Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight (17 page)

It would be the first salvo in a bitter and divisive debate in Congress and throughout the country.

While the debate raged on in the Senate, Muhammad Ali was in Miami anxiously awaiting his draft board’s ruling.
New York Times
reporter Robert Lipsyte was with him when he received word of the classification decision. He recalls the atmosphere and events of that day:

I was in Florida to do some features on Ali. I think I was doing this to justify a winter vacation. Before I headed for Ali’s place, I had been watching the Senate war hearings on TV in my hotel room. Maxwell Taylor and Wayne Morse were choosing up sides for the country, and this by coincidence was the day the news arrived that he had been reclassified. He had rented a small house in a black section of Miami and when I got there it was early afternoon. He was sitting on the lawn making flirtatious comments at high school girls coming home from school. One of the Muslim women who cooked for him called him inside and when he came out, he was angry and bewildered. A wire service reporter had just informed him that he was eligible for the draft. Then the television trucks started to pull up and he was interviewed and interviewed and interviewed and he kept cranking up. He kept saying how could the government have embarrassed him for so long, saying he was a nut? They made his mother and father suffer. How could they take him out of all the thousands of eligible kids in Louisville? It was weird because, as he was sitting there, he was humming the Bob Dylan song “Blowing in the Wind.”

All his Muslim bodyguards and members of his entourage kept coming by and saying, “This is how the White Devils do you,” “This is what the Messenger said will happen.” And a lot of these guys had been in World War Two and Korea and they had horror stories about racial discrimination in the army. They were saying, “Some fat cracker sergeant’s going to drop a hand grenade down your pants.” And Ali, who always had this capacity to ignite himself, kept getting hotter and hotter and saying, “Why me?”

In retrospect, as he became an icon of the anti-war movement later on, I thought how interesting it was that his first responses were so self-centered. Then things kept getting weirder. There were all kinds of rumors that an army convoy was on its way to pick him up and take him to Vietnam that night and suddenly this third wave of journalists arrived and started asking him things about the Vietcong. They were saying, “Do you know where Vietnam is?” He just sort of shrugged. He didn’t know where Vietnam was, I mean I didn’t even know where Vietnam was. Nobody knew where it was. It was this building, throbbing beat. You kind of get a sense of the fever that was building on that lawn. Then some reporter keeps saying, “Do you know where Vietnam is, do you know where Vietnam is?” And he said’sure.’ And the reporter says “Where?” And he just shrugged. Then somebody asks, “What do you think about the Vietcong?” By this time, he was angry, tired, pissed off and he gave his quote, which is “I ain’t got nothing against them Vietcong.” I had seen this build up for a few hours, it seemed an absolutely appropriate response to somebody who was being fucked over, whose intelligence, whose sanity was being questioned. And who also at that moment was afraid. His world was crumbling around him. Did this mean he wasn’t going to box anymore? Did this mean he was going into the army? Did this mean he was going to be killed? The world was now really on his head. This was really the first taste of what was going to come. There were pockets of issues and problems before but they were all boxing related, all related to his religion which he was still getting a grip on. But this was serious. Considering what happened next, it’s interesting to note that Ali’s remarks weren’t nearly as inflammatory as Senator Morse in Congress that morning.

Lipsyte’s notes reveal that Ali’s initial quote was “I ain’t got nothing against them Vietcong.” He insists that’s what he heard. But the headlines the next morning in newspapers around the world has Ali saying, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong”—the quote for which he’s most famous and which was about to set off a political avalanche.

He was also quoted as asking, “How can they do this without another test to see if I’m any wiser or worser than last time? I’m fighting for the Government every day. Why are they so anxious to pay me $80 a month when the government is in trouble financially? I think it costs them $12 million a day to stay in Vietnam and I buy a lot of bullets, at least three jet bombers a year, and pay the salary of 50,000 fighting men with the money they take from me after my fights.” He expressed his conviction that he was being unfairly singled out because of his affiliation with the Nation of Islam. “I’m a member of the Black Muslims and we don’t go to no wars unless they’re declared by Allah himself,” he added.

Reaction was immediate and fierce. That night, Ali’s phone rang off the hook with callers anxious to share their opinion on his remarks: “You cowardly, turncoat black rat!” yelled one caller. “If I had a bomb I would blow you to hell.” Another caller, a woman, sounded hysterical as she vented her anger. “Cassius Clay? Is that you? You better’n my son? You black bastard, you. I pray to God they draft you tomorrow. Draft you and shoot you on the spot!”

The media were only marginally more restrained. In the
New York Journal American,
Murray Robinson raged, “For his stomach-turning performance, boxing should throw Clay out on his inflated head. The adult brat, who has boasted ad nauseam of his fighting skill but who squealed like a cornered rat when tapped for the Army, should be shorn of his title.”

The dean of America’s sportswriters, Red Smith, weighed in with his assessment. “Squealing over the possibility that the military may call him up, Cassius makes himself as sorry a spectacle as those unwashed punks who picket and demonstrate against the war,” he wrote.

Syndicated sports columnist Jerry Izenberg, one of Ali’s earliest and most passionate defenders, was one of the few who supported his stand. “With that one sentence about the Vietcong,” he says, “Ali became the patron saint of the anti-war movement. Before that, none of the protesters could really articulate why they were against the war. He gave them the reason.”

Jack Olsen of
Sports Illustrated
described the backlash, “The noise became a din, the drumbeats of a holy war. TV and radio commentators, little old ladies from Champaign-Urbana, bookies and parish priests, armchair strategists at the Pentagon and politicians all over the place joined in a crescendo of’Get Cassius’clamor.”

