Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein

Author:Rick Perlstein
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 0743243021
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2008-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Polarization

SIX OF THE ELEVEN TOP-RATED TV SHOWS IN 1969 WERE BOB HOPE SPECIALS. But Bob’s annual Christmas special from Vietnam took on a harder edge this year. During their round at Burning Tree Country Club, the president had lined up the comedian as a soldier for positive polarization, and just before the New Mobe protest, Hope sent out a letter to every senator:

“How about a big cheer for the great USA?

“A committee has been formed to salute a work of national unity and I am proud to serve as their national chairman. There are millions of Americans, of all ages, who make up the Silent Majority and we are urging them to participate in activities from coast to coast to display unity in America.

“I certainly hope you will accept my invitation to serve as a co-chairman. Please wire your confirmation to me at Hollywood, California, so that we may unite in this program together.

“Warmest regards,

“Bob ‘FOR A WEEK OF NATIONAL UNITY’ Hope.”

Unity was in the eye of the beholder. Bob’s specials had always flown the standard of patriotic reassurance. (“Bob wasn’t born—he was woven by Betsy Ross,” a friend told Time in a 1967 cover feature.) Now the hunger for reassurance was desperate. That was what gave Hope, who started his tour for the first time with a command performance at the White House, his new right-wing edge.

Bantering with Romy Schneider, the German ingenue who costarred in Woody Allen’s What’s New, Pussycat? Hope called Allen “the little spider monkey with the falsetto voice.” He called Laugh-In “fruitcake galore.” He dipped into drug humor to reach his live audience; “GI’s in Vietnam High on Hope’s Marijuana Jokes,” the New York Times reported from Vietnam December 23. But none of those jokes made it into the broadcast when it ran in January. That would have soured the story they were telling—that the old, good, pure Betsy Ross America that only talked about sex with a wink and nudge was still going as strong as ever.

But jingoism was a difficult sell these days. At First Division Headquarters, the camera panned over the crowd, the traditional mocking banners (WELCOME, BING CROSBY!)—but many weren’t wearing shirts; most had shaggy hair; some wore mustaches and necklaces with garish medallions. Tom Sawyer–faced Neil Armstrong, the first man to step on the moon, an icon of the new square chic—he brought his fraternity pin along on Apollo 11—did a question-and-answer session. The NBC cameras trained upon a blond nurse in hippie sunglasses asking him in all earnestness “when you’re going to take the first woman to the moon.” Armstrong answered with leering innuendo. Bob chimed in with a joke about diet-conscious ladies: “I’m sure they’ll all go when they find they can go up there and be weightless.” Meanwhile, the camera found a banner out in the crowd: a peace symbol and the circle-and-cross emblem of women’s liberation.

The show ended, as always, with a sentimental Bob Hope exhortation. This year it folded in clumsy damage control

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