However, even in mourning for Kennedy, he was looking ahead. His column about the assassination ended with a call for Republicans to line up behind Rockefeller as a candidate for the presidency in 1964. His reasoning was easy to follow, at least while observers still assumed that Lyndon Johnson was at heart a segregationist unlikely to pursue the civil rights policies initiated by the Kennedys: “If the Democratic Party chooses President Johnson as its standard-bearer in 1964,” he wrote, “and if the Republicans select Barry Goldwater, where will the Negro stand?”
ON DECEMBER 26, at the end of one of the most wrenching years in American history, Jack headed for Jamaica in the West Indies on a vacation he badly needed. The guest of Hugh Shearer, the second-in-command in the government of Prime Minister Alexander Bustamante, he relaxed at the luxurious Runaway Bay Hotel on the North Coast of the island with Rachel, David, David’s friend Eddie Allen, and Jack’s ghostwriter, Al Duckett. Independent only since 1962, Jamaica seemed in stark contrast to the United States on the question of race. With its motto “Out of Many, One People,” it seemed to epitomize true democracy and effortless racial integration. After a touch of rain on their first day, the tropical skies were clear and blue and the nights heavenly. Jack and Rachel loafed in the sun and tried to think as little as possible about Chock Full o’ Nuts.
In his first column of the New Year, 1964, Jimmy Booker in the New York Amsterdam News offered a prediction: “Jackie Robinson and Chock Full o’ Nuts will part company whether he gets that state post or not.” By the first week of February, Robinson was indeed out, with his resignation to take effect officially on February 28, almost seven years to the day after he joined the company. Ostensibly, his departure was amicable. Jack was leaving to join Rockefeller’s presidential campaign as one of six deputy national directors. “We’ll miss Jackie,” Black told the press, “but it was his wish to enter politics.… Our 1,500 employees and I wish him good luck.” At first, Jack, too, put a bright face on his leaving. But a few weeks later, when he at last commented on it directly, he was terse: “I did not want to be in any job where I would be a figurehead.” Scarcely mentioning Black’s name, he said nothing that could be construed as praise but also lashed out at no one. He seemed more baffled than angry by what had transpired. But given the range of Jack’s activities, and the nature of his political sympathies, the leeway Black had granted him for seven years was extraordinary.
Now, in the middle of his life, two major roads lay ahead. Each had its own peril. One involved his continuing work in politics, and especially his relationship with Rockefeller. That way was uncertain, ill defined; in any event, it seemed intrinsically limited. The other—more dangerous, because his ability to earn a livelihood was directly at stake—involved business. His prospects here were slim. In the late winter of 1964, Robinson was now truly on his own.
CHAPTER 15
On the Killing Ground
1964–1968
Every dire development which I had envisioned … is coming to pass.
—Jackie Robinson (1964)
ON JANUARY 31, 1964, Jack passed his forty-fifth birthday well aware that he was at a watershed in his life. His seven-year career as a company executive was drawing to a close without a similar job anywhere in sight. The civil rights movement, in which he had invested much of his hopes, and which was once united, was coming apart in ways that threatened to leave him more and more isolated. His future in electoral politics, which was increasingly tied to Nelson Rockefeller, was also uncertain. At home, his relationship with his son Jackie had soured into distrust and silence. Worst of all, although he had recovered from his brush with death in Mount Vernon Hospital the year before, the decline in his health was beginning to accelerate. Diabetes was placing a growing strain on his eyes and his legs, and ultimately on his heart.
Feeling the danger but ever optimistic, Robinson put on the brightest face he could muster as he weighed his chances in business. “The time is ripest now,” he insisted in his column, “for the Negro to gamble and go into serious business for himself because the opportunities are greatest today.” In the coming years, Jack would find himself caught up in a wide variety of ventures. Some were a continuation of old interests, others were new. At one time or another, he would launch or help to launch serious projects involving banking, public relations, life insurance, real estate development and construction, books, radio and television broadcasting, and professional football. He also found time for an array of other related activities—from serving on the board of directors of the New York State World’s Fair (scheduled to open in the spring of 1964) to working as elected treasurer of the Negro Actors Guild of America, which he did in 1963 and 1964. According to J. Bruce Llewellyn, who would become one of the most powerful blacks in the American financial world, “Jack had what I would call a pioneering competitiveness. But that makes the road doubly harder. It’s tough enough to be a good competitor, but it’s really tough to be a pathfinder, making your own way through the woods, so to speak. And he was always doing that, making new paths, as a black man who wanted to be an entrepreneur.”
