By the early 1960s, Hope’s annual Christmas tours to entertain the troops overseas were starting to draw some criticism. A few wondered why they were still necessary in peacetime. Cynics suggested that Hope was simply using the military to create top-rated TV shows. Objections were raised in Congress about the tours’ cost to the military—which had to plan them, provide the facilities, and pay most of the travel and accommodations expenses. For his 1961 tour of Labrador and Greenland, the Air Force limited Hope’s troupe to just one plane to save money, barring any journalists or even Hope press agents from coming along.
Inside the military too some grumbled that Hope’s tours were taking too much money away from other, more mundane but equally important projects. “Hope did a valid service. But it was an expensive project, and it took a good deal of the budget,” said Dorothy Reilly, whose husband, Colonel Alvin E. Reilly, as head of entertainment and recreation for the Air Force, argued internally that the trips ought to be cut back. “That budget had to cover everything—libraries, R-and-R centers. There were so many ways that money could be used.” She couldn’t forget the sight of thousands of GIs in Korea in 1957, waiting on a hillside for hours in the subzero cold while Hope and his troupe were preparing and rehearsing. “I thought it was kind of a selfish use of the military,” said Reilly.
What Hope needed to stifle the criticism was a real shooting war. And in 1962 he found one—in South Vietnam, where government forces were fighting a stubborn Communist insurgency backed by North Vietnam. The United States had only about nine thousand military “advisers” in the country, and the war was still beneath the radar for most Americans. But Hope made a request to go there as part of a Far East tour in December 1962.
Pentagon officials initially approved the trip, but at the last minute reversed themselves and nixed it as too dangerous. Hope went ahead with his Far East tour, visiting US bases in the Philippines, Guam, Okinawa, Japan, and South Korea. But the war in Vietnam shadowed the trip. At Iwakuni Air Base in Japan, a marine who claimed he had “hitchhiked” from Vietnam gave Hope a scroll with hundreds of signatures from soldiers there, asking him to come entertain. Hope put in another call to the Pentagon, asking for last-minute permission to go, but again he was turned down.
Echoes of Vietnam also were unmistakable when Hope and his troupe visited that other divided Asian country, Korea. On the heavily guarded border between North and South, Hope saw a Christmas tree that had been planted by the United Nations and that the North Koreans were demanding be removed. “The commies just stared at us,” Hope said, narrating his NBC special on the tour. “They claimed it was a capitalist weapon. In a way they were right. . . . But that tree is still there. And while it stands, there’s hope for all.”
A year later, with the US military presence in Vietnam growing, Hope again asked to make a trip there at Christmas. Again he got an initial okay. But after the assassination of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem in November 1963, in a military coup backed by the CIA, the Pentagon again called off the trip as too risky. Instead, Hope switched the itinerary to the eastern Mediterranean, where Greece and Turkey were locked in a dispute over the island of Cyprus.
Just before the trip, Hope had another flare-up of his eye problems. On the advice of his doctors, he went to San Francisco to see another specialist, Dr. Dohrmann Pischel, who had developed a new laser treatment for his condition. Hope received two treatments in early December at San Francisco’s Children’s Hospital and was forced to lie nearly immobile in a darkened room for days. During his hospital stay, he got so many get-well calls that two extra switchboard operators had to be added to handle them. President Johnson, barely two weeks in office following the assassination of President Kennedy, sent him a handwritten get-well note: “Christmas without Bob Hope is simply not Christmas. God be with you.”
Hope returned to Palm Springs to recuperate, and his Christmas troupe began the tour without him—flying to Turkey, with Jerry Colonna handling the emcee duties and teen-movie star Tuesday Weld as the top-billed guest. But Hope wouldn’t stay grounded. He joined the company in Ankara and continued with them to Greece, Libya, and Italy. In between shows he had to wear a pair of dark glasses with pinholes to protect his eye. Hope tired easily, and the trip was “one of the roughest we’ve ever had,” said a veteran of his tours. But Hope got stronger as the trip went on, and for the last show, against doctor’s orders, he did a strenuous dance routine with old-time vaudevillian John Bubbles. The special that resulted drew some of Hope’s best reviews yet. “Bob Hope is so established an institution that he necessarily runs the risk of being taken for granted; he shouldn’t be,” wrote Jack Gould in the New York Times. “His annual Christmas tour of overseas bases . . . remains one of the enduring demonstrations of the star’s special niche in contemporary Americana.”
Hope had no reason to believe the cheers wouldn’t continue the following year, when he finally got approval to go to South Vietnam. The intensifying war there still enjoyed strong support back home. After an attack on US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, Congress in August 1964 overwhelmingly passed a resolution authorizing President Johnson to take any action necessary to counter threats to US forces or allies in the region. The war was not a major issue in the 1964 presidential election, which Johnson won in a landslide over Republican Barry Goldwater. By the end of the year the official US presence in the country was still only around twenty-three thousand men. For Hope, South Vietnam was simply another global hot spot where American troops needed a lift.
He assembled a large outfit of seventy-five cast and crew members, including five sexy females: red-haired movie starlet Jill St. John, Italian actress Anna Maria Alberghetti, Hope-tour veterans Janis Paige and Anita Bryant, and the current Miss World, Ann Sydney. Colonna was back as well, along with Les Brown’s band. The cargo also included nearly a ton of thirty-by-forty-inch poster board, which Barney McNulty would lug around from show to show and turn into Hope’s cue cards.
The troupe stopped first in Guam and the Philippines, then paid another visit (Hope’s fourth) to Korea. A helicopter carrying some of the entertainers developed engine trouble and had to make a forced landing in a blizzard, causing a show in Bupyeong to be delayed while another chopper was sent to rescue them. From frigid Korea they flew to sweltering Thailand, where they were invited to a formal dinner by the king and did shows at US air bases in Udorn, Takhli, and Ubon. Then, on Christmas Eve, they flew into the combat zone of Vietnam.
