The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

At the start of the 1987 baseball season, Ted Koppel, the host of ABC’s Nightline, invited Los Angeles Dodgers executive Al Campanis to discuss the fortieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s rookie season as the first black player in the major leagues. Perhaps Campanis was expecting a sleepy chat. Koppel confronted him with the question of why baseball had been so slow to hire blacks as managers and general managers. “I really can’t answer that question directly,” Campanis said. There were black managers, he explained, and perhaps the most prominent former players had found better opportunities elsewhere. “Baloney,” Koppel replied. “Is there still that much prejudice in baseball today?” Campanis suddenly found himself in an awkward position—defending his employers and his colleagues against a charge of bigotry. He responded with a string of clumsy answers. “They may not have some of the necessities to be, let’s say, a field manager, or perhaps a general manager,” he said. Then, perhaps as a way of parrying any sinister interpretation that might be put on the word “necessities,” he started blurting out his thoughts, which grew more and more tangled. “Why are black men not good swimmers?” he asked, before answering his own question. “Because they don’t have the buoyancy.” Dodgers owner Peter O’Malley tried to defend Campanis, but there was pointed rage from baseball hero Hank Aaron, the NAACP, the Urban League, and prominent black politicians in Los Angeles, including mayor T...