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The “Dulles Doctrine on Love”: Immigration, Gender, and Romance in American Diplomacy, 1956–1957

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 March 2016

ANNE M. BLASCHKE
ANNE M. BLASCHKE*
Affiliation:
History Department, College of the Holy Cross. Email: ablaschk@holycross.edu.
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Abstract

This article explores the gendered potential and limitations of eastern bloc immigration to the United States under Eisenhower and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. When Dulles endorsed the romantic marriage of Czechoslovakian Olympic gold medalist Olga Fikotova to fellow Olympic winner – and American – Harold Connolly in 1957, he engineered a cultural-diplomacy coup that complimented the president's New Look brinkmanship abroad. Feminine, heteronormative, Protestant, and a world champion, Fikotova initially seemed an ideal Cold War immigrant. When she and her new husband arrived on American shores amid media fanfare, though, she exercised her newfound freedom of speech to criticize American social problems and advocate women's equality.

Information

Type
Immigration Forum
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , May 2016, pp. 397 - 417
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2016 

In March 1957, twenty-three-year-old Czech medical student and Olympic discus thrower Olga Fikotova stepped from her car into a massive crowd awaiting her in downtown Prague. The Czechoslovak State Film Company and Radio Prague recorded her every move.Footnote 1 Despite having prepared carefully for this event, Fikotova's hands shook with nervousness. She gathered her strength and moved into photographers' flashbulbs; international media attention would remain brightly fixed on her for the following decade. Fikotova strode into the Prague Town Hall, exchanged vows with her betrothed, and emerged Mrs. Harold Connolly. Her marriage to an American Olympic hammer thrower made her – at least temporarily – the United States' most exciting new citizen. The field athletes' East–West romance also threw into sharp relief the importance of high-profile, gendered immigration to 1950s foreign policy and the unconventional tactics that US strategists used to convey American power. In an effort to emphasize American support for the union before the Czech government had given Fikotova permission to wed Connolly and immigrate to Boston, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had handed down his policy recommendation to international reporters: “We believe in romance.”Footnote 2

Why did Dulles, a notoriously brusque, socially awkward diplomat and hardline Cold Warrior, laud the love between two Olympic stars? As President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Secretary of State, Dulles normally pushed the administration's New Look policy of brinkmanship with the Soviet Union (USSR), orchestrated cultural diplomacy to showcase worldwide US capitalist democracy, and favored the strict policing of national borders against un-American influences.Footnote 3 His claim for American faith in love seems incongruous with his typically hard-nosed approach to diplomacy.

Fikotova's immigration plea garnered Dulles's support because her circumstances perfectly complimented US cultural-diplomacy goals in 1957. She and Connolly fitted a paradigm of opportunity, heteronormativity, and freedom that Eisenhower promoted in his representation of the United States at home and abroad. Fikotova's ability to embody normative American femininity and express heterosexual romantic love made her an ideal weapon in the ideological struggle pitting the American domestic containment ideal against Communist principles of gender equality. Yet tensions emerged within Fikotova's attempts to represent and manipulate Cold War dreams: while she made herself into an icon of femininity and patriotism during the immigration process, her subsequent protests of the marginal conditions that US women athletes faced put her at odds with the New Look order she had so successfully personified in the wake of her Olympic triumph.

This account builds on work by Elaine Tyler May, Margot Canaday, and Siobhan Somerville that argues for correct performances of heterosexual, familial desire as central to Cold War and immigration policy. May asserts that both civilians and state valued conventional heterosexual relationships as bulwarks against Communism at mid-century, while Canaday and Somerville each illuminate policymakers' understanding of immigration as a privilege contingent upon appropriate gender mores and sexuality.Footnote 4 Fikotova's journey from Prague to Boston reflects the impact of an elite woman athlete on diplomats' heteronormative understandings of policy, but also the reveals the hollowness of the Cold War bargain that many immigrants made to achieve naturalization. As Fikotova discovered, Dulles could not deliver on the impression of equal opportunity that the United States represented abroad. New Look capitalist democracy depended on gender discrimination in order to work.

Czech Communists, on the other hand, relied during the 1950s on belligerence to compel both citizens' outward subservience to the state and foreign powers' attention. The Connollys' marriage and Fikotova's immigration provided a human-interest foil for Eisenhower's tough stances on two violent international events of 1956–57: the Hungarian revolution and the Suez Canal crisis. In addition to Czechoslovakia's important geographic location northwest of Hungary, Fikotova's home country had drawn Dulles's ire by selling arms to Egypt three months before the Suez crisis in December 1956. In this context, Dulles breathed fresh air into an increasingly terrifying Cold War when he spoke for young love across borders early the following year. The State Department scored an efficient coup in supporting Fikotova's immigration; Dulles weakened the cultural cachet of the eastern bloc by poaching a celebrity athlete while highlighting the freedom of choice – the freedom of the heart – that democracy offered in contrast to Iron Curtain repression. Thus, though Dulles might seem an unorthodox advocate of true love, his support shows how New Look policymakers took a gender-conscious approach to immigration as a cultural-diplomatic compliment to their ruthless foreign policy. Cold War tensions spiked to unprecedented heights during the mid-1950s – fueled in no small part by the Eisenhower administration – and Fikotova embodied a badly needed US public-relations win in the propaganda battle for hearts and minds.

Fikotova's immigration marked one of few times that Eisenhower diplomats sought an Iron Curtain woman's immigration and naturalization. During the twenty years after World War II, the federal government varied in its approaches to Eastern European immigration. In 1952, at the height of McCarthyite hysteria over enemies' ostensible presence within the gates, Congress passed the McCarran-Walter Act to uphold restrictive quotas put in place by the 1924 National Origins (Johnson-Reed) Act, which had limited foreigners' fitness for residency and citizenship.Footnote 5 Eisenhower, in contrast, sought to shelter Communist refugees from the Soviet bloc; he supported what became the 1953 Refugee Relief Act and paroled, in 1956, thirty thousand Hungarians following their attempted uprising.Footnote 6 But Fikotova came to the US via marriage and her own prestige – as victor, not victim. Unlike most refugees, whom geopolitical crisis had deprived of the claim to a homeland, Fikotova, as Czechoslovakia's most famous celebrity in 1956, had to fight the authoritarian power of her national government for months and win US diplomatic support before she could emigrate. Communist Czechoslovakia badly wished to keep her. But her US endorsement became an exceptional moment. Dulles proffered, as a Cold War offensive weapon, an open-armed welcome to the Soviet bloc athlete.

