The Last Hero

by Howard Bryant

  I’ve read some newspapermen saying156 I was just a dumb kid from the South with no education and all I knew was to go out there and hit. They didn’t know how to talk to me and then wrote that I didn’t know how to talk to them … you know how newspapermen build up a lot of stories, and they built ’em about me, me saying this and me saying that. I got wise to ’em, but what could I do? In spring training I hit a triple off Curt Simmons. Well, you know how it is in spring exhibitions, when they keep bringing in pitchers after pitchers. So, when one newspaperman asked me if I knew who I hit that triple off of, I said, “No.” He said, “That was Curt Simmons.” And then they wrote that I didn’t know who the pitcher was … that’s how the story started.

  I’ve saved my money. I have four kids. We live, my wife and me, in a little country town 18 miles from Milwaukee called Mequon. Living’s been very good there. The kids go to school and don’t have any trouble; they play with other kids in the town. Of course, Milwaukee is a pretty good city as far as Negroes are concerned, but all places could stand improvement regardless of where you go. There’s no other Negroes in Mequon but us. My wife has one friend across the street; we have other neighbors who talk to us. Baseball has done a lot for me, given me an education in meeting other kinds of people. It has taught me that regardless of who you are and how much money you make, you are still a Negro.

  The mainstream baseball press did not quite know what to do with this new Henry Aaron, especially the Henry who, in his emerging sensibility, channeled the civil rights rhetoric that sowed the seeds for what would become the mind-set of black Americans. The urgency concerning civil rights revealed itself on many important fronts. But the insular baseball world—the writers, the coaches, players, and executives—was confounded by what appeared to be sudden and expansive dimensions to Henry’s character, and this would remain true for much of the rest of his playing career, through the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, when it was difficult to be an American and not have an opinion on the massive upheaval of the times. In general, the writers did not do much to expand on the emerging thread of civil rights, though a few writers, such as Dick Schaap, found the confluence of a national civil rights movement and the growing outspokenness of black professional athletes to be not only a fascinating story line but also in many ways an explanation for the drive and hunger of this generation of exceptional performers. While the daily press and the more austere Sports Illustrated were slow to take up the issue, Sport magazine excelled in exploring the impact of the burgeoning civil rights movement on the sports industry.

  I COULD DO THE JOB

  By Hank Aaron With Jerome Holtzman

  The Braves’ star names the Negroes—and includes himself—who could manage in the major leagues. He also discusses the problems they might have.

  —SPORT, October 1965

  The writers listened to Henry and did not believe he had simply evolved politically, as had so many Americans during that period. Instead of approaching him as a serious political athletic figure, the writers attempted to ascribe a motive for Henry’s sudden interest in topics that went beyond the batter’s box. Who was putting ideas in his head? The Henry they knew cared only about hitting and sleeping. He did not fire political torpedoes. That was territory belonging to Jackie Robinson or Jim Brown, Bill Russell or that new explosive upstart Cassius Marcellus Clay. This new Henry, quoting Baldwin, channeling Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., analyzing the philosophies of both, clearly had to be the by-product of outside influence. Somebody had to be whispering in his ear.

  Henry’s initial approach to the disbelieving press was to forgive their past indiscretions and move forward, which revealed a larger question: Why didn’t Henry turn on the press? He was famous and powerful. He was, by the mid-1960s, on a clear Hall of Fame path. He was at long last bigger than anyone else on his team, and that included Mathews. And yet he did not make the writers pay for the past transgressions of characterizing him so poorly, even cruelly. He would be angered by Furman Bisher’s original profile in The Saturday Evening Post nearly a decade earlier, carrying the scar from that original article into his sixties. Bisher stood by his profile of Henry even decades later. Instead of excommunicating the people who had hurt him in the past, Henry in later years would collaborate on a book deal with Bisher.

