Thoughts for Decoration Day -- and Bob Hope’s birthday

Some scattered shots pulled from my clipping file while I try to

decide if the new Patriot’s Act requires me to report my neighbor

down the street who isn’t flying the American flag:

I missed an easy shot at a column with the coming and going of

Memorial Day, but one post-holiday comment, culled from memory, might

be allowed. I read several articles exploring the origin of this

holiday that noted it was once -- in some antediluvian period --

known as Decoration Day. As a card-carrying antediluvian, I can

attest to that.

Decoration Day -- at least in Decatur, Ind. -- was originally set

aside to decorate the graves of those who had served in the Civil

War. Later, it was extended to include all of our loved ones who had

died.

I had it both ways in my youth. My mother’s father was a colonel

in Gen. William T. Sherman’s army and was wounded during the Civil

War at the Battle of Chickamauga.

His grave was always our first stop. Then came my other

grandparents and several dozen aunts and uncles and nephews and

nieces -- all buried in Decatur Cemetery, many of them, including my

own two infant brothers, tragically young.

It was changed to Memorial Day to commemorate all veterans, but on

a richly green, slightly rolling several acres of land just outside

Decatur, it’s still Decoration Day.

Joe McCarthy came back into my life a few weeks ago. McCarthy

would have been pleased to see his name on front pages once again, 50

years after the salad days when he had been a fixture there.

The current catalyst was the public release of long-sealed

transcripts of secret hearings McCarthy conducted in the early 1950s.

The newly released documents underscore the enormous damage that can

be done by public officials using their office to make reckless and

unsupported charges against people in the name of protecting our

safety.

The televised McCarthy hearings that ended with attorney Joseph

Welch saying, “Have you no sense of decency, senator?” and McCarthy’s

censure by Senate colleagues had an enormous impact on my life. I had

quit my only real postwar job a week before the hearings started and

spent my first month as a freelance writer glued to the TV set when I

should have been out hustling work.

No Hollywood western ever had a clearer depiction of good guys and

bad guys than these hearings. I can still see McCarthy’s boy

sidekicks, the oily Roy Cohn and the smarmy G. David Schine,

whispering into the senator’s ear while the patrician Welch, his bow

tie at half-staff, awaited a new attack on his often bewildered Army

clients.

I would hope that McCarthy’s downfall -- caught vividly in a

documentary called “Point of Order” -- is an integral part of the

American history being taught in our public schools.

As Sens. Collins (R-Maine) and Levin (D-Mich.) said in a preface

to the just-released transcripts: “These hearings are a part of our

national past that we can neither afford to forget nor permit to

recur,” an admonition those who didn’t live through this period --

and especially our current attorney general -- might consider.

There were a lot of mixed reactions -- many of them cynical -- to

the careful staging of President Bush’s arrival, in full flight gear,

on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln to address

servicemen returning from Iraq. My reaction turned more to irony.

It sent me to a book called “The Slipstream,” a kind of college

yearbook put out for the Naval aviation cadets who finished flight

training and won their wings in 1943 at Corpus Christi, Texas.

I’m on page 137, in the graduating class of May 29, 1943. And,

sure enough, just as I remembered, three pages and two weeks later is

the picture of 18-year-old Ensign George H. Bush. He went on to fly

dive-bombers in combat in the south Pacific. And he really did fly

off the decks of carriers, which was never considered appropriate to

turn into a photo-op while he was president.

Finally, you will be reading this on Bob Hope’s 100th birthday. He

will probably die some day, but it’s hard for those of us who grew up

with Hope inextricably in our lives to imagine that happening.

I was writing Hollywood profiles in his waning performance years

and had the privilege of spending some time with him. One of the

things we did was enjoy a day wandering through the museum of

personal artifacts connected to his home and allowing him to recall

the circumstances of each display. I pulled up my notes from that

day, and here are a few of the things he told me:

* “The greatest form of comedy is tearing down bigness. When I

talked about Eisenhower’s golf, people used to scream because I was

taking him down to the common man as a bad golfer.”

* “How can you say that World War II was a popular war, and

Vietnam was unpopular? What war could be popular when kids are

getting killed?”

* “Mitchell Lyson, the director of my first movie, took me to

lunch and told me that pictures are a lot different from the stage

because in pictures, you do everything with your eyes. So if you

watch “Thanks for the Memories,” I’ve got floating eyeballs all over

the place. It’s the scene that kept me in the movies.”

* “I hear people say to me, ‘You never stop’ -- and that’s not

true. I’m a stickler for health, for physical condition and I

exercise every day. I stay in shape. I could go three rounds right

now with Hermione Gingold.”

* “When a nation calls on us for help, we must help them, but we

must never again make the mistake of Vietnam.”

* “People put a label on you. I was only a hawk so far as I wanted

to see us win and get out of Vietnam. I have seen the results of

fighting in the intensive care wards and the burn wards. When you

smell burned flesh, as I have in three wars, you don’t like war

anymore.”

I once asked Hope why he was doing commercials after such a long

and distinguished career, and he said:

“When I stop working, I die.”

Maybe that will never happen. So, happy birthday, Bob Hope.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.