Fikotova's sex also made her a distinctive newcomer. A feminine, exceptionally skilled woman who promised to add to American sport prestige in the world, she seemed one among few foreigners worth opening the gates for in the 1950s. Neither war bride nor refugee, she nevertheless found easy acceptance from federal officials who closely considered gender in their evaluation of potential immigrants. Congress's adherence to McCarran-Walter meant that both women and men from Eastern Europe faced restrictive quotas, while even western hemisphere men faced an increasingly restrictive policy. Particularly after Eisenhower appointed former West Point Military Academy classmate Lt. Gen. Joseph Swing as Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) commissioner in 1954, even males within the western hemisphere unaffected by the 1924 restrictions found the United States highly exclusionary.Footnote 7 Fikotova's story provides access to a hitherto unexplored side of Eisenhower's diplomacy and border control. Dulles became a partner in showing – and celebrating – how immigration could become a publicity weapon when the applicant was one of the world's most diplomatically desirable women: a feminine, Protestant, charismatic Olympic gold medalist who loved an American champion, and who hailed from an aggressive Soviet satellite. Eisenhower capitalized on the overseas publicity advantages of making Fikotova an American.

As a sports star, Fikotova was especially unusual in being in the vanguard of women's sport that Eisenhower approved of in 1956–57. The US government had long marginalized female athletes. In fact, Fikotova had to capture an American gold medalist's heart for Dulles to appreciate her sports gravitas. Through 1955, Eisenhower had prioritized male athletes in Olympic cultural diplomacy; during the early 1950s he explicitly fostered US soldiers' enrollment in elite athletic programs. But Soviets prioritized differently. The Czech state valued Fikotova as much as any other elite athlete, male or female. Having trained in Prague, Fikotova never found discus a manly or subversive event. And the training that fueled her self-confidence paid off; she and other Iron Curtain women had changed cultural foreign policy by the 1956 Melbourne games. Here, female Soviet bloc athletes began skewing Cold War medal counts, and thus moved US diplomats to grudgingly concede the international importance of women's sport. Hence Dulles invited Fikotova to join the American postwar family.

While Czech subsidies and other resources fueled her prowess, Fikotova controlled a critical factor in her own fate: her gendered self-presentation. Her clearly heterosexual motive for immigration, overtly feminine aesthetic, and canny presentation as appreciative of Western social family roles made her appealing to the US diplomats who intervened in Czech politics on her behalf. She fitted the “American Look” of healthy, approachable femininity with which advertisers conflated national identity during the early Cold War, a phenomenon Emily Rosenberg has discussed.Footnote 8 Along with other women across ethnic, race, and citizenship boundaries, Fikotova learned that emphasizing a conventional Western femininity engineered her social acceptability as an American. Dulles noted Fikotova's physical strength, but also appreciated her curled hair, made-up face, and eager plans to have children.

Yet while policymakers reaped the benefit of the international soft-power coup, they also felt the domestic boomerang effect of Fikotova's cultural clout once she became a US celebrity athlete and failed to behave in the normative feminine, patriotic manner that the administration had expected. A high-profile immigrant, Fikotova had appeared – her ability to throw heavy discs the length of football fields notwithstanding – an ideal American woman. But once ensconced in US elite sport, she drew negative attention to its limitations. In newspapers at home and abroad, Fikotova Connolly castigated sexism, racism, and lack of government support for national athletes. She revealed for US politicians the unintended consequence of gendered eastern bloc immigration as a foreign-policy tactic: she had been more effective for policymakers as a heteronormative symbol during post-Olympic negotiation than she was upon her naturalization. As an American, she demanded the fair treatment that Dulles had argued she and her marriage epitomized.

GENDER AND MILITARISM IN AMERICAN SPORT

As a sportswoman, Fikotova came to the United States an unusual celebrity. Women athletes of renown were rare; track-and-field elites even more so. Running, hurdling, and throwing crossed the bounds of gender-appropriate social behavior. American education administrators, medical doctors, and media had criticized competitive sportswomen, particularly tracksters, since the late 1920s because of the sport's perceived gender abnormality. Though women athletes in black southern colleges and urban clubs had garnered limited accolades during Olympic years, widespread distrust of female competition remained after World War II.Footnote 9 While several sprinters, like Mildred “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias and Stella Walsh, had attained celebrity and admiration through exceptional skill, Americans regarded them with bemused, slightly apologetic, affection.Footnote 10 No woman discus thrower had previously appeared culturally acceptable.

In addition to Americans' long-standing doubt about women on the cinders, US politicians and amateur sport executives associated sports with men even more strongly after World War II, when cultural diplomacy became a Cold War front. In 1948 Congress passed the Smith-Mundt Act allowing the State Department to “communicate” with foreign populations via broadcasting, exchange programs, and other propaganda. In response, State Department officials strengthened communication with the eastern bloc and Third World in attempts, through emotional appeals, to convince these residents of the superiority of democratic capitalism.Footnote 11 Eisenhower, who preferred covert action to open attacks on Communism, also sought to increase his own executive control over the United States' international impressions.Footnote 12 White House officials created the United States Information Agency (USIA) to serve this purpose in 1953.Footnote 13 In this context, Eisenhower prioritized masculinity in cultural diplomacy to match his New Look military buildup around the globe during his first term.

The President tapped into a postwar reverence for men's sport that the military had already established within the nation's primary amateur elite sport organization, the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU).Footnote 14 The armed forces focussed its sport connections explicitly on men. Women played no part in their framings of military strength, American values, or future sport potential at annual AAU meetings; instead, high-ranking brass conflated sport, masculinity, and professional military service. “I want … to attest to the natural abilities of the American men who served with me on Bataan and Corregidor,” General Jonathan Wainwright asserted in reference to his harrowing surrender in 1942 to the Japanese, immediately reminding listeners of his leadership and valor. Despite their defeat in the Philippines, the general explained in his 1946 address, his troops' innate qualities enabled them to retain their fortitude, just as an athlete who lost a sprint would go on to win other races due to his inborn masculine talent, national values, and tough character. Other officers also grounded American men's bravery in manly terms.

