Rome 1960

by David Maraniss

  A few seconds later, Yang was bending down again when Johnson appeared, lifted him up, and stood with him arm in arm. “It was a moment of such beauty,” Neil Allen wrote in his diary, “that I was not surprised to see one friend in the press box with tears in his eyes, and I for one, for the first time in my life, found that my hands were trembling too much to type.” To Don Graham, “that fantastic moment when Yang turned to Rafer and hugged him, that seemed like what the Olympics were all about.” The special vacation that his father had arranged for him now gave Graham this unforgettable memory. He left the stadium thinking that he wanted to be a decathlete.

  Being a decathlete was now the last thing on Rafer Johnson’s mind. He had pushed himself to the finish line by telling himself this was the last time, and now he told the world. “I never want to go through that again—never,” he said in the dressing room. “I’m awfully tired…I don’t even want to think of another decathlon. All I want to do is get back to the Olympic Village, walk around by myself, look at the moon, and think.”

  After back-to-back fourteen-hour days, ten events, draining humidity, evening chill, rain delays, unbearable tension, and the accumulation of an Olympic record 8392 points (by the scoring system used in 1960), Rafer Johnson left the Stadio Olimpico for the last time at eleven o’clock that night, retracing the steps he had taken nearly two weeks earlier as the captain and flag bearer for the U.S. Olympic team. As he trudged, relieved and exhausted, along the moonlit Tiber and over the bridge, C. K. Yang, now just a friend, no longer a competitor, walked once again at his side.

  JOHNSON’S VICTORY was a cause for celebration. Not only was he immensely popular among his teammates, but his starring role in Rome was a relief to U.S. officials who saw the Olympics as an important propaganda battle in the cold war. With racial confrontations and overt acts of segregation rocking the South, from Florida to Washington, DC, during the very days of the Games, and the Soviets spreading stories about the inequities of American life at every opportunity, Rafer Johnson, the person and the athlete, was viewed as a powerful antidote to the otherwise irrefutable poison of American racism. And while other controversies swirled around the U.S. team—Did some athletes choke? Were they partying too much? Could they be counted on to say the right thing?—Johnson was a rock of stability. No one could question his sense of purpose or his goodwill. The Soviets admired him as much as anyone else. In the dressing room after the meet, Kuznetsov, who had been unable to mount a charge for gold but finished with the decathlon bronze, embraced Johnson with a bear hug and kissed him on both cheeks. The Soviet press did the same, figuratively, prominently noting Johnson’s achievement and harkening back to his glorious performance earlier in Moscow.

  What the Soviets and their Eastern bloc allies would not acknowledge was the silver medal winner. Pravda’s account of the decathlon took note of who came in first, third (Kuznetsov), and fourth (Soviet Yuri Kutenko), but said nothing about second place, as though C. K. Yang did not exist, an ideological extension of their refusal to acknowledge Taiwan, by any name. At the American legation in Budapest, Hungary, U.S. diplomat Nicholas Feld took note of this omission in a dispatch to Washington. In reading the Olympic coverage in the Hungarian sports magazine Kepes Sport, he said, “although Rafer Johnson and Vasily Kuznetsov, his longtime Russian rival, are carefully covered, the magazine made no mention of the California collegian Yang, a Nationalist Chinese…In this respect, the Hungarian press followed the Soviet technique of relegating the Nationalist Chinese to the memory hole by expunging Yang from the pages of sports history.”

  In Taipei, it was already morning when the decathlon ended. The local papers had waited overnight for the results and hit the streets with extra editions. Yang’s silver medal was the top story, his photograph on the front page of every paper. The Chinese Track and Field Association sent two trucks into the streets with loudspeakers blaring the news. Volunteers roamed block to block with pamphlets extolling the exploits of “the Iron Man of Asia.” Top officials made their way from the capital city to rural Taitung County to pay their respects to C.K.’s parents. They announced that since “the Chinese Communists will not permit the enslaved millions to know the glory of their countryman,” plans were under way to direct broadcast transmissions to the mainland. President and Madame Chiang, who had been given periodic reports on the decathlon, were said to have “smiled happily when told of the results.” Among other things, the decathlon story had at least temporarily overwhelmed accounts of Chiang’s repression of leading democratic dissidents. Keeping the track team in Rome, rather than boycotting the Games as the Americans suggested, now seemed fully justified in Taipei with the news that Chuan-Kwang Yang was bringing home the island’s first and only Olympic medal.

