And when illicit bank transfers were insufficient for the task at hand, there was a more direct way to get the money to its intended recipients—in black suitcases. In the kind of scenario that would later dominate Hollywood movies, barely trained CIA operatives met with high-profile Italian politicians in rooms at Rome’s luxurious four-star Hassler Hotel and handed over bags of cash, intended to defray campaign expenses. Wyatt later acknowledged: “We would have liked to have done this in a more sophisticated manner.… Passing black bags to affect a political election is not really a terribly attractive thing.”
For all its activities and money, the CIA’s work was just one part of a larger American effort in Italy. Other government officials worked with various Italian-American organizations to implement a wide-reaching public campaign to win over the hearts and minds of Italian voters for the Christian Democrats. Americans with Italian roots were encouraged by local churches, newspapers, and other organizations to write some ten million letters, postcards, and cablegrams that were sent to Italy with various terrifying messages. (“A Communist victory would ruin Italy. The United States would withdraw aid and a world war would probably result.”) Hollywood also took up the Christian Democrat cause. Italian radio stations aired a one-hour program to raise money for the orphans of Italian pilots killed during World War II, and stars ranging from Frank Sinatra to Academy Award–winning actor Gary Cooper recorded messages of support that were broadcast throughout the country.
Russian Communists, working on behalf of “Uncle Joe” as Joseph Stalin was nicknamed by some in the American press, staged some stunts of their own. They released Italian war prisoners in a bid to gain sympathy, and supported Communist newspapers in Italy. They also gave money. Although the total amount remains unclear, one reporter estimated it was several million dollars.
With all this foreign money and attention swirling about, Italy turned into “a sort of European Wisconsin, full of political hoopla, Tammany ward-heeling and high-pressure campaigning from the outside world,” according to one American journalist. Even the leaders of the parties were willing to discard propriety and wage battle in the muddy trenches of personal insult and slander. De Gasperi denounced Togliatti and accused him of having the “cloven foot of the devil.” Togliatti was no better, smearing De Gasperi as a Fascist. He was even reported to have offered something of a vague death threat to De Gasperi, publicly predicting that De Gasperi would meet a violent end like Hitler and Mussolini.
By mid-April, with the elections just days away, the carnival-like atmosphere of the campaign screeched to a loud finale. Italian politics dominated the front pages of newspapers in every language in various countries. In England, discussion of the election had become so popular that Lloyd’s of London was reported to be offering odds on it, with De Gasperi favored three to one. In the United States, where De Gasperi and Togliatti had become household names, the New York Daily News asked the question on everyone’s minds: “Italy Picks Uncles Today; Will It Be Sam or Joe?”
In Italy, there were some signs that many average voters saw themselves as helpless in the face of all the foreign involvement. When asked by an American reporter how it felt to be a voter in Italy, one Italian replied skeptically, “How do we feel? How do you think it feels to be the rope in a tug-of war? Does the rope ever have a chance at winning?”
In the end, the Italian people gave a clear verdict. The Christian Democrats won a landslide victory that handed them an absolute majority in the Chamber of Deputies. Gino immediately sent a telegram to congratulate De Gasperi on being elected the prime minister of Italy: “With sincere thanks I underline my devotion to you and send deep wishes of good luck for the great victory of democracy. GINO BARTALI.” The message was printed up as a poster and displayed publicly in various cities.
De Gasperi soon formed his new government, but it was obvious that tensions persisted. The great problems of the day, massive unemployment and endemic shortages, remained unresolved; many Communists were embittered at having lost the elections. In June 1948, it all came to the fore during the speech of a prominent Communist in the Chamber of Deputies. He boldly accused priests, sympathetic to the Christian Democrats, of encouraging Calabrian women in southern Italy to go on a “bedroom strike” and cease sexual relations with their husbands so as to motivate them not to vote for the Communists. A Christian Democrat deputy shouted his rebuttal: “You Communists find your recruits only among criminals and women of ill repute.” The Communists wasted no words with their reply, charging across the Chamber almost as one to attack the Christian Democrats. Within seconds, dozens of out-and-out brawls had erupted in what was described as “the worst fight in parliamentary history.” Inkpots were thrown and stenographers’ desks ripped from the ground and used as weapons. Even a Communist woman deputy was said to have joined in the brawl, hitting several bearded Christian Democrats.
