The confidential report moved up the military chain of command from Harkins to Superintendent Irving, who shared it with West Point’s academic board and then sent it along to the Pentagon with his own conclusion on July 2 supporting the board’s actions. The recommendation of expulsion would stick unless it was countermanded by higher-ups, and Blaik worked passionately to try to soften the penalties, urging what he called an “intramural” solution in which erring cadets would be disciplined privately within the academy. He tried to recruit MacArthur to help him in this effort, but the general was preoccupied with giving political speeches and unavailable to meet with him. Blaik was able to make several trips to Washington and meet informally with Army brass to repeat his case: He told his boys to tell the truth, which they had done, so why expel them when other cadets, who had blatantly lied, denying any knowledge of the academic cheating, were allowed to remain? The Army would have had difficulty getting enough evidence against most of these boys unless they had confessed. And the honor system was fatally flawed in any case, Blaik insisted, designed not to instill integrity, but to entice cadets to cheat and squeal.
During the third week of July, Lombardi, Warmath and Kenna returned from Japan. As Blaik began to outline the dimensions of the problem to them, he seemed beside himself, they said later, tormented in a way that they had never seen before. West Point was a starkly different place from when they had left. The granite fortress, symbol of right and might, now seemed cold and unforgiving, like the walls of a penitentiary. The incriminated cadets, many of whom had left for summer duties, were called back and confined to barracks, virtually under house arrest. Reporters had sniffed the faint scent of scandal and had begun visiting the academy looking for leaks. At the end of that week, Blaik appeared before what amounted to a final review board, a high-level panel consisting of two retired generals and Learned Hand, the distinguished federal appeals court judge who had retired that May from regular bench duty in New York City. The Hand board stayed at West Point for two days, reviewed earlier findings, interviewed cadets and heard out Blaik. The coach left his session encouraged by a statement from one of the retired generals that his account was the first one to make sense. Finally, Blaik thought, his arguments hit home.
Some of them did, it seemed. In his report, Hand questioned the West Point custom of using the same written examinations in classes throughout one day and into the next, allowing cadets to pass along information. “This was the means by which all the cheating was done which has so far appeared. It offers a perpetual inducement, indeed a tempting bait, to those whose resistance is weak,” Hand wrote. “And, although it is considered to be a part of the Honor System, it seems to us unnecessary and undesirable to so try the virtue of all, when that can … be easily removed.” The Hand report also sympathized with the inequity facing the cadets who happened to get caught. “Evidence indicates conclusively that nearly every cadet in this large group of honor violators fell into a practice already existing in violation of the code, were shocked and dismayed when they discovered it, and that in some instances through the usually commendable quality of loyalty to close friends, they did not have the courage to take action which they knew the code demanded. Evidence further shows without question that they were led into this situation by men in classes ahead of them, most of whom are now graduates and beyond anything but very complicated punitive action.”
But Blaik’s brief was seriously flawed. He had been making his pleadings based on his belief in his players and what they had told him, without access to confidential documents and interviews of the investigation. He believed, as his players insisted, that many of them only had knowledge of the wrongdoing but did not participate themselves, and that perhaps hundreds of cadets outside the athletic corps were also involved. He called it cribbing, not cheating, and sought to diminish the nature of the offense by saying that the cadets were merely passing along possible quiz subjects, not the answers. Blaik and his many supporters would make these arguments then and for decades to come, whenever the bitter subject of the 1951 scandal arose. The evidence that Hand and the others analyzed showed otherwise. Almost all of the implicated cadets, at least eighty-two of them, had confessed that they had succumbed to cheating themselves, rather than only having knowledge of the cheating ring, and in their testimony they established that the transgressions went far beyond merely passing along possible quiz questions. “Passing the poop” involved getting specific answers as well, in most instances. Similarly, the notion that academic cheating was an academy-wide problem proved to be an exaggeration spread by ringleaders in an effort to diminish their own responsibility.
