Jackie Robinson and Nixon: Life and Death of a Political Friendship
Here in Yankee Stadium’s locker room after Game 5 of the 1952 World Series, Senator Richard Nixon of California, Republican nominee for vice president, congratulates Jackie Robinson on the Brooklyn Dodgers’ 6-5 win over the Yankees. (The Dodgers ultimately lost in seven games.)
In 1960, Robinson endorsed Nixon for president, declaring that the civil rights commitment of Nixon’s Democratic rival, John F. Kennedy, was “insincere.” In those times, an African-American Republican was by no means unusual. About 39 percent of black voters had supported the re-election of President Dwight Eisenhower and his vice president.
Then, in October 1960, Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed in Georgia on a trumped-up charge. Kennedy made a much-heralded telephone call to King’s wife, Coretta, which helped to get King released. Declining Robinson’s insistence that he intervene in the case, Nixon told him that Kennedy had opportunistically made “what our good friend Joe Louis called a ‘grandstand play.'”
Jackie withstood intense pressure — including from his wife, Rachel — to follow King’s father in switching from Nixon to Kennedy; he later wrote that his decision had “something to do with stubbornness.” As a result, a ballplayer who had withstood death threats in 1947 to break the major leagues’ color barrier was denounced as a “sellout” and “Uncle Tom.” That November, Nixon won only a third of the African-American vote, a crucial factor in his hairbreadth defeat.
Although Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson championed what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Robinson quit his executive job at Chock Full o’Nuts that spring to campaign for Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New York, a Republican, explaining that “we must work for a two-party system, as far as the Negro is concerned.”
But Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater, who opposed the 1964 legislation as unconstitutional. When Rockefeller denounced political extremism at the party’s San Francisco convention, Robinson, a “special delegate,” shouted, “C’mon, Rocky!” As Robinson recalled, an Alabama delegate “turned on me menacingly” before “his wife grabbed his arm and turned him back.”
Spoiling for a fight, Jackie cried, “Turn him loose, lady, turn him loose!” He later wrote with uncharacteristic overstatement that on leaving San Francisco,
“I had a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”
That fall,
Robinson joined the 94 percent of the African-American electorate that backed President Johnson. (Since then, the percentage of the black vote for Democratic presidential nominees has never dipped below the low 80s.) In 1968, furious over Nixon’s courtship of Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who had once led the segregationist “Dixiecrats,”
Jackie backed the Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey.
Jackie Robinson died of a heart attack at age 53, two weeks before the 1972 election. Although President Nixon’s civil rights record was considerably stronger (especially on public schools desegregation) than many understood, he was eager that year to carry the five Southern states that had supported George Wallace’s third-party candidacy in 1968; Nixon felt he had little chance to regain much of the African-American vote.
That March, Robinson, ailing and tired, complained to President Nixon by letter that he was “polarizing this country.” No longer the political optimist of his earlier years, he poignantly wrote his onetime friend, “I want so much to be a part of and to love this country as I once did.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/07/u...e-and-death-of-a-political-friendship.html?hp
