Jackie Robinson (79 page)

Not for the first time in his life, but now from a source he had never expected, Jack had also become the target of much hate mail—and even death threats. Authorities had just uncovered an alleged black nationalist plot to kill Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young. Again Robinson refused to yield. “
I don’t seek to be anyone’s martyr or hero,” he pleaded, “but telling it like I think it is—that’s the only way I know how to be me.” Accustomed to attacks, he would not bow to these threats. “
I am human,” he wrote. “I like public approval as well as anyone else. But, if I have to be misunderstood and misrepresented because I follow my convictions and speak my mind, then so be it.… In the long run, I’m the guy I have to live with. And if I
ever become untrue to myself and to the black people from which I came, I wouldn’t like myself very much.”

But the new year, 1968, would only further test his courage and resolve. It would be a year largely of death and disappointment, as he and his family, and the nation itself, endured a series of blows for which no one, including Robinson, was well prepared.

F
OR ROBINSON, 1968 OPENED
on a promising note. A new business venture offered an opportunity to succeed where other schemes had stagnated or failed. On January 4, Sea Host Incorporated, a subsidiary of Proteus Foods & Industries, both of Manhattan, hired him to help launch its main project: the sale of franchises for “fast food” restaurants specializing in fish and other seafood. Jack’s main role would be to publicize the project. In addition to seeking out and encouraging potential franchisees, he would secure as much publicity as possible on radio, television, and other media for Sea Host. In return, he would be paid $10,000 a year, $500 for each franchise sold “
through your personal contacts,” as well as stock options and a tiny fraction of the gross sales of each franchise in the operation. Finally, if he wanted to take part in the 1968 presidential elections, he was guaranteed a “sabbatical” without pay.

For Jack, this job represented a hope not only for himself but also for cash-starved blacks eager for a chance to break into business on their own. If in 1968 franchising was still in its relative infancy in the United States, it accounted nevertheless for about ten percent of the gross national product, with almost $90 billion in total sales. With Sea Host, a would-be franchisee needed only about $16,000 to go into business—$2,500 for capitalization costs, $10,000 for the franchise fee, plus an additional sum for equipment and miscellaneous expenses. The franchisee then had a chance to earn between
an estimated $10,000 and $18,000 a year in profit. “
Our aim is to help people help themselves,” Robinson declared. “With the company’s training program and support, almost anyone prepared to work for his income can become a successful Sea Host franchisee.”

Robinson offered a rosy picture, but in almost every way this job was a step down for him. His pay was about a quarter of his last Chock Full o’ Nuts salary. Between him and the president of Sea Host, Wah F. Chin, there was little of the mixture of idealism and practicality that had sparked Jack’s relationship with William Black. Formerly, Jack was the head of personnel; with Sea Host, he was more or less a front man, a “shill” for the product. An internal memorandum laid out the company’s hopes in this respect. In general, the opening of franchises would be trumpeted as something far more significant, “
particularly for ghetto or ethnic areas.” In particular, Robinson’s work with black investors would bring highly favorable publicity.

The “utilization” of Robinson’s prestige in the black community was needed because by 1968, the franchising industry was already plagued by accusations of fraud and deception at the expense of gullible or powerless franchisees. In fronting for a corporation that sought to attract black investors, Robinson was placing his own reputation on the line. “
I think the masses of black people know,” he declared more than a year later, “that Jack Robinson is not going to sell them out for anything.… I have the feeling that the black community, while they don’t always agree with me, at least know I’m not going to sell them out.”