But politics was foremost in his mind even as he cleaned out his office at Chock Full o’ Nuts. On January 3, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona had announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for President of the United States. Jack’s view of the Republicans was complicated. The previous August, in the Saturday Evening Post, he had bared his central anxiety with a controversial article, “The G.O.P: For White Men Only?” Robinson saw “a striking parallel” between the Black Muslims and Goldwater Republicans: “Both groups want to detour from the highway to racial integration. Both groups feel they can reach their goals by traveling the road of racial separation.” Goldwater, by adhering to a rigid states’-rights position and by appearing to court the extremist John Birch Society and even the Ku Klux Klan, had become the Devil incarnate for Robinson. Other leading Republicans also failed the crucial civil rights test, including Everett Dirksen, the silver-haired, oracular, but reactionary senator from Illinois; the former actor Ronald Reagan, once a liberal and now a rising conservative star in California; and Richard Nixon himself, stirring again after declaring himself dead in 1962. “The danger of the Republican Party being taken over by the lily-whiteist conservatives,” Jack had argued once in the Amsterdam News, “is more serious than many people realize.” That the Republicans had targeted the South with “Operation Dixie” was well known. But, he asked, “is Operation Dixie calculated to corral Negro as well as white votes—and if not, why not?”
Increasingly, even as many pundits wrote off Rockefeller’s chances of being nominated, especially following his recent divorce and remarriage, Jack saw him as the sole hope of the party. “I am proud of Governor Rockefeller,” he proclaimed. “He has once again displayed his deep concern for justice and human rights.” The zeal Jack brought to his new role as a deputy director of the Rockefeller campaign surprised some observers. On January 29, the fierceness of his speech at a fund-raising dinner and his sheer hard work for the event earned the gratitude of one party loyalist for “the most effective work which you did in that capacity.” Impressive with black voters, Jack also attracted younger voters, black and white. On February 28, the New York Young Republican Club, resisting Goldwater’s spell, presented Jack with its annual War Memorial Award for humanitarian service. A month later, he scored with a youthful audience again when he took part in a mock Republican Convention at the Perkiomen School in Pennsburg, Pennsylvania. There he spoke grimly of the results of the Wisconsin Democratic primary, where George Wallace swept twenty-five percent of the vote. “What can they possibly think of us in Africa?” Jack asked his audience, incredulous. “When a man—a crazy man like Wallace—can go into a Northern state and draw 25 percent of the vote, then there is something very seriously wrong.”
On cross-country trips to campaign for Rockefeller in primaries, Jack hit hard at Goldwater—harder in most ways than Rockefeller himself ever struck. In Por
tland, Oregon, Jack left little unsaid. “If we have a bigot running for the presidency of the United States,” he said, “it will set back the course of the country. Rockefeller must beat Goldwater in the primary.” He even urged Democrats in the audience to switch party affiliation temporarily in order to vote against Goldwater in the primary: “If you want to go back being a Democrat after the election that’s your privilege.” (In an upset, Rockefeller won in Oregon.) In May, as the featured speaker at a gala dinner at Concordia College in Minnesota, he spoke of the election in almost spiritual terms. “This is a struggle to redeem the soul of America,” Robinson insisted, as he warned of a possible race war resulting from the extremism of Birchers and Klansmen. “The Negro is not interested in avenging the past, but in enriching the future. How fatal it would be if we came face to face with each other in armed camps of white versus Negro.” The rising popularity of Wallace in the North, and of Goldwater across the nation, was a catastrophe. “I feel sorrow,” he said, “when Gov. Wallace can come into a northern liberal state and pile up hundreds of thousands of votes. It is tragic that a madman can do this.”
