In the ultimate insult, even Hope’s cherished bond with the troops was called into question. Kenneth D. Smith, chief of the Special Services agency for the entertainment of troops in Europe, complained to reporters in Ohio that not enough young entertainers were willing to go to Vietnam, and that old-timers such as Bob Hope were “unacceptable” to the younger generation of soldiers. The comments caused an uproar in the Hope camp and prompted some fast damage control. The Pentagon issued a disclaimer, Smith said he had been misquoted, and a USO spokesman wrote a letter to Variety asserting that Hope was still “socko” with the troops. “I have seen Bob Hope operate in three wars,” wrote Colonel Edward M. Kirby, “and if there is anyone in show business who is persona grata it is Bob Hope, the nearest thing to a court jester of class and distinction.”
The press, meanwhile, was taking a more skeptical look at the nation’s court jester. In a New York Times Sunday Magazine profile, journalist J. Anthony Lukas suggested that some of Hope’s own writers were uneasy with his political activities and felt he was growing out of touch with the servicemen in Vietnam. “He just doesn’t understand how the GI of today feels,” said one unnamed Hope writer. “When he sees a V sign in his audience he thinks two guys want to go to the bathroom.” Hope was furious at the Lukas article. He talked to his attorney Martin Gang about a libel suit and demanded that his New York publicist, Allan Kalmus, supply a list of all the people Lukas had talked to. Nothing came of it.
The bad press made Hope more defensive and intemperate. In an interview with the Washington Post, Hope called campus violence “a ridiculous thing” and said he was speaking out because he felt the United States was being undermined by left-wing dissenters and the press. “I just hated to get involved in politics,” he said. “I stayed away from it until this past year, when I figured that it had to be pretty important. I got a very negative feeling that the country was getting very little support from the news media.” In an interview with London’s Guardian newspaper, he insisted, “It’s not American students who are blowing up buildings or shooting people. It’s the Communists who are doing it.”
He spent a week in London in November 1970, but got only a brief respite from the political fire. He hosted two benefits for the royal family, including a cabaret show for the World Wildlife Fund that attracted a galaxy of European royalty. (“I’m the only one here who doesn’t have his own army,” quipped Hope.) He was the guest of honor for a segment of the British This Is Your Life, with all four Hope children and other relatives and old friends flown in to pay tribute. (Hope, inevitably, learned of the show in advance and faked his “surprise” reaction.) He capped off his busy week by emceeing the Miss World pageant, an event that usually produced a glamorous guest for his Christmas tour. This year, however, it produced only chaos.
Shortly after Hope took the stage at the Royal Albert Hall, he was interrupted by a handful of women’s liberation activists, who set off noisemakers and smoke bombs, threw tomatoes across the auditorium, and unfurled signs attacking the beauty contest for “selling women’s bodies.” Hope, who had braved Vietcong rocket fire in Vietnam, was forced to flee the stage under the feminist barrage. When order was finally restored, he returned and wisecracked, “I’ll say this, it’s good conditioning for Vietnam.”
Talking to reporters afterward, he called the fracas “the worst theatrical experience of my life.” As for the feminists’ complaints about beauty contests, he was dismissive: “You’ll notice about the women in the liberation movements, none of them are pretty, because pretty women don’t have those problems. I don’t get it.” He clearly didn’t.
A month later he was headed back to Vietnam, for the seventh straight year. Once again, it was a round-the-world jaunt, including stops in Germany and the Mediterranean. With most big stars staying away, his relatively low-wattage cast included dancer Lola Falana, singer Gloria Loring, and Cincinnati Reds catcher Johnny Bench. In response to news reports of widespread marijuana use among soldiers in Vietnam, Hope was big on pot jokes that year. “I hear you go in for gardening,” he said at one show. “The commanding officer says you all grow your own grass.” Bantering with Johnny Bench, Hope cracked, “Where but in baseball can you spend eight months on grass and not get busted?”