  16

  NEW WORLDS

  BEFORE President Eisenhower held a press conference on the Wednesday morning of September 7, White House advisers prepared a memo detailing his suggested answers to possible questions. The issues of the day included a water dispute involving India and Pakistan; the role of religion in the general election campaign between Vice President Nixon and Senator Kennedy, whose Catholicism had emerged as a significant issue; the latest on the bloody revolt in the Congo; Khrushchev’s impending visit to New York for the opening session of the United Nations; and the cold war propaganda battle going on at the Olympics in Rome.

  One question Eisenhower’s staff thought he might get was along these lines: “Mr. President, would you comment on the U.S.-Soviet rivalry at the Olympic Games, which are now taking place in Rome, Italy?”

  The proposed answer read as though IOC president Avery Brundage had scripted it:

  “The Olympic spirit emphasizes individual competition, good sportsmanship, and international friendship,” Eisenhower was to say. “It is, therefore, a mistake to consider the Olympics as a competition between two large nations. Olympic champions come from both large and small nations. All the Olympic champions, whatever their race or national origin, merit the admiration of sports followers everywhere. The Olympic creed states that ‘the important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part.’”

  As it turned out, no variation of that response was uttered aloud by Eisenhower when he met the press in the Executive Office Building that morning, because no correspondent raised the question. But if the press would not broach the subject of cold war sports rivalries, others would. There was growing concern among American officials in Rome that the U.S. was not being aggressive enough in counteracting propaganda from the Soviets and was particularly vulnerable on issues of race. The competition at the Summer Games extended beyond the athletic arenas, their thinking went, and it seemed naive not to acknowledge it. The Olympic gathering was not just another sporting event but one of those rare occasions when the wide world was watching and paying attention, and when it was important to deal with perceptions as much as reality. At about the same time that Eisenhower held his press conference in Washington, Arthur Lentz, press chief of the U.S. Olympic Committee, visited the U.S. embassy in Rome to push that argument—“informally asking” diplomats there to persuade the president to make another public gesture before the Olympics ended.

  Ambassador Zellerbach agreed and drafted a dispatch to the State Department in the compressed grammar of diplomatic cablespeak: “Especially in view some press allegations individual misbehavior, and Communist taunt that U.S. relies on Negro leadership in games while discrimination exists against Negroes at home, message congratulating team composed of ‘Representative Americans’ on sports-manlike competition in best Olympic tradition would be useful.”

  The embassy message made its way to the White House with strong backing from foreign policy analysts. “The Department also believes it important to team morale and national and international opinion that the president extend congratulations to the team on its athletic performance,” asserted a State Department memo to the White House. Enclosed was a draft of what Eisenhower could say. Echoing the phrasing o
f Zellerbach, the last line of the draft stated, “All citizens take pride in the gallant performance of these representative Americans in the face of stiff competition.” It took another week for White House aides to edit that sentence and release it under Eisenhower’s signature. By that time, the Olympics were over, the athletes, journalists, and propagandists of the world were dispersed, and the statement ended up gathering dust in the files of U.S. Olympic Committee president Tug Wilson at his office on North LaSalle Street in Chicago. And in the final draft, the phrase “these representative Americans”—wording that Olympic and State Department officials thought would best emphasize that black and white athletes were equally American—was changed to read “…in the gallant performance of their representatives in the face of stiff competition.” The meaning was lost, along with the message.

