J. Parnell Thomas, the Republican chairman of the committee, was eager to show how the Democratic administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman were, as he put it, “hand in glove with the Communist Party.” Bentley seemed only too eager to help him prove it by burnishing her story with lies and distortions. She falsely testified, for example, that sources within the government provided her with advance notice of the D-Day invasion. “Elizabeth’s testimony did not need any embellishments,” writes Kathryn Olmsted. “Her true story was scary enough. In her eagerness to please the congressmen and generate headlines, though, she was not satisfied with the truth.”
Bentley’s appearances before Congress at the end of July 1948 did indeed generate headlines. But if she expected to emerge as a heroine, she was no doubt disappointed. Certainly the Right celebrated her revelations, which, in an election year, provided excellent ammunition against President Truman and the New Deal Democrats. Yet the anti-Communist press also caricatured her as a temptress who seduced secrets out of treasonous Reds in the government. The Left, on the other hand, dismissed her altogether. Her charges, writes historian Earl Latham, were treated as the “imaginings of a neurotic spinster.”
The Red Spy Queen’s image was hardly enhanced after Harry Dexter White, the prominent Treasury official whom she accused of disloyalty, passionately defended himself before HUAC and then dropped dead of a heart attack three days later. Many believed Bentley’s charges were baseless and drove a good man to his grave. Other men and women she named vigorously denied her charges as well. One in particular, an official with the War Production Board by the name of William Remington, would harass her for years with libel charges and batter her reputation with revelations his lawyers uncovered about her sordid past. Still, the fact remained that Remington, like the others, was indeed guilty of espionage.
Stories started to circulate, some of them from the highest levels of the Truman administration, that Elizabeth was a lunatic. Yet her charges were soon bolstered by Whittaker Chambers. His testimony before Congress, which was prompted by Bentley’s own, verified much of the undocumented information she had provided. (This in addition to his startling revelations about Alger Hiss, the State Department official Whittaker famously accused of espionage.)
Decoded Soviet communications from the Venona project also proved much of what Elizabeth said. But Venona remained a secret to all but a few, and would remain so until 1995. Even President Truman was unaware of it. Had the president known, he might not have been so quick to dismiss Elizabeth Bentley and what he termed “the Communist bugaboo.”3 Furthermore, as John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr point out in their study of Venona, if the project had been made public, the very real threat of Communist infiltration of the government probably would not have been reduced to the dangerous partisan rantings of the Far Right. Conversely, the limits of the conspiracy would have been clearly defined by Venona, and such demagogues as Senator Joseph McCarthy would have been denied the platform to smear loyal Americans including Secretary of State George Marshall and others who he claimed were part of “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” With the secrets of Venona well concealed, one of the ugliest chapters in American history began.
Bentley became the avenging angel of the Right as she made more appearances before Congress and various grand juries investigating Communist infiltration of the government. Her testimony thrilled newfound pals such as Joe McCarthy, but she continued to embellish it with distortions and fabrications that further inflamed the Red hysteria she had helped ignite. For instance, just as she had earlier lied about the D-Day invasion, she also falsely claimed that a source inside the Pentagon had given advance notice of General Jimmy Doolittle’s famous raid on Tokyo in 1942. “Yes,” she declared, “we knew about that raid, I guess, a week or ten days ahead of time.” Over time, her tales would become even more fantastic.
Although she was always cool and collected when she testified, Elizabeth was a drunken, paranoid mess out of the spotlight. The FBI worried that she was “bordering on some mental pitfall,” as one agent put it. Unstable as she was, however, she remained a valuable asset to the bureau and had to be protected, particularly since she would be a key prosecution witness in several important trials—most notably that of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.4 Bentley knew the FBI needed her and, as a result, her demands for cash and other perks became increasingly outrageous. “You should inform her,” an exasperated J. Edgar Hoover wrote in a memo, “that any further trouble may necessitate our terminating any further weekly payments to her.” Yet no matter how irksome she became, the bureau continued to compensate its star witness.
Profit was always a major motivating factor for Elizabeth. She went on what she hoped would be lucrative lecture tours (they weren’t), and converted to Catholicism to boost her anti-Communist credentials and thus her income potential. (Her new faith did little to improve her morals, however: She was dismissed from a teaching job at Mundelein, a Catholic college in Chicago, for her rather uninhibited lifestyle.) Bentley also hoped to make money from her autobiography, Out of Bondage, a book many found to be a bit disingenuous. “She decided to portray herself as a sort of Communist June Cleaver,” writes Kathryn Olmsted—a devoted companion led down the path to treason by the man she loved. “It is very hard to decide whether to treat Out of Bondage…as tragic, or as ludicrous, or as terrifying, or as pathetic,” journalist Joseph Alsop wrote in one review. Whatever it was, the book was definitely not a bestseller.
