Cold War Games
Subtitle: Propaganda, the Olympics, and U. S. Foreign Policy
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9780252040238
Subjects: Olympics; Sports and state; Sports, social aspects; Propaganda, anticommunist; National characteristics, american
Description: "The U.S. Government became increasingly alarmed by Soviet attempts to exploit the Olympic Movement in the early 1950s, and responded to this challenge aggressively. Cold War Game chronicles that response and shows that it was not a replication of the state-directed Soviet sports system, but was instigated through covert psychological warfare operations and overt propaganda distributed to the "free world." In the lead up to and during each Olympic festival throughout this period, the U.S. sent waves of propaganda material across the globe to advocate the American way of life and to denounce communism. It used the Olympic host cities as venues to advertise the American economic and political system; it also attempted to manipulate the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in clandestine ways. Cold War Games describes the emergence of government fears about communist sport in the late 1940s and, crucially, how these fears were channeled into the Olympic Games starting in 1950. It concludes its analysis in 1960 at the end point, in many ways, of covert government initiatives at Olympic festivals. Cold War Games situates sport in the larger discussion of how America was committed to a "total" Cold War by demonstrating that the Olympics Games was embroiled in the U.S. government's own cultural offensive"--