Nicholas Evan Sarantakes is associate professor in the strategy and policy department at the U.S. Naval War College. He is the author of Dropping the Torch: Jimmy Carter, the Olympic Boycott, and the Cold War, from which this article was adapted. (The views expressed here are his alone and do not represent the policy of the U.S. Navy or the Department of Defense.)

Muhammad Ali was exhausted as he clambered from a plane on a tarmac in Tanzania as the waiting throng exploded with enthusiasm. “ALI, ALI, ALI,” the crowd chanted. By all appearances, the former champion’s arrival in Dar es Salaam looked familiar enough: exactly like the humanitarian missions to which the boxer had become accustomed. But this was different, and Ali—who had been doing charity work in India the day before—was groggy. Worst of all, he was unsure about why he was even there.

In a plan that seemed like a good one when it was hatched, U.S. State Department officials were dispatched to India in January 1980 to convince the boxing legend and Olympic gold medalist to help them lobby African countries to support a proposed American boycott of the Summer Olympics in Moscow. The boycott had been ordered by President Jimmy Carter in response to the recent Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but the White House knew that a failure to get other nations to similarly boycott could embarrass the U.S. and render its move to sit out the games ineffective. Now the president was in bad need of assistance in selling the plan abroad—and the boxing legend was needed in Africa. Ali, offended by the Russian invasion himself, agreed to lend a hand.


The night before he left for Tanzania, the first stop on the diplomatic tour, Ali had a late-night meeting with the Soviet ambassador to India, Yuli Vorontsov, who tried to convince Ali not to make the trip. Vorontsov failed, but the exhausted boxer spent his flight sleeping and arrived in Africa poorly informed and was quickly rebuffed. Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere, insulted that Carter had sent a mere athlete to discuss the boycott, refused to meet with the special envoy. Ali was hustled into a press conference that quickly became combative. The boxer was stunned when asked if he was a puppet of the White House. “Nobody made me come here and I’m nobody’s Uncle Tom,” he said.

When Carter called to get an update, the news was not good. “Ali began to talk about jumping ship,” one member of the delegation reported to the president. In a meeting with the Tanzanian minister of youth and culture, Chediel Mgonja, someone slipped him a note, calling him a stooge of Jimmy Carter. The mission limped along, though it never recovered from the bad press. Sports columnist Shirley Povich of the Washington Post declared, “The whole fiasco was not all Ali’s fault. Much of the blunder can be traced to the White House.” An editorial in the Economist dryly noted: “It seemed, no doubt, like a good idea at the time.” As a metaphor for the larger American struggle to initiate a boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics, the Ali trip was a good one.

Muhammad Ali meets with Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi to enlist support for the Olympic boycott. | AP Photo

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The sight of Soviet tanks rumbling into Afghanistan in December 1979 can easily be regarded as the moment the stage was set for the U.S. boycott. But conditions had been developing for years as the 1970s, a period of managed competition between the two superpowers, came to a close. It was a time when the Cold War was supposedly less dangerous, but still ongoing. While Americans saw themselves making economic concessions in return for good Soviet behavior and negotiating from a position of equality with Moscow, the Kremlin considered the concessions a reward for its military buildup.

It was against this backdrop that Kremlin leaders decided to make their move in Afghanistan. The invasion was the Soviet Union’s first grab of new territory since the end of World War II. Where Washington saw communist aggression, the perspective was significantly different in Moscow. Soviet leaders wanted to bolster a flailing regime in their backyard, a short-term maneuver of no real importance to any other country. They expected few international repercussions. It never occurred to them that it would spoil the Olympic party they planned to host the next summer.

I’m as patriotic as the next guy, but the patriotic thing to do is for us to send a team over there and whip their ass.”

Perhaps nobody saw the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in more dire terms than Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser and a hard-line cold warrior. “Afghanistan is the seventh state since 1975 in which communist parties have come to power with Soviet guns and tanks, with Soviet military power and assistance,” Brzezinski told Carter.