Foreign-policy experts began considering sport cultural diplomacy early in the 1950s. Athletics became an informal “soft sell” proxy arena for Cold War face-offs.Footnote 15 As commander in chief of the armed forces, Eisenhower saw this “soft” or “slow” diplomacy as a top-down military strategy that he controlled.Footnote 16 But he needed, it seemed, to wield as many cultural power plays as possible, because Communist ideology tempted populations around the world. Newly decolonized countries declared independence, while other nations' internal conflicts split them into Communist and capitalist entities. The US military waged a hot war in Korea into mid-1953. Cultural transmission via sport, US officials believed, played a powerful part in the global struggle for hearts and minds.

Soviet athletes did much to push US foreign policy toward including sport. Their formidable performances at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics – the first in which the USSR competed – had shocked American athletes, administrators, and military personnel. Soviets' physical prowess had added a visceral, quantifiable image of Communist strength to expansionist fears that Americans harbored. Diplomats initially responded by redoubling the early postwar military links between male soldiers and elite athletics. Checking the Soviet sport advance with US victories might not prevent the spread of international Communism or affect the arms race. But it would win a critical battle on the Cold War cultural front, important territory both abroad and at home by 1955.

In this context, American officials had continued to downplay women's athletic accomplishments through mid-decade. Diplomats especially marginalized track, a gender-inappropriate sport. In a report on the most prestigious Olympic fundraising event of 1955, a sport extravaganza at Madison Square Garden sponsored by the US Olympic Committee and billed as the “kick-off for National Olympic Day, proclaimed for Saturday by President Eisenhower,” reporters all but ignored elite women competitors.Footnote 17 And new laws shored up men's dominance. In 1955 Eisenhower signed legislation “authorizing athletes in the Armed Forces to take part in the Olympics, Pan-American Games and similar events,” and the Defense Department “to spend up to $900,000 in each four-year period for training, equipping and tryout costs for such athletes within the services.”Footnote 18 Women missed the windfall because they comprised just 1 percent of military personnel through the 1950s and could not train for combat.Footnote 19 The same year Eisenhower cemented the state–sport connection by exempting United States Olympic Committee (USOC) events from admission taxes “to raise funds to send athletes to the Olympic and Pan American Games.”Footnote 20 The dearth of active-duty women meant that the military–sport alliance reinforced men's opportunity through the 1956 Melbourne Olympiad.

Eisenhower's support indicated domestic institutionalization of sport as a cultural-diplomacy weapon that in 1955 discounted women. Ironically, despite world championship records that black and ethnic women tracksters set at mid-decade, international sport administrators also devalued women's athleticism. Male emphasis so strongly dominated that International Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage mused in 1954, “despite our decision … not to discontinue events for women … about one-third, if I am not mistaken, of the members … would be happier if there were no events for the opposite sex.”Footnote 21 In this hostile climate, only by emphasizing gender conventionality did US women tracksters survive in sport.

FIKOTOVA'S IMMIGRATION: A FOREIGN-POLICY ISSUE

By 1956, administrators made an about-face; they began to look twice at female athletes whose international celebrity drew Communist audiences’ respect. A grudging appreciation of women emerged among diplomats old and new who appreciated women's skill, provided that athletes emphasized the gender normativity that resonated with postwar American mores. Gender had grown increasingly important to soft Cold War power. A woman who could combine femininity with elite skill became a unique propaganda weapon. In the State Department and USIA, supportive diplomats made limited infrastructural gains as exceptional women athletes grew indispensable to cultural diplomacy. Olga Fikotova led the vanguard of postwar women celebrities whose global fame came from sports.

A difference in US–Soviet understandings of women's roles presaged Fikotova's relevance to international affairs. Americans' long tradition of interpreting Russia though a gendered lens heightened after World War II. Though cultural attaché George Kennan had defined Soviets as inherently masculine and seen this characteristic as a “potentially positive influence on the feminized West” early in his career, by 1946 he feared Soviet masculinity as inherently paranoid and expansionist.Footnote 22 American observers who echoed Kennan's argument for Soviet manliness – and the need to contain it – reasoned that it extended to the country's females. These women workers, in such views, subsumed femininity to a greater interest in the state. By 1956 US reporters had firmly established this antifeminine trope. Journalist Welles Hangen sighed over the stereotypical characteristics of Russia's first woman Party higher-up, a representative “Soviet Woman”:

She typifies the articulate, resourceful and self-reliant women who run Soviet factories, collective farms and scientific research institutions. She makes little effort at beautifying herself. Her hair is pinned back in a severe bun and her typically Slavic face is never adorned with makeup of any sort.Footnote 23

This woman's appearance revealed a lack of interest in attracting men or conforming to Western heteronormativity.

For American women, new postwar circumstances faced opposite the Communist paradigm. Stratified sex-role organization provided the basis for Cold War family life, as scholars have shown.Footnote 24 Gender roles in burgeoning suburbs among first-generation homeowners and college graduates became more restricted and heteronormative than ever before.Footnote 25 Male veterans earned college diplomas, received low-interest mortgage loans, and streamed into middle management, while brides – many in their late teens – felt social pressure to adopt the roles of housewife and mother.Footnote 26 The Cold War emphasis on military culture, business, and gender stratification saw women emphasize their femininity as a visual example of gender difference. Fikotova's exceptional immigration would be possible because she bridged these two beliefs about East and West – strength and heteronormativity – that US diplomats held dear at mid-decade.