Ali’s close friend Lloyd Wells was the first black marine drill sergeant during World War II and was wounded fighting in a segregated unit during the Korean War. He recalls his reaction to Ali’s remarks.“When he said he had no quarrel with the Vietcong,” says Wells, “I thought about it and realized that I had no quarrel with the North Koreans during my war either. It made a lot of sense and I immediately supported him even though I was a decorated ex-Marine.”

He may not have known exactly where Vietnam was at the time, but Ali had already formed an opinion about the war. “Up to the time of my statement,” he later recalled, “the extent of my involvement had been as a TV spectator. But I had seen a series of pictures in a magazine showing mangled bodies of dead Vietcong laid out on a highway like rows of logs and a white American officer walking down the aisle of the dead taking the body count. The only enemy alive was a little naked girl, searching among the bodies, her wide eyes frightened. I clipped out that picture; and the face has never quite left my mind.”

Today, Ali looks back at the initial controversy with only one regret. “If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t have made the Vietcong remarks so early I would have waited until I was about to be inducted to announce my plans.”

The first American soldier to be gunned down by the Redcoats in the Revolutionary War, Crispus Attucks, was a black man. Hundreds of escaped slaves were fighting for both sides. The British government had assured black men in the colonies who participated in the conflict that when the war was over their freedom would be assured, prompting George Washington—a slave-owner himself—to follow suit with his own promise of freedom. Yet once the war was over, many of the Blacks who had fought bravely for independence were actually re-enslaved. This was the first of many broken promises to come.

In 1924, the great African-American writer and philosopher W. E. B. Dubois analyzed the conflicting loyalties of the black American soldier in wartime:

He fought because he believed that by fighting for America, he would gain the respect of the land and personal and spiritual freedom. His problem as a soldier was always peculiar; no matter for what America fought, the American Negro always fought for his own freedom and for the self-respect of his race. Whatever the cause of war, therefore, his cause was peculiarly just. He appears, therefore, in American wars always with a double motive—the desire to oppose the so-called enemy of his country along with his fellow white citizens, and before that, the motive of deserving well of those citizens, and securing justice for his folk.

When Lyndon Johnson was elected president in 1964, he vowed to wage a “War on Poverty” and to spend billions of dollars to rejuvenate the inner cities. When the Vietnam War began to escalate, however, the government diverted its financial resources to fighting the war. Poverty and unemployment continued to plague urban ghettoes in hugely disproportionate amounts. Johnson promised the black community that, when the war was won, they would reap the benefits.

But Eldridge Cleaver, reflecting a growing skepticism among black youth, refused to accept his assurances.“The black people have been tricked again and again, sold out at every turn by misleaders,” he wrote. “After the Civil War, America went through a period similar to the one we are now in. The Negro problem received a full hearing. Everybody knew that the black man had been denied justice. No one doubted that it was time for changes and that the black man should be made a first class citizen. But Reconstruction ended. The lyncher and the burner received virtual license to murder Blacks at will. White Americans found a new level on which to cool the Blacks out. It has taken a hundred years of struggle up from that level of cool-out to the miserable position that black Americans find themselves in. Time is passing. The historical opportunity which world events now present to black Americans is running out with every tick of the clock …. The black man’s interest lies in seeing a free and independent Vietnam, a strong Vietnam which is not the puppet of international white supremacy. If the nations of Asia, Latin America, and Africa are strong and free, the black man in America will be safe and secure and free to live in dignity and self-respect.”

When Ali made his first controversial statements about the war, he made no explicit link between racial issues and Vietnam, despite the lately widely circulated myth that he said at the time, “No Vietcong ever called me nigger.” But the whirlwind of events to follow was about to convince him that his instinctive reaction against the war had a firm basis in race politics.

As abuse was heaped on him from all quarters, Ali found himself very isolated and thoroughly confused. None of the major media had yet turned against the war, only two Senators dared to speak against it in Congress, and wide-scale student protests had not yet begun. Julian Bond, still embroiled in his own battle with the Georgia legislature, describes the mood: “When Ali said he had no quarrel against the Vietcong, I was ecstatic,” he recalls. “Suddenly I didn’t feel so alone. Here was a public figure with a national forum expressing something which needed to be said but which everybody was afraid to say for fear of being branded a traitor. It took tremendous courage.”

It was at this point, notes sportswriter Budd Schulberg, that Ali went from reflecting his times to shaping them.

Soon after Ali’s remarks, a schism erupted in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee when its chairperson, Stokely Carmichael, invoked the term “Black Power” during an integration march in Mississippi. “We been saying ‘Freedom’ for six years,” he told the marchers shortly after he was arrested and released. “What we are going to start saying now is’Black Power’!” The term had actually been coined by black New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell a month earlier but, out of Carmichael’s mouth, it galvanized a new generation of black militants and struck fear into many whites.

Carmichael would help usher in a new era of black activism, following in the steps of Malcolm X to demand not just integration but full economic and political justice. The new slogan would eventually be taken up by the revolutionary Black Panther Party, a group that would make the Nation of Islam seem like Boy Scouts in comparison. And foremost on the agenda of the new militants was a rejection of the Vietnam War and especially the role of black Americans in the war. Carmichael crystallized the new sentiment: “Why should black folks fight a war against yellow folks so that white folks can keep a land they stole from red folks? We’re not going to Vietnam. Ain’t no Vietcong ever called me nigger!”

For Ali, still searching for a way to articulate a viewpoint that he had instinctively understood when he blurted out his own Vietcong remark, Carmichael’s phrase resonated. From then on, he often told crowds and reporters, “No Vietcong ever called me nigger!” when pressed to explain his anti-war stand.