The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron by Howard Bryant

Author:Howard Bryant
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Hank, Autobiography, Baseball players, Baseball - United States - History - 20th century, African American baseball players, Sports - General, 20th century, Sports & Recreation, General, United States, Blacks And Sports, Aaron, Baseball, Biography & Autobiography, Sports - Baseball, Baseball players - United States, Sports, Cultural Heritage, Biography, History
ISBN: 9780375424854
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2010-08-15T07:39:53.216000+00:00

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.

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