Olympian Power

The most astonishing thing about presidential powers in the age of Trump (sorry, Joe!) is how Trump himself exercised them to enrich himself and try to take full control of the mechanism of government.  Trump, of course, is the extreme example of the abuse of power,  and I don't want to compare any of his recent predecessors' behavior to the egregiousness of Trump's.  But it should be remembered that, in recent years, Presidents of the United States have always exercised power in a belligerent, authoritarian way, from Harry Truman finding a way to go to war against North Korea without Congress declaring war on what was essentially a government we did not recognize as legitimate (it was a "police action") to John F. Kennedy extending the trade embargo against Cuba by executive order to Richard Nixon refusing to spend money earmarked by Congress.  But even Jimmy Carter acted belligerently in enforcing the ill-considered boycott of the Moscow Olympics to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

This is a subject I have discussed before on this blog, but it's worth revisiting now. 

The U.S.S.R. invaded Afghanistan in the last week of December 1979, which the United States viewed as a major crisis despite the fact that the Soviets were essentially intervening in Afghan affairs to swap out one Communist leader for another one.  Two months after Hafizullah Amin, a co-founder of Afghanistan's Communist government, deposed and executed President Noor Taraki, Amin himself was taken out by the Soviets in an effort by the Kremlin to place a government in Kabul under Babrak Karmal that would be more friendly to Moscow.  Coming as it did seven months before the start of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, President Jimmy Carter, who apparently thought that a Soviet-backed Afghan Communist leader like Karmal was a greater threat to peace than a renegade Afghan Communist leader like Amin, called for a boycott of the Summer Olympics.

When I originally wrote about this back in 2004, I more or less said that Carter was able to get the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) to support the boycott even as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher failed to get the British Olympic Association to do the same.  In fact, as I noted then, apart from Canada and West Germany, no allies supported President Carter's Olympic boycott. 

But I also said that the United States Olympic Committee ultimately agreed to support the boycott because Carter was "acting like the national governess, expecting the USOC to fall in line.. . .. If we Americans weren't such sheep, we would have boycotted the boycott . . .. But no, our Olympic committee voted to blindly support the President."  

But, as Kenny Moore reported in Sports Illustrated in April 1980, it didn't quite play out like that.

The USOC had in fact opposed making their athletes stay home, and the defiance of their British counterparts to Thatcher encouraged them to think they they could stand up to Carter.  But then the White House lowered the boom on the USOC, as they invited sports officials to the State Department for, as Moore reported, "strongly worded briefings which not only presented the Administration case that a boycott was a crucial element in a coordinated U.S. response to a dangerous situation in Afghanistan, but also made it clear that extraordinary measures would be taken to see to it that the USOC had no choice but to comply."   Moore also reported that The Justice Department told the USOC that the President could legally bar athletes from participating in the Games, and Carter vowed that he would in fact take such action if necessary.  The White House even threatened to investigate the tax-exempt status of sports organizations that opposed the boycott, and corporate donors were also under pressure to rescind financial support for the USOC, which relies on private funding, not public monies as Olympic organizations in countries do.  Former Treasury Secretary William Simon, then the treasurer for the United States Olympic Committee, said that the simple fact that the Carter administration pressured these corporate donors "is in itself tragic."  

See, it's always worse than you think.  The United States Olympic Committee was against the boycott before threats, intimidation, and extortion made them decide they were for it.  It was presidential authoritarianism, pure and simple, and it was presidential authoritarianism at its worst.  The Mafia-like pressure brought to bear on the USOC sounds like something Trump would have perpetrated, but this was done by a Baptist Sunday-school teacher.

I posted this look back at this piece of ancient history mainly to how that even the most noble of men, like Jimmy Carter, don't always do noble things.  I also wrote this now because I don't like to speak ill of the dead, and I wanted to get this out while Carter, who turned 99 last week, is still alive.

*

And what, pray tell, did the boycott lead to in the end?  Absolutely nothing.  It did not force the Soviets out of Afghanistan in the short term, and the Soviets responded with a boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.  If anything, it politicized the Olympics and linked international sport to conflict.  William Coghlan, the president of the Irish Amateur Athletic Federation president in 1980, noted, "It must be remembered that Great Britain, now supporting the boycott, herself invaded Afghanistan over the Khyber Pass something like 25 times. She's still in Ireland. Yet civilized people set that aside when we compete."

And a little over twenty years later, the United States invaded Afghanistan after 9/11 to hunt for Osama bin Laden but ended up staying to replace a government we didn't like with one we did (sound familiar?),and like the Soviets did in 1989, left Afghanistan after that didn't work out.  And like the Soviets in the late 1980s, we seem to be headed for a crackup.

And let's hope that other countries don't boycott the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics if Trump is President again.