The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (29 page)

Chavez blocked out May
³¹
to campaign and make speeches around the state. He traveled through cities in the San Joaquin Valley where just a few years earlier he had struggled to attract a handful of workers to meetings. He marveled to Drake as people turned out in droves. On college campuses, where McCarthy had strong support, Chavez told students that Kennedy was the candidate the farmworkers wanted. “And some people would say, ‘All right, if that’s what the workers want, we’ll work for Kennedy,’” Chavez recalled.

In the final weeks, Chavez took a hundred farmworkers and volunteers to Los Angeles and ran the campaign in the heavily Chicano areas of the city. He divided East Los Angeles into precincts and assigned several workers to each precinct. They, in turn, were assigned to blocks, where they walked door to door, hitting every registered Democrat four times. The first visit was to test the waters, and they found strong support for Kennedy and for their own cause. “We were extremely popular,”
³²
Chavez said. “They knew all about the farmworkers and they liked them very much because they’re only about a generation removed from farm work.” The second visit was to ask for volunteers, the third to drop off literature, and the final visit, a few days before the election, was a reminder to vote.

For Chavez, the only thing unusual about this campaign was that he did not have to worry about finding money for gas, food, or supplies. The career politicians running the Kennedy campaign, on the other hand, found his organization astonishing. When Walter Sheridan, a Kennedy campaign coordinator, first met Chavez, he had a typical reaction: Chavez did not look like a leader of anything. He was short and slouched over, with small hands and a weak handshake. Then Sheridan watched Chavez
³³
run a meeting. The discipline was complete. Whatever he told them to do, they did. At the end of every meeting, when he had carefully explained what they should do, Chavez put the plan up for a vote. Then they broke into the rhythmic applause that had become the farm worker movement clap—starting slow and gradually speeding up, growing louder and louder as the clapping grew faster and faster.

On election eve,
³⁴
Chavez organized a fiesta with a mariachi band, which cost the Kennedy campaign $500. Sheridan invited Chavez to bring all the workers to the party the next night. Chavez said they would be delighted, and could they bring the mariachis as well? There was no room, the word came back. Well, then they would go someplace else, Chavez told Sheridan sweetly. It was no problem. It was just that the workers had voted, and they wanted the band. Sheridan told him to bring the mariachis.

On election day, twenty cars with loudspeakers drove through the streets of East Los Angeles making announcements in Spanish while teams knocked on doors and offered rides. In some precincts, the turnout was 100 percent—more than twice the normal rate. Kennedy carried the city, and the results in Los Angeles propelled him to victory in the state.

Chavez, a couple of hundred farmworkers, and the mariachi band all arrived at the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard for the victory party. The candidate was still upstairs in his suite, but the results were already clear. Chavez was tired, and he slipped out early. Kennedy requested that Chavez be on the platform for the victory speech, but he was nowhere to be found. So Dolores Huerta took his place. She was just a few feet from Kennedy when he was shot.

Within two months, two iconic American figures had been assassinated: King, already a legend, and Kennedy, heir of the Camelot dynasty. In Delano, they mourned the death of Robert Kennedy for political and personal reasons. And they began to worry about Chavez’s safety. As Jerry Cohen wrote to a friend: “The attitude now is that sooner or later
³⁵
Cesar or Ted Kennedy or anyone who speaks out for the poor will get it.”

At Forty Acres, they wrapped the thirty-foot cross in black crepe paper.

Chapter 16

The Celebrity

It got to where, you know, I was, well in many places I was introduced as a saint and it went on and really just went on and on . . .

By the time he flew to New York to serve as a pallbearer at Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral, Chavez had been catapulted into the stratosphere. Nothing had prepared him for the leap from little-known, eccentrically charismatic labor leader to national celebrity.

Journalists from around the United States began to make pilgrimages to a tiny city so remote they had trouble pronouncing its name (de-LAY-no, the
New Yorker
explained). Chavez had been conscious for some time of his place in history. Now he was in a position to be selective about how his story was told to a wider audience. He chose to grant extraordinary access to two chroniclers, both of whom became advocates and penned sympathetic, influential profiles.

Peter Matthiessen, writer, naturalist, and cofounder of the
Paris Review
, knew of Chavez’s work and was happy to help
¹
when a friend asked Matthiessen to draft an anti-pesticide manifesto for a fund-raising appeal in the
New York Times
. Chavez liked the advertisement and asked to meet the author. Matthiessen traveled from his home on the East End of Long Island to Delano in the summer of 1968. The two men were born just months apart, and Matthiessen felt an instant kinship, though their worlds could not have been more different. Matthiessen spent weeks working on what became a lengthy two-part profile in the
New Yorker
, and later a book,
Sal Si Puedes
. He deftly captured Chavez’s humanity and the essence of his remarkable appeal as well as the euphoria of the young movement: “[Chavez] has an Indian’s bow nose
²
and lank black hair, with sad eyes and an open smile that is shy and friendly; at moments he is beautiful, like a dark seraph . . . There is an effect of being centered in himself so that no energy is wasted.”

The second journalist to whom Chavez entrusted his story was Jacques E. Levy, a reporter who had taken a leave from the
Santa Rosa Press
in Northern California. Levy had begun his writing career at the
Harvard Crimson
and worked for several papers before ending up in Santa Rosa. He had covered farm labor issues, become interested in Chavez, and persuaded him to cooperate with a biography. Levy taped and transcribed hundreds of hours of conversations with Chavez’s family and closest advisers. Chavez steered Levy to the right people to interview and included him in strategy sessions. Often Levy interviewed Chavez on long car rides; Levy drove, while Chavez held the tape recorder.