By early May, polls showed a dead heat between Goldwater and Rockefeller among voters in general; but a Gallup poll taken of Republican Party members told a different tale: Rockefeller had barely nine percent of the party faithful behind him. For Robinson, this was a grave disappointment. He would also support Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts or William Scranton of Pennsylvania; but under no condition would he vote for either Goldwater or Nixon, against whom Robinson had turned decisively once Nixon had declared his support of Goldwater. On June 2, Jack was thus in a difficult spot when the California primary wrote finis to Rockefeller’s hopes and assured Goldwater of the nomination. “I never could nor never will buy Goldwater,” Jack stated unequivocally. “In my opinion he is a bigot, an advocate of white supremacy and more dangerous than Governor Wallace.” Senator Jacob Javits of New York also refused to support Goldwater, because, he said, he was an American first. “I am a Negro first,” Robinson said; supporting Goldwater was out of the question. On June 15, speaking to an overflowing crowd of restless blacks in still-segregated St. Augustine, Florida, Jack urged them to march for their rights—“This is the time for action”—and to vote Democratic if Goldwater won the nomination.
On June 27, he flew to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to meet with Governor Scranton, who had attracted most of the anti-Goldwater forces. Robinson left the meeting assured only that Scranton would try hard to influence the party platform away from right-wing views and toward a liberal position on civil rights for blacks. The next day, Jack was in Sasser, Georgia, along with Martin Luther King Jr., for the rededication of the three black churches rebuilt, largely through Robinson’s fund-raising efforts, after their torching in 1962. A few days later, taking the last vacation they would ever have as a family, the Robinsons drove west from Connecticut to San Francisco, the site of the convention. They went by way of the finest natural sights in America, the Grand Canyon in Arizona and the Grand Tetons in Wyoming, where they were guests of Nelson Rockefeller at the family ranch there. “We had a beautiful time on the way out,” Rachel recalled, “and an entertaining stay at the Rockefeller ranch. Jack was never one to love the wilds, and he hated mosquitoes. But I noticed that he sat on the Rockefeller porch with the insects eating him alive and never said a word. He was thrilled to be there, to help plan the convention fight.”
In San Francisco at the Cow Palace, the site of the convention, Jack quickly united with the few blacks accredited as delegates or alternate delegates; out of 1,303 delegates, they accounted for slightly more than a dozen. Their plight reflected the unpopularity of any liberal presence at the convention. A move to condemn the Klan and the John Birch Society also foundered, and lofty talk about the “neighborhood school” concept made it clear that many delegates favored segregation. But Jack would not surrender quietly. When local church and labor groups sponsored a Freedom March to the City Hall plaza, he gamely joined a throng of about thirty thousand people despite the fact that he had trouble keeping up. “Jackie Robinson looked,” one reporter wrote, “as though he was having some trouble with his old knee injury as he marched. At one point he was limping along until he sat for some minutes on the hood of an NBC radio car. Evidently the rest did the trick because he came swinging into the Plaza under his own steam.”
Inside the convention, he did his best to make his presence felt. He helped bring together most of the black delegates and alternates in meetings to plan strategy in the face of the wholesale defeat of Scranton’s liberal amendments and Goldwater’s sweep of entire state delegations, such as that of Ohio. Out of this group would come the National Negro Republican Assembly, which sought to advance black interests within the party. In San Francisco, Robinson was “undoubtedly the leading light and spirit,” according to one reporter, “in a relentless fight for the party and the principles he believes in.” But for Jack, the highlight of the convention was Rockefeller’s doggedly noble performance in addressing the convention, when a torrent of boos, taunts, and jeers by Goldwater supporters all but drowned out his speech. Finding himself behind the Alabama delegation, Robinson became such a vocal one-man cheering section that he almost got into a fist fight with another delegate after someone allegedly threw a lighted cigarette or some sort of corrosive on the jacket of a Rockefeller supporter. For Jack, Rockefeller’s courage would remain vivid. Two years later, he would write that it had been “a classic and splendid sight to observe this man standing tall in a hostile atmosphere, fighting with all the vigor and eloquence at his command.”
