Rome 1960

by David Maraniss

  Yet hours later, with the capacity crowd watching inside the stadium, including several officials from the U.S. embassy, and an exponentially larger potential audience on television and newsreel, here came a banner introducing athletes from Formosa. In a little-noticed gesture of political pride, members of the delegation wore sport coats with insignias that depicted the Nationalist Chinese flag. And as the group moved down the track and passed in front of the official reviewing stand, a team official marching directly behind the country banner unfolded an unmistakable symbol of discontent: a handmade sign that read UNDER PROTEST. He marched with the sign for about a hundred yards before folding it and stuffing it in his pocket.

  What reaction did this modest political demonstration inspire? The government-monitored press in Taipei, which had editorialized against participating in the Olympics under any name except the Republic of China, declared that “the people of free China were greatly impressed by the radiophoto picture” of the protest sign. A U.S. diplomatic account from the scene reported glumly that aside from a few cheers in the crowd, the protest was barely perceptible and provoked little comment. It most certainly provoked Avery Brundage, who had been watching from the stands next to the president of the Italian Republic, Giovanni Gronchi. Brundage was “very disagreeably surprised” to see the protest sign, as were all leaders of the Olympic Movement, he said. He considered the gesture “inelegant, political minded, and an offense to the dignity which should prevail in the Olympic Games.” Rather than bringing support to the cause, he later wrote in a scalding censure letter to the Taiwanese, “we think that by this way of action you have lost the last sympathy you might have had among the sportsmen of the world.”

  As the Parade of Nations continued, Brundage’s displeasure evaporated with the entrance of the unified German team, outfitted in light gray. Turning to his Italian host, Brundage boasted, “Those are East German athletes and West German athletes in the same uniform marching behind the same leaders and the same flag.”

  “Impossible,” Gronchi said.

  The response from Brundage, recounted in an autobiographical manuscript, sounded too perfect to be verbatim, but nonetheless reflected his idealistic, if naive and selective, perspective.

  “While it might be impossible politically, in the nonpolitical Olympic Games, such surprising things can happen,” he told Gronchi. “Contestants on Olympic fields are individual athletes and not countries. Neither ideologies of different kinds nor political systems are at stake. In the Olympic Games, it is pure sport and sport only. German sport leaders are demonstrating their devotion to the Olympic idea in a way that will make sport history.”

  Shirley Povich, veteran columnist for the Washington Post, thought he observed “a lift in the applause…when the two Germanys marched side by side under one flag. Ideologies shelved for this event at least.” A Soviet writer detected warm applause as well, noting approvingly that “viewers could not tell the difference among athletes dressed in light gray uniforms which one is from the west and which one from eastern Germany.” But the West German press was more measured. The team marched in looking “almost courtly with their neat gray suits,” noted the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, saying the drabness of the outfits seemed to match both the personality of the team and the reaction of the crowd. “A bit of the charm and good mood presented by other nations was missing, so the applause remained only friendly.”

  In other ways, things were less than they appeared. Marching four abreast behind flag carrier Fritz Thiedemann, a bowlegged equestrian champion from West Germany (“I mean, I did ask myself, ‘Can’t they find a flag carrier prettier than me?’”), the delegation looked larger to observers in the stadium than it was. The Associated Press reported that the Germans entered with the maximum allowable number, 245, but in fact there were far fewer. Most of the track stars, especially from the West, remained in Germany, held back because of the Roman heat wave. At the head of the formation were West German team leaders Gerhard Stoeck and Dr. Max Danz, walking beside their East German counterparts, Heinz Schöbel and Manfred Ewald. All seemed peaceful on the surface, noted a correspondent from Die Welt, a West German newspaper, “even though behind the Via Germania, in block 30 [Olympic Village quarters for the German team], political baggage has also been unloaded.”