Hope had never faced more danger. His arrival in South Vietnam was shrouded in secrecy “greater than that normally used to veil the movements of generals and cabinet officers,” UPI reported. His exact itinerary was kept under wraps until the last minute, and for each show a stage was set up in two different locations, to confuse the enemy and thwart any potential terrorist attacks. Director Jack Shea was told that for every five thousand men Hope entertained, another five thousand were on alert outside the perimeter to protect them. But when Hope walked onstage at Bien Hoa Air Base—dressed in shirtsleeves, his tie loosened, wearing a baseball cap to shield his eyes from the sun, and casually twirling a golf club (the first appearance of Hope’s favorite stage prop, two months before the first Bob Hope Desert Classic)—the response was tremendous.
“Hello, advisers,” Hope began, a sardonic reference to the euphemism for US troops, who were officially there only to advise South Vietnamese forces. He recycled a favorite line he used when venturing into hostile territory: “As we flew in, they gave us a twenty-one-gun salute. Three of them were ours.” He made jokes about the new kind of guerrilla war that was already confounding US military planners: “I asked Secretary McNamara if we could come here. He said, ‘Why not, we’ve tried everything else.’ ” Henry Cabot Lodge had just been replaced as US ambassador to South Vietnam. “We’re on our way to Saigon, and I hope we do as well as Henry Cabot Lodge,” said Hope. “He got out.”
From Bien Hoa they were supposed to travel to Saigon, twenty miles away, in a convoy of armed personnel carriers, but at the last minute the road was deemed too dangerous, and they were flown instead to Tan Son Nhut Air Base, just north of the city, and driven in from there. But as they inched their way through the clogged streets and neared the Caravelle Hotel, where Hope and the entertainers were to stay, they found a chaotic scene: billows of smoke, piles of rubble, people running, and sirens wailing. Minutes before, a massive explosion had gone off in the Brinks Hotel, a billet for US officers just a block away from the Caravelle. The blast killed two Americans and wounded another sixty-three people, both Americans and Vietnamese.
The shaken entertainers made their way to the hotel, where glass littered the lobby and the electricity was out. There was talk of canceling the tour. But after MPs searched the entire hotel for explosives and assured Hope they could provide security, he forged on. “We had no electricity all the time we were there and no water,” recalled Butch Stone, Les Brown’s saxophonist. “We just had candles. And all the glass from the windows had been blown into our beds. So before we could get in bed, we had to turn the beds over to get the glass out.”
Ambassador Maxwell Taylor had invited Hope and the cast to his house for cocktails that night, and the ones who weren’t too shaken by the bombing showed up with Hope. Afterward Hope, Colonna, and Brown were driven to a Navy hospital to visit servicemen who had been injured in the Brinks blast. To end the trying day (and keep a promise he had made to Dolores), Hope went to midnight mass. For safety reasons, it had been moved from the downtown cathedral to a small hotel nearby, where the service was conducted in a cramped single room and a priest heard confessions in the hallway.
The troupe spent two more days in South Vietnam, doing shows in Vinh Longh, a small base in the Mekong Delta; Pleiku, in the central highlands; Nha Trang, the seaside headquarters of the Green Berets; and the air base at Da Nang. The memory of their near-miss in Saigon dominated the trip. “Just as we got to town, a hotel went the other way,” Hope cracked. “If there are any Cong in the audience, remember: I already got my shots.” They returned to Tan Son Nhut Air Base for a show in front of ten thousand soldiers, their largest audience of the tour, and got an official welcome from General William C. Westmoreland, the new chief of operations in Vietnam.
The living conditions were even rougher than usual for Hope’s traveling crew. In Pleiku, mirrors had to be specially brought in so the women could do their makeup. Janis Paige recalled arriving at her “tiny room, with one Coke bottle of water—for your teeth, drinking, everything—and a twin bed covered with mosquito netting. When I got in, it was still warm and covered with sand. Somebody had just gotten out of it. Believe it or not, I didn’t care. I got in and went to sleep.” The entertainers were impressed by the beauty of the country—and startled by the extent of the US presence there. “We supposedly had thirty thousand men there,” said Jill St. John. “But I saw thirty thousand men everywhere we went. It was clear we had been misinformed. It was a much bigger commitment than we had been told.” After they returned home, St. John tried to speak out during a press conference: “I started complaining. Suddenly there was no microphone in front of me. It was just removed.” Still, St. John saw Hope’s mission, at least at that early stage of a war she later opposed, as beyond politics: “He was definitely not a hawk. He was thinking of the servicemen.”
Footage from Hope’s twenty-three-thousand-mile tour was edited into a ninety-minute NBC special that aired on January 15, 1965. An evocative mix of documentary and variety show, it featured most of the elements that would become fixtures on his Vietnam specials. Hope narrates as the cameras show his entertainers boarding and exiting military planes, being greeted by generals, visiting with wounded men in military hospitals. There are clips of his stage shows, recorded by four cameras—three focused on the stage and a fourth handheld camera roaming the audience. The bug-eyed Colonna turns up in the crowd at each stop, dressed in a different costume or service uniform, for some back-and-forth with Hope. Each female guest star gets a musical number and some comedy shtick with Hope, and they appear onstage together for some banter at the star’s expense:
“How’d he get you to go on this trip?”
“He asked me to go on a walk in the moonlight.”
“He threatened me too.”
Anita Bryant closes the show by singing “Silent Night,” asking the men to join in—a sentimental moment that would be repeated on all of Hope’s Vietnam specials. For his studio shows Hope never wanted reaction shots of the audience; he felt they disrupted the timing of his gags. But in Vietnam the reaction shots are constant—men applauding and laughing wildly, often shirtless, cigarettes dangling from their lips, iconic faces of the GIs Hope felt so close to. He pays tribute to them at the end, offering support for a military mission that was still considered noble and necessary:
Even though they’re putting up a great fight against tremendous odds in this hide-and-seek war, they’re not about to give up, because they know if they walked out of this bamboo obstacle course, it would be like saying to the commies, “Come and get it.” That’s why they’re layin’ their lives on the line every day.
The NBC special chronicling Hope’s first Vietnam tour was seen in 24.5 million TV homes, according to Nielsen—the largest audience for any Hope show to date, and the fourth-most-watched special of the season. Hope had enough outtakes from the tour to put together a second hour-long special, which aired in late March. He even released a record album, On the Road to Vietnam, featuring highlights from the trip—though its sales were disappointing.
