If the women seemed like good copy off the field, even they could not compete with the young boxer Cassius Clay. After yakking his way through his flying phobia on the long flight across the Atlantic, he found everything in Rome new and exciting, even the bidet in his suite at the village, which according to teammate Nikos Spanakos he first mistook for a drinking fountain, and tried to take a swig from it. Within a few days, Clay had established himself as the gregarious clown prince of the world athletes. He seemed to be everywhere, shaking hands, telling tall tales, boasting about his boxing prowess, joshing with Olympians from Europe, Asia, and Africa.
“He was always preaching, no matter where it was—in the cafeteria, out on the grounds, in the enormous village, downtown, over at the boxing venue. He was always talking,” recalled Paula Jean Myers Pope, an American diver. One American official said that in four days, Clay had already posed with twenty-eight different delegations and signed countless autographs. Francis W. Nyangweso, a boxer from Uganda, recalled coming back from training one afternoon and being approached by athletes wearing USA uniforms. “One of them, very tall and big, spoke to us in an American accent. When I got used to his English, our conversation ranged over topics including wild animals, forests, and snakes,” Nyangweso said. “Before we parted, this gentleman advised us that the boxer on our team who happened to be drawn against him should duck on medical grounds and should not try to fight him, for he, Cassius Clay, would not like to demolish a young brother from Africa.”
Members of the press corps quickly dubbed Clay “Uncle Sam’s unofficial goodwill ambassador,” and were especially taken by his “solid Americanism”—a trait he reinforced in an exchange with a foreign journalist. “With the intolerance in your country, you must have a lot of problems,” the reporter said to Clay. “Oh, yeah, we’ve got some problems,” Clay was quoted in response. “But get this straight—it’s still the best country in the world.” Clay’s political sensibilities would change dramatically within a few years, but his personality at age eighteen was essentially the same as it would be the rest of his life. In retrospect, because of the worldwide fame he gained later as Muhammad Ali, there is a temptation to present him as a larger figure at the Rome Olympics than he really was. He was ebullient and memorable from the start, but he was not a leader of the U.S. delegation. It was Clay seeking out people, not people seeking out Clay.
“They try to rewrite history,” Rink Babka, the discus thrower from Southern Cal, said later, reflecting a common feeling among Olympic veterans. “When I think of 1960 and hear people say Cassius Clay was Mr. Olympics and everyone went to see him—bullshit.” The most respected athletes on the American squad, according to their teammates, were, first, Rafer Johnson, the captain, and, second, Wilma Rudolph, the leader of the Tigerbelles. Ray Norton, the sprinter, and John Thomas, the high jumper, held star status because of the expectation that they would shatter world records and bring home gold medals. With basketball more popular in the U.S. than track and field, the brilliant triumvirate of Oscar Robertson, Jerry West, and Jerry Lucas had a special aura even though their sport was considered an Olympic sideshow. Glenn Davis, the determined 400-meter hurdler from Ohio State, and Bo Roberson, the long jumper and three-sport star at Cornell, radiated dignity and intelligence and also had larger internal followings than Cassius Clay.
IGOR TER-OVANESYAN and his Soviet teammates were kept busy with the work of comradeship on the day before the Olympics opened. On that Wednesday morning, they were called to an assembly on the square near their dormitory to listen to a special greeting from their leader back in Moscow, Nikita S. Khrushchev. With earnest oratorical flourishes, Nikolai Romanov, the head of the Soviet delegation, read aloud a letter from Khrushchev which that same day had been printed on the front pages of Izvestia and Pravda. A correspondent from Tass, the Soviet news agency, reported that “with warm applause our sportsmen greeted the warm message from the head of the Soviet government, which was full of ideals of friendship of the youth of the world.”
Khrushchev’s message was meant not just for the Soviets but for all athletes gathered in Rome, even if it was boilerplate Soviet rhetoric. In Russian, he welcomed the “life-loving sports youth” of the world. He said the Olympic flame “fires in the hearts of people the spirit of camaraderie.” The progress of humankind, he said, depended “on mental richness, moral cleanliness, and physical development.” Those characteristics, he claimed, were evident in both the Olympic Movement and the Soviet Union, where “the government takes care of strengthening the health of workers and also the physical and mental development of the nation.” The Olympic Games were worthy because they improved “brotherly contact among sportsmen of different countries,” he noted, concluding: “I wish all sportsmen taking part the best success in sports as well as in work, studies, and their private lives.”