  The East Germans were aflame with reports that Hans Grodotzki, a distance runner, had received an anonymous letter in his room in block 30 “urging him to leave the German Democratic Republic forever by not returning there from Rome.” An account in Neues Deutschland said the “poaching” letter came from “Bonn’s henchmen” and included a map “printed by one of the West German revanchist lobby groups.” That the effort failed is no doubt why it ever made the East German news. The sender “failed to psychologically destabilize the young runner,” according to the report. Grodotzki was said to have given the letter to his team leaders, declaring, “Something like this leaves me completely unshaken.”

  GREAT BRITAIN arrived in blue blazers and gray trousers, among the largest delegations as always, but fading fast in international sports, much like France. The Brits seemed to boast less talent among the athletes rounding the oval than they could muster up in the press section, where the squad of Times of London writers included Roger Bannister, the legendary four-minute miler, and Harold Abrahams, winner of the 100 at the 1924 Olympics in Paris, who would be immortalized two decades later as a main character in the movie Chariots of Fire.

  Haiti, Hong Kong, India (here were the wrestlers in white and yellow turbans who lifted up little Paolo Pedinelli, plus the dashing middle-distance runner Milkha Singh, known as the Flying Sikh), Indonesia, Iraq (spelled Irak, hence the place in line), Iran, Ireland, Iceland, Israel, Yugoslavia, Kenya, Lebanon, Liberia. Pravda’s correspondents took note of the African delegations. This was a summer of independence in Africa, and much of the continent had become contested ground in the cold war. Fourteen nations were in the process of being born, and the Congo, with the colonial Belgians leaving at last, was exploding in civil war during the very days of the Olympics. “They exude strength,” the Soviet sportswriters Alexei Dykov and Vitali Petrusenko wrote of the Africans. “Together with their nations, the athletes, boxers, and gymnasts of Africa recently fought for independence. Now they march in the Olympics as equals among equals. It is not very important that they have little sports experience. Observers already forecast that the Rome Olympics will reveal many new talents among representatives of the black continent.”

  The Pakistanis appeared in forest green coats and white turbans, ready to take their difficult geopolitical struggle with India onto the hockey field, where the two neighboring nations dominated a sport taught to them by the imperial British. Panama, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Rhodesia, Romania (like the Bulgarians, all friendly, waving handkerchiefs to the crowd), San Marino (the Apennine mountain state, with ten athletes, all pistol shooters and cyclists, out of a populace of fewer than thirty thousand, the highest athlete-per-capita ratio at the Games), Singapore. The Spaniards entered to loud applause.

  Eddy Gilmore, covering for the Associated Press, then noticed that “suddenly, a strange quiet came over the vast crowd. Almost before you knew it, it happened.”

  What happened was a sighting of Rafer Johnson, carrying the U.S. flag, stepping from the shadows of the tunnel at the northeast entrance, marching into view. His movements were rhythmic, precise. In his blue blazer, white pants, red-striped tie, and white straw hat, the decathlete looked cool and calm, but he never felt more nervous, or more alive. Some ceremonial events appear glorious but have no deeper meaning; this one, to Rafer Johnson, was “as important as the competition itself.” Never before had a black athlete walked in front as flag carrier for the U.S. Olympic team. Since the moment he reached Rome with the track team after that raucous overnight train ride through the Alps, he had been the most interviewed, most photographed athlete in the village. “Keep in step,” he said to himself now. “Don’t drop the
flag.” He cradled it like a baby, one observer thought, like “something fragile that he must not drop.” Johnson’s life flashed through his mind as he moved along. He thought about his mother watching back home in California and the road he had taken to this moment.

  The Johnsons came west from Texas in 1945, when Rafer was nine, and eventually settled in Kingsburg, where his father, Lewis Johnson, found a job with the Southern Pacific Railroad. The San Joaquin Valley town was about as flat, hot, and white as America gets. In the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, where Rafer came from, he almost never saw a white person. In Kingsburg, the Johnsons were the only black family in town and one of only two in the area. They lived in a small one-story “section house” near the railroad tracks and in the shadows of a local cannery. A legend arose later that they lived in a boxcar—not quite, although the narrow house looked like one. In the summers, Rafer and his siblings worked the fields near the cannery, picking grapes, plums, and peaches. With one exception, he felt very much embraced by the predominantly Swedish farm community, where “everyone knew everyone.” That lone exception was the police chief, a racist who reflexively suspected the Johnsons when anything went wrong. “Every time something was taken, something was stolen, a bicycle missing, they came to our house looking for it,” Johnson recalled. “We weren’t taking anything, and we weren’t doing anything.” That only stopped after Lewis Johnson had a heated confrontation with the chief.