When order was finally restored some ninety minutes later, three deputies were found to require medical care and several others were left with bloody noses and black eyes. An uneasy truce was established, but few could ignore the deplorable state of relations in the Chamber. With all the work to be done and with all the lingering hostility between the parties, it was clear that a dramatic change was needed. Nevertheless, it was surprising and almost sacrilegious when a plan was proposed in the ensuing days to do the politically unthinkable—and force the deputies to shorten their summer holidays.
Coppi: 21 votes. Bartali: 1 vote.
As the new government took shape in the summer of 1948, Gino wrestled with the aftermath of an altogether different selection. Earlier that year, when the leaders of the Italian Cycling Federation, along with their international counterparts, voted on the greatest achievement of the past cycling season, Gino had faded almost completely from sight. With his 1947 Giro victory and a string of other wins, Coppi won twenty-one of twenty-six possible votes, proof positive that he was “Italy’s greatest cyclist,” as one leading Italian newspaper editor described him. Gino got just one vote, tying for last place with an essentially unknown rider.
In the press write-up following the award ceremony, nothing was said about Gino—probably because no one knew what to say. Poor results could be dismissed, and a few errant episodes did not a pattern make. Yet Gino had not done anything to win himself any support in a deadlocked court of public opinion. Where some saw an aging athlete growing increasingly desperate, another group, a devoted but shrinking contingent of bartaliani, hung on to the flickering prospects of a renaissance.
Gino knew that the only race that could settle the debate was the one that had consumed him for the last decade: the Tour de France. It was the Tour where he first won cycling’s crown; it was the Tour where he would have to return to reclaim it.
11
Les Macaroni
Gino Bartali and teammate Giovanni Corrieri enjoy a rare moment of rest during the Tour de France.
(photo credit 11.1)
PLANNING FOR THE TOUR de France began in the early months of 1948, and speculation started immediately about who would lead the team. “Lots of discussion, lots of writing, lots of hidden politicking,” Gino explained. When Gino emerged as a favorite because he had last led the Italian team to victory in France in 1938, Fausto Coppi quickly made his dissatisfaction clear in an interview with the French press. “I would really like to compete, but I would prefer to race against Bartali and not with him, for reasons that you can surely understand.” Having beaten Gino in various races including the Giro d’Italia, Coppi felt he had proved that he shouldn’t have to serve as a domestique for another racer, and certainly not Gino. Others didn’t see it in the same light, and merely chalked up Coppi’s response as the latest illustration of his deep rivalry with Gino. When it became clear that Gino would definitely captain the Italian team, however, Coppi surprised many fans when he declined to participate in the Tour altogether. He would debut at the Tour another year, and on his own terms.
Losing Coppi as a supp
orting rider was a big blow, and filling out the rest of the team roster was even more difficult. After the war, very few men who had raced before it returned to compete at the highest levels. Yet most of the younger riders, the new generation, had raced only two seasons to establish themselves as professional racers. This inevitably created a gap in the talent development process, leaving a shallow pool of candidates from which to shape a team. The final group that was selected reflected this reality. There was but one other racer besides Gino who had raced at the Tour before the war.
The issue of coaches would prove no less thorny. Gino approached his former Tour coach Costante Girardengo and asked him to lead the Italian team to France. Girardengo considered the proposal seriously. Still, at fifty-five years old, he felt he was too old to go back to the Tour. He declined Gino’s request with a less than ambiguous warning. “Ten years have passed—that’s a lot.” Without Girardengo or Coppi, Gino and the Italian Cycling Federation were forced to become a little creative. For a coach, they turned to Alfredo Binda, the temperamental former cycling star Gino had idolized as a boy.
