Then, at a decisive session in Munich on May 25, 1959, the IOC voted to force the Republic of China Olympic Committee to compete under the name Taiwan (or the other name for the island, Formosa) or not at all, arguing that it could no longer use China in its name because it did not physically represent the vast territory of China. Brundage and the Marquess of Exeter, the strongest Western proponent of the name change within the IOC, said it was a practical decision arrived at free from ideological pressure and without political overtones. The political act came from those who insisted on calling it China when it was not China, they argued. “We cannot recognize a Chinese committee in Taiwan any more than we can recognize an Italian committee in Sicily or a Canadian committee in Newfoundland,” Brundage said. But the U.S. government, which recognized Chiang’s Nationalist China but not Mao’s mainland government, viewed this as a major symbolic victory for the Communist bloc, and thought Brundage had been naive and manipulated by the Soviets, who had initiated the proposal.
The first American press dispatches from Munich lent support to this view with their hyperbolic interpretation, reporting that the IOC had bowed to pressure from Moscow and had expelled Nationalist China with the intent of paving the way for the return of the Communist Chinese. For the next year, Brundage was attacked not as an imperialist tool but as a Communist sympathizer. He withstood vitriolic attacks from right-wing radio commentators, a letter-writing campaign launched by the John Birch Society and various church groups, and critical editorials from mainstream newspapers and magazines.
The direction of the attack befuddled Brundage, who took pride in being a staunch anti-Communist. His hard-line political views on China were set out bluntly years earlier in a speech he delivered to the Detroit Economic Club in February 1955: “Why was China betrayed? Why was Mac Arthur held back in Korea? Right then and there we—I say we—made Red China a major power, destroyed what was left of not only the United States’ but the entire white man’s prestige in the Orient, and snuffed out the light of freedom for Asia’s helpless millions.” Those were still his views on the larger question, yet his position on the nomenclature issue had given him a far different image. Allen Guttman, an Olympic historian and Brundage biographer from Amherst College, uncovered a haiku-like note that Brundage scribbled to himself during the heat of the controversy:
AB
Clever fellow
Imperialist
Fascist
Capitalist
Nazi
& now Communist
While not going to that extreme, the New York Times denounced Brundage and said he had “succumbed to the rawest sort of political blackmail.” “Avery Brundage Must Go,” blared a headline in the Detroit Times. And Sports Illustrated said “politics have entered Olympic affairs with a vengeance at the Olympians’ own invitation.”
Among Brundage’s few defenders in the press was, surprisingly, Red Smith of the New York Herald Tribune, who once called him “the greatest practicing patsy…of this century” and commonly lampooned him as an out-of-date autocrat. “The role of dissenter is not one to be coveted,” Smith wrote, yet he felt compelled to dissent from conventional wisdom. Even if the “agitation leading up to the decision” came from “a source that is repugnant to us,” that did not mean that the decision was wrong, or political. “In this instance the [politics charge] might more properly be brought against the critics of the IOC than against that organization.”
The U.S. State Department lined up strongly against the IOC and began an intense effort to reverse the Munich decision. Foreign service officers in all European capitals were instructed to lobby local contacts on the issue. Cable traffic flowed regularly between Washington and embassies in Rome and Taipei, the Taiwan capital. One airgram from Rome to State early that summer suggested an attempt at sensual diplomacy: The Italians should invite Otto Mayer down from Lausanne “to discuss technical aspects of Games and then after showing him some of the fleshpots of Rome” try to persuade him to back down from the name change. Although Brundage was more prone to weaknesses of the flesh—Sports Illustrated would later call him “a philanderer of enormous appetite”—no similar strategy was broached for him. In terse telegramese, one dispatch from State to Rome and Taipei read: “Department has concluded it inadvisable attempt directly influence him this matter at this juncture. Basis past experience, such efforts would probably have negative effect. Department however continuing attempt influence issue through Roby and others.” Roby was Detroit business executive Douglas F. Roby, one of the two U.S. members of the IOC, who spoke out against the Munich decision and had become the key Olympic contact, feeding inside information to State and doing its bidding.
