"But by 1990, even Robert McNamara was claiming to have been a closet peacenik. In the 1960s, when Hope wasn't on stage making sour fun of hippies and draft-card burners, he was giving interviews in which he mouthed the domino principle: 'If the Commies ever thought we weren't going to protect the Vietnamese, there would be Vietnams everywhere,' he said in 1965. He has more in common with Jane Fonda than either might realize--they both were casualties of Vietnam. She's always going to be 'Hanoi Jane' to right-wing talk-show hosts, and the left is never going to forgive him for mistaking Vietnam for Iwo Jima. I say it's time we granted Hope amnesty, not because we owe it to him but because we owe it to ourselves. He never made a movie as good as Klute or They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, but at least he never made one as sappy as On Golden Pond or as heavy-handed as Coming Home."
<http://thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030630&s=davis>
I'm not as big a fan of Hope's as Davis is, but is an "amnesty" really necessary? Does anyone go around cursing Hope for Vietnam? I don't think that's his legacy (he was also a Reagan supporter -- does that sully his prime comedy years?). As for Fonda, that publicity stunt in Vietnam did cost her to a degree, but as I try to remind her rightwing critics, she and former-husband Tom Hayden also supported Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. They went to the front and watched the IDF blitz Beirut. So, I would think that might cancel out the anti-aircraft pose amid N. Vietnamese regulars, and earn her a new (and better title) "Beirut Jane." And despite that wretched stance, I still liked "Coming Home," which, while not one of Hal Ashby's better films (see "Harold & Maude," "The Last Detail" and "Being There"), remains a decent antiwar flick, and a nice, restrained performance by Jon Voight, who finally breaks down at the end.
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