Not Bob Hope’s Idea of Troop Entertainment
FTA button, 1970. [Wikimedia Commons]
In the fall of 1970, ex-Army doctor Howard Levy asked Jane Fonda to meet with him to discuss an idea. In March 1966, he had been court-martialed for refusing to train Green Beret medics at Fort Jackson “on the grounds that Special Forces units were responsible for war crimes in Vietnam.” The case became high profile when the judge agreed to allow Levy’s lawyer to pursue a Nuremburg defense, which granted Levy permission to accuse the US of violating international law. “Thus,” as a New York Times reporter wrote in the run-up to the trial, “for the first time in U.S. history, a domestic court may hear evidence that elite American troops commit atrocious acts on the battlefield as a matter of policy.” While, in the end, Levy lost and served twenty-six months of a three-year sentence doing hard labor at Fort Leavenworth, his case positioned him to become an important figure within the GI movement. After his release he moved to New York and began working as an organizer with the United States Servicemen’s Fund (USSF). The USSF had quickly became “the most important agency for providing material aid to GI papers and coffeehouses around the world.” Notably, its activities extended well beyond these two central areas of work and included providing entertainment. As a result, the USSF was well positioned to organize and sponsor a national tour of the sort Levy had in mind: “something like a Bob Hope type show, you know touring the bases and giving the troops some really first-class entertainment — sort of an alternative Bob Hope show.”
Fonda’s experiences speaking to and with veterans and GIs in coffeehouses across the country made her an exceptionally well-informed and credible celebrity advocate for the movement. She also possessed sufficient star power to attract the desired level of publicity and a broad GI audience, and to get other celebrities involved. At the time of her meeting with Levy, she was in New York filming Klute, for which she would win an Oscar the following year, and it was in the process of fundraising for the Winter Soldier hearings that Fonda drew together well-known singers and actors into a program she called “Acting in Concert for Peace.” Many of these performers would later join her in the show, including Dick Gregory and Donald Sutherland. Fonda, for her part, loved Levy’s proposal, particularly the opportunity to combine her work and her politics beyond the uninspiring but fruitful task of asking for money from rich acquaintances. She quickly went to work enlisting friends and colleagues to perform.
The official line from the show’s actors and organizers, after the show began touring, was that “FTA,” as the name of the show, stood for “Free the Army.” This phrase, however, was the polite interpretation of an acronym the performers had borrowed from the soldiers themselves, who had appropriated it in turn from the US Army’s slogan “Fun, Travel, and Adventure.” During performances, when the troupe came to the line in their signature song that featured the phrase “Free the Army,” spectating servicemembers would regularly offer a gleeful correction and encourage the performers to take it up — which they did, shouting “Fuck the Army!” from the stage.
In a New York press conference on February 16, 1971, announcing the group’s plan to stage its first antiwar revue at Fort Bragg in March, Fonda remarked, on the one hand, that:
It’s been very disconcerting for many of us in Hollywood to see that Bob Hope, Martha Raye, and other companies of their ilk have cornered the market and are the only entertainers allowed to speak to soldiers in this country and Vietnam. A lot of us who have different points of view about the war and what’s happening to this country have decided that the time has come to speak to the forgotten soldiers. They are the majority of soldiers. They want peace and freedom, but they are isolated in the military world and they need our support.
