After their Korean adventure the coaches split up for more football clinics. Lombardi was sent to the Philippines with Paul Amen. Kenna and Warmath went to Okinawa. It was July by then and they had been away two months. Bull Pond would be coming soon and then fall practice. By the time Lombardi reunited with the others in Tokyo, he seemed eager to return to West Point and begin work with his talented corps. Messages awaited in Tokyo; one from Colonel Blaik, urgent. Kenna called the Old Man, and when he hung up, he reported that Blaik was “absolutely sick” and wanted the staff to “get on back” as quickly as possible. Something about football players and violations of the academic honor code. Details would come soon enough, but one thing was obvious to the coaches as they scrambled back to West Point: this might be worse than any loss to Navy.
THIS WAS 1951, the beginning of what was later perceived through the lens of nostalgia as a decade of simplicity. This was West Point, garrison of traditional American values: duty, honor, country. And this was Coach Blaik, the Old Man, demanding and austere. It would be easy for someone nearly fifty years later, discouraged by the corrupted state of sports in America at the end of the twentieth century, and unmindful of the cycles of history, to take a fleeting look at that combination and make a backward leap of faith: now there was a time and place where sport was honest and clean, by the rules, when pride still mattered. But history has a way of mocking attempts to render it retroactively pure. That very trinity—1951, West Point, Red Blaik—could also be remembered for one troubling event: a massive academic honor code violation that resulted in, among other things, the devastation of Blaik’s audacious football squad. Lombardi’s role was peripheral. He was there and not there, he lived through the scandal, he survived it unscathed; his name does not appear in a single document related to it and he rarely spoke of it later in his career, as though he had repressed it. But the events of that episode are not immaterial to his larger story; they are central to understanding the mythology of Lombardi, the contradictory demands and expectations of football, and the fallacy of the innocent past.
THE TROUBLE for Blaik’s boys began even before Lombardi and the other assistants left for the Far East, blissfully unaware. It was on the morning of April 2 that an honor representative for the first class, or seniors, visited the office of Colonel Paul D. Harkins and reported that some cadets had formed a ring to pass along unauthorized academic information—meaning questions and answers—for daily quizzes and midterm reviews. The cadet told Harkins that his knowledge of the scheme came originally from a third classman and member of the swim team whose own familiarity with the ring was more direct: he had been invited to join it. The swimmer believed the ring was operated by football players. After declining the offer to join the conspiracy, he became concerned about reporting fellow cadets, but also realized that failure to do so would be a violation of the honor code. A cadet does not lie, cheat, or steal. A cadet who knows about someone who has lied, cheated, or stolen must report him for violating the code. That was the honor code, as old as West Point and enforced by the cadets themselves. It was revered as the foundation of the academy’s integrity, drilled into every plebe from the first week of orientation at Beast Barracks.
Colonel Harkins wrote a memorandum for the record detailing what he had been told about the ring and noting that he was “indeed shocked to hear of such a thing.” As commandant of cadets and head of West Point’s tactical department, Harkins was responsible for transforming college students into soldiers. His background for the job was unquestioned. He had been trained at the side of General George S. Patton, for whom he had served as deputy chief of staff with the Third Army during World War II, earning a nickname—the Ramrod—that reflected his determination to carry out Patton’s wishes. In style and substance he was more Patton’s opposite, unemotional and all by the book. What he excelled at was framing rules and following them. His feelings about Blaik and football were decidedly negative. It was Harkins who had confronted Warmath during dinner at Leone’s, offended by the behavior of young officers-to-be. He considered the football department a discredit to the academy; it was favored with special privileges, flouted the rules of the corps, was stocked with athletes who belonged neither in college nor the Army, and was led by a coach whose power outstripped his position and whose rank exceeded his merit. Harkins was among the nonbelievers when it came to St. Blaik. The word among these heretics was that Blaik was at West Point when he could have been fighting in World War I, and became a colonel as a matter of show; after being recruited from Dartmouth to build the football program, he was recommissioned as an officer and during the war insisted on status equal to Navy’s coach.
It was with that frame of reference that Harkins received the tip that Blaik’s football squad might be involved in an academic scandal, and he responded with zeal. He quickly called a meeting of his immediate staff. “We had no tangible evidence and knew we would have to get some before we could prove anything,” he wrote later in a confidential memorandum. “We discussed means and methods, we thought of everything from recording systems and hidden ‘mikes’ to having someone join the ring.” They decided to “fight fire with fire” by asking the swimmer and two other trusted cadets to infiltrate the ring. The swimmer agonized about becoming a “stool pigeon.” The request, he said later, seemed “unfair, unnecessary and undignified…. However, is the West Point Yearling privileged to doubt the judgment of the Commandant of Cadets?” He contacted an uncle, a corporate lawyer in New York, who drove to West Point that weekend to counsel him. They strolled up the path to Michie Stadium and stood by the low wall surrounding Lusk Reservoir as the cadet calmly outlined his dilemma. He said he felt trapped and wanted to quit West Point. His uncle urged him not to leave under fire since he had done nothing wrong: “Do as the colonel says.” The tormented cadet agreed to go along with Harkins’s plan.
