Jackie Robinson (83 page)

Still, with Jack’s failing health, Rachel could see the dark closing in. In the fall of 1969, she had resigned her position with the mental health program in New Haven and taken a one-year, unpaid leave of absence from Yale. “
I told everyone that the idea was for me to study,” she said, “to read the mountain of books I had wanted to read but could never find time for. I really did spend a fair amount of time in the library. But I was also more available for Jack and Jackie.” Happy to see Jackie and Sharon turn around their misfortunes and David stay on course, she was nevertheless in growing pain herself because of Jack’s physical deterioration. By this point, she understood that he was dying. Examining Jack’s body, Arthur Logan could not discover a pulse in his legs. In two or three years, he told Rachel, Jack would be dead. “I was very angry at Arthur,” she recalled. “I did not want to hear such news. Jack definitely did not want to hear such news. He would not talk about death. Denial was his greatest prop, and he denied that he was dying. But after a while I knew I had to do something, so I went into therapy in order to learn how to cope with this terrible fact.”

As her sabbatical year drew to a close in the summer of 1970, she seemed to Jack “
like a caged lion with too much spare time.”

In August, Jack felt well enough to join Jesse Jackson, the national director of Operation Breadbasket, and Fannie Lou Hamer, vice-chairman of the Mississippi Freedom Party, in helping to judge a Miss Black America beauty pageant at Madison Square Garden. He and three other members of Jackie Robinson Associates also met with Rockefeller family aides to seek a loan of $150,000 toward the purchase of a black-owned office building in Washington, D.C. But a few days later Robinson was back in the hospital. Chronically tired, with his feet aching and pain throbbing through his legs, he had visited his doctor. Tests revealed Jack’s diabetes in a new, frightening stage; his weight had dropped notably, but his blood pressure and blood sugar were high. He had also suffered a mild stroke. In fact, that month he suffered two mild strokes, the first on his right side, the second on his left. Deceptive in that their effects were hard to see, the strokes left Robinson’s physical strength and his speech virtually unaffected but caused an unnerving loss of balance as well as a substantial loss of sensation on his left side. Most distressingly, they also ruptured blood vessels in his eyes, with episodes of hemorrhaging that seriously damaged the retina and diminished his sight. Jack seemed on his way to blindness.

In September, on what she called one of the most harrowing days of her life, Rachel and Jack watched as their last child, David, left home. Behind the steering wheel of a little yellow English sports car, a 1969 MG Midget, David headed down the driveway, turned left on Cascade Road, and set out alone for Palo Alto, California, to begin his freshman year at Stanford.
Now, after fifteen years, the big house on Cascade Road was a lonesome place. “
It was so traumatic for me, to see David go,” Rachel recalled, “that I took off for Cape Cod and spent three days looking out at the water as I tried to come to terms with what was happening in our lives.”

She returned in time to join Jack on September 14, when he received an honorary doctorate of civil law from Pace University at the dedication of its Civic Center Campus in lower Manhattan, and Terence Cardinal Cooke, the Roman Catholic prelate, was also honored. A week or so later, Governor Rockefeller announced that Robinson would be a deputy manager in his campaign for reelection that fall, when his main opponent was Arthur Goldberg, a former United States Supreme Court justice and ambassador to the United Nations. But Jack’s thoughts were mainly about his failing health. In October, after a persistent wheezing and coughing at night and an oppressive shortness of breath, he went to Minneapolis for a consultation at the celebrated Mayo Clinic. There, mysteriously, despite evidence of severe hypertension and congestive heart failure, with a blood pressure reading of 185 over 115, he was told, apparently, that nothing was wrong with him. Back home, his nighttime coughing and wheezing became worse, as did shortness of breath and an increasingly painful pressure in the middle of his chest. Twice his shortness of breath had become almost unendurable. In these moments of stress, as he told his doctor, his main relief was to lean forward, or to kneel down by his bed and rest his arms helplessly on the side of the bed.

