Richard M. Nixon’s election as president in November 1968 marked the start of a new, more strident phase in Hope’s tour of duty in the domestic war over Vietnam. He had gotten to know Nixon during the Eisenhower administration (“Ike’s caddy,” Hope jokingly called the vice president) and his unsuccessful 1962 run for governor of California, so they were already friends when Nixon entered the White House. Hope had struck up a more recent, even closer friendship with Spiro Agnew, Nixon’s surprise choice as vice president. Hope and Agnew first met in June 1968, at a Variety Clubs International dinner in Baltimore where Hope was honored and Agnew, then governor of Maryland, gave a speech. Two months later, after he was picked to be Nixon’s running mate, Hope sent Agnew a congratulatory telegram: “See what one dinner with me will do?”
They talked frequently on the phone during the 1968 campaign, with Hope feeding jokes to the vice presidential candidate. “The humorous ‘one-liners’ which you sent me for spicing up my tedious speeches were most successful,” Agnew wrote to Hope after the election. “For a fellow who was having problems with the press, these efforts at light relief were most helpful.” Hope ordered his writers to continue supplying jokes for Agnew speeches after the inauguration—a task some of them resented. “We hated writing for a repressive reactionary like Agnew,” said one writer at the time. “But when you work for Hope these days, that’s part of the job.”
Nixon, meanwhile, began using Hope, more aggressively than Johnson ever had, to help sell his Vietnam policies to the American public. “He took natural advantage of the friendship,” said Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s special assistant, who often acted as a liaison between the two. Shortly after taking office, the president stepped up the bombing of North Vietnam and announced a policy of “Vietnamization”—gradually withdrawing US troops while handing over most of the fighting to the South Vietnamese army. Protests against the war only intensified, climaxing on October 15, 1969, with the Moratorium to End the War, a coordinated series of nationwide protests and teach-ins. Two weeks later, on November 3, Nixon addressed the nation on TV, laying out his plan to end the war and appealing to the “silent majority” of Americans for support. The next day, at a White House dinner for Britain’s Prince Philip, Nixon asked Hope if he would serve as honorary chairman of National Unity Week, a series of rallies and patriotic displays across the country, intended to counter the next big antiwar demonstration, a march on Washington scheduled for November 15. Hope, who could never resist a presidential call to service, agreed.
National Unity Week—cast as a nonpartisan event, but clearly orchestrated by the White House—was overshadowed by the November 15 peace march, which drew 250,000 people, the largest crowd ever to march in the nation’s capital. But Hope’s involvement in the White House–backed effort to blunt the protest seemed to be a tipping point. The comedian who wanted to be loved by everyone was now a symbol of a war many people hated.
Suddenly, Hope found himself a target of protests. “Where There’s Death, There’s Hope,” read a leaflet handed out to students arriving for a Hope appearance at the University of Michigan. At the University of Washington in Seattle, seven hundred protesters staged a peace vigil outside the auditorium where Hope was appearing. “Hell, I’m for peace, but not at all costs,” Hope told a reporter afterward. “Why don’t they march against the North Vietnamese?” Some colleges canceled Hope appearances, for fear of the protests he might spark.
Like his friend Agnew, Hope blamed the press for overplaying the antiwar protests. “It’s those small minorities on campus that make the headlines,” he said in response to a student reporter’s question at Clemson University. “The news media are guilty of blowing this kind of disturbance way out of proportion.” At a press conference for National Unity Week, he even lashed out at his own network, claiming that an NBC News report on unequal treatment of black soldiers in Vietnam used “rigged clips” and was “not honest.” (NBC News president Reuven Frank sprang to the show’s defense: “I have no doubt that Hope spoke his criticism of our Vietnam coverage sincerely. But his comments are wrong.”)
Family and health concerns distracted Hope for much of 1969. The hemorrhaging in his left eye returned, and he was hospitalized twice for treatment, in January and May. Then in June, while he was accepting an honorary degree at Bowling Green University in Ohio, he got word that his oldest brother, Ivor, seventy-seven, had died suddenly of a heart attack in Cleveland. Only a few days after the funeral, his youngest brother, George (still employed by Bob as a “production coordinator” on his specials), died of lung cancer, at age sixty. Shaken by the loss of two siblings in just a week, Hope cut short a four-day engagement at the Pikes Peak Festival in Colorado Springs, returned to Palm Springs, and took most of the next month off.