When Romanov finished reading his leader’s words, several Soviet athletes were brought forward to respond with similarly grand elocution. High jumper Taisia Chenchik, gymnast Boris Shakhlin, and heavyweight weight lifter Yuri Vlasov expressed “warm feelings of gratitude for the care of the Soviet government and mainly comrade N. S. Khrushchev.” In a letter they composed back to him, they wrote:
Dear Nikita Sergeyevich,
Your greeting is full of concern about peace and the happiness of mankind and it inspired us toward better achievements in sports and other endeavors. We promise the Communist Party and the Soviet people, and you dear Nikita Sergeyevich, that we will represent our Fatherland in the 17th Olympics with a great deal of honor, and we will fight to strengthen the friendships between athletes from all over the world.
A reporter from Pravda reported that Khrushchev’s letter swiftly became the talk of the village: “On the street we stopped a dark-haired sportsman who had the word Italia on his blue uniform. ‘Have you heard about Khrushchev’s letter?’ The answer was ‘Yes, all sportsmen know about it.’”
Like his teammates, Ter-Ovanesyan kept private whatever skepticism he might have felt about Khrushchev’s commitment to sports. Nearly a half century later, looking back on that scene, he said, “Khrushchev could care less about sports. He didn’t care about sports at all. He was very cool toward sports.” In biographies of Khrushchev, the closest he comes to participating in sports is playing shuffleboard. Ter-Ovanesyan recalled a reception at the Kremlin where a Russian skater who had returned from the 1960 Winter Olympics, held in Squaw Valley, California, offered a mild complaint to Khrushchev about the shortage of skating rinks and poor overall sports conditions in the Soviet Union. Khrushchev was coldly dismissive. “Nikita said there were much more important problems in the country, like having a poor woman with ten kids and one herring to feed them,” Ter-Ovanesyan said. “He said there were much more important issues to think about than skating rinks.” But in the cold war propaganda struggle, perception often trumped reality, and Khrushchev’s letter was perceived as a tactical coup for the Soviets. With no Olympic events to write about yet, the message filled a news vacuum and was covered in most of the Italian and European newspapers, receiving enough notice to concern American representatives in Rome. Among officials in the U.S. delegation and at the nearby American embassy, a conversation began about whether President Eisenhower should counter with his own letter to the Olympic athletes.
The Soviet public relations campaign trumped the Americans again that same day when the delegation paid a courtesy call on the U.S. athletes at their quarters. With photographers and journalists recording the scene, officials from the two teams exchanged little flags and diplomatic pleasantries while the athletes mingled on lawn chairs under the breezeway sipping Cokes and munching on potato chips. A few translators were there, but much of the interaction was nonverbal. They smiled, laughed, and traded pins. (The Soviet pin, depicting the world-changing 1957 Sputnik satellite, was the most coveted trinket in the village.) Some athletes were renewing old friendships, like Rafer Johnson and his Russian decathlon rival, Vasily Kuznetsov. Other
s were connecting for the first time. It was here that Dave Sime first eyed Ter-Ovanesyan and began a conversation they would resume later on the practice field.
Swimmers from the two superpowers had been bumping into one another all week at the Olympic practice pools, where the Soviets trained immediately after the Americans. Bill Mulliken of the U.S. team regarded his counterparts as “warm and friendly,” but he did not feel the same way about the sober Soviet officials supervising the swimmers. The Americans called them KGB. With their “stereotypical trench coats and hats,” Mulliken later noted, “they looked like seconds out of an anticommunist B movie. They’d ask us what we’d done for workouts, and we’d tell them the most outrageous stuff, but all they had to do was watch us, and they did.” When Anne Warner was talking to women swimmers on the Soviet squad, she thought of it as “just kids talking to each other the way kids do.” But the Soviet men appeared much older, she thought, and with their military bearing seemed to come from a different planet than the California schoolgirls with their chlorine-streaked greenish blond hair.