Judge Hand and the retired generals understood the consequences of any decision they were to render. To dismiss the cadets, Hand wrote, “in effect wipes out the entire varsity football squad. With the great national prominence of West Point’s football coach, the sports pages will comment and enlarge on the enormity of the disaster for a very long time to come. Moreover it will destroy West Point’s football for at least 10 or 15 years.” But any punishment short of dismissal, he concluded, would destroy West Point’s honor code. Given a choice between honor and football, Hand’s board chose honor and affirmed the superintendent’s ruling. Blaik’s boys had to go.
The coach received word of this decision as he was preparing for his annual vacation at Bull Pond; the news surprised him and left him deeply dispirited. Kenna had been staying at Blaik’s house that week (his pregnant wife was back in Mississippi) and remembered that for three nights in a row, with Lombardi there for much of it, Blaik stayed up until dawn obsessed with his dilemma, looking for explanations, for a way out, burning at the notion that his enemies in the academy, the anti-football battalion, could get such ammunition. The colonel “never went to bed. He was under siege. He was miserable. Just absolutely emotionally wiped out.” The discussions continued at Bull Pond, where the group was smaller than usual and the atmosphere less buoyant. No fictitious All-America squads. No guffaws for Chuckles Axemurder. The coaches played cards and commiserated, hiding from the world.
How did Lombardi behave during those bleak times? He and Murray Warmath, the two civilian coaches, seemed to be the last to hear about the emerging scandal—“Somewhere along the line, other coaches heard the scoop of things before Vince and I did,” Warmath said later—and they had the most difficulty framing the issues. Particularly alien to them was the honor code mentality, which required classmates to squeal on one another. What Lombardi cherished about football was its fraternity, the sense of team and loyalty, one for all and all for one. He did not condone cheating, he told the others at Bull Pond, but from his understanding of the controversy (which was limited and one-sided; he had not read the investigative findings) it mostly involved helping athletes prepare for tests. This happened every day at other colleges. Why the fuss? What was new—or wrong—with that? Lombardi had become especially close to Bob Blaik, the quarterback, and the fact that such an able young man could be expelled for an honors violation bewildered him. During his college days at Fordham, he learned how taxing it was to study and play football; the demands at West Point seemed twice as difficult. He and Warmath had recruited several players involved in the scandal, talented athletes with modest academic training, many of them from Italian and Polish working-class backgrounds, the first in their families to go to college. It was easier for Lombardi to identify with them than with the aristocracy in the officer corps.
Lombardi was at Bull Pond with Blaik and the coaches at 12:50 on the afternoon of August 3 when Western Union transmitted a news release from West Point’s public information office to all New York newspapers, the wire services, major radio networks and Dumont Television. After days of final deliberations in Washington, including notification of President Truman, the Army went public: “Breach of West Point Honor Code Announced,” read the press release headline. Superintendent Irving was quoted as saying that approximately ninety cadets, among them many “who have been prominent in var
ious activities including varsity football,” had violated the honor code and would be discharged. It was a “stern and uncompromising” solution, Irving acknowledged, but officials saw no alternative. Within ten minutes the phones were ringing at the public information office. By three that afternoon members of the New York press corps had arrived “in considerable numbers” at Thayer Gate. The academy spokesmen said there was nothing to add to the earlier statement. Irving was not available for comment.
Out at Bull Pond, Lombardi was screening the calls. He took one from Tim Cohane, the sportswriting pal from Look, who had been vacationing with his family at Little Lake Sebago in Maine when the news broke. Lombardi gave Cohane the sorry picture: Blaik was convinced that he had to resign. They all might resign. They were suffering from shell shock. Warmath was grumbling and swearing, furious at the Army brass for being so cruel to the players. Vince was angry, too, but also depressed. Two and a half years after Cohane had helped him get hired at West Point, this might be the end. The assistants were supportive of Blaik, but they could not tell him what to do. Not even Cohane could. That level of influence belonged only to MacArthur.