‘“I didn’t talk to the military brass about doing it,” Hope told AP reporter Bob Thomas, who asked about the pot jokes. “I just went ahead. I think it’s better to get this thing out in the open. Then it can be treated as the problem it is.” NBC didn’t agree: the network ordered the marijuana references edited out of the special, a rare instance of censorship of Hope’s Vietnam shows. This time the press jumped to Hope’s defense. “Hope is not only an entertainer and his trip not just a show in the usual sense,” said Jack Gould in the New York Times. “He also doubles as a reporter, a journalist in greasepaint, and the public would seem entitled to share in what he found out.”
Hope, the journalist in greasepaint, was typically upbeat in his report to the nation on his January 14, 1971, special. Again he used scenes of orphaned Vietnamese children—youngsters who “will have to rebuild and live in the Vietnam of tomorrow”—to make his case for uniting behind the war and pursuing it to an honorable conclusion, an echo of President Nixon’s refrain of “peace with honor.” “Everyone agrees that this most unpopular of wars has lasted too long,” Hope said. “But now for the first time we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
At least one home viewer gave the show a rave. “I thought your closing remarks on the recent NBC broadcast of the highlights of your Christmas tour were sensational,” President Nixon wrote Hope. “Your eloquent call for unity was deeply moving, and I wanted to add the Nixons’ congratulations to the many others you must be receiving.” Other viewers, however, were starting to feel some battle fatigue. “The growing unpopularity of the war in Vietnam seems to have stolen some of the bloom off the rose insofar as Bob Hope’s annual Christmas season trek to entertain the troops is concerned,” wrote Variety. “The electric excitement of past treks did not come over the tube this time.” Still, the show drew another huge rating—44.3 percent of the nation’s TV homes, just a shade behind the previous year’s all-time high.
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Back home, Hope continued to be a target for opponents of the war. In early 1971, Jane Fonda announced that she and a group of antiwar actors, including Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland, would make a tour of US military installations, expressly to counter Hope’s shows, which she called “superhawkish” and “out of touch with today’s soldier.” Students at Valley State College in Northridge, California, marched in protest of plans to award Hope an honorary degree. For the first time in five years, Hope was not invited to appear at the Ohio State Fair. And in March the Council of Churches of the City of New York, representing seventeen hundred Protestant congregations, rescinded its own decision to give Hope its Family of Man award, after antiwar clergymen objected to his “uncritical endorsement of the military establishment and the Indochina war.” The council voted instead to give the award posthumously to civil rights leader Whitney Young.
The group’s executive director, Dan M. Potter, tried to smooth over the embarrassing turnabout, claiming it was not a snub of Hope but a tribute to Young, who had died a week earlier. Hope was gracious in public, praising the choice of Young: “I couldn’t say anything against that man, and I was glad he got the award instead of me.” Still, getting an award taken back was galling. “I appreciate the Americans who have laid down their lives for our country,” Hope said. “If that stops me from getting awards, then I’ll have to live with it.”
Nothing, however, got under Hope’s skin more than a caustic profile of him that ran in Life magazine in January 1971. Writer Joan Barthel had accompanied Hope on a personal-appearance tour of the Midwest in November, and her story was a revealing portrait of an entertainer under siege. When he was introduced at halftime of the Notre Dame homecoming football game, boos rained down from the upper gr
andstand. (Hope contended, with a straight face, that the crowd was actually crying, “Moo, moo”—for Edward “Moose” Krause, the school’s athletic director, who introduced him.) At an appearance in Flint, Michigan, Barthel reported, Hope called the Vietnam War “a beautiful thing—we paid in a lot of gorgeous American lives, but we’re not sorry for it.”
Hope went ballistic over the article, particularly the suggestion that he would call the Vietnam War—any war—“a beautiful thing.” He claimed he had been misquoted, and that he had actually said “our guys fighting the war were beautiful Americans who have set aside their own lives to fight for their country.” Again, he mobilized his lawyers, who questioned witnesses at the event and demanded Barthel’s audiotapes. (Her tape recorder had actually run out before Hope’s “beautiful thing” remark.) But Barthel stood by the quote, and no legal action was ever taken.