In August the Hopes celebrated a happier family occasion, the wedding of their youngest daughter, Nora, to Sam McCullagh, an assistant dean of admissions at the University of San Francisco. Nora, who was a favorite of her father’s but whose relations with her mother were strained, had graduated from San Francisco College for Women and worked for a time in New York City, before returning to San Francisco to marry McCullagh, whom she had dated in college. Their wedding reception in the Hopes’ backyard was a more modest affair than the extravagant party for Linda seven months earlier. Still, Bob did his usual stand-up routine, Dolores sang “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever,” and the 250 guests included such notables as Stuart Symington and Phyllis Diller.
Hope’s 1969 Christmas tour was a departure in two ways. For the first time, it was a round-the-world trip, with stops in Berlin, Italy, and Turkey before the usual series of shows in Thailand and Vietnam. And for the first time, Hope and his troupe (which included perky pop singer Connie Stevens, Teresa Graves of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, and the Golddiggers, the singing-dancing troupe from the Dean Martin Show) got an official presidential send-off, with a formal dinner and performance at the White House—a sign that President Nixon was actively embracing the Hope tours as part of his campaign to rally Americans behind his war policies.
At the dinner in the Blue Room, Stevens sat next to Nixon at one end of the table, while Hope sat at the other end beside the first lady (who asked Hope for his autograph). One of the Golddiggers caused a minor disturbance when she unfurled a napkin with a STOP THE WAR slogan on it. Undeterred, Hope and his entertainers did a run-through of the show for the Nixons and a VIP crowd in the East Room. Hope got laughs with jokes about administration figures such as Martha Mitchell, the outspoken wife of Attorney General John Mitchell. “She’s the one who makes Agnew look like Calvin Coolidge,” Hope quipped. The next afternoon the troupe took off from Andrews Air Force Base, with Secretary of State William Rogers, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, and General Westmoreland on hand to wish them bon voyage. Hope, who woke up late and was complaining about his eye again, was so late getting there that Rogers had left.
At their first stop in Germany, Hope was joined onstage by sexy Austrian actress Romy Schneider—and in the audience by Dolores and their son Kelly, now in the Navy, who came over to meet him. Hope did a show aboard the aircraft carrier Saratoga in the Mediterranean, and another at Incirlik Air Force Base in Turkey, where the WELCOME BOB HOPE banner was the same one they had used when Hope was there in 1963—the 3 changed to a 9. Then it was on to Thailand and Vietnam, where Hope returned to familiar spots such as Long Binh, Lai Khe, and Da Nang, but ventured farther north than ever before, to Camp Eagle near Hue, just seventy-five miles from the DMZ.
The real star of the 1969 tour was Neil Armstrong, the astronaut who had just walked on the moon. (NASA opposed sending any of the Apollo astronauts to Vietnam with Hope, but President Nixon insisted on it—and threatened to fire any NASA employee who objected.) Armstrong was a big hit with the troops, bantering onstage with Hope and answering questions from the crowd, a few of them pointed. “I want to know why the US is so interested in the moon and not the conflict here in Vietnam,” asked one serviceman. Armstrong replied evenly that the American system “works on many levels” to promote peace, and that “one of the advantages of the space activity is that it has promoted international understanding and enabled cooperative efforts between countries.”
In his closing remarks on the NBC special showcasing the tour, Hope once again made a plea for support of the war, trying to shift the focus from politics to the men doing the fighting: “One of the things that never changes is the unbelievably good spirit of our fighting men. Yes, in all this sorry business, it’s the guys who are making these sacrifices who complain the least.” Over shots of US soldiers with Vietnamese orphans, he continued, “The number of them who devote their free time, energy, and money to aiding Vietnamese families would surprise you. And don’t let that image get tarnished by the occasional combat-disturbed casualty who may freak out and create the horrible headline”—a reference to the My Lai massacre of South Vietnamese civilians, which had recently come to light. “These are the men who lay their lives on the line every day. And in return they ask for one thing: time to do a job. For us to be patient, to believe in them, so they can bring us an honorable peace.”
The 1969 tour, however, was most notorious for an incident that called into question just how in touch Hope really was with the troops he claimed to speak for. At his first show in Vietnam, before ten thousand men of the First Infantry at Lai Khe—so near the fighting, said Hope, “we had to give the Vietcong half the tickets”—Hope told the troops he had just been at the White House and assured them President Nixon had “a plan to end the war.” He was greeted with boos.
