Dangerous Grounds

by Parsons, David L. ;

  After some experimentation, coffeehouse organizers realized that integrating the youth counterculture into their political project was a complicated undertaking; rather than promote solidarity among civilians and soldiers, the lifestyle of sex, drugs, and rock and roll could often serve inadvertently to highlight the differences between them.

  “WE KNOW WHAT YOU’RE UP AGAINST AND WE SUPPORT YOU”: THE FTA SHOW TOUR

  Despite major disagreements about its appropriate role in the GI movement, organizers at GI coffeehouses recognized that youth counterculture was an important element in their overall strategy. Coffeehouse network founder Fred Gardner had always insisted that the coffeehouses were, above all, cultural institutions, offering soldiers a hip refuge from the stifling atmosphere found in the pool halls and dive bars that dominated most military towns. Michael Uhl, a Fort Hood GI who became an antiwar activist after returning from Vietnam, discovered that the Oleo Strut coffeehouse was, for many soldiers in Killeen, the only game in town:

  I might not have started going there at all had the town offered any reasonable alternative. But after a few deadly evenings shooting pool, I cruised slowly past the Strut, and the scene there appeared leagues more inviting than anything Killeen’s other leisure dives had to offer. The organizers had created an informal—but hip—cafe setting, where a spinning light on the ceiling strobed wall posters of rebel political icons. . . . Of the patrons, overwhelmingly off-duty GIs, a few had their noses buried in newspapers or magazines. The majority percolated around the small tables in animated conversation, while the activists who staffed the place, both male and female, circulated among them. Here was the antithesis of the non-verbal posturing and compulsive boozing that so typified the holding pens where most American servicemen spend their idle hours.46

  To Fred Gardner, stories like Uhl’s helped confirm that the counterculture was a significant part of the coffeehouse network’s overall appeal.

  Like Gardner, army veteran and antiwar activist Howard Levy was convinced that youth culture could be a revolutionary force in the American military. To this end, in the fall of 1971 Levy began formulating an idea for an antiwar-themed stage show for soldiers. He envisioned a kind of counterculture comedy revue that would reflect the political and cultural values of young soldiers who were turned off by the military’s official entertainment. Most of all, thought Levy, the show would be a visible demonstration of the civilian antiwar movement’s support for dissident soldiers.

  For several decades, Bob Hope’s USO show was the most popular, and most officially sanctioned, of the different kinds of entertainment offered to GIs at military bases around the world. The USO was chartered in 1941 in coordination with the Department of Defense, with a mission to provide “morale, recreation, and entertainment” services to American troops serving overseas.47 Though not officially a part of the government, USO shows and related recreational events bring celebrities and other public figures into a war zone as a means of elevating morale. For a period of nearly fifty years, Bob Hope was the USO’s chief entertainer, a ubiquitous presence on the scene of virtually every American military campaign of the era. Hope, a vaudeville comedian who became a Hollywood film star in the 1940s, first signed on to the USO show during World War II and, over the course of fifty years, evolved into the USO’s most tireless performer (and, ultimately, a symbol of the USO itself). As Time magazine put it in 1967, “Bob Hope wasn’t born—he was woven by Betsy Ross.” On tour, Hope’s performances blended comedy routines with musical acts and the obligatory scantily clad appearances by Miss USA and other pinup girls. With his signature golf club, faux bachelor persona, and obvious affection for military men and women, Hope served as the popular, smiling face of the American home front, sent to bring good cheer to soldiers and support staff in the heat of battle.48

  By the late 1960s, though, many of Hope’s old-fashioned jokes began to fall flat for audiences of young GIs, who often found Hope’s show corny at best, offensive at worst. For the portion of those soldiers who were opposed to the war, the government-sponsored USO show seemed like a form of cultural propaganda that reinforced many of the values that had created the Vietnam War in the first place. In an attempt to win over the increasingly unreceptive crowds (particularly in Vietnam itself), in 1970 Hope introduced jokes about marijuana into his act and even claimed that he himself was antiwar (joking that he was “a hawk who’s now turned chicken”).49 There were signs that many GIs saw through Hope’s bid for cultural and political relevance, however. At one USO show performance in Saigon in 1970, a group of musically inclined soldiers employed their own countercultural form of expression, acid rock, to voice their disapproval. The GIs had been booked to play a set of songs before Hope came onstage. To the roar of the crowd, the soldiers announced, “We’d like to dedicate this to our childhood idol, Mr. Bob Hope,” and immediately began playing their first song: Black Sabbath’s searing heavy metal classic “War Pigs.”50

