Hope: Entertainer of the Century (59 page)

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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And in March the Council of Churches of the City of New York, representing seventeen hundred Protestant congregations, rescinded its own decision to give Hope its Family of Man award, after antiwar clergymen objected to his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 grandstand. (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 to 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’s effort was private, done in secret and without official government sanction (though, with a US ambassador and an Air Force plane involved, it clearly had White House approval). But when he returned to Bangkok, the press had gotten wind of it, and Hope’s meeting with the North Vietnamese became worldwide news. The White House, while not endorsing Hope’s mission, said it “deeply appreciated” any gesture on behalf of the POWs. Hope’s effort, however, came to naught. Before leaving Vietnam, he got word that his application for a visa to North Vietnam had been denied.
“I’d known all along that my chances were slim,” Hope wrote later, “but it was depressing just the same. I couldn’t help feeling that all the talk in the press might have had something to do with Hanoi’s negative reaction.”

Hope made only glancing reference to the POW mission in his January special. As US forces were being withdrawn from Vietnam—only about one hundred thousand were still there, down from a peak of half a million—Hope found his audiences more relaxed and ready to laugh. “Actually, you guys are lucky,” he said. “You
know
you’re going to get home. But what hope is there for our men at the Paris peace talks?” In his closing remarks, Hope said the empty seats, in camps where he had once entertained tens of thousands, were a heartening sign: “Because every empty seat meant a guy who’d returned home, a GI who’d gone back to the world.” And then a final sign-off, for what he expected would be his last trip to Vietnam:

All any of us wanted to do was make the burden lighter for those who are making the sacrifices. Maybe we don’t all demonstrate or join parades, but we’re all antiwar. Especially these guys right up close to it, the guys doing the miserable business and signing the receipts for it. And when people ask me is this our last trip, I can only hope that this is our last war.

Hope’s Vietnam special of January 1972 was not the ratings blockbuster it had been the two previous years—only second in the ratings for the week, behind the new hit comedy
All in the Family.
Hope blamed it on his time slot—later than usual, at 9:30 p.m., eastern
time.
“I know one thing—I’d never put a show this important and with this work behind it on at that late hour,” he wrote Jimmy Saphier. “I was very apprehensive about it before
it was shown and certainly they’ll never get me again in that spot.” But the ratings slide was another sign that Americans were growing tired of Hope’s war.

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Nixon and Hope, two men under siege because of the war, grew closer as the debate over Vietnam grew ever more rancorous. Hope had dinner at the White House and at Nixon’s retreat in San Clemente several times. They played golf together—Nixon once landed in a helicopter in Hope’s backyard in Toluca Lake so he could play a round at Lakeside—and would see each other at Walter Annenberg’s annual New Year’s Eve party in Rancho Mirage. They corresponded frequently, Nixon congratulating Hope for various awards, sending condolences on the death of his brother Ivor, praising him for his Vietnam specials. The president showed up to support Hope at the grand opening of the Eisenhower Medical Center, for which Dolores had led the fund-raising campaign. When presidential assistant Dwight Chapin called two months before the opening to warn Hope that Nixon’s schedule might prevent him from attending, Hope bristled. “It was, to say the least, an awkward phone call,” Chapin related in a memo to his boss, H. R. Haldeman. “He indicated that of course if the President had to cancel, he would understand and they would do the best they could. However, he stressed that Mamie is expecting the President to come and everything is being geared around a Presidential appearance. . . . The result is—Hope has been warned, yet he still very much wants the President to try to work it out so he can be there.” Nixon wound up making the event—along with Governor Reagan, Frank Sinatra, and most of the area’s philanthropic and social mavens. Afterward, Nixon and Hope played golf together at the Eldorado Country Club, where Ike had been a regular.