Olga Fikotova was born near Prague, where she grew up amid the stress of Nazi control over divided Czechoslovakia during World War II. In the late 1940s, upheaval and revolution left her resentful of the Communist government that seized power. Communist forces had imprisoned her father, a career officer in the Czech President's security detail, during the 1949 revolution, after which time both parents had been relegated to paltry food rations and unhealthful factory work.Footnote 27 Fikotova had harbored bitterness toward the state since adolescence but grew adept at pleasing Party officials and downplaying her Protestant faith in her late teens. That said, she appreciated socialized support for sports. In Czechoslovakia, as well as other Iron Curtain countries, the state valued women's athleticism as a representation of national strength and international prestige at glamour events like the Olympics even as it continued a prewar assumption that women found spousal, parenting, and household concerns more gratifying than did men.Footnote 28 The eastern bloc trained men and women with equal dedication and funding in the early 1950s. As a semiprofessional basketball player, trackster, and medical student, Fikotova received subsidized rations and special treatment for being a national athlete. She decided to focus on discus in 1954. Unlike Americans, Czechs saw no contradiction in gender normativity and field athletics, despite the obvious categorization of the discus throw as a strength event. Competing in domestic exhibitions in the early 1950s, Fikotova reaped enthusiastic popular support.

After losing badly to Russian throwers in 1954, Fikotova redoubled her efforts to excel. While the Russian women's raw strength inspired her, she also sought what she described as their beauty and femininity. Soviet women's champion Nina Ponomareva, for example, “slung her discus with ferocious strength, and was careful not to smudge the curve of her lipstick as she wiped the perspiration off her sedately beautiful face.”Footnote 29 For Fikotova, Soviet women conflated femininity and power. At the Melbourne Olympiad, Fikotova achieved triumphs of gender acceptability and sport prowess, winning rave reviews for both in international media. She also manifested both accomplishments on the Olympic practice infield, where she met American hammer thrower Harold Connolly.

Connolly, known to friends and family as Hal, saw the 1956 Olympics as a surprising destination in his unlikely athletic career. Born to a Catholic working-class Boston, Massachusetts family, Connolly suffered an injury as an infant that left his left arm slightly withered and four inches shorter than his right.Footnote 30 As a mediocre sprinter at nearby Boston College, Connolly inadvertently realized his talent for the hammer throw after shagging tossed hammers and lobbing them back at record distances in practices. A rise through elite sport ranks nearly as rapid as Fikotova's saw both athletes take gold medals in their respective events at the Melbourne Games. Their attraction formed almost instantly.Footnote 31 Their union, however, took nearly a year to finalize. After both athletes won, Connolly assumed Fikotova would defect in Melbourne. Her handlers, suspecting so too, watched her carefully. Fearing for her parents' safety and her own national honor, however, Fikotova insisted on returning to Prague to apply for marriage in the Czech Ministry of Interior office of Marriage to Foreigners.Footnote 32

Olga and Hal's fight to wed became an international incident covered in more than fifty papers and fifteen countries. Their East–West romance, sporty good looks, and obvious affection captured millions of observers' hearts and piqued the frenzied interest of international reporters. The United States gave Connolly permission to marry Fikotova as soon as its officials learned that they sought to wed. A talented, popular athlete from a particularly belligerent Soviet satellite, Fikotova appeared an appealing immigrant. In Dulles's view, acquiring Czechoslovakia's most popular celebrity in 1956 would certainly counter the nation's recent arms sales to Guatemala and Egypt – without militarily increasing Central American or Middle Eastern tension.Footnote 33 The Czech government, however, refused to allow Fikotova to marry Connolly because she wished to immigrate to Boston with her new husband afterward.

Although she applied to retain Czech citizenship and continue competing for her homeland while living in the United States, Communist officials stonewalled Fikotova's application. She faced off with Czech bureaucrats and, by early March 1957, with President Antonin Zapotocky.Footnote 34 In a desperate move following denials from the Interior Ministry, Fikotova had mailed the President a plea for help on 27 February. Granting her his longest private audience since taking office, Zapotocky lambasted the gold medalist's unwitting creation of an East–West impasse.

If the state agreed to her marriage, he lamented, Czechoslovakia would lose to America's “capitalistic glitter” its only 1956 gold medalist and a comrade in whom it had invested much financial, ideological, and emotional support.Footnote 35 Should Zapotocky refuse to endorse her union, however, the republic could never again let her compete abroad for the high probability that she would defect. Fikotova had failed her homeland by falling in love with Connolly, since athletic prowess remained her only unique skill useful to Czechoslovakia.

In the United States, meanwhile, diplomats raised the stakes. During a 5 March press conference, John Foster Dulles had weighed in on the lovers' side, declaring, “We believe in romance … That is our basic principle.”Footnote 36 His statement of support for the gold medalists rebounded through international press channels. Despite Dulles's spontaneous delivery, his official articulation of US policy on romantic love rattled Zapotocky, who only agreed to see Fikotova after learning of it via news briefing. “[Y]ou two,” he scolded Fikotova, “have created an awkward situation that troubles not only us, but also Washington.” The Americans talked sentimentally, Zapotocky continued, but they might behave ruthlessly; Fikotova failed to understand the grave geopolitics at the heart of cultural diplomacy:

We are engaged in what is popularly called the cold war, a struggle of ideologies that must continue until the oppressed, exploited, and impoverished peoples break the shackles of the imperialists … our country stands on the opposite pole from Mr. Connolly's … their Congress is run by big business that perpetuates wars for profits … we as representatives of the peaceful camp, must protect ourselves from the ever threatening inroads of the enemy … you and I, and also Mr. Connolly, must take one side or the other.Footnote 37

Loyal Czechs, the President insisted, must align with the East. Yet he calculated differently after the US Secretary of State framed Olga and Hal as young lovers who simply wished to exercise individual freedom of choice across borders. Zapotocky believed it would be folly to ignore Dulles's impromptu policy; romance served as a compelling publicity foil, but US military capability underlay it. “One reporter called it the ‘Dulles Doctrine on Love,’” Zapotocky complained, with false mirth, to Fikotova. “Of course, we are unable to guess in what manner Mr. Dulles will back up his doctrine.”Footnote 38 Fikotova added her own pleas to Dulles's policy, insisting that true love had deeper meaning than ideology. Their distinct tactics together convinced Zapotocky to concede defeat. Deflated by the realization that his Olympic champion prioritized personal freedom, he acknowledged, “we've already lost you.” For while Fikotova had originally made herself a principal actor in this Cold War power play when she decided not to defect in Melbourne, Czechoslovakia had no incentive to retain her once she became untrustworthy abroad. Her argument for the universality of romance had different motivations than Dulles's – Fikotova negotiated for personal happiness, the statesman for a soft-diplomacy win – but together they achieved a US victory in compelling Zapotocky's capitulation. The Czech President recommended to foreign-affairs personnel after the meeting that they approve the marriage.Footnote 39