  But the prevailing sensibility in Kingsburg, a community that showered attention on its children, was a boon to Rafer, who excelled in school and in sports. “The parents would build the fields and drive young people back and forth to different competitions [in farm towns scattered around the valley]. They were the coaches. It was a wonderful community for young people.” Rafer’s best sport was football, but he also starred in basketball and track and field. Much of his athletic skill came from his mother, Alma, who could outrun him until he was a teenager. His mother was also Rafer’s role model, the person he most admired. “I can’t think of anything I ever did or any place I ever went or any accomplishment I ever had that she was not either there or in my thoughts or we had some conversation about what was happening or going to happen,” he said later. “I can’t think of a time when she was not a part of what was going on with me.” His father, though a hard worker, drank too much and could be hard to handle during his off hours. “There would be weekends when he could start drinking, and the whole weekend would be lost. There were very few Monday mornings when my father was not at work, but there were a lot of weekends when the family suffered because of his drinking problem. At athletic events, sometimes, honestly, he could be a little disruptive. My mother was able to keep him calm for the most part, but there were times when she couldn’t control him, and no one else could.”

  When Rafer was a junior in high school, and the best athlete on the Kingsburg Vikings, track coach Murl Dotson drove him down to watch a decathlon meet in nearby Tulare, the hometown of Olympic decathlon champion Bob Mathias. It was a transformative moment. Mathias was the hero of the valley, someone Rafer aspired to follow. Although there were no decathlons in high school, young Johnson returned from Tulare determined to compete in as many individual events as possible and build up his skills so that someday he might succeed Mathias with the title of the best all-around athlete in the world. Seven years later, here he was in Rome, approaching his dream, leading the Americans into the Stadio Olimpico.

  Behind him, after a wedge of team officials, came row after row of American athletes. The walker from Buffalo, the javelin thrower from Newark, the gymnast from Van Nuys, the wrestler from Ponca City, the boxer from Louisville, the equestrian from Camden, the small-bore rifle shooter from Chicago, the fencer from New York, the sprinter from Tuscaloosa, the cyclist from Muskegon, the miler from Portland, the canoeist from Akron, the basketball player from Cabin Creek, the swimmer from Urbana, the weight lifter from Detroit, the shot-putter from Santa Monica. The youngest of the swimmers, Donna de Varona, had just turned thirteen. The oldest of the yachtsmen, Robert Halperin, was going on fifty-three. Track aficionados in the stands looked for familiar faces, Olympic favorites.

  Where was the sprinting medical student from Duke, Dave Sime? Back in the village, still recovering from strep throat. “Didn’t even watch it on television,” Sime recalled. “I was still laid out.” Ray Norton, the favorite for gold in the 100, was also back at the dorm, not wanting to aggravate a sore leg by making the long walk on cement from the village to the stadium. Rink Babka, the massive discus thrower, missed it too, though not by choice. Officials had issued him a sport coat far too small for his massive fifty-two-inch chest, and a new one had not arrived in time. But lanky John Thomas was there, the phenom from Boston U., considered a mortal lock for the high jump. And that little guy nearby was Ike Berger, the featherweight weight lifter, all 132 pounds of him, who only that morning in practice had bettered his own world record for the two-hand clean and jerk by hoisting 3361/2 pounds. There came Cassius Clay, the ebullient light-heavyweight boxer, but many of his teammates in the lower weight classes, who would start competition that night and the next day, stayed back in the village. “They wanted me to march,” Nikos Spanakos, the American featherweight, said later, “but I told the coach to go fuck himself and stayed in.”