Brzezinski also saw an opportunity for Carter to assert himself on matters of foreign policy. But what could the United States hope to do? Carter began to realize he had few levers to pull. Rolf Pauls, the West German ambassador to NATO, suggested an Olympic boycott. The White House was intrigued. In a meeting of the National Security Council, Lloyd Cutler, the White House counsel, argued that the United States should boycott the Olympics only if it were combined with other strong action. Vice President Walter Mondale was enthusiastic, claiming that a boycott “could capture the imagination of the American people.” Cutler, despite his reservations about the boycott, said he saw no problem in implementing one; seizing passports of the athletes would be a simple way to keep them from traveling overseas. As for the president, according to White House notes of the meeting, Carter said the idea sent “cold chills” down his spine.

Almost instantly, the press supported a boycott. On Jan. 10, the Washington Post’s Robert G. Kaiser, a former correspondent in Moscow, wrote, “There should be no underestimating the significance the Soviets themselves put on their selection. They have been treating this Olympiad as one of the great events of their modern history.” A boycott, he argued, “would be a tremendous blow to Soviet prestige; but perhaps more significant, the collapse of this Olympiad would send a genuine shock through Soviet society.”

CIA Director Adm. Stansfield Turner disagreed, and passed along an agency finding that a boycott would have limited impact on the Soviet Union. It could even backfire on the United States, he warned. “The Soviets would also be able to play the role of an aggrieved party before a partially sympathetic international audience and to utilize international disagreements over the boycott to exacerbate tensions between the U.S. and non-boycotting (or reluctantly boycotting) states, probably including some close U.S. allies.”

A boycott was popular; 55 percent of the American people supported the idea. But Olympians fervently opposed it. “Any boycott isn’t going to change the Soviets’ mind and isn’t going to get troops out of Afghanistan,” complained Julian Roosevelt, an American member of the International Olympic Committee. “I’m as patriotic as the next guy, but the patriotic thing to do is for us to send a team over there and whip their ass.” Al Oerter, a four-time gold medalist in the discus who was trying to make a comeback at age 42, agreed: “The only way to compete against Moscow is to stuff it down their throats in their own backyard.”

Carter worried about the politics. “After I announce our Olympics boycott,” he told his foreign policy advisers, “we’ll face the wrath of [a powerful] force—Howard Cosell, telling the sports fans that Jimmy Carter killed the Olympics.”

He need not to have worried: Cosell, a dominant figure in sports broadcasting, spoke on the air in support of the boycott. “I harbored no illusions about the sanctity of Olympics,” he wrote years later. “It seemed absolutely wrong to me to let them use our athletes and our technological capabilities to broadcast their perverse propaganda to every corner of the globe—and I’ll always admire President Carter for having the guts to spoil their party.”

At a breakfast meeting of his foreign policy team, Carter made the decision to initiate action against the Olympics. The conversation focused on Afghanistan until Vance raised the issue of the Moscow games. The President told his lieutenants: “It’s the toughest question of all for me.” He was fully aware that he was about to set in motion events that could destroy the Olympic movement. “I don’t want the onus for the failure of the Olympics to fall exclusively on the United States.” He told the group, “It must be seen as a legitimate worldwide political reaction to what the Russians are doing in Afghanistan.”

Carter’s official announcement came on Jan. 20, in the form of an ultimatum on Meet the Press. “Unless the Soviets withdraw their troops within a month from Afghanistan,” Carter said, he would insist “that the Olympic games be moved from Moscow to an alternative site, or multiple sites, or postponed or cancelled.”

The one-month deadline was controversial. Critics saw it as an example of Carter’s generally inept handling of foreign policy; in setting a date, he robbed himself of flexibility, committing himself to action against the Soviet Union sooner than circumstances demanded. Waiting longer “would have been ideal for making the Soviets squirm,” Sports Illustrated argued. Delay would also have made it possible for Carter to line up support from other countries and, more importantly, their national Olympic committees.

What if no one joined in the boycott? Carter was willing to go it alone: “Regardless of what other nations might do, I would not favor the sending of an American Olympic team to Moscow while the Soviet invasion troops are in Afghanistan.”

The strong stance alarmed the International Olympic Committee, the games’ governing body. IOC President Lord Killanin, an Irishman with a British title, quickly dismissed the idea of moving the games as unworkable. “There is no alternative besides Moscow anymore,” he said. “It’s Moscow or nothing.”