A startling footnote to the trip came two years later. In March 1967, US troops captured a cache of secret Viet Cong documents, which revealed that the Brinks Hotel blast had, in fact, been directed at Hope and his group, but had detonated ten minutes too early. “Shortly after the explosion the cars of the Bob Hope entertainment group arrived,” the document recounted. “If the bomb exploded at the scheduled time, it might have killed an additional number of guests who came to see the entertainment. . . . Basically the results were not satisfactory.”
Looking back at their close call, members of Hope’s troupe recalled that, on the day of the bombing, they were held up for ten minutes at Bien Hua Air Base because of Barney McNulty. The cue-card stand had collapsed during their first show, and McNulty was hastily trying to put the cards back in the proper order before boarding the plane. McNulty’s ten-minute delay may have saved their lives.
• • •
Hope had no way of knowing, when he made his first trip to Vietnam in December 1964, that the battle against a stubborn Communist insurgency in the remote jungles of Southeast Asia would become the longest war in American history, or that he would return there every Christmas for nine straight years and become embroiled in the most divisive political fight of a generation. The country’s, and Bob Hope’s, Vietnam nightmare didn’t begin in earnest until 1965, when President Johnson, in response to mounting Communist attacks on US bases in the region, sent combat troops there for the first time and began a rapid buildup of forces. The US military presence in Vietnam grew from less than thirty thousand troops at the beginning of 1965 to nearly two hundred thousand by year’s end. The escalation sparked antiwar protests back home, and opposition from such public figures as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a foretaste of the convulsive political battles ahead.
A political, social, and cultural revolution was brewing in the country, but for Hope it was simply more comedy material. He joked about long hair on men (“It’s very confusing; everybody looks like Samson and talks like Delilah”), and protests on college campuses (“The Defense Department gave me a choice of either combat zone—Vietnam or Berkeley”), and those crazy mop-tops from England, the Beatles (“Aren’t they something? They sound like Hermione Gingold getting mugged”). In his one movie released in 1965, I’ll Take Sweden, Hope played the father of a very now teenager (Tuesday Weld), whom he transplants to Sweden to get her away from her motorcycle-riding boyfriend (Frankie Avalon), only to run headlong into the swinging Swedish sex scene. The ham-handed sex farce (an “altogether asinine little romp,” said the New York Times) placed Hope firmly on the Geritol side of what would soon be called the generation gap.
For the Defense Department, however, Hope was still the go-to guy as a morale booster for the troops, wherever they might be. Near the end of April 1965, President Johnson sent fourteen thousand marines to the Dominican Republic to help quell a left-wing uprising that some feared might result in “another Cuba” close to US shores. Three months later, after order had been restored, Hope arrived with a troupe of entertainers, headed by his I’ll Take Sweden costar Tuesday Weld. He did six scheduled shows and three impromptu ones in three days. When he saw signs on the streets of Santo Domingo saying YANKEE DOGS GO HOME!, he opened his show with “Hello, Yankee dogs!” and got a big laugh. In those days, it was still a joke.
With the buildup of US forces in Vietnam, there was little doubt that Hope would return there for his 1965 Christmas tour. He again assembled a big cast packed with pulchritude, including Carroll Baker, the sexy, blond star of Harlow and The Carpetbaggers; Joey Heatherton, a miniskirted go-go dancer from the Dean Martin Show; Anita Bryant, the former Miss Oklahoma returning for her sixth Hope Christmas tour; Kaye Stevens, a redheaded comedienne who did a faux striptease to “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”; and the new Miss USA, Diana Lynn Batts. Also along on the tour: singer Jack Jones, the dancing Nicholas Brothers, perennial sidekick Jerry Colonna, Les Brown and his band, twenty-six production people, three writers, two hairdressers, a makeup artist, a publicist, and Hope’s trusty masseur, Fred Miron.
They took off aboard a Lockheed C-141 transport plane and made a refueling stop on Wake Island, before landing in Bangkok, Thailand. It was a rough trip from the start. Les Brown’s band members, onstage for hours in the broiling sun without protection, got terrible sunburns. Trumpeter Don Smith’s lips swelled so badly he couldn’t touch his mouthpiece, and Joey Heatherton had to cut her performances short because of sun blisters. Hope had a nasty accident just before a show in Korat, Thailand, when he was jostled off a narrow, overcrowded stage and tumbled backward five feet to the ground. Though his fall was broken by a security man standing nearby, he tore two ligaments in his left ankle and was hobbling for the next several days.
The already worn troupe flew into South Vietnam’s Tan Son Nhut Air Base on Christmas Eve, the plane doing a steep dive into the landing strip—a routine security precaution that always rattled Hope and his gang. After a press conference and lunch with General Westmoreland, they did a show for ten thousand troops on a nearby soccer field, with a temporary stage set up on the bed of a military truck-trailer. In his monologue, Hope captured some of the cynicism already building over a war that was proving to be more complicated than advertised: “The situation’s improved; things couldn’t be better.” Beat. “Well, who am I gonna believe—you or Huntley and Brinkley?” He told the troops, “Last year you were all advisers. And now that you see where it’s gotten us, maybe you’ll keep your trap shut.” Nor did he ignore the antiwar demonstrations that were getting more attention back home: “You men have a very important job: making the world safe for our peace pickets.”
In Saigon, Hope and the entertainers once again stayed at the Caravelle Hotel, while the rest of the crew were put up at the Meyercord, a new, fortresslike hotel with concrete abutments and armed guards on the balconies. Hope again attended midnight mass, which was conducted at the downtown cathedral by Frances Cardinal Spellman, the New York prelate who was also a frequent visitor to the troops in those years. With memories still fresh of the previous year’s hotel bombing, nerves were on edge. At five in the morning on their first night at the Meyercord, members of Hope’s troupe were jolted awake by the sound of an explosion. Fearing the worst, they burst from their rooms, half undressed—only to find out that the rope lowering a load of dishes from the rooftop garden had snapped, sending the dishes crashing to the concrete below.