During the same press conference, however, Fonda would insist that the show was “not an inflammatory far-left show — basically it’s just entertainment.” More generally, coverage emphasized the show as a response, reply, or alternative to “military-sponsored entertainments,” acknowledging that the performers were antiwar but that the show was “like Hope’s.” Donald Sutherland remarked that the show was “not trying to lay some heavy political line on anybody.” Fonda framed the show as not so much providing different content, but different performers, conveying that “if the government could support Bob Hope’s annual trips to Vietnam to entertain the troops, it should also support entertainers whose political beliefs differ from Hope.” She explained that “the point of all this […] is to show the soldiers there are those of us who understand.” By leaving open and ambiguous the question of what, precisely, a civilian supporter could claim to “understand,” Fonda proposed an updated version of the basic concept of supporting the troops. When a reporter wondered during the press conference whether “it were not audacious to ask the Army to underwrite a show which would be anti-Army,” Fonda replied, “I don’t think so. If the Army is democratic, then they would be providing the kind of entertainment the soldiers want to see. Bob Hope is not entertainment for them, he’s entertainment for the brass.” Leaving aside the fact that the Army is not “democratic,” in referencing “the brass” (meaning the officer class), Fonda reflects what was, by this point, a sharp division within the military, not only along political lines, but generational ones as well. Overwhelmingly, young men were being sent to die by older men — men Hope’s age, and men with whom Hope had longstanding friendships. Reporting from Saigon in 1970, Ian Wright, a correspondent for the Guardian, noted that Hope’s routines were of little comfort to soldiers with no goal other than to survive their deployment and go home. A significant part of the FTA’s success would come from the fact that it targeted not the foibles of enlisted life, but the officers (and their wives) whose lives, as one of the songs put it, were “the same in peacetime as in war.”
By the time of the press conference, the USSF had formally submitted to Lieutenant General John J. Tolson, the commander at Fort Bragg, a request to stage the show on base and an accompanying request that they be extended the courtesies routinely offered Hope and his guests (namely, that the Pentagon would cover lodging and travel expenses). The USSF had chosen Bragg deliberately, as Tolson was considered to be at the forefront of instituting “progressive” measures, among them tacitly allowing the use of “soft” drugs. Fonda and Levy attempted to use Tolson’s reputation as leverage, and failing that, as evidence of hypocrisy: “Levy said if Tolson ‘is really serious about the Army’s so-called liberalization policy … then he will let the show on base … If not, he will ban it and let the public know it’s the same old oppressive Army.’”
Unsurprisingly, the group was denied access to the base, as they would be at all subsequent bases (Fonda herself had been banned previously from Fort Bragg for passing out leaflets), and so they sought another venue. In fact, not one but two contingency plans had been in place from the beginning, for the inaugural performances in Fayetteville: the Cumberland County Memorial Auditorium and, failing that, the Haymarket Square coffeehouse. In its determination to avoid sponsoring the show, the Pentagon ultimately contributed to the group’s goal of politicizing that which was already political — entertainers’ access to the troops — but which had maintained a pretense of neutrality via the USO’s formal independence from the Department of Defense. Following Tolson’s rejection, a second media surge surrounded the group’s attempt to use the municipal auditorium. They were denied this as well, based on the various arguments that they would destroy the space, as audiences at rock shows had done previously, or that they were presenting a view “contrary to existing local sentiment.” The former would prove a recurrent concern over the course of the group’s existence, despite the fact that, as articles covering shows in Killeen, Monterey, and Japan note, the audiences for the FTA performances were generally less disruptive than the audiences that attended other events at the same venues.
Reacting to the possibility that the show might not find a suitable space, 1,770 soldiers signed a petition asking Congress to reverse the decision refusing the show permission to perform on base. Soldiers Philip Friedrich and John Berk presented the petition to Representative Bella Abzug of New York, who argued on its behalf before Congress just days before the show was to open. Likely containing not only the signatures of committed antiwar activists but also of those simply interested in getting a glimpse of Fonda, the petition demonstrated already the threat posed by the show — to draw soldiers, via celebrity, to an explicitly antiwar event. The publicity generated by the military and the city government effectively banning the show contributed to its popularity, and also put the military in the position of opposing the presence of celebrities ostensibly only there to entertain the troops.
Two days prior to the scheduled March 13 performance, the USSF requested an injunction against the ruling that had upheld the decision to refuse the group access to the Cumberland County Memorial Auditorium. The injunction was granted, but the town then demanded $150,000 in insurance, which the USSF could not secure. Finally, instead of a 2,500-seat auditorium, the FTA performed in the Haymarket Square coffeehouse, playing three shows to packed houses of over 500, in a space meant to hold 450. Attendees paid “$2.50 each for a hard wooden seat or standing room along the black, poster-covered walls.” This not insignificant sum (nearly $20 by today’s standards) went toward the coffeehouse’s expenses, and some of it went to the USSF. (All of the performers donated their time, and those who were able covered their own travel and accommodations.) Attendance was high in spite of ongoing and varied attempts to discourage it. The Evening Outlook remarked that the soldiers were “indeterred [sic] by telephoned bomb threats.”
