The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (64 page)

Helen Chavez had filled in for her husband’s secretary one day and opened the mail. She found a love letter
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to Cesar, sent by an eighteen-year-old who lived in Mendota, a small agricultural community west of Fresno. The teenager came from a farmworker family. She had gotten involved in the union through her mother, helped on the picket line during a Mendota melon strike, and then spent a summer in La Paz along with three classmates. Helen’s first instinct when she read the love letter was to seek out a friend and ask her to drive to Mendota to confront the teen. Talked out of that plan, Helen left La Paz and moved in with her daughter in Delano. When Helen asked the secretary who normally opened the mail if she had seen similar letters in the past, the secretary lied to protect Cesar and said no. The woman later confessed to Hartmire.

Chavez’s infidelities
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had become common knowledge in certain circles, particularly among those who spent time around him at La Paz. The threats against him, his ability to disappear for unspecified reasons, and his need to travel with trusted guards all facilitated his liaisons. His affairs were not discussed, in part out of deference to Helen, in part because extramarital affairs were common, and in large part because such behavior would not have squared well with the image of the saintly founder and devoted Catholic family man. Just as people did not talk about internal conflicts or purges out of fear the revelations might hurt the movement, they kept quiet about his flirtations and sexual indiscretions.

On a few occasions, Chavez made a point of talking about how women approached him, painting himself as a hapless victim in stories that may have been intended to counter any rumors that surfaced. In the CSO days, he told a story about an angry husband who interrupted a house meeting with a knife and threatened Chavez. “The moment you’re sort of different from other men, there’s a natural attraction,”
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he told a group of union volunteers in the early years. “It has nothing to do with your looks . . . Some women, they get attracted.”

Helen’s anger over the love letter and her absence from La Paz forced the issue into public view. The letters, Chavez claimed, were intended to frame him. He had warned his wife that something like this would happen. “My marriage is on the rocks
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right now, on the fucking ice. I told Helen, ‘I bet you, whatever you want, you’re going to be approached, you better watch out.’ Sure enough, two fucking weeks later, there’s a fucking love letter. In perfect Spanish. It just sort of appeared. When I came back, she’s just going out of her mind.”

Chavez hoped to resolve the situation at a meeting to be moderated by Manuel Chavez. Manuel, whose own affairs were legion, would support Cesar’s testimony about the ways that infiltrators seduced or framed union leaders to gain information. “I have to meet tomorrow at nine to find out if I’m still married or not,” Cesar told the executive board meeting. “It’s really fucking ridiculous. I can’t believe it. But it’s there.”

Chavez extended the cover story to protect his son-in-law Arturo Rodriguez. A volunteer in Coachella had recently been publicly purged after she held meetings among women staff members to discuss security and other issues. Among the accusations Chavez now leveled against her was that she suggested Rodriguez was cheating on his wife, Linda. “I’m feeling some pressure,” Chavez said. “They’re fucking over with my daughter, her marriage. They fucked with Helen, you know. I told Helen this was going to happen. She believed, but didn’t believe it . . . That’s what they do. They’re experts. They’re doing it now. They’re doing it to my wife. They’re doing it to my daughter.”

He cast the net wider. “They almost fucked over Fred Ross in San Francisco,” Chavez said, an apparent reference to Ross’s early affair with Ida Cousino. “Your dad,” Chavez said, turning to Fred Ross Jr. “Remember?”

The only board member who really understood was Huerta, Chavez said. She jumped in to back him up. She talked about men who had approached her over the years with the intention of spying on her and the union.

By the end, everyone went along, some out of conviction, others accepting the inevitable. They wanted to put it behind them and get back to the place where they had once been. Almost as an afterthought, they agreed on the need to “concentrate” on negotiating contracts, at the expense of almost everything else. Only Ganz voted against the resolution.

At the end of the meeting, Drake announced his resignation. Everyone ganged up on him, begging and challenging him to stay. He said it was like being at his own funeral. He agreed to stay.