Security precautions were high everywhere. On Christmas Day, Hope and company rode in helicopters to the First Infantry’s base at Di-An. With a Vietcong staging area just a mile away, a thousand soldiers were stationed around the base to protect it during the show. When Hope went to the latrine, an armed guard went with him; when Hope asked why, the guard told him the Vietcong were close and some “might even be in the audience.” Before the show got under way, an officer gave instructions to the crowd on evacuation procedures in case of a mortar attack. Jack Jones turned to bandleader Les Brown and said drily, “In case of an attack, you can cut my second number.”
As Hope’s troupe moved around the country, the massive buildup of US forces was unmistakable. The day after Christmas they did a show for seven thousand troops at Bien Hoa Air Base; a year before, at the same base, the crowd numbered fifteen hundred. The troupe flew to Cam Ranh Bay, where docks, roads, and airstrips were under construction, to create what would soon be the biggest port in all of Southeast Asia. They visited An Khe, which had been nothing but virgin jungle six months before, but now was home to sixteen thousand troops and 480 helicopters. In Da Nang, Hope’s troupe did a late-afternoon show in the rain for eight thousand men, many of whom had been waiting in torrential downpours since eight in the morning.
On the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga, the entertainers had to compete with the roar of fighter planes taking off and returning from combat missions. At night they watched as one F-8 Crusader trying to land missed its arresting wires, overshot the deck, and plunged in flames into the sea. They waited in horror as rescuers raced to find the pilot. “Tension became almost unbearable,” Hope wrote later. “I heard a sound behind me, looked around and saw Joey Heatherton sobbing uncontrollably. Kaye Stevens was hanging on desperately to an officer’s arm, her face registering shock and disbelief. And to tell the truth I felt pretty weak myself.” There were cheers when the pilot, who had ejected just before the crash, was pulled from the sea unhurt. Hope later visited him in sick bay. “I can’t tell you how glad we all are that you decided to stick around for the show,” Hope cracked. He was so keyed up that he couldn’t sleep that night and found himself wandering the deck at two in the morning.
Hope was hardly the only entertainer going to Vietnam in those early years of the war; on his 1965 trip he ran into another USO troupe headed by Martha Raye, Eddie Fisher, and Hollywood “mayor” Johnny Grant. But no one connected with the troops like Hope. On the ninety-minute special drawn from his 1965 tour, the frequent cutaways to Hope’s audiences—soldiers laughing, applauding, cheering—may well have been edited to Hope’s best advantage. But the live, raw sound of the tremendous response could not have been doctored. The men roared as Joey Heatherton did a frenetic Watusi onstage and brought up several GIs from the crowd to join her. They laughed at the corny sketch in which Hope played a wounded soldier being treated by Kaye Stevens’s officious nurse and Colonna’s nutty doctor. They hooted in all the right places at the leering banter between Hope and Carroll Baker:
BOB: “I loved you in Harlow.”
CARROLL: “I was a little hoarse when I made that movie, didn’t you notice?”
BOB: “I didn’t even know it was a talkie.”
The trip made a powerful impression on those who came along. “It was one of the most emotional experiences I ever had in my life,” said Jack Jones. “I was a dove when I left. I became a hawk when I was there. It took me about two weeks to calm down.” Jones later campaigned for antiwar presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy—and had a testy encounter with Hope over it when they ran into each other at a benefit in Washington, DC. But, like St. John and most of the other entertainers who traveled to Vietnam with Hope in the early years, he found the mission inspiring and Hope’s spirit uplifting. “What he was doing was nonpolitical,” said Jones. “He was a happy, positive force.”
Hope too saw himself as a spirit lifter, not just for the troops in the field but also for Americans back home. At the close of his special, he made an emotional plea for support of the war, trying to recapture the patriotic spirit of his World War II appeals, even as he hinted at the divisions that were starting to grip the country. “You hear a few people say, ‘Get out of Vietnam.’ Here’s some of our kids who are getting out the hard way,” he intoned, over shots of the wounded men he had visited in military hospitals. He went on:
In their everyday job of fighting this treacherous war, they know there’s no alternative. They know that in this shrinking world, the perimeter of war is boundless. They know that if they backed off from this fight, it would leave all of Asia like a big cafeteria for the Communists to pick up a country at a time. There are no reservations in their dedication. Our fighting men have confidence in the decisions of their leaders. It’s hard for them to hear the rumblings of peace over the gunfire, but when peace comes, they’ll welcome it.
Patriotic rhetoric and foxhole humor, however, couldn’t hide the grim realities of this new kind of war. While Hope was in Vietnam, Bing Crosby sent him a letter, through an old friend named Gordon J. Lippman, a colonel who was serving with the First Infantry at Lai Khe. Enclosed was a photo of Bing swinging a golf club and a joking message: “Dear Bob, don’t you wish you had a finish like this? And a waistline?” Bing asked Lippman to pass along the letter when Hope came through. The letter arrived safely, but before Lippman could deliver it, he was cut down by a sniper’s bullet and died thirty minutes later in the camp’s hospital tent.
The letter was delivered to Hope later in Toluca Lake, after he had returned home.
• • •
Hope’s Christmas tours, and the TV shows that resulted from them, were enormous undertakings. After the itinerary was set in the fall—by the Defense Department, in consultation with the USO and Hope’s people—two Hope advance men, associate producer Silvio Caranchini and soundman John Pawlek, would travel to scout the locations, set up production facilities, and gather local gossip and other tidbits for the writers to use in creating Hope’s monologues. For the entertainers and the crew, the trips meant two weeks of rough accommodations, sporadic sleep, and holidays away from the family. Jack Shea, who directed most of Hope’s Christmas shows in the late 1950s and early 1960s, reluctantly told Hope after the 1964 trip to Vietnam that he could do no more of them; he needed to stay home with his family at Christmas. Hope was taken aback, then wistfully sympathetic. “I’m past that,” he said. Mort Lachman, Hope’s most trusted writer, took on the added duties of directing the Vietnam specials after that.