It’s impossible to know for sure whether Hope was accurately quoted, but the fragmentary quote—with the subject for “a beautiful thing” left out—does seem ambiguous and framed to cast Hope in the worst light. Yet the Life piece was damaging in other, more subtle ways. Accompanying Hope on his visits to three cities, Barthel gave an up-close portrait of a chilly and inscrutable celebrity, accustomed to deference and unwilling to engage. While being driven to a benefit dinner in downtown Chicago, Hope and his escort, a man named John Gray, director of the Protestant Foundation of Chicago, have a one-sided conversation about Hope’s schedule for rest of his visit:
“Do you have a lunch date tomorrow?” Gray asked. “No,” Hope said. “Will you go to lunch with some people?” Gray asked. “No,” Hope said. Gray paused. “There’ll be a small reception after the dinner,” he said. “But you don’t have to stay long. About an hour.” Hope said nothing. “Forty-five minutes,” Gray said. Hope said nothing. “As long as you want,” Gray said. Hope laughed, and Gray began talking about salmon and trout fishing way up north, beyond Vancouver. “I love that kind of thing,” Hope said. “Would you like to go sometime?” Gray asked quickly. “It’s not very comfortable, but I know you’ve been to Vietnam, and I know you sleep in tents.” Hope did not reply.
Surrounded by sycophants, besieged by fans, and excoriated by foes, Hope responded by detaching even more. “I learned it was better not to engage in politics with him,” said his son-in-law Nathaniel Lande. “I don’t think he was truly and completely aware of all sides of the issue to have a diligent discussion.” Sam McCullagh, his daughter Nora’s husband, once mentioned at a family dinner how much he liked Robert Altman’s film comedy M*A*S*H, and Hope jumped on him, arguing that the film didn’t give a true picture of the dedicated work done in army hospitals. “That was the only time he ever pushed back with me,” said McCullagh. “I was careful not to challenge him. I don’t think he was challenged much, like a president of the United States isn’t challenged. People deferred to Bob.”
Which made a question-answer session with students at Southern Methodist University on January 29, 1971, all the more extraordinary. It was a friendly campus—the site of a theater named for him—and hardly a hotbed of antiwar activism. But amid the softball questions about his career and his comedy, Hope was drawn into a rare, and sometimes testy, debate over the war.
“If the people of Vietnam want to be Communists, why can’t we allow them to be Communists?” asked one student. Hope replied that the United States was fighting to preserve Vietnam’s freedom: “You cannot stand by and see a little child get crushed by a giant.” Another student described his visit to the officers’ training school at Fort Benning, Georgia. “I saw that giant you’re talking about,” he said. “I saw him in the senior officers who could laugh about wholesale slaughter of civilians. As far as I’m concerned, that giant, as much as I hate to say it, is the United States Army.” Hope responded with a rambling discussion of the My Lai massacre and the morality of war. “This is a cruel, lousy war,” he said, “but war is war.”
Hope was ill suited to this sort of debate. He had little understanding of the nuances, say, of whether the United States was trying to repel aggression in Vietnam or intervening in a civil war. He was mystified when his old friend Senator Stuart Symington grew disenchanted with the war and came out against it (though they remained friends). In 1970, Hope and Mel Shavelson were trying to develop a movie in which Hope would play a comedian who goes to Vietnam and is taken prisoner of war. After the invasion of Cambodia, Shavelson’s secretary said she would no longer work on the film. Shavelson told Hope they should drop the project, and he reluctantly agreed.
“Money insulates you from a lot of things,” said Shavelson, “not least of them public opinion. Bob never really understood the public thinking on Vietnam because he rarely discussed the war with anyone below a five-star general.” Yet Hope wouldn’t temper his hard-line views or stop speaking out about the war. “His attitude was we could finish it if we wanted to, make it end,” said his son Tony. “He felt so strongly about it that he couldn’t sit still and say nothing. We begged him to watch what he was saying. We warned him they’d blame the war on him. And they did.”