J
ACK’S NEW BUSINESS
did not prevent him from giving his time generously, as always, to help others. On January 26, in Los Angeles, he addressed a fund-raising dinner to help endow a professorship in memory of Karl Everette Downs, his former pastor and guide in Pasadena and employer at Samuel Huston College in Texas in 1945; at the dinner, Jack presented the fund with a check for $5,000, a gift from Nelson Rockefeller. In February, still loyal to the National Conference of Christians and Jews, Jack served as national chairman of its Brotherhood Week. He also spoke out on certain issues of the day. In a short letter to the New York
Times,
he praised the paper for its editorial sympathetic to the singer Eartha Kitt, who was under fire for noisily disrupting a White House luncheon with a protest against the Vietnam War. He joined the national debate about whether or not black athletes should boycott the Olympic Games later that year. While the boycott struck him as unwise, “
I do support the individuals who decided to make the sacrifice by giving up their chance to win an Olympic Medal. I
respect their courage.” As spokesman for a large group of current and former athletes, he pressed the conservative American Olympic Committee to vote not to readmit the Union of South Africa (barred from the 1964 games) to the Olympics because of its commitment to apartheid. Many Americans, he knew, resented mixing sports and politics; but they should try to “
understand the reasons and frustrations behind these protests, and the causes involved, and not just react unfavorably to the mere fact of protest.” He went further. Today’s young athletes, he told the writer Robert Lipsyte, insisted on being heard. “
It was different in my day; perhaps we lacked courage.”

On March 4, Robinson was absorbed in work at his Rockefeller office on West Fifty-fifth Street when a newspaper reporter reached him on the telephone. Did Robinson have any comment? Comment on what? On the news that the police in Stamford had arrested his son Jackie and charged him with possession of marijuana and heroin, as well as a .22-caliber revolver. Early in the morning, narcotics officers had broken up a drug sale in front of the Allison-Scott Hotel in downtown Stamford. Shots were fired both by the police and by Jackie, who fled the scene but was apprehended not far away, on South Street. He was now in the Stamford jail, held on $5,000 bail.

Since returning to the United States, Jackie had been a mysterious, troubling figure to his parents, adrift and aimless in Colorado, where he was honorably discharged by the Army in 1966, or at home in Stamford, unable to remain in a regular job, a shadowy presence in and out of their house. From Colorado Springs one day, a policeman had called to alert them that Jackie might be heading for trouble; when police stopped his car one day for a traffic offense, they had found inside it drug paraphernalia, which Jackie said belonged to a young woman riding with him. Late one night, a local judge in Stamford had called Jack and Rachel to warn them that the police were about to arrest Jackie. Nevertheless, the charge of possession of heroin came as a shock; the idea that his elder son might be a dope addict, or a dope pusher, or both, stunned Jack. Jackie’s sister, Sharon, would recall first hearing the news on her car radio in Stamford: “
I felt hot. Sick. I wanted to scream at someone. Cry out. Blame the faceless-thankless voice on the radio. Smash the dashboard. Crawl into a hole.”

With their local attorney and friend Sydney Kweskin, Jack and Rachel, accompanied by Sharon, went to the gloomy red-brick prison building to post Jackie’s bail. (David was away at a boarding school, Mount Hermon, in Massachusetts.) On the telephone, Rachel had already arranged for Jackie to be accepted at Yale–New Haven Hospital, where she worked, for detoxification and psychiatric evaluation. Outside the station, reporters peppered
Jack with questions and snapped photographs. Roger Kahn, gathering material for
The Boys of Summer,
saw “
a bent gray man, answering questions in a whisper, and drawing shallow breaths, because a longer breath might feed a sob.”

“Sir, are you going to stick by your son?”

“We will, but we’ll have to take the consequences.”

“Were you aware he had certain problems, Mr. Robinson?”

“He quit high school. He joined the Army. He fought in Vietnam and he was wounded. I’ve had more effect on other people’s kids than on my own.”

“How do you feel about
that,
sir?”

“I couldn’t have had an
important
effect on anybody’s child, if this happened to my own.” After answering another question “at length, as if in relief, as if in penance,” Jack continued to speak to the reporters but pressed through their ranks with Rachel and Sharon.

Downstairs they found Jackie slumped in a cell. Rachel and Sharon broke down in tears; Jack was more stoical.

“
Are you all right, son?” he asked, as Rachel reached through the bars to take Jackie’s hand. Eventually Jack posted bail and, with Jackie in tow, left the prison for New Haven. There, Jackie entered the hospital for an extended period of observation and treatment.