Warner’s early encounters with the Soviet swimmers took place in an unlikely setting. The athletes of capitalism and Communism often trained in an indoor pool that had been built expressly for the Fascist dictator Mussolini. Situated inside an athletic compound known as the Foro Italico, which during its early years had been Foro Mussolini, the pool was less than regulation size and had one lane missing, but it was an artistic relic, with elegant columns and mosaic tiles on the floor and walls portraying graceful swimmers and divers. The floor tiles were scuffed to prevent swimmers from slipping when barefoot. The diving board had a hydraulic lift so it would not cover up the wall mosaics. Warner’s strongest memory was that the pool was “sanitized with copper that tasted like you were swimming with copper pennies in your mouth.”
In preparation for the Olympics, the Italian government had been under pressure to erase or hide physical reminders of the Fascist era, but its effort was half-hearted. Fascist symbols were everywhere at the Foro Italico, most of which had been constructed at Mussolini’s directive in hopes of landing the never-to-be-held 1944 Olympics. At the main entrance, visitors encountered an imposing white marble obelisk with Mussolini Dux inscribed vertically. How to hide it? The Rome Council had talked about simply yanking it down but decided to leave it as part of history. Beyond the obelisk, walking farther into the Foro Italico toward Stadio Olimpico, Duce, meaning “leader,” the Italian equivalent of führer for Adolf Hitler, was etched into the pavement 264 times. Across from the main stadium and connected to it by an underground tunnel was a smaller outdoor facility, the Stadio dei Marmi. The horseshoe-shaped bowl was rimmed by sixty marble statues of ancient Roman athletes, each looming thirteen feet high, representing Mussolini’s visions of the sporting Fascist ideal.
At eight-thirty that morning, long before the Russians paid their visit, Rafer Johnson had walked from the village across the river and down a mile to the Stadio dei Marmi, where he practiced carrying the flag through the connecting tunnel and into Stadio Olimpico, tracing a route he would follow the next afternoon at the Opening Ceremony. On his way to and from the stadium, Johnson passed the obelisk and a set of administration buildings, one containing Mussolini’s personal palestra, a deluxe gymnasium featuring ornate columns and mobile panel marble walls; a training floor of linoleum and cork; a rectangular block water fountain with mythological figures carved into the cabinet; ropes and punching bags stored on a pulley running along the middle of the high ceiling; and billowy curtains and soft golden light that once projected the bulldog despot’s oversized shadow as he practiced fencing and boxing.
An adjacent building housed the Italian National Olympic Committee, known as CONI. Its members and officials of the organizing committee met every morning that August and September in an assembly hall where the front and back walls were covered by green carpet, put there by the U.S. Army after it liberated Rome in June 1944 and transformed the Foro Mussolini into the Fifth Army Rest Center.
Concealed under the green carpet on the front wall, the side that Olympic officials now faced during their daily morning deliberations, was an extraordinary mural, a romantic work of totalitarian iconography so bold and monstrous that it is obvious why the American military covered it up and why Italians would not feel comfortable uncovering it until four decades later. It was titled The Apotheosis of Fascism. Mussolini dominated the mural, standing center stage, larger than life, delivering a speech, while around Il Duce were his Blackshirt supporters waving the Fascist flag, and various scenes of his legions violently beating opponents as the children, mothers, and fathers of the state huddled together off to the side, with glorious depictions of agriculture and industry across the way, and angels hovering above to protect it all, and representations of the fascio—the hatchet of ancient Rome held together by a bundle of twigs, a sort of Roman tomahawk—from which the word and symbolism of modern Fascism derived. All of this behind the green carpet, out of sight and mostly out of mind. It was said that the 1960 Olympics were sweeping over the city like a fresh breeze of openness, and Romans felt free and easy, loosened from the dark grip of their recent past.