Still, an ailing Jackie Robinson had more energy than most other people. On a sunny Saturday afternoon in October, he and Rachel welcomed about three hundred guests to the grounds of their home for a cocktail party in support of Rockefeller in his bid for reelection. With Rachel striking in a tiger-striped gown matched by a flowing cape of the same material, lately purchased at an African boutique in Harlem, Jack made a bright speech to his guests and urged them to build a better, more purposeful Republican Party.

Above all, he took comfort in his children’s growing sense of fulfillment. Earlier in the fall, Jack and Rachel had visited David in California. The antiwar mood of student life across the nation had reached Stanford, where David greeted his parents dressed in a preppy blue blazer, white shirt, and white cotton trousers—but with the American flag sewn across his bottom. In Washington, D.C., Sharon was happy with her husband, Joe Mitchell, and her studies at Howard. Most profoundly gratifying of all, on November 4, in an informal but unforgettable ceremony in Seymour, Connecticut, attended by the entire family, Jackie graduated from Daytop. In the eyes of even the hardboiled former addicts who ran the facility, he was now clean. Indeed, he
showed promise of becoming an outstanding leader within the organization. Earlier that year, he had testified frankly and in detail about his drug experience before Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut’s Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency in the United States.

To Jack, as he faced the growing ravages of his heart and lung disease and the specter of his increasing blindness, this was a source of sublime comfort as he looked ahead to the few years left to him.

F
EBRUARY
10, 1971, was a special day for the Robinsons, their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Jack surprised Rachel, who loved fine cars, with something special. She had given her 1969 MG Midget to David to drive to Palo Alto. Now Jack gave her, in its place, a sporty convertible two-seater Mercedes Benz 280SL. It was only a token of the gratitude he felt for her love and support of him over the years.

A few days later, he was a patient in the French Hospital again. Feeling poorly, he had gone on February 12 to the New York offices of Dr. Eric Cassell, whose mentor before and after medical school had been Jack’s physician of many years, Dr. Cyril Solomon. Examining Robinson, Dr. Cassell found him in alarming condition and ordered him into the hospital for a series of tests. On February 17, also at Cassell’s insistence, Jack underwent a cardiac catheterization at St. Vincent’s Hospital. A catheter was passed through the groin up into the heart; dye was then pumped into the heart to measure its performance. Dr. Cassell found clear evidence of advanced heart disease caused both by hypertension and by severe blocking of the arteries; he also diagnosed chronic, obstructive lung disease. Cassell put Robinson on strong medication for his heart and his lung troubles and increased his daily dosage of insulin. Jack was also given diuretics that dropped his weight by several pounds.

Once, working for Dr. Solomon, Cassell had gone to the New Yorker Hotel to draw blood from Babe Ruth, who was living there. Although Ruth’s body was wasted, as he slowly succumbed to lung cancer, he had seemed immense to Cassell. Robinson was like Ruth in that way. “
Meeting Robinson,” Cassell recalled, “I thought, ‘This is a big man.’ My response had nothing to do with how much he weighed; it was that he and Babe Ruth were men who inhabited their own authority, who inhabited themselves to the fullest. They knew who they were and what they were about.” Nevertheless, Robinson was also “modest. He was relaxed, he didn’t make a big fuss about things. He certainly did not advertise his celebrity. He was who he was.” He would remain Cassell’s patient for the rest of his life.

After six days at the French Hospital, Jack was discharged. Sending him off, Dr. Cassell pressed on him the need to stick to his medications, to watch his diet, and to walk at least a half-mile every day, to try to force blood into his deteriorating legs. Back home, Robinson tried to keep up his exercising but found the going tough. Physical discomfort was one reason; another reason was psychological. “
Every time I go to do what you want me to do,” he told Dr. Cassell, “all I’m aware of is what I cannot do.” Walking was now painful. Then Jack tried riding a stationary bicycle and found that he liked it better. The circulation in his legs seemed to improve. Over the coming year, his blood pressure would drop from 180 over 110 to 125 over 80, or normal.