Early the next morning, with his wife, Merle, accompanying him, Blaik set off to see the retired general in Manhattan. As he drove south on Route 9W and approached the George Washington Bridge, a tire on his car blew out. For Blaik, this was an uncharacteristic but fitting moment of disarray. He had always been a model of precision. He hated being late: Lombardi had watched in amazement once when Blaik drove away as a tardy assistant struggled to enter the car, one foot in, one foot dangling, the door flying wide open. But now Blaik’s own wheels were coming off, literally and figuratively. Fearful of keeping the general waiting, he left his wife at the roadside to deal with the broken-down car and hitchhiked into the city, arriving at the Waldorf-Astoria Towers a half hour late. MacArthur greeted him with words of sympathy—“They have set the academy back twenty years,” he proclaimed (“they” being Army officials, not the erring cadets)—then ushered the shaken coach into a vast living room adorned with the ornaments of his foreign campaigns. “Now,” MacArthur said, settling into his favorite chair, “tell me the whole story.” Blaik did, for two hours—at least his version. When he finished, the old soldier urged his disciple not to fade away. “Earl, you must stay on. Don’t leave under fire.”
Blaik returned to Bull Pond with the news. Four days later, on August 9, he agreed to meet the press for the first time since the scandal broke, not at an open press conference but at a private luncheon session with forty of his writing friends at his favorite Manhattan meeting place, Leone’s. It was a main event in the city that day; newspaper photographers and newsreel cameramen jostled for position on the sidewalk outside on West Forty-eighth Street, and a lunchtime crowd stopped and gawked at the scene. “Jesus Katy!” Blaik muttered as he entered the restaurant flanked by Lombardi, Warmath and Kenna. Among the journalists inside was Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith, who was then beginning to replace the aging Grantland Rice as a leader of the New York sportswriting brotherhood. Smith was not a mythmaker in the same grand fashion as Rice and Runyon. His prose was less romantic, more literate and ironic, but the difference was of degree, not of kind. Smith came from Green Bay, the Wisconsin town that also produced Sleepy Jim Crowley, and had gone to college at the citadel of football glory, Notre Dame, as had Crowley. He sang from the same sports hymnal as his predecessors. Later he would solo in the sports chorus for Vince Lombardi. Now he sang sympathetically for Red Blaik, comparing the expulsion of Blaik’s boys to “shooting a dog to rid him of fleas.”
In his column describing the scene at Leone’s for readers of the New York Herald Tribune, Smith depicted Blaik as “a shy man, inward turning, who never allows an outward sign of emotion,” but whose face that day “bore the signs of strain.” It was not until after lunch that Blaik addressed his handpicked audience, speaking with what Smith called “a grim eloquence” about his fallen players. He did not condone their actions; nor did he criticize the decision to separate them from West Point. But he wanted to ensure that they left with dignity. “I believe in the youngsters with whom I’ve been dealing,” Blaik said. “I know their families. I know them, and I know they are men of character…. My entire endeavor from now on shall be to see that these boys leave West Point with the same reputations they had when they came in.” Blaik then called on Doug Kenna to give the stellar histories of five athletes implicated in the scandal: their high school academic records and achievements, recommendations from their principals, teachers and coaches. Blaik said they were typical.
As the luncheon neared the end of its third hour, one reporter asked Blaik the single question that had drawn the crowd: What were his own plans? “Well, do you all want to leave now?” Blaik said, demonstrating a keen understanding of the press. He knew that his answer, one way or the other, would send them to the telephones. Then he responded in a deliberate voice: “I believe I can best make the public understand the boys, if necessary—and do the right thing—if I remain.” Open cheering is customarily discouraged in the press boxes of American sport, but sportswriters cheered openly at Leone’s that summer day in 1951 when Red Blaik said he would not resign.