Levy was more intellectual than activist, but he admired Chavez and blended in well as he accompanied top union leaders to rallies and private meetings. Chavez trusted Levy, correctly, to omit material that might make the movement look bad or cast Chavez in an unflattering light. Chavez also knew he could review and censor the book before publication, so he allowed Levy unfettered access. At first Chavez kept the journalist somewhat at arm’s length. Their relationship deepened when Levy, an experienced dog trainer, presented Chavez with a German shepherd and showed the union president how to train the animal. Chavez loved Max, and several German shepherds that followed. The dogs created an emotional bond between Chavez and Levy.

With Levy and Matthiessen, Chavez was warm, funny, low-key, and self-effacing. But beneath his patient demeanor, Chavez struggled to cope with enormous new pressures. The increased adulation brought heightened expectations to achieve victories in a war that had reached a stand-off. Describing the response when he made his first public appearances after the fast, he said: “It got to where, you know, I was, well in many places I was introduced as a saint
³
and it went on and really just went on and on . . .” A priest wrote to Chavez that “Cesar” had become a popular confirmation name.
⁴

His fame generated reverence and resentment that deepened fissures in the union. He had less privacy and more demands. The fast had been not only a way to “zoom things up,” as Ross put it, but also in some sense the ultimate time-out. By the fall of 1968, Chavez needed another escape.

His health worsened, and recurring back problems became acute. In early September 1968, Helen Chavez called Bill Kircher
⁵
in tears, saying she could not get Cesar to stand up. Kircher flew to California, called Chavez’s doctor, and checked him into O’Connor Hospital in San Jose. Dozens sent get-well cards and a parade of visitors stopped by, including Father McDonnell, who made everyone in the room recite the Hail Mary,
⁶
Glory Be, and Apostles’ Creed.

In the wake of the King and Kennedy assassinations, fears about Chavez’s safety increased. When his physician, Jerome Lackner, was not present to act as gatekeeper, two elderly nuns guarded access to the hospital room. In the early morning hours of September 13, a mysterious caller asked for Chavez’s room number. The operator alerted Lackner, who had Chavez transferred to another room and called the San Jose police. From then on, an officer was stationed
⁷
outside his room from midnight till 6:00 a.m.

There had been vague threats earlier. Just after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, a newspaper reported rumors that growers had offered a $10,000 bounty for Chavez. After Robert Kennedy was shot, union officials received various reports of threats, all unsubstantiated but worrisome in the climate of 1968. Union officials relayed the reports to county law enforcement, the FBI, and the White House. Chatfield wrote twice
⁸
to Bishop Manning, suggesting he keep other bishops informed and implying he should speak to growers.

Front-page newspaper stories about the potential threats while Chavez was in the San Jose hospital precipitated a debate in Delano about his security. Chavez professed not to want any protection, but he also wanted to see how people responded. The security issue became another test of loyalty. “Cesar is creating a crisis
⁹
for the leadership of the union,” Chatfield wrote in his diary on September 15, 1968. “He is using the threat on his life, which has been blown up by the press, to force the officers to make a decision about whether they are going to see that Cesar is protected or not.”

Chatfield talked to judo experts and guard-dog trainers. Chavez played down the need for security and resisted entreaties that he travel with guards. With friends, he adopted a fatalistic attitude. After another threat was reported by a Filipino labor contractor in Northern California, Chavez was worried but told Huerta he had decided that “it’s going to happen sooner or later,
¹⁰
there’s nothing I can do.”

Others worried more. As she watched the emotional reaction of a crowd when Chavez spoke to a rally in Coachella, Huerta said to Ross: “This kind of feeling for him the people have, this is exactly what’s going to get him killed . . . The guy sounded like a messiah
¹¹
or something.”

Whatever his feelings and fears, Chavez again turned a difficult situation to his advantage. The threats became a convenient way to escape from public view when he felt the need. The threats fueled more comparisons to the two martyred heroes of nonviolence, King and Gandhi, which enhanced Chavez’s prestige and leverage. The comparisons, however, also increased the pressure to succeed. After the fast, Drake said years later, “he was too saintly
¹²
to make mistakes.”

When he was discharged from O’Connor Hospital, Chavez moved to a small room at St. Anthony’s seminary in Santa Barbara to recuperate. He hung a photo
¹³
of Gandhi and a Mexican straw crucifix on the wall and wore a mezuzah around his neck. Helen and Peggy McGivern, the first nurse who had gone to work for the union, shared a room next door. Matthiessen came to visit, and Chavez greeted the writer propped up in a hospital bed in white pajamas. For therapy, he soaked in a tub with 97-degree water. Matthiessen, his back aching from a touch football injury, joined Chavez in the water. Using his ill health as an excuse, Chavez persuaded Matthiessen to read his draft
¹⁴
of the
New Yorker
stories out loud. That way, Chavez could truthfully say he had never read the glowing profiles before they appeared in print.

Chavez’s health improved dramatically, which he attributed to the hot soaks. Matthiessen offered to pay to install a similar facility in Delano. Arrangements were discreetly made to heat the pool at the home of a nearby union lawyer to exactly the same temperature. Matthiessen quietly wrote a $900 check.
¹⁵

Chavez moved back home, where he had a relapse. He was cross and impatient with those closest to him, even as he was tolerant and kind to others. He had so much trouble resting in the small house filled with children that he moved a bed into his office at Forty Acres and asked McGivern to take care of him.

Just as Luis Valdez had observed on the march to Sacramento, Chavez leaned into the suffering. The pain was real, and he exhibited courageous willingness to endure physical hardship. But the suffering image also proved an effective tactic. Now Chavez experimented with a variation—the crippled leader, conducting business from his hospital bed at Forty Acres. Chavez’s bad back gave him another way to control situations. He could beg off from meetings and engagements or terminate conversations quickly, pleading pain. He gave interviews from bed, in his pajamas.