In the run-up to the Olympics, State sent a confidential memo to its embassy in Rome instructing it to contact Roby as soon as he arrived, “informing him of current situation and offering all appropriate assistance in his efforts to obtain support for ROC [Republic of China] among non-US members.” The memo was dated August 11, the day before the press counselor for the Italian embassy in Washington was reassured by a State Department diplomat that the U.S. would do everything possible to keep the Olympics free from partisan politics or propaganda. Roby reached Rome on the Thursday evening of August 17 and was met at the Hotel Excelsior by an embassy officer. They had “a long and satisfactory talk,” a telex to Washington reported. Roby was said to be “tentatively mildly optimistic” and agreed to “attempt informal approaches with delegates from Venezuela, Canada, Greece, Netherlands, Iceland, Mexico, Spain and India.” On the other hand, Roby was “disturbed by a precedent”—that in a preliminary basketball tournament held in Bologna, Italy, for teams that had to play their way into the Olympics, the Republic of China had already agreed to use the name Taiwan.
There was no question what the executive board would say about the China issue, though its decision could still be overturned by the full IOC at its meeting a few days later. Led by the Marquess of Exeter and Brundage, the board decided to “maintain the decision in Munich.” In specific, this meant that “the athletes and officials will take part in the parades and in the competitions under the appellation Taiwan. They will also figure under this name in the programmes, and will be announced under this name at all the ceremonials pertaining to the protocol.”
At the American embassy down the street from the executive board meeting, a confidential memo arrived at 4:49 that afternoon. Officials in Washington had learned “from high levels” that the fight, for all practical purposes, was over. The Republic of China had decided to “take part in Rome Games regardless of IOC decision on nomenclature”—even if it had to be called Taiwan. This was still a secret, they were trying to keep it out of the press, and some miracle might change things. The Americans were still trying to persuade the Taiwanese to boycott Rome rather than give in. But here was the private word. Two reasons were given for the decision, combining sports and politics: “(1) in order to permit decathlon champion C. K. Yang take part in hope he will win China’s first Olympic medal and (2) because presence of free China even as Taiwan would result in continued Chicom (Red China) political boycott of Olympic movement.”
BARON PIERRE de Coubertin, the Frenchman who founded the modern Olympics, or at least the version that stuck, had always wanted his Games to be staged in Rome, from whence he claimed his ancestors came. After Athens in 1896, Paris in 1900, and St. Louis in 1904, he tapped Rome for the IV Olympiad, seeing it as a return to monarchical glory after a sullying in the democratic New World. He explained later that he “desired Rome because it is only there that, once it has returned from its excursion into utilitarian America, the Olympic ideal will once again wear its sumptuous toga, clothed in art and thought in which right from the beginning I had always wanted to see it attired.” But an eruption at Mount Vesuvius two years before the 1908 Games forced Italy to decline as hosts, turning attention instead to the rebuilding of devastated Naples, and the Games went to London. Benito Mussolini had aspirations for Rome host
ing the 1944 Olympics, but the world was in no mood for games with World War II raging, and Il Duce had been overthrown by then in any case, soon to meet his ignominious death. Now, at last, Rome had its Games, and Avery Brundage was as overcome by the majesty of the setting as his baronial predecessor had been.