  In creating an antiwar alternative to Hope’s USO performances, Levy hoped to create a show that would bring mainstream publicity to the GI movement. To that end, he wanted as much radical star power as the USSF could muster. At the time, Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland were filming director Alan J. Pakula’s Klute in New York City, where Levy maintained the USSF’s main base of operations. Fonda had become deeply involved in supporting the GI movement since her tour of coffeehouses the previous year, and Levy was eager to enlist her support for his antiwar road show. Seeing an opportunity to combine her acting talents and Hollywood connections with her nascent radical politics, Fonda loved Levy’s idea. The actors agreed to help the USSF sponsor a series of performances near military bases around the country, enlisting the support of their friends in Hollywood to create a separate organization, Entertainment Industry for Peace and Justice, which would assemble talent and coordinate resources for the show.51 Writers and activists Jules Feiffer, Barbara Garson, and Herb Gardner (no relation to Fred) were charged with writing and developing a series of songs and skits to communicate an antiwar message with a countercultural sensibility. Co-opting the popular underground acronym found scrawled on the walls of military barracks around the world (though remaining coy about what the initials really stood for), the show would be called, simply, “FTA.”52 The FTA troupe planned to take their tour to major military bases around the United States, using GI coffeehouses as local bases of operation. Fred Gardner joined the FTA show as a stage manager and liaison to the coffeehouse staff.53

  The FTA show’s original planners envisioned a slyly subversive comedy show with broad appeal. The material had an undeniably serious antiwar subtext, but politics was always to take a back seat to entertainment. According to Levy, the goal was to create a series of performances that “could arguably be shown on base” as officially sponsored entertainment for troops, and FTA writers worked hard to fashion a “mainstream” show that avoided direct political provocation in favor of comedic barbs and light satire. By the spring of 1971, the troupe had developed a complete three-hour program and rehearsed in New York City for a few weeks before taking the show on the road.54

  Before leaving New York in February, Fonda and Levy held a press conference announcing their intentions to kick off the FTA tour in Fayetteville, North Carolina, near Fort Bragg. They explained that Fort Bragg had been chosen as the first stop on the tour because its commanding officer, Lieutenant General John J. Tolson, played a significant role in the army’s recently instituted experiments in “social liberalization,” which allowed GIs to wear longer hair and mustaches in an attempt to ameliorate generational and cultural tensions within the military hierarchy.55 The organizers saw the FTA show as the perfect opportunity to test the limits of Fort Bragg’s newfound cultural permissiveness. Levy appealed directly to Tolson: “If General Tolson is really serious about the Army’s so-called liberalization policy, and believes in the Army’s ‘new mod look,’ he’ll let our show on the base. If not, he will ban it, and let the public know it’s t
he same old fashioned, repressive Army.” Because Tolson was the “key architect of the Army’s new look,” Levy added with tongue partially in cheek, “we expect his full cooperation.”56

  After USSF organizers sent Tolson a script of the FTA show, he refused to allow it on base, describing the show’s contents as “detrimental to discipline and morale.” GIs at Fort Bragg reacted to the show’s rejection by drawing up a petition to Congress, signed by more than 2,000 soldiers in a matter of days.57 The ensuing publicity, largely the result of the involvement of antiwar celebrities, was an embarrassment for Tolson. When reporters asked him if he had banned Fonda and company from the base because of their antiwar politics, he replied that the FTA show was “not so much antiwar as poorly done.”58 Unsurprisingly, the show was subsequently banned from military bases across the nation; the search for usable performance space became a significant logistical hurdle for the show’s national tour.