The Italian press viewed these developments with concern and wanted to hedge their bets. On the one hand, many could sense the national interest in the event, such as one reporter who suggested everyone in Italy was thinking about “nothing but the Tour.” Yet newspaper publishers with tiny postwar budgets did not want to invest too many resources in a lost cause, and so their actions reflected their abject pessimism about Gino’s prospects. When all was said and done, Italian editors would send only fourteen journalists to France to cover the Tour. In contrast, nearby Belgium, which had a significantly smaller population and newspaper readership, would send some fifty reporters, to say nothing of France, which would assign two hundred reporters to cover the race.
The Italian racers, or les Macaroni as many of the French fans referred to them, were scheduled to travel to France on June 26, 1948. In the days before the departure, each man made his final arrangements. Gino did some training under the supervision of his professional team, Legnano, whose director remained guardedly optimistic about Gino’s prospects. Speaking with the press, he declared that Gino wasn’t thinking about anything but victory at the Tour. And then immediately, as if he sensed that he was somehow tempting fate with such a comment, he insisted that Gino, just shy of his thirty-fourth birthday, would be ready to sign a paper declaring an end to his racing career if he won.
In Florence, Gino spent some of his last days in Italy with Adriana, Andrea, and Luigi, knowing that the Tour and the schedule of velodrome appearances and mini-races that followed would keep him away from home for the next several months. Speaking with Andrea, who was a few months shy of his seventh birthday, Gino was reportedly caught off guard when his son asked him a simple question.
“Papà, what gave you the idea to go do the Tour de France? You’re too old now. You’re going to get a beating.” Although Gino must have realized that his son was just parroting something he had heard, it still must have been a blow to his confidence to know that even Andrea seemed to have lost faith in him.
On the morning of June 26, the team gathered at a hotel in Milan to do their final inspections. In the late afternoon, they made their way to the city’s main train station. Surprisingly, very few fans were gathered to send them off. One man who did appear was the Legnano team director, bearing two gifts. The first was a large tart for the journey, and the second a bar of soap for each man to use throughout the Tour, an item he thought would be impossible to procure in France without ration booklets.
On the train, they made an unhappy discovery. Someone at the Italian Cycling Federation hadn’t bothered to book the first-class sleeping carriage tickets that the team usually reserved so that they could rest during the overnight journey. It was an astonishing oversight that only underlined the skepticism in the cycling community about Gino’s Tour prospects. Gino tried to save face by offering to pay for the first-class tickets on the spot, but they were sold out. Frustrated and resigned to a sleepless night, he and his teammates settled into their cramped quarters, sitting eight people to a compartment.
In the second-class section of the overnight train to Paris, one of Europe’s most famous athletes began his long journey back to France.
The 1948 Tour would be heralded as the first truly European Tour of the postwar era, but it was not the first time that it had been raced since the cessation of hostilities. Already in 1946, Tour director Jacques Goddet had attempted to restart the event. For all his best efforts, however, he was unsuccessful. The government refused authorization, given the extraordinary quantities of food and gas required to carry out the competition. At first it even hesitated to sanction the 1947 edition for the same reasons. In the end, it relented because, as legend has it, the French longshoremen threatened to go on strike if it did not occur.
As it turned out, the Tour of 1947 was rife with labor unrest and other challenges. Tour communications were all conducted by telegram because a national postal strike had left mail idling in post offices. More important, there was a demonstrable lack of international variety among the racers. Neither Germany nor Spain participated in the Tour. Italy did not send a team either, abstaining for a combination of diplomatic and commercial reasons. Goddet fretted about Italy’s absence because it meant that the Tour would have one less superpower, reducing the international prestige of the event, and potentially endangering its postwar renaissance.
Still, Goddet was too entrepreneurial to give up so easily. Though stymied at the official level by the decisions of the Italian government and the Italian Cycling Federation, an undaunted Goddet quietly worked just weeks before the race to cobble together an Italian team of his own, composed largely of Italian émigrés living in France and whatever second-tier racers he and his colleagues could entice to join. Many of these Italian riders fared surprisingly well; two would finish in the top five. This achievement was particularly impressive given that they had come together at the last minute, with some team members literally cycling across hundreds of miles of France just to get to the starting line.