A. J. LIEBLING, the acerbic American writer, in Rome to cover the Games for The New Yorker, made his way to St. Peter’s Square before the six o’clock start time and stood near the back of a milling throng of four thousand people who had assembled to hear an address and benediction from Pope John XXIII on the eve of the Olympics. The crowd included a few thousand athletes, representatives from almost every team, including Jews, Hindus, Muslims, and a small atheist delegation from the Soviet Union. There were also a few hundred Catholic youth scouts, some eight hundred members of the Vespa Club of Europe, who brought their scooters and wore red and yellow outfits, and various observers like Liebling. “From where I stood, at the opening of the Piazza, almost diametrically across from the Papal throne, His Holiness—a blob of white robe topped by a smaller blob of red cape—looked no bigger than a rabbit’s foot,” he wrote. Liebling was renowned for his descriptive powers, but in this case his were no better than those of Wilma Rudolph, star of the Tennessee State Tigerbelles, who was also there, gazing at the Pope from a closer perspective.
“Wilma thought he looked like a jolly, round Santa Claus,” her teammate Lucinda Williams recalled. “And we kept saying to her, this is a serious moment, you know? And it was one of the most fantastic moments that I can remember of those days. You really got to see the Pope? But Wilma was young and really didn’t understand the whole significance of that. And I can’t forget her saying, ‘Well, he looks like a jolly, round Santa Claus. And a bowlful of jelly.’ And we’d say, ‘Girl, you better be quiet, better be quiet.’”
Pope John XXIII had returned to the Vatican that morning from his summer palace at Castel Gandolfo to greet the Olympians. His address was short, six hundred words, and he spoke in Latin. He was seventy-eight years old, and the brutal August heat lingered into early evening, the sun’s rays glancing off St. Peter’s golden dome, but a reporter from the Boston Globe was impressed by “the vigor of his voice and the bell tone clarity of his diction,” and Anna Brady of the Baltimore Sun noted that “he appeared to be in excellent health and to be thoroughly enjoying himself.” As his message boomed over a public address system, he held his script in his left hand, gestured with his right, and stopped short of saying that God was on anyone’s particular side. “It is obvious that we cannot wish victory to every team or to each individual athlete,” he said. “May the best man win. But this is not an obstacle to our expressing the desire that the contests of these days will be of benefit to you all, and that from them, all without exception will be able to gain some advantage.”
When he had finished in Latin, his words were repeated in fourteen languages. Liebling by then was edging his way out, the rabbit’s foot disappearing in the distance. “As I walked away, voices cried to me, Who speaks?—Pope? Yes, Pope, I answered, glad to be helpful. I was wrong
by that time. It was the voice of an announcer of the Vatican radio station, reading prepared translations of the Supreme Pontiff’s brief speech in English, French, Spanish, [Italian], Portuguese, German, Dutch, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Rumanian, Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic.” In any language, Liebling found the papal words mild if not pedestrian. But “unexceptionable as [they] seemed to a stranger,” he noted, “they wildly perturbed the Rome organ of the rival world cult. L’Unità, the Communist Party paper, detected in the address an attempt to take over the Olympics.” The irony of the situation delighted Liebling, as usual. “The Communists, like the Church, are in a delicate position on the question of the Olympics,” he wrote. “They would like to be against them, but the big Communist Party—the one in Moscow—approves of the Games for propaganda purposes.”
Liebling was on to something. Beneath the public rhetoric of brotherly love, peace, and sportsmanship offered that day by Nikita Sergeyevich and His Holiness, a fierce propaganda struggle was being waged by partisans from the left and right. The Communist press had begun a relentless attack on the Vatican, accusing the Church and its allies of manipulating the Olympics to political advantage. Even as it praised the Olympic Movement, the Moscow newspaper Izvestia accused the Vatican of “provocation, blackmail, roguery, and underground activity against athletes from socialist countries.” It claimed that the CIA was in partnership with the Vatican in attempted “poaching.” A Polish newspaper reported that priests and nuns in Rome had been assigned to advise athletes about a monastery that would serve as an asylum house for Eastern athletes who wanted to defect, an operation said to be headed by Clemente Cardinal Micara, then an eighty-year-old vicar-general in Rome. Il Paese, a local party newspaper, offered further detail about a vast right-wing conspiracy that involved not just the Vatican and the CIA but also the Knights of Malta and “former Fascist exiles from Eastern bloc countries” brought together in the Assembly of Captured European Nations (ACEN), a CIA-funded exile project. After a strategy meeting earlier that summer in Bavaria, this confederation had begun Operation Rome, run from a safe house at Via Quintino Sella 49, where American agents and Hungarian refugees could debrief potential defectors.
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