An Activist Demonstrates His Faith in Blake

I am at lunch with Jerry Rubin, talking about Robert Blake.

Rubin is saying, “He couldn’t have done it, no way! The man I knew wouldn’t kill anyone!”

He is so worked up about it, he can hardly eat his scrambled eggs--which is rare for the 58-year-old activist. If there is anything Rubin loves, it is peace, happiness, Mother Earth and food.

I am meeting with him because he had telephoned earlier to say he knew Blake well from nuclear protests and peace marches and couldn’t believe he was a murderer. The actor is charged with killing his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, last May.

What riled Rubin in the first place, he is telling me in no uncertain terms, is the way the media are covering the case.

“They’ve convicted him without a trial,” he says between bites. He has a tendency to shout because of a hearing problem and because, I suspect, he just likes noise.

I have known Rubin for almost 20 years. He has been in the forefront of just about every social movement that has passed our way, demanding disarmament, fasting for peace, challenging established laws and going to jail when he’s had to.

He can be a fist-shaking, hell-raising pain in the conscience when he’s turned on, an orator of the old school, full of bombast and outrage; and on this particular day, he is turned on. He sees Blake as a man of peace, not a man who would put a bullet into anyone’s brain.

“I feel bad about this,” Rubin says, taking another bite. “Real bad.”

He first met Blake in 1981 at a demonstration protesting the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in San Luis Obispo County. Blake led a contingent of protesters ashore on rubber rafts at Avila Beach to penetrate the nuclear compound. Rubin was part of a human blockade at the main gate, barring the entry of workers to the plant.

Both men were arrested and dragged away by sheriff’s deputies while demonstrators danced and sang the “Hokey Pokey.” Later, Blake apologized to Sheriff George Whiting for calling him fat and for mocking the other officers during his arrest.

The man who had risen to fame as the cockatoo-wielding undercover cop Baretta had suddenly acquired a new reputation as an activist for liberal causes. A year after the Diablo Canyon event, he was in the forefront of a protest in Dana Point against the San Onofre nuclear plant. So was Rubin.

“Robert didn’t want to be a star,” Rubin says in a tone that does not invite debate. “He was a regular guy who believed in what he was doing--not an actor after publicity.”

It was a phrase Blake used at the start of the 1986 cross-country Great Peace March.

“I’m thrilled to death that the regular folks came out, the same people who stopped the war in Vietnam,” he announced to the gathered media. “These are American straights, the real people.”

When the march, suddenly bereft of funding, began to die in the Mojave Desert, it was Blake who kept up morale, Rubin says, wearing the Great Peace March T-shirt he had worn back then. About 1,200 people had begun the march in L.A., but after its backers declared bankruptcy, 700 went home.

“I asked for a circle of unity among those who were still there,” Rubin says. “We were holding hands in the desert silence when Robert began singing ‘Amazing Grace’ and leading us into a tightening circle. It was beautiful. We all cheered afterward and were more determined than ever, thanks to Robert, that we’d make it cross-country for peace.”

Well, OK.

Rubin says Blake was a peacemaker, and a small stack of news clips also says he was a peacemaker, raising money in Las Vegas and Washington, D.C., to get at least some of the marchers to their destination. Blake went partway, Rubin went the distance, as did about 400 others.

Later, Blake also helped raise money for medical supplies and food for victims of El Salvador’s civil war. And he made an Orange County newspaper columnist cry by delivering an eloquent tribute to a legendary antiwar crusader, Tim Carpenter, who was suffering from degenerative arthritis.

Rubin finishes up his scrambled eggs, leans across the table and says, “How could they even think a guy like that could kill someone?”

I’m not sure he expected an answer from me. He left saying he had already called Blake’s lawyer, Harland Braun, to offer his moral support and was going to round up some of the other peace activists to hold a rally on Blake’s behalf.

All I said to Rubin was that I didn’t know if Blake was guilty of anything but being a mediocre actor, and I wasn’t going to speculate on the rest. He’s got a long road ahead of him called due process, and at the end of that road, a jury’s likely to figure out if he killed Bakley.

But I do know that there are dark places in the soul that often conceal murderous intentions. Whether intentions festered within Blake, the peacemaker, is something we’ve got to wait to find out. But find out we will. And you can take that to the bank.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.