  One easy way to ignite Henry’s fuse was to assume (as so many writers did) that he rustled himself out of bed and hit line drives. He would read the local papers and The Sporting News and crave that the writers would understand the work that it took to read pitchers, to learn their deliveries (Drysdale, for all his fearsome power, always released the ball from the same point), and what pitches they threw when the sweat began to pour (Gibson? Hard inside, but always think slider away). But when the students of the game got their due, Henry was rarely if ever listed on the attendance sheet. They said this new kid Pete Rose kept a book on how every pitcher in the game got him out. Maury Wills had his own book, a list of pitchers he stole bases against and their strengths and weaknesses. There was a story that went around that Lou Brock even filmed opposing pitchers. Henry was every bit a student of hitting, but he felt the writers treated him as a savant, a freak of nature who was given a gift that did not require honing.

  His friends would describe him as gentle and nonconfrontational, inwardly driven but outwardly cool, and that was the reason he didn’t often correct the misconceptions. In later years, when he would become a transcendent figure in his sport, beyond daily characterizations, Henry would merely give up, saying he did not feel any sentiment he projected would be accurately portrayed in the press and thus he summarily ignored the image shapers. They weren’t going to give him the respect as a smart hitter. They weren’t going to allow him living space other than in comparison to Mays, a comparison he would always lose on style alone. They weren’t going to take him seriously as an influential social figure. They would never listen to him the way he wanted to be heard, so what was the point of explaining his positions to the writers? On this point, Henry was resigned. “It never did any good,”157 he would say. “I would try to correct them, and they would get the correction wrong, and I’d have to correct that. So I just let people say whatever they were going to say.” That left it to the growing and committed horde of Aaron protectors. “People have been treating this man158 like he is dumb for 35 years and it gets so tiring,” recalled Allan Tanenbaum, who first met Henry in the early 1970s and would be a business associate and friend for nearly forty years. “Henry doesn’t seem to mind. He stopped caring about that stuff a long time ago, but I certainly do. He does not deserve this.”

  Bill White, who also considers Henry a lifelong friend, believed that a little bit of Mobile always lurked inside of him. He didn’t confront because the South was still talking to him. “It always bothered me159 when people would criticize Henry for not being more vocal. People don’t understand how ingrained that hesitation about talking to whites in a certain way, or giving the impression that you’re getting out of line really is for blacks from the South. When you come from other places, you can say, ‘I don’t give a shit.’ When you’re from down there, talking like that could cost you your life.”

  As Henry began to cultivate his new outspokenness, the baseball insiders first looked to the woman in Henry’s life, Barbara. They felt it was Barbara, considered more short-tempered than Henry, who was the one pushing him to be more public on behalf of blacks.

  Henry would voice displeasure regarding the state of race relations in his sport and he would be dismissed as channeling Barbara, who had put “big words” and “big ideas” into his head, but the sentiment never lost its intensity. The writer Furman Bisher would consistently parry Henry’s latest stance on civil rights by essentially calling him a pawn. “Henry Aaron is a nice man,”160 Bisher said of Henry in 2008. “But he is easily led.”

  BY PURE HAPPENSTANCE, it was Jackie Robinson who indirectly wound up being responsible for Henry’s half century of loyalty to the Democratic
party. For years, Henry had sought to pattern himself after Robinson in being a person of substance outside of the baseball diamond. And that was fine, except that Jackie Robinson was a Republican.

  Almost as soon as the 1960 presidential campaign began, there was no greater irritant to John F. Kennedy than Jack Roosevelt Robinson. From the start, Robinson was unimpressed with the junior senator from Massachusetts, from his noncommittal position on civil rights to his woefully limited personal contact with black people to his lack of intimate knowledge of the black condition in general. Robinson was especially annoyed by Kennedy’s early and mistaken belief that he could cultivate many of the southern politicians responsible for some of the most oppressive racial conditions in the country and still count on blacks to support him. Robinson had first met with Kennedy in 1959 and came away convinced that he could not support Kennedy for president. Aside from Kennedy’s politics, much of the reason was personal style: Robinson did not think the Kennedy brothers—John and Bobby—were particularly good listeners.

