Branch Rickey by Jimmy Breslin

with a circulation of nearly three million, wrote not even one column during this time that called for making room for black players. The thought of Powers, with that immense circulation behind him, losing the clear chance to become a new and commanding figure in America causes you to wince. Oh, he lost that chance, don’t worry about that. He was the most persistent and vicious of Rickey’s enemies. He delighted whites who saw blacks as not just playing baseball but also taking white men’s jobs in the iron workers’ union.
    In 1946, from June until September, Powers wrote eighty columns against Rickey.
    Rickey had neither met nor even seen Powers. At an exhibition game at Yankee Stadium, Rickey told his press agent, Harold Parrott, “Tell me what he’s wearing. So when I look around I’ll know him.” Powers wasn’t there. He never went anywhere except to Madison Square Garden, where he announced the Friday-night fights on television for Gillette razors, and the mobsters who promoted the fights under the name of the International Boxing Club. Otherwise, he wrote his column and went to the golf course in Westchester.
    Faced with this barrage from Powers, Rickey plunged into temporary madness himself. He and his people at 215 Montague Street put together a thirty-seven-page rebuttal. “His charges are poisonous smokescreens, personal vilification, innuendoes, colored exaggerations, half truths, untruths, flat lies,” they wrote.
    Rickey showed it to John Smith, who as president of Pfizer understood that you survive on remaining cool and patient and not stumbling. He told Rickey, “Your mode of refuting Powers’s assertions dignifies them and adds weight to them.” Smith knew that someone practicing prolonged lousiness usually winds up falling into your lap. And in this he was correct.
    One day in 1949, Rickey received a copy of a letter Powers had written to somebody in his business:
    I talked to the captain last night [the publisher of the Daily News ] and he told me not to worry about latrine gossip picked up by the FBI. That if Winchell and the rest of the Jews had their way, America would be a vast concentration camp from Maine to California. There wouldn’t be enough barbed wire to hold back all the decent Christians maligned by the Jews and those who run with them. In short, I was in pretty good company with him, with Col. McCormick, Joe Kennedy and several other decent family men . . . How in hell can I be termed ‘pro-Nazi’ simply because I don’t happen to like certain crackpot politicians and Jews?
    The letter brought jubilation to the Dodgers’ office mail room. A guy called out, “This does it!”
    â€œAnd you are doing what?” Rickey asked.
    â€œSending it to every newspaper in the city,” the mail room guy said.
    â€œNo, you’re not. You’re throwing it away,” Rickey said. “Nobody is to know this exists. I’ve never sunk low enough to do a thing like this. I never should have taken him seriously. Now we can forget him.”
    Rickey called John Smith at Pfizer and thanked him profusely for being right. Of course only the owner of heaven could walk completely away from a wonderful opportunity to inflict some discomfort on a rat that had been gnawing on his feet for some time. Somebody in the Brooklyn office called Powers and told him that Rickey had the letter and was holding it and would do nothing with it. Immediately, Powers looked out the Daily News sports department window at 42nd Street and took many deep breaths to keep his heart from stopping dead. After which he never wrote another bad word about Branch Rickey.
    Rickey then—just for nothing, for he never would think of getting even—sent free passes to Dodgers games to Powers and his family. Powers promptly answered: “I appreciate your thoughtfulness very much. I too wish you a lot of luck, and if there is anything I can do