The 1947 Tour introduced the public to a new generation of cyclists—many of whom would return in 1948—who were presented as being at least as eccentric as their prewar predecessors. One racer was said to call home after each stage to speak to his dog. Another was a viscount of Piedmontese nobility, who claimed to be racing the Tour as a lark, with little concern for whether he finished first or last. A third was said to rest his bike in his bed during the Tour, while he passed the night on the floor beside it. When he fared worse than expected in the race, it was reported that he went home and chopped his bike up in disgust, burying all the pieces in his garden.
Of the one hundred men who raced the 1947 Tour, there were but two revelations, whose stars would shine even more brightly a year later when Gino returned. The first was a scrappy Frenchman named Jean Robic. With his dark aviator sunglasses and the white kerchief he wore over his head on sunny days, he might have passed for a member of the French Foreign Legion, but for the fact that he stood only five foot three inches and was prone to crying when he did poorly in a race. Nevertheless, he was hardly wanting for courage, or, at the very least, bluster. Though he was an unknown racer from one of the lesser-ranked regional French teams, he publicly promised to win and bring his wife the yellow jersey. A little more than three weeks later, during the last stage of the 1947 Tour, he seized the overall lead with the help of a teammate and won the competition.
The Italian press insisted that he had cheated by drafting behind a car in that critical stage, but nothing came of their accusations. Robic celebrated his victory with the extravagant purchase of three cars and the promise to purchase a fourth if he won again in 1948. His wife got his yellow jersey, and the nation got a new champion. Robic quickly became a common figure in the French press, with his face being used to peddle products as varied as shaving cream and bicycle seats. By 1948 he was omnipresent and seemingly omniscie
nt. Like a solemn monarch, he helped send off the organizers who inspected the course before the Tour. When the route was publicized, a photograph of his face appeared in the center of the Tour maps circulated by the press. If there was any suggestion that all this attention had turned a prickly personality into one that was downright Napoleonic, Robic would not consider it. “These detractors, I will amaze them this year, I swear it!” he declared.
The other great discovery was an Italian rider named Aldo Ronconi. To be sure, he wasn’t an entirely unknown element. Anyone who followed Italian cycling closely would have known that he had been a supporting rider for years, first for Gino and later for Coppi. At the 1947 Tour, however, he proved that he was a star in his own right, and earned himself a nickname befitting his new status—“the Emancipated Slave.” His background was colored with many of the same hues as Gino’s. He had come from a poor family that was deeply religious. Indeed, his brother was a Catholic priest who was not above disguising himself as a mechanic to get around Tour regulations that forbade family members from riding along in the Tour caravan.
By the spring of 1948, Ronconi found himself chafing in his role as a supporting rider to Coppi. He complained in the international press about having to sacrifice his own chances for Coppi as part of his duel with Gino. When Coppi declared he wouldn’t participate in the 1948 Tour, it was announced that Gino would captain the Italian “A” team and Ronconi the “B” team (Italy and Belgium, both cycling superpowers, were allowed to send two teams each to compete as separate entities). Ronconi saw his opportunity and made no bones about his ambitions: “After the Tour, I will be able to race for myself.”
The 1948 Tour promised its audience an expanded slate of European stars and, above all, spectacle. At a moment when food shortages were an ongoing concern, the Tour was a celebration of unimaginable extravagance. In the lead-up to the start, newspapers around France left no mouth-watering detail unreported as they covered all the provisions required for the three-week competition. Highlights from the long list of foods that would be consumed included nearly 1,200 pounds of pasta, 1,500 whole chickens, and 200 pounds of chocolate. Thirty thousand bottles of wine, beer, and water were also requisitioned because “without wine,” one journalist declared, “the Tour would not be worthy of being called the Tour de France.” Even the otherwise staid Tour pharmacy was imbued with an air of indulgence when it was announced that it would carry six thousand tablets of aspirin and some twenty-six gallons of eau de cologne, which was thought to have some medicinal value when applied during massages.
Road to Valour Page 19
