Celebrity Military Records – or what’d ya do in the culture wars?

Cortez writes “While it was good PR to have the Pop-Potentates doing their bit for Uncle Sam:
SFGate Reports
“From the likes of Clark Gable and Ronald Reagan to Ted Williams and Joe Louis, the U.S. military has a long history of taking celebrities into its ranks, usually with happy results. Jimmy Stewart, after all, enlisted right after Pearl Harbor and went on to fly 20 combat missions as a command pilot in World War II. But documents released Thursday by the National Archives suggest that sometimes the brass must have wondered whether the famous names were worth the trouble — Elvis Presley, for instance, Steve McQueen or the pied piper of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac.””

June 13, 2005 by Uncategorized 2

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2 Responses

  1. judgebean says:
    June 13, 2005 at 4:04 am

    Steve McQueen
    This article is a bit misleading about one thing. The article implies that celebrities in the military are a headache and mentions Steve McQueen as one of those. But in fact McQueen served in the Marines long before he became a famous TV and movie star. The others, Stewart, Elvis, and Joe Louis, were already celebrities when they joined.

    Reply
  2. Cyberpunk Librarian says:
    June 13, 2005 at 8:02 pm

    Re:Steve McQueen

    As much as I love Steve McQueen, and as much as you’re right about him being a Marine before he was famous, he still did a 30 day turn in the brig for going AWOL. That’s not surprising to me. What gets me is some of the people who joined the military at all. Hindsight being what it is, you just look at it in wild wonderment.

    I mean, Kerouac… in the NAVY? In the MILITARY? That makes about as much sense as Hunter S. Thompson or George Carlin joining the military. (By the way, they both served in the USAF.) It’s just bizaare. Now other celebs, well it made sense.

    Elvis was such a gung-ho American the man made friends with Nixon, for god’s sake. Jimmy Stewart, at least last I checked, still holds the honour of being Hollywood’s highest ranking star. The man was not only a fantastic actor, but he wasn’t too bad at the controls of a plane either.

    I don’t think there were too many surprises here. If you know anything about the real life of a celebrity, you’ll kind of get a feeling of how they acted in a military situation.

    Reply

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