  One question reporters did ask Eisenhower at the Wednesday morning press conference concerned his age. In little more than a month, Ike would celebrate his seventieth birthday and become the oldest president in American history, passing Andrew Jackson. The president cut short a query about how he “maintained good health” at that advanced age with a baseball analogy: “First of all, when a pitcher has a no-hitter going, no one reminds him of it.” But in fact Eisenhower did seem old that September, and it was not just because Kennedy, rich and handsome and forty-three, was going around the country talking about vigor and youth and getting America moving again. Life was changing noticeably during those final months of 1960; the world seemed on the cusp not just of a new decade but of a new cultural era. No one could say precisely what the future would bring, but some hints, good and bad, could be gleaned from the Olympics in Rome.

  Hours before Eisenhower met the press in Washington, Rafer Johnson appeared on the infield at the Stadio Olimpico for the last time. He was out of uniform, dressed in a white shirt and sharp dark suit and tie, as he stepped onto the platform to receive the gold medal he had earned the night before. “Weeks to train, a day to compete, and a lifetime to remember”—that was the Ducky Drake motto that helped drive Rafer toward his goal. He would have the ultimate memory now, and the realization brought tears flowing down his face, but the decathlon champ and first black ever to carry the American flag at the Opening Ceremony was far more than a bit of sporting nostalgia. What could be said of Cassius Clay, with his irrepressible sense of self, and even more of Wilma Rudolph, with her unconquerable grace, was most applicable to Rafer Johnson, with his universal class and cool. All of them to varying degrees were not so much “representative Americans”—as the diplomats would have it—but groundbreaking figures, pushing forward.

  ALSO BREAKING ground was Ljudmila Shevtsova-Lysenko of the Soviet Union. In the women’s 800-meter run that Wednesday afternoon, Shevtsova tied her own world record of 2:04.3 while barely edging out Brenda Jones of Australia, but the excellent time was not the most noteworthy aspect of the event. The history came in the running of the race at all. While Wilma Rudolph’s magical victories in the sprints drew far more attention, and the CBS Olympic coverage of Rudolph blazing to the tape proved inspirational to a generation of girls in the United States, the 800-meter race marked another important step in the long push for recognition of women in sports.

  Progress in the modern Olympics might have moved slightly ahead of society at large, but still it came fitfully. The women’s 800 had been run once before, in 1928, and then was banned for thirty-two years because the males who controlled track and field thought women were incapable of running such a long distance. Most of the old guard never wanted it to return. When a proposal to reinstitute the race was made at the IOC session in Munich in 1959, John J. Garland, a U.S. representative, voted against it. The minutes of that meeting state that he was “opposed on account of the fact that, in Amsterdam in 1928, he was shocked by this women’s race which figured on the program.” Men collapsed during or at the end of races quite often, but the sight of women so fatigued was too much for Garland. Avery Brundage felt the same way. “I can still see the contestants [in 1928] falling from exhaustion and collapsing all over the track,” he said as a way of explaining his opposition. But the IOC vice president under Brundage, the Marquess of Exeter, the former British hurdler, pushed for the return of the women’s 800, saying that the IOC “must go with the times.” The Australians also supported it, along with the Soviets and most of the Eastern bloc countries—just enough for the measure to pass by a close 26-to-22 vote.

  That women were participating in the Olympics at all challenged the original concept of Pierre de Coubertin, founding father of the modern Games (or more precisely, not the first modern Games but the first modern version that succeeded). Although de Coubertin envisioned his Olympics as a revival of the ancient Greek Games, in which women were not allowed, his sexism was more personal than historical. He said he was disturbed by the very notion of women competing in sports, often citing how upset he once was to see women whooshing down a snowy hill on sleds. In his writings, though he grudgingly approved of women taking part in a few athletic endeavors, he did not think they should compete in public. Despite his disapproval, women participated in some Olympic sports, starting in 1900 with tennis and golf. Archery was added four years later, then gymnastics and figure skating (a Summer Games event in that era), followed by fencing in 1924, but still not track and field. Led by the dynamic French activist Alice Milliat, women athletes formed their own track-and-field organization to counter the men, and staged their own small-scale version of the Games in Paris in 1922 and in Sweden in 1926. They finally forced the IOC to include women’s track and field in 1928, but the backlash after the running of the 800-meter race in Amsterdam was so intense that it led to a temporary step backward. In 1929 the IOC voted to remove the entire women’s track-and-field program from the Games. This ban was overturned two years later with the help of some male officials, led by Gustavus Kirby, the U.S. representative on the International Amateur Athletic Federation, who said that if women could not compete, the American men might boycott the 1932 Games.