The extent of the booing was disputed. The first reports called it a “barrage of boos.” Hope, along with his publicist and later biographer Bill Faith, who accompanied him on the tour, described it as only a “smattering.” Richard Boyle, a war correspondent for Overseas Weekly, recounted a more threatening scene in an interview with Rolling Stone a few years later (though he recalled it as taking place at Long Binh, not Lai Khe): “After about fifteen minutes of Hope’s show, he was being drowned out by the boos. When the TV cameras panned the crowd, the GIs were standing up and giving the finger and making power salutes. Then the troops started throwing things and tried to rush the stage. They brought out about fifty-four MPs to guard the stage, and it was getting very menacing . . . pretty close to a riot. Hope, who was visibly shaken, had to stop the show and leave.”
Connie Stevens, who was there, confirmed that the booing was loud enough to drive Hope from the stage—and that he turned to her in distress. “I happened to be walking by the stage,” she said. “And he said, ‘Connie, come here,’ and he threw me out there.” She wrestled with the unruly crowd for a few minutes and only managed to settle them down when she began singing “Silent Night.” Yet the boos, she claimed, were a reaction not to Hope, but to his invocation of Nixon and his supposed plan for ending the war: “They weren’t booing Bob. They were booing the idea that there was any help coming. The war had gone on too long. They were frustrated at what he was saying. They didn’t want to hear it.” Yet the outburst clearly took Hope by surprise. “It threw Bob, because I don’t think he had ever experienced anything like that,” said Stevens. “And I think that was a rude awakening for him.”
Stevens, whose younger brother was serving in Vietnam, never spoke with Hope about the incident afterward. But she was already having her own doubts about the war. She was disturbed at a scene of jubilation she witnessed at one camp when some captured Vietcong soldiers were brought in. When she went to see the commotion, she found a couple of frightened kids of fourteen or fifteen being held up as trophies. “They were severely wounded and they were shaking and they were babies,” she recalled. “I said, ‘You guys, stop this, turn the cameras off.’ I just didn’t like it. And I thought, ‘Oh my God, is this what this war is about?’ I couldn’t go along with that.” Like Jill St. John after Hope’s 1964 tour, she tried voicing her opinions at a press conference. “I was asked not to attend any more press conferences, right then and there.”
When the booing incident was reported, Hope was infuriated. “A few kids, about five, went ‘Boo!,’ which they will do, you know?” he said. “If you say, ‘Second Lieutenant,’ they go ‘Boo!’ ” Yet in an account of the episode in his 1974 memoir The Last Christmas Show, Hope conceded that he had problems with the crowd that day at Lai Khe, calling it “the coldest, most unresponsive audience my show had ever played to.” He found out later that many of the soldiers “were in a state of shock” because they had come to the show directly after a fierce morning of fighting that had resulted in many casualties. “It had been a wipeout day for a lot of them,” he said. “They had lost a lot of friends, and they had been rushed in from a firefight to catch my show. After a morning like that, who could expect them to be in a mood for laughing it up at my jokes?”
Whether overblown or not, the booing incident exposed an undercurrent of frustration among at least a portion of the servicemen Hope entertained. Some of their gripes were trivial: complaints about being shunted to the back rows, for example, so that injured soldiers could be placed up front for the cameras. Some charged that entire units were ordered to attend Hope’s shows, whether they wanted to or not, to ensure huge crowds for TV. Most of the soldiers looked forward to Hope’s appearances; they appreciated the gags, the girls, and the break from their grinding routine. Others were more cynical. “Our response to him came out of fear and loneliness—convicts in a prison would have done the same thing,” said Ron Kovic, the author of Born on the Fourth of July, who served two tours of duty in Vietnam before suffering injuries that left him a paraplegic. “I remember not wanting to go to the show, and the men who did go came back very cynical. People didn’t laugh at his jokes; the war wasn’t funny anymore, and a hundred Bob Hopes wouldn’t have made any difference.”
Some even questioned Hope’s patriotic motives. As far back as the 1950s there were suggestions that Hope’s military tours were big moneymakers for him. To be sure, the TV shows were produced and owned by Hope’s company, a profit-making enterprise. But Hope always insisted that his Vietnam shows actually lost money. Although the military picked up the costs of travel and accommodations, Hope Enterprises still paid the sizable talent and production costs, which were much higher than for a typical studio show. According to figures supplied by Hope Enterprises to NBC in 1971, Hope’s company made a profit of $165,000 on its five one-hour variety specials for the 1970–71 season. His one ninety-minute Christmas special from Vietnam, however, showed a loss of $274,000. Hope, of course, earned his own fee for these shows (around $200,000 per show during the Vietnam years), and the trips had incalculable public-relations value for him. Yet Bob Hope had easier ways to make money than by spending two grueling weeks a year traveling through military camps in a war zone.