The opening dinner of the 57th Session of the IOC was suitably solemn, ornate, all puffery and pomp. The setting was the Palazzo dei Congressi, built by Mussolini just before the war as part of his grand design for a second Roman republic—a modern Fascist version—in the EUR section of Rome that featured ponderous new government offices, apartment buildings, and museums. On a warm Saturday night, the Italian head of state arrived, the Honorable Giovanni Gronchi, ushered in by silver trumpets from the valets of Vitorchiano blasting Roman fanfares. Other important guests and committee members moved toward their seats with more trumpeters from the Carabinieri Band playing repetitions of the Olympic motif. And there came Avery Brundage, looking comfortably at home in this exalted milieu. He stood above the crowd, poised on a raised podium, ready to deliver the speech he brought with him to Rome. The Orchestra of the National Academy of Santa Cecilia and a hundred robed singers were arrayed behind him, framed by a long row of the five-ringed Olympic flags, the wall covered by a vast banner proclaiming “Citius Altius Fortius,” the Latin motto of the Olympics, meaning “Faster Higher Stronger.”
“New glory has been added to the Eternal City,” Brundage declared. He was talking about the architectural designs produced by Pier Luigi Nervi especially for the Rome Olympics, including the nearby Palazzo dello Sport, where the boxing matches and basketball finals would be held, comparing Nervi’s structures to the majesty of “Bernini and Michelangelo, and the monuments left by Hadrian, Trajan, and the other Caesars.” But he also meant the glory of his own design. The Rome of Augustus, the greatest of ancient times, he boasted, “is dwarfed by the world of sport today, which includes all five continents…practically the entire globe.” And the sporting domain, his Olympic realm, exceeded not only political empires but also spiritual ones, he said. “No philosophy or religion…has spread so widely and so quickly as the Olympic Movement in its modern development.”
It was a movement that had “neither armies nor money, but in sixty years it has enlisted the enthusiastic support of the peoples of more than four score countries,” Brundage continued. “It has spread with this amazing speed solely through the efforts of unpaid but dedicated and devoted volunteers. Christians, Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists, and atheists, all respect its basic principles of common honesty, mutual regard, fair play, and good sportsmanship, which are the essence of all religion.” To maintain its integrity, he said, the Olympic Movement could allow “no deviation…from the fundamental and basic principle that there shall be no discrimination because of race, religion, or politics. The Olympic Games are, and must be kept, open to the youth of all the world if they are fully to serve their purpose.”
The trumpeters sounded the Olympic motif again as dignitaries and Mr. Brundage took their leave into the Roman night.
The next morning, in his room at the Hotel Luxor, Michael Scott took out a sheaf of stationery stamped The Africa Bureau, Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, and jotted a note that he would hand deliver to the president of the IOC across town.
“Dear Mr. Brundage,” he wrote. “I have come to Rome at the request of the South African Sports Association and the Campaign Against Race Discrimination in Sport in order to make representations to your committee concerning the South Africa Olympics team, which is not representative of the best achievements of the South African people—that is to say of all the people, including the Africans and the coloured people of South Africa.” Scott said he was there in place of Dennis Brutus, the head of the South African Sports Association, who was unable to appear because the Union of South Africa government had not granted him a passport to leave the country. Accompanying Scott was Nana Mahomo, a recent South African émigré, who would provide firsthand accounts of “the artificial handicaps in sport under which his people labor…which have prevented the inclusion of any of them in the present team and make necessary the protest which we have come to Rome to voice.”
Brundage and his inner circle knew about Scott’s mission to Rome and had tried to discourage it, despite their hollow rhetoric of “no deviation” from the Olympic principle against racial discrimination. Otto Mayer, the IOC chancellor, had been instructed to write a letter earlier that month to officials at the British antiapartheid organization that Scott represented. In his letter to Antony Steel in London, Mayer avoided the issue of race and said simply that Scott was not the right messenger and Rome was not the right time or place. “I think this would not be very suitable, as the situation should be explained by a person living in South Africa and not someone staying in Europe,” Mayer wrote. “As a matter of fact, we are already very well informed on the situation as it is, and I don’t think that a representative from your committee might say more than what we know…Therefore your delegate might take the risk to undertake the journey for nothing.”