In dictating US support for the Connollys' wedding and US residency, Dulles manipulated New Look gender constructions to further payoff through March 1957, while Czech interior ministers continued to stonewall the Olympic couple. Dulles's uncharacteristically romantic encouragement of the young lovers, shared with readers at home and abroad through mass media, communicated his “doctrine on love” as warmly universal. Because millions worldwide followed the story of the Iron Curtain love affair in 1957, American support for the Connollys – who embodied heterosexual vivacity and freedom of choice – scored the nation a diplomatic coup. Hal Connolly built on this global goodwill following Dulles's press conference. Acknowledging the diplomat's support – ”I can use all the help I can get,” he gratefully told his mother via telephone on 7 March – Connolly began a steady campaign of public-opinion appeals through the few international reporters who could get access to Czechoslovakia, where the state forbade domestic journalists to cover the story.Footnote 40 He framed the lovers' appeal in the language of democratic freedom. Within two weeks the order came down from the Marriage to Foreigners office that Fikotova could marry Connolly and move to Boston after all.Footnote 41

The US State Department found Fikotova an extremely attractive visa applicant. In contrast, Czech interior ministers hated to see their only 1956 gold medalist “selling [her]self to the capitalists.”Footnote 42 American journalists made hay with the conflict. Communicating with Connolly via his mother in Boston during his month abroad, major US papers reported the story at least once daily. When Fikotova received her marriage permit, the media emphasized the unlikely geopolitical climate in which they had won the right to wed. The New York Times waxed, “The Suez problem is not solved … [t]he H-Bomb overhangs us like a cloud of doom … but Olga and Harold love each other in the way that began in the dawn of time.” Lauding the match as “natural” and the athletes' love as of a current more ancient and profound than modern political ideology and destructive technology, the Times touted the triumph of heterosexual love across national borders: “The hearts of all who have ever known romance say yes.”Footnote 43 Soon, American media rejoiced that the lovers would settle in Boston, for Dulles had won this Cold War skirmish.

Celebrations began when Fikotova and Connolly married in a three-ceremony event in downtown Prague. The wedding day created a Cold War romantic sensation and media blitz at home and abroad. Though the Czech government had blacked out all internal news of the diplomatic conflict and nuptials, tens of thousands of residents learned of the occasion and crowded into the city hall, Catholic cathedral, and protestant church where authorities held three separate weddings.Footnote 44 The US embassy continued to provide the couple logistical support, while John Foster and Janet Dulles sent them a personal congratulations note.Footnote 45 And despite Czech officials' opposition to the marriage, the Communist government recognized an irresistible international marketing opportunity. Czechoslovak State Film Company authorities forced Olga's parents to sign a licensing agreement to film the wedding and sell footage to sixteen different countries “for the much needed hard currency,” which, her mother bitterly noted, would make the state a profit as the Fikotova family sank deeper into debt.Footnote 46 Though Harold suffered a slight popularity dip in Boston for being temporarily excommunicated from the Catholic Church, the newlyweds found an overwhelmingly welcoming US reception, one explicitly Cold War-oriented that lauded their romance and heterosexuality.Footnote 47 The New York Times included the story of “Boy Gets Girl” in its foreign-policy column “The World.”Footnote 48 In the eyes of Boston Globe writer George Weller, Hal had done more to bridge the Cold War divide than Olga, becoming “the most effective amateur envoy the United States has sent east of the Elbe–Danube frontier since ‘Porgy and Bess’ conquered Moscow.”Footnote 49 The groom himself, while accustomed to the publicity that had followed the Olympic trip and his gold medal, only seemed to grasp the East–West impact of his marriage upon writing to Dulles in the aftermath of the diplomatic turmoil, weddings, and media frenzy: “Forgive us,” Connolly began, “for not writing sooner.”

But ever since we received our permission from the Czech government we have hardly had one free moment. We are looking forward to some peace and rest on the ship. However we could not leave Europe without thanking you and Mrs. Dulles for your very nice greeting on our wedding day. It was a great thrill for us both!Footnote 50

As Olga and Hal set sail for the United States, they ruminated on the diplomatic support that had marked their romance thus far and, indeed, had made their union possible.

American media took its cue from the State Department to gender the union as Hal's conquest when the tracksters arrived stateside. Diplomats also celebrated the wedding as a masculine geopolitical coup. Aware of the international public-relations boon Connolly had scored, Dulles hosted the newlyweds in Washington, DC and thanked the Bostonian for being such an effective goodwill ambassador – Hal had not only represented America well on the world stage with his own sport prowess; he had also poached Czechoslovakia's only gold medalist, and a pretty, outgoing one at that. “You did a great job. I want to thank you,” Dulles emphasized. “You did a lot of good and got yourself a dividend out of it with this lovely lady. I wish we could all do so well.”Footnote 51 The Cold Warrior implied that Connolly – having won a national conquest – deserved to return home with a share of the capital the US had earned on this Cold War opportunity.

If Hal had staked national honor and his religious identity on winning his Czech bride, Olga appeared a promising counterpart. Agreeing to raise her children Catholic and thoughtfully lauding her new husband's country, family, and their union in a flood of media appearances, she seemed to accede immediately to postwar American family life.Footnote 52 The Connollys represented the ideal gendered family installed in the US after Olga traded nation and ideology for love. When she became first a mother and then an American citizen in the late 1950s, the State Department, press, and AAU considered their return on her immigration investment a success.

IMMIGRANT ACTIVISM: GENDER AND FREEDOM OF SPEECH AFTER 1957

Olga Fikotova Connolly, however, turned out to be an imperfect cultural diplomat because, as an American, she publicly criticized conditions in both sport and society that she considered undemocratic. A woman raised under a repressive regime, she eagerly exercised freedom of speech in the United States. Her outspokenness cast her outside the comfortable gender-appropriate bounds within which the State Department had installed her upon her immigration in spring 1957.