By early May, the swim team cadet and other informants had gathered solid evidence on a handful of classmates and believed that as many as fifty to a hundred cadets were involved, most of them connected to the football team. Unauthorized information about tests, they told Harkins, was being “passed freely” at the football tables in the dining hall. They also said the ringleaders appeared to have rigged the system by strategically placing a few tainted cadets on the twenty-five-member committee that enforced the honor code. Professors of Spanish, math, mechanics and physics presented Harkins with evidence that test questions in their classes appeared to be known in advance. As the month wore on, rumors spread that a scandal was about to explode. Members of the ring became suspicious of the infiltrators and ostracized them. Harkins decided it was time to act: he went to Major General Frederick A. Irving, the academy’s new superintendent, and received approval to launch an official investigation. Three officers were appointed to a board of inquiry, led by Harkins’s ally in the tactical department, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur S. Collins Jr., who shared his distaste for Blaik and big-time Army football.
The board targeted fourteen cadets suspected of involvement in the ring and brought them in to testify under oath, one by one, starting at seven o’clock on the morning of May 29. The first witness was a third classman, who confessed immediately. “I first heard about this ring during Fourth Class [his freshman or plebe year, in 1949],” he began. He went on to say that the ring “was started by football players for football players,” and that rings operated in both the First and Second Regiments. The way the process worked, he testified, was that ring members who took a writ (daily quiz) in an early period would pass along the questions to cadets who were to take the same writ later in the day. If there was time, the answers were then worked out by smarter members of the ring and slipped to cadets who were struggling academically. “Everyone has been scared to death, because they have had an idea it is going to break,” the cadet said in concluding his testimony.
This first witness turned out to be the most forthcoming of the fourteen. The second said he knew nothing about a cribbing ring. The thir
d said he would not say anything until he talked to Coach Blaik. “I’ll tell you anything about myself but if it is football players you’re asking about I won’t squeal,” he added. “There are people around here who don’t like football players … my tactical officer is one of them.” The remaining first-day witnesses insisted that they knew nothing of a ring.
The next afternoon, as Blaik strode across the Plain to attend a baseball game (his son Bob played second base), he encountered a football player who nonchalantly mentioned an honor code investigation. To Blaik it sounded minor, perhaps involving one cadet. He learned otherwise that night in an urgent phone call from another player saying that several sophomores needed to see him immediately. At 9:15 he was up in the projection room of the gymnasium tower, listening to twelve of his players tell him about the ring and their appearances before the board of inquiry. They said they were confused and would do whatever Blaik advised. By all accounts, he directed them to return to the board and tell the whole truth. “You know how we do business in the squad and at the military academy,” he said. “Each one of you should state the facts to the board without equivocation.” When the players left, Blaik remained in the film room, alone in the dark. Lombardi and his other assistants were on the other side of the world. His mentor MacArthur was off giving rousing political speeches. “No foreboding could have been greater than my own,” Blaik later wrote of the dismay that overwhelmed him at that moment. “I had been in many a tough game, but this was not a game. It was a catastrophe.”
When he left the gymnasium that night, Blaik walked next door to Superintendent Irving’s house. All lights were out, but Blaik could not wait until morning; he flung pebbles at a darkened bedroom window, roused Irving from bed and sat in the “Supe’s” living room recounting his meeting with the players. He pleaded with Irving to take the investigation away from the tactical department, arguing that the situation was “too important” for young officers to decide. Left unsaid was his concern that the board appointed by Harkins, an antagonist, was unlikely to give Blaik’s boys a sympathetic hearing. He called Harkins a “black-and-white man with no shades of gray,” and there was plenty of gray in this situation, Blaik maintained. He considered the honor system flawed because of its reliance on squealing, and he thought the academic system even worse, set up almost to ensure that the honor system would fail. Why give the exact same writs to different classes one day to the next?
Irving was consoling but noncommittal.
The next morning brought more bad news to the coach. Bob Blaik, his son and starting quarterback, confided that he was among those who had violated the honor code; he was a fine student who said he knew about the cribbing but did not report it. “My God!” said father to son. “How could you? How could you?” That same day the football players who had met with Blaik in the projection room notified Lieutenant Colonel Collins that they wished to reappear before his board of inquiry. This time they told the truth. They were followed by more cadets, football players and others, who also confessed. Suddenly the board had more information than it could process. The answers to Blaik’s lament came gushing out. How could they? Their answers, as transcribed by a court stenographer and compiled in the confidential report of the board’s proceedings, reveal the full range of human impulses, good and bad. They could violate the honor code out of fear, peer pressure, custom, laziness, academic inadequacy, loyalty, friendship, teamwork.
CADET 1: I did it to stay in the Academy; I could not have passed without it…. I knew this was a violation of the Honor System, but when I knew all these other people had done it and when I wanted to stay here so much it was either get help or go home.