Each trip produced more than 150,000 feet of film, which had to be boiled down to around 8,000 feet for the ninety-minute special that would typically air on NBC in mid-January. That meant a two-or three-week siege of round-the-clock work, to wrestle the massive amount of material into shape. “On January first I would take a thirty-day leave of absence from NBC to edit the show,” said film editor Art Schneider, who worked on many of them. “There was an enormous amount of film. It would be shipped to us, and we’d spend two twelve-hour days looking at every single foot of film. Bob would be there, Mort [Lachman], Sil [Caranchini], eight editors, and eight assistants. We used to edit at Universal. They would have cots, beds for us to lie down and sleep. I don’t think we even left for several days at a time. They’d bring in all the food we wanted, anything we wanted to keep us happy. Money was not spared. There was a big placard in the editing room, white letters on a black background: ‘We traveled thirty thousand miles to get these laughs. Don’t cut ’em.’ ”
The Hope Christmas specials are irreplaceable documents of the Vietnam era. The sight of Hope entertaining vast oceans of men brought home more vividly than anything on the evening news the enormity of America’s commitment in Vietnam. The TV specials were patriotic, corny, inspiring, self-serving—and unmissable. The show edited from Hope’s 1965 Vietnam tour, which aired on January 19, 1966, drew an Arbitron rating of 35.2, with a whopping 56 share of the viewing audience—the biggest audience for any TV show of the season, and the most watched Bob Hope show ever. A week after it aired, Senator Stuart Symington paid tribute in the Congressional Record to Hope, whom he had recruited for his first Christmas trip, to Berlin back in 1948: “Because of his continued and patriotic unselfishness over the Christmas holidays for a number of years, and the happiness he has brought to millions of people in this country and all over the world, Bob Hope could well be the most popular man on earth.”
It was hard to argue. He was certainly popular at the White House. On March 31, 1966, Hope was honored at a black-tie dinner at the Washington Hilton to commemorate the USO’s twenty-fifth anniversary. President Johnson made a surprise appearance, presenting Hope with a plaque and telling him that it was nice to honor a “frequent visitor to Vietnam who has never been asked to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee”—a reference to the televised hearings being conducted by Senator William Fulbright, one of the war’s chief critics. When Hope launched into his prepared jokes about LBJ and his battles with Congress (“It’s nice to be here in Washington—or as the Republicans call it, Camp Runamuck”), the president, sitting on the dais, played a perfect straight man, glowering at Hope after each wisecrack. “I have to do it, sir,” Hope said in mock dismay. “It’s on the paper.”
The antiwar protests disturbed Hope. He found it unthinkable that US troops fighting a tough war would not get unqualified support back home, and he became bolder in speaking out. He taped a half-hour TV program for Affirmation: Vietnam, a series of patriotic events in support of the war spearheaded by students at Atlanta’s Emory University. He penned (with the help of his writers) an article for Family Weekly, the Sunday supplement for the conservative Hearst newspapers, lambasting the peace protesters: “Can you imagine returning from a combat patrol in a steaming, disease-infected jungle, tired, hungry, scared and sick, and reading that people in America are demonstrating against your being there? That people in America are burning their draft cards to show their opposition and that some of them are actually rooting for your defeat?”
In June he did the usual round of publicity for his new movie, Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! It was perhaps his most wretched vehicle yet, a slapstick sex farce with Hope as a married real estate broker who gets mixed up with a Hollywood sex kitten (Elke Sommer) hiding out from the press. But interviewers seemed less interested in the movie than in grilling him on Vietnam. Asked his opinion of the growing protest movement, Hope sounded a more strident note. “One group is fighting for their country and one group is fighting against it,” he told the New York Post. “They’re giving aid and comfort to the enemy. You’d call these same people traitors if we declared war.” He told Peter Bart of the New York Times that he was too “charged up” about the antiwar protests to stay silent: “People seem to forget we’re at war.”
Hope never had serious political aspirations, but some were beginning to have them for him. In 1963 Jack Warner had written Hope a letter urging him to run for the US Senate from California in 1964. “They call you a comedian, but that is not my definition,” Warner wrote. “My definition of you is that you are a great American with a big heart. You have the feeling of the human race, which is needed in Washington for the good of our country and the world.” (Hope declined, but his old friend and costar from the Broadway show Roberta, George Murphy, ran for the seat and won.) In May 1966 a Seattle radio station conducted a poll asking listeners if they would vote for Bob Hope for president. More than 62 percent said yes. Around this time, Hope related, “a couple of the Washington boys” came out to see him in Palm Springs and urged him to consider running for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968. Hope had to remind them that he was born in England and thus, according to the Constitution, not even eligible.
But what made him attractive to some as a political candidate was starting to cause problems for Hope the entertainer. As a comedian, he had always kept himself above politics, never taking sides, aiming his barbs at all. Now his open support for the war was making him a polarizing figure. Though he continued to draw big crowds on more conservative college campuses such as North Carolina State and the University of Florida, only 60 percent of the seats were filled for his appearance at the Yale Bowl in July 1966. When he began booking his 1966 Christmas tour, some stars turned him down because of their reservations about the war. The new Miss World, Reita Faria of India, accepted an invitation, but nearly backed out after protests in her country and a request from the Indian government that she pass up the trip because of its official opposition to the war.
Hope managed to recruit Joey Heatherton and Anita Bryant, two returnees from 1965, for the 1966 tour, along with singer Vic Damone. Without a Hollywood sex symbol on hand, Hope went in another direction—inviting Phyllis Diller, the fright-haired comedienne whom he had first seen at a Washington nightclub in the late fifties and had cast in Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! Diller, who became a Hope favorite, had trouble onstage at first, but with the help of Hope’s writers, she developed a self-mocking routine with Hope that went over well. (Phyllis: “All the other girls got bouquets.” Bob: “What’d they give you?” Phyllis: “A machete and a map of the jungle.”) “He played the straight man, I got all the lines,” said Diller. “Very, very generous. That got me through the tour.” Hope just missed getting another big name for the trip: Lynda Bird Johnson, the president’s daughter, who called from the White House in November and asked if she could join the tour. LBJ had apparently given his assent, but General Westmoreland vetoed the idea, saying that ensuring her security would be too difficult.