Most controversially, Fikotova Connolly spoke out against the way the United States treated its amateur women athletes. She castigated unsafe facilities, insufficient resources, and internal racism. After sustaining an injury due to shoddy conditions during her first AAU outdoor women's championship, she angrily fired off a letter to US Track & Field News, the preeminent track journal dominated by men's writing. She also took more radical measures, sending scathing descriptions to former Prague colleagues, who published her rebukes in Czech and Soviet newspapers. American AAU administrators watched aghast – their Cold War belle seemed to go out of her way to trash them to the enemy, critiquing US sport and wounding national pride less than one year after immigrating. Fikotova Connolly herself considered this negativity only fair, noting that she “didn't mind if her statements created a mild international controversy as long as it helped improve conditions for women in United States track.”Footnote 53 Within six months, she became an outspoken advocate of higher-quality, if not equal to men's, infrastructure for women.

Fikotova Connolly remained devoted to this cause as a US citizen and young mother during the following decade. At the 1960 AAU national championship in Corpus Christi, Texas, she took both first place in discus and “verbal swipes at the A.A. U. about meet conditions in general,” including an inferior throwing area, “poor accommodations, little food, and inadequate transportation.”Footnote 54 She also criticized local residents' discriminatory behavior toward black female teammates. The AAU feared the damaging publicity and investigated her charges, prompting Hal Connolly to offer her “moral support,” in the words of one official, by traveling with the women's team instead of the men's to a Swiss meet in August 1960.Footnote 55 In this case, Hal bent to support his spouse, whose fiery temper and memories of better treatment in Czechoslovakia, where the state rated women's sport equal to men's, had led her to speak out.

Fikotova Connolly not only challenged American gender policy; she also came to embody the impact of its most crucial component – funding – on women athletes. Her competitive performances bore the effect of a transition from full public subsidies to scanty privatized support. In 1956, Fikotova's Olympic triumph had indicated to Americans that Soviet satellites subsidized female athletes as comprehensively as male. She confirmed this suspicion after immigrating, freely acknowledging that the state had paid for her food, housing, and medical-school program so that she could focus on training. Fikotova Connolly's celebrity immigrant status did not grant her a similar financial security in her new country. United States amateur athletes received no public funding and had to decline commercial endorsements to maintain eligibility; they received only limited assistance from underfunded organizations – the AAU and, if they made Olympic teams, the USOC. Olga's performance declined during the late 1950s in Boston under these new circumstances. To finance their track careers, the Connollys both curtailed their training to work day jobs; Olga abandoned medical school to clean Boston Globe offices and Hal sold insurance.Footnote 56 Both struggled to maintain elite standards. Women received even fewer AAU dollars than men. Fikotova Connolly embodied the dramatic effect of circumscribing an athlete's financial support within gendered, privatized lines.

Fikotova Connolly remained, as one journalist reverently noted, “a lady discus champion from Czecho-Slovakia who looked like Ingrid Bergman” in the early 1960s.Footnote 57 But she failed to medal at either the Rome 1960 or Tokyo 1964 Olympiads, and the US sport establishment had reason to fear that private enterprise and paltry AAU allotments left American women well coiffed but inadequately prepared for international competition. Among female tracksters, meanwhile, eastern bloc women's superior treatment and American underfunding was not news, but rather the overdue recognition of a thirty-year problem. Field athlete Earlene Brown wryly observed in 1958, “Russia is a sports loving country … And in sports, the Russian women are years ahead of us in knowledge, training and teaching.”Footnote 58 Fikotova Connolly's heteronormative aesthetic had transferred perfectly from East to West, but without her subsidy her elite scores fell in international competition. Imagine, she challenged administrators, journalists, anyone who would listen, really – imagine the medal counts US women could produce with more money. Following the 1964 Olympics, at which she failed to make the finals, Fikotova Connolly argued to attendees of a Rotary Club event that the USOC “should drop ‘its lily-white approach to Olympic preparedness’” and financially subsidize each of its athletes’ training and living expenses.Footnote 59

Indeed, both sexes, Fikotova Connolly insisted, suffered in American athletics. The US sport establishment also pressured men to beat eastern bloc stars, but without the state support that their Communist foes received. While the men's team benefited from better funding than the women's, she spoke for both sexes from her unique dual role as competitor and sport spouse.

“An athlete qualifies for the Olympics,” she said, “and the first thing he's told is ‘go over there and beat the Russians.’ There is very little consideration given to the real struggle and financial burden an athlete must go through to even make the team.”Footnote 60

Fikotova Connolly's Communist background gave her both veteran perspective and sufficient courage to speak out on this issue, unlike other athletes who resented the system but suffered for fear of losing the opportunity to compete. A celebrity by virtue of talent but mostly her high-profile marriage, she had more security within the sport because of the Connollys' national fame and cultural-diplomacy clout. The pair also remained popular abroad – as Hal put it, “in a way, celebrities in Europe” – which insulated them from serious consequences of maverick behavior in the United States, as Fikotova Connolly's hard-hitting tactic of exposing American negligence to Communist former teammates had demonstrated.Footnote 61 But her careful maintenance of her appearance, and the pair's continued reputation as romantic lovers, also insulated her from any real repercussions for toeing an unpatriotic line. “Olga was the prettiest athlete on the field at Melbourne,” remembered a Boston Globe correspondent in 1960, while another reporter lauded her as a “Junoesque lovely.”Footnote 62 Such surface praise continued into the 1960s, but Fikotova Connolly's initial post-Melbourne adaption to American gender conformity gave way to a pragmatic, complex female-oriented advocacy into the 1960s. Though the State Department sought her immigration for her explosive strength, heterosexual romantic appeal, and appealing aesthetics, Fikotova's activism was direct and began soon after she arrived. Dulles endorsed a betrothed beauty but wound up with a complex power player who countered US gender assumptions and practice.