What’s more, while the shows clearly served Hope’s purposes, they also were serving the needs of a huge audience back home. For supporters of the war, Hope’s specials were a patriotic booster shot; for opponents, a reminder of the vast waste of men and resources wrought by the war; for everyone, a communal wallow in the quagmire that was tearing the nation apart. The ninety-minute NBC special edited from his 1969 Christmas tour, which aired on January 15, 1970, drew an almost inconceivable 46.6 rating—meaning that 46.6 percent of all TV homes in the country were tuned in to Hope on that Thursday night. It was the largest audience for any entertainment show in television history.
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A peculiar irony of the Vietnam years was that, even as Hope became an increasingly partisan and controversial figure, his TV popularity was never greater. Chrysler ended his weekly dramatic anthology series in 1967 after four seasons, but the company remained the sponsor of his comedy specials, which continued to draw spectacular ratings. Maybe it was the “silent majority” speaking, or simply the escape that Hope’s shows provided from the stressful, politically explosive times. During the 1966–67 season Hope’s specials averaged an impressive 29.3 Nielsen rating—higher than TV’s top-rated weekly series, Bonanza. For the 1969–70 season, his average rating soared to a phenomenal 32.3—the highest of Hope’s career.
It didn’t seem to matter that the shows were growing more rote and predictable, with their old-fashioned variety format, hokey sketches, and cue-carded patter between Hope and his guests. The monologues were still topical, and occasionally funny, but there were an awful lot of potted jokes about Jackie Gleason’s weight and Dean Martin’s drinking and Zsa Zsa’s husbands. Hope’s musical guests would sometimes include a Smokey Robinson or Ray Charles, but mostly he stuck with middle-of-the-roaders such as Tom Jones, Eydie Gormé, and Andy Williams. He did one show paying tribute to old-time vaudeville, with guests George Burns and Lucille Ball; in another he reprised his original stage role in Roberta, in a live performance taped at the Bob Hope Theater at SMU. (With Hope playing the same role that he had originated thirty-five years earlier, it was a stodgy relic—and Hope’s lowest-rated show of the season.) Sometimes the comedy material was literally recycled: in one February 1971 sketch, Hope played a man being roped into marriage by his fiancée, with Petula Clark taking the role that Rosemary Clooney had played in the virtually identical sketch back in 1954.
His jokes about the counterculture were sounding increasingly smug and out of touch. “Hey, did you read about that rock festival in upstate New York that was attended by four hundred thousand hippies?” he said in his 1969 season opener, a month after Woodstock. “It was held in a cow pasture. I can’t think of a better place for it. Four hundred thousand hippies. Since the dawn of man that’s the most dandruff that was ever in one place.” He poked fun at the feminist movement in an October 1970 special, imagining what would happen if women took over the country. It was not a pretty sight. Hope meets a new female network chief, played by Nanette Fabray, who dusts the furniture during their meeting, and the Indianapolis 500 is canceled because “all thirty-nine women drivers crashed into the pace car.” The show prompted an onslaught of angry mail. “I am not part of ‘women’s lib,’ ” said one letter writer, “but I have never felt so insulted nor so infuriated.”
The critics were getting snippier too. A review in the Hollywood Reporter called his March 1970 special “one of those curiously lackadaisical Hope efforts of late, in which he seems to be living a cruel fantasy that he’s Dean Martin.” Another Reporter critic, reviewing Hope’s special the following month, said it looked as if “everyone has hurriedly gotten together to do the show between holes at Lakeside.” Jimmy Saphier, Hope’s agent, sent both reviews over to the boss, with a note: “They are so prejudiced and vicious and unfair that there may be something more here than meets the eye. I don’t know Tichi Wilkerson Miles [the Reporter’s editor], but if you know somebody who knows her well, she should be spoken to.” No telling if she was, but she did get some letters in Hope’s defense. “This kind of bitchy, ill-tempered effluvium hardly qualifies as a review,” one reader wrote of another Reporter attack on Hope’s poor material. “Anyone who knows anything at all about Mr. Hope’s career knows that his writers have helped make him one of the wealthiest men in all of show business.” The author, using a pseudonym, was Charlie Lee, one of Hope’s writers.