One familiar face was missing from the 1966 tour. Jerry Colonna, Hope’s favorite second banana and his compatriot on every Christmas tour since 1948, suffered a major stroke in August, which left him paralyzed on his left side and unable to go. Colonna was too incapacitated to work much after that—though Hope, loyal to the man who had served him so well comedically for nearly three decades, continued to give him small parts on his TV specials (always positioned to hide his paralyzed side) and sent regular “royalty” checks to help him and his wife, Flo, until Jerry’s death in 1986.
The 1966 tour also turned into a rare family Christmas for the Hopes. Dolores, who hadn’t accompanied Bob on a Christmas tour since 1959, invited herself along this time, bringing their two college-age kids, Kelly and Nora. Kelly worked on the production, helping out assistant stage manager Clay Daniel, and Nora, the bubbly member of the brood, got up onstage at one show and did the Watusi. Hope introduced Dolores at Takhli Air Base in Thailand and asked her to sing “White Christmas.” When she pleaded that she didn’t know all the lyrics, Bob fed them to her. “She was charming and lovely,” wrote Mort Lachman in his journal of the tour, “and when she changed the tempo in the second chorus and wound up with the words ‘And may all your Christmases be at home,’ the boys cheered and cheered and waved and whistled.”
Hope didn’t give his wife quite as good a review. “The last thing those guys needed was sentiment,” he said years later. “Dolores became their mother. What they needed was the Golddiggers and Raquel.” Hope’s treatment of Dolores was often the most callous when she tried to share the spotlight with him onstage—a mixture of hardheaded showbiz calculation and, perhaps, some resentment that she was putting a damper on his freewheeling life on the road. Dolores’s number was omitted from the NBC special on the tour, and she didn’t join Bob again in Vietnam until his last trip there, in 1972.
In Bangkok, Hope and his troupe were invited to the king’s palace for dinner with the royal family, for the third year in a row. The king, who played the saxophone, had learned “Thanks for the Memory” in Hope’s honor. For security reasons, the troupe spent only one night in Saigon, on Christmas Eve; the rest of the time they were based at the Erawan Hotel in Bangkok, shuttling back and forth for their shows in Vietnam. The heat, always oppressive, was especially brutal that year. Barney McNulty fainted at one show, and Lachman had to handle the cue cards. At another, Nora Hope acted as a runner, carrying ice-cold towels to the band members, so they wouldn’t pass out from heat prostration. (Dolores, Kelly, and Nora left when the conditions got too difficult, finishing out the tour in the Philippines.) The crowds were bigger than ever: ten thousand at Tan Son Nhut, twelve thousand at Di-An, fifteen thousand at Qui Nhon. Flying into soggy Da Nang, Lachman was awestruck: “We saw the show site from the air, and then we saw the hills covered and covered with men—all the way up to Marble Mountain. We’ve never seen such a sight. In the rain—in their hooded ponchos, or bareheaded but coated—in the mud—there were thousands and thousands and thousands of them. Would you believe 20,000? They looked like more.”
Hope said he was happy to be back in Vietnam, wearing “my Sunday-get-shot-at clothes.” Again, he took note of the political storm that was brewing over the war: “If you don’t get better ratings, this whole war may be canceled.” He told the troops he brought them good news from back home: “The country is behind you, fifty percent.” Dressed in tropical shirts and pants hiked up high on his waist, swinging his now ubiquitous golf club, Hope looked more and more like a middle-aged emissary from the Palm Springs Chamber of Commerce. In World War II he had been one of the boys. Now he was one of their father’s friends.
In his TV special chronicling the tour, Hope seemed more intent than ever on rousing the nation’s patriotic spirit and making a case for the war. Hope does an on-camera interview with Marines general Lew Walt, who says Vietnam is “a war we must win,” to free the people of South Vietnam, who “have been enslaved by the Communist forces that have come into the country.” Billy Graham, who crossed paths with Hope on the trip, appears in Da Nang to assure the troops, “Millions of Americans are very proud of what you fellas are doing.” Anita Bryant sings a lugubrious version of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (Les Brown was tearing his hair out at her slow, ponderous tempos). “Nobody wanted this war, but we can’t wish it away,” Hope says in closing. “The boys fighting in Vietnam want peace as much as we do, and they’re fighting to get it.”
Some who were close to him said it was his 1966 Vietnam trip that hardened Hope’s views on the war. He was taken to a Vietnamese village to witness the military’s “pacification” program—the effort to win the allegiance of the people by helping local villages become self-sustaining—and came back enthusiastic. “This is what has to win it,” he raved. “Wonderful what they’re doing!” He had dinner with General Westmoreland in Saigon and met with other top generals, absorbing their view that the war needed to be pursued more aggressively. “Bob and Westy would sit up talking a lot that trip,” said General Emmett “Rosie” O’Donnell, Hope’s friend and golfing buddy, who was now head of the USO. “They’d talk about the war, what was happening at home, what it all meant. And this reinforced what Bob was seeing in hospitals. He was terribly torn up by those wards, trying to be gay with a guy whose guts are coming out. Hope put on a bold front, but when he got in the back room with his drink—vodka and orange juice—he’d ask why we subject our boys to this, to get killed, to get maimed, for what—to fight and not to win?”
When he came home, Hope seemed charged up by the experience, more outspoken than before. “Everybody I talked to there wants to know why they can’t go in and finish it,” he told Hal Humphrey of the Los Angeles Times, “and don’t let anybody kid you about why we’re there. If we weren’t, those commies would have the whole thing, and it wouldn’t be long until we were looking at them off the coast of Santa Monica.” Asked at a press conference if he was a hawk on the war, Hope—who had resisted the term until then—replied, “I’m afraid I am. But I’d rather be a hawk than a pigeon.”
Hope’s position on the war was simplistic, emotional, and unsurprising. He had become a national hero during World War II and, like many members of his generation, could not conceive that his country would get into a war it couldn’t, or shouldn’t, pursue to victory. He fully subscribed to the Cold War dogma that stopping Communism in Vietnam was essential to preventing the rest of the dominoes from falling in Southeast Asia. Most of all, he backed his nation’s leaders. One of the strongest arguments in favor of the war, in Hope’s view, was that it had been supported by every president since Eisenhower. “When you get guys like Eisenhower and his staff,” he said, “Kennedy and his staff, Johnson and his staff, all of whom thought it was important enough to save this little nation from Communism or enslavement, then you have to think maybe they know something.”