  Robinson developed important relationships with two men who would cause considerable consternation to Kennedy. The first was Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Jr., the Minnesota senator, who was running for the Democratic nomination for president against John F. Kennedy.

  The second was the vice president himself, Richard Milhous Nixon, who was seeking the Republican nomination and was virtually unopposed. Nixon and Robinson had met years earlier, and Robinson was taken by Nixon’s impressive recall of his career at UCLA, and the two would forge a warm—if not curious, given both the cultural leanings of both men and the period of seismic change occurring in America during the growth of their association—and lasting friendship. Politically, Robinson was registered as an independent, but his politics leaned toward the Republican party of the early 1960s, which had not yet adopted the rigid platform that would define it a generation later.

  ROBINSON DECIDED EARLY that either man would be better for black America than would Kennedy, and early in the political season, both Nixon and Humphrey made earnest attempts to cultivate Robinson. Robinson was a tireless correspondent, and in personal letters to both men, his voice was fiercely single-minded in the area of civil rights, but also tinged with a certain element of romance, perhaps a hope that, like he had on the baseball diamond, individuals committed to civil rights could overcome both party and societal opposition to advancements of civil rights legislation. Thus, Robinson’s letters contained a certain personal fondness for Nixon. It was a position that would gain Robinson great criticism, especially from black members of the Democratic party—Adam Clayton Powell, for instance—who believed Robinson relied too heavily and too naïvely on his belief in Nixon the man, instead of following two far more telling indicators regarding the vice president: his voting record and the company he kept. It was an incongruity that exposed Robinson to the stinging charge that off of the base paths, perhaps the most daring and courageous baseball player of his time was well out of his league.

  When Robinson corresponded with Humphrey, he wrote directly and boldly, both men speaking candidly of their common purpose in expanding civil rights legislation as well as changing the attitudes of the country’s populace. Unlike Nixon’s, Humphrey’s voting record reflected his passion for civil rights. With Nixon, the letters took on a more personal approach, but Robinson regarded Humphrey as a serious man of honor and principle.

  As the Wisconsin primary neared, Robinson decided he would campaign for Humphrey, with one caveat: Should Humphrey fail, he would dedicate his energies toward a Nixon victory over Kennedy.

  ON FEBRUARY 3, 1960, Humphrey had been alerted by Frank Reeves, a black Democratic operative, that Robinson could be a potential ally. Among the states that held primaries, Wisconsin represented a key battleground, and in the weeks before the primary, Reeves attempted to cultivate Robinson, hoping he would use his formidable influence with black voters to gain support for the Humphrey campaign.

  February 3, 1960

  MEMORANDUM TO SENATOR HUMPHREY

  FROM FRANK D. REEVES

  SUBJECT: Jackie Robinson

  Pursuant to general agreement,161 arrangements were made for me to discuss personally with Jackie Robinson whether a) he would be willing to sign a letter to be sent to a selective list of Negroes, endorsing and urging support for Senator Humphrey’s candidacy, and b) he would be willing to go to Wisconsin and D.C. to support and campaign. Bill Gruver arranged a luncheon meeting for me with Robinson in New York City on 1 February, 1960.

  On March 30, 1960, Vice President Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, typed a letter to Nixon that explained Robinson’s potential interest in the Nixon campaign.

  To: RN

  From: RMW

  Fred Lowey called162 and wanted to talk with you. I told him you were completely tied up and he left the following message.

  He would like very much to talk with you for one minute in the next couple of days in connection with the following: He had lunch yesterday with Jackie Robinson. He stressed, of course, he did not need to tell you how important Jackie was as far as the Negro vote was concerned. He feels that with the slightest persuasion Robinson could be swung around and would come on the Nixon bandwagon. To use his terms, “Robinson is more or less considered a God up here.”