The left demonized Hope; some began calling Vietnam “Hope’s war.” The right rallied around him. In a column for the Arizona Republic, Barry Goldwater wrote, “Anyone—and I don’t care whether he is the president of the United States, the world’s most popular entertainer or the least-known person—who dares to take a stand against the far left is immediately, viciously, libelously and scurrilously branded, and it is shameful the way Bob Hope has been treated.” Dropping any pretense of neutrality, Hope worked openly for the reelection of President Nixon. In November 1971 he appeared at two “Salute to the President” fund-raising dinners on the same night—first in New York City, then hopping a plane to Chicago with campaign director Bob Dole, just ahead of President Nixon on Air Force One. When Hope received a humanitarian award from the National Conference of Christians and Jews, Jack Benny had the best line. Hope was born in England and “came to this country to entertain the troops at Valley Forge,” Benny said. “He knew we were going to win that war.”
The mail poured in, from both sides: letters from the wives of servicemen, praising him for his Vietnam trips (“I thank you, as I know every other wife, mother and girlfriend thanks you, for bringing a little happiness to our men away from home,” wrote Linda Faulkner of Kansas City, Kansas, whose marine husband saw Hope in Da Nang); attacks from the left for his disparaging jokes about hippies and antiwar protesters; criticism from the right for sharing a stage with “Communist sympathizers” such as Sammy Davis Jr. and the Smothers Brothers. Hope still tried to answer as many as he could with personal replies, even the negative ones, but by 1970 he had a form reply, with an edge of defensiveness: “The servicemen over there believe they are doing a necessary job, and they can’t understand the draft-card burners and the anti-Vietnam demonstrations. They wonder if patriotism and love of one’s fellow men have gone out of style.”
Many of the letters asked him to help do something about the American prisoners of war being held by North Vietnam, in what many charged were inhumane conditions. One came from Mrs. James B. Stockdale, whose husband was the highest-ranking naval officer held as a POW and who was leading an effort to pressure North Vietnam to abide by the Geneva Conventions: “These men must be completely desperate, Mr. Hope, and they are the forgotten men in an unpopular war. Can you consider helping them by exposing Hanoi’s treatment?” Hope decided to help by trying some freelance diplomacy.
His Christmas trip in 1971 again took Hope around the world, with Jim (Gomer Pyle) Nabors, country star Charley Pride, and singer Jan Daley among his entertainers. (Jill St. John also met up with the troupe for a show in Spain, and astronaut Alan Shepard made an appearance at Hope’s last stop, at Guantánamo Bay.) When a show aboard the USS Coral Sea had to be scrubbed because of monsoon rains—the first time one of his Vietnam shows had to be canceled—Hope had some extra downtime in Bangkok, and he got in touch with the US ambassador t
o Thailand, Leonard Unger, who set up a meeting for Hope and the North Vietnamese envoy in Laos to discuss the POW issue.
The next day an Air Force plane flew Hope and his publicist, Bill Faith, to Vientiane, Laos. They were greeted there by US embassy officials, Admiral John McCain (whose son, the future US senator and presidential candidate, had been a POW since 1967), and the Reverend Edward Roffe, a Christian Alliance Church missionary in Laos, who served as interpreter. Hope, Faith, and Roffe were then driven from the airport to the home of the North Vietnamese envoy, Nguyen Van Tranh.
By all accounts, it was a cordial meeting. Tranh, a personable young man in his early thirties, told Hope he was a fan of the Road movies. Hope showed photos of his new grandson, Zachary, and said the war ought to be ended for the sake of the children on both sides. With no preset agenda for the meeting, Hope suggested enlisting American children to contribute their nickels and dimes to a fund to help rebuild homes and schools in the war-ravaged country. Tranh responded that the war could easily be ended if President Nixon would only agree to North Vietnam’s seven-point plan at the Paris peace talks. Hope didn’t even know what the seven points were, but he pressed his request to at least pay a visit to the POWs in North Vietnam and came away optimistic that he might have made some headway.
Hope: Entertainer of the Century Page 45