  As the athletes streamed from the “tunnel, dark and cold, out into the blazing bright sunlight,” Anne Warner, one of the California swimmers, was amazed that they were marching in unison, right foot forward at the same time—Bo Roberson’s drilling seemed to have worked. Terry Dischinger, the basketball forward from Purdue, was stunned by the enormous ovation that reverberated through the stadium as the Yanks strode in. “It sounded like thunder coming out of those stands.”

  American sportswriters traditionally scorned overt signs of emotion in the press box, but few could keep their stoic game faces now.

  “When the American flag swept around the far turn of the Olympic stadium, and behind it came marching what had been up to that time the largest delegation that the 100,000 spectators had seen, a great cheer roared out and thousands of people sprang to their feet,” Don Maxwell, editor of the Chicago Tribune, reported in his daily letter from Rome. “Hats were waved, and I am sure there were tears in many eyes.”

  More rapture from Fred Russell of the Nashville Banner, who described the parade as “the lasting thrill” of the entire Olympics: “When the United States flag came by in the parade of nations, the spine tingle caused a few misty eyes in the press box.”

  The moment struck Eddy Gilmore as at once moving and politically meaningful, a reaffirmation of America’s role in the modern world. “Call it corny, but it brought tears to your eyes. It made your heart beat a wee bit faster. It took your breath away. And all at once, this spontaneous demonstration seemed to justify lend-lease, the Marshall Plan, and all of the millions American taxpayers have poured out on other parts of the world. Sure, Americans love to be liked. And brother, they were liked today.”

  Among the political and military dignitaries watching the parade that afternoon was General Lauris Norstad of the U.S. Air Force, who now served as supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe. The quintessential cold warrior, Norstad had developed the air defenses for Western Europe against possible Soviet attack. Earlier that afternoon, he had arrived from Paris with his wife and three aides as the guest of Giulio Andreotti, the Italian defense minister and president of the Olympic Organizing Committee. After changing into civilian clothes at the Grand Hotel, the general was escorted to Stadio Olimpico just in time for the Opening Ceremony. The sight of the American delegation marching onto the track to resounding applause, with Rafer Johnson at the lead, struck Norstad as a reassuring political moment.

  “What an impressive experience!” he later wrote to his friend, Charles J. V. Murphy, a prolific cold war journalist at Time with intelligence community affiliations. “Having heard and read so much criticism of the U.S. and its ways in the last few mon
ths, I was surprised and warmed by the enthusiasm for the U.S. which was demonstrated by the…spectators in the Olympic Stadium at the opening. By far the greatest and warmest applause was for the American contingent. Our group flag bearer and leader was Rafer Johnson, and he looked magnificent. I discreetly inquired from people of several nationalities about their reaction to this colored boy being in the lead, thinking that there might be some feeling that this was arranged for political purposes, but I found that the case was quite the contrary. It was generally believed that he had been elected by his teammates, but that even if he had been appointed by officials, it was in recognition of the fact that he was a very fine man and perhaps the world’s outstanding athlete. The reaction was very good.”

  Johnson himself was not concerned about why he was chosen. He was proud to represent his country, knew that he had won the respect of his athletic peers, and thought that he could make no stronger statement in support of civil rights and the desegregation of American life than to be the leader of the U.S. delegation at a time when blacks were pushing for equality—and at a time when it remained within the realm of accepted discourse for a white official to refer to him as a “colored boy.” The most profound course of action black athletes in his situation could make, he believed, was “showing up, doing their best.” His sensibility, he explained later, was that he had to stay positive and keep his focus on what he could achieve. And, for the moment, to focus on carrying the flag. It was a matter of Olympic courtesy for nations to dip the flag when passing the reviewing stand, but the U.S. and the Soviet Union, competing for supremacy in the cold war world, maintained their own uncompromising traditions—never dip. For the Americans, this refusal to gesture had been a matter of law since 1942, when Congress passed the U.S. Flag Code, saying the flag should not be dipped to “any person or thing.” Johnson held the Stars and Stripes upright all the way, though he said later that he had not received instructions on how to carry it. “I didn’t dip,” he explained, “but no one told me not to do it.”