Free Everything They Had by David Halberstam Page B

nation was making great progress in ending age-old racist laws, but no, the progress was never fast. Yes, the country was a bulwark against a totalitarian power in Europe, but yes, too, it had become an anti-revolutionary force fighting on the wrong side in a war of independence in Asia. He touched all of our fault lines and it was not surprising that attitudes toward him on the part of sportswriters and sports fans tended to divide along generational lines—a reflection of an America which was fighting a war not so much against the Vietnamese, but against itself, a great power with a fractured soul.
    Ali was not going to be like Joe Louis, or for that matter Floyd Patterson, the benign black fighter who knew his place, was grateful for his opportunity, was respectful to all in authority around him, no matter how sleazy they were or how tenuous their hold on a position of authority, and watched carefully what he said and did. Ali represented a new and angrier generation of more alienated blacks: A lot of damage had been done over centuries of slavery and neoslavery, and a lot of anger had been stored up.
    In the end he was a marvel, a figure not only of sports but, like Jackie Robinson, though in a different way, of history itself. The day after he became heavyweight champion, he had announced that he was a Muslim and that his name was Muhammad Ali. A few years later, because of the war in Vietnam, he refused induction into the army, citing his religious principles. So it was that he lost his crown—and the ability to fight—for more than three years.
    Politically, time worked on his side: By the Seventies, the Muslims were perceived to be less menacing. Dissident, and alienated, certainly, as blacks who lived in the poorer parts of America’s cities might well feel alienated and dissident, but not that threatening. As for the war in Vietnam, that became something of a badge of honor, that Ali had dissented, and acted upon his dissent; he, it turned out, had paid the price for others on a war which was something of a scar on the national conscience.
    In time he regained his crown. Older now, several critical years wasted, he returned, his conscience having been served, to fight better than ever, to demonstrate in his fight with Foreman in Zaire and in three wondrous battles with Joe Frazier his true greatness.
    His was a sobering challenge to America’s self-image at a volatile and emotional time. He, the most marginally educated young man, barely able to get through high school (he got his high school degree only because the officials at his school realized that he was going to be the school’s most famous product, and that it would shame the school rather than Clay if he did not graduate), had turned out to be right about a war about which the most brilliant national security advisers who had gathered around the President—including the Dean of Harvard College, the former head of the Ford Motor Company, and the former head of the Rockefeller Foundation—had turned out to be wrong. That was sobering, a reminder that America at the height of its affluence and power in this century had lost sight of what its true meaning and purpose was. The arrogance of power, the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator William Fulbright, called it. Ali would never have been able to come up with a phrase like that—instead he simply said, “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Vietcong.” He had acted upon conscience; the advisers, even when they were later burdened by doubt as the war went forward, had not. He had paid the price for his actions when he was young; they, the architects of this disaster, would pay it when they were older. That, for a nation which in its increasing power had become too prideful, too sure of its value and its rectitude, was a sobering lesson. No wonder, then, by the Nineties he had become something of a beloved national figure.
    The success of Ali, the