“He was very supportive of the American government, the president, no matter who it was,” said Tony Coelho, the future Democratic congressman from California, who lived with the Hopes for nine months in 1964 and 1965. “That was true of a lot of people of his generation. I don’t think it was so much naïve as patriotic. He supported the troops. He’d come back from those Christmas trips and he was emotionally worn, torn, elated—he was part of their effort. So I think it was hard for him to stand back and critique or question. He became part of it.”
Obviously reflecting the views of the generals he talked to, Hope argued that the war could have been won quickly if only the military had not been hamstrung by politicians. “If Kennedy had lived, I guarantee that the war would have been over in four weeks,” he said in 1977. Yet he never talked about the politics of the war with the entertainers he brought with him to Vietnam—and rarely, in any sustained way, with friends and family back home. “It was difficult for him to really give voice to the emotions that were going on,” said his daughter Linda. “He didn’t really talk much about the trips when he got back. He’d just say, ‘It was something else’ or ‘It was very moving.’ He said, ‘People don’t have any idea what goes on. And I see it.’ ”
What he couldn’t see, however, was the political and cultural shift that was taking place in the country: a new skepticism of the nation’s leaders and the military, a questioning of middle-class values and Cold War assumptions. Even more than most Hollywood stars, he lived in a rarefied world—enjoying the adulation of millions, with a direct pipeline to the people in power and a loyal entourage that shielded him from dissenting views. He was too far above the political turmoil roiling the country to realize that the ground was shifting beneath his feet.
• • •
In early December of 1967, Bob and Dolores celebrated their first family wedding. Their oldest son, Tony, a graduate of Georgetown University and Harvard Law School, had been engaged once before, to a nursing student he’d met at Georgetown, but the family didn’t like her and he soon broke it off. Now, after serving a stint in the Air Force, he was engaged to Judith Richards, a minister’s daughter from Ohio whom he had met in law school and who was now an attorney in Washington, DC.
The wedding was the biggest thing ever to happen in the bride’s hometown of Defiance, Ohio. Her father gave the blessing at the ceremony, held in a Methodist church (though Dolores packed it with fourteen priests). The wedding party of nearly six hundred was too large for the town’s hotels, so most of the guests stayed in Toledo, an hour’s drive away. Bob and Dolores flew in from Los Angeles on a chartered plane (along with Kathryn Crosby and other Hollywood friends) and arrived an hour late for the ceremony. On the ride back to Toledo for the reception, their car was stopped and Bob was “arrested” by a local sheriff—a joke orchestrated by Judith’s father. Hope kept his sense of humor for the toast: “Isn’t it wonderful. Have you ever seen two lawyers kiss?” The couple skipped a honeymoon and after the wedding flew back to Los Angeles, where Judith relocated and Tony was working in the business affairs department at Twentieth Century–Fox.
A few weeks later Hope was on his way back to Vietnam, for the fourth time in as many years. In a cast that included singer Barbara McNair, Phil Crosby (Bing’s son), and columnist Earl Wilson, the big attraction was Raquel Welch, the buxom star of such movies as One Million Years B.C. Welch was the quintessential piece of Hope cheesecake. He coached her on how to get a rise out of the men (“When you come onstage, take the long walk, because the guys want to see you”), and she was the perfect foil for his leering wisecracks:
RAQUEL: “I’m most happy to be here and see all these boys.”
BOB: “They were boys before you came out. Now they’re old men.”
He taught her how to behave at the hospitals they visited—no tears, no pity, only good cheer—and impressed her with his dedication and work ethic. “He never got ruffled,” she said. “He was absolutely tireless. He was good with the boys—he knew their hometowns and would give them ball scores and talk guy talk. He didn’t phone it in. I had nothing but admiration for the man.” Like other performers who joined Hope in Vietnam, she ignored the political controversy and embraced the mission: “I was over there to entertain the guys, not to talk politics. This was something you could do for them.”
They visited twenty-two bases in fifteen days, from Pleiku in the mountains to the aircraft carrier Coral Sea. Once again, the company set up base camp at the Erawan Hotel in Bangkok, making short hops to and from Vietnam—though Hope split off from the group to spend Christmas Eve in Saigon, where he had a private dinner with General Westmoreland. The next day Hope entertained his biggest crowd yet in Vietnam: twenty-five thousand troops at Long Binh, headquarters of the US Army in South Vietnam. All the top brass were in the audience: Westmoreland, US ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, and even South Vietnamese vice president Nguyen Cao Ky.
The US military presence in Vietnam was nearing its peak of a half million troops. “Welcome to the land of rising commitment,” said the Army specialist who introduced the show. Hope joked again about the antiwar protests back home, though with a more derisive edge: “Can you imagine those peaceniks back home burning their draft cards? Why don’t they come over here and Charlie will burn ’em for them.” But in his closing remarks for the TV special, he sounded a more conciliatory, even hopeful note:
Despite the millions of words that have been spoken and written, we know that there are no easy answers to this conflict. But an answer there must be. Somehow we must get through to Hanoi, in one way or another, that it’s all such a waste, that it’s better to build than to destroy. There are now some faint glimmers of hope, a few telltale signs that reason may yet prevail. We hope and pray that before too long the peace for which we’re all yearning will become a reality. With God’s help, this will be the year.
But it wasn’t. On January 31, just two weeks after Hope’s Christmas show aired, the Communists launched the so-called Tet Offensive—a massive, coordinated series of attacks on cities, bases, and airfields throughout South Vietnam. Though taken by surprise, US and South Vietnamese forces retaliated strongly, and the offensive wound up being a military defeat for the Communists. But it was a turning point for the war effort back home, casting fresh doubts on the optimistic reports of the war’s progress and intensifying calls for the United States to get out of Vietnam. The next few months were the most traumatic of a turbulent decade: President Johnson, facing a strong primary challenge from antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy, announced he would not run for reelection; Dr. Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated; violent protests rocked college campuses from Columbia to Berkeley; and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago descended into chaos when police beat demonstrators on the streets outside the convention hall.