There was no similar option for his varsity football players. All but two out of forty-five, including son Bob, were packed and gone by the end of the next week, among eighty-three cadets ultimately separated from West Point in the cheating scandal. Their discharges were by administrative order, neither honorable nor dishonorable. They left without courts-martial or due process hearings. They had no lawyers, agents, corporate sponsors or public relations firms to challenge the authorities or make their cases for them. There was no cable television with its sports channels or sports talk shows on radio to solicit public opinion on behalf of the players. They simply left, carrying conflicted sentiments of guilt, regret, bewilderment and rage at the system.
Blaik and his assistants tried in various ways to help them recover and get into other schools. Murray Warmath was busiest and boldest in that effort. He considered the expelled cadets “the finest group of young men” he ever knew and was outraged by the finality of their punishment. “I thought they were mistreated. I thought it was shoddy and still do,” he said nearly fifty years later. Warmath left West Point himself later that year to coach at Mississippi State, then went on to receive national renown at Minnesota, but before he left he made scores of telephone calls to coaches around the country seeking programs that would accept Blaik’s boys. “Kenna and Lombardi understood the system better than I did and knew when to keep their mouths shut. I said, ‘Shit on this,’ and started calling people. Blaik knew I was doing it and was happy about it. I had the football players going everywhere. I sent several players to Kansas State, another to Kansas. I hired two or three of them to work for me down at Mississippi State. Got them jobs.” Warmath helped place nearly twenty of the players who were forced to leave.
Lombardi worked his strongest contacts with Fordham and the Catholic hierarchy in New York. Within days came a statement of sympathy from Francis Cardinal Spellman (“To err is human; to forgive divine,” he said) and an offer to accept any of the cadets at Fordham, Manhattan or Iona. Kenna was on the phone several times with another Catholic benefactor who wanted to remain anonymous but said he would pay the way for discharged cadets to attend Notre Dame. This unnamed donor was Joseph P. Kennedy, patriarch of the political Kennedys. As Kenna remembered it, “Joe Kennedy thought it was terrible what happened to those kids. He had no connection to West Point. He was interested in Notre Dame, the Irish, a big fan. There was no small talk, he just wanted to help.” The offer was made because it was “in the American tradition,” Kennedy said, his quote attributed only to the anonymous donor. “A man who makes a mistake should have a reasonable chance to rehabilitate himself.”
Several cadets responded to Kennedy’s bequest and attended Notre Dame. Bob Blaik chose to go even farther away, enrolling at Colorado College. One nig
ht before leaving West Point, he asked his father, “Dad, do you now believe it would have been better to have lied?” It was an agonizing question for both Blaiks then; years later, after Bob had received his degree and become successful in the oil business, father and son would not have to swallow hard to answer “no.” The shadow of scandal thinned over time and most of Blaik’s boys eventually regained their footing, many of them in the same Army that had tossed them away. Because the cadets were separated by administrative order, not dishonorable discharge, they were not banned from further military service; some enlisted in ROTC programs at other colleges and returned to the officer corps, and one eventually reached the rank of general. Among those who returned to football in some fashion, backfield stars Al Pollard and Gene Filipski played briefly in the NFL and lineman Ray Malavasi rose to become head coach with the Los Angeles Rams.
Paul D. Harkins, the rigid colonel who launched the investigation and seemed determined to undo Blaik and the football program, wound up a dozen years later as the commanding general of American military forces in Vietnam, preceding the better known William Westmoreland. Life can turn around on people in unexpected ways. The officer who had disparaged some of Blaik’s boys at Leone’s that night in 1951, calling them a disgrace to the military, was derided himself in Vietnam. From his command post in Saigon, Harkins predicted easy victory and ignored any intelligence to the contrary. He constantly underestimated the troop strength and stamina of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese, whom he dismissed as “those raggedy-assed little bastards.” False bravado and inflexibility ultimately defined his conduct as an officer. After two years running the war, he lost the confidence of the White House and Pentagon, became an object of ridicule among American journalists in Vietnam and was quietly called home.
When Pride Still Mattered Page 18