1968 - Mark Kurlansky [203]
Do you realize the responsibility I carry? I am the only person standing between Nixon and the White House.
—JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY, 1960
I believe that if my judgment and my intuition, my gut feeling, so to speak about America and American political tradition is right, this is the year that I will win.
—RICHARD M. NIXON, 1968
PRESIDENT GUSTAVO DíAZ ORDAZ of Mexico formally proclaimed the opening of the games of the XIX Olympiad yesterday in a setting of pageantry, brotherhood and peace before a crowd of 100,000 at the Olympic Stadium in Mexico City.” So read the lead on page one of The New York Times and in major newspapers around the world. Díaz Ordaz got the coverage he had killed for. The dove of peace was the symbol of the games, decorating the boulevards where students were lately beaten, and billboards proclaimed, “Everything Is Possible with Peace.” It was generally agreed that the Mexicans were running a good show, and the opening ceremonies were hailed for pomp as each team presented its flag to the regally perched Díaz Ordaz, El Presidente, the former El Chango. And no one could help but be moved as the Czechoslovakian team marched into the stadium to an international standing ovation. For the first time in history, the Olympic torch was lit by a woman, which was deemed considerable progress since the ancient Greek Olympics, where a woman caught at an Olympiad was executed. There was no longer any sign of the student movement in Mexico, and if it was mentioned, the government simply explained in the face of all logic that the movement had been an international communist plot hatched by the CIA. Yet the size of the crowd was disappointing to the Mexican planners. There were even empty hotel rooms in Mexico City.
“Freedom of expression.” 1968 student silk-screen poster with the logo of the Mexico City Olympics at the bottom
(Amigos de la Unidad de Postgrado de la Escuela de Diseño A.C.)
The United States, as predicted, assembled one of the best track and field teams in history. But then politics began to chip away at it. Tommie Smith and John Carlos, receiving gold and bronze medals for the 200-meter dash, came to the medal presentation shoeless, wearing long black socks. As the U.S. national anthem played, each raised one black gloved hand in the fist that symbolized Black Power. It looked like a spontaneous gesture, but in the political tradition of 1968, the act was actually the result of a series of meetings between the athletes. The black gloves had been bought because they had anticipated receiving the medals from eighty-one-year-old Avery Brundage, the president of the International Olympic Committee, who had spent most of the year trying to get South Africa’s segregated team into the games. Certain that they would win medals, they planned to use the gloves to refuse Brundage’s hand. But in a change of plans, Brundage was at a different event. Observant fans might have noticed that they had split one pair of gloves, Smith using the right hand and Carlos the left. The other pair of gloves was worn by 400-meter runner Lee Evans, a teammate and fellow student of Harry Edwards’s at San Jose State. Evans was in the stands returning the Black Power salute, but no one noticed.
The next day Carlos was interviewed on one of the principal boulevards of Mexico City. He said, “We wanted all the black people in the world—the little grocer, the man with the shoe repair store—to know that when that medal hangs on my chest or Tommie’s, it hangs on his also.”
The International Olympic Committee, especially Brundage, was furious. The American contingent was divided between those who were outraged and those who wanted to keep their extraordinary team together. But the committee threatened to ban the entire U.S. team. Instead they settled for the team banning Smith and Carlos, who were given forty-eight hours to leave the Olympic Village. Other black athletes also made political gestures, but the Olympic committee seemed to go out of its way to find reasons why these offenses were not as severe. When