Two days after the meeting, Cesar and Helen talked at their daughter Eloise’s house. Cesar prepared notes
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for what he called “My Marriage Meeting.” His opening statement indicated that he did not expect to be believed. He wanted to know at the end of the discussion whether he was still married. Number two on the agenda, “My Affair,” included a discussion of the young woman and the letters. Number three was evidence in his defense, which included Manuel and the guards. He ended with some “observations,” including thoughts about the assassination threats, the lack of security, and Helen’s changing role.

Helen moved back to La Paz, ending their most public separation. Some months later, Hartmire presided as the community gathered to pay tribute to the first lady of La Paz on her fiftieth birthday. “Through all of it,” Hartmire said, “she and Cesar, through all the ups and down, they seem to still like each other! It always amazes me. I think the thing that kind of draws us to her most quickly is, she is just so damn real.
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There isn’t an ounce of phoniness in her being.”

The roller-coaster summer meeting of the executive board was prominently featured in the president’s newsletter, with a front-page picture of the board and Cohen. The caption read: “The meeting progressed almost without pause and proved to be the most productive in the movement’s history.”
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Chapter 33

The End Game

It is not difficult to get rid of total failures. They liquidate themselves. Yesterday’s successes, however, always linger on beyond their productive life. We must seek out those sacred tasks of the past that drain needed resources and scarce time, and prune them ruthlessly so we can focus on the future.

When Chavez had lamented the “so-called democracy” that would require him to sacrifice his best people before they turned on him, he singled out Marshall Ganz as a special ally. When they come after me, they will take Ganz out as well, Chavez told Jacques Levy
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in their late-night conversation at the union’s 1973 founding convention.

For more than a decade, Ganz had enjoyed a special closeness to Chavez, a father-son dynamic resented by some and envied by others. Ganz’s father had been a rabbi, and his religious upbringing helped form an early bond with Chavez. Ganz’s relationship with Jessica Govea linked him to a CSO family that had been among Chavez’s earliest supporters. A high school debate champion, Ganz spoke his mind more freely than most. He and Chavez quarreled from time to time but always made up. After Huerta, Ganz had been Chavez’s strongest ideological supporter, committed to the importance of the movement philosophy and strongly opposed to paying wages.

Since the ALRA had passed, however, Ganz had felt increasingly estranged. He was unable to get Chavez’s attention and confused by his preoccupation with the La Paz community. Thrust into the unknown world of elections with little guidance, Ganz learned fast. His fluency in Spanish and comfort in the Mexican culture helped him form relationships with workers in Salinas and figure out the complicated vegetable industry. He immersed himself in strategies to win elections, negotiate, and administer contracts. He was excited by the strength of the ranch committees and his success in building leadership. Ganz was eager to share his new knowledge, but Chavez rebuffed discussions, resenting the intrusion of “real world” issues on his work at La Paz.

In February 1978, without notifying Ganz, Chavez announced that Ganz would be shifted to organizing—a department all but abolished after the decision to concentrate on negotiating more contracts. The switch was motivated, Chavez said, by concern from state officials that if the UFW did not pick up the pace on elections, the Agricultural Labor Relations Board’s budget would be cut.

Ganz responded
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to the abrupt about-face with a thirteen-page, single-spaced letter that detailed everything he found troubling in recent months: Chavez’s lack of interest in substantive issues facing the union. His response to the loss of Prop 14, “the first time the public really rejected us.” The focus on purging “assholes” as “a substitute for dealing with our own problems of administrative incompetence.” Chavez’s annoyance when problems arose. His desperation to sign contracts at any cost, and the message of weakness that sent to employers. His veiled comments at recent meetings about board members having “political interests” that conflicted with Chavez’s plans.

