockefeller himself never mentioned Nixon by name, Robinson unabashedly endorsed the Vice-President and struck at Kennedy and Johnson. In his zeal, Jack was not afraid to risk alienating local black Democratic leaders. At a rally in Memphis, Tennessee, he ridiculed those blacks who “champion the Negro cause until they are paid off—with a job or something else they want—and then the Negro is forgotten.” After rousing appearances in Delaware and New Jersey, other campaign workers were “lavish in their praise” for “the almost superhuman effort” he was making; according to a high campaign official, “There are very few men in your position who would sacrifice so much for a cause and a conviction.” Following a visit to Kentucky, the local chairman called Jack’s effort “outstanding” and marveled at the evident “sincerity in your heart.”
But criticism also came. The AFL-CIO, denouncing him as antilabor for his alleged role in union troubles at Chock Full o’ Nuts, refused a request for $50,000 from the NAACP for a crusade to register a million black voters. (“I am not now, nor could I ever become, anti-union,” Jack insisted, despite his support of William Black’s efforts to block the unionization of his company. “But there are rotten apples in every phase of life.”) More upsetting perhaps was the surge of opposition to Nixon from many of his friends. “So many people even tried to influence my wife,” he told a reporter, “that she became quite worried and disturbed.” (“I was not passive,” Rachel said later, “and I disagreed with Jack’s support of Nixon.”) Worst of all, he was soon aware that, facing black voters, Nixon’s managers were often ignorant and arrogant. To Jack’s dismay, they declined to bring Nixon’s caravan to Harlem in favor of trying harder to woo the white South. In this respect, Jack’s friend E. Frederic Morrow, the only black on the White House staff (who also took a leave of absence without pay to campaign for Nixon), was appalled at the way he himself was treated: “The part given me to play was insulting.” Val Washington, nominally the top black campaign manager, “was in a similar boat.… His urgent pleas for help fell on deaf and unsympathetic ears.” It was left to the celebrity Jackie Robinson to carry most of the load. “He made a great personal sacrifice to help Nixon,” Morrow recalled, “yet he, too, had a heavy heart from the ignorance with which the campaign was being conducted.”
This ignorance eventually cost Nixon the election. The key moment of failure came in October, when a hostile local judge in De Kalb County, Georgia, sentenced Dr. King to four months in jail, to be served at hard labor on a road gang, for taking part in a sit-in demonstration. The sentence was so clearly a travesty of justice that King’s family, including his pregnant wife, Coretta, feared for his life. At the almost frantic urging of Harry Belafonte, now a member of King’s inner circle, Jack appealed to Nixon campaign leaders for a direct show of support for the civil rights leader. William Safire, an admirer of Robinson since his days at UCLA (“I used to holler myself hoarse at his exploits on the football field”), remembered him arguing vehemently at the midwestern hotel where they were staying that Nixon had to intervene. “He has to call Martin right now, today,” Robinson pleaded with Safire. “I have the number of the jail.” Safire took Robinson to see Robert Finch, who was managing Nixon’s campaign. Finch, in turn, escorted Robinson into a meeting with the candidate himself. Ten minutes later, Robinson returned to Safire, “tears of frustration in his eyes.” “He thinks calling Martin would be ‘grandstanding,’ ” Jack blurted out. “Nixon doesn’t deserve to win.”
At this point, Jack was ready to abandon the campaign. He was further troubled when a close family friend, the psychologist Dr. Kenneth Clark (whose studies had influenced the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education), now not only switched from Nixon to Kennedy but joined others in urging Robinson to “come home.” At the last minute, Robinson decided to stick with Nixon to the end. A telephone conversation with Branch Rickey, he said, made the difference. “Mr. Rickey reassured me that Mr. Nixon was still personally the fine man I thought he was,” Jack t
old a reporter after the election. “And that I didn’t want this one emotional thing to completely color my overall convictions.”