The eight months of 1960 leading up to the Rome Olympics had been tumultuous in South Africa, delineating a historic turning point in the indigenous revolution against the white supremacist state and how the government was regarded by the world of nations. On March 21 black Africans had staged protests around the country against pass laws, which required them to carry documents listing details of their lives, including their name, tax code, and employer. At a protest in Sharpeville, thirty miles south of Johannesburg, white police officers fired into the massive crowd, leaving 69 dead and 176 wounded. The Sharpeville massacre became the symbol and rallying cry of the movement against apartheid. The United Nations Security Council condemned South Africa and called on it to bring about racial equality. An incipient boycott began, led by Britain and black African nations. The government responded with another crack-down, imposing a state of emergency, detaining 1,700 political prisoners without trial and outlawing the main party of opposition, the African National Congress.
Twenty days after the Sharpeville massacre, Dennis Brutus, secretary of the South African Sports Association, wrote a letter to Brundage from his home office in Port Elizabeth. He said that it was difficult for him to secure information about the Olympics in South Africa, but he hoped the IOC, at its next regular session, would allow him to make the case for the “excluded nonwhite sportsmen” of his country. He applied for a passport so that he could meet Brundage and his committee in Rome. That very day, April 13, South African Security Branch detectives raided Brutus’s home, interrogated him about the goals and activities of his association, and seized his files of letters, pamphlets, and documents.
The next day, not coincidentally, a letter came to Brundage from Brutus’s nemesis, Ira Emery, secretary of the all-white South Africa Olympic Committee. Appended to Emery’s letter were news clippings from the Johannesburg Star about the raid on Brutus’s organization. Understanding Brundage’s rhetorical antipathy toward anything overtly political, Emery argued that Brutus was more interested in politics than sports. With Orwellian logic, he added: “The action of the security police bears out this statement very completely, as no other nonwhite sports body has been screened, to our knowledge.”
Without speaking to each other, Brutus and Emery lobbied their antithetical causes in letters to Brundage over the remainder of the spring and summer. Brutus insisted that he had fresh evidence of racial discrimination in the selection of the South African team. Emery insisted that “not a single Nonwhite South African athlete was anywhere near international standard.” In a May 28 letter to a Swedish member of the IOC, Brundage tipped his hand toward Emery. “We have complete confidence in the South African Olympic Committee,” he wrote. In a circular letter to all IOC members, Brundage and Otto Mayer went a step further, attaching a reprint of an article Emery sent them that purported to represent the interests of nonwhites in South Africa. “Sadly, we must shake our heads and admi
t it,” the article concluded. “The truth is we don’t yet quite make the grade.” The publication, Drum, was owned by a white South African, but the writers were predominantly black.
In early July Brutus sent a telegram to the South African Department of Interior asking for information about the passport. He had not heard a word, except that the local passport office had referred his application to Pretoria. Finally, on Wednesday, July 27, he received a telegram from Interior: “Application of passport not successful.” No reason was given. It was then that antiapartheid activists in South Africa and Great Britain scrambled for a backup plan that led Michael Scott to Rome, where on a Sunday morning he would hand deliver his letter to the Hotel Excelsior, pleading for a hearing before Brundage and the IOC.
NEVER WRITE anything down, Brundage once advised his longtime chief financial assistant, Frederick J. Ruegsegger. Yet Brundage was a chronic doodler, constantly scribbling notes to himself—idle thoughts, aphorisms, bits of philosophy, lists of people and material things. His paper trail offered a window into the peculiarities of his life and mind. During the two-day sessions of the IOC on Monday, August 22, and Tuesday, August 23, Brundage had a pad of paper at his side the entire time, and his scribbles, like a multitude of other letters from his life, were saved for posterity, ending up in an archive at his alma mater, the University of Illinois. During those two days, among other things, the full IOC seconded the executive board decision on Taiwan, rebuffed Soviet attempts to transform the committee structure, heard from a delegation from Tokyo, where the next Olympics would be staged, and agreed to have the executive board see Michael Scott on the South Africa question, but only in accompaniment with the South African committee member, Reginald Honey.
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