His movies were no better: increasingly tired farces, with Hope looking more disengaged than ever, and doing little business at the box office. In the vapid, sitcom-like Eight on the Lam, released in 1967, he plays a single father running from the law with his seven kids and housekeeper Phyllis Diller. In 1968’s The Private Navy of Sgt. O’Farrell, he’s an army sergeant trying to get beer and girls for his men on a South Pacific island during World War II—a dated service comedy that was Frank Tashlin’s last film. Hope’s 1969 film How to Commit Marriage at least tried to look a little more with it. Hope and Jane Wyman play a middle-aged couple who decide to divorce, but hold off so as not to set a bad example for their newly engaged daughter. The twist is that the daughter’s fiancé is a straitlaced classical pianist who is rebelling against his father, a pot-smoking, free-love-spouting rock-music producer, played by Jackie Gleason. The film’s satire of the peace-and-love generation was hackneyed even then (a new-age guru touting “peace through protein”; rock groups with funny names like the Five Commandments and the Post-Nasal Drips), but the movie did marginally better at the box office, and Gleason’s energy at least forced Hope to pay more attention.
During the summer of 1970, Hope again found himself in the center of the Vietnam fray. Following another wave of campus protests in response to the US invasion of Cambodia in May—and the killing of four students at Kent State University by members of the Ohio National Guard—backers of President Nixon organized a daylong series of patriotic events across the country on July 4, dubbed Honor America Day. Though billed as a nonpartisan celebration of America, the event was another effort to blunt the antiwar protests, orchestrated behind the scenes by the White House.
Hope agreed to cochair the event along with the Reverend Billy Graham, and to host an entertainment gala on the Capitol Mall in the evening. “This is one day we’re not trying to sell any political message,” Hope insisted at a press conference. But opponents such as radical activist Rennie Davis charged that the event was “designed to show a phony national consensus for Richard Nixon’s foreign and domestic policies.” In response the organizers recruited some prominent Democrats to endorse the event, among them Senators George McGovern and Edmund Muskie. But Honor America Day became another lightning rod for antiadministration protests.
The festivities began on the morning of July 4 with an interfaith religious service and an address by Graham on the Capitol Mall. Demonstrators trying to disrupt the event started early as well, with a band of a thousand Yippies staging a “pot smoke-in” and bathing nude in the Reflecting Pool. When Kate Smith began to sing “God Bless America,” antiwar chants nearly drowned her out. Protesters and police clashed throughout the day, with at least thirty-four people arrested and twenty policemen injured. When Hope was driven to the site in the afternoon, for a run-through of the evening’s show with bandleader Les Brown, a group of hippies stood by hollering at him. Hope invited them to the show.
Some 350,000 people, mostly families with no interest in demonstrating on one side or the other, crowded onto the Mall in the evening for Hope’s show. “What a gathering,” Hope said when he came onstage. “Nixon took one look at the crowd and said, ‘My God, what has Agnew done now?’ ” The entertainers on the bill were mostly old-timers, known conservatives, or people who owed Hope favors—among them Jack Benny, Red Skelton, Dinah Shore, Glen Campbell, Pat Boone, and Connie Stevens. Hope was distracted by sporadic disturbances throughout the show. When it was over, demonstrators broke through a police cordon and pounded on the trunk of the Chrysler limousine that was driving him back to safety. Hope was the emcee for what was looking more and more like a national nervous breakdown.
Even once-friendly venues were becoming trouble spots for Hope. The Oscar ceremony in April 1970 was a microcosm of the nation’s cultural divide: new-generation films such as Easy Rider and the X-rated Midnight Cowboy were competing for awards, while John Wayne, nominated for True Grit, was greeted at the theater by a picket sign reading JOHN WAYNE IS A RACIST. “This is not an Academy Awards, ladies and gentlemen; it’s a freak-out,” said Hope, one of sixteen “friends of Oscar” who shared hosting duties that year. A Time magazine reporter watched the ceremony at an Oscar party at the home of producer Don Mitchell and writer Gwen Davis, attended by a gaggle of Hollywood insiders. The mostly liberal crowd booed when Wayne won for Best Actor. And when Hope closed the show with a plea for the nation to come together (“Perhaps a time will come when all the fighting will be for a place in line outside the theater”), Shirley MacLaine yelled at the TV screen, “Oh, shut up, Bob Hope.”