Hope tried to stay out of the cross fire, but he couldn’t entirely. For the fourth year in a row he was back to emcee the Academy Awards ceremony, scheduled for Monday, April 8. King was assassinated just four days before, and since Monday was the day of his funeral, the show was postponed out of respect. Two days later, Academy president Gregory Peck opened the delayed ceremony on a reverential note, acknowledging, “This has been a fateful week in the history of our nation.” He noted that two of the five films nominated for Best Picture, In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, dealt with race relations and credited King’s work for helping bring about the “increasing awareness of all men that we must unite in compassion in order to survive.” Then he turned the evening over to Hope, “that amiable national monument who pricks the balloons of pomposity, evokes laughter even from the targets of his wit, and adroitly displays America’s sense of humor to the world.”
But for once, the national monument misjudged the national mood. He opened with some quips about the two-day postponement: “It didn’t affect me, but it’s been tough on the nominees. How would you like to spend two days in a crouch?” Kodak, the show’s sponsor, was also upset at the delay, Hope said, “afraid it would hurt their image—a show that took three days to develop.” The wisecracks were innocent enough, but they offended many in the audience, who thought they made light of a national tragedy. Jack Gould, in the New York Times, called the show “embarrassing” and Hope’s quips “ungracious.” Time scolded, “It was difficult to be funny under the circumstances. . . . Judging by Hope’s monologue, it would have been better not to try.”
The reaction was a sign of how frayed the nation’s nerves had become. And it obscured what was, paradoxically, one of the best performances of Hope’s Oscar-hosting career. He found plenty of material in the new wave of American films that were up for awards, such as Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate. (“They nominated a kid like Dustin Hoffman—he made a picture he can’t get in to see.”) He made a clever bank shot from his own Oscar deprivation to the upcoming Vietnam peace talks: “For thirty years I’ve been trying to get the Academy to sit down and talk. And they’ve always given me the same answer: they’ll negotiate if I stop bombing.” He was everywhere on the show: gabbing with the presenters, introducing the film clips, quipping when the evening dragged on, “I’ve never seen six hours whiz by so fast”—a joke repeated, in some version or other, by practically every host who followed. His most memorable line, however, came at the beginning of the show. “Welcome to the Academy Awards,” Hope said. “Or as it’s known at my house, Passover.” He still got mileage out of the running gag, even though Hope by this time had received a record five honorary awards—the last one, in 1966, a gold medal for “distinguished service to our industry and the Academy.”
By his 1968 Christmas tour, some Vietnam fatigue appeared to have set in, for the war seemed to be downplayed a bit. Vietnam was just one stop in an itinerary that also took him to Japan and South Korea—where tensions had risen following North Korea’s seizure of a Navy spy ship, the USS Pueblo. Hope again landed a top Hollywood glamour girl for the tour, song-and-dance star Ann-Margret, along with singer Linda Bennett and retired football star Roosevelt Grier. A former Robert Kennedy aide, Grier was a rare Hope traveling companion who openly opposed the war. “I went with Bob because I felt he was doing something I could relate to,” Grier explained to reporters. “I wanted to show the servicemen we cared about them.”
Hope’s Christmas shows were by now well-oiled productions, a mix of news documentary, patriotic rally, and vaudeville show. There were Hope’s formula jokes playing off the exotic places he visited (“Os-San—that’s Korean for ‘take it and stuff it’ ”); his playfully suggestive patter with the new Miss World or Miss USA (inevitable question: “What are your measurements?”); his acknowledgment of the vast crowds, always pointing out the men perched on telephone poles or watching from distant hilltops (“Are you on our side?”). Hope would call up servicemen from the audience and read letters from home—and maybe plant a kiss on their forehead from Mom, or a girlfriend. He commiserated with their plight (“Twenty-one thousand men, all dedicated to one purpose—to get to Bangkok”), brought them news from home, and tugged at their heartstrings with the closing chorus of “Silent Night,” by now a Hope tradition. “What a boon he is,” wrote Variety, “to the sinking spirits of the men who defend our way of life.” His Christmas special of January 16, 1969, drew a mammoth 38.5 Nielsen rating, yet another Hope record.
Back home, Dolores spent most of the Christmas holidays in 1968 preparing for the biggest party the Hopes had ever thrown: the wedding of their oldest daughter, Linda. After graduating from St. Louis University, Linda had worked as an English teacher, toyed with going back to school in psychology, and was now pursuing a career in filmmaking. The groom, Nathaniel Greenblatt Lande, the son of a prominent Georgia doctor, was a former Time Inc. executive who had helped launch Time-Life Films and now worked as a producer for Universal. He was Jewish, which meant that Dolores’s retinue of priests had to share the stage with a rabbi for the ceremony at St. Charles Borromeo Church on January 11, 1969. But it was the Cecil B. DeMille reception afterward that got everyone’s attention: a thousand guests under a billowing tent in the Hopes’ backyard, with a who’s who of celebrities on hand, including Governor Ronald Reagan and Vice President–elect Spiro Agnew.
“I wanted to get married under a tree in Carmel. Dolores wanted a big show,” recalled Lande. “I can’t say I enjoyed it. But it was a grand affair, and beautifully done.” Hope presided with his usual aplomb, and a fusillade of gags. “We had the wedding reception at home because Texas wouldn’t rent us the Astrodome,” he joked. He serenaded the couple with a rewritten version of “Daisy, Daisy,” titled “Linda, Linda”: “You’ve just had a stylish marriage / But don’t expect a carriage / You must look sweet / Upon the seat / Of a Chrysler that’s built for two.” Hope left before the party was over, hopping a plane to Miami with Agnew, to see the Super Bowl game the next day.
Richard Nixon couldn’t make the wedding, but he phoned before the ceremony with his congratulations. When Hope handed the telephone over to his new son-in-law, Lande joshed with the president-elect: “You’ll make a Republican of me yet.” Hope just glared at him. In the Hope family, some things were no longer funny.