Jack’s hospitalization early in 1971 and his growing weakness did not stop him altogether. In January, he had gone to Chicago to speak on behalf of a young political leader in whom he was becoming more and more confident, as he looked for bold, far-sighted new black leaders. His man in Chicago was the Reverend Jesse Jackson, a former disciple of Dr. King in SCLC and now with a firm political base in Chicago through his grass-roots organization Operation Breadbasket, on which Jack had been serving as a board member for some time. Out of this venture, following Jackson’s resignation from SCLC (when he could no longer work amicably with Dr. King’s successor at SCLC, Ralph Abernathy), would come, in December 1971, Jackson’s PUSH—People United to Save Humanity—which he would announce with Jack standing beside him in New York City. “
I have hopes for Jesse Jackson,” Robinson would write. “I think he offers the most viable leadership for blacks and oppressed minorities in America and also for the salvation of our national decency. I think Jesse’s leadership is potentially one of majestic proportions. He is totally dedicated and if we are to arise out of this deepening pit between us as a people, it will be by supporting the kind of leadership Jesse Jackson offers.”

Also in January, Jack had joined other black bankers vigorously protesting the charge by Andrew Brimmer, a black economist on the Federal Reserve Bank, that black banks, because of their high costs and economic isolation, could contribute little to black economic empowerment. Even so, Robinson was well aware that Freedom National Bank might be in some trouble. Over the preceding three years, he had heard whispers about alleged irregularities in some of its loans, leading to bad debts that now threatened its stability. Once, a respected Wall Street figure had warned Jack, without much explanation: “
If you want to save Freedom National Bank, the only way you are going to be able to do it is to take it over and clean house. You are in serious trouble.” Later, Jack had begun to see that officers of the Comptroller of the Currency appeared to be holding Freedom National to a lower standard of efficiency, because it was a black bank, than most other banks. For Jack, this kind of paternalism, with its tacit presumption of black inferiority, was galling. Late in February 1971, as he himself wrote, “I began really digging in.” He also consulted friends who understood the world of finance, such as J. Bruce Llewellyn. “
Jack was a man of deep integrity,” Llewellyn said. “As soon as he knew that something was wrong, he took action to stop it.”

Relying on inside information from a few employees willing to jeopardize their jobs, including the head of the mortgage department, Madeline Walburg, he began his investigation of Freedom National. The result was an extended period of arduous, sometimes contentious work as he found himself pitted against William Hudgins, the president of Freedom National, whose skill and energy had built the institution over the past six years. On May 7, after a particularly acrimonious meeting of the mortgage loan committee, Robinson wrote to Walburg to say that he had been “
particularly impressed with the way you stood firm in your conviction.” Slowly Jack began to convince other members of the board about the gravity of the situation. But he was doing so at some cost to his own health, as he wrote. “
I found myself losing sleep nights
and involved in a great deal of activity at the bank trying to make certain that I had a strong basis for making a move.… The more involved I got with the bank problems, the sicker I became.” Walburg, too, became increasingly nervous and upset; when she suddenly died of a brain hemorrhage in the middle of the bank dispute, Jack took the news hard.

The relationship between him and Hudgins reached a point of no return. Drawing the support of most of the rest of the board, Robinson finally won out; in August, Hudgins announced his resignation as president of Freedom National Bank. With Jack’s consent, and in the interest of stability, Hudgins agreed to stay on as vice-chairman of the board. The change
went smoothly. “At 64, I need more time to spend with my family,” Hudgins told the press. “His contacts and knowledge will mean much to the future capital growth of Freedom,” Robinson added. A new president, approved by Jack, arrived: Robert Boyd, a former professional football player with the Los Angeles Rams and an experienced businessman.