On April 7, Jackie’s case was heard before Judge George DiCenzo. No doubt because Jackie was a first offender, and a veteran, and perhaps also because he was Jackie Robinson’s son, he was given a choice of jail or entering a strict rehabilitation program. Judge DiCenzo ordered that charges against Robinson be delayed for two years, during which time Jackie was to undergo treatment and rehabilitation under state supervision. Two court-appointed psychiatrists, Dr. Herbert Kleber and Dr. Robert Willis—both colleagues of Rachel’s at Yale—testified that for about six months before his arrest, Jackie Junior had been addicted to heroin.

At the time of Jackie’s arrest, Jack informed reporters that his son had started smoking marijuana in Vietnam; this was Jackie’s story to him. Gradually the truth came out. Two years later, Jackie would come clean before a United States Senate subcommittee about his drug abuse, which had started in earnest under the abnormal pressures of Vietnam, then accelerated in the United States. “
In Colorado I started getting involved with a lot of the camp followers,” Jackie admitted. “These are people that are prostitutes, gamblers, thieves, drug users and pushers that kind of follow Army towns.” In Colorado, he used mainly marijuana, pills, and cough syrup on a daily basis; then, back in the New York area, “I started using cocaine, heroin, occasionally LSD” and amphetamines; “I was using all types of drugs at this point.” He fell also “into about every type of crime that you
could get into in order to support my habit at this point.” He would steal from other soldiers, or sell marijuana; “I was breaking into houses and after a while I was selling heroin and cocaine.” He now carried guns routinely, as in Vietnam: “I think it was something I got obsessed with over there and fit very well into the image of what I thought was a man … the image of being tough and fighting and this whole thing being what manhood was all about.”

Once Jack and Rachel knew these facts, they were able to put Jackie’s letters from Vietnam into sharper perspective and understand the murderous forces that had driven him over the edge. At first, those letters were simple missives from a young man venturing into the great world, seeking to be all that he could be. Then the letters began to reveal the terrifying pressures on him and the other young American soldiers ordered to Vietnam. If one incident set the tone, it came early, when some other soldiers killed a Viet Cong sniper. “
They tied him to the front of their jeep like a deer,” Jackie wrote his father, “then drove through the village with a loud speaker & had the interpreter tell the people that this is what would happen to all Viet Congs and people who support them. It was a horrible sight.”

Horror soon became routine. His platoon sergeant from Fort Reilly, a man he liked—“he always gave me a fair break”—was killed. In another action, “We lost six men this week, including our executive officer. We also had eleven wounded.” By this time Jackie was sick to his stomach about the war. “This is the most miserable place in the world,” he wrote his father. “I can’t see why we’re fighting for it. When you see somebody get shot you think about what a waste this all is.” Bradley Gordon remembered Jackie telling him later: “Man,
you talk to a guy in the morning, and you’re putting him into a body bag in the afternoon. Or you’re grabbing parts of him, putting them in a body bag.… Man, how can I tell my parents this? How can I tell anyone? No one really understands. Everyone tells me I’ll get over it, I’ll get over it. Man, I have nightmares at night.”

But in Vietnam, military violence was not the only force that shattered ideals. After his relatively congenial years in Stamford, the bitterness between blacks and whites in the U.S. Army over there devastated Jackie. Now he warned Rachel about having his brother, David, grow up in a mainly white world, as he himself had done: “
If he doesn’t learn to talk like he’s colored and get in the groove with
at least
the low-middle class Negro he’s going to get a shock soon.” For one thing, David must learn to dance the way blacks danced. “I didn’t know how to dance,” Jackie wrote, so “I’d get a bunch of hardheads together” and “break up dances.” In fact, the sweep of history had already made David much more aware of race and his African ancestry than Jackie had ever been. “
Jackie had come from a world
of acceptance by whites,” Bradley Gordon said, “but a place where he was an oddity, a famous black man’s son. And then he left that sanctuary and found out that it was a horrible world out there. It got to the point where he couldn’t bring himself to explain one more time what he was about, why he liked anonymity so much. He came back from Vietnam, and he was not the same person. He said, ‘Man, it’s crazy. We’re over there fighting this war, and the racism stinks.’ He was angry. No one understood, he couldn’t talk to anyone.” (Gordon himself would soon understand. Commissioned as an officer in the Air Force at nineteen, he fought in Vietnam and was wounded in the Tet Offensive of 1968.)