CADET 2: At first I tried to be honest but after doing it a few times I just let things slide although I was aware of the Honor System and its requirements, my loyalty to my teammates seemed bigger. I was given the impression that the practice was passed on from upper classmen…. The football players tried to keep it among themselves. Someone said that there was one man on the Honor Committee who would warn us in time. Last night a number of us had a meeting with Coach Blaik. He was shocked. He told us to tell the truth and that is why I am back here.
CADET 3: I know it was wrong, but, after all, people cheat in civilian colleges so we thought it was okay to do it in West Point.
CADET 4: I became aware of it Plebe year during spring football. I noticed people talking about academic subjects at the table in the dining hall but I didn’t know what to do about it. I knew it was against honor, but these men were my idols. When I arrived at West Point they told us to pick out a First Classman and be like him. I [picked one] and when I found out [he] was cheating it really shocked me; I had thought he stood for everything good.
CADET 5: I know everything; I saw everything. What I told you on the 29th was wrong. Coach Blaik told me to tell the truth and I will do whatever he tells me to. During the summer of 1949, soon after I entered West Point, I was approached by [a veteran football player] who told me how to do it: “You look like a dumb football player, kid—if you have any trouble in academics remember that the people in other regiments have instruction before you do. Get the poop. Then you’ll get by.” He was the greatest guy in the world to me. I would have done anything he told me to…. I know many cadets who couldn’t do any problems. When they made good grades on writs I figured that the instructors knew about it and just let football players get away with it…. I couldn’t turn all these people in. They were my best friends and when you play ball together you just get very close. Besides, when you see all those upperclassmen who you worship doing it you don’t think it is so bad.
During the following week, the investigators expanded the probe, calling in cadets from all four classes. The seniors had just returned by train from a training mission at Aberdeen, Maryland, and were to graduate within a week. Although earlier witnesses had implicated members of this first class of 1951, to a man they denied knowledge of the ring. The investigative panel concluded that “a number of the members of this class are believed to have testified falsely but it cannot be established.” They were all allowed to graduate June 5. The juniors from Bob Blaik’s class of 1952 were not so lucky. The board called in dozens of members of that class, football players and others, and the portrait of a conspiracy grew wider and darker. Coach Blaik and his assistant coaches were never implicated directly, but witnesses spoke of players freely “passing the poop” in the projection room near Blaik’s tower and in the locker room. The protective aura surrounding Blaik’s program, some cadets said, made it easier for the scandal to develop.
CADET A: “Passing the Poop” was a big thing…. Everyone in the Corps knows who Blaik’s Boys are and anyone who tampers with them is in trouble. This is the impression one gets from the first day of Beast Barracks. You even hear remarks like that in the hotel before entrance. It is said that Colonel Blaik is so influential that no one had better cross him.
CADET B: Any man on the football, basketball or baseball corps squad who tells you he didn’t know unauthorized information was being passed is either lying or is too dumb to be in West Point. There were so many people in on it that it seemed almost to have official sanction…. I heard when I first got here that Blaik’s Boys get by.
CADET C: Colonel Blaik has always told the football team that they were the rock on which the Corps was built. This and other similar things had a tendency to set the football team apart from the Corps. … I believe the football team is the nucleus of this group.
THE THREE-OFFICER panel concluded its hearings the second week of June and filed a confidential report with Colonel Harkins just as the commandant of cadets was preparing to leave West Point for a new assignment at the Pentagon. The cheating conspiracy, according to the panel’s findings, began as far back as 1947, was “centered in and perpetuated by members of the Football Corps Squad until the fall of 1950, at which time cheating began to spread,” and eventually would have “destroyed the Honor System at West Point” had it continue
d. The findings listed ninety cadets who had been implicated in the ring for cheating, having knowledge of cheating or lying in sworn testimony, and suggested that they be “offered an opportunity to resign and be discharged”—immediately expelled, in other words. Among the ninety were all but two members of the varsity football squad.
Before sending the report to the superintendent and departing for Washington, Harkins added his own recommendations. “Separation from the academy,” Harkins emphasized, was the “one and only” solution for the guilty cadets. He ended his comments with a final shot at Blaik and his boys. “I am sorry that the exposition of this group had to be my parting act as Commandant. However, having discovered it, proved it to be a fact, my duty to the honest cadets, to the Academy and to the country was to expose it, expel it and let the chips fall where they may. I think when the air clears, the whole thing will have a very salutary effect on West Point and the country. It will bring some of the athletic teams back closer to the Corps of Cadets. It will prove to all of us that, though we want to have winning teams and play to win, the teams must be made up of cadets who are members of the Corps and respect and live by the ideals and spirit of West Point. There can be no other way. In the final analysis, the honor system and the Academy will be the gainers and West Point will continue to live by high ideals and carry its banner with DUTY, HONOR, COUNTRY emblazoned on its crest at the head of the long gray line.”
When Pride Still Mattered Page 17