Two years later, as Nixon prepared to run for the California governorship, Rickey would write to him about this watershed in the 1960 election, in which, Rickey insisted, “the Negro vote was determinative.” Someone had alerted Rickey that the Democrats were mounting “a very strenuous effort” to have Jack pull out of his last four campaign appearances and disavow Nixon. Rickey had then tried frantically but without success to reach Robinson on the road. But Rockefeller had found him in a flash. Then, after a long conversation with Rickey, according to Rickey, “Jackie went manfully [on] with his schedule.” Rickey had also spoken that day to Rachel, who was upset: both Carl Rowan and Bobby Kennedy had called her that morning to apply pressure. Recalling the opposition to Jack’s 1949 HUAC appearance, she told Rickey: “This is worse. I am completely distraught. So is Jackie.” Despite her own objections to Nixon, Rachel had helped a great deal to keep Jack on his course. (“By the way,” Rickey confided to Nixon, “she’s a lot of woman.”)
Nixon’s mistake, exploited by Kennedy’s well-publicized telephone call of sympathy to Coretta King, as well as Bobby Kennedy’s pressure on the judge who had sentenced King, which led to his release, cost him the election. The black vote, undecided until then, swung heavily to Kennedy, especially after King’s father, a powerful pastor in Atlanta, openly threw his support behind the senator. In at least three states that Kennedy carried narrowly (including Illinois, which he won by only nine thousand votes), the overwhelming support of black voters obviously made the difference.
Just before Election Day, when Nixon wrote to thank Jack for his “enormous contribution to our common cause”—by which he meant his campaign—he defended his decision in the King matter. Telephoning King or his wife would have been “what our good friend, Joe Louis, called a ‘grandstand play’ ”; genuine progress in civil rights came from “the day to day, consistent application of the principles which we know are sound.” In defeat, Nixon treated his leading black supporter with grace—letters of gratitude for Jack’s efforts, the gift of a plaque signed by Richard and Pat Nixon, and an invitation to an emotional farewell dinner on January 17 that Jack called “one of the highlights of my life. What happened there convinced me more than ever that I supported the right man.” (In return for the plaque, Robinson sent Nixon twenty-four pounds of Chock Full o’ Nuts coffee.)
But Jack believed that the Republicans had thrown away a rare opportunity—and that blacks would suffer for this negligence. “I was terribly disappointed over the election,” he wrote to a friendly party official, “and feel we are at a great loss. I only hope that Kennedy will prove to be a good president.” Now Robinson heard snickering at his back, as perhaps when a respected Amsterdam News columnist ridiculed “the various self-styled Negro leaders” who in the recent election “suddenly became experts on advising Negroes on how to vote.” But for Jack and his family, the most immediate concern was probably the reaction of William Black of Chock Full o’ Nuts, who almost certainly had voted for Kennedy. But Black squashed any idea of firing Robinson. “It is my belief,” he stressed, “that a publicly owned company has no right to take sides in a political campaign. An employee, however, has the right to speak out as he sees fit.”
Black was sincere. A year later, he would take the initiative in Jack’s appointment to the board of directors of the company. Jack would then be earning $42,500 a year, with only one other vice-president making more money.
But the New York Post was not so forgiving. Its editor, James Wechsler, writing the day of the election but before the results were known, fired Jack. Wechsler gave four reasons for his action. To Wechsler’s embarrassment, he had found out that Robinson was going to work for Nixon only when someone at the New York Times, a major rival, called him about the matter. Also, Jack’s behavior in the affair of the African students’ airlift suggested that “partisanship played a larger role than journalism” in his thinking at that time. Making matters worse was Jack’s sudden appearance as a columnist during the campaign in the black New York Citizen-Call. Last of all, Jack’s use of a ghostwriter prevented his true personality from emerging in his columns.
A year later, this letter still riled Jack. Roughly, but not entirely convincingly, he rejected these reasons. “No one will ever convince me that the Post acted in an honest manner,” he said. “I believe the simple truth is that they became somewhat alarmed when they realized that I really meant to write what I believed.” Hinting vaguely at racial discrimination, he saw a “peculiar parallel” between some Northern liberals and “our outstanding Southern illiberals.” Acting “magnificently” in many areas, the Post had become “uncomfortable” because it disliked his opinions.
Hurt to have been booted, Jack returned to Chock Full o’ Nuts and also to the wide range of activities that placed his celebrity at the service of others in need. But the defeat of Nixon, and the punitive loss of his column, did not kill his interest in politics. Instead, Robinson realigned himself politically. In thanking him for his 1960 effort on behalf of Nixon and Lodge, an official in the Republican National Committee had offered a flattering remark: “Personally, it is my judgment that you could be a ‘Messiah’ for the Republican Party in the days ahead!” But within a week of Nixon’s defeat, Robinson had already begun to look to another man as a potential political Messiah.