Goldwater won nomination on the first ballot. In his acceptance speech, he offered his dictum that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” and “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” These words further alarmed his opponents, including Robinson. Thus when, after the convention, Goldwater reached out to him, Robinson was not receptive. On July 25, he sent Jack a letter that was half conciliatory, half a rebuke. Robinson had attacked him “rather viciously on several occasions” publicly without seeking to ascertain in person the senator’s views. Now Goldwater “would deem it a great pleasure,” he assured Jack, “to sit down and break bread with you sometime” and explain his positions.
But if Goldwater expected a friendly response to this letter, which he made clear would soon be public, he did not get it. In a reply that Jack also made public, he offered a long, scathing list of questions that Goldwater might answer in the private meeting he proposed. These included queries about his opposition in the Senate to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, his silence on certain brutal crimes against civil rights workers that summer, his ties to the John Birch Society, and the treatment of Rockefeller at the convention. No rapprochement was possible between the two men. “Is it unity you seek or uniformity,” Jack asked rhetorically, “compromise or conformity, cooperation or complaisance?”
For Jack, his duty was now clear. Acting once again as an apparent renegade in party politics, he swung his support to Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota in the Democratic Party. He did so even though he understood that Johnson would be nominated for the presidency. Humphrey’s vigorous efforts throughout the spring to move the Senate to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had earned for him Robinson’s continuing support, which in turn moved Humphrey: “Your understanding and support mean a great deal to me.” When, after the San Francisco convention, Humphrey wrote Robinson to lament that it was “truly a great national tragedy” to see extremists capture the Republican Party, Jack volunteered to campaign on behalf of the Johnson-Humphrey ticket.
Jack did not understand how any right-thinking American could support Goldwater, and his severity on this matter embraced even Rockefeller. On October 7, after the governor set aside the memory of his humiliation at the Cow Palace and came out for Goldwater, Jack rebuked him in a stinging letter. “You know and I know,” he wrote, “that a Goldwater victory would result in violence and bloodshed. His can
didacy reeks with prejudice and bigotry.… It seems to me that to support him is to reject the ideals and principles for which the Rockefeller name has always stood. Your doing so is one of the most disappointing things that has ever happened to me.” Robinson became national chairman of the Republicans for Johnson Committee.
In November, Johnson and Humphrey crushed Goldwater and his running mate, William E. Miller. But to Jack’s disappointment, Robert Kennedy, despite Jack’s vigorous support of the incumbent, Kenneth Keating, a liberal Republican, won election to the Senate from New York. It was “inconceivable to this writer,” Robinson had written, “that New Yorkers will be so blinded by the Kennedy glamour that they will forget the splendid job” done over the years by Keating. In fact, blacks and whites alike rushed to support Kennedy. Robinson continued to hope for a revival of inclusiveness and compassion among the Republicans, and to believe that the African-American future depended on having a black presence on both sides of the party divide. “We must have a two-party system,” he insisted. “The Negro needs to be able to occupy a bargaining position.” Or, as he put it elsewhere, “A split ballot can mean a united nation.”
EARLY IN 1964, Robinson was also haunted by the fear that the March on Washington and the killing of Evers and Kennedy, among others, had been a terrible watershed in the nation’s history. Growing gloomy about America, soon he was talking about a white backlash in response to “the Negro Revolution of the summer, fall and winter of 1963.” But he also saw a new bitterness among young blacks. “I am no race leader, no social scientist,” he admitted to a reporter, “and claim no special wisdom as a spokesman or analyst. Yet, every dire development which I had envisioned … is coming to pass.” In large part, he was alluding to an epidemic of crime in the black communities, including violent crimes against whites fueled by racial rage. Lamenting “the atmosphere of hate which seems to be spreading throughout the land,” he traced much of it to Kennedy’s death, which had demoralized the nation. “We were a saddened people, shaken up by the naked exposure of hatred”; yet now there was “more disunity among Americans today than ever before.”
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