  Since the whole point of the FTA show was to bring the maximum amount of publicity to the GI movement, its planners worked to make each show a major event for the military towns in which they intended to perform. Although GI coffeehouses seemed like the logical venues for FTA performances, with a ready-made staff of sympathetic civilians and GIs, organizers thought the coffeehouses were far too small to accommodate the kinds of massive crowds they hoped to attract and instead attempted to book the show in large public venues like high school auditoriums, civic centers, and performing arts halls. But the show’s subversive reputation made many local leaders reluctant to allow their public institutions to host it. As the tour made its stops in cities across the country, GI coffeehouses often turned out to be the only spaces willing to accommodate Fonda and her traveling antiwar show.

  In Fayetteville, for example, resistance to the FTA show was not limited to military leaders at Fort Bragg. When the show’s planners submitted an application to use the city’s 2,500-seat municipal auditorium, city officials initially rejected the proposal until a federal judge agreed with USSF lawyers and overruled the decision. The city then demanded $150,000 in insurance for the performance, a prohibitive expense for the USSF, and the first FTA show was finally held instead at the Haymarket Square Coffeehouse on March 14, 1971.59 Since the coffeehouse only had room for fewer than five hundred people, the troupe put on a series of performances, to packed houses of GIs, over the course of two days and nights.

  By most media accounts, the FTA show’s premiere in Fayetteville was a huge hit among the soldiers who crowded into the coffeehouse. The performers included Fonda and fellow actors Donald Sutherland, Peter Boyle, and Elliot Gould, comedian Dick Gregory, folk singers Len Chandler and Barbara Dane, and rock acts Swamp Dogg and Johnny Rivers. The show itself embodied the antiestablishment, antiauthority attitude of the youth counterculture, with each song, comic routine, skit, or reading focusing on a different aspect of the Vietnam War and the GI experience. Gregory set the tone of the evening with his first joke, in which he suggested that GIs vote as a bloc to raise the draft age to seventy-five, to “send all them older cats to Vietnam with John Wayne leading ’em.” Throughout the first performances at the Haymarket coffeehouse, hundreds of GIs clapped, sang along, and cheered loudly.60

  Although the material was undeniably subversive, in general the FTA show favored light satire over radical political statements. Many of the jokes, about the unfairness of military hierarchy and the everyday annoyances of army life, would not be out of place in a Beetle Bailey comic strip or even in Bob Hope’s ostensibly “pro-war” USO show. What made the FTA show different was that its performers were understood to be representatives of the civilian antiwar movement and the show itself was recognized as an explicitly political act. The performances demonstrated support for the varied forms of antiwar activism then being expressed by growing numbers of active-duty GIs on bases around the country. During the show’s more serious moments, such as when Sutherland dramatically read from Dalton Trumbo’s 1938 antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun, the FTA troupe underlined the horrors of war, the specific injustice of Vietnam, and the responsibilities of citizen-soldiers to challenge the military power structure. But the show stopped short of proselytizing, instead expressing a kind of abstract solidarity with, and support for, soldiers who questioned the war. Fonda explained that the show reinforced “what the soldiers already know. They know that the war is insane. They know what GIs have to contend with better than we do. We’re simply saying, ‘We know what you’re up against and we support you.’”61

  While the FTA troupe saw their show as a relatively uncontroversial statement of support, military and local authorities often viewed Fonda’s arrival as a significant threat to morale and security. On the weekend the show debuted in Fayetteville, Fort Bragg went into high alert, mobilizing fifty jeeps and trucks behind barracks and using military police to block access points to the base’s stockade (where nearly half of the 173rd Airborne Brigade was confined).62 The Haymarket Square Coffeehouse was inundated with plainclothes and undercover agents, many of them wearing “counterculture” disguises that were apparently easy to spot; Dick Gregory joked that GIs should be on the lookout for “spit-shine sandals.” Groups of photographers, presumed to be police or federal agents, surrounded the coffeehouse throughout the performances, using infrared cameras to photograph soldiers in the crowd, coffeehouse staff, and, of course, Hollywood celebrities.63 Fayetteville authorities were clearly alarmed by the FTA show’s presence, unsure of its intentions, and hostile to its political message. The pattern of resistance displayed in Fayetteville, from its refusal to allow the use of its public facilities to the mobilization of its police force, was repeated in military towns throughout the FTA show’s fall 1971 tour.