In October, as part of their efforts for Nixon, Jack had joined Nelson Rockefeller in a series of street-corner electioneering stops in Harlem that ended in a big Republican rally on St. Nicholas Avenue. In all these efforts, Jack was impressed by Rockefeller’s ebullience and charm, his confidence and apparent sincerity in dealing with both the middle class and ordinary folks on the street. Later, at a luncheon in honor of Marian Anderson, Rockefeller confided to Jack details of his own efforts to convince Nixon to intervene in the King case. In addition, Jack was aware of the long association between Rockefeller money and black higher education through large gifts to schools like Spelman College, which was named after Laura Spelman, Nelson’s grandmother. With Nixon’s defeat, he began to see the governor, whose ambition to be President was well known, as poised to assume the leadership of the Republican Party and steer it toward the commitment to civil rights that Nixon had timidly shunned. Within days of Nixon’s defeat, Robinson drafted a careful message to Rockefeller. “Please do not think me presumptuous because of this letter,” he asked; “your family name is magic, but the lopsided Kennedy victory in New York City should be given careful study.” Robinson offered to sit down “at some time” with Rockefeller’s “representative” to discuss its implications.
Clearly Rockefeller welcomed this overture. In February, when Jack assured an Amsterdam News columnist that he would remain in politics, he ventured that he would “perhaps” be working closely with the governor. He again concealed his hand when he spoke the following month at a luncheon meeting of the Young Republican Club; but on Friday, April 7, he introduced Rockefeller at a meeting, unprecedented for a New York governor, that Jack helped to arrange with about a hundred other well-to-do blacks at the Dawn Casino on Seventh Avenue in Harlem. The meeting went well. Peppered with questions over an hour and a half, Rockefeller spoke smartly on issues of special interest to Harlem. After another meeting on June 12, this time in Brooklyn, Rockefeller thanked Robinson for his efforts in staging an event that was “most constructive and provided a wonderful opportunity for frank discussion.”
Later that month, when Martin Luther King Jr. came to New York, he flew with the governor to the state capital, Albany, in Rockefeller’s private plane, to fund-raising events for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In Albany, Rockefeller escorted King to church rallies and in general threw his great prestige behind King. Rockefeller was laying the base for not only his reelection as governor in 1962 but also his expected challenge in 1964 for the Republican nomination and an expected showdown
later that year with the incumbent, President Kennedy. Jack proposed to help him with this odyssey, and in the process strike a tremendous blow for black freedom and empowerment.
FEW PEOPLE WERE HAPPIER to see the 1960 campaign end than Rachel and the three children, for whom Jack’s travels in support of Nixon, and the special pressures of the election, were a chilly reminder of Jack’s old Dodger days, when from late February until October he was a sometime presence in their home. Jackie was now fourteen, Sharon ten, and David eight.
To the children, their father was a benign, beloved figure. David would remember him as “a tremendous physical presence, a big guy, so you were conscious of his size. But he was not one to raise his voice to us, certainly not his hands. There was none of that terror of their father some kids have. There wasn’t ever a threat from him.” Short of hugging and kissing, Jack showed them rich affection. “My father was very indulgent of me,” Sharon said. “Perhaps too indulgent—to him I could do nothing wrong. He was so very loving without being touchy-feely; I never had any doubts that he loved me.” David would remember various fishing trips, including one long, blissful outing to Canada, and hours on the links caddying for his dad. Sharon would never forget thrilling excursions into the city when she and her father, a man born to shop, went looking for clothes for her and Rachel in the garment district, where proprietors welcomed him like a rich cousin. Outgoing and popular, Sharon was also poised and responsible; and David was an amusing, inventive child confident enough to enjoy his own company. “My greatest love was fishing by myself,” he recalled. All was not sweetness and mirth. Integrating New Canaan Country Day School, he had fought battles against “our small core of racists”; but he also made many friends and allies there and elsewhere. “I have extremely fond memories of my childhood,” he said.
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