Even before the Munich attack, Ralston said he had been warned not to take the team to Romania by Neale Fraser, the coach of Australia’s Davis Cup team, which played in Bucharest in the summer of 1972. Fraser told Ralston that his match had been stolen by partisan line calls and cheating. “You can’t win because they won’t let you,” Ralston recalled Fraser telling him. “You have no idea what you’re getting into.” But much bigger forces were propelling the United States toward Bucharest. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Romania and the United States had a cautious alliance that was crucial during the cold war. The United States saw Romania, and its leader, Nicolae Ceausescu, as a wedge to split the Soviet bloc. Ceausescu had shown himself independent of the Soviet Union by refusing to join other Eastern bloc countries in severing diplomatic ties with Israel after the Six-Day War in 1967. A year later, he did not support the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The United States and Western European countries gave Romania large loans and trading privileges, allowing it to join GATT in 1971 and the I.M.F. a year later, the first Eastern European country to do so. Another benefit was that Ceausescu had relations with the Chinese government and was perceived as one conduit, along with Pakistan, for Nixon to quietly forge what would become the signature legacy of his foreign policy. One of Nixon’s early foreign policy trips was to Romania. In keeping up relations with the United States, Ceausescu, known as the Conducator (leader), was trying to have it all. He wanted to be a good Stalinist while also getting the fruits of outside capital, and, when it suited him, culture. He saw sport as a way to safely build nationalism. In one hint of political context, a New York Times article at the time reported that the United States Lawn Tennis Association had agreed to play in Bucharest in part with the advice of the State Department. Another hint of the diplomatic stakes came from a series of phone calls, said Sigrid Draper, who then had close ties to the White House. Through her work in the Republican Party, she had become friends with Michelle Smith Chotiner, the wife of a close Nixon aide, Murray Chotiner. After the attacks in Munich, Draper said, Bob Kelleher, an acquaintance and Nixon-appointed federal judge who had been captain of the 1963 United States Davis Cup team and the president of the tennis association from 1967 to 1968, called her to say the Davis Cup team was worried about its Jewish players. Draper, in turn, contacted Murray Chotiner. “The next thing I knew,” Draper recalled, “Murray called me and said that Nixon called Ceausescu and said, ‘Send them over.’ ” Whether Nixon actually placed the call is tough to verify. But several members of Nixon’s national security team at the time said that it was as likely as not. Denis Clift, who in 1971 joined the National Security Council staff, said he had no direct knowledge but he could see the logic behind such a move. “This is a positive move of a pawn on the chess table,” Clift said. “He’s calling Ceausescu saying: ‘We can have a win-win. I can have my people go over, and you can guarantee nothing can happen.’ ”
Posted on: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 06:44:29 +0000
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