"You Have To Pay the Price" (1918, 1952, 1968, 2020)

An American patriot in Vietnam...and the Return of Sports in America

Welcome to Throwbacks, a weekly-ish newsletter by Michael Weinreb about sports history, culture and politics.

I. “Black and white heroes and villains”

In 1952, a man named Ralph McGehee received a telegram highlighted by one key question: Would you like to serve your country in an unusual way? McGehee was a management trainee at the Montgomery Ward department store, but before that, from 1946 to 1949, he’d played tackle at Notre Dame under legendary football coach Frank Leahy. Over the course of those four seasons, the Fighting Irish won 36 games, tied two and lost none; in three of those years, they’d finished No. 1 in the Associated Press poll. McGehee, a key cog in that dynasty, fit a prototype: As a former college football player, he later wrote, he received that telegram—written by a recruiter from the Central Intelligence Agency—because the agency presumed ex-college football players “liked the active life” and were “not overly intellectual.”

McGehee emerged from Notre Dame an una…