  I asked him specifically what Robinson said and Lowey said the story is he is first of all interested in Humphrey but he feels Humphrey doesn’t have a chance and his second choice would be you. Fred Lowey thinks it is very important that you get together with Robinson so that he can get to know you better. I told him that you had talked with him and that you have had correspondence with him in the past.

  Ten days later, Nixon wrote that Robinson could be an asset to his presidential campaign. The letter also underscored Nixon’s inherent suspicion, a characteristic that would define—and in time ultimately destroy—his political life.

  April 10, 1960

  To: RHF

  From: RN

  I think Fred Lowey163 has a point with regard to seeing Jackie Robinson. I would suggest the next time we are in New York that we arrange to have him drop in for a visit. Of course, we must remember that he is now employed as a columnist for the New York Post and that he will be under great pressure from his editor Wechler to take whatever nominee the Democrats select. As a matter of fact, I think a letter from me to him at this point might be in order.

  To the Kennedys, friends could be more important than money. Friends, in certain cases, were like money, and, like any important form of currency, they existed to mitigate the effect of unexpected eventualities. That Robinson posed a powerful, unpredictable threat in what was expected to be an extremely close race was obvious, both to Kennedy and his staff, to Humphrey, and certainly to Robinson. Not so obvious was exactly what to do about him.

  And it wasn’t just that Robinson was a living legend; he was a legend with a platform. In 1959, Robinson agreed to write a thrice-weekly column for the New York Post. The column appeared on the sports page, but Robinson was given leeway to write about any subject that interested him. To the dismay of Kennedy, Robinson, by the end of 1959, wrote of politics almost exclusively.

  That was when the old man164—Joseph P. Kennedy, patriarch of the family, whose financial wealth was rivaled only by the wealth of his connections, former ambassador to the Court of St. James—stepped in. It was the resourceful Joe who knew whom to talk to in Wisconsin. Kennedy contacted Joe Timilty, one of his flamboyant and loyal (if not completely scrupulous) Boston associates and directed Timilty to get in touch with Duffy Lewis, the Braves traveling secretary. The connection with Lewis came, naturally, from Boston, when Lewis was (with Harry Hooper and Tris Speaker) part of Boston’s Million-Dollar Outfield, winning championships with the Red Sox back in the teens, and when Joe Kennedy was what he always would be: the power behind the power. It was Joe who understood at once that the best way to neutralize the famous Jackie Robinson was to enlist the most famous black man in the state of Wisc
onsin, Henry Aaron. Understanding the power of advantage, Joe also asked Lewis to recruit the second most popular black man in the state, as well. And that was how both Henry Aaron and Billy Bruton enthusiastically agreed to campaign on behalf of John F. Kennedy for the 1960 Wisconsin primary.

  For the first time, Henry was in the act, beyond the batter’s box. Bruton and Henry traveled throughout the state on behalf of Kennedy. In the heavily black areas of Milwaukee, where the city’s black population comprised virtually that of the entire state, Henry stood firmly for Kennedy while his hero, Robinson, went on the attack, both in his Post column and on the campaign trail.

  When the primary ended, Kennedy had scored a decisive victory over Humphrey, beginning the end of Humphrey’s campaign. Henry would always talk about his campaigning for Kennedy as one of the significant moments in his life. Two years later, with Kennedy in office, Timilty wrote to Larry O’Brien, Kennedy’s top aide, about obtaining a token of appreciation that Henry would treasure.

  March 3, 1962

  My Dear Larry,165

  You will recall that during the Wisconsin Primary Campaign we needed the services of some Colored ball players to offset Jackie Robinson who appeared for Humphries [sic].

  At the suggestion of the Ambassador I consulted Duffy Lewis and he obtained the services of the following players, who made personal appearances and speeches for us:

  Lou Burdette

  Hank Aaron

  Bill Bruton