Appearing on Meet the Press, Carter called on the U.S. Olympic Committee to boycott the Moscow Summer Olympics. | AP Photo

Many wondered whether Carter even possessed the authority to make a boycott work. Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti’s assessment was that success depended on the compliance of the United States Olympic Committee—either that, or the White House could ask the Congress to force the boycott by, say, amending the Amateur Sports Act to prohibit participation in the Moscow Olympics; passing a law that prohibited any American sports organization from participating in the games; or by enacting a bill allowing the president to revoke athletes’ passports.

Days after the announcement, in his State of the Union speech, Carter declared: “Neither the American people nor I will support sending an Olympic team to Moscow.” The line received the loudest applause of the evening.

Finally, the Kremlin now realized, Carter was serious. Some members of the Politburo, the Communist Party’s inner circle, thought the man was emotionally unstable. Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet Union’s longtime ambassador to Washington, was summoned home to offer his insight on the matter. He explained that the Carter administration had convinced Americans that the Soviets were the aggressor and that cooperation with an aggressor was impossible. “For all my experience of anti-Soviet campaigns in the United States,” he wrote later, “I had never encountered anything like the intensity and scale of this one. What particularly caught my attention was the president’s personal obsession with Afghanistan.”

***

Members of the U.S. Olympic team, meanwhile, felt they were fighting not just for the chance to compete, but for the very survival of the Olympic movement. Bob Mathias, a gold medalist who become a four-term congressman from California and was then the director of the Olympic Training Center, feared the Olympics were doomed. “We’re going to fight to the end,” he said. “We’re fighting for the life of the Olympic Games. It’s almost too late. I’m afraid it might be.”

I feel I have no choice but to support the president or be perceived as supporting the Russians. I resent that.”

In early February, looking to galvanize support within the Olympic community, Carter dispatched Lloyd Cutler to Ireland to meet with Lord Killanin, the IOC president. Culter and Killanin met in the library of the Irish baron’s home. The meeting went badly. “I was, as it turned out, to get a great shock,” Killanin recalled. “I discovered that Cutler had not flown in from Washington to discuss, but rather instruct.” Cutler demanded the IOC postpone or cancel the games on the dubious grounds that that they could not be held while the Soviets were at war. “Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Afghanistan affair,” Killanin wrote later, “the judgment of one man, already scrambling for his political life in the American presidential election campaign … had turned the Olympic arena into what was to be its own battleground.”

By this time, Carter had begun to realize he had a problem. The Muhammad Ali sojourn to Africa, for instance, was failing and so Carter called the boxer home to meet with him at the White House. A number of State Department and National Security Council officials lined the Cabinet Room for the meeting, but it basically amounted to a 20-minute photo-op. Abroad, Ali had managed to generate little beyond a good deal of ridicule.

Carter celebrates with members of the 1980 U.S. Winter Olympic team at the White House. | AP Photo

As momentum for the boycott slowed, something predictable occurred. The Winter Games—hosted that year by the United States—opened in Lake Placid, New York, and America got excited about the Olympics. As it does before every set of games, the entire membership of the IOC assembled for a meeting, where Secretary of State Cyrus Vance was invited to offer a ceremonial opening to the winter event. Instead, he made an unexpected pitch for boycotting Moscow. “Let me make my government’s position clear,” he said. “We will oppose the participation of an American team in any Olympic Games in the capital of an invading nation.”

The room was silent after Vance’s remarks. Even the Americans in the audience thought the speech was a disaster. “That night was the only time in my life I’ve been embarrassed to be an American,” Phil Wolff, the chief of staff of the Lake Placid games, said. “I spent three years fighting in World War II. Nobody has a deeper love of this country than I do, but that was not right to be so derogatory and political when we’re supposed to be welcoming all our guests from around the world.”

In the end, the IOC affirmed its intent to hold the games in Moscow. But the White House was unbowed. Cutler drafted legislation that would give the president legal authority to prevent the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) from participating in the Olympics and ban all U.S. media organizations from sending reporters to Moscow. Lawyers in the Department of Justice protested, noting that Congress had refused to grant the president the power to control the media even during wartime. Cutler also continued to advance the idea of holding alternate games about two weeks after the Olympics, “to be held at several sites including an American site, open to athletes from all nations, including those who go to Moscow.” But the idea wasn’t catching on.