  Organizers at the USSF, aware of the hostility the show faced in military towns, relied on local coffeehouse staff to survey the situation and help find friendly venues for performances. In Killeen, Texas, FTA show representatives alerted Oleo Strut staff members in July that the FTA show would be stopping by to entertain Fort Hood GIs in September and asked them to set to work looking for available spaces. Killeen’s high school auditorium was one of the town’s few venues capable of accommodating more than a thousand people. Although the coffeehouse staff had witnessed the auditorium hosting a number of religious and right-wing political events during their years in Killeen, the school board denied their request on the basis of the show’s political content; a federal suit filed by USSF lawyers, similar to the one filed in Fayetteville, was unsuccessful. Killeen’s movie theaters also refused to rent out their facilities. After the Killeen Daily Herald issued an editorial stating that Jane Fonda and her troupe should be legally barred from even stepping foot in town, the manager of the Oleo Strut reported that “looking for an alternative place to have the show . . . was like trying to find a Cuban cigar in Selma, Alabama.”64 When the show finally rolled into town, the Oleo Strut coffeehouse was literally the only place in Killeen that would welcome Fonda and the FTA group. They staged five smaller performances in the cramped coffeehouse for audiences of 200 to 300 GIs at each show. On Sunday, the troupe held a picnic in Killeen’s Condor Park, where performers talked with soldiers and other activists for several hours before moving on to their next stop.65

  More than 15,000 GIs saw the FTA show during its fall 1971 tour of U.S. military towns, despite often intense local efforts to disrupt it. The involvement of antiwar celebrities like Fonda and Sutherland created an unprecedented amount of publicity and media attention for the GI movement and helped reveal how widespread military discontent had become. By the time the FTA show arrived in Mountain Home, Idaho, in December 1971, a robust local antiwar movement was already underway among airmen and airwomen from Mountain Home Air Force Base. Together with USSF-sponsored civilian activists, they had finally managed to reopen their antiwar coffeehouse, the Covered Wagon, after the original was burned to the ground. The Covered Wagon was unquestionably the center of antiwar activity in the tiny town of fewer than 10,000. The FTA sho
w’s packed performances at the coffeehouse suggested that antiwar sentiment was as powerful among air force personnel in 1971 as it had been in the army in 1968; wherever the burden of war shifted, desertion, insubordination, and antiwar activism among soldiers followed.66 After the performance at the Covered Wagon, a reporter asked Fonda if her show encouraged air force servicemen to revolt. She responded, “No, they’re ahead of us on that.”67

  While coffeehouses proved to be the only consistently reliable venues to hold performances throughout the FTA show’s tour, local coffeehouse staff greeted the show’s arrival with trepidation. Several coffeehouse organizers were skeptical of the show’s intentions and overall value to the movement. David Zeiger, who managed the Oleo Strut coffeehouse during the FTA show’s visit, later reported that GI projects were protective of the local movements they had been building and resented the FTA show’s perceived arrogance: “The leadership of the show considered itself fully capable of passing judgment on projects that had been working and organizing for years; they also presented the picture of seeing the show as the most important thing going. The result was that there was some heavy conflict between the show and some of the projects.”68 Fred Gardner, in his role as liaison to the coffeehouses, often found himself in the middle of tensions between local activists and the FTA show’s entourage of celebrities, press photographers, agents, lawyers, and support staff.69 As the glitzy FTA media machine came to town, many longtime coffeehouse organizers felt pushed aside.70

  Despite these signs of division, the FTA tour represented an important moment in the history of military resistance during the Vietnam War. Thousands of dissident soldiers were able to get a sense of their numbers, as performances were invariably packed beyond capacity, disregarding significant official and unofficial intimidation. The show’s central objective—to raise public awareness of the existence of GI dissent—was seemingly accomplished, with major coverage of the FTA show appearing in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Life and on the three major American television networks. Jane Fonda, who had become a lightning rod for political controversy and media attention, helped direct some of that mainstream attention onto the thousands of GIs who showed up at FTA performances, providing visual evidence of the Vietnam War’s unpopularity among a significant number of American soldiers. Even the FBI, in reports from undercover agents present at coffeehouse shows, somewhat begrudgingly acknowledged that Fonda’s FTA show struck a chord with the crowd of active-duty GIs: “Throughout the political and military-oriented entertainment there was continuous, spontaneous and interrupting applause. The audience was captivated.”71