Jackie Robinson (77 page)

On some points, however, Jack would not yield. When talk arose that Rockefeller might use William E. Miller, Goldwater’s running mate in
1964, in the fall election, Jack put his foot down. Unaccustomed to being crossed, the governor nevertheless accepted such resistance from Robinson. “
I like a man,” Jack wrote later, “who can look me in the eye and say to me—as Governor Rockefeller has done—‘Jackie, I agree with you that you should always say what you feel you must say. Don’t worry about upsetting me or upsetting anyone else. I believe in a man’s right to be true to himself.’ ” In turn, Jack was loyal to the governor, unless he thought the welfare of blacks was at risk. When a reporter counted only about two dozen blacks among almost thirty-five hundred guests at a state Republican dinner in New York, Jack was defensive; the reporter was “
nit-picking” and “looking for trouble.” But Robinson kept alive his special interest in black Republicans; on May 21, in Detroit, he delivered the main address at the first national convention of the Negro Republican Assembly. The
Amsterdam News
noted that inside the party, Robinson “
is proving to be a real pro in the political infighting and is getting some key recognition for Negroes.”

Fishing for black votes in strange, sometimes treacherous waters, Rockefeller often needed Robinson’s help. But sometimes even Jack was not enough. That summer, as a perspiring, shirt-sleeved Rockefeller tried to open a campaign office in Harlem, about one hundred heckling black nationalists led by Roy Innis of CORE shouted rude questions about the Rockefeller family’s holdings in South Africa and almost broke up the event. As Robinson, buttoned up in a dark suit and tie, watched helplessly, it was left to Eddie “Pork Chop” Davis, a Harlem street-corner orator, to seize the microphone from the beleaguered governor, shout down the hecklers, and restore order.

By this time, another long, hot summer was playing out across the nation. “
One of the most terrible tragedies of our times,” Jack wrote, “is being acted out in the streets of our big cities. It is both frustrating and frightening to see the hordes of Negro people, so many of them the restless young, exploding into the most sickening kind of violence.” The tension in New York was made worse by a prolonged public dispute between forces favoring a strong civilian review board, which Jack supported, and backers of police independence, of whom William F. Buckley Jr. was perhaps the most provocative spokesman. As so often happened, Robinson quickly turned a political dispute into something personal, as in rebuking a popular liberal WMCA radio personality and longtime friend, Barry Gray, who had sided with the police. “
I hope I am wrong, Barry,” Jack chided Gray in his column. “I would not in good conscience call you a bigot. But you know the logical conclusion about the man who lies down with hogs. The hogs do not end up smelling like men.” The idea of Gray and the reactionary Buckley uniting on this issue “would be ludicrous if it were not tragic.”

Making the situation more volatile was the increasingly fierce rhetoric about Black Power. On May 26, 1965, in a commencement speech at Howard University, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. had introduced the term; in the audience was Stokely Carmichael of SNCC, who then used it to galvanizing effect in rallies later that year. To Robinson, the slogan encouraged demagogues and even crime by lending them an aura of political legitimacy. Meanwhile, he said, “
the white power structure builds into giant visibility the slightest pip squeak who comes along with something incendiary or radical to say.” Late in August, a new ingredient was added to the brew. With Carmichael in the chair and all whites banished, a large crowd of SNCC supporters warmly welcomed a spokesman for a new militant group, the Black Panthers, while six Panthers, dressed in black berets, black shirts, and black slacks, stood guard. SNCC, born out of the efforts of Dr. King’s SCLC, had moved some distance away from its source. Later that year, Robinson issued his own definition of Black Power: “
When we use our ballot and our dollars wisely, we are exercising black power without having to define it.”

In November, Rockefeller swept to victory in New York by four hundred thousand votes. While his plurality was somewhat less than in 1962, his support among blacks had grown. For Jack and his team, this was a personal triumph, underscored when he and Rachel were among twenty-five guests who spent the evening awaiting the election results at the governor’s Fifth Avenue apartment. Writing before the results were known, Jack called his effort in the campaign, in which he had served, he said, as “
a day to day, sometimes almost around the clock worker,” one of the “most rewarding experiences of my life.” He was “proud to have made whatever contribution I made because, in my book, the Governor is tops.”

