On the evening of 9 June 1955, Republican senator John Marshall Butler addressed an audience at the Friendship International Airport in Baltimore, Maryland. The topic of his speech, he claimed, reached everyone in “contemporary life.” He spoke of sport and the Olympic Games: “Are we in the United States—where our record of excellence in the field of amateur sportsmanship is a by-product of our unique system of government—allowing the Soviet Union to pollute the Olympic Games; to use, with diabolic deceit, the spirit of sportsmanship itself as a velvet gloved iron fist to ruthlessly hammer out their Godless...

By the time Dwight D. Eisenhower left office in 1961, the United States had developed a far-reaching capability to produce and disseminate propaganda across the globe, not to mention the resources and inclination to launch audacious covert operations. The United States did not, however, enter the Cold War with this machinery in place. These methods had been widely deployed during World War II, but the “usual American procedure of improvident disarmament” largely removed psychological warfare from the scene after the confrontation had ended. “The situation stood thus stagnant,” assessed a later government report, “until eventually the realization dawned that here...

In May 1951, the membership of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) gathered in Vienna, Austria, for the organization’s Forty-Sixth General Session. Leopold Figl, the Austrian federal chancellor, opened the meeting and welcomed those before him to the city and to the country. “I believe that hardly any other institution is as well suited to bring [people] together as the Olympic Games, and to teach the many different nations how to respect and to understand one another,” Figl proclaimed. “Understanding and mutual respect are the preconditions for a proper, and above all for a peaceful, approach towards those that live beyond...

In late 1945, the Young Men’s Christian Association of Chicago sent a communication to the U.S. State Department on the subject of arranging volleyball contests between Soviet and U.S. teams. The proposal, earnest in appearance, certainly garnered a warm reception from the U.S. embassy in Moscow. The U.S. ambassador, W. Averell Harriman, fully endorsed the idea and praised the concept of sporting competition between the two superpowers as a means to enhance “understanding.” In an enthusiastic report, he recalled how the tour of the Soviet soccer team, Dynamo Moscow, through England, Scotland, and Wales in October had been viewed by...

When one of countless letters crossed Avery Brundage’s office desk in Chicago early in 1950, Brundage opened it and surveyed the contents. The communication, innocuous at face value, was from a Count Anthony Szápáry. In the missive, the count politely informed Brundage of a group he directed, the Hungarian National Sports Federation (HNSF), and explained that the organization sought to aid Hungarian athletes who had fled from behind the Iron Curtain and now lived on free soil. The political agenda was not hidden. “Our Federation is in the service of anti-communist propaganda and our main purpose is to gain the...

Shortly after Dwight D. Eisenhower took office, Joseph Stalin suffered a fatal stroke. The Soviet dictator died on 5 March 1953. A small cadre of officials assumed leadership in the Kremlin, until Nikita Khrushchev eventually manipulated his way into power. Almost immediately, Stalin’s successors took steps to reconfigure Soviet foreign policy. They brought an end to the Korean War and mended diplomatic ties with Yugoslavia, Israel, Turkey, and Greece. They also displayed a willingness to negotiate with the United States. “There are no contested issues in U.S.–Soviet relations,” announced Georgi Malenkov, the chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers,...

During his election campaign, Dwight D. Eisenhower had publicly criticized the Truman administration for “silently consenting” to Soviet rule in Eastern Europe and told voters that he would endeavor to restore freedom to the countries behind the Iron Curtain. Yet as his first term in the White House drew to a close, the United States was no nearer to fulfilling this goal. The government’s aim of “liberating” Eastern Europe suffered perhaps its greatest setback in 1956, when riots in Poland and a revolution in Hungary failed to dislodge either country from the Soviet orbit.¹ In the aftermath of these events...

One year after the Melbourne defection, members of the Hungarian National Olympic Team assembled in San Francisco, the city where they first set foot on the U.S. mainland. The athletes who, as one newspaper put it, “refused to return to their communist-dominated homeland,” sipped drinks and reminisced about what happened at the time of, and also after, the 1956 summer Olympics.¹ To mark the occasion, the group sent letters of appreciation to a host of individuals involved in the defection. A letter, of course, was conveyed to C. D. Jackson. “We will always be grateful to you for your support,”...

Throughout the second term of the Eisenhower administration, the United States remained fixated upon its global confrontation with communism. The “total” contest for international preeminence continued to spill unrelentingly, it seemed, outside the parameters of traditional diplomacy and ever more into the boundless activities of the human race. When the Soviet Union launched an artificial earth satellite into space in 1957, what could have been hailed as a moment of technological progress for all to share was instead viewed as a considerable setback by the U.S. public and its federal government.Newsweekmagazine called the Soviet breakthrough a “defeat in...

The late 1950s had been a difficult and challenging period for the Free Europe Committee (FEC). In 1956, the Hungarian people looked to be on the verge of a revolution that could, some thought, have led to dramatic social and political changes across Eastern Europe. The portents were promising, but they were wrong. The Soviet bloc had been shaken, but it had not been turned upside down. Shocked and demoralized by these events, the FEC struggled to regroup. It was riven by internal squabbling and disputes. Central Intelligence Agency officials even wondered whether its days of usefulness had passed. In...