All the while, the Winter Olympics were eroding the case for a boycott, demonstrating the power of simply competing and beating the Russians. In one of the sport’s most historic upsets—the “miracle on ice”—the U.S. hockey team beat a heavily favored Soviet squad, capturing the public’s imagination. “The Olympic situation seems to be disintegrating,” one White House aide warned Brzezinski. “If we are not careful, our magnificent hockey win may fuel domestic sentiment against the boycott.” Brzezinski was ready to thrown in the towel. Nelson Ledsky, head of the State Department task force on the boycott, warned Vance in early March: “The starch seems to be slowly going out of our boycott effort.”

The plan was crumbling across the Atlantic as well. British Prime Minister Margret Thatcher announced she was unwilling to use any radical legal mechanisms like the seizure of passports against the Olympians. The ramifications were immense. If the Brits attended, so might much of continental Europe. Meanwhile, in the middle of March, efforts to organize a set of counter games collapsed when U.S. officials traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, for a planning meeting. Only 12 of the 25 countries invited bothered to attend.

To make the boycott work, the president needed the USOC to vote to support it. The problem would be winning over its members. To make its case, the administration held a series of briefings for members of the committee, the most important of which came in late March, when they convened in the East Room of the White House. Brzezinski started the session with a presentation on the situation in Afghanistan. He explained that the Soviets had established a “strategic wedge” and could now reach the Strait of Hormuz, a key choke point for U.S. oil supplies, with bombers. Evidence suggested the Soviets were using chemical weapons, sealing the borders and building permanent bases in the country. Sitting in the audience, Jane Frederick, a pentathlete, thought to herself: “Yesterday I was on a sunny track in Santa Barbara. Today I’m being exposed to the iron realities of the world.”

A crowd greets the U.S. Olympic team, just back from the Winter Olympics, at Andrews Air Force on Feb. 25, 1980. | AP Photo

Before long, Carter walked into the room, and for the first time since he had become president, no one stood or applauded—a fact mentioned prominently in news accounts of the meeting. Sam Donaldson of ABC News called it “a grim moment for President Carter.” The insult was not intentional; it was just the result of bad staff work. No one had bothered to advise the athletes on protocol—few had ever been to the executive mansion before—and the president had appeared abruptly without warning.

Speaking in a solemn and sober tone with an icy look in his eyes, Carter admitted he was speaking to the athletes “with some degree of trepidation.” But he made his position bluntly clear: “I can’t say at this moment what other nations will not go to the Summer Olympics in Moscow. Ours will not go. I say that not with any equivocation; the decision has been made.” He said he had not made this choice easily. “It’s not a pleasant time for me. You occupy a special place in American life.”

The president may have been resolved, but Europe would determine how effective any boycott would be. On March 22, France, Spain and Italy elected to go to Moscow, as had the British. The Carter White House had suffered another major diplomatic defeat. Even Puerto Rico—a U.S. territory with its own national Olympic committee—voted to attend the games.

Carter was in no position to shift course. He decided to use the tools that existing legislation gave him, sending the secretary of commerce a memorandum the following day that prohibited international transactions related to the Moscow Olympics under the Export Administration Act.

Carter’s last chance to avoid utter embarrassment rested with convincing the USOC to support the boycott—a vote the White House managed to win after a robust lobbying effort and an impassioned speech by the former Nixon Treasury Secretary William Simon, who served on the Olympic Committee. Simon had stayed up the night before, writing and rewriting what he planned to say. “I am somewhat incredulous that a group of mature and what I consider to be among the most patriotic of Americans—our Olympians—can seriously discuss defying the president of the United States on a national-security issue,” he said. “We aren’t defying a man; we are defying the office, the highest elected office in our land.”

The Olympics were far more resilient than Carter could have imagined. In the end, 80 countries attended. | AP Photo

Simon earned a thunderous standing ovation, but Carter earned the victory—hollow though it may have been. The USOC officially supported the boycott, though many committee members voted without enthusiasm. One of the reporters present observed that the delegates had “wooden and preoccupied” expressions on their faces. “I feel I have no choice but to support the president or be perceived as supporting the Russians,” a delegate remarked. “I resent that.”

The Olympics that the Americans missed that year were far more resilient than Carter could have imagined. In the end, 80 countries attended, and 36 world records were set. The Soviets would stay in Afghanistan for another decade, ravaging the countryside and leaving behind a radicalized and desperate population—a disastrous and costly war that sowed the seeds of their own downfall. Ironically, if only they’d accepted Carter’s toothless ultimatum, they might have lasted a lot longer.