Although Jack could not have known it, this would be the crowning moment of his career as a political operative. Other election victories also encouraged him. In Massachusetts, Edward Brooke, a Republican, became the first black elected to the United States Senate since Reconstruction. To Jack, this was “
the most resounding reply which could have been given” to those who wanted or expected a white backlash. In Alabama, a black ex-paratrooper was elected sheriff of Macon County over two white opponents, to become the first black sheriff in the South since Reconstruction. In California, on the other hand, Ronald Reagan was elected. “
In my book,” Robinson wrote, “Ronald Reagan is as bad news for minority people as Governor Rockefeller is good news.”

I
N
J
UNE
, J
ACK AND
R
ACHEL
were overjoyed when Jackie Junior finally returned from Vietnam. However, they soon saw that he was in bad shape.
The racism of the white military and the horrors of warfare had left him a demoralized version of the sweet, confused young man who had gone into the Army more than two years before, looking for a place to grow up. He returned to a nation where many young people, and even many older people, black and white, had grown sick of the American effort. This disapproval of the military left Jackie, as it did countless other returning soldiers, baffled and hurt. In addition, if Jackie now seemed almost out from under his father’s shadow, he had also lost the umbrella of protection Jack had provided all his life. But his father’s fame was still a problem, as when Rockefeller, with the best of intentions, wrote to praise Jackie for a job well done in Vietnam, which had added “
a lustre of your own to the famous name you bear.”

Not long after his return, when Rachel and Jackie accompanied Jack on a visit to Montreal, Rachel saw that something was not right with him. “
Jackie was behaving just a little strangely,” Rachel recalled. “Almost by instinct he would drift away from me as we walked, and he seemed to want to walk as close to the buildings as possible, almost hugging them. He told me that this was Vietnam taking over; he was keeping close to cover. I began to get a better sense of what he had gone through and how it was affecting him.” Soon Jackie was living in Colorado, where the Army had released him, as his parents puzzled over what he was doing there. While he was in Vietnam, a girlfriend of his from Connecticut, Penny Pankey, gave birth to their child, Sonya. She was Jack and Rachel’s first grandchild. “
I know I have a large responsibility to Penny and the Baby,” Jackie had written his father; but he was also sure that marriage was out of the question, given his state of mind.

The gap between father and son grew wider. In his column, Jack wrote about the grave troubles that youths faced—and his own sense of powerlessness to help them: “
As I look around today and observe how lost and frustrated and bitter our youngsters are, I find myself wishing that there was some way to reach out to them and let them know that we want to try to understand their problems; that we want to help. I confess I don’t know the way.”

In most other ways, he seemed to know what he was doing and where he was going. A reporter trailing him to Freedom National one morning described a man of energy and verve, although his eyes were failing. “
His step was brisk, his calendar was crowded, he had no time for philosophic pause,” the reporter noted. Entering the bank’s conference room, which he used as an office, Jack flung his overcoat on a swivel chair and pointed toward a corner. “That telephone,” he declared, “is going to be humming today.” In three hours, Robinson made or took twenty-one calls, with many of them ending in new tasks for him. “As his obligations pyramid,” the reporter
noted, “he will complain that someday he’ll have to learn to say no, but he will continue to say yes. He will swivel in his chair, swing his legs left, pluck hard at his cheek. Then, at a moment of intense exasperation, he will abruptly smile.”

To Evelyn Cunningham, he was a man of some complexity. “
Jackie was not too close to many people,” she observed. “He was embarrassed by adulation. On the other hand, he wanted desperately to be liked. And he knew not everyone liked him. Some people would say, ‘Oh, he’s a cold turkey. I don’t like Jackie Robinson. He’s cold.’ ” They respected him but they didn’t like him. “I was never sure he liked me,” she said. “To this day, I don’t know for sure. But I admired him. He had great respect for women. I don’t think he was a real feminist but he respected women and he worshiped Rachel. He was also a little shy about us. I remember once he brought back a big box of clothes and started to show me what he had bought for her—gorgeous underwear, bras, panties. And then, all of a sudden he got embarrassed. He covered up the box and turned away. Another time, a black man, a stranger, came in with a sculpture he had carved to give to Jackie. It was a nude torso of a woman. Jackie took it, but once the man left he said, ‘You want it?’ I said yes. He seemed embarrassed, with me looking at the nude with my eyes, and he’s standing there. I took it before he changed his mind. I still have it.”