In the ultimate insult, even Hope’s cherished bond with the troops was called into question. Kenneth D. Smith, chief of the Special Services agency for the entertainment of troops in Europe, complained to reporters in Ohio that not enough young entertainers were willing to go to Vietnam, and that old-timers such as Bob Hope were “unacceptable” to the younger generation of soldiers. The comments caused an uproar in the Hope camp and prompted some fast damage control. The Pentagon issued a disclaimer, Smith said he had been misquoted, and a USO spokesman wrote a letter to Variety asserting that Hope was still “socko” with the troops. “I have seen Bob Hope operate in three wars,” wrote Colonel Edward M. Kirby, “and if there is anyone in show business who is persona grata it is Bob Hope, the nearest thing to a court jester of class and distinction.”
The press, meanwhile, was taking a more skeptical look at the nation’s court jester. In a New York Times Sunday Magazine profile, journalist J. Anthony Lukas suggested that some of Hope’s own writers were uneasy with his political activities and felt he was growing out of touch with the servicemen in Vietnam. “He just doesn’t understand how the GI of today feels,” said one unnamed Hope writer. “When he sees a V sign in his audience he thinks two guys want to go to the bathroom.” Hope was furious at the Lukas article. He talked to his attorney Martin Gang about a libel suit and demanded that his New York publicist, Allan Kalmus, supply a list of all the people Lukas had talked to. Nothing came of it.
The bad press made Hope more defensive and intemperate. In an interview with the Washington Post, Hope called campus violence “a ridiculous thing” and said he was speaking out because he felt the United States was being undermined by left-wing dissenters and the press. “I just hated to get involved in politics,” he said. “I stayed away from it until this past year, when I figured that it had to be pretty important. I got a very negative feeling that the country was getting very little support from the news media.” In an interview with London’s Guardian newspaper, he insisted, “It’s not American students who are blowing up buildings or shooting people. It’s the Communists who are doing it.”
He spent a week in London in November 1970, but got only a brief respite from the political fire. He hosted two benefits for the royal family, including a cabaret show for the World Wildlife Fund that attracted a galaxy of European royalty. (“I’m the only one here who doesn’t have his own army,” quipped Hope.) He was the guest of honor for a segment of the British This Is Your Life, with all four Hope children and other relatives and old friends flown in to pay tribute. (Hope, inevitably, learned of the show in advance and faked his “surprise” reaction.) He capped off his busy week by emceeing the Miss World pageant, an event that usually produced a glamorous guest for his Christmas tour. This year, however, it produced only chaos.
Shortly after Hope took the stage at the Royal Albert Hall, he was interrupted by a handful of women’s liberation activists, who set off noisemakers and smoke bombs, threw tomatoes across the auditorium, and unfurled signs attacking the beauty contest for “selling women’s bodies.” Hope, who had braved Vietcong rocket fire in Vietnam, was forced to flee the stage under the feminist barrage. When order was finally restored, he returned and wisecracked, “I’ll say this, it’s good conditioning for Vietnam.”
Talking to reporters afterward, he called the fracas “the worst theatrical experience of my life.” As for the feminists’ complaints about beauty contests, he was dismissive: “You’ll notice about the women in the liberation movements, none of them are pretty, because pretty women don’t have those problems. I don’t get it.” He clearly didn’t.
A month later he was headed back to Vietnam, for the seventh straight year. Once again, it was a round-the-world jaunt, including stops in Germany and the Mediterranean. With most big stars staying away, his relatively low-wattage cast included dancer Lola Falana, singer Gloria Loring, and Cincinnati Reds catcher Johnny Bench. In response to news reports of widespread marijuana use among soldiers in Vietnam, Hope was big on pot jokes that year. “I hear you go in for gardening,” he said at one show. “The commanding officer says you all grow your own grass.” Bantering with Johnny Bench, Hope cracked, “Where but in baseball can you spend eight months on grass and not get busted?”
‘“I didn’t talk to the military brass about doing it,” Hope told AP reporter Bob Thomas, who asked about the pot jokes. “I just went ahead. I think it’s better to get this thing out in the open. Then it can be treated as the problem it is.” NBC didn’t agree: the network ordered the marijuana references edited out of the special, a rare instance of censorship of Hope’s Vietnam shows. This time the press jumped to Hope’s defense. “Hope is not only an entertainer and his trip not just a show in the usual sense,” said Jack Gould in the New York Times. “He also doubles as a reporter, a journalist in greasepaint, and the public would seem entitled to share in what he found out.”