Ironically, although Dulles and his diplomatic cohort assumed Fikotova's immigration a positive good for international impressions of American democratic capitalism because of her feminine, conventional sexuality and romantic marriage, once a US citizen she proved a controversial figure unafraid to challenge her new nation's maintenance of its democratic ideals for marginalized groups – women, African Americans, and athletes – where she found limitations.Footnote 63 Fikotova exploited the Cold War context to try to augment women's agency in sport and society. In so doing she inspired a new generation of US diplomats to respect tracksters' cultural power as both immigrants and goodwill ambassadors traveling abroad. After Fikotova's phenomenal popularity, the State Department and USIA began sponsoring women tracksters to spread American values. In the wake of Fikotova's triumphant marriage, State Department officer Nicholas Rodis emphasized that as “American Specialists,” women athletes accepted a patriotic task that no other citizens could fulfill so well: “Their endeavors make important contributions to the image of the United States abroad and, ultimately, to the foreign policy objectives of our government.”Footnote 64 But she also revealed the limits of women's cultural-diplomacy immigration: the multiplicity of new citizens' expectations once naturalized, no matter how exceptional their skills or promisingly normative their presentation. Fikotova, infatuated with the American medalist Connolly, initially personified an optimal bridge between Eisenhower's hard and soft power. But as a citizen she demanded the American dream that she had been used abroad to promote. Her story underscores the importance, for historians, of considering further the impact of gender politics and unorthodox foreign-policy actors on Cold War immigration to the United States.

Footnotes

1 Olga Connolly, The Rings of Destiny (New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1968), 294.

2 “The World: Progress Report,” New York Times, 24 March 1957, 188.

3 On US cultural diplomacy see Frank Costigliola, Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); Frank Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas: US Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Charles S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendency and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997); and Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005). On Cold War race-related issues, anticolonialism, and modernization theory see Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Molly Geidel, Peace Corps Fantasies: How Development Shaped the Global Sixties (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Greg Grandin, Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006); Michael E. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and US Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and US Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Stephen Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: JFK Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Musicians Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); George White, Holding the Line: Race, Racism, and American Foreign Policy toward Africa, 1953–1961 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).

4 Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Somerville, Siobhan B., “Notes toward a Queer History of Naturalization,” American Quarterly, 57, 3 (Sept. 2005), 659–75; Somerville, “Queer Loving,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 11, 3 (2005), 335–70.

5 On the McCarran-Walter Act (the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, PL 82–414, 66 Stat 163) see Reimers, David M., “Post-World War II Immigration to the United States: America's Latest Newcomers,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 454, America as a Multicultural Society (March 1981), 1–12.

6 Donna R. Gabaccia, Foreign Relations: American Immigration in Global Perspective (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 162–63.

7 For example, gender played a critical role in excluding Mexican men's agricultural labor; the tightest federal stranglehold came in the INS bracero procedure Operation Wetback. On post-1945 US–Mexican immigration see Hernandez, Kelly Lytle, “The Crimes and Consequences of Illegal Immigration: A Cross-border Examination of Operation Wetback, 1943 to 1954,” Western Historical Quarterly, 37, 4 (Winter 2006), 421–44; Hernandez, “Mexican Immigration to the United States,” OAH Magazine of History, 23, 4, North American Migrations (Oct. 2009), 25–29; Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 127–66.

8 Emily S. Rosenberg, “The American Look: The Nation in the Shape of a Woman,” in Emily S. Rosenberg and Shannon Fitzpatrick, eds., Body and Nation: The Global Realm of US Body Politics in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 189–208.

9 Anne M. Blaschke, “Racing to Win: Women Track and Field Athletes in American Political Culture,” PhD diss., Boston University, 2012; Susan Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women's Sport (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 55–82; Liberti, Rita, “‘We Were Ladies, We Just Played like Boys’: African American Womanhood and Competitive Basketball at Bennett College, 1928–1942,” Journal of Sport History, 26, 23 (1999), 567–84; Liberti, “Women's Sport History and Black Feminist Theory,” Womanist Theory and Research, 3, 2–4, 1 (special double issue) (2001–2), 45–50; Susan Ware, Game, Set Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women's Sports (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 75–146.

10 On Didrikson see Susan E. Cayleff, Babe: The Life and Legend of Babe Didrikson (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 19; Cahn, 115–16, 215–17. On Walsh see William J. Baker, Jesse Owens: An American Life (New York: The Free Press/Macmillan, Inc., 1986), 169; and Sharon Kinney Hanson, The Life of Helen Stephens: The Fulton Flash (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004); and “What Do You Think? Is This a Man or Woman?” Look, Feb. 1937, 37–40. On “inversion” and American interwar definitions of sexuality see Canaday.

11 William R. Keylor, “Waging the War of Words: The Promotion of American Interests and Ideals Abroad during the Cold War,” in Cathal J. Nolan, ed., Power and Responsibility in World Affairs: Reformation and Transformation (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2004), 84–85.

12 Lawrence D. Soley, Radio Warfare: OSS and CIA Subversive Propaganda (New York: Praeger, 1989); and Parry-Giles, Shawn J., “The Eisenhower Administration's Conceptualization of the USIA: The Development of Overt and Covert Propaganda Strategies,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, 24, 2 (Spring 1994), 263–76.

13 Keylor, 89; Richard T. Arndt, The First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005); Jarol Manheim, Strategic Public Diplomacy and American Foreign Policy: The Evolution of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York: Free Press, 1989).

14 General Wainwright, “Speeches Made at Luncheon and Banquet Sessions Friday Luncheon Session December 6, 1946,” Minutes of the Fifty-Eighth Annual Meeting, Amateur Athletic Union of the United States, 6–8 Dec. 1946, p. 148, Amateur Athletic Union Archives (hereinafter AAU).

15 Keylor, 89.

16 Parry-Giles, 268.

17 John Rendel, “Sports Carnival on Here Tonight: Weight Lifting, Track, Ice Skating Carded at Garden for Olympic Benefit,” New York Times, 20 Oct. 1955, 46.

18 On Pan-Am Games media coverage see “US First as Meet in Mexico Closes,” New York Times, 27 March 1955, S1. On Eisenhower's sport legislation see “Sports Bill Approved: Measure Signed by President Helps Service Athletes,” New York Times, 18 March 1955, 35.

19 Canaday, 175.

20 “Olympic Tax Bill Signed,” New York Times, 13 Aug. 1955, 8.