  But the misperceptions persisted for decades, and so did the barriers. Chris McKenzie, the wife of U.S. marathoner Gordon McKenzie, and herself a distance runner from England, often trained with her husband in the Bronx in the two years leading up to the Rome Olympics, but she found herself on the outside when it came to events, banned from running in 5-kilometer and 10-kilometer races because she was a woman. Since Chris is a name used by both sexes, she often entered events under her real name, hoping the sponsors would not discover that she was a woman until it was too late. At least once she was chased down the street by an outraged judge. At a race in Washington, DC, she ran carrying a sign that read: “If I Can Carry a Baby for Nine Months, I Can Run 10 Miles.”

  The restoration of the women’s 800 was a long time coming, and even now there were objections. As Shevtsova-Lysenko and her competitors gathered on the Stadio Olimpico track, Don Graham overheard a British journalist muttering to Shirley Povich about how it was “unconscionable—they should never allow women to run so far.” The harrumphing continued during the race, especially when a runner who was leading after the first lap, Dixie Willis of Australia, veered off the track and collapsed before the end. Braven Dyer of the Los Angeles Times said the event left him “cold,” then described the scene much as the old-line journalists had back in Amsterdam, saying “the sight of exhausted ladies bent over double in the middle of the track at the finish of the 800 meters is something I won’t forget for a long time.” But this time there was no long-term overreaction, and the rise of women in track and field continued, slowly. Twelve years later, at the 1972 Munich Olympics, women would run the 1500, and after another dozen years they finally could run as far as the men, undertaking the marathon at the 1984 Games in Los Angeles.

  In a later study of women and the Olympics, Bridget Mary Handley identified five obstacles they faced. The first was psychological, “the assumption that females are not tough enough psychologically to stand the stress of
competition.” Second was sociological, based on the historic “connection between sports and war” and the notion that physical competition was “not compatible with society’s stereotyped image of what the female should be.” Third was physiological, “the fear of becoming heavily muscled and unfeminine in appearance.” The final barriers had to do with two of the defining biological characteristics of women: menstruation and pregnancy. As women increased their participation in the Olympics, Handley said, all five factors were shown to be based on “misconceptions, hearsay, male chauvinism, old wives’ tales, and sparseness of biological, medical, psychological, and sociological data.” Women were not as fragile as commonly assumed and were no more susceptible to stress than men. Medical science established that strenuous sports did not damage the reproductive organs, and studies showed that menstruation had no effect or minimal effect on performance. Handley cited a study of women at a track-and-field meet held in Prague in 1930. Performances dropped during menstruation in only 8 percent of the cases; in 63 percent there was no change; and 29 percent of the women had their best performances while menstruating.

  Shevtsova-Lysenko and the twenty-six other women who finished the 800 meters in Rome were among a record 611 female athletes at the 1960 Games, up from 376 at Melbourne four years earlier. They competed in thirty-nine events, also a record, double the number they were given in Berlin in 1936. Ten events were in track and field, nine in swimming and diving, six in gymnastics, five in equestrian, five yachting, two fencing, and two canoeing. There was a complicated cold war aspect to the involvement of women in international athletics. Where could one draw the line between a belief in gender equality and raw propaganda opportunity? Did the Soviets support the increased role of women out of an advanced sensibility or a realization that their women could help them win more medals than the United States? With U.S. officials, was it a matter of principle or a fear of failure—as was evident at that first dual track meet with the Soviets in 1958, when concern about losing a combined point count led some American officials to consider not bringing Ed Temple and his women’s team to Moscow? In questions of gender as well as race, cold war politics pressed hard on athletic deliberations, eventually forcing change.