“There must have been something way back in his life,” she decided, “that had frightened him about people. I was one of the people who absolutely worshiped him, but I knew that I could only show it to him by making a joke about it. He was a very good man, but in many ways he was a sort of mystery.”

O
NCE THE GUBERNATORIAL
election of 1966 was over, Jack and Rachel headed for a much-needed vacation in the Bahamas, where Jack was quickly caught up in local election fever. The British-ruled, traditionally white-dominated Bahamas seemed about to elect its first black government, and Jack met the most prominent of the rising local politicians, Lynden O. Pindling, of the Progressive Liberal Party. Both as Jackie Robinson the race hero and as a special assistant to Governor Rockefeller, he was warmly received by the younger politicians. The rise of blacks to power in the Caribbean was linked to the growing freedom of blacks in the United States. In addition, the Bahamas could be fertile ground for an American with Robinson’s background and connections.

Over the New Year holiday, Jack and Rachel were back in the Bahamas, just in time for the elections that swept Pindling and his party into power.
Soon Jack was holding discussions with a senior official of the powerful Grand Bahama Port Authority about its interest in “
a small personalized hotel project” to be run by Robinson or Sidney Poitier or “in partnership together.” He was still in the Bahamas a few days later when fifty leaders of the black American press arrived as guests of the Ministry of Tourism. In addition to bracing rounds of golf (including at least one round with Joe DiMaggio, another celebrity visitor), Jack met Pindling and discussed with him ways in which Robinson might assist the Bahamas in pursuing its interests in the United States. The men agreed that Jack would pave the way for Pindling’s first official visit to the United States.

Returning home, Jack officially registered under Section 2 of the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 as an agent for the Bahamas in the United States. On February 26, when Pindling reached New York, Jack supervised his news conference and also saw to it that he met both Mayor Lindsay and Governor Rockefeller. However, this turned out to be just about all that Robinson did for Pindling, who eventually would be accused of corruption. “
Jack discovered he had backed the wrong candidate,” according to Rachel.

About this time, Jack had another disappointment as he came close to realizing one of his persisting dreams: organizing a golf and country club where his family and other black families, and their white friends, could feel at home. “
I can hardly describe,” Rachel said, “what golf meant to Jack and his buddies. Since he didn’t drink or run around, it was really the one time when he could socialize fully with other men, and he loved golf with a passion.”

“
Jack absolutely loved golf,” according to his friend Warren Jackson, who was part of a group of black men who organized an annual golf tournament—with Robinson as official host—that drew hundreds of players to courses across the United States and overseas. “He was a terrific competitor, pretty fierce once he got out there on the course. At the sponsored golf tournaments he was an excellent host. He used all the old Robinson charm—but he could become real testy if you approached him the wrong way once he started playing. His mind was on his game and he wanted to win, and that was that.”

Despite his solid citizenship, the private High Ridge Country Club in Stamford, where he played often as a guest, refused him as a member. (According to one report, a member had complained to another that he was having Robinson as a guest
too often. “Too often? I’ll bring Ralph Bunche next week, maybe he’s O.K.” “Yeah,” came the reply. “You bring Ralph Bunche and I’ll bring my maid.”) According to another report, the male members relented but their wives stopped them. The women did not want
blacks, any blacks, as members. Jack was left to wake up as early as 4:30 a.m. some Saturdays to stake out a good starting time on the overcrowded municipal course.

As far back as 1963, Jack and Bill Hudgins had been hunting for a piece of suitable property; the
Amsterdam News
reported then that the two men “
were looking over an upstate site for a golf course.” Two years later, in 1965, they found their spot: the 136-acre Putnam Country Club in Mahopac, New York, some fifty miles from New York City. The club, predominantly Jewish in its membership, had fallen into financial trouble and was on sale for $1.4 million. A real estate broker arranged for a visit by Robinson, Hudgins, and a few of their friends to play the course. But when the group showed up on November 21, officials of the club at first denied that any appointment had been made, then reluctantly allowed Jack’s party to tee off. However, before their round was over a miracle occurred: the club’s finances were in much better shape than previously thought. The club was definitely not for sale. In January 1966, alleging racial discrimination, the NAACP filed charges on behalf of Robinson and his friends with the State Commission on Human Rights; but the club prevailed.