“It was like you locked yourself up in La Paz with your people over there and that the trust which should be shared with the rest of us who worked all these years to help you build this movement is transferred to your ‘co-game players’ and your La Paz folks,” Ganz wrote. “What the fuck political interests are you talking about? Does someone on the board have ambitions to replace you? If so, I don’t know about it. Are those of us on the board some kind of threat to you? If so, I don’t know what it is.”

Ganz felt he had lost Chavez’s trust by questioning his decisions. “If my thinking for myself and arguing for my position is a threat to you and to the union, then I’m ready to leave rather than create an internal division. But I think it’s a bigger threat to the union if you can’t tolerate independence and self-direction among top staff and officers. You cannot build a national union out of ‘yes men.’”

In his anger and hurt, Ganz wrote with more accuracy than he realized; though Ganz found the idea almost inconceivable, yes-men were what Chavez wanted. Rather than respond privately, Chavez brought up the letter at the March 1978 executive board meeting—a further breach of the intimate relationship Ganz had enjoyed. Ganz asked for a private conversation. “He’s the president of the fucking union, Marshall,” Cohen said in annoyance. “He’s not your father.”
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Ganz was coaxed into repeating the points of his letter in a long monologue. Chavez took notes. He scrawled four words on the bottom of his pad: “Let me run union.”
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To run the union, he repeated, he needed the Game. Ganz’s unhappiness became another opening to convince the board to play. The Game, Chavez promised, offered the perfect forum to voice grievances and clear the air. The first Game would be painful, he warned. But “a two, three hour rip-roaring game” would free them to make better decisions. “It’s like hunting two tigers with one bullet,” he said. “You want to take a chance.” Almost everyone who played at La Paz enjoyed the Game, Chavez insisted. Gilbert Padilla immediately disagreed. Plenty of people had confided in Padilla that they found the Game upsetting and destructive. “They come because it’s part of the community; if you don’t come, you’re an asshole,” he told Chavez, who vehemently disagreed. “Let’s go play,”
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Chavez urged the board. “We’ll record it for posterity.”

And so they did. The players knew each other well, knew their vulnerabilities, and knew which attacks would appeal to Chavez. The ten players (Cohen played with the nine board members) included two brothers and two couples—Huerta and Richard Chavez, and Ganz and Govea, who had replaced Philip Vera Cruz on the board.

Chavez had mentioned off and on for two years that he wanted the legal department at La Paz, not Salinas. Ganz gamed Cohen: “The real problem is he’s got his own union going in Salinas. How many unions have you ever heard of that the general counsel, the legal department of the union is 300 miles away from the union? How many of you ever hear of that? But see, he’s got his own thing going.”

Huerta gamed Ganz on developing an independent power base: “I think you’re trying to start your own union.” Then she turned on Govea and accused her of being Ganz’s sidekick: “At the convention we should have just passed a resolution to give Marshall two votes.”

Padilla and Ganz gamed Medina about his ambition and accused him of campaigning to be the union president. “He doesn’t believe in God . . . and he wants to be president of the union!” Huerta said. If he assumed power, she warned, he would bring all the assholes in with him.

Cohen and Huerta gamed Padilla, who had gone around to all the others in recent months in a futile attempt to get them to agree that Chavez had gone crazy. “‘Nutsy,’ is the word, Dolores,” Cohen said.

But they saved their strongest indictments for Chavez. The anger and unhappiness and confusion of the past months spilled out in attack after attack on the union leader. They gamed Chavez hardest on being out of touch with the workers. “He doesn’t know the goddamn members,” Ganz said. “He doesn’t know shit about contract administrations,” Huerta added, recalling the early days of the union when Chavez drove from town to town and spoke with farmworkers all the time.

“He hates the fucking workers,” Richard Chavez said. “He doesn’t know a fucking thing about the field office. He’s trying to make policy for the workers and doesn’t know a goddamn thing about them.” He chastised his brother for shunning the workers whose dues supported the union. (“Think of them as dues-units,” Cohen chimed in sarcastically.) “The workers don’t know who he is anymore. They just know his name.”