Success from the Red Scare continued to elude Elizabeth, leaving her broke, demoralized, and as dependent as ever on the FBI. The bureau needed to protect her “credibility as a witness,” as it was noted in her file, and repeatedly extricated her from the endless problems she created for herself. These included an abusive boyfriend, several car crashes, and debts to the Internal Revenue Service.5 On one occasion, when she demanded that the FBI pick her up at her home in Connecticut and drive her to her doctor in New York, an agent took note of her unsettled state: “Throughout the trip from Madison to New York City she was rambling and incoherent in her speech…engaged in backseat driving, weeping, sleeping, fingering a small crucifix, chain-smoking and was quarrelsome and demanding throughout the trip.” Still, she was a great witness, and whatever problems she caused the FBI were mitigated by her compelling testimony.
For Elizabeth to remain compelling, though, she had to keep telling lies, which battered her credibility. So many questions were raised about her that J. Edgar Hoover was forced to publicly defend his informant before Senator William Jenner’s Internal Security Subcommittee in 1954. “All information furnished by Miss Bentley, which was susceptible to check, has proven to be correct,” he testified. The director’s endorsement thrilled Elizabeth and, she said, “made her feel like a different person.” Nevertheless, she became increasingly marginalized and sank deeper into an alcoholic stupor. A series of teaching jobs all ended the same way—with her dismissal—until she finally landed a position with a penal institution for girls. It was an ignominious end for the Red Spy Queen who had once commanded the attention of the nation and helped set its course during the early Cold War. On December 3, 1963, at age fifty-five, she died of abdominal cancer, already well on her way to obscurity.
30
Dick Fosbury: Father of the Flop
The obscure Americans chronicled thus far all have the distinction of being dead. The fact that Dick Fosbury is alive and well (as of 2007) should probably have been an impediment to his inclusion here, since time is the ultimate arbiter of historical status. But Fosbury bent over backward to get in anyway—with an awkward maneuver known as the Fosbury Flop. It was a technique that transformed a third-rate athlete into an Olympic champion, and in the process revolutionized the sport of high jumping. Roy Blount Jr. described the still-unconventional flop in a 1969 edition of Sports Illustrated:
In detail, Fosbury charges up from slightly to the left of center wit
h a gait that may call to mind a two-legged camel, hooks to the right at the last moment, plants his outside (or right) foot action of a “screw,” as he says, so that his back turns abruptly to the bar and, ideally, rises seven feet and change into the air. Then, cocking an eye over his shoulder at the bar, he extends himself like a slightly apprehensive man lying back on a chaise lounge that’s too short for him and finally kicks his legs up—and falls flat on his back.
Before the flop became standard, high jumpers cleared the bar with the traditional straddle method—kicking the outside leg straight up, ascending after it, stretching out facedown along the bar, and swiveling over it. Fosbury, a self-described gangly and uncoordinated wannabe athlete, never could master the straddle. To compensate, he adopted an antiquated style as a young jumper known as “the scissors,” where the athlete runs at the bar and goes over sitting up, with the legs positioned like an open pair of sheers. It was terribly inefficient, as the center of gravity was too high to achieve competitive results. But Fosbury began to modify the scissors jump by laying out more and landing on his back—the larval form of what would become the flop. The evolution of the unique form was gradual and intuitive.
“You’ll read that I’m a gymnast,” Fosbury told Roy Blount in 1969. “You’ll read that I’m a physicist and that I sat down one day and figured out a better way to jump. You’ll read that I ran up and tripped one day and fell backward over the bar.” In reality, he said, “I didn’t change my style. It changed inside me.”
Fosbury and his slightly ridiculous flop reached their apotheoses at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico, when the twenty-one-year-old cleared the bar with a record jump (7 feet; 41/4 inches) and won the gold medal. Spectators roared their approval. Traditionalists were aghast. “Kids imitate champions,” U.S. Olympic coach Payton Jordan said at the time. “If they try to imitate Fosbury, he will wipe out an entire generation of high jumpers because they will all have broken necks.”
The kids did indeed mimic Fosbury, hurling themselves over sofas and landing on their backs. But instead of maiming themselves, they eventually helped make the Fosbury Flop the standard it is today. Still, the man behind it all—now an engineer in Ketchum, Idaho—has a rather subdued legacy, perhaps because the sport he transformed lacks the rabid following others have. That may change someday, and millions will gather to watch Monday Night High Jumping. But until that happens, Dick Fosbury’s place here among some of America’s more overlooked characters seems fairly secure. He’s certainly in good company.
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