Hope, the journalist in greasepaint, was typically upbeat in his report to the nation on his January 14, 1971, special. Again he used scenes of orphaned Vietnamese children—youngsters who “will have to rebuild and live in the Vietnam of tomorrow”—to make his case for uniting behind the war and pursuing it to an honorable conclusion, an echo of President Nixon’s refrain of “peace with honor.” “Everyone agrees that this most unpopular of wars has lasted too long,” Hope said. “But now for the first time we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
At least one home viewer gave the show a rave. “I thought your closing remarks on the recent NBC broadcast of the highlights of your Christmas tour were sensational,” President Nixon wrote Hope. “Your eloquent call for unity was deeply moving, and I wanted to add the Nixons’ congratulations to the many others you must be receiving.” Other viewers, however, were starting to feel some battle fatigue. “The growing unpopularity of the war in Vietnam seems to have stolen some of the bloom off the rose insofar as Bob Hope’s annual Christmas season trek to entertain the troops is concerned,” wrote Variety. “The electric excitement of past treks did not come over the tube this time.” Still, the show drew another huge rating—44.3 percent of the nation’s TV homes, just a shade behind the previous year’s all-time high.
• • •
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.
• • •
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.
Nixon had good reason to accommodate Hope. With the 1972 election approaching, the president was more intent than ever on using Hope to help make his case to the nation on Vietnam. On April 20, 1972, after Nixon had stepped up the bombing of North Vietnam in response to a major enemy offensive, Hope paid another visit to the White House. Nixon gave him a putter inscribed with the presidential seal and then brought him into the Oval Office for a chat.
“Sit down, let me tell you about the situation,” Nixon began, in a conversation recorded on the White House tapes. Explaining the reasoning behind his response to the North Vietnamese offensive, Nixon said the enemy had calculated that “if they threw everything in, that I would not react,” but were not prepared for the major escalation in bombing he ordered—from three hundred to nine hundred sorties a day. “If, after such a massive invasion, we just did tit for tat, it’s no message. So what we are saying is, look here, if you’re gonna play this kind of a game, we are going to hit you and more is to come.”
Hope jumped in eagerly: “This is five years too late, this bombing! How can you not? It’s like letting a guy who has a gun, let the fellow keep bringing ammunition, to fire at your house. It’s stupid.” He told Nixon of a conversation he had had with the late president Eisenhower four years earlier, in the backyard of Ike’s Palm Desert home. “I said, ‘If you were president today, what would you do?’ And he said, ‘I would invade North Vietnam and not be against using nuclear weapons.’ ”
“The point is, there is no choice,” Nixon continued. “The United States cannot lose in Vietnam. We can’t lose fifty thousand Americans and lose this war. This is where our Democratic critics are just dead wrong.”
“And what about the future? What about Southeast Asia? The world?”
“What about the Mideast?” Nixon said. “Your Jewish friends—you see a lot of those people. Let me tell you, if a Russian-supported invasion of South Vietnam by [North Vietnam] succeeds against the United States, what the hell do you think the Russians are going to do in the Mideast? They will arm those missiles over there, and man them with Russians in the UAR, and Israel is finished.”
“Oh, God,” said Hope.
Nixon bragged about his prowess as a poker player: “I can hardly remember a time when I was called that I didn’t have the cards. We’ve got the cards now. And if they call us, and if these bastards continue to go down there and they do not come to the conference table and really negotiate, about everything including prisoners, we’re going to continue to bomb the hell out of ’em, until we get an end. People say you lose the election if you do it, and impeachment. I don’t give a damn. The main thing is, it’s more important to save the country than to win an election.”
The conversation wandered to Hope’s relations with the press and Nixon’s golf game. But the president hammered home his point one more time as he ushered Hope out the door: “And about Vietnam, just remember—we’re gonna do what’s right for this damn country, the hell with the election. You’re the war hero.”
Hope was a good messenger. He spoke out for Nixon’s policies in his stage shows, at awards dinners, and in TV talk-show appearances. On October 26, 1972, a few days before the election, Nixon wrote Hope to thank him for the supportive comments he had made in accepting the Union League’s Gold Medal Award in Philadelphia, and in an appearance on the Merv Griffin Show: “Your friendship and support are always welcome, but especially so during these last few days before November 7, and I just wanted you to know I am proud to have Bob Hope in my corner!”
The US withdrawal from Vietnam was continuing, even as the Paris peace talks dragged on without an agreement. Few entertainers were going there anymore. By mid-1972 the USO had only three clubs left open in South Vietnam, down from twelve at the war’s height. But Hope had to see it through to the bitter end. In December 1972 he made one more trip to Vietnam, announcing in advance that it would be his last.