21 Avery Brundage to David Lord Burghley, 30 Oct. 1954, Avery Brundage Papers, CIO PT-Brund-corr-7596SD2, Correspondence, juillet–décembre 1954, Olympic Studies Centre Archive, Lausanne, Switzerland.

22 Costigliola, Frank, “Unceasing Pressure for Penetration: Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan's Formation of the Cold War,” Journal of American History, 83, 4 (March 1997), 1329–30.

23 Welles Hangen, “Closeup of the ‘Soviet Woman’: For the First Time, a Woman Has Been Elevated to Russian Communism's High Command,” New York Times, 11 March 1956, 228.

24 Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 161; Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983); May, Homeward Bound.

25 Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003); Howard, Clayton, “Building a ‘Family Friendly’ Metropolis: Sexuality, the State, and Postwar Housing Policy,” Journal of Urban History, 39, 5 (Sept. 2013), 933–55; Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005).

26 May, 74–81.

27 Connolly, The Rings of Destiny, 67. While the official transition occurred in February 1948, Fikotova remembered a shift to Communist rule in 1949. On the Communist takeover see Bradley Abrams, The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation: Czech Culture and the Rise of Communism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (London and New York: Allen Lane, 2012); and Mary Heimann, Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

28 Melissa Feinberg, Elusive Equality: Gender, Citizenship, and the Limits of Democracy (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 198.

29 Connolly, 99.

30 Robert Lipsyte, “At Last, Harold Connolly Raises Both Arms,” New York Times, 13 Dec. 1991, B21.

31 On the athletes' courtship see Connolly.

32 Footnote Ibid., 156, 224.

33 On Guatemala see Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (New York: Times Books, Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 2013), 70–71. On Czechoslovakian involvement in Suez see David A. Nichols, Eisenhower 1956: The President's Year of Crisis – Suez and the Brink of War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 26–27.

34 “Discus Star Urges Zapotocky to Let Her Wed US Athlete,” New York Times, 7 March 1957, 31.

35 Connolly, 246, 247.

36 “Hope for Hal? Dulles' Stand May Aid Suit of Connolly,” Daily Boston Globe, 6 March 1957, 7.

37 Footnote Ibid., 246.

38 Connolly, 245.

39 Footnote Ibid., 247.

40 “MUST WAIT: Athletes' Wedding Plans Get Setback,” Los Angeles Times, 7 March 1957, C5.

41 Connolly, 250. Fikotova endured several more heated interviews with the Marriages to Foreigners Department, fielding such questions as: “The real issue is do you really expect us to approve of your running out on us?”

42 Footnote Ibid.

43 “'Tis Love, 'Tis Love, Etc.,” New York Times, 22 March 1957, 22; Connolly, 294.

44 “Olympians' Wedding Set Today in Prague,” New York Times, 27 March 1957, 5.

45 Harold Connolly to John Foster Dulles, 17 April 1957, Alphabetical Correspondence by Year, Series 2, General Correspondence of the John Foster Dulles Papers, Box 230, 1955–1957, John Foster Dulles Papers, 1860–1988 (mostly 1945–1960), Public Policy Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library (hereinafter JFD).

46 Connolly, 286.

47 “All Prague Agog as Athletes Wed,” New York Times, 28 March 1957, 33.

48 “The World: ‘Progress Report,’” New York Times, 24 March 1957, 188; “The World: Moscow Talks Tough …,” New York Times, 31 March 1957, 185.

49 George Weller, “Connolly Stars as Envoy to Reds,” Daily Boston Globe, 25 March 1957, 1. For more on “Porgy and Bess” and other race-specific 1950s cultural diplomacy see Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights; Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows up the World.

50 Harold Connolly to John Foster Dulles, 17 April 1957, Alphabetical Correspondence by Year, Series 2, General Correspondence of the John Foster Dulles Papers, Box 230, 1955–1957, JFD.

51 Connolly, 309. Also see “Dulles Sees Connollys: Says He Hopes Remarks Aided Them in Getting Married,” New York Times, 27 April 1957, 16.

52 “On Radio,” New York Times, 29 April 1957, 36.

53 “Moscow Story's Facts Confirmed: Olga Admits She Blasted US Officials,” Boston Globe, 8 Sept. 1957, 56.

54 “Discus Title Goes to Mrs. Connolly: She Captures US Honors after Voicing Criticism of A.A. U. Meet Conditions,” New York Times, 10 July 1960, S5; and “American Woman Sets Sprint Mark: Wilma Rudolph Races 200 Meters in 0:22.9 in Meet Marked by Dissension,” New York Times, 11 July 1960, 37.

55 Allison Danzig, “Connolly, Davis in Big Contingent: Hammer Thrower Will Join Team in Switzerland for Meet on Week-End,” New York Times, 17 Aug. 1960, 25.

56 Sarah Duguid, “Olga Fikotová, Czechoslovakia,” FT Magazine Online, 9 June 2012, available at www.ft.com/cms/s/2/a194b7a2-adfc-11e1-bb8e-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1xSehPdIH.

57 “Olympics Changed Lives of Hal, Olga Connolly,” Boston Globe, 19 July 1964, 66.

58 Jeane Hoffman, “Earlene's Missile Shots Wowed Russ Fans,” Los Angeles Times, 31 Aug. 1958, A5.

59 “Mrs. Connolly Scores US Amateur Approach,” New York Times, 13 Dec. 1964, S6.

60 Footnote Ibid.

61 Arthur Siegel, “Siegel's Pineapple Crashes Iron Curtain,” Boston Globe, 13 Jan. 1963, A6.

62 “Olga Connolly May Be First 2-Country Olympic Winner,” Daily Boston Globe, 6 Feb. 1960, 24; and Arthur Siegel, “Light Footgear Helps Big Olympic Hammer and Shot Athletes: Boston Man Makes Dancing Shoes for Whales,” Boston Globe, 3 July 1960, 38.

63 Like jazz musicians whom the US government deployed, women tracksters operated according to their own priorities, complicating the domestic and international images of American femininity in the 1950s and 1960s. See Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows up the World, 24.

64 Nicholas Rodis, “The State Department's Athletes Give a New Look to Foreign Policy,” Amateur Athlete, Aug. 1964, 18–19, AAU.

Ibid
Ibid
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