Apparently, having been unable to stop the show from playing in Fayetteville, and well aware of the problems that might arise if troops were openly prevented from leaving base, the military went so far as to send badly disguised military police to join the FTA’s audience. These were “easily recognized in wigs and hippie garb,” further evidence of the military’s inability to accurately gauge or reflect the cultural shift exacerbating GI discontent. Alternatively, they may have been “badly disguised” precisely so that they might be recognized as present. Both scenarios are possible. At any rate, the military’s efforts belied a claim made by Major Jimmie Wilson that, “There won’t be any spooks down there taking names.” Wilson also gave what amounts to perhaps the most half-hearted and laughable attempt to discourage attendance and downplay the show’s significance, when he told a reporter that General Tolson “had found [the script] not so much antiwar as poorly done and he felt he couldn’t allow it.” Tolson was not there to speak to the press himself, as he “was out determinedly playing golf.”
It is difficult to overstate the success of the Fort Bragg performances. Every published account acknowledges in no uncertain terms how enthusiastically the audience received the three-hour performance. Headlines included “Soldiers Roar Approval” and “Jane Fonda’s Antiwar Show a Hit with GIs” (Los Angeles Times), “500 Cheer Antiwar Performance” (Evening Outlook), “Antiwar Acts a Hit” (San Francisco Chronicle), and “Antiwar Revue Box Office Smash” (Fayetteville Observer). Many media accounts of the show included excerpts from Dick Gregory’s half-hour long routine, such as his suggestion that the draft age be raised to seventy-five and all the “old cats” be sent to Vietnam, his assertion that, despite its efforts at surveillance “the Army ain’t got no intelligence,” and his final, moving expression of how much the audience’s presence at the show meant to him.
Kenneth Reich, reporter for the Los Angeles Times noted that “the general tone of the show was not bitter. Laughs dominated the performance, but when the audience was given a chance to voice its feeling, its views were clear.” He continues:
In one skit, [Peter] Boyle [. . .] played President Nixon and announced he was going to take a poll. First, he asked who was for America leaving Vietnam immediately. There came a tremendous roar from the crowd. Then he asked who was for staying. One person off to the side said, “Baaa, baaa.” “A victory for the silent majority,” Boyle announced in tones used by Mr. Nixon. “We stay.”
Other comedic sketches included Sutherland presenting the war as a magic act, a metaphorical sleight of hand. Another, a parody of basic training, depicted a soldier being whipped into a “mindless frenzy” by a drill sergeant. Finally, the GI, ordered to kill, turns on the sergeant and chases him offstage. A parody of a press conference about the war played on the general absence of information that the military provided to reporters:
Reporter: How are we doing in Vietnam?
Secretary Laird: We’re winning.
Reporter: How about all the Americans who are dying? Secretary Laird: They’re losing.
In another scene, Nixon received “image advice” intended to “brighten up his presentation with the gnong-gnong gesture, the wa wa necktie, the rubber chicken, and other vaudeville paraphernalia.” The finale featured the entire cast, save Sutherland, singing the National Anthem, hands placed over hearts. Unhappy with Sutherland’s unwillingness to stand and participate, the others grow more aggressive in their attempts to force him to his feet. Finally, they “stomp him into a frazzled corpse with staring blue eyes, then regroup in time to finish the song.”
In addition to expressing the overwhelming success of the show, the particular angle taken by the news coverage of the inaugural performance must also be understood as one of the show’s key successes. Although preshow coverage highlighted celebrity involvement and the FTA’s stated intent of “just” offering entertainment, articles on the inaugural performance emphasized the show’s explicitly antiwar content, as the headlines above make clear. While the premise of “just entertainment” had worked in the interest of preliminary publicity, the shift to an explicit recognition of the political content of the show publicized not so much the show itself, but the fact of GI sentiment against the war.
Excerpt adapted from F*ck The Army!: How Soldiers and Civilians Staged the GI Movement to End the Vietnam War by Lindsay Goss, published by NYU Press. © 2024 by New York University. All Rights Reserved.