He lined up one big-name guest star: Redd Foxx, the former nightclub comic now starring in the hit NBC sitcom Sanford and Son. Known for his raunchy club material, Foxx ignored Hope’s pleas to keep his material clean and did a stand-up act so rough it couldn’t be used on the air. Lola Falana was back for a second year, along with singer Fran Jeffries, Los Angeles Rams quarterback Roman Gabriel, and a selection of runners-up from the Miss America, Miss World, and Miss Universe pageants, dubbed the American Beauties.
Dolores also came along for the last Vietnam tour—meeting the troupe in Bangkok, so that Bob could “coax” her onstage from the audience for a song. The troupe nicknamed her Hambone, and Hope didn’t do her any favors onstage either. While she sang “But Beautiful,” he stood in the background behind her, idly swinging a golf club, in full view of the camera. Dolores’s number is included in a transcript of his NBC special reprinted in Hope’s Vietnam memoir The Last Christmas Show. But her song was cut from the final broadcast—as Dolores’s numbers nearly always were when she joined Bob on his overseas tours. There was only one star in this family.
The tour began at Camp Shemya in the Aleutian Islands and included stops in Japan, South Korea, and the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, with just one show in Vietnam, at Tan Son Nhut Air Base. “We figured it would be all over when we got here this time,” Hope told the crowd. “But no luck. Not only did they fail to reach agreement in Paris, but now they’re fighting over the hotel bill.” In fact, a breakdown in talks had prompted Nixon to launch another major round of bombing just after Hope left on his tour. At Utapau, a B-52 air base in Thailand where Hope had often entertained, many of the flyers were missing because they were on missions over North Vietnam. At least fifteen aircraft from the base were lost.
Hope had an uncharacteristic diplomatic lapse on his last trip to Thailand, when he offended the locals by making jokes about the country’s food, crowded living conditions, and no-holds-barred politics (which he compared to Thai kickboxing). After newspaper editorials claimed that he had insulted the country, the American embassy had to do some fast damage control, trotting out Hope for a Christmas Eve press conference in which he said he meant no offense.
But overall, Hope got a warm reception. “Back in the States, a negative press was writing that Hope was booed by the troops because he had spoken out in favor of our military presence. In fact, he was cheered wildly wherever he went,” recalled Ray Siller, a writer who accompanied Hope on the tour. Siller was impressed with Hope’s focus and stamina, even in the last days of his last Vietnam tour. On the way back home, Hope ordered a last-minute stop on Wake Island, and Siller had to gin up a monologue for him on the plane. With no time to put the jokes on cue cards, he simply read them to Hope from his notepad as they were circling the runway at midnight. Hope listened to them once, then asked for a second read-through. A few minutes later he went onstage and delivered all the jokes flawlessly, from memory.
It was an emotional farewell for Hope. At the end of the special that aired on January 17, 1973, he paid one last tribute to the soldiers he had entertained in Vietnam for nine straight Christmases: “Everywhere we witnessed the kindness and humanity of our GIs. They went out of their way to help the civilian population with their time, their money, and their goodwill. I can tell you that they’re more concerned with building and healing than destroying.” He read a long list of thank-yous—to his entertainers, his sponsors, the technical crew, President Nixon. “And especially to the millions of guys we played to in every latitude and every longitude around the world. Thank you for Christmases I’ll never forget. Good night.” And then it was over.
• • •
On January 14, 1973, three days before Hope’s last Vietnam special aired, an agreement to end the war was finally reached at the Paris peace talks, and a cease-fire went into effect on January 27. Hope and Nixon talked frequently during this period. On January 9, a few days before the peace agreement, Hope called the White House to wish Nixon a happy sixtieth birthday, and the president told him that negotiations were “coming along.” On February 15, Hope called again to share Nixon’s jubilation over the homecoming of the first POWs released by North Vietnam. “You must be beaming all over!” cried Hope.
“It’s so good for the country,” Nixon said. “The country could not lose this war.”
Hope exulted, “And it emanates from you! Your strength and how right you were!”
Even Dolores got on the phone to add her congratulations over the freed POWs. “I think they’re gonna bring America back with them!” she said.
Three weeks later Hope was back at the White House, getting a briefing from Nixon on plans for an all-star dinner in May to celebrate the POWs’ homecoming. “You must feel like eight zillion dollars, winding this thing up,” said Hope. “What you did is something else.”
“We now realize that all the heat was really worth it,” said Nixon.
But a lot of work remained to be done—not just to patch up a badly divided nation, but to repair Bob Hope’s career.